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amiedala · 3 years

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SOMETHING DEEPER (a mandalorian story)

CHAPTER 1: There's Always Three Things

RATING: Explicit (18+ ONLY!!!)

WARNINGS: sexual content, hints of voyeurism

SUMMARY: HELLLOOOOOOOOOOO AND HAPPY SOMETHING DEEPER SATURDAY MY LOVES!!! this is the first chapter in Something Deeper, the

second installment in the Something More series. in this one, Nova is her established character, they're still trying to save the galaxy, and the spice is racketed up even hotter ;) more notes at the end, as always, and until then, ENJOY!!!

If you're a newcomer, my fic "Something More" is the first installment of this story! <3

AUTHOR’S NOTE: HELLO MY LOVES HAPPY SOMETHING MORE SATURDAY!!!! this chapter is quite the whirlwind, i hope you love it! more notes at the end as always <3

Novalise Djarin is absolutely certain of three things. One, that the strongest thing in this galaxy is the green alien baby she calls her son; two, that her gorgeous, commanding bounty hunter husband is an excellent leader but a fantastically horrible diplomat; and three, that she is by far the most skilled person she knows at getting out of a particularly sticky situation.

Nova is excellent at getting out of things, period—her husband would argue that she’s an expert at getting the both of them out of their clothes and Mandalorian armor, respectively—but she excels at somehow, miraculously, wriggling herself free from between a rock and a hard place. And, right now, the asteroid belt that makes up Polis Massa is the abundance of rock, and the TIE fighters right on the tail of Kicker’s infamously sporadic power is the hard place.

They’re relentless. Nova squints her eyes, making the starry backdrop of the Outer Rim split and fractal into a thousand more glittering balls of light. There’s only three of them, this time, but this is the closest they’ve ever dared to follow her to Mandalore, and there’s something dangerous and electric kicking around somewhere inside of her chest. They keep shooting, jarring bolts of blasts that do their best to try and knock down Kicker’s very stubborn shields.

“Stupid,” Nova whispers, her breath low, the ghost of a smile stretching across her face, even in the crush of space. A year ago, she wouldn’t have recognized herself—this fearless, feisty pilot, the fully-formed reconstruction of the girl she used to be. On the ground, even with the Force on her side, she’s clumsy, an amateur. But up here? This is where Novalise shines. She has the upper hand out in the stars, and, besides, even if she were being chased by an artillery of a hundred more, there’s reinforcements on her old, lovable beater of a starship.

“Surrender,” one of the mechanical, ordered voices comes over the comm, and Nova giggles to herself in the darkness.

“Does that ever work?” she asks, flipping the right switches to make Kicker drop down and over itself, sending one of the fighters careening into the nearest asteroid. It doesn’t deter whoever’s in the cockpit for long, but it’s enough to utilize her infamous barrel roll to twist up and away from the other two fighters close in tow. “You know, asking impolitely for whoever you’re chasing to surrender?”

Silence. Nova smiles again, biting her teeth down against the fullness of her bottom lip. Her stomach grumbles. It was a sleepless night and a long day she spent back on Hoth before making the short trek back home—Mandalore, which isn’t the kindest of planets to call your own but is undoubtably better than some of the other alternatives—and the broth-based soups and dried legumes that frequent the base there are not nearly as filling or delicious as the feasts that being Mandalorian royalty entail. Still nothing from the other fighters, which is perfectly fine, because she’s about to feign dropping into warp and leading through a wormhole that’ll lead nowhere but the barrenness of the Mid Rim, but usually, they’re much more demanding.

“Surrender,” comes the voice again, and Nova sighs, cracking her neck, readjusting the familiar, worn helmet still stamped with the orange Rebel insignia. Kicker beeps angrily, and she lends a soft hand to the worn metal of her beloved ship’s dashboard, coaxing the metal to just go a tiny bit further.

“I’m just saying, you might have a stroke more of luck if you’re a little bit nicer. Less demanding, more asking. Who am I surrendering to?” she asks, and even though the TIE fighters are still volleying an array of blasts at the back end of the starfighter, they’re not quick to identify themselves. Nova squints again, catching a glimpse of one of them as she swoops to avoid a larger chunk of asteroid. It was stupid to come here, she admits internally to herself, even though it makes her heart drop a tiny bit inside of her chest. All she wanted for the hours she spent on Hoth was to get back to Din, to hold Grogu against her heartbeat for as long as she could before she reluctantly had to relinquish him to the one and only Luke Skywalker, but when Wedge called, it seemed urgent. “Hello?” she whispers, only to dare the strange, affected voice on the commlink to rattle back across the stars.

“Andromeda Maluev,” the comm blurts, and the sound of her name—her birth name, still heavy and pearlescent with the weight of losing her parents—makes Nova’s heart drop even further. Everyone left in this galaxy that Nova associates with—Din Djarin, Luke Skywalker, Wedge Antilles, Bo-Katan Kryze, Boba Fett, Cara Dune, Greef Karga, and every person she met along her trip with Din through the galaxy and back—knows that Andromeda Maluev is dead, and that Novalise Djarin rose from her ashes. But every single bounty Nova’s had on her head has slammed that full weight of her first identity back into her bones, like a brand, like something she can’t escape. It makes the force of people after her—the shadowy legion of the obscured First Order, and all of their cronies—feel just a bit more insidious.

“Not my name,” she volleys back, but the brace in Nova’s voice doesn’t sound like anything dangerous, anything sharp enough scare them off. “I’ve ran into enough of you by now for you to get it right.”

“We’ve got you surrounded. Surrender or be killed.”

Nova snorts. There’s three fighters on her tail, and they’re nowhere close to surrounding her. It’s so ludicrous, so unexpected, that the laugh catapults out of her mouth and echoes in the small hull of Kicker. She wishes Din and Grogu were here to equally share in her utter disbelief—she can practically see the helmet cocking and the baby’s giant, intuitive eyes crinkling—but she dodges another set of shots, which are almost completely aimless and hardly land on the tail end of the ship. “Be killed?” she repeats, swerving and ducking through another large chunk of asteroid, seamlessly, barely paying any attention to the terrain around her. She doesn’t need to. Even in a field this littered, space is Nova’s strongest suit. She could do this with her eyes closed. “As far as I can see, you’ve landed what, three shots? I don’t think you’ll be getting anywhere near close enough to even do damage to my ship. You’re three fighters strong, and one of you has a wounded wing. And you still haven’t answered my question.”

“The First Order demands your services.”

Nova’s blood runs ice-cold. It’s a familiar request at this point, but still, the name sends a very real shiver all the way down her spine, rocking and rattling her vertebrae. She swallows, blinking furiously, avoiding the tailspin of a smaller asteroid as she lurches out of the chase. That wasn’t the lowly voice of some sorry stormtrooper that got the shitty job of trying to wrangle her out of the skies. It sounds evil. Dark. Mirthless. It wasn’t Moff Gideon’s voice, but it was something close to the memory of the dark timbre of it. Fear forms wet and cold on the back of her neck, curling up through the bottom of her hairline, seeping underneath the warmth of her standard, Rebel-orange jumpsuit. She swallows, but the air feels like it’s evaporating out of her mouth.

“The First Order,” she manages, finally, trying to detach the nervousness from her voice, “will not be getting my services. Not now, not ever.”

It’s only been two weeks since Din’s coronation. Two hectic, packed weeks in which her big, brave bounty hunter boyfriend got forcibly turned into a very reluctant diplomat under the watchful—and perhaps slightly resentful—eye of Bo-Katan Kryze. Din never seemed to really need sleep the way a normal human being did, but Nova watched as the bags under his eyes darkened and grew as he spent long hours in the war rooms, buried somewhere in the giant, stark palace they’d moved into, eyelids pressed into the warm hollow of her neck in the early hours of the morning when he made it to bed at all. In the meantime, Nova was spending every single precious second of her waking hours with Grogu, who she knows is on the verge of needing to go back to Jedi training, trying to absorb as much of his small, green light as she possibly can. When Wedge called the other day, though, he sounded desperate, which didn’t happen often, and she had wrenched herself away from her family on Mandalore to try and stop the impending doom of the First Order on Hoth, but it had been yet another dead end. Polis Massa was a pit stop—an impulsive, foolish one—because Nova ran furiously out of the library archives the last time she was here, and she wanted to pick up books on the history of Mandalore for Din and herself, and a small star of yearning in her chest was to spend a little more time in the shelves like her father used to before the Empire killed him.

And as much as Nova wants to put Andromeda Maluev to rest, longing for the days when she was tiny and growing up on Yavin with her parents alive and happy beside her outweighs the alternative. She swallows through the lump in her throat and closes her eyes to shake the starshine of her past lives away. The time to focus on getting the hell out of here is now, all yearning and ache can blossom fully formed when she’s away from the reaches of the First Order, safely back on Mandalore.

“Surrender,” the voice says again, only this time it is the timbre of some sorry stormtrooper and not the one that still haunts her nightmares, and Nova sighs, flipping all of the switches on Kicker’s dashboard to feint left and fake drop into hyperspace.

“I’ll ask you again. When,” she exhales, straightening up in the pilot’s chair, “has that line ever worked?”

“We are granted permission to obliterate your starfighter under Order Number—”

“Obliterate?” Nova interrupts, stifling another giggle. “Is the Order giving you vocabulary lessons? I’m impressed, trooper—”

“Andromeda Maluev,” the voice comes again, and Nova tries her absolute hardest to ignore the pulsing and aching in her heart that comes with the punch of her previous identity, “you are to surrender to the First Order. Failure to comply will result in termination. This is your final warning.”

Nova sighs, pulling Kicker to a temporary halt. If she stares, the ghostly outline of Mandalore, embedded forever in her memory, will flash in front of her vision, even out here in Polis Massa’s gigantic asteroid belt. She knows that the troopers, whoever they are, whoever they’re working for, will understand that she’s intending to go straight back to the strange palace she’s started calling home, but she also knows that any force in this galaxy, no matter how dark, no matter how strong, is smart enough to know they can’t take on a planet full of Mandalorian warriors without all the strength they’ve got. From the way Kicker is paused in the middle of space, she knows it looks like she’s about to surrender, or at least like she’s weighing her options heavily, and the satisfied, smug silence of the trooper on the other end of the commlink is enough to assure herself that her plan—hasty and rash as it may be—is working.

“Okay,” she whispers, feigning resignation, into the comm. “I understand I’m dealing with forces a lot stronger than I am. I don’t surrender, but I’ll come with you. But first,” she whispers, silencing the clicking that the switches to go into hyperdrive with the muffler of her right hand, “I need to tell you something.”

There’s a pause. “So be it. Reeling you in via tractor beam now.”

The unmistakable whirring of a ship forcibly being dragged onto another’s power starts up, and Nova swallows, pushing the second to last toggle into place, keeping a steady eye on the rocketing meter on her dashboard that indicates the ship is fully charged. Under the noise of Kicker being pulled into the largest TIE fighter’s proximity, the beeping goes unnoticed by the other party. Nova slips her hand off the switch and finds the necklace Din gifted her back before he accepted his role of Mand’alor, pressing hard enough that the symbol embosses itself into her thumbprint. “First of all,” she starts, trying her hardest to keep her voice level and even and not reveal a single ounce of the glee that she’s concealing, “my name hasn’t been Andromeda Maluev in a decade. You want me to answer to you, to answer to the Order? You’ll call me Novalise.”

The sigh from the trooper is short, clipped. “Noted.”

“Second,” Nova continues, leveling her jaw with the center of the dashboard, watching every single thruster lock itself into gear, “I am married to the galaxy’s most ruthless bounty hunter. It’s going to take a hell of a lot more than the word surrender to scare me into submission.”

Kicker grinds to a halt in midair. Nova straps herself in tighter, just enough to ensure that she won’t be sent reeling across the perfectly aligned dashboard when she breaks free of the tractor beam and shoots Kicker straight into the stars, back to Mandalore, back to Din, back home, and steels herself.

“Stop,” another voice says, tinny and nervous over the speaker. “She’s—she’s screwing with us, sir—”

“I’m assuming,” the original trooper speaks, trying to intimidate Nova with the ice in his voice, “that there’s a third thing?”

“Oh, there’s always a third thing,” Nova volleys back, eyes catching the light of what’s been powering up the entire time the troopers thought she was weighing her options and deciding the First Order’s clutches sounded warm and delightful, after all. “Not only am I a commander in the New Rogue Squadron, not only am I the wife of the reigning Mand’alor, I contain multitudes.” She grins, her teeth bared and gleeful in the low light of space, knowing this is by far the most badass exit she’s ever attempted. “And do you know what that means?”

The trooper in the largest fighter sounds defeated. This was barely even a scratch compared to the narrow scrapes Nova’s been entangled with before. She bites down on her bottom lip, cracking her neck, taking advantage of Kicker’s stationary position to break free of the tractor beam, and as the angry clamor of the three troopers in the fighters trying to reel the ship in starts to filter across the commlink, Nova does what she does best.

She barrel rolls the entirety of Kicker, flipping downward and over so that she’s facing the three fighters, staring through her Rebel helmet at the floodlights drenching her whole ship in florescence that shouldn’t be possible in space, and shows every single one of her teeth, smile stretched so far across her face that it hurts, “My starfighter is Rebel-made, sure, but it’s gotten a few upgrades in the past few weeks. The only reason you got this far was because I was waiting to unload the artillery loaded up in the guns that are pointed at you right now. And you know what they’re made of?”

“All aim to kill—”

Nova can’t resist. She tries, but this whole royalty thing, the whole leading the New Rogue Squadron thing, this whole being a Jedi thing—well, all of it has been tallied up enough to recognize she can stand to be the tiniest bit cocky to the people trying to kill her or bring her in as a slave. She raises a single middle finger, making sure that the pilot of the largest fighter catches her elongated, elegant bird with the floodlights. “Same thing as my resolve is. Beskar, bitch.” And with that, she punches all the thrusters, Kicker dazzling and evaporating through hyperspace, gone before the first trigger even pulls.

Mandalore is quiet. There’s a strange serenity that lives on the horizon, pulsing and shifting, but never quite tangible from the planet’s surface. It’s hard to look at the place where the greatest warriors in the galaxy are born and bred and not see anything but a whetted, sharp arena, but so much of this planet is soft around the edges. The blue architecture in the capital, for one—something Nova knows is much newer than the ancient history of the land here—and there’s a silence here that teeters on eerie but mostly stays in a strange sense of tranquility.

It doesn’t hold the feeling of abandonment, like so many other planets do these days, but it seems like the rest of the world around the city is disconnected. Inhabitable. Nova parks Kicker in the nearest landing bay, watching the strange haze that hangs over the atmosphere, trying to find other places where lights are lit, where people live, but so much of the planet is quiet. It’s the same sort of stark contrast that Yavin had when her and Din got engaged all those months ago, or Hoth’s anesthetic brutality, but Mandalore’s environment feels different.

And, Nova reasons, as she disembarks off Kicker’s gangplank, running the tips of her fingers over the Rebel insignia hidden under the outermost coat of white and silver detailing, it’s likely because this isn’t home. Not yet, anyway, and it might never have that feeling of belonging that the Crest did, that Kicker does, that her and Din found on Naator and Kashyyyk and Nevarro. Nova climbs the marble steps to the palace, smiling at the stoic Mandalorians stationed outside as she slips up the stairs and through the main entrance, immediately cutting sideways up the hallways to the left, watching as her shadow traipses behind her in the blue dusk, trying to not stake stock of the silence that most of the building holds. In true Mandalorian fashion, their holding cells are built into the palace itself, alongside training arenas and the war room where Din spends most of his time. Nova moves as quietly as she can through the halls, up the other marble staircase, and when she bursts into the chambers twice the size of the starship that she and Din usually call home, a gurgle from Grogu on the floor makes the entire day turn around.

Nova grins, dropping to her knees. Grogu beams up at her, his big bug eyes full of nothing but love, and she scoops him up, pressing his tiny, warm body against her chest. It chases away all the chill of Hoth and the crush of space, and for a second, she just runs her fingers over the top of his fuzzy head, pressing kisses to his green skin, soaking in every second she can.

“I missed you, lovey,” she murmurs, and Grogu’s giant green ears perk up. “What did you do in your day here?”

Grogu pulls away from her chest, pressing a three-fingered hand against Nova’s temple. The visions that used to terrify her, the ones Grogu put into her head, filled with screaming and loss and desperation, fall away as he shows her the bath he took, the feast he got for dinner, sitting on Din’s lap while in the war room. As he drops his touch, Nova grins down at him, all teeth and excitement, all of the panic and isolation of the last few hours melting away.

“He terrorized Bo-Katan,” a familiar voice rings out from behind her, and Nova pushes herself up on the heels of her hands, her heart flipping over with the same butterfly menagerie Din’s always given her. “I didn’t have the heart to tell him to stop.”

“Hi,” Nova whispers, giddy, watching as Din steps forward out of the shadows. It doesn’t matter how many times she’s been lucky enough to gaze over his handsome face, it doesn’t matter that he’s been spending more time helmetless here on Mandalore, every time she sees him, it’s like the first time. In the moonlight, obscured by the permafrost of Mandalore’s blue twilight, Nova’s eyes roam over the valleys and mountains of her husband’s face. His hair is the length it was when he proposed, long enough for the ends to curl up gently. His mouth, even in the near darkness, is pink and gorgeous, his lips slightly parted in the unconscious way they do when Nova’s the only thing in his eyeline. His scruff is there, long enough to scratch her chin—or her thighs—up something terrible, and the ghost of the mustache she used to feel in the dark is strong, dark, manicured. His eyelashes are longer than the length of her thumbnails, and his eyes, his gorgeous brown eyes, soften around the edges the second Nova smiles.

“Hi,” Din echoes, bridging the gap between the two of them with two quick strides, and Nova feels her breath catch in her throat. Din’s hands, gloved in black and twice the size of her own, balance on the curve of her hips, his fingers digging into the loops of her orange jumpsuit, pulling Nova over her own feet, anchoring her body right up against hers. The way he kisses after only being separated overnight is desperate, longing, filled with words he doesn’t always know how to say. Nova leans into his embrace, head fuzzy, waterlogged, like everything else fades away. It does. She loses track of time, how many minutes pass, the stars behind her eyes dazzling, supernovae, regenerated.

When they break apart, Nova’s hand trails over the regalia Din’s wearing. It’s his familiar beskar, the armor he’s worn since they first met, but it’s been cleaned, and underneath, where his typical black undergarments used to cling to his build, he’s wearing Mandalore blue. It’s the color of the skyline at dusk, a faded azure that signals something more than warrior, something a shade closer to royalty. The material is lightweight, practical. It’s the same kind that every single one of her matching outfits are made out of—Mandalorians don’t have much use for aesthetic, it just gets in the way of practicality—but it seems more vibrant on Din. “How was today?” she whispers into the hollow of his mouth, and Din exhales, low and slow, tipping his bare forehead against hers.

“Long without you,” he admits, his voice barely anything. Nova’s eyes search his deep brown ones, trying to figure out where his exhaustion is hiding. “Come with me. I—I want to show you something.”

Nova nods, catching sight of the dirty orange jumpsuit stretched over her tan trousers, the black tank top she’d spent the past year replacing every time Din tore it off of her body. “I should change.”

Din’s eyes flick hungrily over her silhouette, and when he speaks again, his voice is husky. “No,” he says, finally, digging his thumb slightly into the flesh on her hip, “you shouldn’t.”

The trek downstairs is quiet. Both of them move in the shadows, lulled into an easy silence, their hands knitted together in between their two bodies. Nova watches as the low light of the corridor flickers as they cross over another staircase and down a side hallway, entering through the war room by the back entrance instead of the front, even though there’s no one left in here to try to hide from.

Nova’s been in here at least ten times, but the decoration steals the breath straight out of her mouth every time. A glittering holotable, top of the line, at least twenty years more advanced than the one on Hoth, sits in the direct center. The ceiling looks more like a cathedral than it does anything else, which is perfectly fitting for a group of people who treat fighting as their religion. Nova looks up through the sheer domed ceiling, watching as the moody dusk falls into a silent, quiet night. Stars dazzle and shine from above, and even though they’re not nearly as poignant and powerful down here as they are out in space, the direct line to the cosmos is bright enough to make her throat ache. “Wow,” Nova whispers, voice barely anything at all, staring straight upward, mapping constellations under her breath. Eventually, her eyes slide off of the ceiling, traveling over the careful architecture, the shrines in the corners, the murals painstakingly hand-painted across the circular walls, all of beskar and helmets and Mandalorian history. It feels so ancient, even though the palace was recently rebuilt, reconstructed from nothing during both of their lifetimes. She’s been in here a handful of times before, but never as night is on the horizon. There’s something transcendent about this place, this holy center of Mandalorian worship. Something deeper, something divine enough to make a Jedi believe in them, too.

Din’s standing across the other end of the holotable, fidgeting with the controls until a map of the galaxy sparkles to life in front of them. Through the light, Nova watches the peaks of her husband’s face getting caught in the reflections, letting everything except his face blur out to stardust. “Did you get anything from Wedge?” he asks, and Nova blinks her eyes to refocus on the map. “Anything new? Anything…useful?”

Quietly, Nova shakes her head. “He thought—he called me back to Hoth because of a prison break in one of the sectors Cara doesn’t have jurisdiction in, or I’d suspect she’d have already taken care of it. It was small, just a few criminals with nothing more than petty charges breaking out of a hold somewhere, but he thought it might be related to—”

“The First Order?”

“Me,” Nova finishes, quietly. Her eyes narrow just a fraction, refocusing on Din’s silhouette through the glitter of the galaxy between them. “Yeah, the Order. We couldn’t prove anything, but I—”

“You feel something is coming,” Din interrupts gently, stealing the words right out of her mouth, bracing his strong, gloved hands on the side of the holotable, and Nova nods, watching his grip, starting to get a little dizzy, with lust or with the reflections above them or both. “Don’t you?”

“I do,” she echoes, confirming his theory. “I—I took a detour coming back here. I went to Polis Massa, to try and return to the library archives so I could learn more about Mandalore and bring you back something other than a dead end.”

Din stares at her, his face partially hidden in the glow of the rotating image of the holotable. “You brought yourself back here,” he says, finally, and Nova’s knees buckle a little under the husk of his voice. “It’s hard to care about much else.”

Nova bites down on her lip, butterflies swirling up a storm inside her tummy. “Din,” she whispers, leaning forward on the table, cocking her head in the signature way he always does, lifting her chin slightly with the tilt, “we are tasked with the incredible privilege of saving the galaxy, you know—”

“Fuck the galaxy,” Din breathes, and despite the fact that what he’s wanting to shirk is their top priority, and really has been for months, it buzzes inside Nova, wet and hot. “Let someone else handle it for once. I don’t care.”

“You do care,” she protests, weakly, but his tongue slides out from the hollow of his mouth, and everything else seems to evaporate. “I know—fuck, I don’t know, I know you missed me when I left overnight, I know we’ve been apart more than we’ve been together, but it’s for good reason, and when we save, y’know, the whole galaxy and everything, it…it’ll be all the time in the world for the two of us.”

“I’m impatient,” Din counters, roughly, and then he’s around the table in three quick, determined strides. Nova sighs, letting her body crumple a little as Din moves forward, his hands on her hips, anchoring her pelvis against his. “Don’t make me wait any more for you, cyar’ika, I won’t be able to stand it.”

Nova inhales sharply, feeling him harden against her leg, and she lifts her chin a touch more, enough for their lips to only be an inch apart, enough to make eye contact, enough for all of this to let the rest of the world fade right out. “You know,” she whispers, finally, blood pumping furiously, “you’re the leader of this planet. You could order me to do anything, and I’d be helpless to do anything but comply.”

Din lets out a groan, low and desperate, a choked off, guttural one. “And if I told you I wanted you right here on this table?”

Nova grins, her teeth glittering against the quickening darkness, pulling away only to drape herself over the holotable, face down, letting the spots where her body occupies the space filter out of the reflection. The glow of the lights is disrupted by her figure, and she hears Din’s voice catch in the dark behind her as she arches her back, still fully clothed, an invitation for him to come closer, to take what’s rightfully his. “Then you’d have me right here on this table, Mand’alor.”

She feels Din press up against her, hard against the soft, voluptuous curve of her ass. He inhales, heavily, she can hear it whine through the darkness, not hidden under the evenness of the modulator built into his helmet. Nova knows she’s an expert at getting out of things—sticky situations, clothes, everything in between—but right now, she wants to make Din wait beg for it before she complies. Something to prove that even while he’s the one on the throne, her neck is holding up the crown. At least here. Especially here.

“And if I told you I wanted to fuck you on the floor?”

“Then you’d take me on the floor, Mand’alor. I quite like the floor, you know.”

“You—” Din’s breath cuts off again, and Nova lets the timbre of his voice soak into her. It turns her heart over, first, that excitement tangling up with the knowledge that she’ll let him do anything. It’s been over a week since the last time they fucked, because he’s been spending most of his time in this room, trying to prove to the rest of the planet that he’s worthy enough to hold the throne, and she’s been splitting her time between Grogu and saving the galaxy. All of them necessary evils, deserving distractions, but it’s nearly impossible to think about anything other than the feel of Din up against Nova, his mouth on her neck, his hands on her hips, concerned only with burying himself as deep into her as he possibly can. “I brought you down here to show you the stars. You’re distracting me.”

Nova smiles, then braces her palms on top of the holotable, pushing herself up, gliding her body backwards up against her husband’s. “What an honor,” she purrs, quiet, low, the same kind of voice Din always uses when he wants her so badly it hurts to breathe, “that the king of Mandalore thinks I am a suitable distraction.”

“Novalise.”

“Use me as a distraction, then,” Nova continues, taking hold of one of Din’s gloved hands, guiding them against the curve of her chest, making sure he feels how her nipples harden under his touch, a soft, mewling sound with her mouth completely indicative of the flush of warmth rushing between her legs. “Show me anything you want, oh worthy Mand’alor, please—”

Her breath is cut off as Din whirls her around by her throat. It’s sudden, desperate, the kind of electricity he used to greet her with whenever he finally tracked down the bounty he was hunting and could let loose with her on the Crest.

“Get on,” Din starts, voice raggedly, both hands clenching against Nova’s cheeks, puckering her lips, “the fucking throne, cyar’ika.”

“The—throne?” Nova repeats, breathless. “You want—”

“I want to fuck you on my throne,” Din interrupts, and stars above, she can feel the way that his cock is throbbing in his pants, through the regalia, through the beskar, all of it. “You said anything I want. I want to make you scream my name on the planet we rule while I’m seven inches inside of you. That work for you?”

Nothing but a strangled moan comes out.

Din nods. “Good. Get over there.”

Nova reels back as he releases her. It takes more than a few seconds to collect herself enough to move, and when she does, her legs feel like they’re made out of rubber, elastic and wobbly. She can feel his heavy gaze on her as she makes her way around the holotable, and when she takes the few steps that lead to the ironclad, menacing chair that sits atop the highest point in the room, Din’s voice rings out.

“Stop,” he commands, and she does, feeling her heart hammer. “Face me.”

Nova turns, her breath caught in her throat, staring down at Din. The few steps she’s scaled make her just a tad taller than Din is, and she watches as he slowly moves forward, crossing the tile of the floor with quiet, intentional steps.

“Take your clothes off,” Din manages, and Nova’s almost a hundred percent sure that he’s whispering, even though it might just be that she can’t hear anything over how loud her blood is pumping, over how hard her heart is hammering.

“Now?”

He raises a single dark eyebrow, and Nova nods, trying to peel off her shirt and her trousers as fast as she can. She kicks off her shoes, and they land at the bottom of the steps with a very incriminating thud, but Din just kicks them out of the way as he presses the soles of his beskar boots deliberately against the tile. Everything in here is blue and reflective, even after night has fallen on Mandalore, and Nova catches sight of her silhouette in the floor. Her breath stutters in her throat, suddenly very aware that she’s completely naked and Din, save for his forgotten helmet, is fully clothed, but with the way his eyes are roving over her body like he’s starving and she’s the only thing in this galaxy or the next that can satiate it, she forgets how to care.

“You,” he starts, trailing a single gloved finger down the curve of her body, “are so beautiful.”

“Stop,” she whispers, smiling, everything burning and in flames. It’s the opposite of what she means—she never wants Din to stop calling her beautiful, stop revering her, stop treating her like something holy—but when they’re in a public room that just about anyone left on this planet can walk on, and she’s the only one naked, the risk burns hotter than her desire. “Din, I—”

His finger is on her lips before Nova even realizes he’s moved. “Do you believe me?”

Nova blinks, stuttering over the dying words hidden somewhere between her teeth and the back of her throat. The answer is yes, because Din Djarin never utters a single word that he doesn’t mean, because he uses so few of them to begin with, and also because he’s seen every single inch of her body and worshipped it, but in this reflective room, usually full of figures so much more athletic, razor-sharp, warrior-grade, a tiny bead of insecurity spools down the back of her neck. Nervously, Nova’s gaze filters off of Din’s, flicking over to the ornate door on the other side of the room, and when she looks back, he’s staring at her.

“Nova?” he repeats, gently, and something about the way he’s saying it makes tears spring up in her eyes. “Here. Come here. Look at yourself.”

She lets him guide her over to the throne, which is made out of the shiniest, most reflective beskar she’s ever seen, polished so effortlessly it doubles as a mirror, and Din pulls curls of her dark hair away from her collarbone, fingers grazing the new necklace he gifted her, one hand curling around her jaw, the other sliding down the side of her body.

“Look at yourself,” Din repeats, his touch still so light, and when Nova doesn’t immediately obey, his grip tightens. Not hard, just filled with enough desire to snap her back to her senses—that he took her into this room to fuck her senseless, that his eyes don’t meet anyone else’s, that Din Djarin isn’t a pious man in any other capacity than his Creed and all the rules he broke to worship Nova instead. She relaxes under his touch, her eyes glazing as they travel over the valleys of her naked body. Her skin doesn’t glow in the darkness like it does during the daylight, but it’s a rich brown, three or so shades darker than Din’s. Her eyes, a deep sage green that dips into brown in the darkness, glitter as they flash against the beskar. Her eyelashes, dark and tangled up in the corners from where her laughter lines are. Her nose, not as prominent as Din’s hooked, curved one, but big, slightly upturned, and anchored in the center of her face. Her mouth, plump and perma-stained deep pink from where she bites hard on it in concentration. Her hair, so long now that it trails down to where her curved hipbones protrude, woven into a deeper curl than the natural wave of her hair from the braids it’s always tied back in. Din’s hand on her hip clenches gently at his knuckles, and she lets her gaze shift off of her face, down the stocky muscles of her upper arms, slightly sore from twirling Grogu around and from flying out of her skirmish with the TIE fighters. Her hands are long and elegant, princess fingers, her mother used to call them, dainty and slender, nails kept short to flip all the necessary switches on whatever vessel she’s flying, thumbs worn down with callouses from fighting and twirling Luke’s lightsaber around for the last two weeks, trying to conjure the power he radiates on her own. Down the left side of her tummy, which is rounded and collects weight around her bellybutton, is the scar that Jacterr Calican left in an attempt to rip her soul out of her body, and Din’s finger traces over the bump of it, gentle, endearing, protective. Her hips, which are wide, the curves of her upper legs, the muscles that pack on more weight in her calves. Nova looks at herself and sees, just for a glimpse, just for a split second, that sure, she’s not shaped like a Mandalorian, but she’s certainly desired by one. Din pulls her hair back from where it’s settled against her throat, pressing his lips to her skin.

“What do you see?” he murmurs, his voice deep and electric.

“The girl you love,” Nova whispers, grinning at him in their reflections. Din spins her back around, much gentler than he did a minute ago, all the fire gone, his eyes gentle like the oceans on Yavin.

“Damn right,” Din affirms, the timbre of his voice in her ear making goosebumps spark up across Nova’s bare arms. “Now get on the throne.”

She’s giddy. Her heart is, as usual, racing a thousand beats per minute, threatening to hammer right out of her chest. It’s cold—the throne—cool to the touch. As Nova slowly slides down onto the beskar, she watches Din’s brown eyes flash with lust and longing, and his look alone is enough to take away the chill against her bare skin. The beskar warms to her touch, and she crosses one thick thigh over the other, trying to quell the nervousness that’s still whining at the back of her mind.

“Don’t look at the door,” Din orders, his head cocked to the side. It’s been a few months now since Nova’s seen every single contour of his face, but every new expression not hidden behind the helmet makes her stomach lurch up into her throat. Right now, she can see the tenseness of his command in his clenched jaw, but his eyes soften as they roam over her body. “Look at me.”

“Din—”

“Look at me.”

Nervously, she does. The second her eyes meet his, everything else fades away. In the back of her mind, she’s aware that she’s completely naked, her skin up and against something divine, something not meant for her, this throne that she’s about to be desecrated on.

And sweet Maker above, she doesn’t even care. Din slowly canvasses the distance between the two of them, the intensity of his gaze never once wavering off of Nova’s face. The pure look of animalistic desire on his unmasked face makes her whimper under her breath. If she were weaker, she would cower away, avert her eyes, but by this point, she’s earned her brazenness. There are exactly two things in this galaxy that the ruler of Mandalore, the most ruthless bounty hunter, and the man in front of her would do anything for. Grogu and Nova.

He doesn’t make a noise. Everything is an electric wire as he finds his secure, silent footing on the first step, and Nova’s heart catches in her throat. She wants to say something, to make a silly comment, to cut through the tension, but she knows that whatever’s about to follow Din’s ascent will be worth her quiet. Instead, Nova bites down on her trembling lip, watching the rest of the throne room disappear as Din steps closer, still not making a single noise, pulling his body weight up the lip of each step, staring at her.

“What?” she manages, finally, the word all air.

Din moves closer. Nova’s seated against the throne, the beskar suddenly warm against her bare skin. Everything in her is burning. “What do you want?” Din asks, his voice deep, rumbling through her like a honeyed thunderstorm. He doesn’t even have the modulator to filter his words, and even though the deepness of his voice through the helmet runs rivers through her, Nova’s suddenly glad for the bareness of all of this. It makes it easier, dirtier, better.

“I want you,” Nova manages, hollowly, the words surrender out of her parted lips. “Just you.”

“You want me?” Din repeats, and a flash of lust sparks up behind his beautiful brown eyes. There’s something dangerous in his tone, something deeper, something electric. She stares at him, unwilling to break his gaze. If it were anyone else, Nova would think that the timbre of Din’s voice was teasing, but the edge to it suggests towards pleading.

“Yes,” Nova echoes, and Din moves forward, towering over her. She stares up at him as one gloved hand easily notches against her right cheek, eyelashes fluttering as the pad of Din’s fabric-laden thumb traces over the mountain of her cheekbone. “I want you, Mand’alor—”

“I’m not Mand’alor right now, cyar’ika,” Din interrupts, his voice low and ragged, sparking somewhere in his throat. “Look at who’s on the throne.”

Nova gulps. Air is suddenly impossible to come by. Everything in her is electric, alive. Everything else fades out except for Din’s touch. Her doubt, her insecurity—it’s all been chased away and zapped into obliteration by the way Din’s speaking, touching, breathing. “I—”

“Say my name,” Din says, hooking his free hand under Nova’s chin. She swallows, letting the roughness of his gesture manipulate her body in any way that he wants, pliable against Din’s weathered hands. “Say you want me.”

“Din,” Nova squeaks out, and a single one of his dark eyebrows quirks up against the celestial darkness of the throne room, daring her to speak. “Din Djarin,” Nova rectifies, her voice suddenly loud and clear. It booms out, fills the throne room with sound. For once, the buzzing in her head completely drowns out her fear of being discovered. This palace doesn’t exist. Anyone walking the strange, ornate, blue halls doesn’t exist. Stars above, Mandalore itself doesn’t exist at this point. She’s emboldened, as if her will has flooded back, full-force. “Three things. There’s always three things included in how I want you. I want you without armor. I want you without titles. I want you like I had you back on Dagobah.”

“And how,” Din whispers, his voice running through Nova like heat, “is that?”

She gasps as Din’s hand slowly slips down to her throat, bracing itself there. He barely squeezes, and without all of her senses screaming at her that Din’s hand is against her, she thinks his touch would feel like a ghost, like nothing there at all. “Like we belong to each other,” Nova manages, and Din’s grip intensifies. It’s a slip. She can tell, with the way that his eyes roll back, with the way that a moan slips out from the hollow of his open mouth. Stars blur through her vision—some refracted from the open sky up above, and some from the restriction to her airflow, and she leans into the pressure just as Din retracts his grip.

“Cyar’ika—”

“I belong to you,” Nova whispers, the words sounding like a confessional, deeper and darker than she intended. Her hands find Din’s, wordlessly pulling his hand back to rest like a vice against her throat. “Everything in me is yours. Remember?”

Din squeezes again, and the grin that was hiding slowly spreads across Nova’s face. She knows that in the darkness, her teeth glow white, framed by the plump pinkness of her mouth. Din’s standing, still fully clothed, but she can tell by the way his grip tightens against her throat that he’s rock hard under all that beskar.

“Din,” she manages, her voice high and thready through the pressure of his hand, “what do you want?”

“I want you,” he chokes out, guttural and dangerous, his voice coming from somewhere beyond the horizon. Immediately, he pulls Nova to her feet by her throat, eyes flickering carefully over her own gaze to double-check that what he’s doing isn’t too far. She smiles back at him, and when she’s fully standing, smile still plastered across her starstruck face, she drops her grip on Din’s wrist and immediately moves to unhook his armor. She could do it in the dark. She could do it blind. By now, Nova’s memorized every single inch of Din’s body, whether he’s armored in all of his beskar or not. Even the new additions to his regalia since becoming Mand’alor are burned into Nova’s memory, bright and gleaming. She doesn’t break Din’s gaze as she undresses him, pulling the pauldrons off, the chest plates, the silver V of covering that protects his lower stomach and his crotch. It’s over in what feels like seconds, and then the only thing covering Din is the soft fabric of his underclothes. Nova tugs at his trousers first, pulling them down to reveal the silky feeling of his boxers. She positions herself in between Din’s legs, grabbing his right hip to anchor his hardness against her, and he groans out again, the desperate, wet sound filling up the throne room. It's loud. Too loud. The kind of loud that Din never reaches, not unless they’re the only two people on a planet, not unless they’re lost out there in the crush of space. If his cheeks redden at the sound, though, Nova doesn’t catch it, because her touch is too focused, her vision still spinning off starry, impassioned, loud. Slowly, she reaches up through Din’s weakening grip to pull the shirt off of his torso, breath catching in her throat as she takes the King of Mandalore without armor, without clothes, without anything. Nova smiles up at Din, blinking away the small tears of pleasure that gathered in the corners of her eyes, and then she sinks back down on the throne, squaring her shoulders, tossing her loose hair out of her face, eyes full of allure and desire.

“I want you,” she echoes, and then her mouth is on his stomach. Din gasps out, the sound of it ringing out like infernal bells, and Nova hides her teeth as she grins against his stomach, tongue swirling up and down his belly, fingers grazing like butterfly wings across the bones of his hips. She can feel him growing harder and harder as she teases, parting some of the faint hair that trails down his stomach with the wetness of her mouth. Din’s hands find her shoulders, and his fingers clench down, leaving small half-moons imprinted on either side of her neck. “Can I taste you?”

“W—want you,” Din chokes out, his voice demanding and desperate, but the rocking of his hips against her chest betrays him, and before he can make good on his command, Nova’s already slid every inch of him down her throat. She moans in rhythm with him, as Din’s hands leave her shoulders in a frenzy and instead tangle in her hair, wanting. Quietly, Nova swirls her tongue around the base before she pulls off of his cock with a loud, slurping, sucking noise, and she doesn’t even have time to be embarrassed before she’s sinking her mouth all the way down over Din again, the tears that have returned at the corners of her eyes springing back to life. They feel like satisfaction. She can feel him trembling, and when she drops one of her hands between his legs, lightly cupping his balls, Din cries out again. “Nova—”

“Shh,” she interrupts, which is truly a feat, considering her mouth is full of him and her saliva and not much else, “let me finish you here.”

“No,” Din interrupts, and his voice is strangled, muddled. Immediately, Nova does, pulling her mouth off of him regrettably, blinking up at him, lower lip slowly jutted out. “I k—fuck, I know you wanted to finish me like this, but—but I need you to break in my throne.”

A jolt of lightning strikes through Nova’s body, and she shudders as Din’s shaking grip finds the small of her back and pulls her to her trembling feet. For a moment, everything else evaporates, just the two of them breathing and holding each other, Din’s forehead stooped low to press against hers, and then he whirls her around.

Nova’s used to Din’s manhandling, the expert way he spins and lifts her, like she’s made of nothing but air. This is much clumsier than his usual vigor, and when she’s done a complete 180 and is facing her husband, Mand’alor, the big brave bounty hunter, he’s seated on his throne like he owns it, and his hands are on Nova’s hips in the same place where she was sitting a second ago. There’s something deeper and more intense in his gaze right now, something beyond just lust. It’s power, Nova recognizes as Din pulls her hips down, her knees splaying to the sides of the beskar throne. The metal is unyielding against her bones, but still, she doesn’t feel the impact. Din has collapsed her on top of him, the only thing keeping her upward is his grip and her knees trying desperately to cling onto the straddling position that Din’s holding her in.

For a moment, she just stares at him. He looks like divinity, here, something deeper than just another human being in front of him. Nova doesn’t know if it’s the starry sky spinning through the throne room, or because this feels like a holy place of worship, or if it’s just been weeks since they’ve had longer than a handful of minutes at the end of the day before they both fall asleep, too exhausted and dizzied by their work to touch each other relentlessly, but she feels like she’s spinning. Like this has been months in the making, even though it’s only been a handful of days since Din pulled her down over his lap and anchored her hips to his. Her eyes are on his, desperate, searching. When a single hand trails up to brush against her throat, she eagerly leans into his touch, nodding before his outstretched hand makes contact with her neck, skin on skin.

“You want this?” Din breathes, eyes fixed on her open mouth, and Nova nods against his question, his touch, everything.

“More than anything,” she manages, voice throaty and high, stars spinning beyond her eyes. Din nods in assent, and then his hand is gone, a claw rounded around her hipbones, his fingernails sinking into the plushy flesh. The way he holds her as he grinds her down on top of him is enough to make the rest of the world—and every insecurity—trickle out of Nova. When he pushes inside her, slick and warm and so big from this position, she gasps, the sound of it wet and obscene, too loud for the silent room.

“Fuck,” Din hisses, and then Nova starts moving of her accord. She can’t really feel her knees as they dig into the smooth, impenetrable surface of the beskar throne, but it doesn’t even matter. This is worth never feeling either patella ever again. There’s something humming low and urgent in Din’s throat, his scratchy face buried in Nova’s neck, tongue licking and snapping at her most sensitive pulse point. She groans. “You—you’re perfect, cyar’ika.”

“Not perfect,” she murmurs, hands wrapping around Din’s neck and tangling in his dark hair, eyes fluttering open enough to catch a glimpse at it, her fingers long and beautiful as they tug at his hair.

“Listento yourself,” Din pleads, one of his strong, toned arms wrapping around her waist, pulling her down over and over. In any other situation it would be embarrassing, the sucking noise coming ceaselessly between her thighs, but she’s so wet and so close to the edge that she doesn’t try to obscure it, and doesn’t try to fight Din’s insistent, guttural words. “You’re perfect. Everything about you. Your hips, the—the way they move. Your eyes, rolling back into your skull as I fuck you. Shit, Nova, everything about your pussy, I—”

She can feel her cheeks burning. It’s not often that Din is this vocal, this unhinged, especially not in this situation. It’s dirty and forbidden, and as she bounces up and down on his cock, eyes rolled back like he loves, everything wet and slippery between her legs, she forgets all about the fact that they’re naked and desecrating the throne of Mandalore. It’s everything. It’s so much, and when she’s right on the edge of orgasm, Din grinds his hips up into her.

“Din—”

“I want to show you off,” he grits out, and before she can ask him what he means, he’s lifting her off of him like she weighs fucking nothing, pushing himself down to the hilt inside her as she watches the empty throne room, the empty seats around the holotable, watched by the lifeless warriors painted on the wall. She doesn’t try to hide any part of her body. Din’s still whispering every dirty sound he can think of in her ear, one broad arm wrapped around her waist, the other hand tangled up in Nova’s hair.

“To whom?” she asks, the words barely even air. She’s on the edge still, eyes blinking, torso trembling. She wants Din to let her cum so bad, she can barely hear what he’s saying over the pumping rush of blood in her ears.

Din lifts up a lock of hair, the same stubborn wave that always falls in her face, tucking it gently behind her year. For a second, she sees red, legs shaking, completely subject to whatever Din’s doing. “Everyone,” he whispers, and the shock of how guttural and feral his voice sounds sends Nova right over the edge she’d been teetering on. He makes her cum so hard that everything explodes out into the same number of stars shimmering above, divine and dangerous, white-hot, so, so alive. And before she has a chance to gain her senses back, Din’s dragging and rushing as deep into her as he can, every inch of him warm and desirable, and when he lets go to follow Nova over the edge of the cliff they’re both standing on, she gasps as he fills her, hot and thick. It’s so much harder than the last time they fucked, both of them devastated, exhausted, fulfilled.

Nova leans back against Din’s chest, heaving, spinning, trying to catch her breath. They’re both inhaling and exhaling intently, trying to return back to the planet they rule, to the throne they just fucked on. “Well,” she starts, pulling the long waves off her back, looking over her bare shoulder at Din, “wow.”

He laughs, and he’s still inside her, slowly softening as he comes back down from the high of it, pressing his pink lips against her exposed skin. “High praise.”

“It’s the truth,” she whispers, giggling, suddenly remembering where they are. “I—I can’t believe we just did that—”

“We’re newlyweds,” Din interrupts, his voice still rough from the aftermath of sex, and something sparks up low in Nova’s belly as he talks, “plus I’m the ruler of this planet, remember?”

She grins, tipping her shoulder back into his bare chest, trailing her fingers over his tan skin, tracing fault lines she’s never seen but knows are there. “I like power on you.”

“Nova—”

“No, seriously,” she continues. “It’s hot. Do you get a crown, maybe? Do I?”

“I think one of us will have to duel Bo-Katan for that one,” Din groans, and Nova laughs again, sliding off of his lap, slowly pulling together the pieces of armor she discarded earlier, tossing them through the dark air for Din to collect. The mention of Bo-Katan, though, sends a shiver of a reminder down Nova’s very exposed spine. She pulls her own underclothes on, quickly whipping her tank top back over her head, suddenly remembering how cold it is in here when she’s not writhing between the proverbial sheets with her husband. She bites down on her lip, hastily zipping her trousers up, the noise loud and discordant. “Nova,” Din continues, squinting at her, “what’s wrong?”

“Oh,” she says, dazed, tossing the last piece of armor back over to him, “you know, we—we just desecrated a holy part of Mandalore, we don’t know how the hell to fight off the First Order, and Bo-Katan is probably standing right outside that door, ready to kick both of our asses.”

“She,” Din answers, pushing against the heavy beskar doors, “is not here. We’re working on how to stop the Order. And this holy part of Mandalore,” he breathes, walking back towards her, one eyebrow raised, as if he’s questioning the way his face is displaying expression, “is ours to desecrate.”

“When you said,” Nova breathes, staring back at him, everything else fading out, “that you wanted to show me off to everyone—”

Din suddenly looks sheepish, and she giggles. “Nova, I didn’t—I was just into the moment, if you don’t want to—you never have to, I—”

She grins, smile glittering in the dark, sliding past him and into the empty hall, drifting in the general direction of their bedroom. “I didn’t say,” she whispers coyly, holding out one hand for Din’s gloved one, “that I didn’t want to.” She winks, pulling a still-stammering Din behind her. “I just can’t believe you want to share me with anyone.”

They’re up the stairs and back to the entrance to the master bedroom, and Din finally finds his words—or his grip—and grabs her, twirling Nova back into his arms with the force of the bounty hunter that he used to be. “You’re mine,” he whispers. “I won’t let a single person in this galaxy forget it.”

Nova grins, heart doing backflips in her chest. By the time they finally make their way into the suite, it’s dark across the whole wide expanse of sky, and Grogu is asleep in their bed, comically small compared to the king-size that takes up most of the room. “I know,” she whispers, looking back and forth from her husband to their son, a smile etched into her lips. “We should get to bed,” she murmurs, after a second, and Din nods, pulling off the armor and his underclothes in his silent Mandalorian way, Nova weaving her hair back into her usual braid, feeling the bruises from her knees banging forcefully into the beskar throne.

“What’s on your schedule for tomorrow?” Din asks, both of them gently pulling the pillows that line the bed onto the ground, until it’s empty except for their usual spread and the baby’s tiny body. His eyes drift down to Grogu, and so do Nova’s. He knows. She knows. Neither of them want to say it aloud. It’s time for Grogu to go back with Luke and resume his Jedi training, even though none of them want him gone. Nova swallows.

“You know,” she tries, halfheartedly trying to lift her voice into excitement, “Back to business.”

Din rolls over, facing Nova in the darkness. “You don’t have to,” he whispers, and she knows losing Grogu again, even though it’s to Luke Skywalker, even though they’ll be able to fix it, is wreaking havoc on him too. Nova settles down next to him, ears focused only on the miniscule snores of Grogu’s open mouth, her hand finding Din’s, her eyes falling over where Luke’s lightsaber is hanging ceremoniously by the door.

“But I do,” she answers, finally, closing her tired eyes. “We have a galaxy to save. And I,” she breathes, snuggling in closer to the baby, “have a Jedi to see.”

if you would like to be taken off the taglist or put on it, send me a message/ask/comment!! <3

I HOPE YOU LOVED IT!!!! whether you're a returning reader or a longtime lover, i m so happy you're here with Din, Nova, Grogu, and me. i just simply could not stay away from this story, and i cannot wait to go across the stars and back with the second fic in the series!! leave all your thoughts in the comments here, or find me over at tumblr @ amiedala, or scroll through my tiktok @ padmeamydala

CHAPTER 2 WILL BE UP SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 11TH, @ 7:30 PM EST!

xoxo, amelie

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camilliar · 3 years

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recs for someone new to omgcp

[February 2021.]

Reading, or not reading, OMGCP fics has come up in a couple of conversations I’ve had recently with artists newish to the fandom (ie. @jovishark; @decafffff), who are making OMGCP art (!!!) but haven’t started exploring fic -- but maybe want to? Which of course reminded me that I’ve never bothered to make an actual, concrete recs list for this fandom. So, I mean. Here is one.

The approach is, what do I think about when I think about OMGCP fanfic? What comes to mind, what stands out to me? I have excluded some very popular fics. Some of these I just don’t think are very good, and others I do think are good, and/or I enjoy them, but I don’t see why you’d need me, specifically, to recommend them. I am thinking of a story like maybe i’m waking up, which I discuss below because I link to a podfic of it. It has a lot of merits, to be sure, but it’s the second-most-read fic in this fandom by hits, and it’s got thousands of comments, and it’s by an author whose work is relatively widely praised and circulated. I am not sure what telling you more about this fic will add to the conversation; if you want to find and read it, you inevitably will. I’m happy to, say, answer asks about these kinds of fics, or talk more generally about them via DM or whatever. Feel free.

Also, I don’t think there’s a point to pretending to be objective about fanfic; this list has a perspective and that perspective is mine. In this fandom I largely read stories that navigate the tension around Jack, Bitty, and Parse, in various permutations. This is not to say that I’ve never read fic about the frogs, or that I have no interest at all in other pairings, but I am by no means an expert on Dex/Nursey and can really only speak to the one fic about them that sticks out to me because it goes beyond being merely Dex/Nursey and does something else. This is just to say that I am sure there are great and interesting fics about other things and ideas--but I’m not the person to hear about those from.

Likewise, I’m not super interested in stories that really reproduce that which is already in OMGCP. I like Zimbits--albeit maybe not in the ways or for the reasons most fans would--but I do not really need to see endless iterations of the same story about them falling in love and being cute together. I don’t think these stories are bad or they shouldn’t exist or that they have no merit by default. Still, I don’t need fanfic to give me more OMGCP. I need fanfic to complicate, to comment on, and to transform OMGCP. Many people don’t work like this! Totally okay! But I can’t rec you fics that do that.

What I have noticed, however, is that over time there appears to have been a shift in how people do write fic for this fandom. (Other than, you know, increases and decreases in activity pending the status of the comic, pairings going in and out of vogue, and so on.) Early on, say during Y1 and Y2, the comic was about the group of friends having a cool time at college together; about whether the burgeoning attraction between Jack and Bitty would manifest and, if so, how; and, especially, Jack’s past coming into fuller view for Bitty and how it would have to be dealt with in order for a relationship between them to work. YMMV on how great the comic executed there, but as Y3 went on these themes increasingly disappeared from the story. I think this means a lot of fic written over 2015-2016 or 2017 has one kind of tone, and was written mostly around these questions; after that, it feels like a new crop of writers and a new crop of ideas started circulating, that is, either embracing Jack and Bitty’s canon relationship and accepting its relative straightforwardness in text--or deconstructing it, imagining what readers aren’t seeing, or how problems not dealt with in the comic would manifest later. People who have read my fic know which of these I’m mainly interested in exploring.

All of which is to say, looking at what I’m reccing here, when the fics were posted or when I first read them probably has a lot to do with why they stick out to me so much. Because there’s no real culture of fanfic criticism--and I mean that in the positivist sense of broad evaluation not explicitly for fault and merit but rather, for context--I think it’s really hard to keep this in mind. But I’m obnoxious and I can’t just be easy about things.

Fic recs

In alphabetical order, somewhat unsorted; if a stand-alone fic has a summary I’ve included it, but in other cases I’ve recced a couple of conceptually related fics or series, which I’ve tried to just describe or explain as opposed to copying the summary off AO3.

There are so many more fanfics I think are great and worth reading! In an ideal world I’d come back and add more later, or create a secondary list that’s more along the lines of “if you like this, read these,” or whatever. But, being realistic, this is a starter kit. I’m open to talking about fanfic.

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7-0-2 by Idday; Friends in Low Places and Sorry for the Blood in Your Mouth; I Wish it was Mine by blue_rocket_frost | I’m not sure it would be correct to say that I don’t like Parse/Tater, or that I’m not interested in Parse/Tater. I’m not interested in Patater a priori; I think it could be interesting, with teeth. These fics stick out to me when I think about this pairing, because they feel different. Accusations of a preference for just linking any two white men who happen to be hanging around have validity, but because of what hockey is and how it works and who’s hanging around it, it’s not exactly a leap to imagine what kind of gritty spark the friction between two closeted NHL players would create. A little violence in your sex? A little sex in your violence.

A Sight Worth Seeing by sadtomato | A four-fic Jack/Bitty/Shitty/Lardo explicit BDSM series. Either you want that or you don’t. It’s nothing hardcore, and not properly a four-way, really; more properly a kind of voyeuristic round-robin. There’s a more open and egalitarian view of sex here than I really get from the characters in the back end of the comic. It’s an expansive, propulsive view of sex and relationships that’s really nice to see. I love Lardo's detached coolness, and Bitty as a smooth operator; if you’re looking for some kind of Dom/sub dynamics world, this really isn’t it, but it’s a lively exploration into the sexual dynamics in a group of friends that’s super close to the good-times vibe you get from Haus scenes in the first couple years of extras.

call me son (one more time) by Summerfrost, Verbyna, and blithelybonny | This is a series, incomplete, and you will love it or be massively put off by it. I mean that as a compliment. I love it. The premise is, Bob Zimmermann and Kent Parson have been having sex since Kent was, like, 19. Everyone in this story has been chewed up: by themselves, by each other, by hockey. Plainly, this is a pretty bleak view of what OMGCP, as a story, is supposedly offering. If you want fic that is dark and glamorous, treading the toxic melange of substance abuse, sex-as-sublimation, and so much money you can’t possibly throw all of it away without trying, this series has that sick-inducing shimmer to it. But, again, its strength is its examination of Kent Parson, textually and meta-textually, as someone to be projected onto. Bob, Alicia, Jack, and Bitty all impute certain feelings of their own onto him, displacing their own issues to a character who’s centralized in every fic but defies neat or total comprehension. Some critiques I’ve read of this series feel it’s too dark, and I’ve also seen it argued on FFA that an overwhelming amount of praise heaped onto these stories has made it tough for other writers to make headway in writing Bob/Kent fic. But I’m also not sure you could engage with Bob/Kent fic without going down this road at some point? I’m sure there are ways to scale it back, but ultimately it’s a story about how hockey’s violent, homophobic, old-guard gatekeeping has continued to set the terms for a younger and ostensibly less toxic culture. I fully embrace PWP fics that tread on the power dynamic without fully excavating it, but buried within any PWP is the fact that a 53-year-old man is ensnaring a 19-year-old, no matter how much the latter is, realistically, into it, and legally empowered to consent. Not to mention the dynamics of it being a 53-year-old man who is the father of the 19-year-old’s ex-boyfriend, and a 53-year-old man who is an eminence grise in the field the 19-year-old is trying to make a career in The sexual element--the vaguely incestuous nature of it--is making textual the subtext of how hockey works, actually: objectification of teenage bodies as older men’s capital.

Coach Z by thistidalwave | Just before the 2009 NHL Entry Draft, tp prospect Jack Zimmermann overdoses on his anxiety medication and is admitted to rehab. His future turns from a clear-cut road to the top into an uncertain path filled with therapy appointments, ignored text messages, a group of boys who aren't there to teach him a lesson about himself, and, of course, hockey. | I keep reccing this fic because it has 360 comments on AO3 but nobody, as far as I can tell, has ever read it; it never appears on rec lists. This isn’t the kind of fanfic I usually go in for, but I can’t help being charmed by it. This is a character study in the truest sense, a kind of Mighty Ducks-but-better view on what Jack’s time coaching peewee hockey might have been like. I have no interest in kids and my own aesthetic is maybe a little darker than this, but I admire this story because it injects vibrancy into a period of Jack’s life that OMGCP has left largely unexplored, and so has the fandom. We know nothing about what made Jack want to go to college, nothing about how he spent his days in between juniors and Samwell. It posits a very sympathetic and patient Jack/Parse dynamic, showcasing the exact kind of ragged teenage push-and-pull that would have led to the circumstances we see in Parse I-III. The outside perspective Jack needs is largely present in an OFC who’s not a love interest. Super unique, somehow both engrossing and low-key.

#dirtbags by angularmomentum | A series that is a Kent Parson/Claude Giroux fuckfest with feelings. I’ve long suspected that Parse is popular in part because he is the character who most easily elides OMGCP with the actual NHL, or rather, NHL fandom; I think he made it appealing to write OMGCP fics where the NHL is a factor. Case in point, this series, which is basically “what if Kent Parson was a real hockey player and therefore part of NHL RPS”? I have only read some NHL RPS, so I’m not the person to assess accuracy, but what I do know is superstar IRL hockey players take turns here as the caricature fanfic versions of themselves, and since Kent Parson is already that, it’s great how seamlessly he integrates into their social fabric. Rambunctious energy peppered with regret and loss, but ultimately this series is farcical, and it doesn’t take its sentimental ending too seriously--which, good.

fated to pretend by nighimpossible | 5 Jack/Kent fics that Ransom and Holster dramatically reenact for the Haus + the truth. | As a fic format, 5+1 doesn’t usually work for me, but this one isn’t just front-loaded with five too-knowing vignettes; it then wraps up by using its +1 better than you might expect. Sometimes I talk about economy of fic, and this one exemplifies it. A zero-waste fic.

go ahead and move along by originally | "Leave, Parse," Jack says. Again. Or: Kent finds himself stuck in a time loop. | Kent Parson is trapped in a Groundhog Day scenario on the day of Epikegster. I’m sure you can imagine, just from that, what happens. And yet I think this fic is super entertaining, reserving some key surprises. What this story is doing is something a lot, and perhaps even the majority, of great Jack/Parse fic wants to do: digging into the question of just why this can’t work in comic canon. Most often this is approached from the past, by writing teenage Jack/Parse deep-dives that examine their lives mid-juniors, or by writing AUs where enough circumstances are shifted that it does work, or via future fics that posit enough growth has happened, and enough things have changed. But this fic makes Parse live the same bad day again and again, testing multiple theories about just how dependent on circumstance and incident real life actually is. Another day, another tone, 10 minutes sooner, not at all--you just can’t know why it didn’t work until you exhaust every possible variable. I worry that this rec has sucked the life out of the story, though--it’s so fun!

I Saw a Life and Strange Lovers by @bluegrasshole | Most AUs in this fandom seem to retell the story in a new setting or with some big detail change, following OMGCP’s rhythm beat-for-beat. I think of this as, “It’s the plot of Check, Please, but” -- they’re doing high school football? They’re acrobats? They’re a/b/o? They’re in a DIY punk band? And so on. These two stories are not that! They’re both 1950s AUs, each deeply felt, and yet hugely different from each other. I Saw a Life is about displacement and fragmentation, two sides of a similar but incongruent social critique; Strange Lovers is a finely wrought social drama about coal mining in Nova Scotia in the 1950s, centered around historical events. I suppose a theme on this rec list is something like, “I don’t even like this, but” -- yes, okay, I don’t even like Dex/Nursey, but--! This fic is so overwhelmingly complete, the AU laid out so carefully that the story breathes with all the background details informing the writing that aren’t actually, in the story; you just know they’re below the surface. (With the exception of one investigation of Jack’s character in a short, separate fic.) I Saw a Life, meanwhile, really tests the limits of the notion that Jack and Bitty are soulmates--not by calling it into question but by asking, rather innovatively, how the setting and place of the comic itself activates that.

Les Hivers de mon enfance by staranise | What do you do when hockey is the language of prayer for your soul, and also the toxic thing that almost killed you? 2009: Jack Zimmermann takes a mental health year. God knows he needs it. | Here’s a fic by someone who’s no longer around so much, but she felt ubiquitous in 2016-2019 OMGCP fandom. Before any of that, though, she wrote this one lovely fic about Jack’s pre-Samwell recovery. The author is Canadian and really irritated by hockey culture, and I think this fic benefits greatly because she is clear-eyed about Jack’s being caught in an exploitative system; it’s hockey he’s in recovery for, in a way. There’s an epistolary element that works for me, too. I read this early on in my time in OMGCP fandom and it really stuck with me.

Lysistrata? I Hardly Know Her! (by which I mean everything) by @tomatowrites | It feels somehow like cheating to recommend OMGCP fanfics by my OMGCP BFF with whom I make an OMGCP podcast where we talk about OMGCP. You know the fics I really want to rec, like truly the ones that speak to some kind of shared depravity, are the ones where Jack is miserably mpreg for the second time and accidentally lets his kid see Kent Parson’s Long John Silver’s shrimp scampi promo spot, which obviously would get twisted into a self-hating three-way. How many times do I have to rec this fic? As many as I need to, is my feeling. If you don’t know, Long John Silver’s is an American fast-food chain that sells, like, fried pollock sandwiches; it is nautical-themed; I have never eaten there; I don’t know where there is one; I don’t eat fried fish. (Shrimp, on the other hand?) All of which is to say that it takes a real genius to investigate a premise that far out. And while a lot of people almost certainly will start reading this humanity’s depths-themed sex scene and back the fuck out, readers with refined taste will note that Kent, the point-of-view character, is right there with you, despairing that he can’t help himself. And so long as you’re in that story collection, honestly, you’ll love petite gems like Jack is transmasc, Jack and Shitty play hockey in 18th-century England, and oh, right, he’s from Georgia. Tomato holds the distinction of being probably the gamest author I know in this fandom, just really like fearless in her pursuit of any range of concept she’s pushed to. (I can push her to?) See, for example, a sublime bandom AU; Bitty is cancelled for buying a maybe-unethically exported Roman fragment of a youth’s torso; or, god, the masterwork that is this future fic series where Jack keeps relapsing and Bitty exiles him to their guesthouse. Do I think you need to read a fic where Bitty is snide about the teen prostitute whose baby they’re adopting? Yes, I mean, he would be snide, don’t tell me he wouldn’t. I could go on, but my main thing here is, if I have to pick just one, I’m going to pick this Lysistrata fic. The premise, literally, is that Bitty reads the Lysistrata and it gives him ideas. Like most of Tomato’s OMGCP fic, it’s a stripping away of the comic’s polite fiction that Jack and Bitty could possibly attain the ideal it reaches in the comic without some kind of messy, efflusive breakdown. Life is like that, you see! Tricky. Like a lot of people, although it’s tough to say precisely how many, I have always intuited that maybe Bitty is kind of a natural top? But obviously when you meet him, as a literal virgin, it’s hard to see how he’d go from zero to self-actualization so neatly. This fic floats a theory, and it has a fun little side plot for Whiskey, something I never thought about or needed before Tomato built it out herein. In conclusion, BONUS: Dex’s gay lobster novel.

only fools rush in and the light of all lights by decinq | This person wrote of the nature of the wound, one of the early, formative Jack/Bitty fics that was oft-recced when I was getting into the fandom in 2016. It forms part of a larger series that deals deeply with how Jack has been shaped by his struggles (? I hate this word) with homophobia and his own mental health. It’s a picture of the character as you might have imagined him much earlier in the comic’s run. The formatting is atrocious and he author’s flair is what Tomato would call “AO3 house style.” It’s a voice that works great for her writing. I think it’s at its best in these shorter fics; the former is about Parse and Shitty stumbling into a relationship almost accidentally; the latter, an eerie PBJ vampire fic. I had begun writing a fic where Parse is a vampire early on in this fandom, only to read this and immediately quit, because you only need one, and this one’s all I need. The Parse/Shitty rare pair fic shares its exuberance with hockey RPS when it’s good: here’s how fun it can be when you’re young, rich, and jocular. And I don’t even like accidental marriage AUs, they’re usually boring, so that says a lot. By all means, read the wound fic; read the entire series. But these are highly unusual.

OVERDOSE and Oomph and a little spin-o-rama by jedusaur | None of these are long, or plotty, and they’re all a little experimental. OVERDOSE is an AU set in a world where you know how you’ll die, but no details; Oomph, a little fic where Jack hears hockey pucks talking to him. This is the kind of stuff I used to think I’d find in fandom forever, coming out of Lotrips lurking in the 2000s: short, zany bursts of energy that surprise and delight. a little spin-o-rama peers at Kent’s character through the grim reality of being the hypertalented superstar stuck on a dead-last team. All three are sparse and stylish in a way that’s really smart, practically economical.

Sowing Season by @agrossunderstatement | Parse and Zimms, Zimms and Parse. Kent Parson's life, from the Q, through his early years with the Aces, to Jack's senior year. Canon divergent. A story of love, loss, moving on, regressing, hockey, and found families of all kinds. | Effectively a novel, digging into Kent’s personal history, mostly concerning his life in juniors but expanding into his present, overlapping with the plot of OMGCP. I think there is room enough for endless speculations on what went down pre-canon; this one offers a fuller life for Kent than nearly any others, digging into him as a whole person rather than as a satellite to Jack or the plot of the comic. Which isn’t to say that the Kent/Jack stuff isn’t dealt with here; it explicitly is. But the fact of Kent Parson’s life, if we can begin to imagine it beyond mere text, would exist before, after, and alongside Jack; he gets to juniors without Jack, presumably, and he is the captain of a hockey team without Jack, and Pinkerton lays the foundation of Parse’s character within a junior hockey that Jack also inhabits, more so that Parse existing for Jack, so to speak. And I’m not implying this latter tactic is wrong; I have certainly employed it, and others have employed it to great impact and effect. But, still, the title of this series tells you what you ought to know: Kent and his story are the potentiality of OMGCP, up to a point; seeds being planted. Young hockey players, similarly. The question implied there is, what will be reaped? And the answer to the latter, in a sense, that reaping is a sort of violence. Which makes this series sound pretty heavy, but it’s not -- more like, realistic.

(tell everyone) you were a good wife by @queerofcups | The biggest problem with pretending that he doesn’t know that Kent Parson is fucking his husband is that Jack can’t tell Kent how grateful he is. | The ne plus ultra of PBJ triangulation; I’ve been squealing to the writer about how good it is since August, begging for behind-the-scenes insights, and I’d only do that if I really meant it. The precarious social fabric stretched across these three chapters is fraying before the reader’s eyes. The details are delicious, and I don’t want to spoil them, but they sing in chorus with the plot. My favorite OMGCP fics, honestly, remove the romance narrative guardrails that keep things in the comic itself humming along. I think Dann’s take is to ask who in this comic has power and what they would end up doing with it. (Or not doing, from another angle.) At one point, early on in its telling, OMGCP looked like it was going to be a story dealing with the compounded traumas of hockey’s discontents. Then, of course, it wasn’t. This is a fic that steps back and asks what the fallout of that oversight would be. But that’s just the moldering core of this fanfic; it’s actually embroidered, like I said, with glittering detail. The color of the suit Bitty wears to his wedding is burned into my brain. The gray manicure of a woman Jack knows. The ingredients in a cake. This is one of those fics I still haven’t reviewed because the thought of stacking everything I could say about it into mere AO3 comments is inadequate.

when you’re ready by megancrtr | The Aces’ director of communications gets the call at 3:13 a.m. Jack Zimmermann has withdrawn from the draft. | “What happened at the draft” is so mythological it gets asked in the comic proper, and I’ve never counted how many fics attempt to answer this question--from Kent’s point of view, even--but it’s gotta be, oh, hundreds. This story replays the situation from the perspective of an Aces staffer who just wants to do her job, and gets at the jarring discordance between the plot of OMGCP in its quest for social justice and the business of actual hockey. Important context is that this story was written around the time the comic was playing out the end of Y3 and start of Y4, and Bitty pointedly asked Jack the question, “why can’t we?” This story reframes the question as literal, rather than rhetorical. A sterling example of fanfic being a gloss on its source.

BONUS, podfics

hockeyed up | There are many things on Jack's mind. Namely: hockey, hockey, Bitty, hockey, anxiety, hockey, hockey, anxiety, Bitty, hockey, hockey, anxiety, and hockey. | A fic read aloud by its French-Canadian author. Also a relatively early OMGCP fanfic; composed while the first semester of Y2 was posting, the story suggests a version of OMGCP that was in some ways more and in other ways less complex than what it would turn into not long after. The real power of this podfic, however, is that it’s read by the writer, so you can hear the intended emphasis in every line. Also, because she’s French-Canadian, Sophie’s intonation is what I picture when I read or write dialogue for Jack.

maybe i’m waking up | It’s almost funny. All he ever wanted was to play hockey, to play in the NHL, to win the Cup. This—Samwell, the team, the Haus—was supposed to be just a detour, but now it feels more like a destination he failed to realize he’s already reached.(Or: Jack signs with the Falconers, graduates, and leaves. It's the hardest thing he's ever done. What comes after is even harder.) | Don’t get too excited; this isn’t finished. A podfic of probably the best-known, most-recced fic in OMGCP fandom. Striking for its use of metatext woven into the story, this is one of several early longform Jack/Bitty fics that posits that maybe Jack has a lot more development to undergo before he can really, truly, be okay--or be okay enough to be with Bitty? To be honest, this story strikes me now as too long, but the parts in it that work are effective beyond that which fanfic demands. Meanwhile, this audio version only covers six chapters, but it’s so slick, so well-realized, so true to the story. Podfic as art.

my own dear friends | Ever since the day he met Jack Zimmermann, Shitty has seen it as his solemn duty to aggressively love him. (He just didn't know how aggressive the love Jack needed would be.) | There’s previous little Jack/Shitty in this fandom and a lot less quality BDSM,

the city’s ours until the fall | Kent has been, historically, good at this—forgetting about things until suddenly he doesn’t, and then it’s like the scar has never been there in the first place, just the wound. (Or: Kent Parson lets himself be happy, after all this time.) | I’ve never read this fic and I never will. I cannot imagine how, no matter how good it is, it could compare to the version that lives in my head, with Kent’s voice so totally realized. Vocal fry and pathos, a languid energy that I still think about when I think about Parse.

the model home | It’s going to be better, and that’s great, but sometimes Jack thinks, why can’t it be good right now? | j/k j/k, this is a self-reminder to finally one day review this.

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mythiccheroacademia · 4 years

Text

No, this is

A/N: Talk about record timing. Can’t believe I got this out in one go. This is the last part of the three part Sero fanfic series. No more angst. Y’all got lucky with this one ;)

Sorry for the mushiness. You and Sero are simps™️. It was kind of ugly. However, it couldn’t be helped.

I had fun writing this. I hope you had fun too. Enjoy 🖤

Pairing: Sero X Fem!Reader

Warnings: cussing, not graphic but heavily implied under-aged sex that teenagers don’t do (hope you noted the sarcasm), and fluffiness!

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

No, this is

It was 24 days post-breakup. You were doing better. Much better. There were still days when the tears would burn, but it was nothing crippling. Not like it used to be. Besides, between training and your academics, you didn’t have time to mope around. You might be heartbroken, but you weren’t going deter your life because of it.

You sat on your couch, studying for your Calculus test the next day. The busy work had been down to a minimal, so you had more time to study for exams. For now, you were reviewing everything you and Momo had reviewed during the evening.

Then your phone buzzed.

You squinted as you read the name, assuring yourself you weren’t seeing wrong.

It was Sero.

It had been over three weeks since you received a text from him. And vice-versa. You almost forgot his contact was in your phone. Hagakure had said texting him in a moment of weakness would mean double heartache for you. So, you made yourself suppress any urges to text him.

There was a voice inside your head to ignore the message. It was only recently that you had been okay with seeing him on a daily basis. And the class dynamic was going back to normal. You didn’t want to ruin it again—

He double—no—triple texted.

Maybe you shouldn’t have opened it as quickly as you did.

Sero: Hey, how are you doing?

Sero:

Okay, that was probably weird. I’m sorry for texting you after all this time. I know I’m probably the last person you want on your phone so, I’ll make these next few paragraphs as quick as possible

Sero:

At first, I thought time apart would be good for us. 24 hours after, I was a mess, but seeing you smile and laugh…I thought I could suck it up and move on if you were too. Three weeks in, and I’m going crazy not being able to talk to you. I know it’s almost been a month and I am every bit of a coward for only now growing the balls to finally reach out to you, but I need you to know this. I didn’t want to break-up. I never did. I only said that because I was angry, defensive and I wanted to hurt you. It was in the heat of the moment, but that’s no excuse. I was being a dick. I’m sorry for hurting you. I didn’t mean to be condescending. I didn’t mean to lose my temper. I never mean to make you feel like I don’t have time for you.

Sero: I would spend every waking moment with you if I could, but it’s just been a bit overwhelming lately with school. Something I know you can relate to and I’m sorry was acting like I was alone in that. I feel like such an asshole for letting you go. You’re worth fighting for, Y/N. These past 18 months have been so amazing and I’m not ready to let that go. I never want to. I want to be by your side through thick and thin. I’m sorry for not showing you that as of late, but I swear it still holds true

Sero: Long story short, I’m willing to fix this if you want to. I want to talk. Face to face. If you don’t want to get back together, I understand. I will respect your decision no matter what. I just want to make sure both of us lay our issues on the table so, at the very least, we get closure and, hopefully, stay friends. Know that you will always have me as your biggest supporter, even if it’s not in the way I want to be

Sero: I love you, Y/N. Now and forever. I’m so sorry I ever hurt you

He watched the dots in the chat bubble bounce, on and off, for 30 minutes.

You: Hey

Sero: Hey

You: Apology accepted. Thank you for reaching out and I didn’t mean to leave you on read. I just had to type up my corny paragraph in notes before I sent it to you. You know how I get

Sero: Of course. And even if you did mean to, I would deserve it

Sero: And I’m all ears…or eyes?

You laughed at that. Even after all this time, he was still cracking jokes.

You: I thought I could make peace with what happened that night. It was so hard going to bed, knowing we had fought and not making up. But you looked like you were moving on and I didn’t want you to pity me. So, I chose to move on to. Or, at least I tried to.

You; The truth is, I never wanted to break-up with you. I don’t even know why I ever suggested the idea. I was mad and I just started rambling, finding whatever I could say to hurt you like I was hurting. I’m sorry for that. It makes me feel happy that you feel the same way. When I heard you agree with me, I felt like I could’ve died right there. I thought ‘I just helped him get rid of myself.’ I felt like the biggest idiot for ruining our relationship. Thank you for apologizing, but I also have things to apologize for.

You: I’m sorry for storming in your room with an attitude. I’m sorry for being a hypocrite and getting angry with you whenever you had schoolwork. That’s important and I was being a jerk. When I confronted you, I shouldn’t have lost my temper like that either. I haven’t loved anyone like I love you, Sero. Losing you broke my heart in ways I didn’t think were possible. 18 months isn’t enough time. I probably sound selfish, but I want more. With you. Only you. I want to talk it out. I know we can fix this. I want to so badly because I love you too much to let you go

You: I’m so sorry for hurting you

Sero: apology accepted. not to be annoying, but you don’t know how happy I am rn. i’d kiss you if i could

You: simp

You: talk tonight?

Sero: look who’s talking

Sero: and as much as I want to, you have the calculus test tomorrow, don’t you? I want you to get all the study time you can

Sero: tomorrow night?

You: no, you have tutoring for the Japanese Lit exam Friday. I know how hard you’ve been working in that class, so I want you to put all your energy on that

You: we can talk after school Friday?

Sero: okay, sounds good

You: okay

You: thank you for not giving up on me

Sero: never

Sero: I love you, baby. I’m sorry again

You: I know. I love you more

Sero: impossible

…

The next day, your classmates were very confused to see the two of you walk into homeroom together. They gaped as you laughed at a joke he cracked.

After nearly a month of ignoring one another, you two were suddenly keke-ing it up? What?

Your friends wanted answers. So, you were forced to tell them after class. Most of them were happy the two of you would talk it out. They respected your split but missed how happy you two when you were together. It just made sense.

Mina and Bakugo said they would only be happy if the talk went well. Bless their hearts.

On Friday night, you were just about to text Sero to ask where and when you’d talk. Before you could send the message, a knock on your window made you jump.

“Helloooo~” the perpetrator goofily sung, dangling by his tape.

You rolled your eyes as you opened the window to let him in.

“You scared the shit out of me. I thought you said no more dangling by windows like a stalker?” you teased.

“I did?” he chuckled.

You let him use your shoulder as support as you held his waist and he climbed through the window. Detaching himself from the used tape, he finally stood on his feet, but his arms never left you.

A moment passed between you two as you stared at one another. Sero only looked at your smile for three seconds before he took your lips with his own. Your hands threaded through his hair as his cupped your cheeks, squeezing out all the space between you.

The kiss was firm, desperate, and it kind of hurt; but it was everything you two needed at that moment. It was a crash course of the 28 days you spent apart. The feeling of your lips pressed against his was arresting. You couldn’t think. All you could do was relish in the feeling of relief. Relief that you were re-learning that he tasted like warm cinnamon and spice.

It was oxygen that separated you two. You kissed one of his hands on your cheeks and Sero connected your foreheads.

“I missed you,” he whispered, against your lips. “I was an idiot.”

“You were.” You softly kissed him, biting his bottom lip and enjoying the way he groaned. “But I was too. I missed you so much.”

“Forgive me?”

“Only if you’ll forgive me.”

“Always,” he smiled.

You returned it tenfold. “Always,” you repeated.

Then your lips found one another again. This time, you drew impossibley closer. Your arms found purchase around his neck as his hands slid down to your hips. Your tongues explored the warm cavern of the other’s mouth, making up for lost time. You moaned into him and Sero felt his dick twitch. One hand gripped the back of your head, tilting your head so he could have even more access. His other hand gripped your ass, making you whine in need. Just as your hands touched the warm skin on his taut stomach, Sero pulled your head back.

“Fuck—wait, baby,” he panted.

“What?” you hissed, pissed he was interrupting.

Even with his eyes clouded with lust, Sero would always prove to be the rational one in the relationship.

“W-we still have things we need to talk about.”

“Hanta, you walked in here, your hair in a ponytail, and no underwear under your sweatpants. Your grey sweatpants,” you enunciated. “And you wanna talk?”

“W-well, this is important and—” He tried to continue even as you forced yourself onto his neck. He forgot how sensitive he was there. And were you always this good with your tongue? “A-and—shit—I mean, we promised to talk…talk about wh-what weeee neeeed…oooh right there sweetheart—fuck! No!”

He pulled you away again, this time glaring down at you. However, he didn’t manage long from seeing your glistening lips from sucking on his skin. Your eyes glowed in pride at the darkening mark and they flickered upwards, meeting his crumbling resolve. You licked your bottom lip, eyeing him like he was a four-course meal.

You were gonna kill him one day.

“We need to talk about how to improve our relationship,” he gulped.

You quirked an eyebrow but smiled. “How about a deal? We get rid of this,” he curses as you palm his erection. “And then we can spend the night talking, yeah?”

He didn’t even miss a beat.

“Bet.”

His mouth was on yours in an instant. You figure yourselves out between kisses.

“Door?”

“Locked,” you confirmed. “Condoms?”

Sero hissed out another curse. “Shit, no. I didn’t think we’d—”

“Don’t worry about it. I have some in the drawer.” You jump and he effortlessly catches you so your secure on his hips. The adornment in his eyes makes your stomach do flips. You’ve missed this. You’ve missed him. You can’t believe you almost let him go.

“I love you,” he whispered, kissing you almost impossibly soft.

You return it. “I love you too. Now, make love to me, Sero Hanta.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

A third of the night was spent tangled beneath the sheets, letting your bodies explore each other until not a single curve or scar was left untouched. After burning through five condoms, the other third was left for conversation. Vulnerable moments were shared. Some tears were shed, but those intimate truths would forever be treasured. Finally, the remainer of the night was spent asleep, wrapped in the other’s arms. A silent vow floating between your lips that you would never let go.

Because, this truly was better.

#sero x reader #sero hanta #sero hanta x reader #mha x reader #sero fanfic #sero imagine #sero scenariio #bnha x reader #mha x poc!reader #mha x black reader #mha romance #bnha romance #bnha simps #honorable mentions:#bakugo #mina ashido #class 1-a is invested #sero smut but not really #kind of sad this is ending but i'm glad it's on a good note

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furiousgoldfish · 4 years

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I don't usually write so much about personal stuff but since I am doing very bad and don't have anyone to talk to (or internet, sorry to everyone waiting for replies) I am going to write about a nightmare I had last night that's been haunting me. (Trigger warnings for dream torture, violence, blood, if you're sensitive to someone's pain this is the time to stop reading.) In the nightmare, I was tied up deep underground, in a dark basement, by my narcissistic grandma. She had a knife in her hand and looked insane. She told me "I've put magic inside of your body, and now I'm going to cut it out", then she took the knife and cut my arm open all the way to the elbow. I was screaming, and knew I had to get out of there because she was convinced there was something inside of me and she would cut me all open to take it out. I managed to get out of the ropes and ran out into the hallway, but she was right behind me with a knife. I ran into another room where my childhood friend was, and I smiled and gave the rope to them, thanking them for borrowing it. I had to act natural because grandma was right outside the door, listening to what I was going to say. I was too scared to say what was done to me because she could hear me. I waited until I thought she was gone, then crumbled to the floor and hid my face and said what happened to me. But my friend didn't care. They told me not to disturb them because they've been up studying all night for a test. I asked them when the test was, and they got angry and started yelling at me. I became frightened then, because grandma never left the door and was still listening in, and now knew my friend was not going to protect me, and she could take me down anytime. That's where I woke up. I haven't calmed down since then. It's hard to look at my hand without seeing the blood. This nightmare isn't what actually happened to me in real life, but looking back, it isn't that far from reality. I was locked up in basement and beaten by grandma. I was also chased by her while she'd be holding a weapon. She would often say there were demons inside of me and she had to beat them out of me. I remember I was always on extremely high alert not to be on the opposite side of the room with her and always close to the door, in case she would lock me in and hurt me. So even though these elements were enhanced in the nightmare, they were not made up. And my childhood friend used to be nice when I was little, but I never could tell them anything that was happening to me at home, I remember sitting down and fretting just how low they would think of me if they could see me broken and defeated; I never allowed anyone to see me unwell. But after I grew up I admitted to bits and pieces and my friend did not seem to take it seriously, and on multiple occasions tried to deliver letters, messages and packages from my parents, even pressuring and guilting me to take them and yelling at me for having a bad reaction and forcing me to feel bad for their feelings because "i reacted that way". So I became afraid of my only childhood friend. Because they fought on the side of my parents even after finding out the truth. Thus their role in the nightmare. They borrowed the rope to grandma that I was tied with. I always thought that stuff grandma put me thru was messed up, but I realize now it was really frightening to me. I hadn't felt fear as a kid, my memories are completely detached from emotion. The nightmare woke up that terror and it's only now I feel like I'm about to get killed. I also got a series of flashbacks connected to her which are extremely disturbing, and it's twisting the perception of my childhood. Because that's not how I remember it, I don't remember it being that bad. It's hard to admit it must have been. But the facts and the aftermath show it. I really was the kid who was locked up and beaten in the basement. I didn't feel like that was a real thing that happened to me, until now. I don't know why I'm writing this publicly, it's not a thing I could just say to a person, but I'm guessing, everyone is dealing with trauma more than usual right now, and everyone must be processing something awful. I wonder if there's more people having similar experiences right now and struggling to make sense of it. If you're having similar experiences, feel free to add them to this post. I wont be able to discuss it with everyone but I guess it would still be nice to have one big "trauma I'm processing right now" post. And it doesn't have to be this dramatic, whatever is making you re-live past fear and pain is traumatic enough.

#child abuse #trauma #physical abuse #narcissistic abuse #trauma processing #nightmare #flashbacks #reliving past #trauma symptoms #personal #okay to reblog #I might delete this later #too personal

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snowdice · 4 years

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Gaps in His Files (Part 11) [Relabeled; Refiled Series]

Fandom: Sanders Sides

Relationships: Logan/Patton

Characters:

Main: Logan, Patton

Appear: Remy, Virgil (but only in the epilogue)

Summary:

Logan Berry has learned many things the last 10 years: a lot of math and physics, a bit of humility, and how to be a hero being just a few. Through his education, his experience teaching, and his exploits as the superhero Bluebird, he’s changed in a lot of small and large ways. He has recorded these changes in well-organized documents and files. He’s even had to create two new file designations: a red one for files about his moonlighting at Bluebird, and a light blue one dedicated to his boyfriend, Patton.

When Bluebird is targeted by a memory device and all of those 10 years of progress suddenly disappear, Patton Sanders and Logan’s extensive files are left as his only resource to get those memories back. But what is Patton supposed to do when there are clear gaps in his files? And what does he do when he is one of them?

This is set 25 years before Sometimes Labels Fail though it’s story is completely independent of it and it is not necessary to read that one first.

Notes: Superhero AU, memory loss, past child abuse, past child neglect, unhealthy ideas about ones place in relationships, emotional suppression, self-deprecating thoughts, medical procedures mentioned, very brief unhealthy views of sex

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10

Logan had not lied to Patton this morning. He was not going to go to the university today, but… he didn’t think he was going to find any answers in this apartment. And he did want answers now. He had always wanted to get his memories back of course, but something a little more urgent had been niggling in the back of his mind since yesterday to the point of a headache.

He’d spent the first hour after Patton left searching around the apartment. The two of them had fallen asleep either on the office floor or in the living room the last few nights while going through Logan’s files in the hopes that those would return his memories. They hadn’t; Logan was beginning to think they wouldn’t. There was something missing from the files that Logan could not determine. The files they were reading were extensive, but heartless: noncontextualized receipts, detached notes, and aloof reports. Logan was all for facts most of the time, but his notes gave little insight into meaning. Perhaps if he got his memories back, he should reevaluate his filing system’s configuration. He knew by now he wasn’t going to find anything within those pages.

So, instead of continuing to read through old receipts, he decided to investigate a room he hadn’t been in yet: the bedroom. The blinds were thick and had been closed tight keeping the room dark enough that it could be night. He’d left them closed and flipped on the light. Like most of the apartment, there weren’t many decorations. There was just a large bed, carefully made that took up most of the large room and a nightstand with only a reading lamp on it. The only thing that seemed out of place was the suit he found in the closet covered in a white plastic bag. When he unwrapped the suit, he found it was not something Logan would ever think to wear. He much preferred plain black suits over the honestly rather gaudy golden one he found inside the plastic cover. He was unsure why he’d apparently purchased such a thing especially since he seemed to have a perfectly functional black one in the closet too.

Then he’d laid in the bed that he knew he must have slept in every night for years judging by the way the right side molded to his body. The sheets had smelled weird somehow, though not as though they’d been spoiled, and he’d found himself rolling toward the other side, his hand finding a pillow in the center of the bed. He’d felt something like a tearing in his chest and found himself curling around the pillow so he could hug it to his chest. For the first time since he’d woken in this time, he’d been absolutely certain that something of his memories must still be in his head because this… this was something like a word on the tip of his tongue he couldn’t quite capture.

Part of him had just wanted to go to sleep in this strange, but not strange bed, curled around that pillow, but the other part had forced him to his feet.

He’d gone back to the main room and found his wallet. He dug out the receipts there before spreading them out on the kitchen counter in chronological order.

He was going to retrace his steps from the week before the incident.

Most of the receipts were places on or around the college campus. He decided to avoid the ones on campus, staying true to his word, but planned to work his way out using the university as the epicenter.

The first place he went was a coffee shop which according to the address on the receipts was only a few blocks from where his office building was. It was called ‘The Hideout’ and was the source of multiple receipts. He was easily able to find it on foot.

The second he walked into the shop, he was hit by a wave of déjà vu so strong that he felt he might get a nose bleed. It was as though he’d walked the path to the cash register thousands of times in a dream.

“Hey Logan!” a cheery man said. “I haven’t seen you or Patton in days. I was getting worried.”

“I have been ill and am still recovering,” he replied. “Patton has been caring for me.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, but I’m glad you’re feeling well enough to be out and about. Do you just want your usual coffee or are you eating?”

“I’d like a turkey sandwich,” he said.

“One turkey sandwich, no tomatoes,” the man said, “and a coffee with two sugars, don’t tell Patton.��

Logan gave him a tight-lipped smile and handed him a twenty-dollar bill, adding another receipt from the establishment to the pile in his wallet.

He sat at a corner table and the sight of the calm coffee shop both made him want to relax and want to jump out of his skin. There were ghosts dancing in front of his eyes: little wisps of figures that weren’t there and conversations that weren’t happening. His head hurt.

He ate the sandwich and drank the coffee, the taste as familiar and unknown as the rest of this place. The man at the till waved to him when he left.

The next place was a small bookstore that he walked around for half an hour and the grocery store on the corner. Each prickled familiarly at the back of his skull but did not give him quite the pounding headache as the coffee shop had.

He felt like a ghost haunting his own life.

There were a few other places he found himself, a couple of fast food restaurants and a juice bar in a gym that didn’t seem to affect him at all.

Last, he ended up outside a tailor’s shop farther from the university than anything else. He had a feeling this had been the source of the new suit in his closet. He didn’t go inside, just stared at the mannequins in the window for a long time before he walked away.

He got back to his apartment a bit past noon. Perhaps he should not have been surprised after yesterday that there was a figure on the couch. Logan froze. Patton did not react for a moment to the sound of Logan entering the apartment and Logan wondered if he’d fallen asleep sitting up with his head in his hands.

“Did you go to class?” he asked after a few long moments, still not moving.

“No,” Logan answered.

After enough time that Logan started to shift uncomfortably, he removed his hands and gave a sharp nod. “I’m glad to see you aren’t dead.”

“Would you like to know where I went?” Logan would like to tell him, especially because now it felt like the missing memories, wherever they were in his head, were slamming into whatever figurative wall the memory gun had erected in his mind.

Yet, Patton said, “no. Not right now.” He got to his feet then. “What would you like for lunch?”

He was not hungry as he’d eaten recently, but he wasn’t going to say that. “Anything is fine.”

“I’ll make buffalo chicken tenders,” he said and once again Logan was stricken that the man with an expression on his face that on lesser men meant Logan was about to be cold-cocked would put forth the effort to make one of Logan’s favorite lunch time foods.

Logan wanted his memories back and not even for himself. He just wanted to remember how to wipe that expression off Patton’s face and wondered why on Earth future him hadn’t bother to write that down.

Want to read more? Click below!

AO3 Part 12 Part 13 Part 14 Epilogue

#sanders sides #logan sanders #patton sanders #logicality #tsss #superhero au #memory loss #past child abuse #past child neglect #emotional suppression #self deprecation #gaps in his files #labeled universe #relabeled; refiled #adriana writes

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codenamesazanka · 4 years

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A meta about Dabi! I surprise myself; but HUGE DISCLAIMER: Dabi is still not a favorite character at all, and I am biased as hell. This is my interpretation of events. I will not be reading his behavior as if he is without doubt Touya Todoroki - that’s not at all confirmed - and so I will be less sympathetic due to not coming from that perspective. Also, extremely long meta.

First up: I’ll take Dabi for his word that he doesn’t gave a crap about the League.

I’m not saying he absolutely does not have a single milligram of care for the League - he does seem to rely on and intend for them to provide support for his goal; but he’s very much detached from everyone else, and haven’t demonstrated much empathy for any member of the League. Not quite part of the ‘Found Family’.

It’s very possible that he could be lying, trying look tough in front of the Hero.

But the evidence from the past chapters kinda shows that he means his words. Here’s him burning away Twice clones and barely avoid hitting Real!Twice:

“He never actually hit Twice,” “He had no choice cuz Hawks was right there,’ ‘He knew those aren’t the real Twice, and what do you expect? He’s a villain, and he expects his teammates to take care of themselves.”(*1)

All fair! Still, I’ll say this attack is pretty careless; and moreover, it took away some of their much needed manpower. Two Twice clones could’ve created four more Twices and so on; and at the very least might have interfered with Hawks targeting the real Twice.

And here’s him attacking Hawks in a way that would’ve burned Twice badly.

Images are out of order, my apologies, but these panels show that 1) Dabi had really intended to hit Hawks (and Twice), what with him being shocked that Hawks had been able to evade the attack; 2) Dabi’s fire output was very strong, and so 3) as Hawks points out, he nearly burned up Twice.

Even if he thought that Hawks would protect Twice, that’s still quite a risky move that would’ve badly injure a fellow League Member.

Here’s a comparison of Dabi and Mr. Compress during the battle in Deika:

In the first image, after Mr. Compress ask for help, Dabi dismisses him. Sure, he does point out the Twice clones shortly after, but it cold enough that Mr. Compress even asks, ‘Are you so unfeeling?!’.

Meanwhile, when it’s Dabi in danger, Mr. Compress is concerned for him, wishes to help, and yeah, that ‘Poor Dabi!’

All throughout My Villain Academia, he’s been pretty rude and aloof from everyone:

Refusing to help fight Gigantomachia (to go recruit a Hero that he never trusted in the first place) when everyone is ready to eat cold dirt for a month and a half with Shigaraki.

And:

Dismissing everyone’s effort, and insulting them.

In fact, in comparison to everyone else in the League, Dabi is really lacking. We all know Twice is a total sweetheart who would do anything for the League; Spinner is canonically in love with Shigaraki explicitly stated that his goal is to help Shigaraki realize his vision (Chapter 233). Toga showed her care for Twice during the Overhaul mess (Chapter 148). And Mr. Compress, again, was worried for Dabi (Chapter 230), wanted the Doc to help Shigaraki (238), and is in general genial towards his teammates.

I think, overall, narratively in both writing and visuals, Dabi is written to be rather unlikeable to the reader (or at least neutral).

My Villain Academia is the arc where the League are the protagonists, the Point-of-View characters: we hear their thoughts, and we learn their backstories.

A huge messy image! I’m sorry! But from the silly faces, to the little actions (Mr. Compress whispering, complete with ‘psst psst’), to the asides (Mr Compress, again, “Where did you pull that phone out of?”), these give us a bit of funny moments that kinda endears the League to us. (Even Giran gets a moment or two.)

Not quite Dabi though. We get a glimpse of his thoughts at the beginning of Chapter 228 when he encounters Geten, we have some interactions with Twice that are humorous (though it’s Twice carrying out the majority of it), and... that’s it.

“What about Mr. Compress? We got no backstory.”; “What about Toga? We don’t really hear her thoughts either?” Yes to all those points, but these were made up for: as shown above, Mr. Compress having those little moments; and Toga, who already demonstrated her care for Twice in the Overhaul Arc, and we’re reminded of that directly when Twice brings out the handkerchief she gave him.

There, of course, is that moment that he goes to attack Hawks and help Twice in Chapters 264-266. Good of him, right? Heroic, even.

Except that 'rescue’ doesn’t really give it a feeling of ‘The Calvary Has Arrived!’. IMO. For one thing, he almost burned Twice. For another, the reaction from Twice is more desperate than relief or joy. Compare with Toga and Mr. Compress’s clear utter joy at being saved by Twice.

(And no could forget those amazing spreads of Twice overcoming his trauma and unleashing Sad Man’s Parade? Those evokes such a feeling of “THE CALVARY IS HERE”, omg. Dabi’s flame entrance is not quite. *To me* )

I would even go as far to say as Dabi is being portrayed as a possible “third party” antagonist.

Yes, the League are already the main antagonists in the overall story, but they’re quite sympathetic-- Dabi, in relation to the League, although being a member, is the odd one out in many aspects.

I think the recent chapters with Twice and Hawks and Dabi illustrates this really well-- Because we go from [Twice vs Hawks] with Hawks as the POV ‘bad guy’; and now we have [Hawks vs Dabi], Dabi as the bad guy. The story writing and the art shifts immediately to portray that, aimed at directing our empathy, at the character Horikoshi wants us to root for.

In Chapter 264 and 265, no doubt we’re to root for Twice. All those flashbacks! Him cowering on the ground. His heart breaking because he trusted Hawks. We feel for him. And so Hawks is portrayed as the ‘Villain’-- but not completely.

For Hawks, we go from dark and menacing, him being looming and scary...then immediately move to seeing Hawks expression of remorse. Horikoshi wants us to understand Hawks is conflicted. And he’s not doing this for fun. And finally, they’re shown as equals in the fight: Twice and Hawk’s faces aligned at even levels.

Chapter 266, we finally have the three together. Most definitely, Dabi is on Twice’s side - but like I said, it’s not actually showing Dabi as a reliable backup.

Then we get to Chapter 267. We first start off with that cute image if the Fataxi. It’s adorable. Then Tokoyami notices the flames, the flying, putting two and two together. This positions them as sorta the main focus. We’re back in the Heroes’ POV.

Moving onto the fight, I do sense anger from Dabi: the flames, the stomping, the stomping flames. But it’s more portrayed as manic, sadistic anger, instead of grief, vengeful anger. And that smile!

It’s a true villain smile. The stretching of the corners of the mouth, and the way the eyes are curved. Joyful smiles tightens up the eyes. And sure, you can have a contradictory smile while angry and in grief, a grimace, but there’s other things to cue at that - tears, sweat drops, the eyes again - usually big and triangular.

Do I think it’s possible he’s smiling contradictory? That he’s feeling real sadness and anger at Twice’s death? Yeah, it’s possible. But it’s also possible he isn’t - and I feel that’s the more likely option, given all he says about Twice being useful and about Stain’s philosophy (*remember Stain didn’t like Shigaraki! he didn’t like Villains either. He was going to purge the world of both.)

Anyways, Hawks is right there, on the ground, trying to shield himself. It’s a pitiful look. He’s clearly drawn as the victim we’re to emphasize with, because this doesn’t look like a fight between equals. Just one guy playing with the other, having the ability to incinerate him immediately, but dragging it out.

(True, Dabi’s a villain, and-- “Didn’t Shigaraki do the same thing? With Overhaul? Dude chopped off limbs and laughed.” Yes! Absolutely. But Chapter 160 was from the League’s POV, and everything about it was to position the League as winners, badasses, ‘The Next’.)

(My god, we even get a Baby Hawks flashback for us to fawn over.)

Here, it’s Hawk’s POV and Dabi is full Villain imagery. Hawks has to looking up from a protective pose - at a very menacing Dabi, looming over, stepping on him. The panels with the outside fighting and the city, linked with Dabi smiling - that’s classic {‘I’m going to target and hurt the world’ evil mastermind monologue, insert evil laughter}.

Once Tokoyami enters the scene, there’s no more argument. A likeable Hero student? Arriving to protect his mentor? He’s the clear Hero we’re to cheer for, against Dabi, (who we never even get to bond with during MVA... unlike Twice).

All in All, Dabi rejects the Heroes... and he also rejects the League.

The thing that confuses me most about this whole arc so far is “Why the fuck did Dabi recruit Hawks?” He said he knew Hawks was lying from the start, but he still let a Hero into the club. Moreover, if Dabi noticed and knew enough to guess where Twice and Hawks is the moment the Hero attack started; if he knew enough to even think “This isn’t your fault, Twice,” then why didn’t Dabi do anything sooner?

We don’t know his specific goal yet. Did Hawks factor into it in an important way? He’s willing to kill Hawks right now. It could be that Hawks, by now, is more dangerous than he is worth as a trap for the heroes, say, so it’s time to cut some losses.

But Hawks had pretty much only brought bad luck for Villains: Made Endeavor look good; found out about the MLA and discovered their plot; discovered the hospital; set up this attack. None of it furthers Dabi’s stated goal to Kill All Heroes, and none of it helps the League either.

Until we get his gameplan, I can honestly regard him as dumb. What is this series of events???

(Even if the other League Members were to be dumb and fuck up like Dabi, we know they did it with good intentions for Shigaraki, for the League.

Toga, doing risky things: Literally said, “I’m sure [retrieving Deku’s blood, betraying the Hassaikai] will make Tomura happy.”

Twice, the sweetheart: recruited Overhaul cuz he thought he was a good guy. Befriended Hawks because he thought Hawks believed in the cause.

Mr. Compress: Kinda ruined the ‘kidnap Bakugou’ thing; but since then he hasn’t done anything. And we’re sure of his sincerity because: Lost an arm, still stayed with the League, fought for a month+ with a broken prosthetic.

Spinner: Was a Stain fanboy, but has stopped.)

“This isn’t your fault, Twice,” and it’s true. It’s not Twice’s fault at all. It’s Dabi’s. The blame has to be on Dabi.

So. Dabi. Looking more and more to be on neither side, and now having wronged both. What’s gonna happen to him?

Not sure, but I’ve got a theory he might actually be killed by Shigaraki, to develop Shigaraki and the League. But that’s for another post.

(*1) “...what do you expect? He’s a villain, and he expects his teammates to take care of themselves.” Also true. And I am aware that Shigaraki did the same thing when he decayed that tower no knowing whether Giran got rescued yet or not, so there was some callousness there. But consider: one guy had been so sleep-deprived for one and a half months that he had hallucinated slightly and was wobbling with each movement; and the other has not.

All this is my opinion and impressions. Sorry if it’s unclear at points. Thanks for reading!!!!! And thank you so much to friends that helped me brainstorm and discuss this! Your contributions are invaluable.

#Dabi #League of Villains #bnha #mha #meta #nalslastworkingbraincell

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perfecting-procrastination · 4 years

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New Beginnings - VAV (Part 1 - Give me more)

Dom!Reader x Lou

I felt a bit inspired lately and wanted to write a series on VAV so here you go! The reader has just arrived in Korea as a student and moves into the same apartment complex as the boys. Let’s just say things get kinkyy....

Warnings: 18+, Dom!reader, TEASING, Oral.

You recently moved into a new apartment complex, it was only temporary as you decided to transfer over to South Korea for your studies. Life back at home was becoming boring and you struggled to find things that would excite you in your small town. You were desperate for a change. So as soon as you saw the ads for studying abroad, you couldn't help yourself. You felt confident that Korea could give you that fulfilment as you continually thought to yourself, "I need somewhere completely different, something I haven't experienced before."

You were unpacking your last bits at the apartment, feeling accomplished. It was finally all coming together and you couldn't wait to relax in your OWN place in KOREA?! It all felt surreal and you were still struggling to process all the excitement. You had only one last box to grab from your car, you paced downstairs with excitement. Unlocking your car, you attempt to grab the last box. However, you didn't anticipate how heavy it was and struggle is written all over your face. While still attempting, you feel a tall presence behind you. "Do you need some help? You look like you are struggling there." You place down the box and turn around to see this tall beautiful man. He has soft skin and innocent eyes. "Haha, yes I am for sure. I don't want to trouble you though." You said politely. He chuckles, "No, no its fine. I am happy to help". You smile back at him and he moves past you to pick up the box. He carries it with such ease that it makes you question your own strength. You walk over to the entrance and open the door to let him through. He smiles and nods back at you. As you both make your way upstairs to your apartment in the elevator, you can sense that he is feeling shy ever since you both stepped into the small enclosed space. "So, do you have a name?" you say with a giggle. He smirks back at you and says, "Haha, yes I do. Its Lou, sorry I should have asked for yours." You smile, "Ahh nice, well nice to meet you Lou. I am (Y/N)". You finally arrive at your floor and he waves for you to go first. As you step back you can't help but feel like Lou is stopping himself from checking you out, you are wearing a particularly figure hugging skirt that makes your bum look great.

You arrived at your door and hastily opened it to let Lou through, you couldn't help yourself but check out this fine man. He is so tall with such broad shoulders accompanied with the most captivating face you've ever seen. He places the box down, his eyes meet yours causing you to break contact. Feeling shy, you focus your eyes to the floor because your mind is so clouded with all the dirty things you could do to him. Questioning what kind of things he was into. Would he be the type to let you take control or would he be the one dominating you? Either way, you are biting your lip harshly in excitement. Lou could see you were getting yourself into a mess and watched your lips hungrily. "So, why have you come to Korea?", you snap back to reality after hearing his low voice and look towards him, "Well, life at home was getting pretty boring and just felt like a change in scenery was much needed". He smiles, "Well you've come to the right place, its amazing here and I'd happily show you around if you like". Not only is this man drop dead gorgeous but he is also so kind. This is so rare for you as you were messed over by so many guys back at home, you need someone like Lou. You look deep into his eyes and smile, "Thank you, I will be sure to take up that offer. Would you like me to make you anything? Some water maybe?" He nods, "Yes please". You walk over to the kitchen, Lou follows closely behind. You pour some water into a glass and hand it to Lou. His hands lightly touches yours and you both share a glance. You could feel your heart beating outside of your chest and couldn't help but imagine all those dirty things again. You tug on your bottom lip and stare at Lou hungrily. He stares down at your lips, wanting so badly to taste them. You could feel the heat rising and felt something take over you. Instantly, you take the glass and move it out the way. You turn around to see Lou's confused face, and pacing up to him, you grab his shirt. Pulling him in close, you attach your lips to his. At first, you were worried that Lou wouldn't kiss you back. But then you felt his lips move with yours, threading his right hand through your hair. You pull him closer, slowly poking your tongue in his mouth. Hungry for Lou to reciprocate. He takes his left hand and pulls your waist in closer, desperately wanting. You can feel the heat from your core intensify, you needed him and you needed him now. You break from the kiss and signal for him to lift you onto the kitchen counter. Lou doesn't hesitate to pick you up and place you on the cold hard surface. Feeling Lou wrap his hands around your thighs made you desperate for more. You open your legs and pull him in closer, attaching your lips back to his. You can feel how hard he is through his jeans, it is torturous. He begins trailing his kisses down your neck, you couldn't help but let a moan escape your lips. You begin to thread your fingers through his thick black hair, tugging lightly. You are getting desperate and are not going to wait any longer. You immediately tug his hair and move him away from your neck. His eyes pierce yours, growing dark. You look at him with an evil smirk, "Fingers. Now." you demand. Lou looks at you, taken back by your sudden request. "Do I need to repeat myself?" you question. He shakes his head, almost mesmerised by your dominance. You lift up your skirt allowing him more access. As Lou moves his right hand to in between your legs, you suddenly grab it and move it towards your mouth. You begin to slowly suck on his two fingers, keeping full eye contact with Lou. You lightly swirl your tongue around his fingers, causing a deep throaty moan to escape his lips. You sluggishly remove his fingers from your mouth, moving it towards your core. You pull him in tight with your spare hand and whisper closely "I’m waiting". His eyes grow wide and needy. He nods, moving your panties to one side and slowly sliding his wet fingers between your soaked folds. You release a breathy moan from the contact. He begins to tease your clit with his thumb while still moving his fingers between the folds, going at a painfully sluggish pace. He’s teasing you and you’re growing impatient. “If you don’t obey my orders, I will make you suffer much worse baby” you huff. He licks his lips and smirks back at you, “Why? Are you suffering baby?”. This boy is being a brat and he has no idea who he’s dealing with. Your eyes turn black, you push Lou back and get off the counter. He looks at you confused, unsure of your next move. You grab his shirt and bring him in closer, “You’re playing a dangerous game baby”. You begin to nibble at his ear and start to place light kisses across his neck. You place your right hand steadily at his hard bulge, moving against it. He needs you bad and you can feel it. You slowly unzip his jeans, moving them down, along with his boxers to grant you more access. You move your lips to his, kissing him gently. You begin to softly graze your fingers over his tip. Steadily moving your fingers around it, placing your thumb over the slit to spread the precum that’s already oozing out. You move painfully slow, while tugging at Lou’s bottom lip. He groans “Please, give me more”. His neediness makes you go wild, you love having him helpless and wanting. You smirk, and comply. Well, at least for now. You detach yourself from his lips and lower your body until your eyes are met with his member. Locking eyes with Lou, you move your mouth towards his shaft. You begin to slowly lick a strip from the bottom of his dick to the tip. Once you reach the tip you start to swirl your tongue around his end, sucking only the very tip of his member. He throws his head back with a loud moan, he’s suffering and its only turning you on more. Suddenly, you decide to take him all in. His tip hitting the back of your throat, “Fuck” Lou exclaims. You pick up your pace, bobbing your head up and down. You can feel his orgasm coming evidently closer. His shaft begins to throb intensely, in need of a release. “I’m close baby” he exhales. You keep the pace up until you feel his orgasm nearing and his groans getting louder. You suddenly remove your mouth from his member. Lou looks at you frustrated and hungry, “What, why?” he cries. You bring him in close and whisper in his ear, “Disobey me again and I’ll make your next punishment much worse”. You remove your grip from him and smirk, “Now if you don’t mind me I’m going to shower and release some built up tension. If you are willing to behave, leave your number on the counter on your way out”. You move your thumb across your lips wiping off the liquid left from Lou away. He looks at you shocked and unable to process your last words. You turn around and walk towards the shower, leaving Lou by the counter.

This boy really doesn't know who he is messing with.

#Vav #vav smut #vav fanfic #lou smut #vav lou #vav lou fanfic #kim hosung #kim hosung smut #kim hosung fanfic #vav lou smut

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whump-tr0pes · 4 years

Text

Honor Bound 2 - 20

This is a series. Start here, continued from here.

This is a sequel series to Honor Bound.

AO3

Cw: discussion of PTSD, past noncon mention, mention of The Thing (and all the gore that goes with it)

It was light before they stopped again.

“Anyone need a break?” Tori said quietly. Her hands were tight on the wheel.

“Yeah,” Isaac mumbled.

“Yes please,” Sam said.

She guided the car off the road and Ellis followed suit behind them. Isaac leaned against the door even after the car had come to a stop.

Sam put a hand on his shoulder. “…Isaac?” Their voice was almost a whisper. “Are you okay? We’re stopped…”

He trembled and let his eyes squeeze shut. “Yeah.”

Sam bit their lip. “Do you want to get out?”

After a moment Isaac fumbled his hand along the door handle. The door opened and he nearly toppled into the dirt by the side of the road.

Sam was at his side in seconds. He put out a hand and held them at arm’s length as he stood. “I’m okay,” he whispered. “I need to be okay.”

“It’s okay if you’re not.” Sam’s forehead was furrowed with worry. “Isaac…”

“I’m sorry,” he whimpered. “I know you said you needed space, you don’t need to be taking care of me…”

“I…” Sam took a step back. “I still do need space. But… Isaac, with the hunters… I know it scared you.”

“I can’t stop feeling scared.” Isaac was fighting back tears. “I’m so scared, and sometimes it’s just… it’s too much, and I…” He glanced at Edrissa where she stood beside the other car. She was watching him with wary eyes. He put his face in his hands. “What’s wrong with me?”

“You, um…” Sam glanced at Tori. She was standing protectively between Vera and everyone else. Vera still looked dazed. “Tori says you have PTSD.” They tentatively reached out with one hand. Their fingers brushed gently against Isaac’s arm. “And you… you haven’t forgiven yourself. I thought you were getting better, those months with Tori, but I don’t think you ever let yourself… rest.” Sam took a step closer and brought both their hands to Isaac’s arms. “I don’t think you ever trusted anyone enough to really let yourself heal.”

Isaac looked at Sam. They had tears in their eyes. He ran his tongue over his lip. “Sam, it’s… not because –”

“I know. But you carry so much, Isaac. So much more than just…” They threw a glance over their shoulder at Gavin. He was standing a little away from the others. Unbound. They shivered.

“I almost killed him, Sam. And Edrissa,” Isaac whispered.

“No you didn’t,” Sam said gently. “You wouldn’t have done it.”

Isaac fell silent. They don’t know. They don’t know how close I came to pulling that trigger on both of them.

Sam’s hand wrapped gently around his wrist. “You need to let yourself heal if you want to be able to help more people.” Then they dropped their voice so Isaac could barely hear them. “You’re not like him.”

Isaac shuddered against the rush of guilt and grief that rose up at those words. He shook his head like a dog trying to clear water out of his ears. Maybe grief is the first step.

He squeezed Sam’s wrist. His eyes went wide when they flinched. He gently took their hands and turned them. There were raw spots on their wrists where they had been struggling against the zip ties during the beating. Isaac’s hands started to shake. His eyes moved over them, really seeing them for the first time since he’d killed the bounty hunter. Their mouth was tight with tension. They winced every time they took a breath. They were slightly hunched over as if it hurt their stomach to straighten up all the way.

“Oh, shit. Sam…”

“I’m okay,” they said, with just a hint of breathlessness.

As if called by Isaac’s thoughts, Finn appeared at their side. They kept their eyes down as they moved their hands over Sam. “I’m sorry I didn’t get the chance to check you before we –”

“It’s okay.” They winced as Finn pulled their shirt up. Isaac’s jaw clenched at the bruises that stretched across their torso, angry and purple. Finn’s hands checked Sam quickly and firmly. They pointedly looked away from Isaac.

“Finn.” Isaac bit their lip.

Their hands moved down Sam’s left leg, then the right. “Yeah?”

“Finn, I’m…” His jaw worked against the words that were pushing against his lips. I’m sorry I lost control. I’m sorry I’m so damned volatile. I’m sorry I blamed you. I’m sorry I’m broken. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry… He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry.”

Finn froze where they were kneeling in front of Sam. Isaac saw the glimmer of a tear on their tear before they swiped it away and stood up. “’s fine.” They turned to head back to their car.

“No, it’s not.” Isaac followed them and they stopped short. “Look, I…” His throat worked. “I lost control. I’m sorry. I know it’s not your fault what… what happened. I wasn’t trying to blame you, I was just… scared. I needed to know how it happened but I didn’t have to ask like… like that.”

Finn stared at the ground beside Isaac, their lip pushed very slightly out into a pout. “Um. Yeah.”

Isaac opened his hands. Relaxed his shoulders. Took a breath. “I know it wasn’t your fault. I’m sorry for yelling, and for… um… what I said. I know that something’s, um.” He cleared his throat again. “Something’s wrong. I know. And I… I’m going to get better.” Finn looked up at him for the first time. “I’m sorry for taking it out on you. It was wrong, it was my fault, and I am going to do my best to never do it again.”

Finn’s eyes were shining with tears. “Do you think, maybe…” they ventured, “you could… trust us? Depend on us?” They licked their lips. “We’re here for you, Isaac. Just like you are for us.” They stepped forward and pulled Isaac into a hug. He wound his arms around them and soaked up their warmth. “I hope you know that.”

“I…” Isaac’s throat worked. “I’m learning that.”

“Okay,” Finn mumbled against his chest. “Well, I say this as your medic and your friend, and I say it with love… Will you please stop being such a dumbass?”

Isaac chuckled wetly against their hair. “Um. Yeah. Let me work on that.”

“We love you, Isaac. Every single one of us.”

“I know.” He felt a ripple of something moving through his chest as he said it.

“Well, we should…” Finn cleared their throat and stepped back, wiping their face.

“Yeah.” Isaac swiped his hand at the wetness on his face, too. “Thanks, Finn.”

Finn glanced over his shoulder. “Well, except for Gavin, maybe. I don’t think he loves you much. But fuck ‘im.”

Another laugh. This one easier. “Yeah. Fuck ‘im.” He glanced back at his car. Sam, Tori, and Vera had already gotten back in. “How bad is Sam hurt?”

“Well, you saw.” Finn’s jaw worked as they looked at Sam through the rear windshield. “The bruising is pretty bad. I don’t think they broke anything, miraculously. Maybe cracked a few ribs. But…” They rubbed the back of their neck. “I hate to say it quite like this, but if there was life-threatening internal damage they’d be fucking sick right now. And they aren’t. So I think we’re in the clear.”

Isaac glanced at the other car. “How about Gray?”

Finn shook their head slightly. “They popped their stitches and were bleeding a bit, but I got that stopped. Same situation with them. If there was internal bleeding there would be signs. And I’m not seeing any.”

“That’s… that’s good.”

Finn moved their hand through their hair. For a moment they looked so much older than twenty-nine. They’ve been through so much. They deserve to rest. They feel responsible for others, probably just as much as I do. Their eyes went wide for just a moment when Isaac put a hand on their shoulder. “Once we get north, we’ll all have time to rest.”

“Yeah,” Finn snorted. “That’s what we thought with Tori’s place.”

Isaac bit his lip. “We should probably get moving. We’ve still got a long way to go.”

“Yeah.” Finn turned and headed for the other car. Isaac walked a little unsteadily to the other car. Tori was staring at him as he closed the door.

“Everything okay?” Her eyebrows were pulled together.

Isaac nodded. “Yup. Just wanted to check with them. Sounds like Gray is –”

“I checked with them. Yeah. Sounds like they’re okay, too.”

Isaac’s mind still felt a little fuzzy. He hadn’t felt right since they’d all been jumped in the woods. He couldn’t quite think fast enough to keep track of everyone. “Right.” He turned his eyes to Vera now, sitting still dazed in the front seat. “You, um.” He chewed his lip. “You alright?”

The car started moving. Vera looked back at him, her face looking haggard with pain. “Um.”

Isaac drew his hand through his hair. “Uh. Stupid question. I’m sorry, I’m not –”

“I remembered more.”

Isaac froze. He looked over at Tori for a moment. Her eyes were filling with tears. “Oh.”

“I remember what he looks like now. I remember him. Um. Hurting me. But I…” Tears were rolling slowly down her face. She didn’t seem to notice. “I remember him holding me. I remember he, um…” She swallowed hard. “After a party one time. He… he cleaned me up. Bandaged my wounds. He um, gave me water and… and held me… He gave me a blanket. Just held me.”

Isaac’s blood ran cold. “A… a party?”

Vera’s eyes were still unfocused. “When Joseph would invite his friends over to rape me.” She said it with such clinical detachment that it made Isaac’s stomach heave. Tori gasped out a silent sob. “But I remember him. Ryan.”

“Do you remember what happened to him?” Isaac’s voice was shaking.

“Um.” Her face screwed up in a look of tortured concentration. “I… I… can’t… It’s like it’s still behind a wall. I remember a plan. A plan to get me out. But I… can’t… He was working with some people to get me out but I just… can’t…” She whimpered.

Isaac’s hand shot out towards her before he stopped himself. His hand squeezed into a fist and he sat back against the seat.

“Vera, um…” Sam said in a tentative voice. “It’s okay…”

“I just… can’t… remember,” she whispered. “I don’t know if the people who pulled me out were there because of Ryan. I don’t remember seeing him with them, but… Maybe he was…” She pressed her hands against her forehead. “Agh…”

“It’s okay, babe,” Tori murmured, and stretched a hand out to rest on Vera’s shoulder.

“Do you think it was…” Isaac’s lips twisted. “…being… um… tied up like that? Or when the bounty hunter said… um…”

“It was being tied up like that,” she whispered. “For one of the parties that’s exactly how I was tied up. The first one.”

Isaac shuddered. “There was more than one?”

Vera met his gaze with haunted eyes. “I remember at least three.”

He heard Sam whimper beside him and ached to reach for them. They said they need space. They’ll come to me for comfort when they’re ready.

“I’m so sorry, Vera,” he whispered. “God, I’m… I’m so sorry…”

“It’s okay,” she mumbled. Isaac’s head snaped up to look at her, expecting to see a look of submission and fear. Instead he saw blazing eyes and bared teeth. “It’s okay. Because no matter what I remember, no matter what… I killed him. I slaughtered him. Ripped him open. I tasted his fucking blood.” Her lips pulled back in a grin.

An image flashed across Isaac’s mind, of her standing in the waiting room stained with that monster’s blood, quivering with fear and relief and exhaustion. Of her folding into his arms after she’d torn him open with her teeth.

“Yeah,” he whispered. “You did.”

“No matter what.” Vera’s hand rested on Tori’s thigh, her eyes still a little unfocused. “I did that.”

Continued here

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ashsblurbs · 4 years

Text

Change will make your life better

*Change series chapter 6*

Light trickled in through his window waking Steve up. For the first time in a very long time Steve had a full night of sleep and didn’t feel like waking up. He knew he had to if he wanted to shower before Sarah woke up. Then he heard a very loud knock on his door. Steve ran to it hoping to stop the noise before it woke up Sarah. Who would be at his door since he had no neighbors and he didn’t know anyone in this town? All of his friends were still in New York. Steve through the door open to fine, “Tony?”

Tony stared in awed at the man he will always love. Steve looked very different then how he did almost two years ago. He grew a thick beard and his hair was longer. Tony thought the look good on him. The man no longer had the cut look of a male model but a softer look. He had to admit Steve still looked great. The two men stood in the thrust hold of the door not saying anything to each other but just staring at each other like they had seen a ghost. Finally, after some time Steve asked the important question, “Why the hell are you here? After almost two years of no phone calls, no text messages, not even letters” Tony swallowed deeply not knowing what to say but he knew he had to tell the truth. “I called Nat a few days ago. She told me where I could find you. I came to apologize.” Steve made an arm gesture telling Tony to come on in. “Don’t mind the mess. I haven’t had the chance to clean up.”

Steve was not happy. How could Natasha have done this to him? He knew that phone call wasn’t Bucky but instead of Tony. A piece of him was happy to see Tony even if he did hurt him. Tony looked healthier and his eyes shone with happiness. Steve walked over to the kitchen to make coffee and maybe grab something for breakfast. “Still like your coffee black with a hint of sugar.” Tony nodded but didn’t move from where he stood. Steve could see the man analyze everything around him. There was Sarah’s play pen in the corner and a few of her toys on the couch. Steve wonder how long it was going to take Tony to ask the question if he had a child or not.

“Tony, come sit. I won’t bite.” Tony took the mug out of Steve’s hand and tasted the coffee. It felt like an old friend revisiting from being away for a long time. It felt like home. A wave of sadness washed over Tony and all of his confidence was gone. He really was an idiot from walking away from all of this. With what he noticed around him Steve was happy and maybe had a kid. He really did live out the dream they wanted. “Tony, can you now explain why you are here?” Tony sucked in a breath. It was now or never he thought. “Steve, my last year has been eventful if I put it lightly” Steve just huffed. Tony couldn’t imagine what kind of year he had but Tony continued. “On my birthday, last year I was in the hospital for alcohol poisoning.” Steve looked shook and the hardness he was holding melted away. “I went to rehab and got therapy to work on all of my issues. Which you know I have a lot of issues. The worst one not thinking I am good enough for anyone and I will just hurt the ones I love. I still have a long way to go to fix myself, but I am in a better place. That is why I am here to say I am sorry for what I did. I regret it every single day of my life and if I could go back, I would change everything. Steve, I hope.” Tony stopped at mid-sentence when he heard a baby cry. “Hold that thought.”

Steve ran to the nursery to find Sarah had just woke up and was crying. “Hey, little one is someone hungry. How about some cheerios?” Sarah babbled not really saying words yet, but she was trying. Steve swung Sarah into his arms slowly walking her out to the kitchen. “Now promise me you will be on your best behavior because we have a special guess.” She just giggled back not knowing what was going on. Steve’s legs shook a little. How was Tony going to take the news he had a kid? Was he going to made he didn’t tell him? Then he thought who cared if Tony was mad. Steve had every right to do what he did.

Tony played with the spoon in his cup. Tony thought maybe he should have called first instead of barging into Steve’s life. Tony was about to leave until he saw Steve walk in with his daughter in his arms saying something to her. The little girl was beautiful with long blonde hair and brown eyes. Tony realize the eyes looking back at him was his eyes. Tony was in shocked. He just watched as Steve sat the child down in her highchair and laid out some cheerios for her to eat.

Steve turned to Tony seeing the expression on his face. Steve knew that Tony knew. It wasn’t hard to figure out since Sarah was a perfect mixture of the two of them. “I’m assuming this is your daughter. She’s very pretty. What is her name?” “Tony meet Sarah Maria Rogers-Stark. Your daughter.” Steve ran a hand down his little girl’s hair smoothing it down from where she had just woken up. Tony just stared at the child in disbelief. He didn’t blame Steve for not telling him. He probably wouldn’t have told him either not after what Tony had done. Tony had abandoned his family. Tony felt like he couldn’t breathe. The room had become very small. He stood up and ran out of the back door to catch his breath.

Steve stared as Tony ran out of the house leaving Steve and Sarah alone once again. “Well, he didn’t take that well did he Sarah.” Sarah just ignore him while she continued chomping down of her cereal. Steve sighed and deep down knew this reaction was to be expected. He definitely didn’t think Tony was going to begin to jump with joy and they would be a family. Steve didn’t even know he wanted to be a family with Tony. He could bear the thought of Tony walking out on him, but he couldn’t bear the thought of him hurting his, their daughter in the process. Steve picked up Sarah leading her to the backyard where Tony was sitting staring at the lake in the distance. Steve sat down next to him with Sarah in his lap. “Tony, what’s going through your head right now. I can see it racing.”

Tony looked over at Steve. Steve was so close to him. If he relaxed his knee slightly, they would be touching. “I’m just thinking about how I left you two alone. I wasn’t there to help and be by your side.” Steve pushed Sarah’s hands away from his face and handed her a toy instead to play with. He could now see that Tony had been crying. Everything in Steve’s chest wanted to give Tony a hard time but he knew the look on Tony’s face was genuine because he knew Tony better then the back of his hand. “Tony, it’s going to take me a long time to get past everything you put me through. Before we talk about Sarah or I answer any of your questions you have to promise me that you will never hurt her.”

Without thinking Tony took Steve’s hand and looked straight into his strong blue eyes. “Until my dying breath I am going to be here for her and you. I will never leave again. I will never hurt her. The alcohol is gone. The self-doubt is in control. I’m better much better. I hope you will see the difference. I understand it will take some time.” Steve removed his hand and placed it onto Tony’s check, thumbing away the tears. Steve could see the change. He felt the change radiate off of Tony. The two men were pulled back to reality when Sarah made grabby hands to Tony. “Dada.” Steve was taken back. “Sarah, you just said your first word.” “Did she just call me dada?” Steve nodded. Now both of the men were crying at how proud they were of their daughter. “Yeah, Sarah, this is your dada. Tony would you like to hold her.”

Tony wasn’t much of a kid person but instinct kicked in. “Hi, Sarah. You have a very pretty name. Did you know your daddy is one of the greatest people in the world and you are very lucky to have him as a daddy?” The baby babbled and started pulling on his hair. “Okay, ow. Sarah release.” Steve detached the little one from Tony’s hair with a laugh.

Steve sat in the kitchen ready to have a proper conversation. Sarah was occupied in her playpen, so they had some time before she got fussy. “Okay, ask your questions?” Tony didn’t know where to begin but he wanted to know everything from Steve’s pregnancy to just what Sarah was like as a person.

“Okay, when did you find out you were pregnant?”

“Two weeks after you left. Next.” Tony looked down in shame. Only two weeks and bam another person was mixed up in Tony’s asinine chooses.

“Who has helped you through all of this? I really hope you didn’t go through this alone.” Steve shook his head no. Steve was thinking back to the day Natasha was there with him holding the positive test.

“Natasha has been with me through all of this. She was here through all the doctor appointments and delivery. She even lives here with me but will be moving out soon. Bucky misses her a lot.” Tony thought back when he got that sonogram and Pepper thought it was Natasha who was pregnant. Tony reached into his wallet and pulled out the photograph not knowing why he stilled kept it but maybe deep down he knew why. He passed the photo over to Steve where he picked it up and examined it. “Pepper dropped that at my office. She thought Natasha was pregnant, but it turns out to be you. I’m guessing that is Sarah.” Steve sniffled and got up to retrieve something.

Steve came back and laid the yellow blanket that had Sarah’s initials on it. “Were you the one that sent those presents. Did you send this blanket?” Tony ran his hand along the hem knowing exactly what this was, and he was happy that this blanket made its way to his daughter. “Yeah, I did. I found this in my house and thought Natasha or well you could use it.” Steve wiped his tears away. “This is her favorite thing in the whole world. She can’t sleep without.” Tony felt better knowing that he might not have been here, at least something of his was comforting his daughter.

“When is her birthday so I can plan for it.” Steve smiled at this question. “May 29th. She will be turning one in a few days.” “Wait her birthday is my birthday. Well that would have been a better birthday gift then an IV in the arm.” Tony chuckled. “Yeah she was ready to come early. Not supposed to be here until June 5th but she had other plans. I was in labor with her for thirty-eight hours. She’s stubborn like her father.” It was Steve’s turn to laugh. He would do it again in a heartbeat if it meant to have a wonderful daughter he had. “Um what’s that smell Steve?” And the tender moment was over. He walked over to Sarah a strong whiff of poop filled his nostrils. Steve picked her up and walked over to Tony placing her in his face. “Dada want to do the honors and have your first diaper change.” Tony scrunched up his nose at the smell, but he was ready to make up for lost time.

“Hey, Steve, I’m back and I brought the boys with me.” Silence. Natasha looked over at Bucky and Sam curiously. Where could Steve have been? “Maybe him and Sarah were in the back yard.” Sam suggested. The group walked out to spot Steve, Sarah, and Tony having a picnic under the large oak tree. Wait she thought Tony was here. Before she could stop Bucky, he was already out there giving Tony a piece of his mind. He grabbed Tony by the shirt and slammed him against the tree. “You have some real nerve to be here. You are a piece of shit. After leaving two years ago with no reason. Breaking my brother’s heart and leaving your child for him to raise alone. You decide to come back here. You are not welcome here you son of a bitch.”

Tony just took it because he knew Bucky would have been mad and why wouldn’t he be. Steve pulled Bucky away letting Tony be able to breathe again. “Bucky stop. Everything is okay. I’m okay. Sarah’s okay. Tony and I have had several conversations the past few days. We are good. I didn’t let him off the hook right way, but he has a right to have a relationship with Sarah.” Bucky pushed his hair back from his eyes and saw Steve’s eyes tell the same message he was saying. He looked over at Sarah where he saw Tony playing peekaboo with her and she is giggling up a storm.

The three of them walked back inside to get the house ready for Sarah’s party leaving Steve to talk to Tony. “How did Tony know to come here? Is even stabled to be around that that girl.” Bucky was now throwing things and aggressively talking. “Bucky calm down now! Everything is fine.” Bucky whipped around and looked at her with fire in his eyes. “Don’t tell me to calm down Nat. That man left Steve and broke his heart. I know all about Tony’s stint in rehab. What doesn’t say he won’t leave again?” Natasha was about to say something when the door opens to Tony. “Bucky, I understand your concerns but I’m never leaving again. I know I have to gain all of your trust and it will take time I understand.” Bucky cooled down and looked over at Natasha. She nodded her head of its going to be okay.

Steve walked in holding a very dirty Sarah. “She seemed to have wanted to play in the mud instead of her toys.” Tony took Sarah from Steve. “I will wash her up. Isn’t that right little miss. Dada is going to get you clean up.” Sarah giggled. Steve went over to Natasha wrapping her up into a big hug. “Thank you, Natasha, for bringing my family back together.” She smiled. “It was the right thing to do. Rhodey assured me it was the right time.” “Tony is different guys. He’s only been here a couple of days, but I can see the change in him already. He’s so good with Sarah.” “Are you and Tony back together?” Sam interjected. Steve shook his head no. “Tony and I are just coparents of a very special child. I don’t think I can bring myself to be wrapped up into the mess that is Tony’s life. He still had ways to go to fix himself.”

“Happy birthday dear Sarah. Happy birthday too you.” The group sang as Natasha placed a single cupcake in front of Sarah. “Blow out the candle sweetie.” The baby looked up at Steve with the soft eyes. Tony looked at his small family and a sweep of love fell over him. All he wanted to do was kiss Steve. Tony could see a future with this man. He only hoped that Steve did too. “Your daddy just cleaned you up.” Steve joked trying to wipe all of the frosting off of her face and hands. Tony giggled knowing he was going to marry this man one day.

Steve found Tony sitting on the porch looking out at the stars. “Did she go down easy?” Tony asked looking up at Steve. “Yeah, just took a few lullabies and she was out. She had a light sugar rush.” Steve sat beside Tony placing his hand close to Tony’s but was not touching. It was nice he thought having Tony around. Having the one thing he dreamed about for so many years come true.

The silence became too much. Neither one of the men looked at each other or made a sound. They just continued looking out at the stars. Tony could feel the heat radiate off of Steve and all he wanted to do was kiss him like there was no tension between them. Tony walked his fingers slowly moving to place his hand on top of Steve’s. Steve didn’t pull away, but his breath did catch in his chest. Tony turned his hand over to lace their fingers together. Steve looked down liking how his pale skin intertwined with Tony’s olive skin.

Tony knew it was now or never. Tony leaned in slowly not to ruin the moment. Tony looked down at Steve’s soft red lips waiting for Steve to pull away, but he never did. Tony placed a light kiss to Steve’s lips. They were soft and warm. They felt like home. The feeling of Steve’s beard tickled his cheeks. Tony found him placing his hands in the other man’s hair. Missing the touch of it. Missing the gentle touch of Steve.

The men pulled apart looking at each other sheepishly not understanding how this moment would change their whole lives. “I am sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.” Tony was about to get up and go to bed but Steve pulled him back down. “Don’t go. I actually didn’t mind it.” Tony felt pressure in his chest. This time for a long time it was good pressure. It was the kind of pressure that you knew something good was coming. “You didn’t mind it?” Tony asked. “No, it reminded me of the old days when everything was right in the world when everything was simpler.” Tony looked away knowing Steve was right. Nothing would be the same for them and they had a new normal that would be their relationship. “To bad I have to go back home tomorrow. I am going to miss you and Sarah a lot. We will need to sit down and make a schedule. I can come up every Friday if that’s okay with you.”

Steve placed a gentle touch to the side of Tony’s face turning him, so he was looking at Steve. “What if you didn’t leave? Nat is going back to New York on Saturday. I have and extra room you could have. It would be little easier to coparent.” Tony didn’t know what to say. Well he did know what to say he was going to say. “That was stupid. I shouldn’t have offered. Your home is New York and you have a company to run. I can’t really ask you to pick up your whole life and move here.” Tony placed a finger over Steve’s lips to get him to shut up. “You can ask me to do anything because I deserve it. I will stay because I lived a world where you weren’t part of it. I don’t care what we are as long as you are in my life.”

Change was the hardest thing to do in your life. Change brought growth. Change brought tears and smile. Change brought new people your life and old people you once knew. Change was beautiful.

#stony #stevetony #superhusbands #superfamily #ash's blurbs #change series

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aliceslantern · 4 years

Text

Beyond this Existence: New Life, short 15--Smoke

Recovery is a tedious, nonlinear process. Demyx, Ienzo, and the others living in Radiant Garden's castle have to learn to come to terms with their pasts and their memories, learn to grow, and begin to understand what, exactly, it means to be human. While there is unexpected joy in this, there is also unexpected sorrow. A series of oneshots set after Beyond this Existence.

Current short: “Smoke.” One of Aerith's tests leaves Demyx with an unanticipated award.

Read it on FF.net/on AO3

Demyx was tired of looking at leaves. His eyes burned, and there was a crick in his neck from being bent over the countertop for most of the morning. He was pretty sure he was going to permanently smell like anise seed. He stuffed the pills he'd made into their pouches and wiped his hands on a damp rag.

Aerith offered him a glass of lemonade. “I’m surprised you haven’t complained.”

He took it. The tart sweetness almost, but not quite, masked the taste of the herbs he’d been breathing. “My strategy now is to try and ignore it.”

“I was hoping you would.”

“Ignore it? Or complain?” He sat gingerly on the stool and felt his feet throb.

She appraised his handiwork. “A lot of our work has to do with endurance. I gave you too much to do, in a manner that was intentionally confusing, on purpose.”

He held back the urge to groan. “So this was a test?”

She smiled. Aerith had a mischievous side, one he was still getting used to. She sorted through the pills and packets he’d made. Anxiety only made the ache in his feet worse. After a long, long moment, she said, “Not bad.”

““Not bad” can also mean “not good.””

She brought her eyes to his. “You made no awful mistakes. The medicine would do its job. It’s the finer points that you seem to have trouble with. Like this migraine powder. There’s no oil or anything to mask the flavor. It’d work--but it’d taste very bitter, which is the last thing a person in that much pain wants.”

Demyx exhaled. “Right. That makes sense.”

She squeezed his shoulder. “It’s only been a few months. You’re bound to make some mistakes. This will all be second nature at some point.”

He stood and flinched when he took back his weight. He really needed to invest in some better shoes. “I want to be good at it now .” The only thing that had ever come effortlessly to him was music, and even that was hard won these days. He started to put away the excess herbs in her apothecary chest. Aerith’s handwriting was notoriously bad; reading the labels felt like something of a test too.

She touched his shoulder. “And I’m happy you’re so passionate. But don’t rush the process.”

He nodded and made himself smile. “Right.” He was just about to shutter the cabinet when one of the smaller drawers in the corner caught his eye. It wasn’t--no. He pulled it open and saw the buds neatly wrapped in cheesecloth, probably to cover the smell.

He didn’t need training to be a healer to recognize this plant.

“Is there a particular reason you just have a drawer full of weed?”

She raised an eyebrow. “It can be used as medicine, you know.”

“Yeah, I… know.” He shut the drawer.

“Did you want to take some? I don’t mind.”

“I don’t need it.”

“But do you want it?”

Demyx didn’t know how to read her sometimes. “I… don’t know.”

“So take it. Smoke it or not, I don’t care. Just give me a heads-up if you want the night off.”

“...Sure.” He held the drug, feeling like he was doing something wrong even though he’d easily carried far more potent painkillers. Embarrassed, he tucked it into his pocket. “Thanks. I think.”

She smirked. “We all need to cut loose every now and again.”

---

Demyx made dinner that night for Ienzo. His own cooking was never inspired, and it all seemed to come out bland no matter what he did to it. Ienzo’s food tasted better, but it wasn’t necessarily fair to always make him cook, especially now that they lived together.

He thought a lot about fairness, these days. He guessed it had something to do with getting continually trod on his whole life.

Before he could spiral along that path, he heard the door open. “Hey. How was your day?”

Ienzo set aside his glasses and phone before giving him a kiss. “Productive. I started my first draft.”

“Can I see it?”

“It’s not nearly ready.”

They took their meal at the small oak table. “You’ve got a funny look on your face,” Ienzo said. “Something happen today?”

“No, not really.” He stirred his rice aimlessly. It was a bit undercooked. His rice always came out that way, or else it was mush. He blamed the front stove burner; it was a bit too hot. “Can I ask you something?”

“Shoot.”

“Have you ever done drugs?”

This seemed to amuse him, more than anything. “Why is it you ask?”

“It just hit me that I kind of have easy access to them.”

“Well, most of the substances you work with aren’t exactly for recreational purposes.”

“Mm. True. Except Aerith kind of gave me a bag of weed?”

His eyebrows shot up. “Really?”

“Yeah. Really.” Demyx took it out of his pocket and put it on the table. Ienzo poked it with the tip of his fork.

“I suppose she must use it as a painkiller,” he said.

“You can look at it, if you want.”

“I’m… fascinated, despite myself.” He cleared his throat. “I suppose that answers your question. What about you?”

“Huh?”

“Have you… indulged in such things?”

Demyx rubbed at the back of his neck. “A few times,” he admitted. “It was usually offered whenever Luxord had one of his poker nights.”

“I do wonder what happened to him. I hope he’s well.”

“He was fun to be around.” Demyx sighed. “If his Nobody was killed, he’s whole now.”

“I hope he’s as happy as we are.”

A moment passed. They contemplated the bag on the table.

“Should we do something with it?” Ienzo asked.

“Like smoke it? Would you want to?”

“I’m… curious. That is if you want to.”

“I think it would be fun to get high with you.”

“Exactly. Fun.” There was something analytical in his gaze, though.

“I just have to let Aerith know I’ll be out of commission. Then we can do whatever.” He felt a blush heat his face as he texted her. Though how was this worse than drinking? Not that he did that often anymore, either. All she sent in response was a thumbs-up emoji. With slightly trembling fingers he took the fragile papers out of the bag and tried to roll a joint. He’d never done this, only seen it done. Ienzo watched with interest. Demyx half expected him to start taking notes. “Let’s go over to the couch.”

Ienzo handed him the box of matches they usually used for candles. They sat, knee to knee, as if about to commit a crime.

“I’ll start it.” It took two tries to get it lit, and he coughed. Already he could tell this stuff was stronger than whatever sketchy stuff Luxord or Xigbar had purloined. He handed it off to Ienzo.

“How do I--”

“Just breathe, but not too deeply. And hold it for a few seconds.”

Ienzo did so. Demyx had to admit that seeing him do it was funny. He coughed as well.

For a few minutes they passed it back and forth, not saying much. Already his head was feeling light, watery.

“I’m not sure I feel anything,” Ienzo admitted. “Am I supposed to?”

“You might not.”

“It tastes… interesting.” He tapped some ash into an empty glass. “How odd, the things people will do for fun .”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

“I’ve seen some interesting things. On missions and whatnot. But then there’s always this veil of impersonal...ness.” He trailed off, and touched a hand to his brow.

“You alright?”

“It stopped.”

“What?” A little wave of fear broke over him.

“The anxiety. It stopped.”

He breathed a sigh of relief. “That’s part of it too.”

Ienzo leaned back heavily. “How strange . I feel so…” He stumbled over his words. “Things feel more the same than I thought. Just slightly… bigger.”

Demyx laughed. “You’re stoned.”

“Am I?”

“I think.” He took the last drag off the joint and ground it out. He felt warm, sleepy.

"The silence is just so lovely," Ienzo said. "My head is always so full of noise--you have no idea. Everything is always too much."

"I can help you, you know. I can give you medicine which will help. Er. Well, like, actual medicine, not this."

He lay on his back and rested his head in Demyx's lap. "I'm afraid."

"Of what?"

"Afraid who I'd be without it?" His eyes were glassy. Demyx brushed the hair from Ienzo's face and looked at both his eyes. "It's the most constant thing in my life. From the past, I mean."

"I don't want it to eat at you, though."

"No." Ienzo took Demyx's hand and began to toy with it, feeling at his fingers absently. It was hard to tell how much of this was weed or how much of this was true blue Ienzo, without the weight of fear or inhibitions. "I will consider it. Truthfully. This is the happiest I've ever been. It may just be my nature."

"Could be."

Demyx stroked his hair. It was so soft. He couldn't believe how soft it was. "God, I'm high," he mumbled.

Ienzo snorted. "You're not so above it all."

"Do I normally seem that way?"

"I can feel you detach yourself sometimes. That you take care of me sometimes instead of yourself."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be."

Demyx looked at him for a long time. "I feel like I'm pretending to be the person I want to be. I want to be better than I was. But it's hard. I get mad. I get frustrated and upset. Slipping into old habits would be so easy." Ienzo shut his eyes.

"I am listening. That feels very good."

"You're like a cat. Independent. Curious. Stubborn."

"Hard to win over. Hard to get rid of."

"I don't ever want to get rid of you."

He smiled. "How sweet."

"I can be very sweet. When I want to be."

Ienzo touched his cheek. "It is in your nature."

“I’m not so sure about that.”

“Well, I am.” He opened his eyes. “We’ve changed so much. And we’ll probably keep changing.”

“I know.”

“It feels… strange.”

Ienzo’s expression was sharp and serious, but Demyx couldn’t contain the bubble of laughter that caught in his throat.

“What’s so funny?” he asked.

“It’s not funny ,” Demyx said, and it was true; the laughter was divorced from his actual emotions. “As it is terrifying .”

“We’ve nothing to be afraid of.”

“It’s hard to get myself to believe that.” His eyes were watering. “Sometimes I swear I’m going to wake up and this will all be gone.” He was verbalizing thoughts he hadn’t been aware of.

“I know. I feel the same. But that is simply… simply not the case.” Ienzo sat up and tried to fix his hair. “I wish I could prove it to you.”

“...Zexion would never have been this nice to me.”

He smiled. “Demyx would never listen so emphatically.” Ienzo kissed him. “Our lives have been full of odd coincidences, but I’m glad you were one.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

“To even calculate the odds of us existing at the same time--much less falling for one another--it must be one in a trillion.”

Demyx groaned. “I do not want to think about math right now.”

“I second that notion… I feel a tad dizzy.”

“Lay back down. It’ll pass.”

He did, pressing his face into one of the couch cushions. “This sensation is so curious,” he mumbled. “I should like to… examine it in more detail.”

Demyx laughed. “I can do that.”

#beyond this existence: new life #demyx #ienzo #zemyx #aerith #tw: mild drug use #beyond this existence #i'm sorry but the idea of them smoking weed together was too funny to resist #i realize this chapter probably says a lot about me

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neuxue · 5 years

Text

Wheel of Time liveblogging: The Gathering Storm ch 47

The Rand al’Thor deescalation strategy: contemplate genocide, attempt patricide, then run away.

Chapter 47: The One He Lost

The left, wasn’t it?

Sorry, one day I’ll stop with those…

Rand’s feeling a bit off after almost annihilating several armies and a city. Can’t imagine why…

No, it was something else that had unsettled him, something he couldn’t quite define.

How close you came to mass murder and also possibly the unravelling of existence itself? No?

Stop distracting me with the geology of the Stone of Tear. I’m trying to pay attention to the pain, here, and instead you throw literal rocks at me? Rude.

Oh, I see: the rocks are symbolism.

He had the form of a human. Indeed, he had the mannerisms and history of one.

We’re just not wasting any time here, are we? That’s…quite a thought. It’s one thing when I’m the one thinking it, but it’s another thing entirely when Rand himself is.

But he was a thing that no human—not even he himself—could understand. A figure of legend, a creation of the One Power, as unnatural as a ter’angreal or a fragment of cuendillar.

Not even he himself. Oh, Rand. He’s just so lost, but lost isn’t something he’s afforded the option to be, so he has to push even that aside somehow and keep going.

But also. On the one hand (ha), we have the concept of the Dragon is one with the land, and the land is one with the Dragon. The Dragon as a part of—an embodiment of, even—the world, and the land, and inextricably linked with it and with history and with the balance of Light and Shadow and existence itself. Something utterly natural, something so bound up in nature and the natural as to be one with it. And so Rand’s thoughts here, that he is a ‘creation’, that he is ‘unnatural’ become dissonant against that note we’ve hit again and again throughout the series. And it shows, then, how far he has strayed from that role, even while staying on his path, that he sees himself as, in effect, the opposite of what he truly is.

He has detached himself from humanity and from the world and from himself, in order to become what he thinks he must be—but the irony is that in doing so he is distancing himself ever further from that very thing.

(Did that make sense to anyone but me? Also wow Lia how many commas does a sentence need? Answer: AT LEAST FIVE MORE).

Never mind his heart of a man long dead, his shoulders created to bear the weight of prophecy, his soul crushed by the needs, wants, and hopes of a million people.

I’m not even ONE PAGE into this chapter and already it is coming for me with knives. Never mind his heart of a man long dead just…what am I supposed to do with that? The layered meaning there—the metaphorical killing of his compassion and acceptance of his death atop the more literal invocation of Lews Therin.

And the next part reminds me rather strongly of one of my favourite lines of poetry: which brings us back to the hero’s sholders, and the gentleness that comes not from the absence of violence but despite the abundance of it (Richard Siken, Snow and Dirty Rain). So that’s…fine.

Oh, Rand.

Because to him it is nothing but a weight, a pressure, a suffocating inevitability that is beyond endurance. That is all that is left to him, all he sees ahead, and no space for choice or life or self.

Two hands. One to destroy, the other to save. Which had he lost?

Oh.

I made the joke but I didn’t expect him to do…that. Wow. Okay. Ouch.

Salvation and destruction, one hand shelters, one hand slays, and he stands between, on the balance, but the balance itself is lost and he is falling and he doesn’t even know where and I know this is probably due in part to Sanderson’s tendency to have his characters philosophise and self-examine on-page but finally Rand himself is thinking all the things I’ve thought about him and it hurts in all the best ways.

He had accepted what he needed to be. Why was he so bothered by it, then?

This is more of a crack in his armour than we’ve seen in a while. Maybe it’s because he’s alone, with no immediate task or goal; when he has something to do, he can focus on it and be utterly cold and ruthless and directed, but when he has a moment to pause, all those things he’s suppressing start creeping up on him again.

I’ll spare you five minutes of pacing, Rand: it’s because you haven’t accepted it. You’ve tried to resign yourself to it, and that’s…not at all the same thing, for all that it seems to be. You’ve resigned yourself to what you’ve convinced yourself you need to be, rather than accepting and choosing what to be.

A voice deep down—one not in his head, but in his heart—had begun to disagree with what he did. It was not loud or violent like Lews Therin’s; it just whispered, like a forgotten itch. Something is wrong. Something is wrong…

This strikes the precise, perfect balance between eerie and just straight-up heartbreaking. He has detached himself so far, and pushed away so much of himself, that all that is left of him, of the shepherd Rand al’Thor, is watching at a distance, quiet and yet still determined, wounded and bleeding and yet somehow still hoping, whispering that this is wrong and yet unable to break through those walls.

He is still at war with himself, only now he’s losing. And looking at it from that angle, this whole series is a fascinating…duel, of sorts, with the balance shifting slowly, almost imperceptibly, from Rand as he was to Rand as he has become. From optimism to despair, from choice to resignation, from determination and will to live to fatigue and a wish to die. A shift in which is the winning side, in this war of one man against himself. And it happens so gradually that it’s hard to put a finger on where it shifts—obviously there are several major points where it becomes clear, but this has been in progress from the very beginning.

Put the nuke down, Rand. You’ve destroyed the Stone enough already. Also you’re still inside it.

He’s decided that it’s seeing Hurin that’s thrown him off, not almost repeating Natrin’s Barrow except against allies and friends. I guess…that’s…progress?

Hurin was a relic from an earlier life. Days when Mat had still mocked Rand’s coats, days when Rand had hoped that he’d marry Egwene and somehow return to the Two Rivers.

Days when he truly was a shepherd named Rand al’Thor.

It’s as though he has sacrificed his recent past for his more distant one. The more of Lews Therin he remembers (or remembered; it’s fairly complete now it seems), the further away that shepherd seems, the longer ago those recent memories feel, the more distant they are from who he is now.

It’s as though in his fear of becoming Lews Therin Telamon and facing that fate, he has sacrificed the very things that would allow him to avoid it. And now, even, the desire to do so.

He’d have wondered if anything could grow more complicated than thinking his friends hated him.

Now it hardly matters, because no one can hate him more than he hates himself.

The colours shifted in his vision. Perrin walking through a dark camp, that stone sword looming in the air above him.

The way this is phrased makes it feel very Sword of Damocles, which maybe is not deliberate as that would apply far more to Rand, if anyone, than to Perrin, I would think. Though I guess you could spin it to fit Perrin as well. Anyway, deliberate allusion or not, it’s a great image.

Mat is in Caemlyn, so it would seem we’ve moved ahead of several characters’ timelines at this point. I always find that to be weird, when used to foreshadow something that is in this timeline’s present but another character’s future, but okay, sure.

Do we run from the past, then? Lews Therin asked softly. Yes. That is well. Better to run than to face it.

It’s so bitterly ironic that we’re hearing this in Lews Therin’s voice, because that is precisely the past Rand has been running from this entire time. And that is what has brought him to this point, where he is closer than ever to repeating it.

It’s beautiful in how cruelly perfect it is.

Rand’s time with Hurin had ended at Falme. Those days were indistinct in his mind. The changes that had come upon him then—realising that he had to kill, that he could never return to the life he had loved—were things he could not dwell on. He’d headed out toward Tear, almost delirious, separated from his friends, seeing Ishamael in his dreams.

That last one was happening again.

They’re all happening again. That entire list, in variation: a visit to Falme, with his state of mind in turmoil, a change upon him as he pushes away all feeling and seeks to become the void. Realising that he can and must kill women, that he must cross that line and leave behind who he was. Believing that he can never return to life at all, and that he must die. Refusing to dwell on it, and pushing all feeling away instead. Coming to Tear, where he stands now, almost delirious and chasing his own thoughts, separated from his friends, seeing Moridin in his dreams.

He strode down the hallway and into a massive chamber with rows of pillars, stout and broad, wider than a man could wrap his arms around.

I hope he knows this from trying, mostly because I need that mental image of Rand al’Thor the Dragon Reborn trying on a whim to hug a pillar and failing. (If any artists out there are looking for inspiration for something random to draw: this).

Rand’s thinking about Callandor now and I’m with him on that; I can’t bring myself to believe we’re done with that sword-that-is-not-a-sword. There’s something more there, something I haven’t worked out yet but probably should have. It seems likely to play a role in the end, as it did in the beginning, but beyond the fact that it requires a circle in order to be wielded safely—which means it requires cooperation and balance—I don’t know what that might be.

Taking the Sword That Cannot Be Touched was one of the first major prophecies that he had fulfilled. But was his taking of Callandor a meaningless sign, or was it a step? Everyone knew the prophecy, but few asked the question that should have been inevitable. Why? Why did Rand have to take up the sword? Was it to be used in the Last Battle?

I’d put money on it.

But this is precisely what I wonder, and have wondered. What is it about Callandor? Because Rand’s right: the Prophecy feels rather arbitrary if it’s just a ‘pull this sword out of the stone and then move on to the next thing’. Sure, Prophecy is Prophecy and can do whatever the fuck it wants, I suppose, but that would be so unsatisfying. And so Callandor is in somewhat the same category as, say, Mat’s ashandarei: things that have shown up to fill one purpose but definitely feel like they have more of a role to play. They’re loose ends at the moment, and not the sort that seem set up to remain so.

Is it just that Callandor requires men and women working together—that which was absent the last time an attempt was made on the Dark One’s prison? Or is there something else?

Why did the prophecies not speak of the Choedan Kal?

Another good question, and I lean towards it being because the Choedan Kal, like nuclear weapons, feel like they’re in that other category of Things That Never Should Have Been Made. If anything in this chapter is unnatural, that’s it.

Yet he used the Choedan Kal to perform arguably his greatest work thus far. So maybe I’m wrong.

The access key gave Rand power well beyond what Callandor could provide, and that power came with no strings.

And maybe that’s the problem. It’s too much power for any one person to wield. He cleansed the taint with Nynaeve, by using the male and female Choedan Kal together. Now, not even that is an option. And so, in contrast to Callandor, the sa’angreal that requires cooperation and balance, the Choedan Kal is unbalanced, unfettered power. It’s very like to what Rand is himself at this point, and what his mindset is. And it’s terrifying.

It’s the illusion of utter freedom, of ‘no strings’, against the reality of it. Rand sees all constraints now as being a kind of box, but in reality this illusory freedom he has found by freeing himself from all emotion or remnant of humanity is not true freedom at all, because he has also removed any sense of his own agency. He is acting out of necessity, not choice. And by putting himself into a state of mind where he can permit himself to do anything, he effectively…limits himself to atrocity. He has removed the choice of mercy, of restraint, of another way, and chained himself to the most direct route, even if it leads to catastrophe.

The prophecies were—in a way—the grandest and most stifling box of them all. He was trapped inside of them. Eventually, they would suffocate him.

So we come once again to this issue of perception. Who can possibly blame him for feeling that way? And yet, especially with how he and Egwene are juxtaposed, it feels more and more like the issue is in that very perception, in the view of himself as having no choice and no agency, of being trapped by prophecy rather than choosing it. He almost realised that, back in…oh…TFoH or so. But then things got worse.

And Moiraine, she who balanced that strange mix of surrendering to and yet choosing fate, of claiming agency even when she believed everything was as the Wheel wove, vanished. I don’t think those two things are unrelated. Rand lost that perspective when he lost Moiraine and, shortly after, Egwene. And so he and Eegwene have almost ended up on opposite sides of the prophecy/agency/acceptance/resignation coin, where Moiraine managed to combine both.

They called my plan brash, but these weapons they created, they were too dangerous. Too frightening. No man should hold such Power…

I absolutely one hundred percent agree with you there, Lews Therin. (Do I still want to see a character holding such power? Hell yes).

He worked so hard to keep from being tied with strings, but at the end of the day, the prophecies would see that he did what he was supposed to.

This. This right here. He cedes to prophecy the necessities, while Egwene went through the rituals by choice, accepting the trappings of fate and tradition in order to claim it as her own. He sees the crowns and coats and titles as little more than decoration that make it easier for people to accept him. Egwene sees the stole and staff in a similar light, but she does not dismiss them as useless ornamentation, or a masking of the truth. She doesn’t see it as a way to make the unnatural seem human, but rather as a part of the role she has claimed. A symbol, yes. Unnecessary to the execution of her duty, yes. But not a disguise, nor a softening of edges and oddities. And so she chooses to claim that for herself, to wear those symbols so that she can even better fulfill the role they represent, while Rand no longer really…cares.

Because this is not his choice. He’s still trying to avoid those strings, rather than claiming them as his own. He’s letting himself be dragged by prophecy, rather than acknowledging it and taking those steps when needed but in service of his own choice to see this through.

It’s a subtle difference, but it’s all the difference in the world, and I’m still not over how well it’s played.

Is Cadsuane really your biggest problem right now, Rand?

The Last Battle loomed, and he spent what little time he had riding to meetings with people who insulted him.

Again, I can’t help but compare this to Egwene, who also is facing the imminent fact of the Last Battle and yet still makes time for the ceremony of being raised (again) to the Amyrlin Seat, and recognises its importance and the importance of both berating and pardoning the Tower Aes Sedai and rebels alike, setting in place those formalities so that healing can begin, and dealing with people who have insulted and beaten her. She doesn’t see those things as a waste of time, because they’re essential. It’s not just about this one end goal, but about the steps along the way, because without those the end becomes meaningless.

(In real life I probably tend more towards Rand’s view of this sort of thing, but this is Epic Fantasy and there is a Point being made here and patience, as we are frequently reminded, is often a worthwhile virtue).

Something about this particular hallway seemed familiar.

Probably from the battle in the Stone, but I can’t help but think of the Prologue. A hallway of twisted stone and despair…

Was there, perhaps, a way to stop the Seanchan for good? He looked down at the access key.

Um.

(This is the thing with great, unfettered power: once you use it once, what’s to stop you using it as the solution to every problem? Why even bother with diplomacy, or lesser military solutions, when you can escalate straight to the most effective one? When there is nothing left to hold you back, why waste time? When you don’t care anymore about your own life and existence, or even of what may become of the world once this is over, why not use your nuclear arsenal to end every war? Why even bother fighting the wars in the first place?)

That [battle against the Seanchan] had been his first major failure as a commander.

Except you’ve learned the wrong lesson from it, Rand. The failure wasn’t in not annihilating the Seanchan. It was in not knowing when to stop. It was in not pulling back once you had succeeded in your original goal. It was in continuing even when saidin was strange and you were tired and angry and holding too much power, and killing your own people as a result, turning a victory into an ugly stalemate that felt like defeat.

Burning Graendal and Natrin’s Barrow away had required only a fraction of what Rand could summon.

If he turned that against the Seanchan, then he could go to the last battle with confidence

Yes, because what your conscience—not to mention your status as hero—really needs right now is genocide.

It would not take long.

That’s…chilling.

And it’s Lews Therin’s voice that is the voice of reason now, calling him back from that to the memory of trying to bring a dead child back to life in this corridor. A smaller failure. A failure to bring life, rather than to bring death. Painful and disturbing but with the intent to do something good. To save, or create, rather than destroy (when all this thoughts at the moment run in the opposite direction). The one he lost.

Moiraine had stopped him. Bringing life to the dead was beyond him, she’d said.

How I wish she was still here, Rand thought. He had often been frustrated with her, but she—more than anyone else—had seemed to grasp just what it was he was expected to do. She’d made him more willing to do it, even when he’d been angry with her.

YES. She understood what his fate meant, understood what it meant that he belongs to the Pattern now, and to history. And she was never quite sympathetic about it, but in a way her almost ruthless acceptance was what he needed. She recognised what he was and what it truly meant, yet she also understood the importance of surrendering to that fate in order to control it. She walked that strange balance more perfectly than most, and so served as something of a guide to Rand. To be more than a pawn in the hands of prophecy, but not to rebel against it. To accept, and suppress useless wishing, but not to lose all sense of agency. To be ruthless without losing compassion.

I also love that it’s only now that he understands her, now that she is—to his knowledge—dead. She was the one no one understood, when she was around. They hated or feared or distrusted her at the best of times…and now Rand himself is in that role, hated and feared and misunderstood, and from there he is able to see and understand and appreciate all that she was, and all she did. And to appreciate that she understood him.

But she’s not there now, and he is alone.

And apparently wants to go fight—or rather, annihilate—the Seanchan right now, because…no time like the present? I guess? Again, when there are no limits, the question becomes a simple why not?

“The darkness won’t matter; I shall create light enough.”

Um.

Yeah that’s uh…terrifying. No symbolism to see there, none at all... The Shadow doesn’t matter if he can just throw power into a harsh and burning Light. Except that’s far from balance, and it’s entirely wrong.

An unfamiliar figure stood with his back to Rand, looking out the open balcony doors.

Moridin?

OH.

NO. NO THAT’S NOT MORIDIN.

It was Tam. His father.

IT’S TAM.

HOLY.

SHIT.

IT’S TAM.

TAM IS IN HIS ROOM.

TAM AL’THOR.

IS HERE.

For the first time in TWELVE BOOKS. I have WAITED for this moment for YEARS and now it’s come at the worst possible time except that also means it’s the best possible time because this is going to hurt and I am here for it.

If anyone could crack that armour of ice and cuendillar Rand has tried to surround himself with…

Seeing Hurin unsettled him because it was an abrupt confrontation with a past that has come to seem like another lifetime. But that was Hurin, someone he liked and befriended and travelled with for a time. This is Tam, and so it’s the same thing but more, by orders of magnitude. It’s his past catching up to him and staring him in the face and daring him to try to turn away, holding that harsh icy emotionlessness of his against the living memory of someone who loves him him like a hand held to a flame.

But comfort clashed with who Rand had become. His worlds met—the person he had been, the person he had become—like a jet of water on a white-hot stone. One shattering, the other turning to steam.

That’s exactly it; that’s so exactly it that it’s eerily close to my own thoughts.

But this is what Rand needs right now, this shocking confrontation against which his past and present cannot both stand. It may not be enough to truly bring him back, but it might just crack those barriers enough to buy him a moment to confront himself, to force him to face the world and what he has become with his skin and soul and self bared, unshielded by that ice. It will hurt; it’s why he has pushed all these things aside and turned away from his past and his friends and family and feelings of any kind, but it is, I think, an necessary pain. He needs to feel again, and perhaps this will be enough to force him to, if only for those few moments where his selves are in conflict and his shields thus stressed between them until he is exposed.

Everything just feels better with Tam here. He is, as Rand himself has thought of him, an anchor, a touchstone, a solid connection to simple reality. And that’s something Rand has…struggled with, lately.

Which actually you can extend to an interesting line of symbolism and connection (bear with me here; this might get weird): he feels unnatural, detached, and thus continues to detach himself from the world, and has he does so he comes closer and closer to destroying it (through the True Power, or through balefire, or through simply throwing himself into the Last Battle uncaring of the meaning or form of his victory). The Dragon is one with the Land, and so as the Dragon becomes less and less anchored to reality, and less caring about what becomes of it, the more reality itself teeters on the brink of existence or annihilation.

The bubbles of evil may well be the Dark One’s influence and essence, but I think Rand has something to do with this as well—the more detached he becomes, the less he cares about the very world he is fighting to save, the more easily it frays at the edges. The Dragon is one with the Land and so as the Dragon becomes less real, less alive, the land—the Pattern, the world—loses that solidity and reality and substance as well.

As the Aiel might say, it’s as if the very world is his dream, and as he removes himself from it the dream warps and begins to fade…

But Tam is here and he is solid and real and steadfast and so we can draw back from that particular spiral into the void. For now.

Tam stood, hesitant, in the balcony doorway, lit by two flickering lamps on stands in the room. Rand understood Tam’s hesitation. They were not blood father and son.

Somehow I really don’t think that’s why Tam is hesitant. But of course Rand seizes on the reason that has nothing to do with simple emotional reaction to seeing the son you raised and loved and still love in pain and hardened by fate and lost and deadly and broken. Nothing to do with being a parent unable or unsure of how to protect your child who now belongs to the Pattern and to history and not to you, never really to you.

“Rand.” Tam’s voice was awkward.

“Please,” Rand said through his shock. “Please sit.”

They love each other and yet here they stand, uncertain and conversing like strangers and it hurts and I don’t even like hugs but all I want for both of them right now is for Tam to give Rand a hug and lie to him that it will all be okay. Just for a moment.

Light, Rand thought, feeling a sudden urge to enfold Tam in a hug.

The fact that Rand is once again echoing my own thoughts on this point makes it hurt even more. Give him that hug, Rand. It’s not weakness to need that reassurance and stability and reminder that you are human and people care about you. It’s not weakness to reach out. But he is the Dragon Reborn and he cannot acknowledge his own humanity, much less a need for a hug from a parent.

Familiarity and memories flooded back into his mind.

I’m also not much of one for nostalgia, but again, this is what Rand so desperately needs right now. He has been so long inundated by Lews Therin’s memories (sorrows and his own suicide) and has so long pushed away his own that he needs this simple reminder of who he is.

“How…” Rand said. “Tam, how did you get here? How did you find me?”

Ah, such a beautifully loaded question. How did you find me, he asks, like a child lost and afraid in the dark, to whom a mother or a father has reached out a hand and said ‘here, I’m here, let’s go home’.

How did you find me, he asks, like someone who has grown so far from himself that he wonders how his own father could find who he once was in who he is now.

Because Rand al’Thor, the Dragon Reborn, is not hard to find. He sends ripples through the world wherever he is, and no longer tries to disguise his movements. All Tam would have to do is ask. But that’s…not the question here, really.

How did you find me, he asks, leaving unspoken the question that small voice left in him might add: when I cannot even find myself.

I’m fine.

Rand can’t even believe this is happening because he has so strongly denied any thought of home or comfort and this whole scene is already exactly what I wanted. Beautiful soft pain.

So many people had changed around Rand—Mat, Perrin, Egwene, Nynaeve—it was a wonder to meet someone from his old life who was the same.

There’s a small irony here in that Tam’s full name is Tamlin (thanks to whoever it was who told me this; it’s still one of my favourite naming things in this series because ARE YOU SERIOUS), and yet he is the one person who doesn’t change. I hope this is deliberate because it’s exellent.

But this is why Tam might just be able to reach Rand, and sort of…jolt him just enough to crack that armour for a few valuable seconds: because he is one person unchanged from Rand’s past. Not just someone Rand loves, but someone who has not changed, and who by his presence alone almost forces Rand back into who he was. It’s as if Tam is an anchor to a reality that has all but dissolved, but now Rand is being tugged back into that reality.

Which brings us back to the Tam Lin story, in a rather wonderfully inverted way.

It’s also a great example of how you can make genuinely effective use of a static character.

Tam, the man who had taught Rand to seek the void.

Oh, that hurts.

Wait, Tam knows who Morgase is? That really happened offscreen? And now Rand is learning that Morgase is alive, and it’s certainly not as huge a shift as learning Moiraine is alive would be, but still, that must be a shock.

“No. Wait. I can get a report from Perrin when I wish it. I will not have our time together spent with you acting the messenger.”

It’s sweet, and it’s almost touching genuine emotion, but instead it goes through this filter of formality, because still Rand cannot allow himself to feel.

With the reference to Tam teaching him the void, I’m also reminded here of Rand running out of the palace in Caemlyn toward Mat and Aviendha, who he had thought dead, tears running down his face and choosing to let the void go because ‘he wanted to feel this’. Now, that is no longer an option.

“Ah, son,” [Tam] said, shaking his head, broad hardworking hands clasped before him, “they’ve really done it. They’ve gone and made a king out of you.”

It’s said with a slight smile, and seems to be said fondly, but there is such an aching feeling of sadness and loss here, and in this entire scene. It’s lovely and it hurts and I want all of it.

“What happened to the gangly boy, so wide-eyed at Bel Tine? Where’s the uncertain lad I raised all those years?”

“He’s dead,” Rand said immediately.

Tam nodded slowly. “I can see that.”

Oh.

I don’t know which part of this hurts more: the immediacy of Rand’s answer, or the way Tam just…tries so hard to take it in stride, and nods and accepts it as true because he can’t deny it. And how, even then, he doesn’t protest or let it visibly rattle him; he tries to show that acceptance, tries to be almost gentle with it, to agree with Rand and not fight him even on this.

There is so much pain here.

Well, at least now the genealogy is out in the open. Clears the air a bit, I suppose.

“Yes,” Tam said. “I can see how. I…” He gripped his hands together tightly. “I never meant to lie to you, son. Or, well, I guess I shouldn’t call you that, should I?”

You can call me son, Rand thought. You are my father. No matter what some may say. But he couldn’t force the words out.

The Dragon Reborn couldn’t have a father.

HELP ME.

THIS HURTS.

I love the way this scene is written, with the unspoken almost louder and more apparent than the actual dialogue on the page. As if the words that are spoken are just a framework, around which everything else hangs, and you get this exquisite feeling of tension and pain and of both of them desperately reaching for each other but not able to speak the words aloud or make the motions. The blocking and the dialogue feel stilted, and instead you fill in the spaces with the absences and the silences and the thoughts. The motions that are considered but never actually executed, the words that go unsaid, the pauses that speak volumes, the warmth and pain and love that cannot be expressed.

It’s a scene told in absences, where what is not there is more important and more apparent than what is.

And just. The tension here in Tam’s body language, as he keeps his words gentle and mild but also deliberately distant. The way he grips his hands together as if to physically stop himself from reaching out to his son. The way he does not challenge Rand, does not push him, and accepts the silences and absences and formality he receives, because it is all he can offer.

And Rand. Who cannot get those words out past the walls of ice he has encased himself in, who cannot let himself feel, who longs to reach out to his father and yet holds himself back because he can’t let himself be human.

They’re in pain and I’m in pain and we’re all in pain and EVERYTHING IS FINE.

The Dragon Reborn had to be a figure of myth, a creature nearly as large as the Pattern itself.

HE’S THINKING THE EXACT WORDS OF MY OWN THOUGHTS AND I’M NOT OKAY.

What would it do if it were known that he kept his father nearby? If it were known that the Dragon Reborn relied upon the strength of a shepherd.

The quiet voice in his heart was screaming.

*falls to the floor clutching this book and wailing*

THIS IS TOO MUCH.

HELP.

If it were know that the Dragon Reborn relied upon the strength of a shepherd that is beautiful and heartbreaking and all the more so because it is exactly what he must do but he has gone too far and sees that as a weakness, sees his own former self as a weakness. He, who once took a moment, bleeding and afraid, to just…sit, and remember a shepherd named Rand al’Thor. That is his strength, but he has pushed it away and now cannot let himself reach out to his father or his own memory or anything that feels like love, because it’s dangerous to be vulnerable and dangerous to hope and dangerous to let himself need.

That’s just such a gorgeous line and it’s already haunting me.

And then the quite voice in his heart was screaming, to underline this sense not just of wrongness but of pain, of the way he is tearing himself apart…but on the surface there still is nothing but formality and the image of a king.

This is. It’s just. It’s so good.

It’s so good and it hurts and he’s screaming but can’t let himself listen and he’s at war with himself and Tam is having to sit there and watch and I am sure Tam sees this, sees at least some of what is happening but can’t let himself say anything, can’t reach out because this isn’t something he can fix except by being there for when it all falls apart and letting Rand know that he is loved, in whatever way Rand will accept.

“You did well, Tam,” Rand found himself saying.

HOW DARE YOU.

Rand picked up the access key—it too brought him comfort—then stood. Tam hastily joined him, acting more and more like just another retainer or servant.

“You have done a great service, Tam al’Thor” […]

“I appreciate that, my Lord,” Tam said.

It (like every single word of this entire scene) hurts, but it’s also, I think, deliberate on Tam’s part. Because it’s the only way he can interact with Rand. Rand sees it as acting like ‘just another servant’ but in the position he now holds he doesn’t really…permit anything else. Maybe, occasionally, from Nynaeve or Min. But even then just barely.

And I think Tam sees that. Tam is a parent. He sees that Rand is hurting but he also sees that Rand isn’t going to ask for help or comfort, and probably won’t accept it if Tam offers. And so instead he lets Rand set the frame of the entire interaction, and takes Rand’s lead, and works within that, and doesn’t ever push. The important thing is that he doesn’t turn away.

“I’m afraid I lost your sword,” Rand found himself saying. It felt foolish.

And so Rand finds himself opening up, if only a little. Tam is important through his presence alone, and I think he knows that. He really is just trying to be there for Rand. Trying to offer his support and his love however he can. And Rand does respond to that, even if it’s only apparent in contrast to how he has been lately. It’s a small change, but it’s a start.

Also you might tell Tam that you lost his sword in Ishamael; that would provide some helpful context, but okay. Sure. Fine.

Even that, Tam accepts. And answers Rand’s questions about the sword’s origins. He’s still letting Rand take the lead and guide the conversation, rather than trying to push Rand too quickly to topics that might cause him to retreat behind his walls and shut down completely.

And so eventually we get to something almost like Rand opening up.

“My life isn’t my own. I’m a puppet for the Pattern and the prophecies, made to dance for the world before having my strings cut.”

Tam frowned. “That’s not true, son. Er, my Lord.”

Now he pushes back a little, because Rand has come very very close—probably as close as he can allow himself—to asking for help here. To telling his father he’s hurting.

And oh, it hurts.

“And you can’t run?” Tam asked.

“I don’t think the Pattern would let me,” Rand said. “What I do is too important. It would just force me back in line. It has done so a dozen times already.”

“And would you really want to run?” Tam asked.

Rand didn’t reply.

YES.

THIS IS PERFECT.

It’s been one of the central problems for Rand for so long—that he cannot see any space for agency, any choice or any reason to make one. That all he has is despair and desperation and the eventual promise of death. That he feels trapped in this box and cannot see a way to free himself of it.

But Tam asks the perfect question. It’s the framing of it. The issue of perception. The question of, in essence, what are you fighting for?

“Does it matter if you can run, when you know that you’re not going to?”

“I’m going to die at the end of this,” Rand said. “And I have no choice.”

And that’s no small thing to have to deal with. It’s hard to truly fault Rand for the mindset he’s ended up in, because how could he not? He’s barely older than twenty and doesn’t expect to see another year, he’s tired and he’s wounded in every sense of the word, he’s been violated body and mind and made a captive again and again, he can barely trust his own mind and he doesn’t know a moment’s peace, and the entire world looks to him in hatred and fear and desperate need, and he cannot see a way out. Of course he struggles to see any kind of choice, much less let himself believe he chooses this.

Because in a way, choosing it feels like it would make it even worse. How could he choose to go through all of that? And so relinquishing agency is itself almost a form of relief—consigning all that pain to inevitability and letting himself focus only on its end.

“I won’t have talk like that,” Tam said. “Even if you’re the Dragon Reborn, I won’t listen to it. You always have a choice. Maybe you can’t pick where you are forced to go, but you still have a choice.”

“But how?”

Tam laid a hand on Rand’s shoulder. “The choice isn’t always about what you do, son, but why you do it.”

THIS IS EVERYTHING. THIS IS IT. I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR BOOKS FOR SOMEONE TO SAY THIS TO RAND AND FOR RAND TO BELIEVE IT.

THANK YOU TAM AL’THOR.

THIS IS…

This is just. It’s everything. What are you fighting for.

It’s the hardest part of the role he must play: to actively choose it, to embrace it and all the pain it brings…but it’s also the only thing that might make that pain bearable. Because if he chooses it, he has a reason for it. If he chooses it, then he is fighting for something. If he chooses it, he can look to why, and look to the balance, and all that he is saving even as he destroys himself.

It’s the importance of caring, which is something Rand has not lost sight of so much as relinquished entirely. Because to him, it doesn’t matter if he cares or not; what is foretold must happen. But that’s not how it work, and it’s what makes him so frightening right now, and what makes the prospect of his victory ‘as dark as his defeat’. He, the Champion of the Light and the world’s best hope of salvation, has lost sight of the world he’s saving, and why he should save it at all. He’s fighting for victory alone, rather than for life and light and a future and the chance to make something more.

“I don’t know if it’s true that you’ll need to die for this all to play out. But we both know you aren’t going to run from it. Changed though you are, I can see that some things are the same. So I won’t stand any whining on the subject.”

O course it’s Tam who finally says it to Rand and pushes Rand to confront that truth. Tam, Rand’s father, the one person who he might listen to. The one who can talk to him and care about him rather than about the Dragon Reborn and the role he must play, or even about the world and its salvation. There’s no ulterior motive, even if it seems almost certain that bringing Tam here was Cadsuane’s plan. She may be thinking about the salvation of the world—a worthy cause, it must be said—but Tam is talking to Rand here, for no other reason than that he loves him.

“Rand, I think you can survive this.”

I CAN’T HANDLE MUCH MORE OF THIS. IT HURTS A LOT AND I LOVE IT AND IT’S TOO MUCH.

It’s such a simple statement but it’s a comfort and a belief that so few people have offered to Rand lately. Because most of them see him as the Dragon Reborn, and need him to save the world, and there are so, so few who can see past that to the boy who is hurt and afraid and facing his own death and doesn’t know what else to do.

But then there’s Tam, who just…talks to Rand as his son, because that’s who he is. Talks to him like a person, like the boy he was, and chides him for ‘whining’ and then offers him hope and does so with an open hand and a father’s love and nothing else.

“I can’t imagine that the Pattern won’t give you some peace, considering the service you’re doing for us all.”

Tam knows the prophecies and knows the role Rand has to play, but again he doesn’t look at Rand and see the figure out of legend who will save them all because that is his duty and his fate; there are so many who see that and do not see the person, and so would never think of a debt owed or of what Rand is sacrificing. But Tam sees that, because this is his son and he wants him to have that peace, and it’s so important for Rand to have someone see that and acknowledge it without being asked. Someone who can see what this is costing him, and can wish for something for him in return, rather than offering him pity or apathy or yet more demands.

“You may not be able to choose the duties you’re given. But you can choose why you fulfil them. Why do you go to battle, Rand?”

I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS CONVERSATION AND IT HAS NOT DISAPPOINTED ME.

These are the true questions, the points around which the future of the world turns. What are you fighting for.

And how perfect it is that it’s his father asking him.

It’s two things I’ve been waiting for—a reunion between Tam and Rand, and someone to push Rand to that question—combined into one and it’s so, so excellent and I’M COMPLETELY FINE.

This book is hurting me.

“Because I must.”

“That’s not good enough.”

This is the other reason it works so well to have Tam be the one to push him on this: because Tam can. He didn’t push Rand before, because he was letting Rand set the parameters of their conversation, and because he didn’t want to steer the conversation too quickly to something that might make Rand close up completely, but he knows where he can push, and he does so here, and it works because he’s Rand’s father. Parents can, often, do that where almost no one else can. Rand may have become all but unrecognisable as the boy he was when Tam last saw him, but some part of that person is still there, and some part of that relationship is still there, and Tam can still make him feel like a child being scolded. And for all that he is a king and a legend, that’s…kind of what Rand needs. Not to be scolded, per se, but to just be…faced with this almost simple reality, wherein he is just Rand al’Thor, and Tam is just his father, and none of the rest matters.

“To the crows with that woman! I wish she’d come to me sooner.”

Uh oh.

I think Tam’s messed up there. I…don’t think bringing up Cadsaune is going to…help, here.

And Rand picks up on it immediately and oh no this could undo everything, and he was so close; Tam was getting through to him and he had brought it to that absolutely essential question and now with one word it could all unravel…

“I’d stayed away, previously, because I thought the last thing you needed was your father stomping across your field!”

Oh, Tam. The magnitude of sacrifice implied there is huge, but he doesn’t even talk about it, or let it show. How he must have wanted to go to Rand, to see him, to do everything he could to help and protect him. How it must have hurt to hold himself back, because he thought it would be better for Rand that way. To protect and help him by staying away.

Tam continued, but Rand had stopped listening.

NO. YOU WERE SO CLOSE.

Cadsuane. Tam had come because of Cadsaune.

No, Rand. He came because of you, for you. Listen to him. Cadsuane was just the impetus; he wanted to come to you before but couldn’t, but he’s not here to manipulate you. He’s here to help you. He’s here because he loves you.

But it’s too late. He was so close. Just one small mistake…

His emotions seeing Tam were so strong that they had worn away the ice. Too much affection was like too much hatred. Either one made him feel, which was something he could not risk.

But he had. And suddenly, feeling nearly overcame him.

He had started to let himself feel; Tam could chip away at that ice and that is what Rand has so desperately needed, but this is what Tam was so carefully avoiding in the early part of the conversation: pushing Rand too far or saying the wrong thing and causing him to withdraw again behind those walls. And now he’s done exactly that, and the chance of reaching him, the chance of buying a few seconds for something to get through to Rand across those walls, is gone.

Tam’s trying to walk it back but it’s too late now. The moment’s lost and how much else is lost along with it?

It was, possibly, one of the best ideas Cadsuane has had. It came so close to working, and beyond the pragmatic…Rand needed to see Tam. He needed that conversation, that reassurance and the simple and unconditional love and support Tam offers. But the very fact that it was Cadsuane’s idea ruins it, because of everything that has come before. It’s yet another cruel irony.

“She manipulates me!” Rand said softly, meeting Tam’s eyes. “And she manipulates you. Everyone ties their strings to me!”

The rage boiled inside. He tried to shove it back, but it was so difficult. Where was the ice, the quiet? Desperately, Rand sought the void. He tried pouring all of his emotions into the flame of a candle, as Tam had taught him so long ago.

Difficult, because he has been brought closer to actually feeling something than he has been in a long time. Because his father is here, and they’ve just been talking about things that matter, and he’s been almost confronting himself and his very mindset, and it’s so, so hard now to shove all of that back down. Into the box he’s made for it all.

This is the moment. This is the chance, if it is not already lost—the point where that armour is cracked, and where he does just barely begin to feel.

It’s a necessary loss of control, in a way. So long he has fought himself, and put up barriers in his own mind, and denied aspects of who he is and who he was, and pushed those and others away, and closed himself off more and more, and convinced himself nothing matters anymore and he has no choice and he is damned and all that remains is for him to win and then die. So long he has just barely managed to hold all of those walls, and the only way I can see—the only way I’ve been able to see—for that to come to any kind of resolution is through a kind of collapse. Some kind of internal catastrophe that forces him to face who and what he is, and was, and remembers, and must be, rather than holding it all at a distance.

And this feels like that point of catastrophe, where he can no longer exert that desperate control he’s kept a fingernail grip on for so long, where the pressure finally cracks his shields.

I’ve wondered for a long time what could possibly bring him to this point, if none of those around him could succeed, if almost killing Min and then touching the True Power could only drive him deeper into that icy void, if burning a city out of existence couldn’t shake him. But this—being confronted with his father and these questions he has held at bay and his own self, and then having that overlaid by the rage of thinking it’s a trick…it might be enough to push him to that breaking point of sorts.

The question, then, is whether it will be enough. He’s balanced on the edge now, trying to push everything back in this desperate fight against himself as it all threatens to crash in on him…so it’s a question of which way he falls. Towards his walls and the cold frightening clarify of order and apathy, or towards the chaos of emotion and memory and pain that may well be his best chance.

Saidin was waiting there. Without thought, Rand seized it, and in doing so was overwhelmed with those emotions he thought he’d abandoned. The void shattered, but somehow saidin remained, struggling against him. He screamed as the nausea hit him, and he threw his anger against it in defiance.

Oh.

Chaos it is, then.

And I still think this is what has to happen—it feels almost like the mirror of that moment in The Last That Could Be Done, shattering the ice that moment built. But still it’s frightening and violent and uncontrolled and.

“Rand,” Tam said, frowning.

Trying to hold on to Rand as Rand changes before his eyes. The inverted echoes of the Tam Lin story are astonishingly perfect here.

“BE SILENT!” Rand bellowed, throwing Tam to the floor with a flow of Air.

No.

No no no.

He needed something to bring him to this moment; he needs those walls to shatter and that shattering was always going to be violent but.

If the cost is Tam…

No Rand no not the access key no no no

He had lost control. But he didn’t care. They wanted him to feel. He would feel, then! They wanted him to laugh? He would laugh as they burned.

Oh, Rand.

Oh, Lews Therin.

Because that’s what this is, isn’t it? This is where Rand seals his own doom, seals himself to Lews Therin’s fate. Looking at his family, someone who loves him, and feeling nothing but uncontrollable rage, and losing control, and reaching that point of madness where he could laugh as they burned.

When he nearly strangled Min, it felt like a clear parallel to Lews Therin killing Ilyena, and Rand felt it as well…but that was not his own doing. That was Semirhage torturing him with his worst memory.

This, though…

This is Rand. It is Rand out of control and consumed by something that could well be called madness, as everything he has held at bay crashes in on him and he reaches for power and all he can think of is the distrust that has eaten away at everything else…but still, it is just Rand. Not controlled by anyone else, not leashed or collared or caged.

Screaming at them all, he wove threads of Air and Fire. Lews Therin howled in his head, saidin tried to destroy both of them, and the quiet voice inside Rand’s heart vanished.

Oh.

That last bit. That’s almost as devastating and horrifying as ‘death and betrayal. It is HIM.’

That moment where the last part of him that is just Rand is silenced. Where all that is left is the rage and the power and the chaos, saidin and Lews Therin’s memory, brought into this present moment as Rand’s own reality. And so history stands poised to repeat itself; Rand’s worst fears and the reason he built those walls in the first place about to be realised.

Because if he kills Tam, that will be his Ilyena.

A prick of light grew in front of Rand, sprouting from the centre of the access key. The weaves for balefire spun before him, and the access key grew brighter as he drew in more power.

No.

This is it this is the moment. It all comes down to this: does he repeat Lews Therin’s past or does he choose something different, choose his own path, make a different choice this time and thus a different future. Does he condemn himself to Lews Therin’s fate or does he take this life as another chance. What are you fighting for, Rand? Why?

Also.

In the story of Tam Lin, he is changed into shape after shape and Janet must hold on to him throughout it in order to save him, and the last form he takes in most versions of the story is a burning coal.

By that light, Rand saw his father’s face, looking up at him.

Terrified.

What am I doing?

Here, Tam, Tamlin, is trying to hold on to Rand as Rand changes into a king, into the Dragon Reborn, into a figure of legend and prophecy. He tries to hold on to his son and does not let go—doesn’t turn away—even as Rand begins to weave balefire and glows with it.

And that is what may save both of them. That is what may call Rand back to himself—let him return to his true shape.

Even if it’s not intentional (but I do wonder if it is), this might be one of my favourite inverted references in the series thus far. It’s beautiful and heartbreaking and perfect.

He was brought to that state of cold apathy by Semirhage causing him to nearly kill Min, and to reach for the True Power. And now, as he himself almost weaves balefire again, this time to kill his own father, he finally stops to question.

It’s finally too far.

I wondered what might be.

This is absolutely stunning.

This is just. What a scene.

What a way to bring him to that breaking point.

Because what else could have? What could have forced him to this? When nothing can hold him back, when Nynaeve could not and Min could not and he saw no reason to...

But Tam looking at him in terror, and the echo of Lews Therin in his mind as he almost repeats history and realises his own greatest fear…

Rand began to shake, the balefire unravelling before he had time to loose it. He stumbled backward in horror.

Finally, finally, there is a line he truly cannot cross. Something he truly cannot do, something so horrifying to him that it reaches him through that swirling chaos and the remnants of the armour he has built around himself.

Tamlin al’Thor holds him through all the forms he takes and faces down the fire and it gives Rand that shaking, shattering moment that may let him come back to himself.

What am I DOING? Rand thought again.

No more than I’ve done before, Lews Therin whispered.

OH.

WOW.

THAT’S.

THAT’S A LINE.

That might be exactly as devastating as Lews Therin’s words when Rand reached for the True Power.

And it’s such a beautiful parallel to that scene. The beginning of the true lowest point of his arc, the last that could be done, and now…not quite the beginning of a rise, but perhaps an end to that place he was in. The last that could be done in a very different sense—the last thing that might bring him back. A last chance.

It’s a moment of crisis, a moment where everything comes crashing down and no more than I’ve done before. He has stood here before, about to do the unforgivable. In The Last That Could Be Done, he crossed what he thought was the last line.

Now, having travelled through that space beyond all restraint, he comes at last to a line he didn’t know existed, a point that would condemn him to that past fate, a thing he almost does and yet, in the end, cannot let himself do.

No more than I’ve done before.

A line he crossed once already…but the difference here is the choice. This time, he can choose not to. And so this is the turning point: accept Lews Therin’s fate or choose a different path.

Tam continued to stare at him, face shadowed by the night.

That one line is so heartbreaking. Tam refusing to look away. Face in shadow, even as Rand burns with light. But still not abandoning him, not turning aside. Still holding on.

Oh, Light, Rand thought with terror, shock and rage. I am doing it again. I am a monster.

Still holding tenuously to saidin, Rand wove a gateway to Ebou Dar, then ducked through, fleeing from the horror in Tam’s eyes.

I just let go of a breath I didn’t even realise I was holding for that entire final page.

This chapter is. Um.

Wow.

Let me just…sit here for a minute.

This is an absolute perfect bookend to Chapter 22. It’s not the same scene, and yet it hits so many of the same beats, but from…the other side, in a way. That was Rand’s fall, and this, even as it feels like an absolute low point, almost is the beginning of a rise. It’s Rand turning away from that line, holding himself back rather than stepping across and accepting unfettered, cold, terrifying power. It’s Rand being called back to himself after he came so close to losing himself for good.

Last time, he was forced to almost kill Min, right after he had accepted at her urging that maybe he had become too hard, too untrusting. Now, he comes to almost a similar point in conversation with Tam, but from the opposite direction.

And then that moment of crisis—the first which drives him across one line in fear of repeating Lews Therin’s past…and then this, which drives him away from a true final line out of the same fear.

No more than I’ve done before.

But here, in this lifetime, he can choose not to do it again.

That’s the realisation. That’s what he has needed to understand for so long, because for so long he has been caged by that fear even as he thought he had found freedom. He can choose.

Ebou Dar, though? I almost, for a moment, thought it might be Dragonmount. Because this is where he comes full circle, in a way. Where he faces that last choice: to repeat his greatest atrocity and succumb to his greatest fear, or to do something differently this time. He is brought to the point that ended his last life, and instead turns away and refuses to repeat that mistake. And so it is coming full circle, in truly facing Lews Therin’s fate, and yet it’s a divergence. Just as in making that choice last time, Lews Therin then killed himself and in doing so made Dragonmount, where in this lifetime Rand was born. Life and death; one choice and another. And the prophecy says he must stand on his grave and weep—I wondered, when Tuon thought that, what could possibly bring him to that point. But it seems like that, too, would have to be a point of coming full circle and facing his past—as he has, really, just done here.

But perhaps that is still to come. Or perhaps there’s yet another Moment to come first.

Either way, what a chapter.

Anyway, like after The Last That Could Be Done, I think I need to go stare at a wall for a while and just…process…this chapter.

Next (TGS ch 48) Previous (TGS ch 46)

#I kept thinking 'surely /that/ was the most painful part of this chapter'#I kept being wrong #Wheel of Time #neuxue liveblogs WoT #The Gathering Storm

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daydreamindollie · 5 years

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m.yg x f.r |“She’s Just My Neighbour” | 01

Chpt. Summary: One gain is one loss is just how the world works and after you've gained something you've desired for so long, unfortunately, what you've already had for a longer period of time is taken away.

Call it fate or just bad luck.

Genre: fluff + angst

Length: 3.4k

A/N: Hey my Lovely Dolls! I'm so sorry this took such a long time to come out but I had, unfortunately, lost all of my planning for this entire series, which really discouraged me from writing it. I'm slowly getting the plot back together and am hoping to continue on with this at a good pace. Thank you all for being so patient and I'm so sorry for the short chapter, I'll make it up to you all in the next one - That's a promise!

Love you all so much!

Enjoy the read!

✚

It’s was a regular Sunday afternoon and you were out in your garden. You were a very big fan of flowers and so was your cat, it seemed. She loved laying down in the sunspots beside them, it was as though she had an exquisite sense of smell that attracted her to the mature scent of your roses. Aside from the flora, you also loved growing your own produce, it was all too satisfying to eat the very vegetables and fruit you’ve been able to grow yourself, there was a new found appreciate you had for them - unlike the ones from the shops. Being frugal was also convenient for you, seeing as the ‘local’ shops were an hour’s commute away and wasting gas for something that you could make on your own, was something that you felt wasn’t as productive for you.

“Hey, Duchess~” you coo a greeting as your Persian cat makes her way over to you. She’s always been a little more affectionate than most other cats so she takes a moment to rub up against your thighs as your knees dig into the dirt. “Pretty kitty~” you coo and giggle as she leaves your side after having had enough of your gentle pets and scratches. She doesn’t go far, settling in the sunspot beside your ankles as her soft, waving tail tickles the small stretch of skin your old, ankle-cropped jeans couldn’t cover. Smiling down at her, you sigh in content before going back to tend to your flowers.

Not many more minutes drag by before you’re getting up to have a stretch, throat parched and eager for a cold glass of water. Bringing your gaze down, you find Duchess already staring up at you but still curled up and contentedly flaunting her cotton-white tail up and down. “Are you going to be okay out here, kitty?” you muse, reaching down and giving the soft tuffet of fur atop her head a rub. Flashing a brief smile, you make your way into your house and wash your hands before handling ice into a tall glass cup. Eager to get back to working on your flowerbeds, you walk out after inhaling half of your glass and was about to get back to work when two voices cut through the quaint silence in the air.

“So here it is.” came a familiar voice. It was Jisoo - the real estate agent that usually handled the people that were interested in accommodating the other half of your semi-detached house. “The other half is already accommodated but the half you will potentially be living in has been kept in good shape.” a deep, gruff grunt of acknowledgement directed your eyes to a male with an unreadable face. Aside from that, he was really handsome, true, his hair was very dishevelled and his clothes appeared to have been put on with not much care. His jeans were faded and ripped at the knees while his black, oversized hoodie draped all the way down to his mid-thigh. Piercing, half-lidded brown eyes met your own as you hurriedly tried to dust down your worn and dirt-crusted jeans, inwardly wincing at your ugly green pleaded button up shirt.

As you opened your mouth, about to greet the two, your mind reeling and hoping that if you couldn’t make the best first impression appearance-wise, then you can certainly compensate with your personality - which is what counted - the unnamed male was already making his way towards you.

“Is it busy around here?” he asked with a voice deeper than the ocean and rougher than the most coarse fabric you’ve ever touched.

“N-no-” you cough, ridding of your timid voice, “It’s actually really peaceful-”

“Are you loud?”

“Wha-?!” you splutter, unable to comprehend his rapid-fire questions but also feeling quite weary of his enquires.

He rolled his eyes and you pretended not to notice, “Will you be loud?”

“Umm…no. I don’t even own a speaker-”

“Would you mind in I blast my music?” so he liked music - it’ll be wise for you to play towards his interests.

“Of course not-”

“Good…” and he ends the interrogative conversation there, turning on his heel to walk back to Jisoo, who flashed her usual smile.

“That’s (y/n), she’s a great person and am sure will make you feel right at home-” the two of you briefly meet eyes and you give her a thankful smile. She was a good friend of yours as you had plenty of time to talk with her as she gave multiple others a tour of the living space the house provided.

“Yeah, yeah. Nice to meet you, I’m Min Yoongi,” he goes to shake your hand but already pulls his hand away before you could reach for his in the middle of bowing, “I think I’m done for today.” he shrugs having already turned around to face Jisoo, causing both you and the estate agent to blink in surprise. He was definitely someone who knew what he wanted and although he was quite rude, your heart stuttered just by his entire aesthetic.

“B-but Mr.Min, you haven’t even looked through the house.” she tried to explain but was still speechless at the fact that he had booked this appointment, and yet, wasn’t willing to spend all of his allocated time.

“It’s alright. That woman, (y/n), had been able to answer all of the questions I needed answered.” you see Jisoo attempt to coerce him into, at least, stepping into the house. “and besides, I could tell from all the pictures on your website that the interior is well kept. There is no furniture left, is there?” he asks, stepping closer to the car he arrived in.

“N-no, it’s completely barren in there,” Jisoo confirms. Never before has she met a client that was so sure of themselves. It wasn’t all that bad but it was so unlike the others that it was only just beginning to sink in how refreshing it was to direct someone who knew what they wanted.

“Alright then.” with that being said, they were already leaving. With such a brief and expeditious visit, you were reluctant to hope that he would end up choosing to buy the space. Sighing in discontent, you stared down at Duchess, who stood up at your sudden shift in mood, that was able to bring you some form of comfort, knowing that she knew you well enough to tell when you were the littlest bit upset. It wasn’t a surprising fact though, you had gotten Duchess when you had turned sixteen and you were already twenty-four, making her eight years old already. For an old cat, she looked as adorable as you had first gotten her as a three-month-old kitten.

“I’ll be okay, kitty,” you assure with kind eyes, crouching down to pick her up in your arms where her now non-moving tail hangs off your makeshift cradle, as if to mimic your downcast mood, “I have you looking out for me, and that’s all I need.” with a giggle, you decide to abandon your work for the day, no longer in the mood to dig around in the dirt for the benefit of your flowers. “An early, mini dinner sounds like a good plan right about now, don’t you think Duchess?” you coo, attempting to distract yourself.

✚

It had been a week and the exchange between you and the handsome but also very blunt man had been long forgotten, and you only have Duchess to thank for being your one distraction. Your friends, who live in the city, have also made their regular calls with the usual gaggle of gossip about incompetent coworkers and the like, also aided in your lapse of memory. Only the concise interaction was forgotten, however, and unfortunate for you, you were able to remember his gorgeous face and times where you’re left in the silence to contemplate your thoughts had you biting your lower lip at his hunky appearance. Having a love interest wasn’t a big fantasy of yours and so you hadn’t determined an ‘ideal type’ of guy for yourself, although, if you had to imagine one, he would be the perfect example. It comes totally unexpected seeing as your appearance is the exact opposite of his aesthetic. He seems to prefer dark colours in a very casual and comfortable style. You, on the other hand, leaned more towards pastels and nudes with the occasional patterned shirt or jumper, you were proud, though, that you are also someone who appreciated a casual comfortable look.

Sighing into your glass teacup, you took a cautious sip of the steaming beverage. This morning was very busy with you talking to clients on the phone whilst making spontaneous designs onto your desktop, all this was then followed by answering multiple emails of past and potential clients and that work carried onto confirming details on designs and setups. You were glad that you had something to do and that your small private business was thriving and getting popular every day but you would have better preferred being out in the garden. It’s an ironic thought, however, seeing as you used to hate digging your knees into the dirt and having to sweat under the blistering gaze of the sun but over time, you had come to appreciate the benefits it brought you and the therapeutic sensation it brought about amidst your hectic occupational commitments.

After the workload you had to mentally force yourself through this morning, however, you were too tired to be out tending to your flowers and cleared up work on your calendar to have time for them tomorrow. For now, you’re settling down with some spicy tea and a warm book, your legs curled underneath a woolly blanket as Duchess purrs in your lap. At some points, she’d weakly look up at you with pleading eyes, which you could never say no to and would reach out to rub behind her ears and stroke down her back. You don’t know if it’s your worry over her old age that is making you realise that she’s seeming a lot weaker recently but you’ve seen her have very lazy times, especially when you know she feels lonely.

As you contemplate phoning into the vets or simply paying more attention to Duchess, you hear the robust noise of a large vehicle. Glancing down at Duchess, you find her already staring up at you, “Who could that be Duchess?”

Inhaling a gasp, your feet almost push off the carpet and fly to the door and sprint its way to the movers so that you could help with anything but looking down at your attire and fluffy socks, you shake your head with a laugh. You could be so silly sometimes. “We’re getting a new neighbour Duchess!” you cheer down at her before taking another glance out of the window from behind your curtains and instantly flush a brilliant red when you make immediate eye contact with your fantasy man from last week. “Yoongi…” you muttered under your breath at which he raised his brow at, clearly having read your lips. Squeaking, you turn away, your face becoming hotter than your steaming cup of tea. The outfit he had on today had your knees turning weak as his smouldering eyes pushed your knees to quake beneath you.

He was in all black: black belt, turtleneck, jeans, shoes, cap, mask and the killer black leather jacket. You begin to wonder what type of job he has, was he a model of some sort? Why would he move all the way out here? He says he likes music so could he be a musician of some sort? He certainly has a similar eccentric air to artists of a particular craft, you just have yet to uncover his speciality.

“It’s Yoongi, Duchess…” you whisper down at her, quickly turning to look past your curtains again in hopes of catching another eyeful of him, only to sigh in disappointment when it appears as though he was beginning to help the movers with the boxes. That was sweet of him but your greed overrode that appreciation, wanting to desperately drink more of him in. Willing yourself to turn away from the window, you looked down at Duchess who was beginning to fall asleep curled around your feet. This was a really cute habit of hers and it always made you giggle at how adorable she could be. “Can you believe he’s going to be our new neighbour?” you watched as the overgrown white fluff ball yawned and began grooming herself, “Why don’t we making him some cookies so that he feels truly welcomed around here? I hope he likes chocolate chip.”

Humming happily to yourself, you set to work. You wanted to hurry so that you can get it to him on time before he starts getting tired from all the moving around of boxes. From first-hand experience, you know how tiring moving can be and you always end up napping whenever you’re tired, so you don’t want to be the reason why he has to wake up from a nap. Thankfully, the window from your kitchen faces the front yard and you’re able to see the gradual process of the movers as well as Yoongi's and, as much as you’d like to ogle the man, you don’t want anything to go wrong with the cookies you’re preparing for him. A good first impression as his neighbour is what you’re determined to convey to him.

To you, it’s fairly easy to bake cookies because you’ve made them multiple times seeing as they’re your favourite snacks, and so, you’re able to get them into the oven in no time flat and patiently wait for them to cook through to perfection. There’s still the added few minutes that you have to allow for them to cool but you aren’t worried about time, from the looks of things, you’ll be able to deliver them with perfect timing.

It seemed to take forever for the cookies to come out the oven and cool down enough for you to take over to your new neighbour, however, now that you were standing right in front of his door with the cookies wrapped up in food-safe decorated paper, forming a cute little pouch of goodies that you tied off with a rustic length of string, your nerves were acting up. Some minutes dragged by with you just standing there, the wrapped cookies in one hand as the other was lifted up and curled into a fist, ready to rap against the front door.

You’ve been so lonely and had been waiting so long for this moment, for someone to start living beside you so that you can have conversations over the garden fence, exchange words of advice and greet each other a good morning for when you both start your days. There was a lot of pressure on you to make a good first impression. It was a sad fact, though, that you were in desperate hopes for this happening when the normal average single woman your age would be hoping for a love story to unfold much like the romanticised ones in movie theatres.

Shaking your head to rid yourself of your delaying thoughts, you inhaled deeply and quickly knocked on the door during exhalation. Now that you had notified him of your presence, you weren’t only left to your distressing thoughts but also to a sudden need to fidget with your hands and feet and mouth. Your teeth were anxiously gnawing at your bottom lip as your hands twirled the excess string extending from their tie on the pouch and your feet shuffled beneath you.

Was it your poor perception of time or did the wait you were forced to endure outside his door last longer than it did when waiting for your cookies to cool?

Eventually, however, you were able to hear the pounding of feet down the staircase through the wooden door, which only added to your already trembling nerves, and before you know it - faster than it took for your cookies to cool - you were face to face with a glum and exhausted looking Yoongi. Completely disregarding his appearance because, admittedly, he’ll always look handsome to you no matter the circumstances, you held out the cookies you had so prettily wrapped.

“U-umm, I wanted to drop by and say hello. I also made you some chocolate chip cookies, I-I hope you like them-” you began and was about to say more if it weren’t for the grunt he gave in thanks before snatching your cookies away and closing the door in your face.

This left you stunned.

Did that really just happen?

In your head, the fun fantasy of all the neighbourly things you were going to do with your new neighbour was slowly shattering and falling to pieces at your stagnant feet, no longer shuffling in anxiousness but remaining still in disappointment and crushed hopes.

✚

Did you, perhaps, have really high expectations from simply having a neighbour around? You often wondered to yourself nowadays, seeing as all of your little daydreams about finally having someone living in the house right beside yours wasn’t at all what you had expected it to be.

You expected - wanted - morning interactions over the small picket fence separating your two front lawns, you wanted casual conversations about things that didn’t matter but things you were still interested in, all in all, you ultimately just wanted someone to cure your lonely life away from the city. Yoongi, however, had other plans and seemed perfectly content with being anti-social and not having to face you or greet you 'good morning' like you always wanted.

Sighing heavily, you tried to continue with handling your garden chores for the week but it was really hard to get on with it due to all of your heavy, lingering thoughts. It wasn’t until the afternoon music from Yoongi’s house started playing through his walls that you were able to muster up a small smile. If you couldn’t have what you wanted from your fantasy neighbour, at least you had the music Yoongi was constantly playing in the afternoon to comfort yourself with. It wasn’t much but it was something, in fact, it was the only thing you had to remind you that there was someone living right beside you. Thinking about it, that is also very agonising to think about and you couldn’t help but huff out a bittersweet smile.

You have hope, however, as you stare down at your elderly cat who was, once again, sleeping in a sunspot beside your feet, you have hope that he’ll come out of his shell and see you as someone that he knows he can greet every morning and be confident that he’ll receive a response from instantaneously.

Sometimes, you’d wonder if you were being too unrealistic, after all, you can’t expect everyone to meet all of your expectations just because they have a certain role in your life as your neighbour. All you need is a cure for your loneliness and you’ve somehow placed all the responsibilities of that onto your neighbour even before you had one and now that you had one, you were utterly disappointed that it wasn’t at all what you had expected.

You took a second to momentarily immerse yourself in the music Yoongi was blasting through the powerful speakers you had seen him bring into his house from the moving van, “At least I have you, Duchess…” reaching out to your sleeping cat, you gently stroke down the fur of her back and frown at the realisation of how fragile her old age has made her.

✚

It’s been several hours since you’ve last seen Duchess and you were beginning to worry. You allow her to have the freedom to roam but she was always back before it got too dark because she loves having her dinner, however, today, despite all of your callings, you were getting no response.

It was odd, very odd, especially for her. And you were beginning to really worry and stress for her safety.

“Duchess, where are you?!” you were almost sobbing, fearing the worst of the worst and when you had finally turned your gaze towards the road, your heart and entire world shattered before you at the sight of your loyal companion laying dormant beside the pavement, splashes of bloodbloodblood red staining her usually pristine white fur.

#bts yoongi #yoongi x reader #yoongi neighbour #bts x reader #min yoongi #kpop fluff #kpop angst

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queencatherynerhys · 6 years

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The Fighter - Chapter 4

A/N: Thank you so much for everyone who is reading this series. I can't believe that there's almost 70 views in only four chapters. I want to make a shout-out to @daugular01 for always commenting and the incredible support you have given for this series. Seriously, this series has seriously been so much fun to write. Please continue to read, write, comment, vote and like!

Summary: Just when America thought she has faced all her past. One surprises her. Can she face the unexpected? Will she survive this time around?

Tag List: @kinkykingliam @devineinterventions2 @madaraism @theroyalweisme @drakewalkerwhipped @drakesfiance @hhiggs @hellospunkiebrewster @alicars @mrswalkerreynolds @mfackenthal @simplyaiden-blog @hopefulmoonobject @blackcatkita @cocomaxley @boneandfur @lizeboredom @crayziimaginations @umccall71 @zarina-x-zig @writtenbycandy @ranishajay @heatherfilliez @drakelover78 @indiacater @pens-girl-87 @katurrade @speedyoperarascalparty @greyeyedsmile14 @barbaravalentino @zilch3 @mynameiskaylabella @darley1101 @scarlettedragon @blznbaby @trashbagfullofflannels @bella-ca @highlyselectiveextrovert

Parts: Prologue, Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3

James rushes up to me, alarm written all over his face. “You really need to see this.”

“What is it, James?” worry seeping in my voice.

He hands me a portable tablet. The screen shows a live surveillance footage down in the palace cells. My team must have set it up for the time being that we are here.

“What am I looking at here?” confused at the empty screen. All I see is a metal table with a bar and a chair behind it.

“Just wait. They’re bringing him in the make shift interrogation room that we set up,” he informs me to be patient.

Sure enough, in a matter of seconds, I see Liam pushing a man into the room, chaining his legs to the chair and his hands to the table. When Liam finally exits, I see a clear view of the man and fear and seething anger rushes through my veins.

It’s a man that still frequents my nightmares. A man that I thought I had killed many years ago. Clearly, I didn’t do a good job. This man is middle-aged at best, black hair. He had the darkest, cruelest eyes. His heart even darker. The most alerting feature about him is the burn scar that spans half of his face. One that I gave him.

“How the hell is this possible?” my voice cracks from nervousness and I quickly clear my throat. I collapse on the base of the massive stairs near the Hall and lean forward resting my elbows on my knees with my head in my heads, my fingers tracing circles on my temples to try to calm my nerves.

“I don’t know, Scar. I really don’t. You and I both thought he was dead, but here he is,” he recalls. “Just when I thought this trip couldn’t have been a more terrible idea.”

“I get it, James, ok. You don’t need to keep reminding me about it. We’re already here and we can’t turn back now,” I look up at him.

He sits beside me and wraps his arm around my shoulders. “I’m sorry, Scar. After so many years of looking out for each other, I just can’t turn it off anymore. But you know, I support and will always have your back, through death and hell. So, whatever you choose to do, I’ll be with you.”

I listen to him assure me and I knew without a shadow of a doubt that every word is true. I would do the same for him. How we never ended up together is mind-blowing, but it was a decision we both decided to make together. We had too many baggage, too many things we were trying to run away from. But even with that, we always knew we would always have each other’s backs. He reminds me a lot of Aspen’s bravery and Maxon’s heart.

I squeeze his hand with mine and nod. I didn’t need to say anything else. I conveyed what I meant with the simple gesture. We are interrupted by Jake approaching us.

“Director,” annoyance flash in my eyes and he catches it. He corrects himself, “Scarlet, my team has secured the inside of the palace as best as we can. Some of the servants couldn’t handle just sitting around and insisted that they help after calling their families, so they are cleaning up some of the debris that is still left. We moved the casualties in the sizeable cells, as well. I wanted to let you know our progress. I think the royals are safe to go back to their rooms.”

“Thank you, Jake. You and your team did well. I won’t forget it. Your next task is to post up defenses. Disperse your team to guard the inside and outside. Find the way up to the roof and post a watchman from above. Some of these rebels can be very cunning and we never know when the next attack can happen. And now that we have one of them, I know they’ll do anything to get him back.” I give him directions and watch him run off and once he disappears around the corner, I release a deep sigh.

“This day has been one hell of a ride,” a dry laugh escapes me. “James, can you let the family know that it’s safe for them to go back to their rooms?”

“Of course,” he gives my arm a squeeze before standing up and heading into the Great Hall.

I look back into the events of the day and I’m overwhelmed by just how much has happened in the last few hours. The wreckage of the palace, seeing my past unfold before my eyes, seeing Maxon. And as if that was overwhelming enough, finding out an enemy has come back from the grave is the tipping point.

A pressure in my chest builds and I recognize it as the start of a panic attack. I need to breathe, I remind myself. Just breather through it. I close my eyes and remember my training. I perform a breathing technique to calm my center. A habit I learned during my time in the pit. I exhale all the breath in my chest for four seconds. One. Two. Three. Four. Inhale and hold for four more. One. Two. Three. Four. And repeat.

I do this for five minutes to regain my center and concentration. I can’t bear to fall apart now. I haven’t worked this hard to let these people get to me. I will not let them hurt me again. Never again. I repeat this in my mind.

I hear the shuffling of feet around me and it must be the royals heading up to the third floor to their quarters.

“Dear?” a voice says near me. A voice I have wanted to forget for six years. I internally groan at the sound of that annoying pet name and just his presence.

“Yes, Your Highness,” I open my eyes slowly and look up at him standing in front of me.

“I just want to let you know that I’m not done with our conversation. I will find out what happened to American and you will tell me,” and with that he walks up the stairs not leaving me time to argue with him.

Maybe I should just tell him so he can stop pestering me about it. Before I mull about it, James comes up to me.

“So, what do you want to do with our friend downstairs?” he finally asks that inevitable.

“Ugh,” I complain and rub my forehead. That friend isn’t what I need right now. He’s a ghost I never thought I’d have to encounter in this life again. Along with dealing with my complicated feelings for Maxon, this man is sending my nerves and memories into haywire.

I fight the memory rising to the surface, but to no avail. Griffin Wright, along with his brother Gareth, were two of the worse monsters in the Southern Rebels. After 3 months of training in the pit, agents are sent to 5 months of red phase. An unforgivable phase meant to instill field mentality through kill missions. Scarlet Ryan became a star in the board member’s eyes.

During those 5 months, I lost myself to my anger. Killing corrupted bastards became easier, even enjoyable. I was the perfect agent to send for a mission. I became cold and detached. I needed to become a monster in order to kill the monsters I was assigned to, and I was about to go into the heart of the lair containing the worst of the worsts.

The objective was to get captured by the rebels and act as a trojan horse. During that time, the agency hasn’t been able to locate an exact rebel camp let alone gain any information about their leaders. There was a high price. The southern rebels were known for their gruesome, merciless treatment. If you were captured, it meant enduring torture until they are finally satisfied or bored and kill you.

When I was captured, Griffin tortured me for a month. During that time, I was able to learn that Griffin and his brother were the leaders of the rebels. I made it my mission to bring them down. I had to. It was the only way to keep my personal promise to keep Maxon safe.

Remembering that memory brings back all the pain, but I exacted my revenge while I was escaping when I burned his face and put 2 bullets in his chest. Now, here he is again still haunting me. Clearly, I didn’t do a good job. I had thought I killed him and his brother. If he’s alive I’m assuming his brother is, too.

I have to think of a plan and quickly if I am going to protect the people I love. The only advantage I have is that they don’t know my real identity. They can’t use my family or Maxon against me. I will have to take that secret to my grave.

Right now, all I want to do is get some rest. It’s already well into the afternoon. Cleaning up the palace and making sure that all survivors were accounted for took most of the day.

“I want to let him sit in that cell for a little while longer. Lock him inside. No water, no food, no air. Let him suffer for a bit before we question him. Set up one guard by his door at all time. Shift them out every 2 hours to make sure they don’t slip up. Griffin is cunning and I will not let him coerce any member of this team. Make sure to inform them not to talk to him. That’s a strict order. If someone utters even one syllable to him, they are fired.” I reply to James’ question.

When he leaves, I let out a long, tired sigh. It has been a long, draining day and it is only the beginning. I ask one of the agents posted in the hall to go to the car and grab the little belongings I brought with me: a duffel bag and a travel briefcase.

When he brings them to me after a few minutes, I head out to seek for a room to occupy while I’m here. I go to the one place where I never thought I’d be back in all the time I’ve been away. My home when I lived in these halls all those years ago. The one place that held so many memories of my past.

#the selection #the selection series #the elite #the one #the fighter #maxon #maxon schreave #america #america singer #america schreave #maxerica #kiera cass #romance #angst #hurt

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alice-in-idol-land · 6 years

Text

bittersweet

Read on AO3 here

Series: Fire Emblem Heroes

Pairing: Summoner/Grima

Word Count: 2179

Summary: “If I’m yours, then you’re mine, right?”

“Of course. There was never any doubt of that.”

The author’s note can be found at the end.

The summoner let out one last breath, watching as Grima delivered the final blow to the last enemy. With that, the battle had ended, the mission accomplished. All that lay after this would be heading home, nothing more, nothing less. All around, heroes celebrated their final victory, a war won in their favour.

“Well, that’s all!” they exclaimed, the lilt of their voice showing everyone how happy they were. “Let’s head back now, why don't we?”

And so they did. The team rejoiced on their way back, alerting any civilians to the good news. The summoner led the pack with Grima by their side, neither talking too much.

“So…” the summoner began.

“Yes?” Short and not so sweet, Grima went straight to the point as always.

“Everyone will be going back soon. Myself included.”

“Oh.” Other than a short exclamation of understanding, there weren’t any words to say. Both of them knew this day would come, there was no doubting that. Still, it seemed rather soon, rather fast.

“You’ll be coming back with me, after all, so there’s no need to worry,” Grima responded, only after considering the words for a long time.

“I.. will be?” the summoner asked.

“Of course. You don’t think I could let anyone else have you, could I?”

“T-that’s not…” the summoner paused. “We… we haven't talked about this before, I can’t make this decision in a few seconds. I’d need time to think about it. I don’t know how I feel about it, I don’t even know how you feel about it.”

Grima scoffed. “Feelings? Who needs to discuss those? Even if I haven’t said it yet, I’m sure you know you’re mine.”

“I… I do.” They couldn't deny it, none of it. Not the way Grima always seemed to be closer than anyone else. The way the summoner sought the dragon whenever they were in need of some company, they couldn't deny that either. Even the way Grima made the others stay away, the summoner had always pretended not to notice. Yet, they couldn’t hide forever, it wouldn’t work that way even if they wanted it to.

“So? What else is there to think about, then?”

“I… I don’t know. I can’t just leave my own world behind. People are waiting for me there, I have a life there that I need to return to.”

“And you have one here too, as the summoner of Askr. And you will soon have another one, ruling with me back in my own world.”

“Grima, I can’t-”

“But you can. You must.”

“Listen, I don’t have to do anything, alright?” With that, the summoner sighed, letting out a small part of their exasperation.

Grima paused for a moment, seemingly considering a thought. When the dragon continued, their tone took on a softer edge.. “If… If you don’t come with me, I don’t know what else I’ll do.”

The summoner looked over, a little surprised at what the Fell Dragon had said. Grima looked vulnerable, almost broken. With a deep frown and worry lines on their forehead, they looked more like the regular Robin than ever.

“I-I mean that… I might miss you? I… I’m not sure.” Head down, the dragon looked nothing like they usually did. Grima's eyes were fading to Robin’s usual colour and the marks on their face turned into nothingness.

“Grima...?” Hesitantly, the summoner reached out, touching Grima’s cheek. Almost immediately, their frown vanished and their face went back to normal.

“Are… are you okay?” the summoner dared to ask.

Grima blinked, all traces of weakness disappearing. “Of course I am. Since you’re coming back with me, I’ve never been better.”

Bringing back their hand, the summoner sighed once more. “I already told you, I don’t know if I-”

“Look, they’re back!” a voice shouted, interrupting the conversation.

“Huh?” Looking up from their conversation, the summoner spied the castle. After all that talking, they had returned much faster than expected.

Without a chance to speak, heroes of all worlds surrounded the summoner. Everyone began to celebrate the victory that had occurred, talking and laughing joyously.

No one could help the happy feelings, they had finally won the war. Now they could go home, they could return to their old lives. They could be happy and stop fighting on strange war fronts. Some were sad to have to leave the friends they had made, but now they cried happy tears. They spoke of how much they would miss each other and their plans for the future, for once they returned home.

The summoner smiled and laughed along with the others. A moment of happiness such as this would be good for everyone after so much war. Soon, they would all be going home, the summoner included.

After participating in several conversations, the summoner detached themselves from the crowd. Strangely enough, the summoner couldn’t help but feel as if they were being watched. A quick look to the left, another to the right, and, oh. Grima stood there, staring at the summoner. There didn’t seem to be any malicious intent, rather, Grima seemed to be waiting. That would be right, they still hadn’t finished their earlier talk, had they…

The summoner cut through the crowd, making their way through clusters of heroes. Grima smirked the second they noticed this. The summoner, going straight towards them? There could be no better sign that the summoner would go back to Ylisse with them.

Halfway there, almost to Grima, the summoner stopped as someone screamed.

The scream itself, shrill and high-pitched, seemed distinctly feminine and very, very close.

Turning around, before the summoner could ask about anything, their eyes found the strangest sight.

Slowly but surely, the rest of someone’s (a hero’s?) body turned to dust and faded away, with Sakura edging away from the dust as quickly as she could. “Who… Who was that?”

“M-Marth. He... he just... disappeared.” Sakura replied in the softest voice. She had been the one who screamed, alerting everyone else to the famed hero-king’s fading. Now, she collapsed to the ground as far away as she could get from where Marth had been standing.

The summoner walked over as fast as they could, passing Sakura. Leaning down to touch the remaining dust on the ground, all the remained of Marth, they grimaced. How had this happened? And what was it exactly?

“I… I’m...”

Whipping their head around, the summoner turned to face Sakura. The princess’ fingertips, then her entire hand, had begun to disintegrate.

“Sakura? Does it hurt?” the summoner asked, voice full of worry.

“I… I’m going home,” she replied. As more and more of her disappeared, she quickly stood up, smiling at everyone around her. “I’m leaving, I'm really leaving! G-goodbye everyo-"

Sakura never finished her last sentence, she had already turned to dust. No one spoke for a moment until every spoke at once. Final goodbyes and thank yous flooded the area as, one by one, heroes began to fade away. A small pile of dust and the memories of those around them, it was all they left behind.

The summoner watched for a solid minute before pushing through the crowd. People were disintegrating here, there and everywhere, but where had Grima gone? The summoner still hadn’t finished talking to the dragon, they couldn’t leave things like this.

“Grima? Grima, where’d you go?” But the dragon wasn’t in the last place the summoner had seen them. Pushing past person after person, the summoner searched.

“Summoner!” Nowi exclaimed, grabbing the summoner’s hand. Lifting her arm, the manakete showed off the palm of her other hand as it faded into dust. “I’m going home too!”

“T-that’s nice.” the summoner replied, eyes still frantically looking for the Fell Dragon. Where had they gone?

“I’m just here to say thank you, right? It’s been so much fun, there was no time to be lonely. And even though I’m going back now, I won’t forget you, alright?” Nowi said, smiling all the while.

“Yeah, alright. I won’t forget you either.”

“Goodbye now~!” Nowi let out before skipping away, off to say goodbye to some hero or another.

The summoner sighed. Nowi had been right, there hadn’t been time to be lonely in Askr. Back home, however... Shaking their head, the summoner decided to focus on the task ahead. They could feel sorry for themselves later.

Now, where was Grima? Turning in a circle, the summoner looked around, hoping to catch even a glimpse of the dragon. Out of the corner of their eye, a flash of white hair and plegian robes entered their vision.

“Grima! There you ar-”

The white hair vanished, leaving behind a pile of dust. They were gone. They had gone home. The summoner stared at the spot. How could Grima have left? After all the ‘I want you to come with me’ conversations, Grima had left without a goodbye.

Water began to gather at the corners of the summoner’s eyes. How dare they? Even if you’re a dragon, a god, you can’t just leave like that, can you? One by one, the summoner let their tears fall.

“Summoner…?” a voice, someone, questioned.

“N-Not right now.” they stuttered out in reply.

“Wh… what’s wrong?”

The summoner let out a short, sad laugh. “They left me. Stupid Grima left me without a goodbye.” Saying it out loud made it feel more real, something the summoner realized too late. More tears streamed down their face, ones of pure sorrow.

The other person paused. “I’m right here, you know.”

“Huh…?” Wiping the tears from their eyes, Kiran dared to look. Right in front of them stood Grima, looking mildly confused, but also somewhat amused.

“I-I thought you left me!”

“You really think me capable of doing so? That was the worm of a tactician who left this world, not me.”

“Oh.” The summoner didn’t know what else to say, the tears were still coming.

“...” Grima didn’t know what to do either but eventually settled for a pat on the head.

“Huh..?”

“It’s okay… I wouldn’t leave without telling you first.”

“Okay.” There Grima went again, being all vulnerable and soft, not to mention irresistible. The summoner couldn’t help but want to go back with Grima when they acted like this, it was the only way they could feel about it.

“I…” the summoner began before they could lose all their nerve.

“Hm?”

“I want to go back with you. I don’t know if I can, but if it’s with you, it’ll be okay.”

Grima scoffed. “Isn’t that what I’ve been saying all along? Even if you didn’t want to come with me, there would be no way to avoid it.”

Even though that was what Grima said, the fell dragon managed to feel relieved of all things. The emotions this human body made them feel…

“Oh…” Amidst their tears, the summoner looked down. Their hand tingled, where it had been, it was no longer there. In its place, dust carefully floated to the ground. They were going home, they could feel it in their bones, in their blood, in their soul and everywhere else as well.

“I’m… I’m going home,” they commented, breathing the words out in a soft puff.

“I am as well,” Grima commented, gesturing to their own hand that slowly fragmented into small particles.

The summoner hesitated. “I… I don’t want to go, Grima. I’d rather stay here with you.”

“I… feel the same.” Despite the slight hesitation, the fell dragon shook like a leaf. Was this sadness they felt? It had to be, for Grima knew no other word for this human emotion.

The shattering reached up and consumed the summoner’s arm, causing the summoner to cry even harder than they had earlier. “I don’t want to go, Grima, I’m not ready to go, what if I don’t end up with you what if I don’t-”

Reaching out with what would have been both arms if one hadn’t disappeared already, Grima engulfed the summoner in a large hug. “You’ll be fine.”

“B-but what if it won’t be fine?” the summoner cried, coating the front of the dragon’s robe with tears.

“You said you were going home?”

“Y-yeah…”

“My home is with you now, and your home is with me. So, you will be coming to me or I will be going to you, no matter what.”

“R-really? Does that really count?”

“It does now. And if it doesn’t, I’ll find you. You will never get away from me.”

“I-I know I won’t.”

“Good.”

“Grima?”

“Yes, summoner?”

“I-if I’m yours, then you’re mine, right?”

“Of course. There was never any doubt of that.”

“Grima, I lo-”

Grima hugged the summoner harder, just enough that their next words were muffled. A moment after, the pair had turned to dust on the ground.

The leftover dust swirled around, mixing the essence of both the summoner and the fell dragon. If either had had control over it, that's the way they would have wanted it.

It seemed much to bittersweet when they both opened their eyes and the other was nowhere in sight.

They'll meet again, in another world. One day.

-.-.-

I will never not love Summoner-Grima content. This was originally meant to be only 200 words for so, but it really got away from me... The pairing itself is really unconventional, so I can't help having fun with it everytime I get the chance to write about it~ Parts of this were inspired by Avengers: Infinity War, mostly because the movie was very good and I can't stop thinking about it... It's very good inspiration, though, so maybe I'll do more things with it in the future. With the summoner and Grima, it's very effective.

Anyways, as always, thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed~

#fire emblem #fire emblem heroes #grima #kiran #summoner #writing #also on ao3

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