#there's smut in this story i'm just not saying where because spoilers but you've been warned

[red-riding-wood]

Heroes - Chapter 2

Chpt. 1 , Masterlist , Chpt. 3

Pairing: Sgt. Elias Grodin x Female OC (Alexis Ryder)

Fandoms: Platoon (1986), Cherry (2021) WARNINGS: I'm just going to put down a blanket for the entire book/all chapters: graphic depictions of violence and gore, torture, explicit sexual content, attempted sexual assault, language, marijuana use

A.N. Thank you for the reblogs! These chapters are actually reposts from my Archive account which you can read here if you want the full thing, but I will continue to update here.

My father was a hero.

My father served in the army for over a decade before settling down with my mother to have a family. He’d been courageous, selfless, brave – everything that I aspired to be.

He was killed in 9/11, when he worked at a clerical position in the Pentagon, and one of the planes veered off and crashed straight through his office.

I was so young when he died, so young that my memories of his warm smile, his loving touch, were distant to me. But they were real.

And I remembered them as I rose the barrel of my gun to the three Afghanis who stood before me, and though my finger shook over the trigger, and something twisted my gut, something gnawed at my conscience, so did the memories of my father.

He was dead, because of them.

And I was here, because of him.

My finger tensed over the trigger, beginning to squeeze faintly.

“Barnes!” A yell split the air, and my finger relaxed, my head tilting up to view Elias and his squad converging over the hill.

Elias’ blue eyes, normally mirthful and gentle, flashed with fury, and his brows were knitted together, his chest rising and falling with ireful breath as he glared at his fellow sergeant.

“What the fuck is going on here?” Elias demanded, his own rifle held across his chest as he started towards us.

Barnes’ lip curled over his teeth, and he turned his head to me. “Do it, Ryder,” he growled.

Bunny shoved one of the Afghanis into a little line the soldiers had made them form, and he backed away, a grin pulled taut over buck-teeth that had probably earned him his nickname. He glanced to me expectantly, and I couldn’t have been sure, but in that moment, I was ashamed to think that the bloodlust in his eyes may have been mirrored by mine.

I pulled the trigger, and with each body that dropped, my rifle kicked viciously against my shoulder.

They fell, crimson bursting from their chests, raining across the earth, staining colourful robes a dark, dark red.

And then everything was just… quiet.

I lowered my gun, and let my gaze wander from the bodies at my feet to the blue eyes that caught mine over the crest of the hill.

I couldn’t really describe what was in Elias’ eyes when he looked at me.

But for some reason, whatever it was fractured my heart.

And then Bunny was laughing, high notes stringing into the air, and he threw an arm around me.         

“Looks like Sugar Tits here has some gall in her after all,” he said, and laughter from Barnes’ squad ensued, and someone else jostled my shoulder.

I teetered on weak knees, my boots digging into the earth to ground myself as the men congratulated me and hooted and hollered, celebrated the death that stained the earth only a yard or so from my boots.

And I forced one of those fake smiles over my lips, went along with this celebration. I didn’t shrug Bunny off, or scowl, or snap at them for their remarks or their callousness.

But the celebration didn’t last, because Elias was charging Barnes, those blue eyes flashing once more in fury, and he slammed the butt of his rifle into my squad leader’s stomach.

Bunny’s arm left my shoulder, and everyone jumped into the chaos, tearing the two men off of one another. I stayed put, not wanting to intervene, but also still too paralyzed, still focused more on the bodies at my feet, at the way a little stream of blood trickled from the gaping mouth of the youngest Afghani, his eyes glazed over and empty.        

---

I couldn’t sleep.

Despite how fatigued every muscle and tendon was, how lethargic I was when I’d wandered to the edges of our encampment, settled shakily down among the rocks and ferns, whenever I closed my eyes to sleep, images of bloodied  bodies painted my eyelids and the howls of agony from the soldiers that hadn’t made it today echoed in my ears.

But mostly, the fracture in my heart seemed to burrow deeper.

“And nothing, nothing will keep us together,” I sang softly, my lips forming broken notes spilled from aching lungs. “We can beat them, forever and ever. Oh, we can be heroes, just for one day.”

I swallowed a rock that had formed in my throat, and I closed my eyes, allowing the beautiful notes of the song to carry me away to another place, another time.

To my mother, and her warm smile, her loving touch. The woman who had practically raised me, after her husband’s death, who had only ever done what was best for me and showed me unconditional love, despite being alone in a world of death and monsters.

“Heroes” had been her favourite song. She’d sung it nearly every morning, while making breakfast, and nearly every night, before bed.

I realized now that she probably sang it to soothe herself of her own demons.

I had given her this iPod, as a gift, when she was in the hospital battling cancer. It was the only song she had managed to download before I watched the life fade from her twinkling eyes, and felt her fingertips slip from mine as I sang her to eternal rest.    

She’d been a hero, too. She’d kept fighting, kept smiling, kept doing good for others even when her world must have been pitch darkness for the disease that had spread to her blood, for the loss that must have plagued her heart.

A tear pricked my eye, and I swallowed again, the knot in my throat building and twisting and culminating into something cruel and painful, and my lips scarcely formed the lyrics now. My spine dug against the rock behind me, and though my head was no longer burdened by the weight of my helmet and my hair now fell loose from its tight, constrictive bun, every part of me was heavier, so my chin dipped down and my skull rocked forward.

My lips parted to silently mouth the next lyric as my tear rolled onto my teeth, and I swept the saltiness away with my tongue, biting it harshly as I squeezed my eyes tighter shut.

Iron spiked my tongue as a rustling sounded from behind, and I nearly jumped out of my skin, ripping my headphones from my ears and reaching desperately for my rifle. 

Through the darkness of the brush, the broken camouflage of one of the soldiers moved, and messy locks of hair fell over a headband that read “AIRBORNE”. Bright blue eyes shone in the luster of the moon.

“At ease,” Elias chuckled, his eyes darting to where my fingers curled around the barrel of my gun, relaxing now that I realized I wasn’t in danger.

But anxiety still wove itself into my gut all the same. Was he here to lecture me? Was he here to tell me that I was a bad person for what I’d done today?

I tucked my iPod into one of the pockets of the tac rig that lay beside me, and I said nothing. I didn’t want to encourage him, still didn’t want to be seen or heard with him, especially after what had occurred today.

As Elias settled down beside me, I took note of the bruise across his bottom jaw, of the red that streaked the side of his face and the dirt that had sullied freckled, sun-kissed skin.

“What’cha listenin’ to, Private?” he asked me as his knees came up to his chest, arms draping over them and his head lolling to the side so that those blue eyes could capture mine.

It took me a moment to respond, to even gather myself enough to, but after a wary glance around, I told him, “’Heroes’. David Bowie.”

Elias smiled, and his head rolled back against the rock, eyes seeking out the stars in the black sky.

“A classic,” he said. “You’ve got good taste.”

Though he meant it as a compliment, I couldn’t help but feel a pang of longing in my chest, for I wished that my mother could’ve sang it to me now, instead of murmuring out the lyrics from tear-stained lips and a throat thick with fear and bitter self-loathing.  

A silence stretched between us, broken only by the sound of crickets and the faint rustling of wildlife along the branches of the alpine trees.

“You should get some sleep,” Elias finally said. “You’re taking next watch.”

I cast him a glance. His head was still rolled back against the rock, strands of untamed hair splayed this way and that against the surface and his eyes still fixed in the sky.

“I know,” I said, numbly. I didn’t want to admit that the events of the day were haunting me, that this knot in my throat wouldn’t wane and the moisture in my eyes wasn’t from lack of sleep but from this fracture in my heart.

“Can’t sleep, huh?” he said, and I realized that maybe this plight of mine was more obvious than I’d thought. He was good at reading people, or maybe just good at reading soldiers. “After what happened today, I don’t blame ya.”

I recalled the way he’d looked at me after I’d pulled the trigger on those Afghanis, and a flicker of confusion shot through me. My brow furrowed, and my lips parted to utter, “You don’t? After…” I swallowed again in vain against the weight in my throat. “… what I did?”

“You were just obeying orders. Weren’t ya?”

Those blue eyes flicked to mine again, head rolling across the rock, and suddenly I felt as if they were impaling me, eviscerating my soul. I felt as if they were a pair of scales, weighing my conscience.

I wanted to say yes, should have said yes. That it was Barnes, that it was only Barnes who’d been responsible for the lifeless eyes that had stared up at the sky and the blood that had trickled from bodies still warm with faded life.

But I wasn’t so sure that it had been entirely him. It was my finger that had pulled the trigger, after all. It was my bloodlust that I’d seen mirrored in Bunny’s wild eyes.

I tore my gaze from his, because I couldn’t handle it anymore, couldn’t gaze into those bright, blue scales, couldn’t bear to see judgment swim in their gentle depths.

“I don’t know,” I murmured, my voice a mere ghost in the breeze.

Thankfully, he rolled his head back to gaze up at the stars, and said, “Don’t beat yourself up over it. This war’s made every one of us do things we end up regrettin’.”

“You think I regret it?” I said, my gaze snapping back to him as the hairs along my arms prickled.

He looked back over, blue eyes once again meeting mine, observing me, dragging lazily across every feature of my face, as if gauging this.

But I didn’t want him to answer for me. So I added, “Those people weren’t innocent. They were gonna cost us lives, like Barnes said.”

Blue eyes narrowed slightly. “You really think that?”

I had to think that. I had to trust in Barnes that I’d done the right thing in following his orders, had to trust in my father that he would’ve been proud of my decision.

“I have to,” I uttered, again so numbly, but so earnestly, and I allowed my gaze to drift from his as I swallowed again against the knot that seemed to build and tighten in my throat, and forced down the tears that threatened to spill from my eyes.

“I should go get some sleep,” I said, as I stood, gathering my rig and helmet from the forest floor. “Goodnight, Elias.”

I turned my back as I twisted my hair back into its constrictive bun, and slung my rig over my shoulders.

“Goodnight…” came his response. “Alex, your name is?”

I froze in my tracks.

“It’s Ryder,” I said stubbornly.

“Alex, if you start justifyin’ the blood on your hands because of what Barnes says, you ain’t gonna like what you see the next time you look in a mirror.”

His words tore at my conscience, at the blackness that I tried to ignore in my soul, at the uncertainty that plagued me, and this frightened me, and every instinct in my body wanted to lash out. 

I turned on my heel, gathering a breath in my lungs only to expel it with a bitter intensity, a firmness that surprised me. “I don’t need my morality of all things questioned when I’m fighting for peoples’ lives.”

Elias didn’t so much as blink. Those blue eyes were still staring at me, perfectly serene, his body still lax against the rock.

“You don’t talk to Barnes like that,” he observed, lifting his head and his mess of tawny-brown locks from the surface of the rock. “You’re scared of him, ain’t ya?”

I eyed him warily, and turned again, settling my helmet over my skull and clasping its strap tightly beneath my chin.

“Goodnight, Sergeant,” was all that I said, before leaving the stars and the crickets and the blue-eyed soldier behind me.

#fanfiction #elias grodin #platoon #platoon 1986 #willem dafoe #my writing #heroes #oc: alexis #sgt. elias #mdni #there's smut in this story i'm just not saying where because spoilers but you've been warned

[reiderwriter]

Unhappy Holidays

Pairing: Spencer Reid x Fem!Reader

Summary: You're unlucky enough to run into Spencer Reid at holiday celebrations four years in a row. In the New Year, you're resolving to rid him from your mind forever, but you never were one to stick to resolutions 👻🦃🎄🎆

Warnings: SMUT 18+ minors dni, enemies to lovers, low-key work rivals, semi-public sex, car sex, hate sex, fingering, thigh riding, creampie, unprotected sex (no condoms but contraceptive mentioned), slight spoilers for s4 of Criminal Minds (but not really).

Prompt Request: #50"You're so fucking obsessed with me.” #82"Really? Because your pussy is saying something different, sweetheart.” #93"Use my thigh. You've been staring at it all night anyway.”

A/N: This is my first submission for @imagining-in-the-margins November/December Office Party writing challenge! I'm sorry I've been so busy recently, but the holiday season really does take a lot of effort to get through at work lmao. Hopefully, I'll be able to post more over my vacation! For now, enjoy some very unserious smut~♡ (as if I write any other kind).

Here's a link to my masterlist, where you can find all my work!~☆

Working with the FBI was no walk in the park, which, from your desk at the opposite corner of the bullpen, Spencer Reid sure made it look like.

Working on adjacent teams for the last three years had become gradually infuriating. You were forever in the man's orbit, stuck dealing with the other women on your team sat giggling about him and his many stupid haircuts, and wondering just how far you'd fallen to have to stare at his stupid face 5 days a week.

If you were unlucky. His team did happen to be out on cases a lot more, whereas yours handled correspondence and consulting cases, a cushy and safe job.

It annoyed you to no end that you had multiple field-based qualifications, extensive fire arms training and were top of your class at the academy only to be relegated yo desk duty whilst boy wonder with his doctorates was allowed to trip over his own feet catching actual killers.

Other people wondered where your dislike of the man sprang from, and you could only let out a disgruntled squeak and tell them your horror stories.

A few months into your job, your been fresh faced and bushy tailed or however that saying goes, and overly eager to take any assignment that came your way. Even if the assignment was baby-sitting an injured Doctor Spencer Reid. He'd been shot whilst out on a case whilst trying to talk down an unsub, and you'd jumped at the chance to get to know him.

He was an office legend, of course, though those days it was more for his characteristic lack of social graces rather than the beauty he'd grown into. You'd been so eager to get to pick his brains, find out how he'd managed to score the position on the BAU at such an early age.

Reality had hit you square in the face when he'd spent a week ignoring you, making you run around like a headless chicken searching for hard copies of documents the FBI had digitised a millennia ago, and hadn't so much as spared you a glance.

The straw that broke the camel's back came as you were running back to him triumphant with a document he'd requested eight hours before and had let yourself into Penelope Garcia’s office quietly, only to hear him bad mouthing you.

“She makes me uncomfortable. I've had her out searching for useless files all day because I don't know what to do with her.”

“She's trying to help, Spencer, it's her job right now, cut her some slack.”

“Her job is currently getting in the way of mine. I even tried writing my own doctor's note so I could get rid of her, but Hotch wouldn't allow it.”

You'd dropped the file loudly on the table, watched the two spin around with horrified looks and turned silently and left the room.

He hadn't once tried to find you after that, and you let your apprenticeship under Doctor Reid quietly fizzle out as you got back to your regular work.

Your resentment still burned though.

Each time you'd been caught in the same elevator with him, you'd ignored him to an almost insane degree, enjoying the way he squirmed and tried to make small talk.

You'd been in contact with JJ and his Unit Chief Aaron Hotchner as well, through cases you'd recommended, but always maintained your cold shoulder.

The one place you could not ignore him, however, was a Penelope Garcia party.

After you'd slammed the file down on her desk, Penelope had guiltily sent you a gift basket filled with sweet treats and books, and had hounded you for a week to make sure your feelings weren't too damaged by her friend's stupidity.

You actually liked her, and found at least one silver lining to the storm that was Spencer Reid ripping through your life.

In the three years since the “incident,” you'd found yourself at three parties where Penelope in all of her heartwarming ways had tried her best to force a reconciliation between the two of you, to disastrous results.

The first was a Halloween party, and you'd been incredibly proud of your Princess Laia costume when you'd arrived. Only until you'd gone to the kitchen to top up your drink to hear Spencer Reid boring some guest or the other about how Star Trek was more advanced, and had a richer plot line.

Penelope had stepped into the kitchen just as he'd caught a glimpse of your (rather skimpy) outfit - yes, you'd chosen swimsuit Laia, yes, you were going to own it - and had immediately jumped into introductions, as if you weren't already intimately acquainted.

“Spencer! This is Y/N! She loves Halloween, too, she makes all of her costumes. You guys should talk.” She'd led the other guest away and left you there with Spencer as you'd awkwardly looked upon his own costume.

“Are you the Tenth Doctor?” You asked begrudgingly, noting his pin-striped suit and the shorter hairstyle he'd chosen.

“Are you a fan? I prefer the original show run more than the current stuff, but David Tennant has really been doing a wonderful-”

“I'm sorry, let me stop you there. I don't watch Doctor Who. I guess I prefer something with a… How should I say, richer plot?”

He'd snapped his mouth shut and didn't have chance to open it again before you turned dramatically and walked away from him.

The second party you'd been cornered into was just over a year later.

Having been stuck in the office over Halloween, Penelope was determined to get in one last celebration before Christmas steam-rolled every other holiday, and thus you'd been invited to her single-people-only-friendsgiving-potluck, and you'd found yourself having to navigate knocking on her door with a casserole dish in your hands.

Luckily a large hand had appeared from behind you and knocked on the door for you. Unfortunately, the sudden shock from the silent appearance of a man right behind you startled you so much that the dish fell straight from your hands anyway.

Penelope opened her door upon hearing the crash and you whirled on your would-be attacker.

It was Spencer again, eyes round in shock, hand still curled into a fist.

You took a calming breath as you gathered yourself, trying not to bite his head off. You wanted to scream and shout and rip his head out but you didn't, instead letting the fury drip into your voice as you finally opened your eyes again.

“That dish took me four fucking hours to make.” You huffed in anger once more as Penelope guided you into the apartment and poured you a glass of wine before you moved back to the entry hall to clean it up again.

Needless to say he didn't care to converse with you after that.

A few small parties in between had been blissfully Spencer-less and you'd lulled yourself into a false sense of security. That's when you accepted the Christmas party invitation.

As one of the unlucky few members of the FBI who had to stay out over christmas in case of some emergency or the other, you'd been grounded in Virginia, unable to travel home for the holidays. So Penelope Garcia's singles-only-Christmas-fun-time-Party was your last ditch effort to spend the holidays actually resting and eating good food.

Learning from last time, Penelope reassured you that there was no potluck, that she had prepared all the food herself, and all you'd need were a bottle of wine and a willingness to party.

You'd taken those recommendations as law and had immediately let yourself into a glass of mulled wine as you arrived, and - noticing that the party was Reid-free - had allowed it to raise your Christmas spirits slightly more than you usually would.

By hour two of the event, you were full of yuletide joy and swaying freely along to the tune of Silent Night.

Spencer’s late entrance really would have gone unnoticed by you had you not bumped face first into his chest as you spun yourself around in your dance, his hands quickly falling to your hips to steady you.

The few moments it took you to gather yourself were about as long as you needed to realised that he'd caught you in his arms underneath the mistletoe. And with your mind fogged by mulled-whatever-it-was-Penelope-mixed-into-that-punch, the part of your brain that objected to the very existence of Spencer Reid went silent, and the incredibly tiny and somewhat damaged part of your brain that instead saw him as attractive started shouting loud instructions.

Before your common sense could return, you pushed yourself up on your tiptoes to kiss the very warm, very close man holding you upright.

“Mistletoe,” you muttered as you clawed his arms off of you and took yourself straight to Penelope's bathroom to throw up.

So yes, your acquaintance with Spencer Reid had never been good, and you were perfectly fine with resenting him from afar, privately.

With three years of bad experiences under your belt, you weren't excited at completing your yearly tradition of horrendous interaction. Which is perhaps why you immediately and loudly protested Penelope’s New Years Eve party invitation.

“Y/N, it's a party. What's the worst that can happen?” She pleaded as she followed you down the corridors of the office building.

“I could see Spencer Reid. I could be forced to converse with Spencer Reid. I could get absolutely wasted and kiss Spencer Reid. There, three options, please accept my resignation from partying.”

“Y/N we both know you don't drink anymore, so at least one of those is unlikely to happen. And Spencer might not even come, he has tickets for an indie theatre from 6pm onwards, they're playing some Russian movie from the 60s that's like 4 hours long or something. So u retire yourself and tell me you'll come?” She had to take three or four steps for each of your own, not that you were so different in height but because you were practically marching in order to avoid the topic.

But you finally stopped and let out a sigh as you turned back to Penelope who stopped just before she ran into you.

“You're sure he won't be there?”

“I'm sure he RSVP’d no.”

“Fine. But I'm not drinking and I will still be expecting the Penelope Garcia virgin punch experience.”

“Bring the party poppers and you have a deal.”

“Done.”

–X–

Over the week since you'd accepted the invitation, you'd made peace with it. For the most part, you did love a Penelope Garcia production. There was something wonderful about your friend and her ability to brighten anyone's mood, an ability that was only heightened at holidays. She was like a glittered goddess gaining power when worshippers used her altar, except the altar was her house and the worship was a range of hallmark-induced holidays.

You arrived at the party at 10pm, and though that was the start time you'd been given, you weren't surprised to see a full house of Penelope’s team mates already in attendance. Derek Morgan, Jennifer Jareau and Emily Prentiss sat spread across the sofa in the living room area, and you noticed a few techie friends also grabbing drinks and chatting.

“Y/N, I'm so glad you're here! You remember everyone on the team, right?” She pulled you into a hug and then sat you down in the middle of the group, waiting for you to mingle and become comfortable before she ran off to more hostess duties.

“Of course, nice to see you guys.” You grabbed your promised punch and sat back comfortably, striking up a conversation with Emily about how bleak the dating scene had been recently.

“It seems like all the men around me are jackasses,” Emily muttered and you giggled along.

“I'm wounded,” Morgan shot back, a hand pressed to his chest in faux pain.

“Good. You're like a lion out there in the clubs stalking gazelles, it's like watching a nature documentary when you're out there.”

You almost snorted your entire drink up your nose as Emily finished, needing to compose yourself for a second.

“I guess the men on our team aren't great with romance,” JJ laughed and took a swing. “Hotch and Rossi have four divorces between them, and Derek here is a lost cause.”

“Our only hope is young Spencer. May he grow into a respectful young gentleman and break out curse,” Emily toasted.

“Oh that ship has sailed,” your laugh this time was bitter, your mood immediately growing sour with even the smallest mention of Spencer Reid.

“Ah, Penelope mentioned you had a problem with our boy wonder. Care to share?”

You opened your mouth to give your standard non-answer and move the conversation along, but you were interrupted.

“Yes, Y/N, care to share? I am slightly curious about that as well.” You turned around and there he was, and your stomach turned in disgust.

Just one time, just one party. You'd been having fun, and here he was to ruin it.

“What are you doing here?” you gaped up at him, unsurprised to see him still decked out in sweater vest and slacks even in his down time.

“I was invited.”

“You declined, Penelope said you had movie tickets.”

“Ticket, singular. And it was cancelled so here I am. What's your problem with me, Y/N?” His jaw clenched and he grabbed the back of your chair and leaned down. It was supposed to be intimidating, but you rolled your eyes. When he looked that attractive, veins in his arms popping out of the sleeves he'd pulled up, you couldn't see him as intimidating. His arms were distracting yes, but God that was nothing compared to his thighs. His pants were tight, and you thanked whatever Clueless tailor had sewn them, because you now allowed yourself a momentary lapse to enjoy the appearance of his lower body.

You tried to shake the thought of his attractiveness from your mind, reminding yourself where you were and in what company.

“I don't think I need to answer that. I think I'll enjoy holding it over your head instead,” you said, standing up and beginning to gather your things.

“Wait, Y/N, where are you going? New Year isn't for another 30 minutes.” Penelope scrambled over and grabbed your hand, pleading with you to stay.

“I'm sorry Pen, but there's just this very annoying bug buzzing around me, and I think I need to get away from it.” You said your goodbyes and excused yourself from the party, happy to have walked away relatively undamaged.

Fate had other plans, and as you stepped out of the apartment building ready to walk yourself home, a hand caught yours from behind as a voice chased you.

“Y/N, wait. I'll go. You go back inside.”

“And return with my tail tucked between my legs after making a grand exit? I'll pass, thanks boy genius.” You shook yourself from his grasp and made to walk away again, but he quickly matched your pace and stepped into your path, cutting you off.

“I can't let you walk home. It's like 40° out here, and your coat is more style than substance.”

“Get into a car with a stranger? I'm sure you of all people know how stupid that sounds.” You stuck a finger out and poked his chest, but he grabbed your hand and held it in place as he spat out his next words.

“I'm not a stranger, I'm the man you're obsessed with, Y/N. Big difference.” You laughed, mostly in shock at his indignance, but he stared at your face as serious as could be.

“Me? Obsessed with you? I'm not the one who followed a woman they're barely acquainted with out of a party filled with all of my friends. Sounds like you're projecting, Spencer.”

“Am I?” He questioned, stepping closer and grabbing your hip as he continued his questioning. “I wasn't the one who was sat there talking about me with all of my colleagues.”

“Well, I wasn't the one who turned up to a party I'd declined an invitation to.”

He was imperceptibly close now, hand gripping your hip so tight you wondered if it'd leave you with a mark.

“I certainly was not the one who initiated a kiss last year, Y/N. You need to face the facts, you're so fucking obsessed with me.” If his hands had you feeling dizzy, his words were completely knocking the sense out of you. Suddenly you returned to the person you'd been under that Mistletoe, and everything from his closeness to the rough edge to his voice begged you to do it once again.

“Go fuck yourself,” was about all the words you could manage as he finally let his lips fall down and crush into your own.

You should've pushed him away, but instead your traitorous body wanted to prove his point, opening up for him faster than you'd opened up to anyone else before.

His tongue flicked against your lips and you gladly let him explore your mouth, opening up to tangle your tongue with his.

He tasted sweet, like the punch Penelope had handed you earlier, only now you wondered if someone had accidentally laced it with how free you were being with your affections.

He resurfaced for air, but you didn't care if there was nothing in your lungs at all if it meant that his lips would engage your own in battle once again.

“Look how much you want me,” he smirked. “Look how needy you are after a single kiss, chasing my lips like that.”

“You and your big fucking mouth. I wish you'd shut up once in a while.”

“I'll make it my new year’s resolution.” His lips joined your own again, and you clashed hard, exploring as much as you could muster as he pulled you in the direction of his car.

“I'm not driving… home… with you,” you growled between kisses, trying not to put your teeth to his neck and bite down hard. You're not sure if that impulse was a murderous one or a kinky one.

“I'm not putting you in the front seat, Y/N, I'm putting you in the back. You should be familiar with the idea.”

Heat sparked between your legs, and you allowed yourself to be manhandled into the beat-up trash heap of a car.

He'd not taken his hands off you as he got you in, pushing himself in first and then pulling you by the hand that you'd unconsciously gripped hard. You immediately straddled his hips, skirt naturally riding up in the process. He noticed and looked curiously down at you, growling as you pressed your lips against his neck and grabbed you instead by the hair gathered in a ponytail at the back of your head.

“See, you're obsessed with me. Just admit it.” Without breaking eye contact, he dug his fingers into the material of your tights and pulled in opposite directions, leaving your underwear exposed to his wandering eyes.

“I'm not obsessed with you,” your voice needed conviction to land, but it came out as a lusty whisper, especially as he slipped his fingers inside your underwear and finally touched your aching cunt.

“Really? Because your pussy is saying something else, Princess.” He found your clit faster than you'd ever expected, rubbing slow circles into your skin as you began rocking your hips back and forth.

It was becoming hard to disagree with him, with each flick of wrist growing the heat between your legs. You attacked his neck again, hands practically ripping at his top buttons so you could muffle the sounds of your arousal against his neck, collarbone, chest, any stretch of that pale skin available to you.

He forced your hips to a stop with one hand as he slipped a single digit inside of your hole, gathering your arousal as he set a steady pace, thumb keeping your bundle of nerves occupied.

“Listen, Y/N, can you hear that?”

“I can't h-hear anything.” You had to grind your teeth together to get the words out with minimal interruptions of moans bursting from the pit of your stomach.

He leaned in close to your ear, nuzzling your neck and placing chaste kisses up towards your ear, finally pulling away just enough to whisper a single word in your ear.

“Liar.”

His hand stilled and pulled off you quickly and your eyes broke open, hands unconsciously fitting into his shirt as if you were worried he was going to leave you there like this, on the edge of pleasure but still so far away.

“Use my thigh. You've been staring at it all night anyway.”

“Jackass. You've only been here for like 20 minutes.”

“You can climb right out of this car if you want to, Y/N.” He tried to keep his tone light, but the death grip he had on your thighs, the very obvious tent pitched in his pants and the way his eyes couldn't go five seconds without undressing you told you you had more power in this interaction than he wanted to give you.

There was no way either of you were letting the other go unused tonight.

You relaxed your grip on his shirt and shifted your weight to one of his thighs. Lithe he may be, but lowering yourself down there was an unexpected strength there. He watched on curiously as you rocked experimentally against him. Back and forth you rocked, trying desperately to keep up his momentum or tempt him to help you out again.

It was time to let your voice back out, and you did, moaning without a care as you hummed his leg like a bitch in heat.

“You're enjoying this lot, huh, Y/N,” he muttered, and you watched as his hand worked his pants zip open, removing one of the barriers in the way between the two of you, as he began palming himself.

“What's that saying? Anything you can do, I can do better?” He growled at that response but didn't stop you. Instead he bought a hand down on your ass as you moved, so hard you jolted at the sudden pain. Your eyes shot open as your hips stilled, but you felt warmth grow between your legs.

“Yes, you definitely enjoyed that. Should I do that again, or do you think we should hurry this up and go back up for the countdown?”

You hesitated only a second before you pushed his hand off his lap, shifting your hips further towards his knees before letting your hand reach for where his had just been.

You didn't let yourself think about how big he was as you pulled his cock free, didn't let yourself wonder how he measured up against anyone you'd been with before. You didn't let yourself waste time thinking about how various office rumours were true, and definitely not a second was wasted feeling jealous about how those rumours were spread in the first place.

Instead you simply slammed your lips back against his, mouth opening to let your tongue engage his as you lifted your hips with his help and lowered yourself down on him.

You didn't have to rid yourself of sinful thoughts after that as he purged every single brain cell from your head, filling you so contently that there was simply no space for anything but him.

You locked up on top of him, clawing at his shoulders as you whimpered at the stretched, falling so he was balls deep inside you. You wanted to move, to use him for your pleasure, but your walls tightened every time you even thought about it as he stroked your hair through it all.

It had been some time since you'd last had a sexual partner, and you needed the few minutes to overcome the first uncomfortable bliss of it all.

“That good?” he whispered, but the harsh tone of earlier was gone, replaced only by unsure humour to break the silence.

“Been a while.” He nodded, kissing you again to distraction as he shifted your positions.

Cradling your neck and securing your legs comfortably around him, he lowered you against the backseat, pulling out slightly as you adjusted to the new angle.

“Better?” You nodded quickly, because it was. There was no more pressure on your legs, and despite the cramped space in the car, you had enough space to lie almost flat.

“Yes… thank you.” Just as his cutting tone had escaped him, you also heard your own tone softening, the sigh of contentment slipping past your lips almost sweet. Almost.

“Are you going to fuck me now, or what?”

He let out a shocked laugh, but lent down to shut you up with a kiss nonetheless. Bracing himself against the car door, his hips softly rocked into you, pace increasing until you were back to the edge of cumming, nails pressed hard into his skin until you were sure he was going to complain.

He didn't though, but kept up his thrusts, until your vision suddenly darkened and stars exploded in them, rolled back in your head as they were.

“Shit, shit, shit, shit, where should I…?” He panicked, but you wrapped your legs around him, grabbing him by the tie and pulling him down to swallow his moan as he shot his load inside of you.

“Birth control.” You whispered when you finally let him go, gasping for air. “Contraceptive pill. No need to get the car dirty.”

He collapsed on top of you then, forehead resting against your own as you both caught your breaths.

The moment was silent, and you found the synchronicity of your breaths almost calming. Eventually you had to break apart, and he helped you up to a sitting position, but didn't break eye contact as fell back into his lap.

His hands stroked your back, dipping to your ass at times, but he didn't talk. Neither of you did.

The eye contact between the two of you was possibly the most pleasant conversation you'd ever had.

“I'm sorry.” He blurted, just as fireworks erupted into the night sky. Your heart shook, and you weren't sure of it was the shock of the sound, or the way the rainbow of lights illuminated his sincere expression.

“You don't have to apologise for cumming in me, Spencer.”

“Not that. Before. The casserole and the mistletoe, and the Halloween costume.”

“Wow. Um, okay. Apology accepted, I guess, though I'm not entirely sure why you're apologising now.”

He took a deep breath just as another set of fireworks went up.

“I pulled you under the mistletoe. It was Penelope’s idea, she knew how stupid I was being around you and sent me over. I saw it and took the chance.”

“Fuck. Why?”

“Because I was pretty useless at being chivalrous the year before.”

You climbed off his lap in a scramble and sat on the seat beside him, mind racing, trying to figure out where the hell he was going with this.

He turned to you, trying to keep your attention as he stumbled over the words.

“You couldn't knock on the door, so I wanted to help you, but I didn't think I'd scare you so much you'd drop it.”

“You didn't scare me it was a momentary lapse in my observational skills.”

“You shrieked,” a smile threatened to pull his lips up, they twitched as you flushed red.

“And Halloween?” You looked at him again now, trying to figure out what the hell was going on between the two of you.

“You refused to look at me for a year after we stopped working together,” he shrugged quickly running a hand through his hair and expelling a breath. “I don’t really know how to talk to women.”

“You just know how to piss them off?”

“Morgan says it comes naturally.”

“Yeah, well, Morgan is very wise.”

A brief silence stretched between you, or as silent as a night full of cracks, pops, whizzes and bangs could be.

“I don't get it. You tried your best to get rid of me when I was there to help you. I wanted to impress you, and you kept sending me on meaningless errands, and now you're saying what? You wanted my attention?” There was a quiet anger to your voice, but you were surprised to find it diminished and tired.

“I wanted you gone because you were distracting me, Y/N, not because I hated you.”

“Well, what's the difference, Doctor Reid? Please indulge me.” You huffed a little but kept your eyes on him, trying not to seem too desperate for his answer.

“I have an IQ of 187. Emily says when I'm around a pretty girl it's more like 52,” he fidgeted with his pants, forcing the words out.

“You're a pretty girl. We had a case to work and all I could think about was how to get you to like me. Hotch chewed me out like three separate times for being absent minded.”

He was looking anywhere but you, trying his best not to appear like a fool but you were locked onto him.

“Oh my god you're an idiot.”

“When you're around, yes.”

“And that means I'm equally stupid.”

“No, you just jump to conclusions and hold grudges. There wasn't anything really that stupid about your actions, though it could be suggested that not thoroughly thinking through the wording of the conversation you overheard-”

You cut him off with a kiss, pulling him down again mlby his tie.

“Oh my god, shut up,” you whispered as you broke apart.

“Does that mean we can do this again? Because I'd like to do this again?”

“Stop talking, start kissing jackass.”

He finally didn't argue with that, pulling you back into him as you sat under the stars in his car welcoming the new year.

#spencer reid #criminal minds #spencer reid x reader #spencer reid fanfic #mgg #spencer reid smut #criminal minds fanfiction #criminal minds fandom #spencer reid x reader smut #spencer reid x self insert #spencer reid fanfiction #spencer reid criminal minds #dr spencer reid #criminal minds smut #cm writing challenge

[satancopilotsmytardis]

I don't think you've had a headcannon so far that I haven't also shared and it's great. Honestly I'd love to hear anything about your headcannons and/or reasonings behind your Shigadabi and (Shigadabihawks) relationships. And also Duster is the superior nickname and I can't remember were I first saw it either.. huh... I'd just like to let you know I still haven't gotten the dog teeth series off my mind so I've been re-reading everything you've written (in bnha, I still haven't finished all your gravity falls fics I'm getting there tho), I've gotten stuck on your talk to me series as it's probably my favourite at the moment but I can't figure out why? It's just so feely? So if your open to it, sharing anything about those particular fics or I dead would be greatly appreciated. Also every time I read or re-read another one of your fics it seems to become my favourite, your writing is just so compelling :)

Howdy, so! Thank you for the kind words on my writing overall, but I'm about to show my whole ass because I'm gonna be really, really honest over both Talk To Me and Dog Teeth. We're gonna start with Talk To Me and Dog Teeth will have a little aside for triggering content before I get into that one later on!

Talk To Me was entirely written because I wasn't satisfied with the amount of Shigaraki's dirty talk in Say Something Nice. Like my main goal with Say Something Nice was to play with praise kink and dirty talk and while that piece was fine, I didn't feel like I pushed it far enough. So A Way With Words was created in response and I just pushed those themes harder.

As for them being 'feely' I think that just comes from the fact that my writing focuses a lot on introspection. Like for pieces that don't have a strong external conflict, which a lot of my smut centered fics don't, the conflict in the story needs to come from somewhere internal. Since I'm playing in a sandbox with established characters it then becomes a matter of looking at their personalities and then picking what to heighten or what would clash with the world/desires of the other characters around them that would push the plot forward. In A Way With Words specifically I heightened Dabi's desire to not get too involved with the rest of the League. This creates an emotional conflict on two fronts. The first is that Shigaraki obviously and actively wants to be involved with Dabi and is seeking him out. But it also creates a secondary conflict internally with Dabi who wants attention and connection very badly, but has been denied it by himself and others for years. This is why I can even tell the story at all because obviously if he was just like 'yeah let's bone' from the start then there wouldn't really be anything but the smut to write, and I personally don't think that's as satisfying. I think that when stories use internal conflict as the backbone of the plot, that puts a lot of emphasis on the inner world and emotions of the character(s) and that may be why it's more noticeable in the stories where I use that as a major form of conflict. (Spoiler, if you've noticed this tone across almost all of my writing, it's because I almost always include an internal conflict and give it significant weight in the story even if there is an external one happening too.)

Internal conflict is actually also the reason that this went from a one-shot to a duology. I really wrote A Way With Words not intending to do anything else with that world but after it sat with me for a little while I realized that while Dabi and Shigaraki were together, Dabi's internal conflict still hadn't fully resolved. He was still struggling to accept the depth of emotional intimacy that Shigaraki clearly had been broadcasting, and there was opportunity to show his struggles to be emotionally honest with himself about any kind of positive emotion. Hence him throughout that entire fic trying to 'protect' Shigaraki by tearing open a wound from his past and starting a frankly unneeded and kind of ridiculous investigation for months rather than just have a conversation about his feelings. This man does not know how to express himself without doing The Most and this was such a fun idea to add into play to go with the threads still hanging from the first part, this fic earned itself an unintended sequel.

Now we're gonna talk Dog Teeth and I probably won't be going in depth about all of these elements but please be aware that this series contains explicit sexual assault, physical/psychological torture, graphic descriptions of violence, and abusive relationships, so if you want to dip on this post here, then that's completely valid and please take care of yourself!

This series was really just born of "What if I wrote something really fucked up?" That was the main thought. I really emphasize consent and communication in my fics, what would it look like if I did the opposite? From there I just kind of busted out some psychology stuff like specifically how cults indoctrinate people and started to formulate how that would look if applied to my favorite son, Dabi. Then I just wanted to make sure I was keeping an internal logic so that nothing in the story was included for the sake of shock value or anything like that. Like throughout the story there are several explicit scenes of sexual assault, each one established a significant setup or had a payoff that was foreshadowed by earlier scenes. The very first establishes that assault will be a consistent threat and violence inflicted on him, and there are quite a few times Dabi mentions being 'used' that the readers don't see because I didn't feel the need to retread scenes like that which didn't actively contribute to the plot. I found it very interesting to play with the idea of what it would take to tear down someone's sense of identity in All Over Me, and in A Matter of Perspective it was very fun to explore how the abuse was being hidden as well as show that everything done throughout the first story was an active, methodical, and deliberate manipulation by Shigaraki-- even if the final results were 'better' than he'd expected.

In my opinion Dog Teeth is definitely one of the tightest series I've written and while it has some very uncomfortable content, it's definitely in my top three of things I've written.

Phew, okay, that was so long, sorry! I mean, you read my fics, you know I'm horribly verbose, but that was more talking than I'd planned on, whoops. Hope this was? Interesting? Informative? I have no idea, but I hope you got something out of this!

#Showing my whole ass and writing degree in this one lads #apologies if it comes off as pretentious but you all know I'm just out here writing anime villain smut #Also oh my god i did not mean to talk that much jesus fuck #tanco speaks #tanco's meta #ask #asks

[thehoneybeet]

7 smutty scenes/dialogue

Thanks for the tag @wolfpants! See their smutty scene royalty here. I've only written two fics with smut, so I'm going to cheat and give you more than one tidbit from each. Some of these are a bit long but hopefully worth it.

Rules: pick any ten fics, select some smut or pre-smut dialogue, and tag ten people. If you have written less than ten, feel free to share anyway!

Tagging @kbrick @teledild0nix @violenttulips @nv-md @m0srael @the-starryknight @andithiel and you if you're reading this (if you do it, please tag me!)

Sex! You've been warned. Also: spoilers.

everything is relative to you (drarry, 43k, E)

1.

Potter shoves him back down after Draco teases with a fourth finger, growling, “I swear to God Malfoy, if you make me wait another second—”

When he sinks down onto him the feeling is so intense Draco almost chokes on it, but it’s swallowed by Potter kissing him again. His fingers are tight enough on Draco’s shoulder to bruise, but he doesn’t care. He doesn’t. He reaches with a still-slick hand to pull on Harry’s cock in time with his thrusts upward into Potter’s body.

When Potter feels too close, he reaches down and feels the place where they’re joined.

“You care about me,” Potter breathes.

Draco removes his hand. “Shut up.”

“If you didn’t you wouldn’t—oh my God, don’t stop. You wouldn’t have come.”

“You are far too coherent,” Draco says, and touches his fingers to the side of Potter’s face. His eyes are so close. They are looking into him. “Besides, I haven’t come yet.”

Potter rolls his eyes, but gasps as Draco pushes his hips up enough to pull out, and turns them over. He shoves a cushion beneath Harry’s hips and presses into him again.

“You care about me,” Potter gasps against his mouth.

“Yes.” Draco kisses him again to shut him up. The sounds they’re making are obscene, and entirely more appealing than the truth that’s coming out of his mouth.

Potter is relentless. “You don’t want me to die.”

Draco grasps his black curls between his fingers and pulls. “God, Potter, I don’t want you to fucking die.”

2.

The scar Harry had noticed on his neck stretched down and crossed with others down his chest. Harry traced them with his fingers, suddenly reminded of Draco. He couldn’t remember if the pattern was the same or different. “What happened here?” he whispered.

“Fight with a cat,” Noah said. “Take off your clothes.”

“Really?” Harry laughed.

“No, but let’s not discuss it,” Noah replied. “Unless you’d like to tell me about yours?” He gestured to Harry’s face.

There was nothing to the story, really. “I was an energetic child. I tripped and fell against a sharp table corner,” he shrugged. “Not a very thrilling tale, I imagine.”

“Not everything needs to mean something,” Noah said. “Sometimes they just happen.”

Harry couldn’t stand the inches of space between them. He finished stripping his clothes, unembarrassed by Noah looking so openly as he stood there, bare before him. It didn’t matter so much, because nothing was as naked as having stones gently cut away from one’s ankles.

Noah dragged him to the bed and climbed over him, somehow managing to touch him everywhere besides where Harry wanted it most.

“Some things mean something, though,” Harry gasped, wrapping his hand around Noah’s cock, hard and dripping, in the nest of blond curls, “right?”

3.

He nearly comes then and there, because Andrea is wearing nothing underneath them. His hard cock is jutting up, red and beautiful, proof that Gio’s aching desire isn’t one-sided.

“Did you expect me to come?” Gio says.

“Didn’t expect,” Andrea replies, propping himself up on his elbows. “Just hoped.”

Gio can’t fight the smile that breaks out over his face. He crawls over him with a renewed sense of urgency and presses him down into the pillows with a kiss, mouth open and searching.

“I love that you let me do this,” he says, breaking away just enough to speak. “That you let me control you, a little.” He takes one of Andrea’s wrists and pins it above his head.

Andrea’s eyes are dark. “I trust you.”

4.

Harry’s knees are starting to ache. Draco is sitting on his desk, pants shoved to his ankles, and Harry’s mouth is on his cock.

“Do you know how a black hole is made?” Draco gasps. Harry hums.

“A supernova. If a star is big enough—yes, like that—if it’s big enough it’ll explode and then collapse in on itself, sucking—fuck—sucking everything inside.”

Harry runs his tongue along the velvety underside of his cock, until Draco can’t speak and is coming down his throat. “Oh fuck,” he says, his hand slipping, as he lands on his elbow, knocking one of Harry’s tools to the floor.

“Good?” Harry says, wiping his mouth.

Draco rolls his eyes.

“Supernova level good?” Harry presses, coming up to stand between his legs.

He shakes his head, smiling at Harry’s stupid joke.

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Draco says. “Total obliteration.”

5.

“You’re not hallucinating,” Harry says, bringing his hand up to Draco’s face, trailing it down his nose, over his lips.

“But I may as well be,” Draco whispers against his fingers.

Harry replaces them with his mouth. “Did you feel that?” he murmurs.

“Yes,” Draco says.

Harry rolls over him, pressing him into the marble floor with his hips. “Do you feel that?”

“You’re so hard.”

“So are you,” Harry says, grinding into him, groaning at the hot feeling of their groins rubbing together. He feels rebellious, subversive, to be grinding into Draco on the floor of his ancestral home. It’s exhilarating.

“More,” Draco gasps, his moans rising to a crescendo, echoing in the hall. “Fuck me again.”

wild with all regret (draco/ron/hermione, 3.5k, E)

cw: humiliation/degradation, slapping. In the fic they are friends! This is a scene!

6.

“I almost died.” Ron said. “It makes me sick to even touch you.” He pressed down on Draco’s cock.

“So why are you?” A glimpse of defiance.

“Because it humiliates you. Being at the mercy of a Weasley. Doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” Draco whispered.

“Think what your father would say.”

Draco moaned.

“What would he say, Malfoy?”

“Disgusting,” Draco said. “Cavorting with filth. Whoring yourself out for blood traitors and mudbloods—”

Smack. Hermione was diligent in her ruthlessness.

“Oh Merlin, shit, fuck,” Draco gasped, and came in his trousers. Ron felt it sticky and damp against his palm.

Ron slipped his fingers inside Draco’s pants, coating the ends of them with come, and smeared it on Draco’s cheek. “He’s right. That’s what you are. A whore. Look at the mess you made.”

7.

“I’m gonna take off your pants,” Ron said.

“Go ahead,” Draco said. “Do what you want to me.”

“If you want to come again, you’ll come like an animal,” Ron said. “Isn’t that what you always said about us Weasleys? Going at it like rabbits? Living in a barn?"

Draco nodded against the rug. His own come was still smeared on his face. The divot of his spine shone with a thin veneer of sweat. Ron slid Draco’s soft wool trousers, then his pants, down to the back of Draco’s thighs. There was a light dusting of blond hair there. Ron stroked it, sliding his fingers up his inner thigh. His cock was ruddy and long, pressed between his hips and the rug.

“Say it,” Ron said.

“Fucking like rabbits,” Draco gasped.

Smack. Hermione’s hand came down on Draco’s left arse cheek. Draco ground into the rug.

“You’re enjoying this too much,” Hermione said. 

#honeybeet writes #smut #7 smutty scenes #the two at the end are from my kinkuary dacryphilia fic #cw: humiliation and slapping

[arielchelby]

20 Questions Writer Meme

Thank you for the tag @girlwithakiwi!

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

18

2. What's your total ao3 word count?

578,987

3. What fandoms do you write for?

Just Game of Thrones so far! 

4. What are your top five fics by kudos?

The Princess and the Bastard

Burn and Consume

In Another Life

Lure Me To Hell

The Road To Winterfell

5. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

I do because I love any opportunity to geek out about my own fic. I absolutely love comments. 

6. What's the fic you wrote that has the angstiest ending?

Oh I feel like thats spoilers… since I’m not finished writing *that one* yet. 

7. What's the fic you wrote that has the happiest ending?

I prefer happy endings, but I would say of my finished fic, Burn and Consume has the happiest ending. Jon and Dany are a lot less haunted at the end of that one as compared to one of my other fic like In Another Life. Although spoilers: the ending of The Princess and the Bastard will probably be the happiest one. 

8. Do you get hate on fics?

It’s definitely calmed down as the fandom has gotten smaller. Midway through writing The Princess and the Bastard I would get a lot of heat anytime Dany made any kind of show of strength and for some reason, however I wrote Robb in that fic, really triggered Jon stans so I’d get a lot of heat whenever he made an appearance in a chapter. 

Oh and there was this one time, for the whole of 2022, where I was harassed on A03 by a man in the fandom who used the pseudonym RapeLover420. 

OTHER THAN THAT, I have always had an overwhelmingly positive response on A03 that has made writing in this fandom a fun experience. 

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

I do! I love writing smut. The kind depends on fic, but whatever kind I write, I try to make it ooze with feels. 

10. Do you write crossovers?

No. That sounds like a nightmare to me - I don’t know how people can keep that straight. 

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not that I know of! 

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?

Yes! AliveToLiveALie started translating In Another Life in Spanish and Arainbowflyingunicorn started translating The Princess and the Bastard in Chinese. 

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

I have! @moondancer71and I have been working on two fics together and it’s been a really fun experience. Our ideas jive really well together and we’re both good at giving and taking criticism so it works really well. And it is pretty amazing to only have to write half of a chapter! 

14. What's your all-time favorite ship?

Jonerys, of course! 

15. What's a wip you want to finish, but don't think you ever will?

I plan to finish all of my WIPs. (I swear) 

16. What are your writing strengths?

I think my strengths are characterization, world building, dialogue and plotting. 

17. What are your writing weaknesses?

Probably pacing, character and clothing descriptions, and I loathe writing battles. 

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language for a fic?

Hmm I will use bits of Valyrian and throw in the translation. 

19. First fandom you wrote for?

Game of Thrones

20. Favorite fic you've written?

 That’s a hard question. I would say my top favorites are The Princess and the Bastard, Burn and Consume, Under the Same Stars, In Another Life, Lure Me to Hell and Hocus Pocus are my favorite - all for vastly different reasons. Under the Same Stars might be the one I most proud of simply because I had a better idea of how to write by the time I started it and the story also just feels magical to me. 

I'm tagging @moondancer71 @evax3 @moon-ruled-main @alwaysdaenerys @filhadoboto @littledancer9

#tag games #jonerys fanfic

[kholran]

Twenty questions for fic writers

Tagged by @lucientelrunya Thank you friend!

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

26

2. What's your total AO3 word count?

219,573

3. What fandoms do you write for?

Only DMBJ right now, but I have written for The Hobbit and Les Mis in the past.

4. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

I Will Go Now To My Pyre (254)

And Here My Troubles Begin (246)

When the Stars Align (212)

I Get By (211)

Skin Deep (197)

5. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

I try to! Sometimes I am Very Bad at remembering to do it, and I end up replying like months later. But I value every single comment I get, and I want to let the commenter know that I'm grateful they took the time to not just read but say something.

6. What is a fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

Hmm... I always try to end on a hopeful note, if not an outright happy one. I did write a Barduil (The Hobbit) ficlet here on Tumblr where the reveal is angsty, so I guess that one.

7. What's the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

Again, I usually try to end in a happy place. I guess I'll say Ordinary World, because (spoiler alert) the world is saved, the 'ships are all together, and everyone is content.

8. Do you get hate on fics?

Not really. I did get one comment on an unfinished fic where the person made an (incorrect) assumption of where it was going, and then judged the fic based on that assumption. IDK if they actually made it to the end when it *was* finished. They never did comment again.

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

Yep, I do. Usually as part of a larger plot/story. I don't really like writing smut just for smut's sake. But as long as there's some plot around it, then I don't shy away from it.

10. Do you write crossovers? What's the craziest one you've written?

In the traditional sense of the word (characters from one thing meeting characters from another thing) then no. I'm not a big fan of that, either writing or reading. But I LOVE me a good fusion fic, and I've written many of those. I'd say the Les Mis/Les Amis Titanic fic is the "craziest" but it's not a crackfic by any means.

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not that I'm aware of.

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?

Hmm I don't think so?

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

I used to do a ton of forum-based RP, which is basically just collaborative writing. If you look closely, you can still see that influence. I tend to write from the POV of one character at a time, although now I'm writing all of the characters myself, and only switch when there's a natural break/need to change.

14. What's your all-time favorite ship?

That I've written? RiSang, hands down. But I also have a ton of favourite ships that I've never written for. I think maybe Alucard/Integra (Hellsing/Ultimate) is at the top of that list? It's been one of my faves for a very long time, in any case. As has Zechs/Noin (Gundam Wing). And honourable mention to Weilan (Guardian) and Wenzhou (Word of Honour) for being more recent, but consuming my every brain wave ever since I watched those shows.

15. What's a wip you want to finish, but doubt you ever will?

The Weilan mermaid AU I still have sitting in my laptop's Docs folder. I had the whole thing planned out but then RiSang happened and that's all I've been able to focus on writing ever since.

16. What are your writing strengths?

I think I'm pretty good at setting scenes? Like the atmosphere and setting, and who the characters are in the particular universe I'm writing at the time.

17. What are your writing weaknesses?

Abuse of adverbs and em-dashes, but you can pry both of those out of my cold dead hands. Oh also natural dialogue. I am an awkward human person who can't carry on a conversation to save my life and it shows.

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language for a fic?

Dialogue, not so much. I will occasionally use a word, phrase, or title (like Fuguan or Tianzhen or Heipaoshi) if it's something I'm sure is common knowledge of the fandom, but apart from French, I'm not fluent enough in any language to trust my ability to write realistic and grammatically correct dialogue in it.

19. First fandom you wrote for?

When I was in like fifth grade, I was obsessed with Baywatch (don't judge me). So me and my friend made original characters and wrote out like little stories about them and the show's characters hanging out.

20. Favorite fic you've written?

I think my favourite has to be Pyre. RiSang got me back into writing after I had a massive confidence crash and spent 5 years not writing anything. I'm also very proud of Ordinary World. It's my longest fic to date, and, in my own humble opinion, one of the tightest plots I've ever written. I can reread it and not be bored, even though I wrote it.

Tagging: @merinnan @hils79 @xantissa @eirenical @saxgoddess25 and uhhh @amidalogicdive (Only if you want to! No pressure!)

#things i'm tagged in #writer things

[sequinsmile-x]

😅😈😬

hi and thank you :)

😅 What's a story or scene you've created that you're a smidge embarrassed exists?

If I'm honest, as much as I love the first couple of stories I wrote, I reread them recently and I can see how much my writing has come and it does embarrass me a little. BUT that is just me being hyper critical of myself, because I would NEVER think that of anyone elses work!!

😬 Which of your fics would you be most horrified for friends, family, or coworkers to stumble upon?

Literally any of the smut i've written

😈 Has there been a point in a story where you did something just to be playfully mean to your readers?

I've changed the order so I can put a spoiler for Stained Glass Windows below the cut.

Yes. There very much has...

In chapter 4 of SGW Emily says:

“We’ll get him, Aaron,” she says, repeating the same thing she had in the months that had passed since she’d first said in the alley next to the bus that still haunted his nightmares, “He’ll slip up, and we’ll get him,” her lip twitches in a smile, “And I’ll shoot the bastard myself if I have to.”

.....and then she does EXACTLY that 3 chapters later 😬

#vic answers asks

[dabifixation]

see you later

pairings: dabi x fem!reader

warnings: smut, fluff, angst, major character death, mha manga spoilers, slight gore, MINORS DNI

summary: Dabi knew he had to end things soon before they got out of hand. He knew this wasn't supposed to last long, he told himself that everytime he left your apartment in the early hours of the morning. Until he found himself back here again, in your arms and lost between your thighs.

word count: 4.7k words

"... We encourage everyone to stay at home tonight, as there is a possibility of a severe thunderstorm, along with it flashfloods all over the city..."

The television only served as background noise for you as you moved around your kitchen. Cleaning up the dirty dishes and utensils, a small smile on your lips after the friendly company you had tonight.

It's been a while since you invited your friends over for some supper after the long depressing week you had. You needed that, the entertainment and companionship only they could offer you. You've never laughed or cried so hard in months, telling each other about your sorrows and thoughts for your futures ahead.

Being an adult was never easy, especially in a world full of rejected heroes.

You were so lost in your thoughts that you hadn't heard the warning cough behind you, or the tap against your kitchen counter. But you did give a short shriek when you felt someone wrap their arms around your waist, their chin resting on your shoulder, inhaling your scent.

You relaxed once you felt the familiar warmth of who it was. Only one person in the entire world could be dubbed a walking, breathing furnace, and it was him.

"I missed out on a big meal didn't I?" He drawled, his warm hands rubbing soothing circles against your stomach.

"Maybe if you didn't pop into my life every few months, I would've saved you a plate." You sarcastically replied, but you didn't miss the way how you sounded partially hurt.

You weren't expecting much all those years ago when you found him bloodied and passed out behind your childhood home, and you weren't expecting much now.

You never asked questions, and he never pried in your personal life. You were quite fine with that. Not everyone was an extrovert and had their whole life story ready to be dished out. He was a very private person and you respected that.

He ignored what you said and continued to nuzzle his face into your neck. Using one hand to push your hair over your shoulder, exposing your neck to him.

You suppressed a sigh when you felt his warm lips give short kisses against your neck.

"I've missed you." He breathed cold air into your neck, making you stiffen at those words. He's never said something like that before, not once in the six years since you've known him.

Dabi noticed you stiffen in his arms, but he didn't say a word. He wasn't lying. He did miss you, achingly so.

He missed your stubborn attitude, the sarcastic replies that were on par with his own, the homemade cooking you offered to teach him countless of times that he doubt he'd pay attention to cause he wouldn't be able to keep his hands to himself. But most importantly he missed you. The way your touch lingered even days after his monthly visits, the way your lips would pay close attention to the magenta scars all over his body, and the different ways you'd say his name depending on what he was doing to you.

God, he was going to miss all of this once he leaves for the League of Villains.

"I've missed you too." You shyly said, you've never admitted these words aloud before and it felt good to tell him that.

"Turn around for me, I wanna see how good you look." He whispered in your neck.

"Dabi I'm wearing nothing but my puppy printed sweater." You deadpanned.

"It doesn't matter, you always look good no matter what." He playfully nipped your ear, making you roll your eyes despite the heat in your body relocating to your cheeks.

You turned around to face him, a beaming smile on your face that was only ever directed at him. Your heart always soared whenever you looked at him. He was beautiful. The most beautiful man you've ever had the pleasure of laying your eyes on. His eyes were the most vibrant blue you've ever seen, little specks of grey dancing in those pretty blues that were half lidded but always calculative and aware of his surroundings. He licked his lips, bringing your attention to the plump flesh that were an interesting contrast between soft and jagged, and the pink tongue residing in his mouth.

Your eyes were transfixed on his appearance, making sure no hair on his head was missing or any new injuries to his increasing collection. You rested your forehead against his hard chest once you found nothing out of place, letting out a sigh of relief when you finalized that he was okay, and not sporting a limp or any other injury.

"Damn, I stress you out that much huh doll?" You could hear the smirk in his voice, but didn't have the energy to make a snarky remark, only offering him a small smile.

"Your visits are becoming less and less you know, the last time I saw you was five months ago. I was..." so worried about you, you wanted to say. You were so worried that you stayed up everyday, two hours after your initial bedtime hoping that he'd at least show up once in those five months. He didn't, and you were beginning to think he never would, until tonight. You didn't want to tell him that.

He wouldn't care.

You felt embarrassed that you were crying to your friends about him earlier on. Scared that you'd never see him again, not because he's moved on from you as you know there's nothing keeping him here other than sex and a warm bed to crash in, but because you were worried he'd get himself injured or worse. And you didn't like dwelling on what worse could imply.

"I kno–" Dabi's words were cut off by a small sneeze he muffled into his arm. Sneezing twice more before he regained his composure.

You only noticed now that his clothes were slightly damp and heavier than usual. It made your eyesbrows furrow.

"How long were you in the rain Dabi?" You questioned, knowing you wouldn't like whatever answer he'd come up with.

"Ever since your lady friends came by."

"That was over two hours ago? You've been sitting in the rain this entire time?!" You felt your blood pressure rising when he only shrugged at your accusations. It was like arguing with a toddler sometimes.

You sighed again, pinching the bridge of your nose. "I've got a box of mens clothes laying around here somewhere. Go take a shower and I'll get them for you and make you a cup of hot tea."

He quirked one eyebrow up, staring intensely at you.

"What?" You averted your eyes away from his, embarrassed that he was searching your face for something.

He shrugged again, rolling his battered coat off his shoulders and started stripping the rest of his clothes off. You turned around before he could go any further. Busying yourself with getting his tea ready.

Dabi stopped undressing, standing there with nothing but his jeans on. Watching you as you got the correct items in order to make him tea, muttering to yourself about which biscuits he might like with it.

He liked the butterscotch ones, but he didn't bother opening his mouth. Too memorized by the way you moved around so frantically as if he was dying instead of coming down with a small cold.

He liked that about you, he liked a lot of things about you. Especially the way you cared about the simplest things pertaining to him even during moments of intimacy. You treated him like glass even if he didn't offer the same treatment in return, not because he didn't want to, he just didn't know how to go about it.

He frowned.

Dabi was only ever vulnerable around you, and you didn't even realize it. You didn't know the power you had over him, and he'd like to keep it that way. Afraid that you'd use it against him and he wouldn't be able to bring himself to hurt you for that. He could never hurt you.

He found himself walking towards you on impulse, hugging your waist once again. This time pressing his body flush against yours. He heard you gasp and that pulled a smirk out of him.

"Do you know what you do to me?" He gripped your hip with one hand, and snuck the other hand underneath your shirt. His lips against your neck, right above your pulse point.

Your stomach tensed when you felt his hot fingers rubbing soothing circles against it. He pressed you further against him, making you feel the growing length against your ass. You bit your lip, stopping yourself from whimpering too early.

"The way your nipples are perking up so nicely for me in this shirt that's practically transparent is driving me nuts." He snaked his hand further up your shirt, brushing the skin underneath your breasts gently. Your breath caught in your throat as you gripped the counter tightly.

Your panties were clinging to your pussy uncomfortably, you could feel the material getting wetter with each passing second. You tried rubbing your thighs together for some friction, but Dabi wasn't having any of it. He clicked his tongue out of irritation, the hand on your hips falling towards your inner thighs, parting your legs. His hold was strong enough to prevent you from rubbing your thighs together, you wanted to whine when he didn't place his hand right where you wanted them.

Just a little higher.

"I asked you a question doll." He spoke into your hair, taking a deep breath from the rooibos shampoo you used. The smell turned him on even more.

"W-what question?" You whimpered, resting the back of your head onto his chest, sighing out as he brushed the pads of his thumb against your hardened nipples.

"I don't like repeating myself." He growled, pinching your nipples harshly causing you to whimper pathetically in his arms. He continue to tweak at your nipples roughly before groping your breast and fondling it the way he liked.

"Dabi... " You mewled.

"Don't. Don't say my name like that." He gave your nipples a warning pinch.

You bucked up into his hips, involuntarily grinding against his cock. The swollen head rubbing in between your ass despite the jeans restricting him. Making him choke back a groan.

Dabi was just as impatient as was it in his nature to tease. He took his hand away from between your thighs to quickly lick the tips of his index and middle finger, bringing them back towards your aching pussy. You were such a good girl, not once taking the opportunity to touch yourself or rub your thighs together.

He wasted no time in pushing your thong to the side, sucking a deep breath through his teeth when he rubbed his fingers through your slit collecting the thick moisture gathered there. You always got so wet for him.

After coating his fingers in your arousal, he moved his fingers towards the bundle of nerves that had been pulsing ever since he rocked up at your house.

You let out a breathy yes, eyes rolling to the back of your head as Dabi rubbed your clit just the way you liked, grinding it down in tight circles that had your toes curling. He pinched at your clit piercing, knowing how much you liked it when he played with the metal and how easily it could make you gush for him. The pleasure was overwhelming and had you feeling light headed.

Without warning, Dabi plunged those same two fingers into your tight pussy. You bit back a scream as your body jerked and writhed against him. Hips chasing after his fingers as they thrusted deeper into your spongy walls, the palm of his hand grinding against your clit. The stimulation was too much for you.

"Fuck!" You shouted out, bringing your hand down to his, gripping on his wrist tightly so he could go deeper and faster. He could get you cumming around his two fingers alone, he didn't need more than that.

"Dabi please." You begged.

"Please what?" He asked curiously, knowing exactly what you so deeply craved.

The hand around your breast disappeared. He reached for his jeans so he could unzip it and pull it down. A short relieved sigh left his lips once his jeans were pulled down his thighs, just enough to free his heavy cock from all that pressure. He gripped his cock in his free hand, he wanted to feel you around him so bad but he had to be patient, as much as he hated it.

Dabi watched you from underneath his dark lashes, the way your body responded to him in delicious squirms and moans drove him mad. He added pressure to your clit, grinding his palm hard against it. Your body rocked back into him for more, a high pitched wail leaving those beautiful lips he couldn't wait to claim.

"I want you ins- shit shit shit!" He watched your body shaking silently against him, thighs trembling, pussy clamping so hard around his fingers he hissed as he pulled them out and quickly replaced them with his angry, pulsing cock.

"Fuck." Dabi let out breathlessly in your ear, feeling you clench and gush around him as you came. He wasn't prepared for this. To feel you around him after five long excruciating months. He loved the way your pussy gripped onto him after all these years, as if it was the first time all over again.

Dabi pulled your head back by your chin so he could look into your eyes as he drove you into your next orgasm. Ignoring your pained whimpers of pleasure from being overstimulated like this. He dragged his cock slowly out of you, holding back a gasp as he slid out of your warm walls, missing the snug warmth around him, and then slammed right back into you without warning, making you cry out.

Your ass bounced against his thighs as he gained momentum, making him cuss underneath his breath at the squelching noises that came along with it and the mess you made on his jeans. Your hands fell down to Dabi's thighs, gripping them tightly but not tight enough to leave your mark, as he practically seethed from the power trip of fucking you after so long.

The drag of his cock inside you had you nearing your second orgasm so soon, and with the animalistic grunts Dabi let out, you could tell he wasn't too far behind. He usually lasted longer than this, way longer, he underestimated how much he truly missed you it seemed.

"Dhabi... Phleasinside... Please!" He could barely make out what you were saying, a stroke to his ego at fucking you so silly to a point you couldn't use your words properly.

"What doll? Use your words." There was a slight wheeze to his words, your pussy clenching so tightly around him had him close to losing his breath.

"Please cum inside... fuck your cum inside me please. Please!" You momentarily gained back your speech long enough to form coherent sentences. You screwed your eyes shut as you felt your orgasm nearing.

His grip on your hips tightened immensely, no doubt leaving his fingerprints there for days. He wouldn't last much longer and you knew it, the telltale signs of his thighs tensing and the urgent bucking of his hips told you he was close.

Dabi let out a groan so deep from the very depths of his stomach, goosebumps began to rise on your sore arms from the intense sound alone. He forced your head to the back so he could kiss you as he came, making a sound so damn carnal it had you cumming alongside him.

The two of you came together in perfect harmony, your pussy clenching down so hard on his cock it had you lurching forward from the force, breaking the heated kiss. Long strings of hot semen shot up into your awaiting womb, dripping down your thighs when it had no more room to go.

Your breathing was uneven, your chest and throat burning from your screaming session. Forever grateful that you didn't live by your parents anymore, back when you had to muffle all your moans from when you and Dabi used to fool around even back then.

He was no better, his breathing shallow and unsteady.

Dabi didn't pull out just yet, savoring the moment of the two of you being joined as one. His fingers traced the long line running down your back, not caring how sweaty you were as he kissed your shoulders gently in gratitude. After awhile he pulled his softened cock out of you, groaning from the oversensitivity while you winced from the evidence of what took place running down your shaky thighs.

The high from sex quickly came crashing down on him. He wasn't here to have sex with you, it just happened. Guilt began to chew at his mind from what he was about to do next, but the way you looked at him, with those caring eyes someone like him didn't deserve, made him drag this moment out far longer than it should've been.

He wasn't a ''now rather than later'' kind of guy after all.

"Let's get you cleaned up." His stomach churned when he watched you look up at him in confusion.

That's right, Dabi never cared about aftercare or basking in the afterglow. He thought it was unnecessary, but couldn't say he hasn't wondered how it would feel to have you running your fingers through his hair and humming childhood lullabies the way his mother used to do to him.

A pang shot out to his heart at the thought of his mother, quickly stomping those traitorous thoughts from making an appearance tonight. Not now, he thought. Returning his full attention towards you and your warm hand grasping his own. Squeezing it gently to bring him back down to earth.

Usually after he was done he'd leave, not that you were bitter about it or anything. That's just how it was. A small smirk would grace his two-toned lips with a "See you later" sent your way before he left your apartment. It was a little tradition shared between you two, the first time he said it you were still 16, applying ointment to his injuries after you found him in your parents backyard. He abruptly left without so much as a thank you, only offering those three words.

Now whenever he left, he'd always say those words to ease your brewing anxiety in promise of seeing you next time. And he never broke that promise.

He didn't speak to you about it, but you could tell he risked everything by coming to your place every once in awhile. You were not ignorant to the things Dabi did, some part of you knew he was involved with some shady things. Things you didn't want to bring up with him.

A man didn't get that many scars in their 23 years of life by being a good samaritan.

You reached your shower, stepping in while Dabi adjusted the settings to both of your liking, joining you once he was satisfied. You've come to love the heat as much as him, hot showers always reminded you of the flame user.

The water ran hot against the both of you. You looked up at Dabi, surprised to see him watching you. For a short moment, you held his gaze. Wondering what could possibly be running through his head that had him looking so defeated.

He wanted to tell you then and there that he'd have to leave for good this time. The League weren't people to be taken lightly, especially with that unhinged brat as their leader. He wouldn't be surprised if the creepy fucker was the type to kill the loved ones of people in order to maintain compliance.

But Dabi kept his mouth, and reached for your blue loofah instead. Squirting some of your lemon scented body wash onto it, scrunching it up so it could get more soapy. He worked in silence, scrubbing your body gently with utmost care and concentration.

Hell would freeze over before Dabi allows anyone to touch a single hair on your body. He didn't care who it was, even if it was the League members, he'd make damn sure their life would end with them being nothing but dirt underneath his shoe. He had to stop coming over after tonight, he was heading into dangerous, unknown territory afterall and he'd rather avoid killing the people he needed to exploit. His plans were finally at his fingers tips, and he wasn't about to throw them away over sex.

No, it was more than sex, no matter how many times he tried convincing himself that he was only here for one reason, he'd just end up fooling himself. At night when he'd look for shelter on the streets, when his quirk couldn't keep him warm the way he wanted, you'd plague his mind with your sweet smile and honey voice. Scolding him for not taking better care of himself and that he could crash at your place if he needed to get back on his feet.

That's why Dabi stopped scrubbing you just as you began to relax at the newfound comfort. You felt his hands tense against your body, making you turn around in concern.

"Hey. Is everything okay?" You were so concerned about him, his chest tightened. Why did you care so much about someone like him. You were so ignorant and stupid. Could you not see the blood on his hands from all the innocent people he convinced himself he killed out of pleasure. It infuriated him to no end, but he could never get mad at you. Not really. He tried pushing you away before, but you were as stubborn as him so he gave up on that method.

Your shoulders fell from his lack of response.

You were too grown to be playing guessing games with him, it was cute entertaining it before, but not now. Not when you were just coming to terms with... with what exactly?

You had an inkling of what was going on, but didn't want to push further. If he was going to tell you, he would. So you asked the next best thing.

"When will you be back?" You asked hopefully, water running down your face. He flashed you a smile that didn't quite reach his eyes. His fingers brushing your wet hair out of your face. He learned in, placing a soft kiss against your forehead, his lips lingering for a moment.

"You're so important to me and I don't want you getting hurt because of my suicidal actions." Was what Dabi wanted to say, but he didn't.

So Dabi did what Dabi did best, deflect from the situation and push his true feelings down. Just when you thought you were making progress (as small as that progress was) in this twisted relationship you had with him, you were right where you started.

"I don't know when, I can't tell you exactly. But just know it won't be anytime soon." Or ever.

"Okay. Just... just stay safe." You whispered, placing your hand above his chest, where his heart was. You could feel the way his heart was beating ferociously against his chest, like a caged animal.

He brushed his thumb against your cheek, wanting to remember how soft your skin felt underneath his fingertips, wanting to remember everything from tonight before he left for good. He gave you one last kiss, this time on your lips. A quick peck that said a thousand words, and got out of the shower getting ready to leave. You stood still underneath the scorching heat of the shower, for the first time in years it actually made you flinch in pain.

You watched as he dried himself off with your towel, not paying any attention to you as his hand reached for the doorknob. Much to your relief, he spared you a brief glance that said everything you needed to know in that moment.

"See you later."

-

It's been ten months since you last saw him, almost a year. And in those ten months you've moved out of the city, got a new job and apartment better than the last. You were happy, content with how life has been treating you lately. Your skin was healthier and glowing, you made time for the gym and started toning your body to your liking. Everything was perfect.

It's been ten months since you last saw him, until you finally did.

There Dabi was, or as it said on the news headline, Touya Todoroki, all over your television. Standing above the ruins of a burning building. His clothes were torn, and his body full of cuts and bruises. You didn't even notice the white hair until the news reporter pointed it out.

There was a ringing in your ear as the camera zoomed in on what looked like a teenage boy emerging from one of the ruins, sporting dual coloured hair. Shouto Todoroki was his name they said, Dabi's younger brother who was a 1st year student at UA High School.

Dabi burst into those beautiful blue flames that you admired so much, while the young boy's left side burst into flames of red and orange. They appeared to get ready to fight, the entire country watching with bated breath.

And then everything happened so fast after that.

You don't remember when the tears started falling, but you do remember the loud sob that tore out of your throat as you watched Dabi's flames engulf him from over-exerting his quirk. He fell on his knees, face twisting as he screamed in pain. You couldn't hear what was happening as the mic from the camera crew melted from the overbearing heat of the two flame users, but you could tell that the pain he was going through was excruciating.

You didn't even recognize your own scream when his body swayed as his flames ate away at his flesh. The staples holding his two skin types together, melting into his flesh. You felt sick to your stomach.

Dry sobs continued to leave your sore throat as you watched the man you've known since you were 16, the man you were afraid to admit that you loved so deeply and finally came to terms with it after six years, slowly dying on national television as the entire world watched and didn't do anything about it.

The anchorman's voice was muffled as you watched your lover fall down, face first into the concrete. His body immobile. Your throat clogged up in pain, all you could do now was cry and watch as his little brother tried reviving him using CPR. A failed attempt, but what else could a 15 year old with zero experience in the medical field do.

A part of you felt like it was being ripped out as you watched heroes rush to the scene trying to pry the young boy away from his older brother. You watched as he pushed them away baring his teeth at them, tears streaming down his young face. You watched as a stretcher rolled by, two medics picking up Dabi's burnt corpse and putting him in that black body bag, zipping it up and slowly moving away from the scene.

The screen went blank, offering nothing but silence as you came to terms with what just happened, before the news anchor popped up, a nauseating smile on his pinched face.

"... The villain Dabi has finally been defeated by his own quirk. A win for hero society against their fight with the villains!!"

You were too numb to tell how many hours passed by as you sat there all alone in your room.

While the country celebrated his defeat, your entire world came crumbling down.

You would never be able to feel his warm hands cup your cheeks, pecking you all over the face while he praised you. You would never get to kiss him again, the type of kisses that left you weak in the knees. You would never get to do things with him that you always wanted to do, simple things such as falling asleep in his arms after a long day of work.

But most of all, you would never hear those three special words of his again, the words you didn't even realize until now, were his way of proclaiming his love for you.

"See you later."

#dabi #touya todoroki #touya #touya x reader #dabi smut #dabi x y/n #bnha smut #bnha imagines #manga spoilers #dabi headcanons #dabi fanfiction #mha fanfictions #anime #mha spoilers

[altamont498]

Fic Questionnaire

I was tagged by @yoshi-g-teh-first, thanks so much for that!

I can't think of anyone to tag off the top of my head, so I'll just leave this open to anyone who wants to do it.

Let's get this started...

SHow many works do you have on AO3?

21, as of today.

What's your total AO3 word count?

129,012 as of today (19/08/2021)

How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?

Sherlock Holmes (ACD canon), Ace Attorney, The Great Ace Attorney, Yuri on Ice and The God of High School. So 6 total.

What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

1. Nirvana - [Ryunosuke Naruhodo/Kazuma Asogi] - The Great Ace Attorney

2. In The Morning - [Ryunosuke Naruhodo/Kazuma Asogi] - The Great Ace Attorney

3. Yuuri Katsuki's Secret Fanfiction - [Yuuri Katsuki/Viktor Nikiforov] - Yuri On Ice

4. Onsen - [Ryunosuke Naruhodo/Kazuma Asogi] - The Great Ace Attorney

5. First Name Terms - [Ryunosuke Naruhodo/Kazuma Asogi] - The Great Ace Attorney

So yeah, quite a lot of AsoRyu fics.

Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

Yes, every time, because if people took the time to write to me to show appreciation for my fic then they deserve appreciation back.

What's the fic you've written with the angstiest ending?

I don't really "do" angst, so this one is just N/A.

Have you ever recieved hate on a fic?

Not that I'm aware of. But then again, I'm a firm believer in the mantra of "Don't Like; Don't Read" which I chant quite often so it seems to have rubbed off on quite a few readers.

Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

I do write smut. I don't often publish the very explicit stuff (I've some more explicit stuff on @reds-self-shipsafterdark for the self shipping end of things) but I do have some published.

Also there's some implied stuff floating about in my fics.

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

No, and I hope I never have.

Have you ever had a fic translated?

No, but if anyone wants to translate a fic of mine, do let me know and I can help with implied meanings to make sure puns/names/etc. carry across properly.

Have you ever co-written a fic before?

No, but I'd love to team up with someone some day to write one if I could find the time and I could get along well enough with someone's line-of-thought to make sure it turned out as planned.

What's your all time favourite ship?

Well I do self ship over on @reds-self-ships so I'd have to say my own TBH. Excluding that, I'd say it's a tie between Yuuri Katsuki/Viktor Nikiforov (Viktuuri) and Kazuma Asogi/Ryunosuke Naruhodo (Asoryu).

What's a WIP you want to finish but don't think you ever will?

Probably A Turnabout of Identity. It's been so long and it kind of fizzled out towards the end. I'll probably orphan it some of these days tbh.

What are your writing strengths?

Apparently I'm good at writing characters in-character and being able to capture their movements, lines of thought, etc. and carry it across.

What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

I avoid it where possible, but when I do I make sure it's a reliable translation and that I avoid Poirot speak/Wapanese.

I.e. "Konnichiwa! I'm a person from Nippon. You can tell because I say something Nihongo every san seconds! It's so kawaii!"

Also I make sure to provide translations at some point as a footnote or whatever and I avoid anything that isn't the Latin alphabet because I know that sometimes random symbols can be inaccurate (e.g. kanji) or people can't read/interpret them.

What was the first fandom you've ever written for?

I believe it may well have been Club Penguin or Wizard101. All traces thereof would be considered long lost and long-since-deleted though.

What's your favourite fic you've ever written?

Probably my ongoing fic over on @reds-self-ships even if it isn't an AO3 fic specifically. The Adventure of the Detection Club is currently allowing me to poke fun at loads of famous crime novelists even if it isn't direct.

And for something AO3 specific, I'd say probably The Adventure of the Doctor's Deduction because it references an old Sherlock Holmes story and allows Sholmes and [REDACTED FOR TGAA 2 SPOILERS] to enjoy some development as well as just having a laugh in general.

#long post #fanfiction #archive of our own #tag game #fic questionnaire

[red-riding-wood]

Heroes - Chapter 3

Chpt. 1 , Masterlist , Chpt. 4

Pairing: Sgt. Elias Grodin x Female OC (Alexis Ryder)

Fandoms: Platoon (1986), Cherry (2021)

WARNINGS: I'm just going to put down a blanket for the entire book/all chapters: graphic depictions of violence and gore, torture, explicit sexual content, attempted sexual assault, language, marijuana use

Dawn was rolling over the horizon, filtering in through scraggly branches and needled boughs with its warm, soothing touch; and although it made my eyes dart less nervously around at the shadowy brush, it did nothing to help the sweat that funneled in rivulets down the grooves of my back.

My armour, helmet, rig, and rucksack lay in a heap beside my shovel, which I thrust into the earth with another lethargic swing.

I’d barely gotten any sleep since my turn on last night’s watch, and I was running off of adrenaline.

Wolfe and the sergeants of each squad had met early in the morning to discuss a converging mass of al-Qaeda on our position, and had been strategizing – though mostly bickering – about how we would tackle this threat.

Most of us new fry were tasked with digging foxholes, while the more experienced soldiers would flank the hostiles and flush them towards us.

O’Neill had stayed to keep an eye on us, make sure we were doing our jobs, but really, it was just so that he could kick back his boots and leave the work for someone else.

I huffed out a strained breath over the handle of my shovel, arms quivering over it. My head felt as if it were growing light, from my lack of sleep and from not allowing myself a single break over the past two hours.

“Hey, Sweet Cheeks!” O’Neill’s voice cut through the air, and with my back turned to him, he couldn’t see my wince, the curling of my gums over my teeth as I panted out each laboured breath.

“Get back to diggin’ that hole, will ya? I was enjoying my little show,” the sergeant remarked, and I clenched my jaw, but said nothing.

This was precisely why I hadn’t allowed myself any breaks.

I drove the shovel deeper into the soil, and with reluctance, bent my aching spine with it. My shirt rode up at the base of my spine, catching on the stickiness of my perspiration, and a cat-call behind me signalled that I’d appeased the NCO.

As I went to heave another load of dirt from my shovel, I caught sight of a flicker of movement across the dirt, and I heard the guy next to me – Taylor, his name was – suck in a sharp breath.

I stilled for a moment, watching as a scaled, mud-brown rope curved and slithered its way around his boots. I narrowed my eyes, studying the dull patterns on its body, and then flicked my eyes up to meet the wide, fearful ones of Taylor.

“It’s non-venomous,” I told him, under my breath. “It’s just a dice snake… I think.”

A week into basic, some of my fellow recruits had found out that Taylor had a fear of snakes, and had gathered a few cobras from the outskirts of Kandahar and stuck them under his blanket. Poor guy hadn’t seemed to shake the feeling of scales on his flesh for a good couple days after that.

That was when I’d learned that you never told people of your fears in the army.

Taylor was the transfer that had taken Cherry’s spot in Two Bravo. I hadn’t properly been introduced to him yet, but we were digging the same foxhole and had been working alongside each other all morning. He wasn’t like Bunny, or Junior, or any of the other guys that had been giving me grief all morning. He was quiet, shy, kind of like Cherry, and seemed to be just as rattled as I was by everything that was happening.

And though everyone got their fair share of teasing, Taylor was one that everyone loved to just take out their aggressive, restless energy on. He’d been some rich kid, apparently, had shown up on his first day smelling like La Chatelaine soap and sporting luxuriously-styled locks of hair that had since been mercilessly buzzed like the rest of the new men.

As rough as I had it, I didn’t have it as rough as the rich white kid amid a platoon of uneducated men who’d joined because they had no money or no place to be.

Taylor nodded at me, though the fear didn’t leave his eyes until the snake had, its lithe form disappearing beneath a few fallen branches.

I resumed my digging, though Taylor, in his gratitude, said to me, “Thanks. I still don’t know which ones are the gonna-bite-your-dick-off kind or not.”

My lip curled into the slightest of smiles, and I said, “Well, I’m not really an expert on that myself.”

“I’m Chris,” he said. “Chris Taylor.”

I looked up at him from where I laboured over my shovel, and nodded. “Ryder,” I reciprocated.

“Heard some talk ‘bout snakes over here?” Bunny cut in, sauntering over from the foxhole he dug with Junior. He flashed me a toothy grin, and added, “Taylor bein’ a pussy again? Might have to shove it down his pants, this time. Heard there’s plenty o’room.”

I eyed the man warily, and said, “Snake’s gone.”

“’Course it is,” Bunny said, wild eyes flashing and fixing me with a look. “What’re you two chummin’ ‘bout, anyway?” The wiry soldier shoved his way between us, knocking my shoulder with his.

“We’re talking about books,” Taylor said, and I caught his eye over Bunny’s shoulder. In our gaze, for a mere second or so, flickered the seed of an alliance, and I forced back a smile.

“Fuckin’ books? ‘Course fuckin’ rich boy’s yabberin’ ‘bout books. You don’t really wanna be hearin’ ‘bout that, do ya, Sugar Tits?” Bunny jostled my shoulder again, intentionally this time, and I felt his fingers graze the sweat-slicked fabric on my lower back.

I hoped he didn’t notice how I’d stiffened, and I cast a glance back at O’Neill. Was he not going to tell Bunny to get back to his foxhole?     

O’Neill simply flashed a wink at me, leaning back against a pile of rocks like they were a throne.

“No,” I told Bunny, because disagreeing with this maniac would’ve been suicide. “I don’t wanna hear about books.”

With Bunny’s attention now fixated on me, Taylor went back to digging, trying to mind his own business. I wish I could’ve. Suddenly, the physical toll of working the shovel didn’t seem so bad if only Bunny’s wandering hand and the stench of his sweat would take their leave.

Instead, I found myself fake-laughing at some fucked-up joke he made about one of the al-Qaeda he’d killed yesterday. Something about them sucking air through the hole he’d blown in their spine, how he’d thought of sticking his dick in it for a quick blowjob… I had a feeling that Bunny’s creativity would never cease to amaze me, nor would his blatant lack of regard for human life.

But I shouldn’t have been talking. I’d blown away three men yesterday out of peer pressure and hate.

“You like that one?” Bunny said, grin spreading from ear to ear. “Wait ‘til I tell ya about – “

Thwack.

My head snapped around to glimpse the remnants of a tree’s bark exploding in a puff of air, a gunshot announcing its presence along with the sound it made against the wood.

I dropped my shovel, and dove into what Taylor and I had managed to dig so far of our foxhole, fingers dragging across the earth and soil lodging itself beneath my fingernails as I grasped desperately for my M-4.

My heart thudded rapidly in my chest, but I couldn’t hear it over the ringing in my ears; more gunshots followed suit, and equipping my headset wasn’t my priority at the moment.

The gunfire was coming from the trees to the north of us, where the platoon officers had said the al-Qaeda would be headed from. But if these were the same ones, they’d arrived much earlier than their estimation.

Bunny was shouting something; I could tell that much from the way his ribcage expanded and contracted so fervently against my side, where he’d fallen into cover between Taylor and I, and I was just propping up my elbows to open fire when he stuck his head up and began reefing on his trigger, spraying the forest wildly with rounds. Casings landed beside me in the dirt, and I tried not to flinch every time the brass caught a wink of sunlight.

With him laying cover fire, I had enough time to toss my helmet and headset on and pull my plate-carrier around myself before getting myself back into position to shoot.

I was working up the nerve to poke my head out from my foxhole, but seemed to be frozen.

Just do it for a second, I told myself, but another part of me caught the splatter of blood and the violent whiplash of a skull and I also thought to myself, I don’t want to die.

So I thrust my arms up so that barely my wrist was showing, and my gun was held over my shoulders, and I fired blindly into the trees.

When I was out of bullets, I pulled my rifle back down so that I could grab another mag from my rig, little rivers of dirt cascading down around my face as I did so. My eyes and sinuses burned as I inhaled, and a cough wracked my body, but I shoved the mag into place with a relieving click.         

With my headset now protecting my ears, other sounds were starting to trickle in past the gunfire: the frenzied shouting of al-Qaeda, the hammer of sandals and boots against earth above me.    

And suddenly, my M-4 was being kicked from my hands, and I was staring up at one of the terrorists, their dark eyes wild from where they peered at me beneath their distinguishable black niqab, though the rest of their uniform was camouflaged, designed to mimic U.S. soldiers.

But darker than their wild eyes was the barrel of the AK-47 that stared down at me, maybe a foot from my face.

Though my heart had been palpitating wildly, I thought for a moment that it might have stopped.

I was being yanked upward by the collar of my uniform, and I gritted my teeth, hands lunging for their arms, their throat, but all in vain, for I was seized, not just by one soldier but by three.

But the gunshots had finally ceased, and the al-Qaeda had descended on us like an inexorable tide. Grunts and screeches of defiance mingled with their shouting as my fellow soldiers fought against their clammy, choking hands and their ruthless shoves.

One of these shoves sent my body flying to the earth, a spray of dust raining around me, coating a tongue that was exposed by my panicked breaths, and wedging itself between rheumy eyelids.

Beside me lied a bloodied and mangled Gardner, his chin quivering as he rolled his head to meet my gaze past dying eyes. I swallowed bile as the metallic stench of his blood and the sordid tang of his punctured guts filled my nostrils, and I reached for the rifle that rested beside him, his fingers attempting weakly to close around its stock.

But Gardner shook his head at me, fear laced brightly into those dying eyes, and I hesitated, pulling my hand back beneath me.

Don’t try and be a hero, some part of my mind narrated this action. Just live.

So I was yanked viciously back up, empty-handed, my unlatched helmet falling to the earth, and then my world became blackness; my breaths were coming hot and fast against burlap, and someone’s hand tightened the bag around my throat for a moment just to choke a sputtering cough from me.

But I conceded, allowed rough, calloused fingers to shove me forward over perilous terrain that I could no longer see, and allowed the compensator of an AK to rest assuredly against my spine.

---

Brilliant light blinded me as the burlap sack was torn from my head, and I cringed, wincing against the flashlight that someone was holding to my retinas. It strobed a few times, and I blinked hard against the rheum and dirt and dried mucus that rimmed my eyes. I felt my head roll like a bobble-head’s on an unsteady axis, and a knife split my skull, hot and fiery. My jaw gaped open, and I inhaled the musty stench of straw, the staleness of the air, the faint yet rotten tang of dried blood that my weary eyes now glimpsed beneath my bound legs.

The room was dim, brighter than the burlap sack only by a few shades; it took my eyes a second or two to adjust since the flashlight, and as they did, I dragged them deliriously across the fractured seams of the walls, where daylight spilled in and highlighted clouds of dust that clung thick to the stale air.

My legs burned as hot as my skull, and I was almost certain that I’d torn a ligament or two when they’d escorted me down the rocky terrain of the mountains. Though I’d no idea what direction we were facing, we’d lost plenty of elevation.

Two men stood in the room with me. One uttered unintelligibly into his partner’s ear, though I recognized a few of the syllables, the cadence of his language, to be Arabic. I was fairly certain he’d been the asshole with the flashlight.

The other simply stared at me from those dark eyes, nodding along to who was probably his superior. I couldn’t really tell apart from their body language; their uniforms mimicked ours, though they bore no badges of honour. As far as I knew, terrorists had no real honour.

Fucking pigs, I thought to myself, though I kept my lips sealed. And it was only after my mind uttered these words did I recognize them to be Barnes’.

Once the first man had spoken into the second’s ear, the latter of the two revealed himself to be a translator, for he spoke to me in accented, broken English:

“Tell us mission. How many of you? Where? Purpose here?”

I swallowed past a dry throat, and my gaze flicked to the man who now left the translator’s side to pick from an array of tools on a splintered, deteriorating bench. He was the torturer, and I was his prisoner of war. If I didn’t talk, he would make me.

I hissed in a sharp breath, and clenched my teeth, now glaring up at the torturer’s dark, emotionless eyes and bracing myself for whatever was to come. But something in those veiled, glassy eyes, something in the way he walked toward me told me that there was no way, not even from the training that I had received, that I could prepare myself for anything that was to come.

The torturer held an iron rod that glowed hot with fire; he muttered something to the translator.

“Look down,” the translator told me. “Don’t look in his eye.”

I furrowed my brow, confused, but dropped my gaze to the floor, my eyes once again tracing over the dried blood that had spattered the dirty floor beneath my chair.

They were trying to ingrain subordination into me, I realized; it was their first attempt to break my will.

Though my gaze never left the floor, I promised to myself in that moment that I wouldn’t break, that I wouldn’t compromise any of the men that I had trained and fought with. Not Barnes, not Elias, not even Bunny, who would’ve probably given my name up without a moment’s hesitation.

I felt the heat of the iron grow closer to my flesh, to the sleeve they had ripped upward on my arm.

“Start talking!” The translator screamed at me, and the torturer gripped my jaw in his firm, merciless grasp, dirtied and bloodied fingernails digging past the flesh and feeling as if they might scrape bone.

I gasped, pain searing along my jaw, but I kept my gaze on the floor, and my tongue bound.

A pair of knuckles struck my cheekbone, and my head whipped to the side, but I merely breathed, listened to the sound of my heart drumming against my ribcage, counted the beats and kept my mind off of the horrors that were only beginning to unfold.

Then, it was the iron that struck my flesh, and I convulsed in my chair as pain greeted every nerve of my body, and I wailed, screeched, lamented my pain until a filthy, sour rag that tasted of urine and grime was stuffed between my molars.

When the iron left, its searing pain did not; I glanced down at my arm, at the reddened, swollen skin that seemed to be starting to peel away like old leather. I panted short, frenzied breaths around the rag in my mouth, and I counted the beats of my heart again.

One, two, three, six, eight, eleven… I couldn’t keep track anymore.

“Talk!” the interrogator yelled at me again, but I remained still, my body a statue in every way but the fervid heaving of my chest and the shaking, quivering curling of my fingers into a loose fist.

My shirt was torn from my torso, which, for a moment, was almost a relief, for the room, in the heat of the summer and its stagnant air, was like a boiling pot. Sweat glistened across every inch of my flesh, beading and collecting to form rivulets down the grooves of my abdomen and back.

But then, next came my bra, and my trousers, and even my boots and socks. I shivered, the sweat that had beaded on my flesh beginning to chill me, the sensation so alien in contrast to the magma that boiled on the flesh of my arm.

My whimpers were made into what I was now convinced was a urine-soaked rag, and I resisted the urge to curl in on myself, to appear weaker to my torturers. They wanted to humiliate me.

And then my world tipped over, my head growing light as it fell like an iron weight to the floorboards, the backings of my chair digging harshly into my bare spine and the impact sending a jolt through my quivering body.

The rag was ripped from my mouth in time to unleash a cry, but then blackened my face, and my heart, which was already running in time to a racehorse, skipped a beat in my chest.

In survival training, every soldier had been water-boarded for a number of seconds to prepare us for times like this. Even in training, nearly every recruit had given in to this method of torture. I’d hoped and prayed that day that it would’ve been the last time I ever experienced it.

I wormed beneath my bindings in anticipation, the ropes twisting into my flesh and allowing bubbles of blood to emerge along my wrists, hot against my skin, metallic in my nose.

Someone’s fingers were laced into my hair, holding my head down, and the rag flattened against my face, curving around the orifices of my mouth and nostrils as a cold liquid poured across it.

And I began to drown.

Oxygen became nonexistent, though my lungs fought for it like a ravening wolf would its prey; they filled, tightened, and convulsed, and my mind could not even count to one with the beating of my heart, because all I knew was panic. All I knew was helplessness. All I knew was the flood, the burning of my nasal cavity and the absence of life from my lungs.

And finally, after an indeterminate amount of time, the cloth was removed, my bulging eyes darting across the cracks in the overgrown ceilings, and an elbow struck my abdomen, made me heave the watery contents of my lungs or my stomach or both onto my chest and the floor next to me.

The torturer pulled me up by the roots of my hair, contorting my face in pain, and he asked me again to talk.

When trained for becoming a POW, every officer always told you that there was a point you would reach when you needed to start talking for your survival, but to only give up information that was irrelevant, that bid you time.

With my body trembling, my flesh on fire and my muscles seizing and my lungs burning so intensely that tears poured from my eyes, I realized that now was this time.

“My name is Private Alexis Ryder,” I coughed, spurts of water flying from my lips. “I am a soldier in Two Bravo, a squad in the second platoon of Bravo Company.” I panted out a couple more frenzied, wet, gurgling breaths, and then recited my serial number.

Spittle landed across my cheekbone as the torturer communicated some words in Arabic, and his translator said,

“More, girl. More, or your punishment won’t stop.”

My trembling lip curled over my teeth, and my eyelids fluttered, delirious, but the torturer’s hold tightened on my locks.

I thought of my father. He wouldn’t have given up the details of his mission, wouldn’t have been broken.

I thought of Barnes. He would’ve spat back in their faces.

And, strangely, I thought of Elias, and his bright, blue eyes, and the stars that glittered above him in a hollow, black sky.

And I wanted to ask him what he saw in them. I wanted to ask him if he ever looked up and thought about Heaven, or a life after death. I wanted to ask him if he feared death as I did, in this moment.

The torturer released my scalp, but landed another blow to my stomach, and I keeled over, ropes tightening against the abrasions on my wrists.

And then the two left, and my tears pooled on quivering, naked kneecaps before trickling down aching calves like venomous snakes leaving a lifeless corpse.

--- 

I had blissfully nodded off, and when I peeled back crusted, tear-ridden eyes, I noticed daylight again through the seams of the walls, and the air around me felt cold, frigid against the sweat and tears and blood that had congealed on my bare form.

It must have morning again.

The first sound I noticed was the screaming.

The wails that echoed down the halls, beyond my room of isolation. The howls that were likely from the rest of my teammates, the “cherries” that had been digging the foxholes.

Taylor was probably one of them.

And then I heard the faint humming of music, so low that for a moment, all I could do was close my blurry eyes and listen, gulping against the dryness of my throat and the taste of bile and urine on my tongue.

Ever-so-softly, “Heroes”was playing, and with how heavy each limb weighed, with how much pain still coursed from the charred flesh of my arm and the chasm that split each leg, and the sting that had formed beneath each rope, I wondered if this was my passing, my ascent through the pearly gates themselves.

But when I blinked open my eyes, forcefully blinking the rheum from them, I saw one of the al-Qaeda men sitting with his back leaned against the wall, and a niqab pulled back around his ears to make room for a pair of headphones. He rocked his head gently to the beat.

“Hey,” I snapped, though my voice came out quiet, weak from my strangled lungs.

“Hey,” I spoke, louder, collecting the deepest notes of my diaphragm and thrusting them into the stale air between us.

The al-Qaeda’s head snapped up, and he set the headphones and the iPod aside next to my other belongings.

“That doesn’t belong to you,” I hissed, and swallowed again past the taste of bile as I bravely – or perhaps foolishly – met his eye.

“You belong to us now, girl,” The terrorist growled as he strode forward. His English sounded crisper than the last, though I couldn’t tell them apart. They all wore the same thing, all shrouded their faces in darkness. I’d begun to wonder if it was more than a cultural custom, or a means of obscuring one’s identity – if, perhaps, it was yet another variable to drive one mad.

“So you’d better talk,” he added, his fingers wrapping around my throat and emptying my lungs of any breath.

Past my strangulation, I mouthed a few vulgarities, and this caused his grip to loosen, his eyes to narrow from between the dark lines of his niqab.

I remembered how helpless, how useless and impotent I had been after my first firefight, and I refused to be that pathetic, scared child again. I refused to be anything less than my father, or Barnes, or the hero that I’d set out to be.

“No,” I panted.

Rage danced in those beady, dark eyes, and a clammy hand ran down my flesh, streaking blood across it. A dirtied fingernail dragged over my nipple, and I winced.

“I’m going to rape you, if you don’t talk, girl,” the al-Qaeda warned, his thumb now hooking the hem of my underwear and his filthy fingernails digging deep into my hipbone.

I swallowed. I panted. I counted my heart-beat again. And I closed my eyes.

The jingle of a metal buckle nearly made me flinch, but I steadied myself, forced a calm to wash over my trembling form that nearly rocked from each beat of my heart.

I heard the thud of a rifle being placed on the ground, felt the brush of its wooden stock against my toe.

My wrists began to fumble with my bindings, pushing the rope past the abrasions of my flesh. They were looser than they’d been before, perhaps from my struggle, and hope flared from somewhere deep inside my chest. Somewhere dark, somewhere buried, it blazed to life, a sole light in an endless expanse of black.

As the belt hit the floor alongside the AK, I jolted, not from the sound but from the freeing of my wrists; the rope had sidled down and was now cradled delicately over the hillocks of my knuckles.

And then, shouting, and the hammering of boots against the floor joined the echo of wails, and my eyes shot open, gazing past the al-Qaeda torturer and to the door that remained closed.

Gunshots rang in my ears, and his head snapped to the door, too.

This was my chance, and I took it.

I tore my bloodied wrists from my bindings and lurched forward, sending my chair tumbling over where my ankles were still bound to its legs. My finger wrapped around the trigger of the AK, and the others elevated it enough to fire a round into my captor’s leg.

His scream curdled my blood, but it also stoked something in that abyssal wasteland in my chest, a human instinct to survive, to hate, to kill.

I shot a couple more rounds somewhere into his chest, and he collapsed on the floor beside me, blood pooling at my fingertips and staining the long strands of blonde hair that clung to the floorboards.

I took the butt of the AK and began slamming it against the rope that bound my ankles, my muscles straining with each effort but adrenaline giving every cell a newfound strength.

Finally, I scrambled free, frayed ropes falling from bruised and bloodied ankles, and with one hand cradling the AK, I reached the other to pull my khakis over my legs, and hastily pulled my shirt around my shoulders, but didn’t bother with the buttons.

My head spun, and I teetered, but I steadied my shoulder against the wall. Even though every instinct told me to curl up against it in the fetal position and let the battle rage on outside the door, I forced myself back into the fray.

I shoved the iPod into the pocket of my khakis, hooking the headphones in their hem, and then thrust the barrel of my weapon towards a door that rattled and shook on its old hinges.

My finger tensed, the iron sights moving and blurring out of focus as I fought to steady my breath.

And then a cloud of dust rained down on me, and I raised the barrel of my weapon to the roof, because the uniforms that greeted me bore the stars of the American flag, and the faces that stared at me, though once intimidating, were now so wonderfully familiar.

“Clear!” Warren – the sergeant of Two Delta – shouted, before moving on through the halls with a cluster of followers.

A few others rushed in to my aid, but one gestured the others away.

“Get back in the fight,” Elias barked at them. “Go, get the other prisoners, now!”

A sigh of relief escaped my aching lungs as my gaze settled into blue eyes, and my grip loosened on my rifle as a dizzying wave struck my skull.

“Ryder,” he said, his eyes raking across my form with urgency. “Are you injured?”

“Elias,” I breathed, and as I staggered across the floor, my fingers reached for him, brushing the fabric of his shirt and grazing the hot flesh of his neck.

“Alex,” he repeated, and asked me the same question as his hands wrapped around my waist.

“I don’t know,” I breathed, my words barely a whisper as darkness teased the edges of my vision.

He smelled of sweat, but also of wildflowers, and earth; and when I inhaled, my head reeled again, the darkness threatening to consume me. But I was okay with that. I was okay with being transported from this nightmare into a place where I could embrace those beautiful scents of nature, where I could be cradled by the warmth of his touch – it soothed my aching body, like honey melting and oozing through every pore.

I wasn’t thinking anymore. My world was being fed in broken fragments to me.

The baritones of his voice murmuring above me, the brightness that streamed through the cracks in the ceiling, the weightlessness that seemed to consume me, the warmth of that honeyed-touch lulling me into sleep as the final thread of my consciousness snapped like a wire.

#fanfiction #elias grodin #platoon #platoon 1986 #my writing #heroes #oc: alexis #sgt. elias #mdni #there's smut in this story i'm just not saying where because spoilers but you've been warned

[red-riding-wood]

Heroes - Chapter 10

Chpt. 1 , Masterlist , Chpt. 11

Pairing: Sgt. Elias Grodin x Female OC (Alexis Ryder)

Fandoms: Platoon (1986), Cherry (2021)

WARNINGS: I'm just going to put down a blanket for the entire book/all chapters: graphic depictions of violence and gore, torture, explicit sexual content, attempted sexual assault, language, marijuana use

Raucous gunfire still peppered the village and the trees; the Taliban were retreating, though across the open, rocky hills and into the treeline at their crest. I had my rifle steadied on the corner of one of the huts, the bark of the wood splintering each time the weapon kicked back in my hands.

“Advance! West treeline!” shouted Barnes, who was waving towards the trees adjacent to the ones the Taliban had retreated into. “Don’t let the bastards get away!”

The Taliban had ambushed us about midday, but our platoon had managed to hold them off, thanks to the defense of the village, despite their forces outnumbering us. I was confused, now that Barnes was telling us to run after them into the trees, but I only hesitated for a moment or two before following my fellow soldiers and looping around, boots hammering across straw and then endless grass and rocks as I made my way through the village and then the shadows of the dense thicket.

My heart slammed wildly against my ribcage, and adrenaline coursed like fire through each vein as my body moved like a machine through the brush, each limb seeming to move with an unabated velocity and precision learned from my time deployed and in training. My footfalls landed with greater accuracy through the labyrinth of fallen branches and ferns, and my torso twisted more deftly around each tree.

As we drew to the crest of the hills and the junction of the forest, I slowed, bringing the barrel of my rifle up to the line of my vision. I used the trees and the bushes as barricades and camouflage, moving from each dollop of cover to the next. My breathing came heavy, and as I pressed my body to the side of a pine, the pungent scent of tree sap burned my nostrils on each inhale.

Ahead, the shadows moved like demons flitting through a maze of death, the shoulders of the Taliban occasionally moving through a bundle of leaves or the barrels of their AKs jittering a little too unnaturally to be the low-hanging branch of a tree. I steadied my breath and pulled the trigger of my M-4, landing a few shots between a few scraggly branches. A body convulsed, and a burst of blood splattered against a tree.

Barnes and Elias led the charge, pressing forward and leading us over the crest of the ridge and through the trees after our attackers. I tried to divide my attention between my shots, the moving shadows of the Taliban, and the backs of the two sergeants. I was meant to follow Barnes, though I couldn’t help but constantly check to see if Elias hadn’t fallen, or been injured. And though I tried to keep up, he moved with a certain grace, a swiftness that I had not yet mastered.

Barnes’ arm was then held up to command us to stop, and I took cover behind a boulder that just barely covered my head; I was sure that my helmet poked just slightly over the lip as a volley of bullets skimmed the rock and whizzed inches past my head. I gritted my teeth, sinking lower into the earth, my knees disrupting the musty soil and my toes bending sharply in my boots.

My head whipped violently to the side, and I nearly toppled, an ear-splitting ping exploding in my ears, and I curled my neck into my body as if to protect myself. A hot, sticky substance trickled down my jaw, splattering across my knees like some kind of cruel, red rain, and I gazed down in horror, hands grasping at my throat. The flesh, however, was smooth, until my fingers hooked through the fabric that ran under my jaw, and I realized that the clasp of my helmet had bitten into my flesh, drawing blood, but it was only a cut.

I tore the clasp open and lowered my helmet to my lap, strands of hair springing wildly free from my bun. My fingers ran over the indentation on the side of the helmet, and I breathed a sigh of relief; a bullet had grazed it. I threw the helmet down beside me and pressed myself further into the earth.

The shouting was as virulent as the gunfire that echoed through the trees, and my heart seemed to thud faster with each decibel that it grew louder in my headset. They were converging on us.

To my left, Barnes shoved a Taliban soldier off of him with his rifle, and put the barrel to the bottom of his jaw; the back of the terrorist’s head exploded across the bark of a tree like red oil paints on a canvas.

One, two, three, five, eight, ten.

I concentrated for only a moment on my heartbeat, but it was too frantic to count, and I forced a breath from dry lips before I poked from around the corner of my rock, the stock of my rifle kicking viciously against my shoulder every time I pulled the trigger.

Someone called out that they were tossing a frag, and I ducked back behind the rock, heart now in my throat, as debris rained down on me, bits of leaves and twigs catching in my hair and dirtying my uniform. Several more explosions followed suit, and I fumbled for a moment for the grenade in my rig, pulling the pin and launching it over my head.

It might’ve been minutes, maybe seconds, before the shouting began to grow more distant now, and silence began to settle across the forest as the last volleys of bullets left the barrels of the American soldiers. Someone pumped their fist in the air – Bunny, as I now recognized him, with his wild, toothy grin and his blood-lusted eyes.

I straightened my spine, and poked my head from hiding; the Taliban were retreating again, only a few stragglers seeming to move through the bush now.

Elias and Barnes were yelling at each other, and I turned the knob up on my headset as I listened in to what they were saying, listening past my roaring heartbeat.

“They’re baitin’ us, dammit!” Barnes shouted.

“We need to flank right, cut ‘em off!” Elias argued. “They’re gonna come back, or hit us from the sides. I don’t want to sit around and get caught with my ass hangin’ in the breeze when they do!”

“I give the orders round here, ‘Lias, and you’re stayin’ put, ya hear?”

“You’re an asshole, Barnes!” That was the last thing the blue-eyed sergeant shouted before he was off, winding and pounding through the bush like a deer on steroids. Barnes shouted something about him acting like a hotdog, but he was already gone, flanking right.

My legs were put into motion without a second thought, spurring me from my cover and launching me in his direction as my heart skipped a beat and my oxygen seemed to deplete as my throat constricted with a deathly concern.

“Ryder!” Barnes’ shouting was directly in my ear now, and his fingers were clasping around my forearm, nearly yanking me backwards. Icy blue eyes flashed in rage. “If you go after him, that’s the end, ya hear? I’ll personally see-fucking-to-it that you’re dishonourably discharged if your sorry ass makes it out alive!”

I swallowed against the rock in my throat, and glared back at him, jaw hanging agape as I panted out my uneven breaths.

But the fear that that dreaded gaze instilled in me was nothing in comparison to the fear that pulsed in my chest at the thought of Elias with a 7.62 in his skull.

Wordlessly, I made my decision. I yanked my arm from his grasp and continued after Elias, trying to recount the movements he’d taken through the brush. A string of cussing ensued behind me, but it faded, along with the groans of agony from my fallen teammates. They all sort of faded into the background, were drowned out by the sound of my roaring heartbeat and my boots landing in quick succession across the earth.

A crack split this symphony, a bullet flying by my left ear, and I threw my weight behind a tree as a volley of gunfire sprayed the forest around me. Pieces of bark flew like a storm of dust around me, and my head felt light as I struggled to steady the flow of oxygen in my lungs.

From the sound of it, there were at least four guns. I stayed behind the tree, counting my heartbeat now again, tightening my fingers around the grooves of my rifle.

One, two, ten.

And I peeked from around the tree, crouching this time, so that my head wouldn’t be at the same elevation it had been before. As soon as I discharged my weapon, watching a couple of soldiers fall in the bushes ahead, another line of bullets sliced the air above me.

My spine slid down the tree, my knees coming up to my chest as I clutched my rifle to my belly and again worked on steadying my breath, counting the frenzied beats of my heart. I noticed that one of the shots had seemed to come from behind when I’d shot, so I studied the forest ahead, peering past the thick trunks and shuddering boughs.

Nothing.

I stole a glance around my tree again, but silence met my ears, and only the scraggly branches of the wood moved gently in the breeze. And then it was a series of get back, take a look, get back, take a look.

I furrowed my brow, and rose on my quivering knees now, but all I saw past the tangle of brush was the limp arm of a Taliban soldier poking from a fern, a rich stream of crimson trickling through curled fingers.

Only half-satisfied that I had neutralized the targets, I decided to make my way towards the discordant shot. It may have been Elias, for all I knew, quickly exterminating his prey before carrying on like a ghost through the wild bush.

I tried to move quickly, but I’d slowed to a walk now, acutely aware of the sounds my boots made against the soft earth, and a twig snapped to my right. My gun was immediately pressed to my cheek, the cold metal reassuring against my flesh, and my barrel swung towards a figure emerging from a tangle of bushes as I suspended my breath.

A sigh cascaded from my lungs, and I lowered my barrel as I caught sight of Taylor around my red dot.

“Thank God,” I breathed, and stepped toward him, noticing the recognition that flashed across his features, as well, as he lowered his gun shakily. “Taylor, what the hell? Are you good?”

But he didn’t answer. Hazel eyes were stretched wide and inscrutable in emotion; he stepped forward, but only slightly, his jaw held tight and teeth seeming to grit together.

“Taylor?” I pressed, continuing forward.

The soldier collapsed like a ragdoll, disappearing behind a cluster of dense ferns. I sprang forward, heart once again in my throat as brambles tore at the fabric of my khakis and a gnarled branch sliced the flesh of my cheekbone.

Taylor’s head was cradled against a fallen log, and his limbs were splayed out before him insensibly; it was then that I noticed the blood that seeped from his leg into the bed of grass and fern. His calf was a gory mess of red, his khakis torn, and I wasn’t sure, at first glance, if the shredded pieces I was looking at were bits of fabric or sinew.

I knelt beside him, and immediately worked on applying pressure to where the blood spurted like a mini geyser from his calf, and I called behind me for a medic.

“Ryder,” he murmured, and I spared him a glance to catch his hazel gaze, glazed over. He was in shock.

“Stay with me, Taylor,” I breathed, and worked at peeling the shredded bits of his khakis from his leg and fastening them around the bullet wound. I was no medic, but I knew the very basics of how to treat a wound – the first rule being, stop as much blood from escaping the body as possible.

“Medic!” I screeched again, and I heard footfalls through the forest. My flesh prickled, goose-bumps forming beneath the cold sweat of my uniform. They could’ve been Taliban, coming to finish the job.

I stared helplessly at the wound, at the blood that seeped through the fabric, and I reached my bloodied hands into my rucksack, throwing it to the grass beside me with my rifle. I procured the rag I used to clean my gun and wrapped it around his leg, twisting it as tight as I could, but it didn’t hold.

I reached my fingers into the back of my hair, sticky and wet against the fine strands, and I winced as I yanked my hair-tie from my bun, a few golden threads coming with it. I tied this around the twist in the makeshift-bandage, and I held it tight, slick fingers curling around the fabric that was rapidly morphing from an oil-stained ivory to nothing but red.

I flinched, losing my grip on his calf as a voice sounded only a yard or so behind me, but the words were American.

Doc Gomez, the medic of Two Delta, came up beside me, and nudged his way past my shoulder to address Taylor’s wound. “I can take it from here,” he told me, and I breathed a sigh of relief, maneuvering aside. I noticed a few other soldiers filtering in around the trees beside me; Delta, at least, had advanced, following after Elias and Taylor and I.

“Ryder,” Taylor breathed, and I wiped the blood from my hands on my khakis before I rested them gingerly across his arm. His eyes, still glazed, landed on me, and he swallowed harshly before saying in a strangely-calm tone of voice, “Am I dying?”

I cast a glance to where Gomez had finished re-bandaging his leg, cinching the fabric tight and then procuring a morphine syrette from his rig.

“No,” I told Taylor, my attention back on him. “You’re gonna live, and get out of here. They’re gonna fly you out and you’re gonna go back to the med-bay. Maybe you’ll see that nurse again, you know, the one that gave you extra rations.”

Truthfully, I didn’t know if Taylor was going to make it, but I was trying to distract him the best I could, trying to distract myself from the way my fingers quivered over his arm and my heart fluttered with uncertainty in my chest.

“Oh… yeah,” he said, and out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Gomez’s thumb press the morphine into his vein. “What was her name?” Taylor slurred, his lip quirking into the slightest of smiles and the other muscles of his face relaxing. “Sarah? Sandra?”

“Cindy,” I corrected him.

“Yeah, her,” he chuckled, though his words came out in a cough.

“Hey,” he said. “Did you ever finish reading that book?”

I scoffed, the line of my mouth curving ever-so-slightly upward. “Yes, I did,” I said. “It was old-timey, and wordy, and exactly the kind of thing I’d expect to be sitting on a grandma’s shelf, but it was really good.”

Taylor grinned, and rolled his head back against the log, helmet setting itself ajar on his skull. “Good,” he breathed. And then, his brow furrowed slightly, eyelids blinking slowly, and he said, “I wrote something.”

“You did? What did you write?”

Another half-cough, half-chuckle, and then, “I wrote about those little mints that restaurants give out and hotels put under your pillow. You know, the ones that melt into little balls of chocolate.” Taylor was grinning like a fool now, the morphine kicking in stronger by each passing second. I found myself smiling as well, though it was as bitter as it was sweet.

“Those are so fucking good, man,” Taylor mumbled, and I nodded, imagining the flavour on my tongue. It reminded me of the strawberries that Elias and I had shared, and a fuzzy warmth seemed to battle my worry.

“And those wrappers they come in…” he continued dreamily. “They’re so blindingly white. And they’re so satisfying to open.”

I looked to Gomez, who was calling for a stretcher now, and hope soared in my chest. The blood had seemed to stop, though I wasn’t sure how much he’d lost, but he was still conscious. I heard Wolfe radioing behind me for medevac, and a tear pricked my eye.

“Taylor,” I said, and squeezed at his arm. Though I wanted to entertain his reverie, my worry was beginning to poison that fuzzy warmth that had spread, and I was thinking now of Elias, still AWOL, out there somewhere in the trees that danced with death and ruin. “Why were you so far out here? Did you see Elias?”

“Elias?” He tasted the name on his tongue like he’d never heard it, and his brow furrowed and he blinked again, slowly, before recognition passed across his features. “Elias. Yeah. I followed him, thought I’d give him some back-up. God, last time I saw him… I think it was just before you and I were under fire. Think I saw Barnes running after him. Maybe they were going after the survivors.”

Ice crystallized around my heart, and I swallowed past bile. Barnes, running after Elias, after the argument they’d had, after the Two Bravo sergeant had seemed so certain of his orders? After everything that had happened, between Elias and I and Barnes, after all the stony looks and the yelling and the rage? It didn’t sit right with me at all.

“Where?” I demanded.

“I don’t know…” he slurred. “Same direction I was heading when I ran into you.”

My head shot up as I got my bearings, gaze darting around me at the trees that all looked the same. I touched my fingers to my cheek, feeling the hot ooze of blood from the brambles.

“Taylor, I have to go,” I said, as I slung my rucksack over my shoulders and fitted each groove of my gun beneath my fingers. “But you’re gonna be okay, alright? Just think about home. Think about those mints.”

And I was off, pacing through the bushes until I found the blood that dripped from one of the brambles I had bulled through when I’d rushed to Taylor’s aid. I used this as my compass, and started through the bush.

I ran faster than I ever had in my life – at least, it felt that way. My hair streamed behind me, threads catching on more brambles and tearing mercilessly from my skull, but I continued on, adrenaline still thick in my renewed veins. My lungs swallowed the air, and every muscle extended and contracted like something inhuman, but more alive than a machine. Fear, most of all, coursed through me like malignant drug.

I was only fueled more by the being that chased me; I didn’t so much as look over my shoulder to see who they were, but I was outrunning them. Their footsteps were not heavy enough to be Barnes’, at least, but I was still determined that they didn’t catch me, for they were likely giving chase to stop me. I had, in defying my sergeant’s orders and leaving my platoon, perhaps gone rogue.

The trees had begun to thin when I glimpsed the blood trail, and my heart pumped ice. The splatters of crimson against the grasses of the forest floor led to the crest of a ridge, the metallic odour in the air signalling that it was fresh.

I stumbled to a halt at a jagged rock that poked from the crest of the incline – which was riddled by more like it, and so steep that I was fairly certain you’d have to be a mountain goat to traverse it – and my eyes followed the red that stained the rocks and dirt until they landed on a sprawled figure, combat boots wedged among the rocks and army-green fatigues stained an unnatural dark. Wild, tawny locks stirred on a bobbing head, and one hand clung to a crucifix while the other pressed tightly to his abdomen.

I glissaded down the incline, my fatigues tearing from the rocks and digging harshly against my flesh, but I persisted, using all fours now to scramble down to the wounded soldier.

“Elias,” I huffed out, my lungs barely able to spare that much breath, as I came to settle beside him, my hands immediately reaching for the dark, dark red that poured like wine from his belly.

“Sweetheart,” he greeted me from an equally-strangled breath, and his head rolled back so that those blue eyes could glimpse me. Like Taylor’s, they were glazed, and his chest shuddered with each breath.

“No, no, no,” I repeated weakly as my hands fumbled for his wound, balling his shirt and pressing it firmly against the river of blood.

“Alex!” A shout split the air above. I recognized it, though my mind was reeling too much to identify it. “Is that Elias?”

Pebbles snarled down the mountainside, a few landing against my spine, as the man made his way down to us, and when I spared a glance upward, I saw that it was Cherry.

“Cherry,” I breathed. “Help him, please.”

We switched places, so that Cherry would get to work, nestling his rucksack against the rocks and pulling bandages from it. I linked my arm under Elias’ neck to support it against the rock, pulled him in a little closer to my body so that I could feel his warmth, the assurance that he was still alive, and let my other rest over the hand that clutched the rosary.

“No,” Elias croaked, and coughed up a spittle of blood. “I’m done, man. Go tend to someone who’s got a chance.”

“Elias,” I hissed, my eyes blurry now from the tears that veiled them. “Don’t say that. Please don’t say that.”

Cherry was working feverishly down at his abdomen, wrapping bandages. I turned to him as Elias coughed again, and asked, “Do you have any morphine?”

Cherry nodded, and said, “I think I’ve got one left. Apply pressure here.”

I drew my hand from Elias’ but his blood-slicked fingers curled around it, begging it to stay, but with a tear in my heart, I broke his grasp and pressed my hand to the bundle of blood-soaked bandages that were wrapped tightly around his wound.

“Barnes did this,” Elias coughed again. “He went down into the woods there somewhere, think he’s gonna loop back around and say we got caught up in an ambush. Alex, you have to make sure that son-of-a-bitch gets his justice.”

Hatred pierced my heart, though I focused on Elias. I would deal with Barnes later – we would, because he was going to live; I’d make sure of it.

“Don’t say that, Elias. You’re gonna live,” I whimpered, my breaths coming strangulated and squeaky from my suffocated chest.

“No, Alex, you have to listen to me, sweetheart, I’m not gonna – “

“Shhh. No, no,” I mumbled past tears that had collected on my lips. My thumb worked in a circle against his shoulder, though I wasn’t sure if it was more to calm his nerves or mine.

Cherry was administering the morphine now, and I could feel Elias’ muscles begin to relax, slowly, his hand gripping his rosary a little more loosely now and in those beautiful blue eyes, his pupils constricted, and his eyes fluttered as he looked at me, as if he wasn’t seeing me quite right.

“Alex,” Cherry said. “He’s lost a lot of blood, and he has internal bleeding, and I don’t think… I don’t think I…” His breaths were coming too frantic now to continue, and he wiped his sleeve over bloodshot eyes and cast me a tragic look.

I shook my head adamantly, but when I parted my lips to speak, no words came.

“Go, Cherry,” Elias mumbled. “There are wounded men out there that need you.” He sighed, his heaving chest moving with a little less fervor. “That’s an order.”

Cherry looked from me to his sergeant, and back, eyes now rimmed by tears, and in those eyes I saw all of the pain I had when he’d lost Crawford, when he hadn’t been able to save him.

And as much as I kept telling myself that Elias was going to make it, and that there was something else the medic could do, Elias’ blood was still seeping inexorably through the bandage and trickling around my trembling fingers like a fountain, and the breathing of his chest was still broken occasionally for him to sputter up a dotting of crimson.

So, with my chest heaving out its own constricted breaths and tears staining my cheeks and my head growing light, I nodded to Cherry wordlessly.

You can’t save him. It’s okay, I wanted to say – would have said, if it were anyone but Elias. But I only hoped that my nod was enough to communicate that, because I couldn’t bring myself to utter the words, to make them reality.

“I’m sorry,” Cherry breathed, and gave his rucksack a hefty swing over his shoulder before he made his way back up the perilous ridge.

“Sweetheart,” Elias uttered, his tone slurring slightly from the morphine as he reached a hand to mine, that was still clutching his bandage. “There ain’t nothin’ you can do.”

My chest tightened, and one of my tears fell onto the collar of his shirt, but my fingers relaxed. I allowed him to guide my hand back up to his, blood streaking across his uniform and finally the bare of his chest where he clutched his rosary. I sobbed, but tried desperately to control my breathing, and I blinked more of the tears from my eyes so that I could see him better. Even dying, he was still beautiful; though high from the morphine, those eyes gazed at me as if I were the only thing that existed around him, and his mouth even curved into the slightest of smiles. The sun, now setting, cast an otherworldly glow across the freckles of his face.

“I ain’t dyin’,” he said to me, and sputtered out another cough. Blood beaded across his chin, and I would’ve wiped it off if I had another hand to spare. Our blood-soaked fingers were woven tightly together now, the cold metal of the crucifix wedged somewhere between my thumb and his palm. “I’m just comin’ back,” he said. “Maybe as one of those stars…” His eyes rolled back blissfully to the sky, which would be void of the twinkling lights this early. But it gave me an idea, and my eyes caught one last time on how the golden light tinctured that sun-kissed skin and those earthy locks of hair, and as I pulled him tighter to me, I said,

“Elias, look.” And I nudged him gently, casting my gaze out at the sunset that was now crowning the peaks of the mountains and streaming like wondrous beams of Heaven through the pine and fir trees, limning their needles in a warming yet ethereal glow. I remembered when he had stopped me to look out at the view, and it had soothed me, how in the errant clouds and the dying light and the sprawling nature that I’d found some kind of inner peace, of freedom.

“That’s beautiful, sweetheart,” Elias said, and I could hear the smile in his words. We stayed like that for several moments – me, shivering against the rock, cradling his body close to me, and him, his breaths growing lighter and farther between, his life fading from him in everything but the eyes that glittered as he turned his head up to look at me. “Actually,” he said. “There is somethin’ you can do.”

My attention turned back down to him, I said, “Yes?”

“Sing to me.”

I swallowed against the knot of thorns in my throat, and another tear dotted the green of his shirt before I parted my lips, and from strangled, barely-present breaths came the lyrics,

“I… I will be king. And you… you will be queen. For nothing…” I sobbed, and gritted my teeth, forcing my diaphragm to calm so that I could sing my next words, “... will drive them away.”

And for a moment, it became my mother’s hand that I had clasped in my fingers, and the tears I shed stained the white sheets of her hospital bed as I leaned over from my visitor’s chair, singing to her in her final moments.

“We can beat them,” I breathed. “Just for one day.”

Her lips parted to form the breathless words, “We can be heroes, just for one day”, and my eyes brimmed with more tears to shed as I met her gaze, the gaze that still twinkled with the waning trace of life.

Elias’ eyes still held that twinkle as he sang with me, sputtering out a few lyrics as more droplets of blood landed across his chin, and with every lyric, another of my tears collected on his collar.

The beeping of my mother’s heart-rate became fewer, less frequent, and the pulse that drummed beneath Elias’ warm flesh grew weaker.

My mother’s fingers tightened and loosened around mine, and Elias’ breaths hitched in his chest as he sang from those bloodied lips.

“I, I can remember…” My voice was a cry now more than it was any semblance of singing, but I forced the lyrics from my aching lungs and my panted breaths. “Standing, by the wall.

“And the guns… shot above our heads.”

Though the forest had finally quieted, the gunfire of the attack still echoed in my brain. The words shared between Barnes and Elias still haunted me, played on loop like a broken record.

“And we kissed… as though nothing could fall. And the shame… the shame was on the other side.”

The heart monitor had nearly gone silent, and with each breath cast from Elias’ lungs, I feared it may have been his last, for they were so laboured, yet so faint. Each time his chest fell, I expected it not to rise. But he continued to sing with me.

“Oh, we can beat them. Forever and ever.”

As that last twinkle of life faded from my mother’s eyes, so did it from Elias’, and as her lips barely formed the lyrics anymore, Elias’ singing became a barely-heard whisper.

“Then we can be heroes...”

Elias’ breath hitched in his chest, and those blue eyes finally became void, like starless, hollow skies, and his lips stilled just as my mother’s had, and he was no longer staring at me, was no longer staring at anything.

My lungs seized, and I gritted my teeth again as a tide of tears spilled from my face and stained the collar of his shirt. Though my hand slipped from my mother’s, it still tightly gripped Elias’, now limp around the crucifix that he’d clutched less than a minute prior. I pulled him closer to me, dipped my chin to his chest so that I could inhale his scent – the wildflowers, the musky sweat – but it was overpowered by the nauseating, metallic stench of blood, and my stomach twisted as I sobbed.

But I finished the song, because I didn’t know what else to do, because it didn’t feel right not to fill the silence.

“… just for one day,” I finished, the last notes sputtered into his chest.

I could’ve stayed like that, cradling his corpse, for hours, maybe days. But past the vacuous tunnel of my grief brewed the incipience of rage, and I forced myself to release his hand, forced myself to slide my arm gently out from beneath his skull so that it could rest limp against the rock.

I ran bloodied fingers through those wild, soft locks of hair once more, the heat still emanating from his scalp as if he were alive, and I slipped his headband from him. I unclasped the dog tags from around his neck; I would send them to his brother, along with his letter, if I could, but the headband was for me, something to remember him by, something to run my fingers along whenever I felt lonely or whenever I found myself to be hysterical. Something of his that was tangible, that was still here, that would always be here. I tucked them into my rucksack, and finally wiped the speckles of blood from his chin with the hem of my shirt.

Barnes had done this. And Barnes would receive his justice, but not by a military judge; he would receive it by the 5.56 bullet that I would personally deliver to his skull.

And for once, I embraced that wolf inside of me that fought with hate in its heart and ire on its wicked breath.

#fanfiction #elias grodin #platoon #platoon 1986 #writing #my writing #fanfic #oc: alexis #heroes #there's smut in this story I'm just not saying where because spoilers but you've been warned #mdni #sgt. elias

[red-riding-wood]

Heroes - Chapter 8

Chpt. 1 , Masterlist , Chpt. 9

Pairing: Sgt. Elias Grodin x Female OC (Alexis Ryder)

Fandoms: Platoon (1986), Cherry (2021)

WARNINGS: I'm just going to put down a blanket for the entire book/all chapters: graphic depictions of violence and gore, torture, explicit sexual content, attempted sexual assault, language, marijuana use

The adrenaline was still tapering from my bloodstream when the supply chopper landed and I was tasked with handing out empty letters to the soldiers – those who had survived, anyway.

Our platoon had launched our ambush on the Taliban village this morning, seizing it and its hostages. Most were Afghan, though a couple Americans had been flown back on one of the medevac choppers.

We were instructed to stay here for a few days to a week, to maintain our presence and convert the village into a U.S. camp, which meant that we needed more ammunition, medicine, and rations. Someone in authority had provided paper and envelopes for us to write home to our families in case we wouldn’t be able to call back at base anytime soon.

New soldiers would arrive in a couple of days. Slowly, and yet all too quickly, the faces of my platoon were becoming strangers; fresh faces filled the roles of the dead as if replacing the rusted cogs in a machine. It was both a relief and a tragedy when I locked gazes with someone familiar, knowing that they were still here, and knowing that they might not be the next day.

Barnes and O’Neill’s squads had been clearing out the rest of the camp for any Afghans that had hidden; we’d had to pull a few out from under the floorboards of one of the huts, and I’d watched Barnes throw a frag into a hole that still had a screaming child in it. Lerner had tagged along with us, to translate, and I could tell from the grim, about-to-hurl look on his face when he was dismissed that he hadn’t yet witnessed the complete horrors and moral ambiguity of the Two Bravo sergeant’s commands.

When I handed him his letter, I told him that if he wanted to keep his job, that he shouldn’t write about anything he’d witnessed today. 

Though he hadn’t been on clearing-duty, psychologically-speaking, Cherry was probably in the worst shape. The whites of his eyes were glazed red, still watery with tears – they’d been like that since the firefight. Crawford had been one of the unlucky casualties this morning, and the friend he’d made in his squad couldn’t seem to shake his death. Taylor and I had been the ones to drag him off of Crawford’s corpse, his entire body shaking as he tried desperately to resuscitate him.

“I’m supposed to hand out letters,” I told him as I approached. He was sitting cross-legged on the ground, staring blankly at the dirt. Dark, glossy eyes that had shone so brightly with mirth in the Underworld were now as hollow as the sky. Gone was the man who’d slung his arm over my shoulder and danced to CCR and laughed at the stories of his fellow soldiers; I almost felt as if I didn’t recognize him, as if he were one of the replacements, or perhaps a ghost of the Cherry who had really died in our last battle and was now haunting the village with his blank stare and the sullen slouch of his shoulders.

Cherry didn’t answer me, his gaze still fixed somewhere on the dirt, but he swallowed, which was enough of a sign that he’d heard me, at least, so I handed him a letter.

“No,” he spoke, swallowing again against the broken fragments of his voice and shoving the envelope away.

“You don’t want to write to Emily?” I asked. She was one of the things that Cherry hadn’t been able to stop talking about during basic, and there had been more than one occasion when I’d given up my phone time so that he could spend more time talking to her, since I didn’t have anyone to call, myself, and since he’d gotten in trouble the first time he hadn’t hung up the phone when he should’ve. He was crazy about this “Emily”, the girl he had waiting for him at home.

Cherry shook his head, gaze flitting down to his boots. “I’ll call her back at base,” he said. But he spoke it as if it were an afterthought, each syllable as hollow as his eyes. I knew that his thoughts were elsewhere.

I knelt down next to him, hugging the stack of envelopes to my lap. “You know, there was nothing you could have done to save him, Cherry,” I spoke hesitantly, but as soothing as I could to my friend.

Finally, his gaze met mine, though it drilled a hole through my heart. He blinked, some of the moisture of his reddened eyes collecting into a tear that suspended itself in limbo beneath an eyelash. For several moments, we sat like this, as he held my gaze, and then he looked back to the earth and said absently, “I know.”

He didn’t believe me, and he was telling me this only because he didn’t want to be convinced he was wrong. He would likely think for the rest of his days if things would have been different if he’d gotten to Crawford a little sooner, if he’d cinched his bandages tighter or if he’d administered more morphine.

I didn’t know what to say – what could I have said? – and carried on to the next soldier with a certain heaviness to each step that I hadn’t possessed before.

Taylor was tying his combat knife to the barrel of his rifle with a piece of twine from one of the huts, wrapping the fabric several times around the now-bayonetted weapon. I wondered if it was because he’d watched Crawford die from a similar invention.

“Mail’s in,” I said, and handed him one of the envelopes. “Do you want extra pages, for your manuscript?”

Taylor’s hands stilled on his rifle, and his eyes darted to the envelope, but he didn’t reach for it. “Nah, it’s okay,” he said, and went back to fastening the bayonet. “I don’t know who would wanna write about this place.”

I frowned, and settled the envelope back on the stack. Ever since he’d arrived at basic, Taylor had been writing letters to his grandmother, with the hopes of someday turning the pages into a novel that documented his experiences in the war. He’d been pretty consistent with it, always writing away in his spare time. For him to pass up the opportunity was unusual. Though I understood not wanting to write any more about Afghanistan, I didn��t understand why he wouldn’t want to give his grandmother the peace of mind that he’d made it another week.

“You’re not even gonna write to your grandma?” I asked, and took a seat beside him on the log pile underneath one of the poplars that he’d made a small haven.

Taylor shrugged. “Don’t know who would wanna read about this place, either.”

My heart sank a little bit. I was no literary genius, but if I had someone to write to, I’d be writing every day, even if it was just about how much I missed them.

But he seemed disinterested enough that I didn’t argue with him, and I could feel stares on me; I was meant to be carrying out my mail-duty a lot swifter than I was.

“That reminds me,” I said, and dug into the duffel that contained letters and "care packages" for the soldiers. “Something came in for you.”

I handed him the small parcel, and his hands stilled on his rifle again. He took it in his hands and went to set it to the side, but I raised my brows at him, and he gave me a confused look.

“Are you gonna open it?” I urged. I didn’t want him sitting here all day stewing in whatever thoughts were plaguing him, mindlessly wrapping that twine around the barrel of his gun over and over and over. 

He gave me a bit of an uncertain look, and tore at the outer plastic of the package, revealing a vintage copy of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

“You can read it,” he said, and handed it back to me. “I got in shit for humpin’ too much stuff on my first day. Had to send back a bunch of my grandma’s books.”

I took the book in my hands, which was only maybe a half-inch in width, and said, “Taylor, this barely weighs anything.”

Taylor bit his lip, and fumbled with the knot of the twine, before deciding to loop the ends beneath the material a few more times. “I don’t really feel like reading,” he said, and I nodded, though my actions were separate from my thoughts. It seemed that it wasn’t just Cherry who’d taken a serious hit to his morale today. And now that I looked out over the village, I noticed that many of the soldiers were hanging their heads and busying themselves absently with cleaning their rifles or opening mail.

“You should, though,” he said, still fixated on his little project. “It’s a classic.”

“Alright,” I said, reluctantly. “Tell you what, I’ll read this, if you write something. Doesn’t have to have anything to do with this place. Doesn’t even need to be addressed to anyone. Just… something.”

Taylor finally set his rifle aside and met my gaze for more than a few moments. “I appreciate it, Ryder, but I don’t need the therapy.”

“It’s not therapy. It’s accountability.”

“Yeah, right.”

A light sigh escaped my diaphragm, and I looked across the clearing of the village as King shouted some string of obscenities at me, of which I was only able to decipher half of.

“I think that means I have to go,” I said. “Look… just… think about it, alright?” I set a few of the envelopes down on the log beside me before I took my leave.

King was as chipper as ever, impervious to this morning’s grueling battle. “You fuck the sergeant yet?” he asked me as I handed him his mail – an envelope, which contained a letter and some nude photographs of a lover that he had no issue with ogling in front of me.

I nearly choked on my own spit, and I glanced around, but thankfully, I didn’t think that anyone had heard.

“It’s been a day,” I said to him.

“That don’t sound like a ‘no’.”

“Is fucking all you ever talk about?”

“I’ll have you know I’m a man of variety, little lady. I also don’t mind a lil’ bit o’ rimmin’ action, and I’ll tell ya what, the things a woman can do with her feet – “

“Please stop talking.”

King flashed me a toothy grin, and I felt my mood lighten, if only slightly. “I really do look forward to our talks, King,” I said, as I turned to start towards one of the other men, my steps not feeling quite as heavy as they had a minute prior.

“So that’s a ‘yes’ on you fuckin’ Elias, then?”

I stilled, and turned my head, and though I should have felt more anxious than anything, I was focused more on the blush that rose to my cheeks. I continued on my way, sucking a breath in through my nose and channeling it from my pursed lips. From behind me, the last I heard of King was him shout,

“Hey, Manny! You owe me ten bucks, man!”

After finally making my way through the camp, Wolfe was next to last; he sat on one of the ammo crates near the LZ, working on packing mags. He accepted one of the envelopes with a gentle smile and asked if he could have another.

I took a glance at the stack in my hands, which had seemed to get no smaller, and then another out at the soldiers that I had already delivered to.

“Yeah, there’s plenty to go around,” I said, and sifted off a few from the stack. “Who are you writing to?”

Normally, I wouldn’t have been caught dead talking with the lieutenant of the platoon, but last night had broken a barrier I’d spent so long forging; a piece of my cowardice had chipped away, and a part of my soul felt just a little more free – free, like Elias, who wore his heart on his sleeve; free, like a deer, bounding through a meadow; free like that eagle, soaring over the jagged peaks and the love and the hate. Perhaps the freedom I had found was courage.

Surprise registered on Wolfe’s face, but he replied affably, “My parents, and a girlfriend back home.”

I nodded, the faintest of bittersweet smiles crossing my lips. I thought of him returning to his family when this was all over and hugging and smiling, laughing over a dinner table. And though it tugged cruelly at my heart, I could not help but feel the slightest bit of contentment that at least one soldier would be making use of these letters.

I didn’t get to dwell on this thought for long, however; Elias, who’d been nowhere to be seen during the supply drop, had appeared, having walked from the huts. He was standing with Lerner, who was chatting his ear off about something, but his attention wasn’t on the translator; it was on Wolfe and I.

I noticed the way his eyes seemed to trace over the letters in our hands, the way the mirth disappeared from those pretty blues and his shoulders sunk a bit, like Cherry’s had. He turned to Lerner to utter something briefly, and then he was off, back in the direction of the huts.

“Ryder?” Wolfe’s voice snapped my attention back to the lieutenant, but I was no longer present; I turned back to him with a furrowed brow and a distant stare.

“Here,” I said, sifting one of the letters off and leaving the rest of the stack beside him on the chopper gate, alongside the emptied duffel that had contained the packages from home. “I only have one more delivery to make.”

Wolfe didn’t protest when I left, hurrying through the clearing, past Lerner, through the door of one of the wooden huts, letter in my hand.

The floorboards creaked beneath my boots as I entered the ingress that Elias had disappeared through, and immediately, I recalled the women and children that had been herded out like lame sheep. But I pushed those thoughts to the back of my mind, focusing instead on finding my blue-eyed soldier in the now-barren building.

Subtle, but still audible in the silence of the hut, was the groaning of fabric stretching, and as I rounded the corner, I caught sight of the swinging hammock from the Underworld. Elias’ weight had sunken into it, and he merely flopped his head to the side so blue eyes could witness my approach.

“Got mail for me, sweetheart?” he asked.

“You tell me,” I said, and handed him the envelope. “Are you gonna write?”

Elias’ eyes wandered from me, to the envelope, to the dusty floor, and he said, “Haven’t spoken to my family in over a decade. They’d be gettin’ a letter from a ghost.”

Elias had never spoken of anyone back home – I’d assumed he had no one, but from the pain in his poorly-veiled gaze, I could tell that a part of him, however buried, did want to write to someone.

“Why don’t you come up here and join me, sweetheart?” he said, his eyes now glittering with their usual playfulness. He sat up in his hammock, motioning for me to take a seat on his lap.

I smiled faintly as a heat suffused my cheeks, and I found myself tempted by the way his eyes shamelessly raked over me and a few locks of wild hair flopped over his headband at the motion.

“Fine,” I said around a broadening smile, and I clambered up onto the fabric, the ropes groaning again at the stretch of the added weight. Elias made room for me between his legs, forming a little crook by pulling his left knee up to support my back and letting the other lay flat so that I could swing my calves over it. I settled in, a contented sigh nearly escaping me from the way his body heat percolated through his fatigues. I could’ve been in the desert, and I still would’ve ached to feel it seep through my pores like honey.

My world swayed beneath me, the lines of the wooden planks and the woven straw of the walls undulating like the waves of the sea. So I let my head rest against Elias’ chest, sinking into him, my hand loosely gripping his shirt for stability. He untied my hair, letting it tumble in loose waves over my shoulders, and hot lips brushed my cranium as he blessed me with a soft kiss.

“Tell me about your family,” I said, my other hand fumbling idly with the envelope in my lap.

A sigh escaped from Elias’ lungs, disturbing the strands of hair on my skull, and bringing my torso up and down with his own.

“Is that really what you wanna talk ‘bout right now?” he murmured into my ear, voice husky and sparking something in my gut. His hand slipped from where it had threaded into my hair and down to my spine, fingers tracing it through the fabric of my shirt and travelling lower and lower and lower. His groin, where it cradled the underside of my thigh, rocked slowly upwards, his khakis stiffening beneath me.

I breathed a little moan of yearning as I felt my heartbeat drop to my lower abdomen, and I bit my lip as I pushed back from his chest to stare up into blue-black eyes.

“Yes,” I told him, my voice light and almost scarce. Though I wanted nothing more than to repeat last night, I knew that this letter business would weigh on me until he gave me a better reason for not writing.

The line of his lip twitched, and something shifted in his eyes as he stared down at me – their tragedy pained me, tightened my chest – but I continued to stare up at him expectantly, my thumb running soothingly over the bare flesh between the buttons of his shirt.

“You’re a real piece o’ work, y’know that?” he said to me, and I chuffed out a laugh.

“Yeah, I know,” I said.

Another sigh rolled from his lungs, moving my body with it, and he said, “My old man was always sayin’ I didn’t work hard enough, didn’t dream big enough. Didn’t get the right grades, or the right girls. Nothin’ was ever good enough for him. I think he was bitter, think he was tryna project onto his sons. One of them took it. I didn’t.”

Elias paused his story to root through a small pouch of woven weeds and tossed a wild strawberry onto his tongue. I could smell the sweetness as he popped it in his mouth, and I looked curiously at the pouch. So that must have been what he’d been so busy doing. Picking wild berries.

“Always knew my mom didn’t agree with what he said, but she never stepped in. Just made our dinner every night and tucked us in and wished us good luck in school. She was real sweet, y’know. Can’t say I blame her for not sayin’ nothin’. My dad was a scary guy.

“My older brother, he came home one night, drunk as a skunk. He’d lost his apartment, lost his job. Even lost his girl. My parents were out and he was lookin’ for our dad and I was the only one ‘round, so he started yellin’ at me, blamin’ me for his failed marriage and his student loans and his empty bank account.”

He chewed at another strawberry, as if they were pills to numb the memories, before continuing,

“I don’t like takin’ peoples’ shit. Especially since my dad had been tellin’ me earlier that I should be more like him, just ‘cause he was a good boy and did as he was told. So when my brother started takin’ everythin’ out on me, I told him to go to Hell.”

Elias seemed to still then, his exhale lingering beneath me.

“That was the last thing I said to him before I walked out that door and never came back. Haven’t seen or spoken to him since,” he said, a remorseful waver in his tone.

I looked up at him again, my cheek grazing the rough fabric of his shirt, but his gaze was fixed somewhere past me, blue eyes glittering with sorrow.

“What did you do after that?” I asked.

“Got a job in the oil fields,” he said. “I was young, hadn’t finished school. Just needed somethin’ to keep the rent money comin’ in.”

I nodded in understanding, and asked, “Is that why you got involved with drugs?”

Elias chuckled, and shook his head. “That was my ex-wife. She was all into psychedelics – the hard kind, mainly LSD. Blew all my money on drugs and gurus and all that shit, pinned the evidence on me.”

I’d never thought about Elias having a girl back home, or being married. I supposed it made sense; he was in his early thirties. I admonished myself for the slight twisting of jealousy in my gut, though I was more concerned in this moment how Elias must have felt, betrayed by both his family and his lover.

“So that’s why you’re here,” I breathed against his chest, and he chuckled again, notes a low rumble in his diaphragm.

“Surprised King didn’t tell ya. That’s one of his favourite stories,” he said.

“That’s an awful story,” I whispered. “I didn’t know, I’m sorry, I wouldn’t have – “

“Shhh,” he said, stroking his thumb over my hair. “Not your fault, sweetheart.” A pause, and then the wry quirk of a smile. “I think King tells it better, though.”

A slight smile graced my lips, and I sank back into his chest, running my fingers this time over the chain of his dog tags.

“You got family, sweetheart?” he asked me, and cold seemed to seize my chest.

“I used to,” I murmured, half into the fabric of his shirt, half into the stale, dusty air. “They’re not around anymore.”

“That have anythin’ to do with that Bowie song you listen to so much?”

I’d nearly forgotten how intuitive he was, even without those piercing eyes eviscerating my soul.

“I sang it to my mother…” I began, words so quiet I wondered if he could even hear them, his hand stilling where it stroked my hair. I swallowed, and continued, “…when she was dying in her hospital bed. It was her favourite song.”

“It’s a beautiful song,” he said, hot breath soothing against the top of my head, and slowly, the warmth of his body began to seep past the cold that seized me, and I relaxed.

“Elias,” I said, tilting my head back up at him as his thumb resumed its languid motion over my skull. “Do you still love your brother?”

He looked down at me, sadness darting through those pretty blues once more, and he said, “Yeah, guess I do.”

“Why don’t you write to him? Or call him?”

“Alex, I’ve been through a lot o’ shit. Run headfirst into firefights, gone head to head with Barnes, went through tunnels with IEDs. But whenever I pick up that phone, I just… I can’t do it.”

I settled my head back against his chest. A moment of silence passed between us, and in that moment, I thought of my parents, of my mother’s lips parting gently to form the lyrics to her favourite song as her heart rate slowed, and my father, wrapping an arm around me and grinning at me in my youth.

“I think you should,” I told him. “The things I wouldn’t give to hear my mother’s voice again. See my dad’s smile.” I tipped my head back again, making sure to capture his gaze in mine. “Don’t let those things slip away from you, Elias. ‘Cause when they’re gone, they’re gonna make you ache.”

Maybe I should’ve let it go, let him live his life, but yesterday, he’d taught me something I wouldn’t have been able to realize myself, had released me from a demon I had forged. It was my turn to impart some of my own wisdom, the words I’d wanted to say to Cherry, to Taylor, to every soldier out there who’d turned their noses up at the envelopes I handed out.

I remembered the paper now, and pressed it to his chest where my head had been.

Slowly, a lazy grin spread across his lips, and Elias gently pushed the envelope away. “Don’t worry ‘bout me, sweetheart,” he said, his eyes glittering again with affection rather than regret. “I got all I need right here.”

My heart swelled with warmth, and my mouth quirked again into a smile. Though part of me thought that he was just saying that to distract me from the unpleasant subject, another part of me – the part of me that ached for family, for a bond – eagerly accepted his words, let them sink in and spread along every nerve of my body, making my skin fuzzy and my gut all giddy with electricity.

And I decided that in that moment, I didn’t need to hear my mother’s voice, or see my father’s smile. All I needed was Elias. Maybe it wouldn’t last – though I wanted it to –, but it would be enough to get me through.

I tucked the envelope away into the hem of my khakis, and smiled back at him as I watched him catch another strawberry between his teeth, tipping his head back to let it land on his tongue.

“Can I have one?” I asked, licking my lips. The MRE I’d had earlier was still settling in my stomach, though I reckoned that the dry bread and cold beef stew wouldn’t even compare to just one of those little red delicacies.

Elias smirked at me, and plopped one of the berries on his tongue, sticking it from between his teeth invitingly.

My gaze darted from his mischievous gaze to the strawberry on his tongue, and my gut stirred with a different sort of hunger. I giggled and leaned in to capture the strawberry in my teeth, the seeds gritting against my molars but the tart yet sweet flavour exploding across my tongue.

I’d barely swallowed the sugary syrup of the berry when Elias pressed his hot lips to mine, and tugged me closer to the warmth of his body, my thighs to the hardness that had redeveloped in his trousers. His tongue still tasted potently of the berries, and his lips were slightly slick from their juices, but every bit as heavenly as they’d been last night.

I swung my right leg around his waist so that I was straddling him, pressing my own pounding arousal against his now, grinding the coiled heat into him eagerly. We went to work swiftly on unbuttoning each other’s shirts; he had less to accomplish, since I’d never replaced the one Bunny had torn from my collar, and soon enough, I was baring my flesh to him.

He sank back into the hammock, our kiss breaking so that I could kick off my trousers and undo his belt. Beginning to tug down his khakis, I positioned myself up on my knees, but they wobbled beneath me from the sway of the hammock, and I caught myself from collapsing by letting a hand fall to his chest and my spine to curl over above him. I laughed against the bare of his chest, and his own grin mirrored mine, mirth in his eyes. His member was pressing against my stomach now, and as the laughter ceased, I caught my lip in my teeth, a devilish idea forming in my mind. 

I watched as his face fell slack from sharp cheekbones and those blue eyes darken with lust as I sidled down, panting my breaths against his navel and inhaling the scent that was of both him and the wilds, my lips brushing the mound of dark hair that crowned his length.

I panted out one last breath against his flesh before letting my tongue run along his length, and he immediately bucked his hips, a moan stirring from him as his hands sought my hair, fingertips just barely managing to hook a few of the strands.

It did cross my mind that Barnes, or Bunny, or anyone could’ve walked through that door in that moment, but I didn’t care anymore. I needed this, in this place that only brought sorrow and guilt, needed to indulge myself in this thing that made me human in this place that made me a monster. And I could tell that Elias needed it, too, from the way that he clawed desperately at my hair and writhed his hips beneath me and bit his tongue to hold back a moan every time I licked or kissed at him.

“Quit bein’ such a goddamn tease, sweetheart,” Elias rasped between heavy breaths. It was oddly reminiscent of when he’d kissed at my thighs last night and I’d told him to fuck me, and I grinned as I felt him twitch beneath my lips, my tongue darting against his sensitive flesh almost wickedly.

His hips bucked again, and I ground the sopping mess that was my panties against the fabric of his leg, seeking my own satisfaction to the burning desire in my groin. A pleasured breath passed from my lips, and I drew my tongue along his length one last time to savour the taste of him before attempting once again to steady myself on my knees.

He nudged my panties aside, a shiver dancing across my flesh as his finger brushed a bundle of nerves, and I lowered myself onto him. I clamped a hand over my mouth to stifle the gasp that poured fast from my lungs as he filled me, stretching walls that still seemed to ache from last night.

It took me a minute, but eventually I got into a rhythm, and the spring of the hammock helped rock my hips up and down, a strangled moan parting from my lips every time the bare flesh of my thighs met his. I tried to keep as quiet as I could, in case anyone outside heard, but I only devoted a small portion of my efforts towards the discreetness, for I was far too enraptured by the movement of my hips, the pleasure that ran from my core all the way to the top of my head, the man who still moaned and squirmed under me as his hands grasped at my waist and his length shuddered inside of me.

His fingers curled firmly into my hipbones as he kept my thighs pinned to him, his hips bucking madly upwards as he spent himself inside of me, and I shivered around him, my head feeling light and my core flooding with the warmth that I craved.

I stayed like this for several moments, head swung back, hair teasing the line of my nude back, riding out the beginnings of my own high, walls tightening around him and my sweat-slicked thighs still trembling on top of him.

When euphoria finally claimed me, I drew myself from him and collapsed on his chest, honey-blonde hair pooling across his neck and shoulders and my fervent breaths panted across the musky sweat of his collarbone.

Elias’ thumb stroked the back of my head again, sending tingles through my overly-sensitive nerves, and with his other hand, he entwined his fingers through my own. And he murmured against me, “See, told ya I got all I need right here, sweetheart.”

#fanfiction #elias grodin #platoon #platoon 1986 #my writing #heroes #oc: alexis #sgt. elias #mdni #there's smut in this story I'm just not saying where because spoilers but you've been warned #writing

[red-riding-wood]

Heroes - Chapter 7

Chpt. 1 , Masterlist , Chpt. 8

Pairing: Sgt. Elias Grodin x Female OC (Alexis Ryder)

Fandoms: Platoon (1986), Cherry (2021)

WARNINGS: I'm just going to put down a blanket for the entire book/all chapters: graphic depictions of violence and gore, torture, explicit sexual content, attempted sexual assault, language, marijuana use

Two Bravo had run into a Taliban patrol earlier, and as fate had it, I ended up visiting the creek afterward to wash the blood from my fatigues. We’d lost another man today. Sal, the one who’d ratted me out. I’d watched his eyes bulge, his legs kick, as Barnes had clamped his hand over his mouth to silence his cries and demanded that he take the pain.

Dried blood didn’t wash off easily. Despite nearly rubbing my own knuckles raw scrubbing the fabric, they still bore dark, faded stains – the markings of a slaughter, the markings of war. I didn’t know anymore what was what. What was right, what was wrong. I guess it didn’t really even matter. All I needed to focus on was survival, and yet, here I was, at the edge of the creek, trying to rid myself of my own violence.

My khakis had mostly dried, strung up over one of the low-hanging branches. There wasn’t much point leaving them up any longer; the sun’s warmth was fading as the evening and the inevitable darkness crept closer, just as tomorrow’s violence would.

I’d just done up the button on them, letting the fabric once again hug my hips, when I heard a shuffling through the brush, and my heart leapt in my chest. My gun rested beside me on a nearby rock – I’d learned to keep it closer than my water or my rations or my sleeping bag, learned that it was my best friend – and I had in my hands within seconds, standing there in my standard-issued sports bra and my blood-stained khakis, my hair undone and wild and the scrapes from the forest earlier reaching like gnarled branches across my cheekbones. I must’ve looked like the survivor of a plane crash.

I breathed a sigh of relief, strands of blonde hair fluttering against my lips as I lowered my gun back to the rock. It was only a few of the men – Bunny, Junior, and O’Neill.

The cat-calls immediately ensued upon sight of me, but I turned my back and stepped for the shirt that hung over another branch over the creek.

“Whoa there, Sweet Cheeks,” O’Neill called over my shoulder. “I don’t think that looks dry yet.”

I clenched my jaw and ran my fingers over the damp fabric of the shirt. He was right, unfortunately, but I took it down from the branch anyway and began to fit it around my torso, a cold chill racing along my flesh.

When I turned, Bunny was inches from my face, and I let out a startled puff of air. “Jesus,” I breathed.

The soldier grinned at me around those buck-teeth, and reached a hand to mine, where I’d begun doing up the top button on my shirt. He ripped it from my grasp, the button popping from the fabric and falling somewhere among the wet pebbles of the creek-bed.

I swallowed, and stared into his wild eyes – eyes, that, once able to trace down the line of my stomach, the crease of my cleavage above my bra, glittered with a sort of hunger – but I didn’t make a move to stop him. If I did, he’d go crying to Barnes. And if he did that, I was dead.

His darkly-inked rabbit tattoo flashed in my peripheral as his arm reached up to yank the shirt from my shoulders, letting it fall at my heels as he snaked a tongue between his lips.

“Hold on there, Sugar Tits, I didn’t say you was done givin’ us a show,” he chuckled darkly. “You can’t walk around lookin’ like that with those pretty tits out and not expect to rile someone up.”

I swallowed again, audibly this time, and let a hiss of air exhale from my flared nostrils. Bunny was casting a look behind him now, at O’Neill and Junior, whose gazes devoured me with just as much hunger.

“Ain’t that right, boys?” he said.

O’Neill smirked, and took a pace forward like a predator would to its prey.

Every muscle in my body tensed; every capillary of blood pumped viciously beneath my flesh; every instinct in my gut told me to fight or flee – maybe to blacken that crooked nose of Bunny’s, maybe set it straight.

But Barnes’ words came back to me.

Take the pain.

Take the pain, take the shame, take whatever I needed to to survive.

So I tried to relax, tried to steady my breathing and count my heart-beat as Bunny’s fingers began to trail down my clavicle to the line of my breasts, hooking in the fabric of my bra.

One, two, three, eight, twelve, fifteen.

“Hey, asshole, get your fuckin’ hands off her!” a shout, a painfully familiar voice split the silence of the unfolding war crime.

Elias.

He barged from the brush, tac rig and armour left somewhere behind, but his finger held firmly over the trigger of his rifle and his blue eyes boiling with fury.

“Oh, come on, man!” Bunny groaned, though his hand slipped from my bra, and I breathed a tremulous sigh.

“Get away from her!” Elias snapped at him, gun held to his head as he stalked forward.

Bunny threw his hands up in the air, and stepped back, towards where O’Neill and Junior were already retreating. “Jesus, sarge, you gone crazy or somethin’?”

“You’re the one who’s gone crazy, Bunny. And you’re gonna be dealin’ with worse than a court-martial if you don’t get out of my sight in the next five seconds.”

Bunny hesitated, and my gaze darted between the two, wondering if the thrill-seeker would actually stand his ground, but in what seemed to be the tail-end of those five seconds, he finally sauntered off, grabbing his rifle from the ground with a belligerent swipe and grumbling as his figure disappeared through the woods.

O’Neill’s hands had also gone up, and fear twinkled in his eyes as he faced Elias. “I didn’t do nothin’,” he pleaded. “I swear. I didn’t – “

“Cut the bullshit,” Elias snapped, and lowered his rifle, though his chest still heaved with fervor and venom still laced itself surprisingly thick into his tone. “It was probably your fuckin’ idea. I want you out of my sight, too.”

The Two Charlie sergeant’s hands lowered to his sides, and reddish brows furrowed across his forehead. “C’mon, man. Why don’t you cut me some slack? You’re always playin’ hero with these sorta things.”

Elias had only just shifted his attention to me, when O’Neill’s words stirred hellfire again in him, and he shot his fellow sergeant a glare. “Hey, O’Neill,” he said. “Go take a break. You don’t have to be a prick every day of your life, y’know.”

With Elias’ scathing glare following him, O’Neill spat and began walking away with great petulance. Junior, who’d remained silent the entire time, scampered after him like a dog.

When Elias’ gaze turned back to me, it had softened, and his fingers reached to brush the bare flesh of my shoulder as he asked me if I was okay.

But my heart still beat at an innumerable rate in my chest, and my limbs were shaking, and panic had sewn itself into every cell of my body.

“No, I’m not fucking okay,” I breathed, and brushed his hand off of me as I started away, attempting to distance myself again.

Elias was nothing short of confused, but he followed me, as per usual, through the brush.

“I told you to stay away from me!” I yelled, and my voice probably carried all the way back to camp, but I couldn’t seem to rein in the tide of emotion that poured from the shattered walls I had built around my heart. “Now Bunny or O’Neill are gonna go back to Barnes, and they’re gonna tell him what happened, and he’s gonna – “

I shook my head, swallowing against this knot of anxiety in my throat. I was shaking. I was hysteric. Everything was falling apart – my reputation, my façade, my safety. Elias’ safety. The lies I told myself, the desires and the yearnings that I repressed.

“He’s gonna fucking kill me – or you, Elias,” I forced the words from my mouth. “If you’d just let things play out, I would’ve been okay. You would’ve been okay. But now everything’s fucked. I tried so hard to fit in here. You have no idea how many times I’ve bit my tongue or looked the other way because of something that one of those fucking assholes has done. You’ve no idea how much it kills me inside to pretend to be something I’m not.”

“Alex…” His fingers reached gently for my wrist.

I whirled around as I broke from the line of trees, and glared at him from eyes that I hoped didn’t splinter and crack and reveal my truths. “What?” I hissed.

“You were really gonna let them have their way with you?” Elias asked, staring at me with a dumbfounded expression, but was still so infuriatingly, impossibly calm despite my unabated rage.

“Yes!” I snapped, and ignored the way my lip curled in disgust at myself over my teeth. Ignored the way my stomach rolled in my abdomen. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right?”

Elias’ brows knitted together, and he said, “You’re startin’ to sound like Barnes.”

I tried not to physically cringe at his words, and I hissed, “You know what…”

I panted out each breath with fervid ire, my head light and reeling, and in that moment, as I felt myself unravelling at every seam, so did my truths.

“You were right, Elias. I am scared of Barnes. I’m fucking terrified!” I gesticulated a hand madly though the air, my eyes gleaming again with unshed tears. “I’m terrified that he’s gonna report me, or hurt me, or maybe even kill me. I’ve seen the look in his eyes, Elias, and it isn’t human. I watched him today, put his hand over a dying man’s mouth, and tell him to take the fucking pain. Who does that? Who fucking – “

“Alex, just stop for a minute,” Elias told me, pleaded with me, and something in his tone ceased the string of panic woven from my tongue, my chest focusing now on heaving out frantic breaths. His fingers reached for me again, brushing the erected hairs of my forearms, and this time, I didn’t jump back or swat his hand away, didn’t have the energy or the heart to. My head was starting to fog, and I felt as if I might pass out. His touch was warm, soothing, grounding. And I nearly sunk into it.

And I looked at him – really looked at him, at the serenity that cloaked his demeanor, at the gentle glimmer of those enchanting blue eyes and the hand that now retracted from me as if scared to break me. And I realized now that it hadn’t been the weed that had enamored me; he was beautiful, with the gold tint of the sun framing his earthy-brown locks like a halo, and kissing that tanned, freckled skin.

“Alex, just look,” he said, and gestured out to the mountains that could be glimpsed from the side of the cliff on which we stood. “Look at that view.”

I almost didn’t want to, almost wanted to stay lost in the beautiful, blue galaxies of his eyes, but I obeyed, my chest still heaving but slowly steadying and my hair cutting my eyelashes as I turned my head. I fixed my gaze on the jagged peaks that shredded the yellow and pink horizon, to the golden rays that reached softly over their crests like angels outstretching heavenly hands towards us. At the trees, that dotted the scape of each perilous mountain, to the winds that whistled between them and rattled their boughs, to the errant clouds that slowly cruised by the light that was ebbing gradually in the sky.

The winds tossed the honey-blonde locks of hair from my shoulders, weaving them like golden threads into air that smelled of sharp pine, and wildflowers, and a strange note of freedom, of a fairy-tale that beckoned me to collapse to my knees before the wonder of it all.

A tear slid down my cheek, collecting at the base of my jaw only to be guided to my smiling chin by the gusts of wind.

“It’s beautiful,” I breathed, my chest finally stilling and my head starting to feel just a little bit clearer.

“It’s all ours,” Elias said, and I tore my gaze from the scenery to settle back in the enchanting depths of those blue optics. “We’ll deal with Barnes. But right now, we don’t have to. Right now, we’re free, and we’ve got…” Elias extended a hand out to the cliff-side again, his lips pulling into a whimsical smile. “… one of the best damn views I’ve ever seen.”

Elias then reached down to grab at my rucksack – he must have brought it along from the creek, and in my hysteria, I hadn’t even noticed – and pulled my iPod from its front pocket. He held it up to me, smiling.

Right now, we could be heroes.

Normally, I would’ve scoffed, called him cheesy, but the human part of myself that I’d buried somewhere deep in my soul ached for the freedom he spoke of, ached for the wonderful nature – the beautiful crests of the mountains, the honey glaze of the sunset –, and above all, ached to share it with him, in its perfectly-saccharine bliss. Even if it was only for the night.

---

Night had claimed the sky, the final struggle of the sun’s defeat retreating over the horizon in snaking tendrils of magenta and periwinkle; they slipped from the jagged edges of the lowest peaks, as if clinging desperately to life. The soldiers had not died so gracefully, nor as silently.

But now was not the time to think of them. Now was only the time to be.

"Heroes" played softly from my iPod speaker, nestled in the grass slightly behind Elias and I; we listened to this, over and over, not a word spoken between us. My legs were turned outwards beneath me, my fingers splaying against the cold earth and the spindly shoots of flora to balance myself.

Finally, I turned my head to regard my company; his knees were pulled in to hug his chest, a joint hung from his lip, and his eyes were lost in the starry sky. I almost didn’t want to disturb him, for he seemed to be so at peace like this, lost in the brilliant jewels in the black that stretched from the peaks of the mountains to the heavens above.

But I had things I wanted to ask him, and with the weed starting to kick in, my nerves were beginning to subside, my flesh tingling with that fuzzy sort of feeling and the edges of my mind softening, allowing me to speak before I thought – to not think about much of anything, really, other than how blissful the kiss of the night breeze felt against my bare flesh, how strangely soothing the cold earth felt along my fingers, how the luster of the moon hallowed the sharp features of the sergeant’s face.

“Hey, Elias,” I murmured, my head rolling along my shoulder-blades. My words were almost distant, quiet as the wind that softly stirred locks of hair from both of our scalps, but they caught his attention, and those blue-black eyes settled on mine with a strange blend of contentedness and insatiability. They stirred something in my gut, something delightful yet terrifying, something that made me feel stronger and weaker at the same time.

“Where are you from, anyway?” I asked him.

“Oklahoma.”

I’d been there once. It was rich with Native American culture, abundant with fauna, and as wild as the soldier who sat beside me. I imagined Elias running through the forests, or the meadows, as he did in the Afghan alpines, bison grazing around him or sunlight dappling him through the boughs of redbud trees. I wondered why he’d ever left it behind, since it seemed to suit him just as well.

“What made you enlist?” I asked next.

Elias cast his gaze back to the stars, and took a long drag of his joint, blowing the gout of dope into a lazy cloud that seemed to evaporate into the night air. “Got myself wound up in some drug rap,” he said. “Military service lessens a parole sentence, so I enlisted.”

I pictured now a young man in the bustling streets or the darkened alleys of a city filled with pollution and crime and fraudulent dreams. A man who never wore his helmet, whose mouth was always curved into a lopsided grin, who smelled of wildflowers and earth, locked behind bars, stripped of everything that made him free. And I understood things a lot better.

He handed the joint to me, which I cradled between my fingers with a sort of subservience, pressed with a gentle solicitousness between my lips like it was something to be worshipped, something ethereal.

Warmth flooded my lungs, and I sputtered out my own gout of smoke as Elias said, “Thing is, when I’d served my time, I didn’t really feel I had anythin’ to go back to.”

I handed the joint back to him, and at his words, something struck a chord in me; I pictured my empty apartment, the dying plants on my windowsill, the family photograph I could never look at without feeling haunted by a life I could’ve had.

I let my gaze follow Elias’, rolling back to glimpse the lurid streaks of the white stars in the silent, black sky – the sky that, so hollow and abyssal, didn’t appear to hold a Heaven, but even in its unknown, I found a certain sanctuary.

From the void emerged a streak of bright, a star falling like a tear across the black canvas. Taylor had told me that every shooting star marked the death of a soldier.

I furrowed my brow, and chewed at my smoky, weed-tinged lip. “Do you ever fear death?” I asked him, vaguely recalling the torture room of the al-Qaeda. Though the marijuana had taken my pain, had displaced my trauma so that it felt as if it had been another lifetime, I viewed it through a fogged lens, through the fractured, crimson-stained mirror back at Kandahar.

Elias tipped his head now to his lap, fiddling gently with his thumbs before removing the joint from his mouth. “Sometimes,” he said, an unusual sullenness to his nature, but mirth quickly blanketed it, and he cast me a wry grin, a twinkle in the dark pupils of his eyes like a star gleaming in its hollow home.

“Why, you writin’ a book on me, or somethin’?” he said playfully, and his mischievous smile and his bewitching eyes made me forget about the torture room, about the shooting star.

“No,” I said, though the word was breathed from the stirrings of a giggle, and my cheeks flushed with heat. If I could write, I would fill pages upon pages about that smile and those beautiful eyes alone.

“Alright, then what’s your story?” Elias turned everything around on me, and my heart, which had been soaring in my chest, sank a little. “Why’d you enlist?”

I bit my lip again, and turned the music off on the iPod. The chorus had kicked in again, and I didn’t want to hear that word “heroes” at the moment. I then looked back out to the sky, as if seeking my answers.

“I guess I… thought I was doing something good,” I finally said, and with the music gone, my words seemed to pierce the silence like a knife, the wind not even having the courtesy to carry them.

“I know what ya mean,” Elias said, and a sigh threaded itself into the air along with another puff of smoke. “That’s what I love about these stars. No right or wrong in ‘em. They’re just… there.”

The line of my mouth curved upward, and I regarded the stars now with a newfound reverence, humbled by this notion. I recalled the tattoos that Rhah had on his knuckles – the ones that read “LOVE” and “HATE”. I recalled the soldiers that I’d witnessed die, recalled that I had delivered some of their fates. Even the grass beneath my fingers drew its nourishment from the earth, from the death of other beings. Even the coyote that howled somewhere in the distance had taken life to nourish its own. Everything beautiful had to take. But the stars… in all of their bright, wondrous glory, had never hated, never loved, never killed, never taken. They were the exception to nature’s rule, the beauty that didn’t have a cost.

“Never thought of them that way,” I said, my eyes still tracing each burning ball of gas with utter captivation. “When I look up at them, I always wonder if there’s life after death… if there’s anything, for that matter. My mom always told me I’d join them someday. But when I look at them…” Again, I regarded the great void of vastness that they rested in. “… I don’t see anything. I don’t see the Heaven she talked about.”

I thought of the crucifix that Elias wore beneath his green button-down, and turned my head to glance at its beaded line alongside the silver of his dog tags. Most soldiers believed in God, thought that a rosary would grant them providence as they faithfully sacrificed themselves to their country. I didn’t really know what to believe anymore. I wasn’t sure that I ever had.

“Who really knows? Heaven, Hell, reincarnation…” Elias said, and shook his head as a faint, whimsical smile tugged at his lips. “Sometimes I think I’m gonna come back as wind or fire…” His eyes narrowed a fraction at the horizon in contemplation, and he said, “Or maybe a deer.” Sharp features relaxed, and his smile broadened. “Yeah, definitely a deer.”

Elias took another toke of his joint, and as he glimpsed me, his black-blue eyes glossy and bright and his tawny-brown locks falling in wild yet tranquil shapes over his forehead, I found myself in agreement, and I mirrored his smile.

“What about you, sweetheart?” he urged me.

“I think I’d wanna be an eagle,” I said. “Be able to… fly above it all, above those jagged peaks and the tops of the highest trees.” Above the carnage, and the death, and the love and hate. My eyes scanned my surroundings, and darted across the sky, sinking into the reverie as my smile turned bittersweet and something in my soul felt as if it might grow a pair of wings, might float from my chest and leave the remnants of my body on this cliff-side. “To be free,” I added. “Like you said.”

“That sounds like a dream, sweetheart.” Another puff of smoke entwined itself into the breeze that softly picked up, and he handed me the joint again as if it were a rite of passage. “For what it’s worth, I wish you could fly. Bet the wind would look perfect in your hair. Make you look like some kind o’ angel.”

My heart beat a little quicker in my chest, and my cheeks grew hotter. I took another hit, and I wasn’t sure if it was his words or the drug that sent a pleasant wave through my body, but when I handed it back to him, I couldn’t help but notice the way his gaze travelled along the flesh of my collarbone, the frame of my face, the soft pout of my lips. And I thought to myself, I could never be an angel, because an angel wouldn’t be thinking the impure thoughts that I was in this moment.

Lost in a daze, lost in these delightful little fantasies about the soldier, I knew I needed to ground myself, so I cleared my throat, and dug my fingers into the earth, feeling the soil bed itself beneath my nails and wedge itself into my pores that burned so hot in contrast to its cold touch.

“Can I see your headband?” I asked him as I brushed my hands off on my khakis, my eyes now tracing the camouflaged fabric that cradled his nest of wild hair. I was suddenly fascinated by it, wanted to trace my fingers along each letter. I was fascinated by him, wanted a part of him that was tangible, a part of him that I could touch.

“’Course you can, sweetheart,” he said, a crooked grin plastering itself to that handsome face. He reached to pull it from his head, but my fingertips glided from my khakis to his hair, shuffling my rear ungracefully across what little space there was between us. My breath hitched in my lungs, and I could feel his own huff with surprise against my cheeks, smelling strongly of dope. His smile faded, but his eyes seemed to darken, glaze over like those starry skies from the Underworld. I could see their insatiability now more than their contentedness.

I swallowed past my dry tongue, and hooked my fingers through the oddly-soft strands of his hair as I pulled the headband from him. His eyes fluttered as they grazed his scalp, and I bit my lip. Maybe a part of me had merely wanted this excuse, to see what it would feel like to do this, to be this close to him, to touch him.

As the headband came free in my hands, the uncaged locks of his hair fell in equal disarray across his forehead, and exposed more of their dark, earthy roots. My eyes drank him in as the headband fell slowly to my lap, my fingers tracing its warm fabric only absently, for my attention had been completely claimed by him.

Elias chuffed out a laugh, another hot breath fanning across my face and causing my lashes to flutter. “It ain’t nothin’ special,” he said to me, though his gaze was intensely locked in my own, eyes still glazed over like he wasn’t really aware of the words he was speaking. “Just standard-issued GI garb.”

We were so close that our knees were brushing, and I could feel his body heat radiating through what little air there was between us, prickling at the bare flesh of my torso, drawing me to him as if I were a moth and beneath his shirt raged a fire.

“Elias,” I breathed, and my eyes darted down to his now-parted lips. I inhaled the scent of him – the musky elixir of earth and sweat and the sweetness of wildflowers and the uniqueness that was him – and became intoxicated.

Kiss me.

My tongue was bound, forbidden from speaking the two words that my lungs ached to expel the most. These moments, filled with short breaths and darting, voracious glances, were both bliss and agony. I wanted to be this close with him, but I also wanted to be closer.

Kiss me. Take me. Make me whole.

And then hot, burning lips were pressed against mine, and one of my hands was tangled back in his hair as he drew me to him, our bodies merging as my legs folded onto his lap and the clothing between us felt as if it were about to combust.

Our kiss was sloppy, bordering the line of a needy hunger and a languid exultation. His hands were everywhere, tracing lines across every groove of my naked flesh and unbuttoning my khakis and groping at my breasts through my bra. I shuddered a broken breath against his tongue as I felt his hips grind upwards against mine, felt his own want for me as its hardness dug itself between my legs. I bucked my hips forward in response, eliciting a groan from him that resonated in my mouth, and I unbuttoned his shirt so that I could run my fingers along his sweat-slicked chest that blazed with heat, feel the brush of his cold dog tags and crucifix in such an unnatural contrast. The joint was long-forgotten, ground out somewhere in the earth beside us.

I gasped as our kiss broke so that he could pull my sports bra from my shoulders, and my hair fell around me in a wild mess, blonde strands sticking to my dampened lips. He hastily brushed them away before pressing his mouth to mine again, tracing his hands leisurely back down over my now-bare breasts before he started to tug at my khakis.

Between his efforts to remove them, and the frantic movements of our hips, we ended up laughing past our shattered, wanton breaths. He gripped my hips, and forced me down, his bottom lip sliding from my teeth as I gasped. My spine hit the cold earth below me, blades of grass reaching around my buzzing flesh and tickling me so that I found a giggle stirring from my lungs.

Elias managed to tug my khakis off, and I bent my legs as he pulled them over my toes. Without the heat of him pressed against me, I now realized how magma seemed to bubble in the pit of my abdomen, melting my core and slicking my panties.

I met the playful glimmer of his eyes and watched as his finger hooked through the rolled-down hem of them. Framed by my milky thighs, he was even more exquisite; with the moon behind him, darkness had fallen over his freckled face, but those eyes gleamed brighter than the stars, and he wore an almost devilish grin.

I licked my lips in anticipation, my heart beating deep within my groin, and smiled back as he peeled the garment from my legs, casting it to the side along with my khakis. He drew himself forward, starry gaze never leaving mine and that grin playful yet starved, like a wild animal, his white teeth glinting in the dark.

His lips were soft against my inner thighs, his fingers teasing, and I arched my back against the earth, moaning as the itch between my legs intensified, begging to be touched, my hips rocking gently upwards and my ribcage brushing against the fabric of the shirt that had fallen loose from his chest. He wanted this just as much as I did, but he was taking his time, savouring me.

“Elias,” I breathed, finally unable to handle the wait, and when I met his eyes again, I was certain that they held every ounce of yearning, of that wonderfully-human, primal need that his did. “Fuck me.”

His grin broadened, and he unbuckled his own trousers, letting his belt fall in a heap somewhere at my feet. “If you thought that wasn’t the plan for even a goddamn second, sweetheart…” he rumbled as he came up between my legs, a shiver running through me as the cold metal of his dog tags dragged across my navel.

His hands groped again at my breasts as his lips sought mine, strands of his hair tickling my forehead. And finally, I felt him at my entrance, filling me, making me whole; his mouth fell still against mine as he groaned, and I bit my lip to keep from whimpering at the stretch. The weed numbed any pain, but it had still been a while since I had done this. My thighs tightened around him, my calves sliding over the ridge of his lower back as if to bring him closer.

I balled his shirt in my fists, nails digging past the fabric and into the muscles of his back, and his body heat washed blissfully over mine again as our bodies melded, his weight settling on top of me and the chain of his dog tags and the beads of his rosary pooling loosely between my breasts.

My tailbone dug into the earth as he rocked me forward, one of his hands slipping from my breast to try and steady me, fingers fastening around my ribcage. But I didn’t care; I was giggling, elated by the sensations and the dope that still coursed through my system, and in my exhales, panted out his name like a prayer.  

His breath came hot and feverish against my neck, where he’d buried his lips, and the fabric of his khakis was beginning to chafe my thighs from the friction, and the tides of pleasure rolled along my body from my core to the crest of my head, which felt light and hot with arousal, buzzing and tingling with electricity.

“Elias,” I gasped, my jaw unhinging wide as my chest rose and fell with fervid breath and I felt him twitch inside my walls. He grunted and bleated his own breaths against the side of my neck, fanning across the oversensitive bundle of nerves that rested beneath my earlobe.

And as I came undone, tightening around him and curling my toes above the base of his spine, the stars all shot across their black canvas in harmony, blurred like lurid, luminous pearls across my vision as my eyes rolled back and my skull dug harder into the earth. His warmth filled my core, leaving every trace of my skin flushed with heat, every nerve of my body singing with rapture.

My legs quivered around him. His muscles fell lax on top of me, skin sticky against mine, head buried in the tangle of hair at the base of my neck. And when he pulled himself upward, still buried blissfully inside of me, that lopsided grin blurred into the beautiful painting of the sky and the stars, and I realized that the Underworld hadn’t been my hideaway, the sky not my sanctuary; Elias was.

#fanfiction #elias grodin #platoon #platoon 1986 #my writing #heroes #oc: alexis #sgt. elias #mdni #there's smut in this story i'm just not saying where because spoilers but you've been warned #fanfic

[red-riding-wood]

Heroes - Chapter 6

Chpt. 1 , Masterlist , Chpt 7

Pairing: Sgt. Elias Grodin x Female OC (Alexis Ryder)

Fandoms: Platoon (1986), Cherry (2021)

WARNINGS: I'm just going to put down a blanket for the entire book/all chapters: graphic depictions of violence and gore, torture, explicit sexual content, attempted sexual assault, language, marijuana use

The next day, we were back in the fray, far from the errant dance and song and cheer of the Underworld.

Captain Harris had sent us to capture a nearby Taliban village, though he allowed us nearly forty-eight hours of preparation; we were to set up a camp, about three or four klicks out. That would allow us plenty of time to assess our situation and target before our ambush, and make sure we’d readjusted to the harsh terrain and elements of the mountains. Many of us had been sitting on our asses in med-bay for two weeks.

Weed thankfully lacked the headaches and nausea of a hangover, but I couldn’t say that it hadn’t taken a little extra willpower to drag myself from my bunk this morning. Each limb weighed heavy with lethargy, not only from the after-effects of the plant but also the sleep that the Underworld had so wonderfully stolen from me.

But at least the air here was less hot than Kandahar; it felt like a trip to the damn Himalayas after two weeks of sweating out in the desert heat. And I was much fonder of the smells of the forest than I was the reek of litter and cheap food from the markets.

I pulled the bore snake – the long, spindly rope that we used to clean our rifles – down through the upper receiver of my gun, listening to King jabber on about gossip in the platoon. Though I’d only met him last night, I knew that Cherry trusted him, and his demeanor was jovial, warm – harmless, in comparison to Barnes’ crew.

“Y’know that Wolfe, man, I heard he’s here to finish a degree in college,” King snorted, as he wiped down the bolt of his rifle with a rag. “And this pussy thinks he can tell us grunts what to do with those shiny badges of his that don’t mean jack shit.”

I remained silent, merely listening to what King had to say as I drew the bore snake through my gun. Wolfe was one of the few people here I didn’t have anything against, which meant that I’d only open my mouth about him if I found myself around company like Bunny or Barnes – people who I knew could plaster my brains to the nearest tree if I got on their bad side.

“What are we talking about?” Taylor asked as he came up to sit by us on the fallen log we’d made a temporary home.

“About people King thinks are a pussy because they went to college,” I said, casting my new friend a bit of a sly grin.

King froze, and turned a betrayed look to me. “That ain’t what I said, little girl.”

“’Little girl’? Is that a demotion from ‘little lady’?” I said, the line of my mouth twitching upward.

“Someone seems to be in a better mood today,” Taylor commented, picking unenthusiastically at the contents of his MRE.

“What does that mean?” I asked him, peeling my attention from King and focusing it on my squad-mate.

Taylor smirked at me around the bite he’d taken out of his bread, his mouth too full to answer, so I turned again back to King, tucking my bore rope away as I awaited on him to explain.

He was smirking, too.

“Means that you and a certain sergeant might’ve had more fun than all us Heads combined last night,” King spoke around a white, toothy grin.

I felt stupid for not realizing sooner that they’d tease me about what had happened last night, how close and personal I’d gotten with Elias. A heat suffused my cheeks, and I swallowed a knot of anxiety in my throat.

I’d been trying to repress the memory of the doped-up, starry-eyed soldier, not because I regretted it, but because it was dangerous; to become involved with another GI was one thing, but Elias? The man who Barnes never shut up about being a pain in his ass? It was probably the worst idea since frosted tips.

“Who, Elias?” I scoffed, feigning ignorance. “Nothing happened. I was just stoned-to-fuck. That’s all that was.”

A deep, throaty chuckle resonated from King, and he said, “Honey, I ain’t never seen dope make a girl look at a man quite like that.”

My cheeks must’ve flushed brighter, and I looked down at the parts of the M-4 that I’d disassembled while we’d talked, fumbling to remove the bolt from its power group. I’d done this hundreds of times, but my nervousness from the subject was practically impairing me.

King sighed, and flopped out a hand so that I would pass over the bolt carrier.

“I’m fine,” I said, and managed to free it; he passed me a rag, however, which I accepted, hoping he didn’t notice how my fingers trembled slightly around its fabric. “Elias is… nice, I guess, but I’d rather not end up with a court-martial.”

King shrugged, nodding as he loaded a magazine into his rifle. “Fair dues, but I still think you’re spewin’ horse-shit. Reminds me, that O’Neill keeps goin’ ‘round sayin’ he fucked ya back at base.”

My lip curled into a bit of a disgusted line, though I focused mainly on wiping the carbon from my bolt.

“’Course I knew that was also a load of horse-shit. So does everyone in the platoon, so I think you’re safe there, lil’ lady. I also don’t think he realizes that if that were true, you could court-martial his ass six ways to Sunday.”   

That finally stirred the faint remnants of laughter from my chest, my lip curling upwards again. As crude as King was, he always seemed to lighten every mood.

“How ‘bout you, Taylor? Got any tail back at base?” King directed his attention to the man across from me, and I was relieved to have the conversation shifted from Elias. But I was only half-present as I listened to them talk. The other half of my mind was back in the Underworld, remembering how warm Elias’ touch had felt against me, even through the fabric of my uniform, and how every molecule of my being had seemed to communicate that I wanted to taste him, devour him. 

I considered myself to be a fairly logical person, and even I couldn’t lie to myself that I had developed an attraction to the blue-eyed sergeant. I wiped away at the carbon of the bolt a little more absently, for my thoughts were now carrying me through dangerous yet thrilling fantasies, and I hadn’t noticed that the faintest of smiles had graced my lips as I became lost in my own reverie.

“Ryder!” It was the unmistakable shout of Barnes, and my smile dissipated as I snapped myself to attention.

The way the sergeant strode toward me, I thought for a moment that he might actually kill me.

“Can you clean that gun any fuckin’ faster? There ain’t no loitering on my watch,” Barnes said to me, eyes shooting icy sparks.

“Yes, sir,” I murmured. “I’m sorry, sir.”

The sergeant grabbed the bolt from my hands, and jammed it back into the carrier, along with the firing and cam pins. He did so with frightening speed, knowing where every piece went by heart without so much as breaking my gaze, and within a mere moment, the gun was reassembled, loaded with a mag he’d snatched from my rucksack, and held in front of him as he nodded me off the log.

“I’d like to speak with you. Let’s go, Ryder.”

I swallowed my rapidly-rebuilding anxiety, and cast a glance to King and Taylor as I stood from the log. Sympathy glimmered in their eyes, but not even they dared say shit to Barnes.

Barnes led me maybe twenty or so yards from camp, just out of eyesight, and with each step we took against the forest floor, my heart beat a little quicker in my chest. I was unarmed; he still held my gun, his own slung over his shoulder, and he was taking me somewhere private. Nothing about this situation seemed to add up in my favour.

When he stopped, turning to face me, I nearly jumped back, but stopped myself, digging the toes of my boots into the earth.

The click of a safety snapped through the otherwise silent air, and I was staring down the barrel of my own issued M-4.

In the past twenty-four hours, I’d had two of my sergeants aim a gun at me. Only one of them, however, I feared might actually pull the trigger.

“Do you know why I needed to talk to you?” Barnes asked, lips tugging at the map of scar tissue that sullied the right half of his face.

“No, sir,” I said quickly, obediently.

Cold, blue eyes narrowed slightly, as if he wasn’t convinced, but he lowered the rifle, and continued to speak, “Rumours been goin’ ‘round about you fuckin’ around with one of the sergeants.”

Ice flooded my veins, imbued perhaps by that stare that bored so intensely into mine.

I waited a moment for him to continue, to elaborate on the situation, but it was clear he was awaiting my turn to speak, so I said, “If this is about O’Neill, sir, nothing happened.”

Barnes snorted, and said, “I ain’t gotta be a goddamn rocket scientist to figure that one ain’t true. Fucker’s got a mouth on him bigger than that dense skull o’ his. I’m talkin’ ‘bout Elias.”

And the breath was stolen from my lungs, a weight dropping on them like a building. I swallowed back that anxiety, and rushed to defend myself, “That’s not true either, sir. I – “

“I don’t fuckin’ care if you fucked him or not, Ryder. That ain’t where my concern lies. You want to be a fucking whore ‘round here, that’s your choice. Let military justice have its way with you. What I don’t want is you jeopardizin’ any o’ my soldiers, ya hear? Elias is bad fuckin’ news, Ryder. He’s a goddamn crusader, thinks he’s Jesus fuckin’ Christ or somethin’. I’ve seen the way he gets in peoples’ heads, had good men die ‘cause of it. As your superior, it’s my job to make sure you keep your head in the game, that you understand who’s really in charge ‘round here, that you don’t end up as a statistic in a goddamn casualty report, ‘cause out here, reality is, you can’t let your judgment get all clouded by hippie talk, now.”

Barnes took another virulent step towards me, but I stood my ground, despite every fiber of my being screaming at me to make distance, tugging at each muscle and tendon and begging to show weakness.

“I am reality,” Barnes growled at me, my gun turned now to the sky, but still no less threatening. “And I’m tellin’ you that if you don’t get your shit together, Ryder, and focus on your goddamn mission, reality’s gonna eat you alive and shit you out.

“I know you snuck off with them potheads. Sal saw you and the rich kid leavin’ the bunks last night. And I know what Elias and them get up to. Now, I’m gonna ask you this one time, Ryder: do you wanna end up dead, or do you wanna be a goddamn soldier?”

I couldn’t hide the way my jaw trembled now, the way I stared up at him with eyes widened by terror. I was certain he could hear my heart slamming against my ribcage, could smell the fear that radiated from me, the sweat that had gathered thick beneath my uniform.

“I’m a soldier,” I uttered past the fifty-tons of ice in my throat.

“Wise choice,” he said, and shoved my gun back into my hands with such an aggression that nearly sent me stumbling over. My fingers grasped frantically for a proper hold on the weapon.

“And I’m warnin’ you,” he said, leaning closer, so close that I could actually smell the tincture of beer on his breath. “Stay away from Elias.”

I nodded, and breathed, “Yes, sir.”

But when he’d left, and I was standing there, paralyzed, amid the softly-fluttering leaves and the low, mournful howl of the wind through the trees, I could only breathe; I couldn’t walk, run, or even hold my weapon right. It fell limp at my side, my still-trembling fingers curled around its hand-guard.

This was exactly what I had been afraid of, why I had allowed myself to become one of Barnes’ goons, why I had so adamantly kept my distance from the sergeant of Two Alpha, despite a yearning, a human part of me that sought a bond. I couldn’t be human in this place; I had to be a soldier, like Barnes said. Nothing more, and certainly nothing less, because my survival depended on it. This wasn’t war anymore; there was no honour in what I was doing, in the men and women and children I was killing. My only objective was to survive. I should’ve known that from the very start.

And I knew now why my father never told me about the things he saw on the battlefield, why he never talked about his years in service. Why he never, ever once said that I should follow in his footsteps, suggested that I serve my country.

Would he have looked at me now, and pitied me? Or would he have been ashamed of me?

Moisture was gathering in my eyes, and I blinked it away, blinking against a blurred canvas of greenery, blinking against the sight of a figure emerging from its labyrinth.

For a moment, I thought it might’ve been Barnes, coming back to yell at me to make myself busy, or perhaps to put a bullet through my skull.

But instead, it was the last person I wanted to see, and the only person I wanted to see. Elias.

My paralysis broke so that I could hastily wipe my tears on the sleeve of my uniform, and hoist my gun back into a ready-position.

Bright blue eyes met mine with a smile, and he said, “Hey, sweetheart. King told me you wanted to talk to me ‘bout somethin’?”

Of course. Leave it to King to try and play Cupid in times of war. I scoffed, and shook my head, eyes travelling to the forest floor so he wouldn’t see that I’d been on the verge of crying.

“No, King’s just being King,” I said, and began to turn my shoulder. “I’m just about to uh… go give my uniform a wash. Went through some poison ivy, I think.”

“Well, uh… I don’t mean to sound bold, but I could give you a hand with that…” Elias said, and I swallowed, a slight glimmer of desire emerging in the pit of my twisting stomach.

“I mean…” he said. “… Poison ivy’s a bitch, and I know how to deal with it. I could help ya out. Cherry went through some on our last deployment.”

“I’d just like some privacy,” I told him, still refusing to look at him, even though I could see his shoulder and those wild, tawny locks emerging in my peripheral. Something inside me broke when I uttered those words; that desire in my stomach fizzled out, because I had dropped the rubble of my heart on it, despite every instinct in my body, despite the human part of me that wanted to tell him that I never went through any poison ivy, but that I still wanted him to come with me, to comfort my soul in this lonely forest and maybe even…

I halted that thought in its tracks. I couldn’t let myself fantasize anymore about the blue-eyed soldier.

I heard him falter slightly in his stride, likely out of shock at the coldness of my tone, but only for a moment; boots landed softly again against the bed of leaves and twigs, catching up with me.

“Everythin’ all right, sweetheart?” he asked, tone softening. I didn’t like it; he was too human, too kind. It only made it harder for me to say what I needed to next.

At last, I spun on my heel, and I stared at those bright, blue eyes from a layer of ice that might’ve rivalled Barnes, melting slightly at the edges, forming unshed tears that I hoped to God didn’t spill.

“Elias,” I hissed. “I need you to leave me alone. I need to focus on the mission, on being a soldier.” My voice was coming out shaky, weak. I didn’t want to admit to him that I was afraid of Barnes, even though he already knew it. I didn’t want it to be spoken, didn’t want my weakness to become reality.

Hurt passed only briefly through the pretty blues of his eyes, and something pierced my heart, so I looked away again.  

“I can’t do that with you around,” I breathed, and swallowed back the virulent tide that rose to my throat.

“Sweetheart – “

“Don’t call me that,” I cut him off, because that was a dangerous word – dangerously saccharine, dangerously tempting. I couldn’t be cold to someone so invitingly warm, couldn’t be a monster to someone so refreshingly human.

So I turned again, shouldering my way through a cluster of tightly-woven branches. Some scraped against my cheeks, splitting the flesh and leaving metallic beads against their bark. But the sting was nothing in comparison to the agony that raged in my soul.

#fanfiction #elias grodin #platoon #platoon 1986 #my writing #sgt. elias #oc: alexis #there's smut in this story i'm just not saying where because spoilers but you've been warned #mdni #heroes

[red-riding-wood]

Heroes - Chapter 5

Chpt. 1 , Masterlist , Chpt. 6

Pairing: Sgt. Elias Grodin x Female OC (Alexis Ryder)

Fandoms: Platoon (1986), Cherry (2021)

WARNINGS: I'm just going to put down a blanket for the entire book/all chapters: graphic depictions of violence and gore, torture, explicit sexual content, attempted sexual assault, language, marijuana use

The Two Bravo barracks reeked of cigarette smoke and buzzed with faint activity late into the night. Taylor and I kept exchanging glances, wondering when we’d get the chance to escape and sneak into the fabled Underworld. But as usual, Barnes’ men had claimed me for the evening; I’d been roped into watching a poker game, which took place over several ammo crates, and relied on blood-speckled cards that might’ve come from a dead man’s pocket for all I knew.

O’Neill’s arm was slung across my shoulder, and he’d jostle me every time he got good cards. Barnes, with his unflinching expression of steel, watched observantly from his cold gaze, silently made note of every time he did this, smoked a drag of his cigarette every time he pulled a flush and blew it nonchalantly in my face.  

“Fucking dammit!” O’Neill cussed, speaking around the cigarette that hung loosely from chapped lips. “You see that, Sweet Cheeks? I’m gettin’ raped here.”

My eyes were burning from the smoke, and my attention wasn’t really on his cards, so it took me a moment to register what they were, and I nodded to him with an absent hum of agreement.

Lieutenant Wolfe came around by my shoulder, and took a seat at the makeshift poker table. He’d been doing his rounds, checking in on all of his soldiers, being met by belligerent huffs and snorts. Since being in the army, I’d learned that the higher-ups weren’t very kindly-regarded; there was a clear discrimination between him and us, and every soldier in this room made sure he knew about it.

“Everyone doing alright here?” he asked us.

“Never been better,” Barnes mumbled around his cigarette. It’d been the first time I’d heard him speak in twenty minutes. “Haven’t even had to start cheatin’ yet.”

“That’s great,” Wolfe said, eyes sweeping across the poker game with a bit of a forced, awkward smile. Then, dreadfully, those eyes landed on me, and he asked, “How about you, Ryder? You doing well?”

Though I would’ve normally appreciated his concern, it was as unwanted as Elias’, and I stiffened under O’Neill’s arm.

Barnes’ gaze fixed on me, the frigidness burning two, icy holes through my face as his cards stilled in his hands.

“I’m doing great,” I told him, mimicking his forced, awkward smile, only hoping that mine was more convincing.

Barnes’ gaze never left me, nor did it shift in its intensity, but it did worm its way beneath my flesh, the hairs on the nape of my neck prickling.

Wolfe held my gaze for a moment or so, and then nodded. I wasn’t sure if he’d believed me, wasn’t sure which was worse – that he had, and he thought everything really was alright, that I was content assimilating with humanity’s rejects, or that he hadn’t, which meant that Barnes hadn’t, either.

After the lieutenant had left, and I went back to pretending to pay attention to O’Neill’s cards, I couldn’t seem to escape that icy glare.  

---                                                              

“Psst, Ryder,” someone whispered, and nudged me from my dreamless sleep.

I rubbed my eyes, and rolled my shoulder around on my bunk to face Taylor, who was prodding my arm gently.

“I think it’s safe to head out now,” he told me, coffee eyes bright in the low-light of the barracks.

I’d forgotten about the Underworld, had ended up passing out on my bunk out of fatigue when the card game had disassembled. I glanced around, at the sleeping, snoring men, and nodded to him.

I got dressed into my fatigues, though I left my equipment behind, and I followed Taylor through the darkened alleys, the crumbling buildings, past the few soldiers that mulled about on night watch or sneaking off to whorehouses. I expected those on watch to chastise us, or perhaps radio an NCO, but they merely looked the other direction.

Though Cherry had later given us rough directions, it was fairly easy to find the Underworld; the low rumble of a bass guitar played the distinct riff of White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane, and the windows to a small, abandoned building were illuminated by the soft luster of candlelight and Christmas LEDs.

My hands peeled aside the strings of hippie beads that hung from the entrance, and they swallowed me as I entered, the music growing louder. One of them caught on the long, wavy strands of hair that I’d let tumble loose over my shoulders, and I glanced nervously at Taylor, who helped me untangle them.

Sure enough, lit candles were on almost every surface in the building, and Christmas lights were strung haphazardly along its derelict walls. Again, ammo crates were being used as furnishings, and scattered across them were empty bottles of beer, packs of cigarettes, and little tins of biscuits, chocolates, and other treats. It was like stepping back into western civilization, and I couldn’t help but feel an ease settle over me as I took in the sight. Even the earthy scent of pot was far fresher than the nicotine back at the Two Bravo barracks.

“This is something else,” Taylor murmured beside me, and I nodded in agreement.

I recognized many faces here, though they were mainly men from Elias’ squad. Cherry, King, Lerner, Crawford, Francis, Big Harold, and Rhah were all here from Two Alpha, but I did notice a couple of Warren’s men from Delta, and Manny, who was from Two Bravo.

Everyone was smiling, or staring dopey-eyed up at the ceiling or the flames that darted hypnotically from the candles. As Taylor and I approached, Cherry passed a bong along to Crawford and jumped up from the floor, where he’d been sitting cross-legged between him and Lerner. The translator cradled a guitar in his lap and plucked absently at the strings, too high to play and chatter with his companions at once.

“You guys made it,” Cherry said, grinning at us and tugging at our uniforms to bring us further into the epicenter of the debauchery. “Ryder, I don’t know if you’ve met King – “

“How do you do, little lady,” King, one of the tall, black men called out to me, his own grin stretching his lips wide and his eyes soft, glazed with bliss. “We placed bets on if you and Taylor would show. Guess I’m out twenty bucks.”

Rhah, who was sitting on one of the few actual chairs in this place, and sort of half-consciously stroking the nude statue of the Virgin Mary, pulled a couple notes from his pocket and shoved them in King’s face.

King snatched the notes from his grasp with a toothy grin and shoved them in the hem of his khakis before darting his attention back to me. “Hey, new girl,” he said, and held a bong up to my lips. “Take a hit of this.”

I swallowed anxiously, for I’d never used marijuana, but lowered my mouth to the glass rim, which was hot against my lips. King lit the other end of it, and I flinched as the clear liquid in the bowl bubbled. Smoke poured rapidly onto my tongue, but I took as big of a breath as I could, my lungs burning, but the sensation was leagues above being water-boarded, or even inhaling the nicotine back at the barracks.

Still, that didn’t stop me from choking, withdrawing from the bong as the small half-circle of men erupted into a fit of giggles and hearty laughs.

Taylor was next, who reacted no better than I did, new to this as well from the way he squinted his eyes uncomfortably against the dope smog and handled the bong as if he might shatter it.

“Hey, ‘Lias!” King called over his shoulder. “You gonna join the party, or what?”

But I wasn’t really paying attention to King anymore, and it took me a few good moments to realize who he was talking to. I was too fixated on the way my flesh seemed to tingle, how the pain had ebbed from the burn along my arm, how heavy my limbs weighed, how the music had seemed to grow louder, clearer, reverberating through the marrow of my bones, how every synapse in my brain fired with the stimulation of the lights that blurred in lurid colours around me, how the dry heat and the sweat that clung to my skin felt strangely fine now; I felt good – like, really good. The worries of Barnes, of my mortality, of the duality of my soul all just melted away, the edges of my mind softening.

I swallowed, tonguing at a dry mouth, and slowly turned my head now to notice the empty, still-gently swinging hammock in the back and the man who approached me now.

Bare-chested and adorned with various accoutrements – a brass bracelet was clasped around his wrist, and a beaded rosary hung an ajar crucifix alongside dog tags that seemed to gleam with a silvery luster now –, Elias stepped leisurely towards me, a lazy grin spreading across strangely-beautiful features as he wedged a joint between his teeth and stared down at me with those glazed eyes that were now more black than blue, pupils dilated-to-fuck and reflecting the Christmas lights like stars in an ebony sky. He stared at me as if I were some kind of angel, like I’d just fallen from Heaven rather than stepped from the fiery gates of Hell.

I snaked a tongue between my lips, enraptured by those eyes, enchanted by them and the subtle movements of his sharp jaw against the joint, the threads of tawny-brown hair that fell in their usual mess over his headband and attached to the sheen of sweat along his forehead.

I wasn’t sure if it was the dope, but I couldn’t help but find myself mirroring his smile, if only slightly.

Removing the joint from his teeth, Elias reached for something that leaned against the pillar beside him, and within a moment or two, I was staring down the dark barrel of a Mossberg shotgun.

I pushed my tongue against the surface of my mouth again, finding it difficult to swallow, and my gaze dragged from the barrel back to those pretty, sparkling eyes. Even with a shotgun in my face, I found myself trying to count the freckles on the light tan of his skin.

“Put your mouth on this,” he said, grinning again around his joint, mischievously this time, and a heat swept across my cheeks, burning against the tingle of my flesh.

Elias flipped the joint around so that the ember rested along his tongue, and I stared in amazement as he lowered the other end to the ejection port.

With the dope thick in my bloodstream, and the colourful lights giving such an otherworldly visage to the building around me, and those blue-black eyes glittering like galaxies, I would’ve done anything this man told me to do in that moment, no matter how many military regulations it broke or how dangerous it was or even if Barnes was watching.

So, still in a trance, I lowered my lips to the barrel of the shotgun – shockingly cold in comparison to the bong – and sucked in a gout of the dope and the metallic, sooty taste of gunpowder and metal, my eyes never leaving those starry night skies.

I coughed again, but the burning in my lungs was barely present this time, and the action was more instinctual than anything. I exhaled, and my lips pulled over my teeth in a smile, and Elias lowered the shotgun back to the pillar with a throaty chuckle.

Several cat-calls sounded around us as the resonating, psychedelic notes of Jefferson Airplane tapered off, and CCR replaced it.

“Hey, girlie, I got somethin’ else you can put your mouth on,” King said to me, watching us from his spot in the semi-circle. “Unless you’re too busy gazin’ into Elias’ eyes.”

I found myself laughing, though I didn’t really know why. The second hit was hitting me harder than the last, and my flesh was buzzing with a sort of electricity now, and everything was prettier. Sharper, and blurrier, at the same time, but fucking beautiful.

“Fuck off, asshole,” Elias said to King, jostling his shoulder, though he spoke the words with a grin and a glitter in his eye. I’d never heard anyone utter those three words so affectionately.

King smirked at him and flashed a wink at me before he turned back around to take another hit from one of the bongs.

And then Elias’ arm was around my shoulders, warm and heavy, but stirred a sensation in my gut that made me feel light, airy, as if I might levitate out of this place like an actual angel. It was exciting, but comforting – far more pleasant than O’Neill’s touch had been.

And that, at least, I was certain wasn’t just from the weed.

“Dance with me, sweetheart,” Elias murmured into my ear, his breath smelling of weed and hops, and burning a special kind of hot as it pooled at the base of my neck.

His hand was trailing down my back, thumb running along each disc of my spine through the thin fabric of my shirt, and in that moment, I might’ve considered taking it off were there not another ten or so men around me.

“Roger that, sir,” I said, a playful nature to my tone that surprised me. I wasn’t speaking. I wasn’t me. Tonight, I was just being.

My brain was too foggy to really piece anything of substance together. My thoughts, if recited back to me on another day, might have sounded nonsensical and ridiculous and existential. But tonight, they were clarity in a city of chaos and ruin.

And the Underworld, it was a hideaway.

And Elias, he was –

Well, I didn’t really know. He was just damn perfect. And I hadn’t realized it until now.

I was swaying – or perhaps gyrating, or maybe just moving around like a damn fool, to “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” and “The Tracks of My Tears”, and Elias’ thumb was running along my tailbone now beneath the hem of my khakis, and I thought Cherry’s arm was around my shoulder now, because everyone was standing up and dancing to the music. My head spun, but in the good way, and when the song switched to something mellower – “Okie from Muskogee” –, I practically fell against Elias, who lowered me to sit beside him on the floor.

We completed the circle of men, but only barely, because I was clinging to him, my knees folded up beneath me and leaning against his, and my arm was draped over his shoulder-blade.

Taylor passed me another hit, and King started telling us the story of some chick he’d fucked during R&R – in extremely graphic detail – and some of the guys egged him on, while a couple made gagging noises. But he carried on, and I laughed, louder than I had in God knew how long, the notes stirring from the depths of my diaphragm and mingling with the baritones of the men in a way that was almost saccharine.

After a couple more raunchy stories from the soldiers, I began to lose interest in their words and began to shift it back towards the bare-chested man beside me. My eyes, half-lidded with tiredness, caught on a bead of sweat cradled by his collarbone, and for whatever reason, I was once again transfixed; I wanted to lick it off, run my tongue along his flesh to see if it was as soft as it looked, and that thought made me giggle, drawing Elias’ attention.

“What is it, sweetheart?” He asked me, though the words had barely passed from his lips when his gaze snared on mine, and his jaw fell a little slack, his pupils distending and his eyes taking on a kind of hunger.

I bit my lip, to suppress my odd whim, and smiled at him.

And he smiled back.

“I like when you call me that,” I told him. Weed apparently made me honest and blunt.

Elias drew his hand up to rest on my thigh, and I bit my lip again, a jolt of arousal running through my body, heightened by the influence of the weed.

“You sure, sweetheart?” He teased. “You seemed pretty hard-up that I call you Ryder.”

I vaguely recalled correcting him weeks ago, but Past-Me was stupid. “Sweetheart” sounded so much better.

My smile broadened, and I said, “I’m positive.”

A hoot sounded from across the circle, and my attention was drawn to Crawford, who had been in the middle of telling his story when he’d seemed to notice the two of us.

“Unless you two are gonna fuck or something, shut up and let me tell my story,” he slurred, a beer in his hand and a grin plastered stupidly – no, wonderfully – on his face.

“Now that’s something I reckon I’d win a bet in,” Rhah said, sunken down from his chair and slouched against its wooden frame as he still absently stroked his Virgin Mary statue, thumb circling her breasts. The room was filled with more testosterone than dope, and was just as horny as it was high at the moment, but I didn’t mind that. It was human, and that was oddly liberating.

“I ain’t bettin’ against that,” King scoffed.

Elias shook his head, but still grinned, and those blue-black eyes wandered down to my face again. I tilted my head to meet his gaze.        

“Would you?” he said to me, voice so low that I doubted anyone could hear it over the music.

I blinked, my brain feeling fuzzy. Everything felt fuzzy – but that wasn’t a bad thing.

“What are we betting on?” I asked.

He was silent for what I was certain was only a moment, but felt like an eternity. In that eternity, I got to know him, the way the left point of his mouth curved downward more than the other, the way his eyebrows formed expressive little ridges on his face, like Van Gogh’s strokes on The Starry Night.

A twinge of a smirk played with the point of his lip, and he said, “Nothin’, sweetheart.” Casting his gaze back to the Californian, he said, “Finish your damn story, Crawford.”

And he did, and I forgot what it was we’d been talking about, but before I knew it, I was back to laughing, and somehow, spending the night in the Underworld was more refreshing than sleep would’ve been back in my bunk. And my heart, it didn’t feel so heavy. And my fear, and my shame, and my self-criticism, all of them were demons of the past and the future, but not the present. Not that night.

#fanfiction #elias grodin #platoon #platoon 1986 #my writing #oc: alexis #sgt. elias #there's smut in this story i'm just not saying where because spoilers but you've been warned #heroes

[red-riding-wood]

Heroes - Chapter 9

Chpt. 1 , Masterlist , Chpt. 10

Pairing: Sgt. Elias Grodin x Female OC (Alexis Ryder)

Fandoms: Platoon (1986), Cherry (2021)

WARNINGS: I'm just going to put down a blanket for the entire book/all chapters: graphic depictions of violence and gore, torture, explicit sexual content, attempted sexual assault, language, marijuana use

Another day was coming to an end, the sun just beginning to dip below the horizon of the highest peaks, dappling the leaves of the deciduous trees and brushing the sky with a tincture of pastel pink. I allowed myself to sit and watch the sky slowly morph into an impressionistic painting, watching as the clouds drifted lazily by, noticing how a gossamer fog crept from the recesses of the valleys below.

Elias had taught me to become more in tune with the world around me – the colours, the scents, the sounds. I could detect the trace of wildflowers, the perfume-like odour that I associated with the blue-eyed soldier, and every time my song came to its end, I took a moment to listen to the creaks of the boughs as the wind stirred the trees, or the lullaby of the birds that were lamenting their final song to the daylight before it died.

But Elias wasn’t here with me, because he was out on patrol with his squad. Taylor hadn’t been in the chatting mood, either, had been a recluse for much of the day. Though I wasn’t permitted to stray far from the village, I had wanted to distance myself as much as I could from the rest of the soldiers – namely Two Bravo.

But with the incipience of dusk, it was time I made my way back down. Elias would be expected back soon, too, so maybe I could wait for him in his hammock, start reading that book of Taylor’s.

As I approached the village, I slipped my headphones down and let them hook around my neck, stuffing my iPod in the pocket of my khakis. Immediately, I was assaulted by a cacophony of shrill, feminine cries and the deeper, more tenebrous notes of male laughter and hollering. An eerie contrast to the serenity I had just come from.

With a knot pulling taut in my gut, I made my way through the village to the source of the sound. I should’ve ignored it, walked away, went back to Elias’ hammock and curled up with the book and put my music on full blast to drown out the helpless wails. But if I had, that knot would’ve twisted, culminated, and the reflection of the killer I’d seen in that cracked, bloodied mirror would’ve haunted me.

Behind one of the huts, in the thicket of trees and brush, were Bunny, Junior, and a couple of Warren’s men. They had three little girls – Afghan, former prisoners of the Taliban, barely past the age of ten, by the looks of them – and were yanking them by their bony arms and tearing the fabric from their impotent forms. Bunny threw one against the gnarled trunk of a tree and began undoing his fly. The little girl’s screams pierced the air like a knife, slicing straight through my chest and stopping my heart.

I should’ve turned the other way, made out of there before they saw me, acted like I hadn’t just witnessed the members of my platoon attempting to rape children.

But “Heroes” still played faintly from the headphones around my neck, and the image of the woman in the mirror still flashed in my mind, and memories of Bunny nearly doing the same to me, of Elias barging in and having to save me because I had been willing to just put up with it, inundated me like a suffocating tide, and I knew that I couldn’t walk away. Not this time. I was done putting up with shit, was done letting my humanity chip away until all that was left was that woman in the mirror.

“Hey!” I mustered as much ire, as much valour as I could and I forced it into my tone. It was enough to make Bunny hesitate where he fumbled with his fly and snap his head towards me. It was enough to make Junior let his hand slip from one of the girls’ mouths and still. It was enough to lull the wailing of the children into quiet whimpers.

“Get the hell away from them!” I shouted, because if I let my volume drop I feared my voice might waver like the hands that trembled at my sides. “What the fuck is wrong with you? These are fucking children!”

An awful smile carved itself into Bunny’s features, and he kicked at the girl by the tree, doubling her over and silencing her crying. I started forward, but something about the way his eyes glinted and his lips curled so gleefully over his buck-teeth stopped me in my tracks, my flesh prickling and my stomach churning.

“You wanna take their place, Sugar Tits?” He asked me, sauntering forward.

I glared at him, and hissed, “Nobody’s raping anyone, unless you want a court-martial when we get back to base.”

“Aw, lookie here, boys,” Bunny chuckled, swinging his head around to regard the men around him before settling that disconcertingly-giddy gaze back on me. “Sugar Tits is threatening to tattle on me ‘cause she knows she ain’t no danger to me. Elias ain’t ‘round this time to rescue her.” Another laugh, and then, “This is real cute, but you’re barkin’ up the wrong tree.”

I wasn’t sure if Bunny knew what that expression meant, but I knew what he meant by it, at least, from the way he stalked forward, closed the distance between us until he was near enough that he could’ve reached out and tore another button from my shirt.

A rustling sounded from the bushes to my left, and Taylor emerged, hazel eyes wild and his rifle gripped firmly between whitened fingertips. “I heard yelling,” he said to me, and darted his gaze to Bunny, and the girls and the men. Horror blanketed his face like he’d just seen a ghost.

“Don’t worry, Taylor. You showed up just in time to get your dick wet,” Bunny cooed, and flashed him a toothy grin. “This generous lil’ girl is about to volunteer those pretty tits o’hers.” His eyes were on me again, glinting with something in-between madness and evil.

I swallowed, but held my ground, and said to Bunny, “You’re not touching me. And you’re letting those girls go. Now.”

Bunny stepped even closer, so close now that I could smell his foul breath as it raked across my face. “What’cha gonna do? You gonna scream, like a lil’ girl? Maybe I like it when they do.”

My lip pulled in disgust over my teeth, and in a flash, Bunny’s hand was reaching for the buttons on my shirt again, but as the movement flashed in my vision, I curled my fingers into a fist and sent it straight for those buck-teeth of his.

“Son of a bitch!” he screeched, staggering back as he pawed like a wounded animal at the blood that cascaded from his mouth, and his helmet, already unclasped and ajar, tumbled to the forest floor.

When those glinting eyes met mine, they were filled with nothing but murder.

He sprang towards me just like a jackrabbit and knocked the wind from my lungs, his scrawny form surprisingly heavy as it sent me careening to the ground. My spine knocked against some sharply-pointed rocks – my rifle had been jostled from my shoulder and had landed somewhere to the side – and I gasped, but fingers slick with warm blood were around my throat now, and the substance was landing in splatters across my cheeks, my lips, my lashes. I blinked furiously against the red, and kicked at him, tried to grab hold of something, but I was half-blind.

Oxygen poured like a vicious yet welcome tide into my lungs as his weight was knocked from me, and as I regained my footing, swiping the blood from my eye, I glimpsed the butt of Taylor’s rifle striking Bunny firmly across the jaw. He shoved him back then, and pointed the bayonet of his rifle at his chest. “She’s a fucking human-being, man!” He shouted at Bunny, and I swallowed, blinking again against the red.

Bunny’s gaze darted back to me, his bloodied lip curled around the gap in his mouth, his eyes still undaunted. I grabbed my own rifle from the ground, though I held it across my chest, and I stood up straighter, squaring my shoulders. I spat some of his blood that had trickled past my teeth onto the grass and sneered at him.

“Taylor!” A thunderous voice barked, and everyone’s attention was immediately stolen by the Two Bravo sergeant.

Fear darted through Taylor’s eyes as he turned, and he lowered his gun, Adam’s apple visibly bobbing along his throat.       

“Barnes,” I said, and stepped forward. “He didn’t do anything.”

Ugly, scarred features turned to me, and cold blue eyes froze me in my tracks. They darted to the blood on my face, and realization flickered through them – whether it was a good kind of realization or an awful, calamitous kind, I wasn’t sure. But I was quickly met with my answer.

“The fuck you mean, Ryder?” He said, and forgot about the men as he stalked towards me. “You mean you started this shit?”

“I saw Bunny and these men trying to rape these girls, and – “

“You didn’t see fuckin’ shit, Ryder! You attacked my men for no fuckin’ reason! You wanna explain to me how we’re gonna win this war if I got lunatics like you tryna bring their own justice where it don’t fuckin’ belong?”         

Barnes’ voice was like thunder in comparison to Bunny’s, seeming to reverberate through the marrow of my bones, and his stature loomed well over me, shoulders blocking the light that stretched its pleading fingers through the trees. I thought that my breaths were coming as rapidly as my pounding heartbeat.

“I – “

“I know what this is all about,” Barnes snapped. “You let ‘Lias get in your fuckin’ head, you did. You, and Taylor. Fucking hippies. I told you to stay the fuck away from him, Ryder. You think you’re some kind o’ water-walker now, too?”

I trembled, but stood my ground, even as the bitter tang of alcohol and the smoke of cigarettes on his breath met my nose, and the blood roared in my ears, reaching a terrifying crescendo of which there was no return, no escape, no sanctuary.

Barnes’ eyes darted then to the headset around my neck, that was set ajar from my skirmish, and to the wire that travelled to my pocket. My heart seized.

“What the fuck are you listenin’ to, Private? Some fucking bible hymn? Give me that shit.”

He snatched the headphones from my neck, leaving my throat feeling so unnaturally exposed, and I gasped as he held the cuff to his ear. I watched as his expression soured, and recognition passed through his eyes when he heard the song, and he threw the headset to the ground.

“You think you’re some fuckin’ hero, is that it?” Spittle landed across my face as he bellowed these words to me, and I flinched. He reached for my pocket, and he was quicker than Bunny; in less than a second he had my mother’s iPod  in his hand, and he was letting it fall alongside the headphones.

“No, sir,” I spoke feverishly, my eyes darting frantically from him to the last piece I had of my mother.

But he wasn’t listening. He brought the heel of his boot down on the screen, and followed with a bullet that made me jump back.

My chest heaved. My ears still roared with blood. And my heart split in my chest.

I hadn’t realized tears had welled in my eyes, but they streaked my cheeks now; one bound itself to Bunny’s blood, and the crimson-hued bead suspended itself for a moment from my nostril only to dribble down to lips parted in a shallow, aching breath. Metal tinged my tongue, and I stepped back, my head light and my fingers seizing as I tried to wind them tight around my rifle.

Whatever bravery I had found within myself had shattered, like the mirror, like the screen of the device that lay at my feet, a little eddy of smoke winding its way through the air.

But somehow, one of its fragments managed to hiss out from my bloodied teeth with trembling tones, “Fuck you.”

And I turned and I ran, insensibly slinging the strap of my rifle over my shoulder and sprinting for the trees, for the wild terrain, for the honey-gold light that burned through the diaphanous fog and reached so sorrowfully for me.

My sweat was beginning to mix with my tears and the blood and the spittle, and the shouting behind me became distant, like gunfire echoing across a barren battlefield. And I kept running, nearly twisting my ankle over the perilous terrain, but my adrenaline and this vacuous canyon in my chest kept me going.

I barely noticed as I ran into the returning squad of Two Alpha, and I nearly swatted King’s reach away as he extended an arm to block my path.

“Whoa, easy there, little lady. Where do you think you’re…” He trailed off  as he saw my face.

“Alex?” Elias bulled through the jumble of men, and past the blurry veil of my tears, I could see the golden limn of the dying sun on his wild hair, and the way his brows knitted solicitously on the sharp yet soft features of his face, and as I pulled him into a hug and buried my face in the fabric of his uniform, I could smell the wildflowers, the earthy grime, the musky sweat, and I closed my eyes and imagined myself back on that cliff-side, or in that hammock, pressed to his body.

Elias moved my rifle to the side, sliding the strap from my shoulder and letting it fall gently to the ground before returning my embrace – but only for a moment, before his hands were peeling my head back, strands of hair clinging to my face from the blood and tears.

“What’s going on?” he demanded, blue eyes shining with worry. “What happened? Are you hurt?”

“Barnes,” I breathed, blinking away tears. The rest of the men were coming into view around me now, but I ignored their stares. “He – “ A sob seized my chest, and I let the crest of my head fall back to his chest, but as I tried again to form the words on my lips, I realized that if I did, that I might be sentencing Elias. I’d seen what he’d done – or tried to do, rather – to the man when he’d ordered me to shoot those innocents on my first day. I could only imagine the hellfire that he’d unleash upon the sergeant and Bunny if he returned to the sight I had. And the violence that would surely rival it.

“Elias,” I breathed, and tipped my head back to meet his gaze. “Take me away. Please.”

Elias stared back at me for a moment, seemingly torn, before barking out to his men, “Rhah, you take the men back down to the village.”

Without question, the men began filing down the hill through the trees. Cherry tried for a moment to linger, but I shook my head at him, mumbled that I was okay past the hair that clung to my bloodied, tear-stained lips.

Elias smoothed out the messed hair on my skull as I buried my face back in his chest and sobbed. “Where’s your music, sweetheart?” he asked me, trying to find something that would calm me.

This only widened the chasm in my chest, and I heaved a broken sob into his uniform. I was so pathetic, weeping like a child, barely able to speak. My fingers, still unnaturally stiff, clawed at the course fabric on his chest, unable to quite grasp it.

“Shhhh,” he breathed, hot breath sending a shiver through me. “Alex. Sweetheart.”

I kept sobbing into his chest. I couldn’t get a hold of myself.

“Alex,” he said, and pulled me from his warmth again, leaving me shivering in my cold sweat. But those eyes were staring down at me with nothing but affection, and the final rays of the sun were silhouetting his head again like that of an angel, and I reminded myself that I was okay now, that whatever happened, we’d get through it together.

“Come with me,” he said, and slipped his fingers through mine, filling the trembling gap finally and giving them some kind of stability. With his other hand, he carried my gun, and I followed him, up through the trees, and he took me away, just like I’d asked. Away from the fear, and the anger, and the hate.

---

The wind in the rustling leaves and the persistent hoot of an owl and the symphony of crickets were my music, the song that threaded itself so ethereally into the otherwise silent night.          

I rested my head against Elias’ shoulder, my fingers still looped through his, and the warmth of his body radiating against mine as it stabilized me. I nestled Taylor’s book against my wrist, eyes slowly tracing the words from still-slightly-blurry eyes. Shoots of grass tickled the bare flesh of my ankles where my khakis rode up from my boots, and my attention was briefly drawn from the literature as an insect crawled across Elias’ knee.

My tears had dried on my face, and when I blinked, my lashes would stick together, but there were none left to shed, and my body felt like a drained faucet, resting limply against the man that sat still and quiet beside me, his eyes trained up on the stars that glittered overhead like winking diamonds in the black sky. We were entirely sober, the last of the weed smoked last night when we’d found ourselves in a similar position, but we were still content.

At this point, the events of earlier that evening seemed like nothing more than another reflection in a dirtied, broken mirror, and I couldn’t believe I’d cried so much over them. I was at peace, in my sanctuary, and nothing – not Barnes, not Bunny – could hurt me.

“Elias?” I murmured, and slipped a finger through the pages of the book to mark where I’d left off as I shut the cover. “Do you believe that every man has two sides to him?”

Elias shot me a glance from his starry eyes, and he smiled. “What’s gotten you so philosophical, sweetheart? You hidin’ some of the good shit?”

The line of my mouth quirked into a smile, and I shook my head, and opened my book again. “Listen to this,” I said, and recited, “’I have been doomed to such a  dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two.’”

The soldier made a soft yet resonated “hmm” sound and landed his gaze back on the stars above, pondering this for a moment or two. And then, he said, “There’s a Cherokee legend that in every man exists two wolves – one evil, one kind. They’re in a constant battle.”

Once again, I found myself reminded of Barnes’ cruelty, of Elias’ kindness, and I wondered if Barnes had ever been kind, if Elias had ever been cruel. It was difficult to fathom either. When I thought of Barnes, I thought of dead bodies at my feet; I thought of children being raped. When I thought of Elias, I thought of hope, of the warm glow of the sunset, of the feeling of wind through one’s hair.

I fell silent as I ruminated, and stirred my head from its perch as Elias’ baritones reverberated beneath me, before nestling my cheek back into the crook of his neck. “You still got that letter, sweetheart?” he asked me. 

“Um… yeah,” I said, at a loss for words in my state of alarm. I shifted, and pulled the envelope and a pen from my rucksack, and handed the objects to him. “You change your mind about your family?” I asked.

“I’m gonna write to my brother,” he said, and took the pen and the envelope in his hands; he removed the contents of the latter, smoothing the paper across his knee.

A contented smile graced my lips, and though I wanted to ask about his change of heart, I said nothing, deciding instead to let him be deluged in the music of the night as his pen laid its first stroke against the paper. I settled back into place, my cheek falling against his warm shoulder, and I opened my book. I inhaled, breathing in once more the wonderful tincture of grass and earth and man, filling that chasm that had split inside my chest, and as I exhaled my sigh, with it I expelled the cruel, haunting gaze of the woman in the mirror. And the ache that dwelled beneath my ribs, I imagined to be the warring of two wolves; one, who’d let bodies fall before its depravity, and the other, who’d had the courage to sink its jaws into the harbinger of such destruction.

#fanfiction #elias grodin #platoon #platoon 1986 #writing #my writing #sgt. elias #oc: alexis #heroes #there's smut in this story I'm just not saying where because spoilers but you've been warned #mdni