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sabraeal · 3 years

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All That Remains, Chapter 8: The Flower Garden of the Woman Who Could Conjure [Part 5]

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Obiyukiweek 2021, Day 3: Strength Upright: Compassion, Courage, Self-Control Reversed: Weakness, Doubt, Discord

Once upon a time, a troll makes a mirror.

Is that not how we started this story, so long ago? How so many start: a vile creature forges an object. Who and what change in the telling; a troll makes a mirror, a god conjures a box, knowledge grows in a garden. In the end, it is all the same: what is once contained is opened, unwitting. Or lost, foolishly, in a heart so cold and cruel that it becomes bent to another purpose entirely.

But that is merely an allegory, a fiction composed to cover the raw edges we leave when we rub against each other. For that is the truth, is it not? There is no fell creature, no capricious and omnipotent beings to blame for our misery. There is only us, carving our place in our story by smoothing pieces off another. A snow queen is not made from frost and cold but by the blades of others, slicing slivers from her flesh until only ice remains.

That is the truth we cannot bear: the only monsters we face are the ones we have made. The only poisons we drink are those human hands have brewed.

And it starts like this, always: a girl in a garden, remembering the image of a rose, and wondering, how could I have I forgotten?

“You were quiet at dinner tonight.” Shirayuki hasn’t been at court long-- or rather, in court, privy to all its secret signals and capricious undercurrents-- but she knows that this is as close to an “are you all right?” as Haki can come. If confrontation is only allowed the glint of a knife, affection is stifled to a hint of warmth, a fire made in a room one is forbidden to venture. “I hope that the meal agreed with you.”

A flash of pharmacy white flutters at the corner of her vision, frustratingly out of reach. It’s been so long since she’s been there, since she’s thought of anything but silverware and schottische; when she tries it’s like a hundred voices shouting at once, each demanding to be heard. Just like being at Lilias, heads bent over a knotty problem--

“Shirayuki.” The consort does not crouch; it’s best, Lady Mihoko often remind her, to pretend one has no anatomy beneath the waist. But Haki does perch on a cushioned stool, her brows drawn tight over the elegant line of her nose. “You are not...indisposed, I hope?”

A solid shake dispels the fog mired around her. “What? Oh, no! I only...” It would be a mistake to speak of loam between her fingers, of the satisfaction of hearing a pod snap from its stalk. “I didn’t have much to say with my, erm, conversational partners.”

Royal brows raise to stunned arches. “Is that so? I would have thought you’d find much in common with Lord Kazunori and Lord Seiichii.”

They had both been older men, southern lords drawn to court for Seiran’s summit. Kind enough, but they spoke to her as they would their own daughters, which is to say: warmly, but brief. Not of any topics that one might sink their teeth into, lest it leaving lines around her mouth.

“I think they were more interested in talking to each other than to me,” she admits. In part because of her sex, and in part because-- well, her body may have been in that chair, obscuring the twining gods and goddess painted across it, but her mind had been a wing away, wondering if it was yet time to harvest the roku berries, or whether this year’s crop of apprentices knew akegi from yura shigure. “It seems there’s much to discuss before they all meet for, ah...discussion.”

Haki hands her a rueful smile. “There always is.” With a sigh, she sweeps to standing, as statuesque as any marble in Wistal’s halls. “Well, I suppose there’s nothing for it. I’ll have to ask the majordomo to find you some more scintillating seatmates tomorrow.”

“Ah..!” Tomorrow. Never had a day seemed so far away, so much more than a handful of hours between dawn and dusk. At Lilias, the nights had wavered between seasons, some so short she hardly slept between sun set and rise; and others so long that she woke in darkness, only to leave the lab in the same. But still, none seemed so long as this, and for no reason at all.

“Is something wrong?” Haki turns to her again, concern rumpling the curved lines of her mouth. “Do you have plans...?”

“No!” Shirayuki rushes to assure her. “It’s only...you mentioned dinner, and suddenly I felt so...”

“Weary?” Haki offers, when she won’t. Her eyes soften with mouth to match, smile turning her from heavenly to beatific. “I’m not surprised. You have been hard at work these last few months.”

And hardly anything to show for it, in Lady Mihoko’s learned opinion. Shirayuki bites back a groan. She would be sixty before that woman found her approaching passable, and even then, she still wouldn’t be good enough for a prince’s wife. Not when his children might have some chance, no matter how slim, of seating their sullied bloodline on the throne of Clarines.

“Perhaps you have earned a break.” Shirayuki blinks, staring up into the consort’s glowing face. “A private dinner seems in order. A night of no pressure of expectation.”

It sounds too good to be true. “Oh, no! I couldn’t--”

“Give me but a moment.” Haki hesitates at the door to her boudoir, lips lifted in an impish grin. “Perhaps my good brother might find himself available as well?”

Her mouth snaps shut. It’s been ages since she saw Zen, just the two of them. He came to dinner rarely-- understandable, with the summit only weeks away, and entirely under his purview, despite Seiran’s tacit position as host-- and where he went, Mitsuhide and Kiki went too. Haki had been her closest companion these past few weeks, the only friendly face, but Shirayuki longed for someone who didn’t look at her and see a princess, but--

Nervous energy courses through her, jolting her to her feet. Her hands itch, wanting for something to do, and with no plants to hand, they land upon the package on the receiving table. It’s wrapped in humble brown paper, folds clean and crisp, twine tightly tied. Haki’s medication, she realizes, dropping it from her numb hands. Made in the pharmacy. There’s a note on top-- instructions. She’d recognize them anywhere; after all, she’d written more than a few of them herself.

It’s curiosity that makes her pluck it from where it sits. It’s been ages since she’s been in the lab, but her knowledge hasn’t faded; there’s no harm in seeing whether there are any mistakes. An apprentice could have made this, after all. The dose does, as Garack was so fond of saying, make the poison.

She flips open the card, already flushed with the thought of being useful, but--

It’s not some apprentice’s writing at all. Oh no, she knows this spidery scrawl all too well. It was on every jar at her bench, every treatise she read late into the night.

It’s Ryuu’s.

Ignorance is bliss, they say. Always with a laugh, but stewing beneath it is envy and longing in equal measure. A pining for times past, for a childhood never quite as innocent as we remember.

For that is what we miss: innocence. Not the not-knowing, but state of not needing to know. The trust we felt towards those who always knew in our stead, who kept us safe from the dangers that pressed in around us. The ones who protected us with little lies; the small pauses to omit what might scare us, the careful editing to make our worlds the giddy fantasy we dreamed.

But there comes a day where all children must grow up. There is a day we must know these things for ourselves, so that we may see the world with clear eyes. For even innocence can be a cage, should some other hand try to lock you within it.

Ignorance is bliss, they say, but oh, only if they can keep you from knowing what it is you do not know.

May I ask you a question? the little girl asks, her gaze no longer on the garden, but the horizon beyond. It is bent in her vision, the glass made in such a way that each diamond blows out the edges, warping the world around it. She had never noticed when she looked only at the garden so near to it, but now...

Now the imperfection is all she can see.

Anything, the sorceress replies, her fingers wrapping around the caps of her shoulders. They’re cold, as cold as the glass beneath her palms.

The girl looks at their reflection, at the way the wave of the glass make those fingers bleed into talons. Where have the roses gone?

Shirayuki’s hands tremble, her eyes tracing every last loop, every hurried curve. “I didn’t...”

Haki peers around the jamb, letter folded in her hand. “Did you say something, my dear?”

This is the closest she’s been to Ryuu in months; even from where she holds it, the scene of lavender and akegi shigure waft from its paper. Not scented, not on purpose, but just from being left in a desk’s cubbyhole with his hastily tidied samples. His parchment smelt the same in Lilias, fragrant as the hothouses themselves.

Her chest can hardly contain her breath. “I didn’t realize that Ryuu was overseeing your treatment.”

A shadow flickers over the sorceress’s face, her grip painful for but a moment before she is her usual smiling self. A moment that could have been imagined, if only the girl was so sure it was not.

Roses? the sorceress asks airily. I’ve never grown any roses.

“Excuse me?”

“It only makes sense,” Shirayuki hurries to add, placing the card back atop the package. “He’s taken over for Chief Garack, and she always oversaw the royal--”

“Shirayuki.” Her name is firm from Haki’s lips, just shy of a scold. “I’m quite sorry but...who are you talking about?”

So many tales speak of trust as a blade, one that may be used to cut, that breaks when forged from brittle iron. A weapon, wielded and forgotten on the battlefield once the story is done.

But you and I know better: trust is a spell, woven to protect. It is a shield, unseen but always felt; sense by faith and not by fingers. And when it wavers, it does not break, does not shatter like a blade upon a stone; no, nothing so dramatic as that. Instead, it frays, unwoven one thread at a time, unnoticed until--

Until the hole can no longer be ignored.

She doesn’t leave the consort’s chambers meaning to break her curfew; oh no, when the door closes behind her, Shirayuki has every intention to head straight to her own. Her feet drag beneath her, weary from contorting herself into a mold that barely fits. There’s nothing she’d like more than to divest herself of all these courtly trappings and pass effortlessly into oblivion.

But she turns a corner, her mental map of the palace resolving, and she realizes: in one direction is her room, and in the other, the pharmacy. It’s late, but Ryuu would still be there, committing his last-minute thoughts to page while the offices emptied around him. She misses him, a longing so intense it aches.

It would only be a short visit. If Izana brought her before him in the morning, trying to act as both judge and jury-- well, Ryuu would be her physician, once she and Zen finally managed to make it down the aisle hand-in-hand. It only made sense to keep a cordial relationship with the man who would bear the next branch of the Wisteria tree into the world.

And if she missed him, the boy who straddled the line of friend and brother and son both-- there was no need to explain that to the king. It wasn’t as if Izana made a habit of confessing his ulterior motives to her. Though strangely, she thought he might understand that better than anyone.

Or all but one. And he...

Well, if there was a single person who might know where he went besides her, her feet were carrying her to him now/.

Were you to ask the girl, she would say she had not chosen night on purpose. The sorceress had housed her, fed her, loved her in her way; even with the image of the rose burned behind her eyes, she trusted her still, in the desperate way one does when one knows they should not, but cannot bear to contemplate why.

Opportunity chooses for her; the late afternoon sun burns hot, and when they finish their dinner, the sorceress excuses herself to lay down in the dark, to merely rest her eyes-- and does not wake, not even when the door creaks as the girl slips around it. The moon guides her steps when she walks into the garden, bright as the day itself, but she does not need it: her feet carrying her better than memory could.

There is one there, just as there was this morning: a petal, pink and sweet, fragrance so familiar she knew it even without sight.

Come out, she murmurs, digging her hands into the earth. Come out my lovely, my dear. I have been searching just for you.

A tendril spirals up from the ground, tentative. It flips and flaps, and oh, she is too shocked, too awed to help it. Even still, it finds her, wrapping around her finger, and with a single drop of blood the bush emerges, whole and dirt-smeared, from the soil.

What, it murmurs, impatience tinging its words, took you so long?

In the day, the pharmacy is all rush and chaos: apprentices burning tinctures and ushering patients to their rooms; masters emptying drawers as soon as they are filled, only for other herbalists to hurry to replace them. Guards arrive with injuries and nobles with ailments, no moment ever dull while the doors are open.

But at this hour, when the lords and ladies are all tucked in their beds-- or are at least pretending to be-- and the work is done, the pharmacy sleeps. There is no herbalist at the front desk, only the push bell Ryuu despised when she was his apprentice, since it always meant she would be pulled away from him or he away from his project.

A necessary nuisance, he called it once, and Obi had laughed. Just like me, eh, Miss?

She no longer remembers what she said-- it was early enough when he was one still, though she’d like to think she was too kind to say it-- but now she wishes, even if just for a moment, that she could tell him how much of a gift he was to her. How much he had made tedium bearable, even when she hadn’t known it for what it was.

Instead she bites her lips, rubbing at the ache in her breast. It’s hardly the first time she’s forgotten to say what matters, but-- but this won’t be her last chance. Obi might be away now, but he will be found, and she will tell him...

Everything. Every last thought she had since the moment they last spoke; her apologies and her worries, her failures and her triumphs. Because Obi hearing them-- that’s what makes them real.

Her hand wraps around the third door’s knob by habit; even now she expects to open it and see her projects spilled across her desk, to see a curtain closed beneath the other, and a window open between them. To see it waiting for her the way her heart waits for them, empty and waiting to be filled.

But there’s nothing of them there anymore. Nothing besides memories that no longer fit over the space it has become.

Her feet carry her onward, down to the last room, a sliver of light slipping across the hall where it’s been left ajar. She still expects to see a curled mass of blonde hair bent over the desk, long tables sprawled with books and half-finished studies, a bottle of roka medicinally sitting in the corner. But instead--

Instead it is a dark one, a riotous shrubbery of walnut and teak in desperate need of pruning. That had been her job in Lilias, along with Yuzuri’s helpful hands, but is seems no one here has yet talked the Chief Herbalist to task.

Give it a few years, Garack would tell her, and he’ll have herbalists as eager to get into his hair as you three were with me.

She leans against the jamb, a sigh slipping past where her heart clogs her throat. Ryuu had once fit beneath a desk half this size, and now he towers over it even seated, looking more and more like Shidan with each passing day, a man overgrown by time and deadlines.

“Ryuu.” It’s a palpable hit when their eyes meet. Everything else about him might change, but that gaze, so wide and thoughtful-- that never does.

Until now. One moment they spark, a fire lit behind blue glass, and the next...

It gutters, his gaze slipping away.

“Shirayuki.” His voice is so much deeper than in her memory, so much older. And colder too. “Excuse me, Lady Shirayuki. Is there something you need?”

“No.” She clings to the doorway, too aware of how fine her dress is, of how little it belongs in this place, his sanctum sanctorum. How little she belong here, now. “I saw a card you wrote to the consort, and I...wanted to see you.”

“A card?” His eyebrows twitch; she can no longer tell if it’s in surprise or confusion, not on this stranger’s face. “Ah. The powder for her migraines. Did you want some as well?”

“No, I’m-- I’m well.” It feels like a lie, even as she says it. It wouldn’t have, only hours ago. “I just...I’m here for you.”

His knuckles blanch where he grips his pencil. “Well, you’ve seen me. I trust you know your way out.”

You’re too late, too late, the roses say, their sing-song jangling in her ears. I’ve been hidden away for so long, and even now I cannot find him. The betrayal in their voice is thick when they ask, How could you forget us, your flower and your boy, when we have always grown together?

“Ryuu.” It leaves her lips cracked, broken; her mouth no longer knows how to form the shape that calls to him. “I know it’s been...a while, but please don’t think that I didn’t want to-- that I wasn’t thinking about you. I just...”

His pencil pauses on the page, but he does not speak. He just looks at her, the way he would at a stranger, and this room is suddenly a desert and ocean both, too far and deep to go by foot alone.

Still, there is nothing she will not brave, not for him. “It was hard to come,” she admits. “I’m not allowed in the gardens, and I’m not allowed to take patients. Coming here, watching everyone working the way I always have...”

It would have been like watching someone eat a feast while she was starving.

His eyes soften, even if they don’t precisely thaw. “I know that you’re marrying the prince, and that you don’t have time for m--” his lips press tight-- “this. I’m not upset because you’ve set your career aside.”

“But you are...” Her words limp as she says them, wounded fawns searching of an elusive mother. “You are upset.”

His hands flex as he places them on the wood, utterly silent. “I knew...” he breathes, so harsh it scrapes her own throat too. “I knew you’d have to give things up--important things. But...”

Ryuu had always spoken slowly, thoughtfully. But still, these moments when he meant what he said, when he composed rather than conversed-- it had never taken him to long to tell her what he meant. He trusted her, knew that even if his words came out garbled or his message was lost in a sea of ellipses, she would salvage it, gluing it back together with his intention.

So when he sits silent, it wounds her almost as much as his words.

At last his gaze lifts again from his work, but the glare he fixes on her-- “But I never thought you’d let one of them be Obi.”

Her mouth works, but the well from which she draws her reason is empty, leaving only pain in its wake.

“I didn’t...I didn’t let him leave,” she murmurs, more wind than whisper. “He never told me he was going. He just left without even...”

Saying goodbye. As if all these years had meant nothing at all.

“There’s a guardsman,” she says instead, her voice trembling toward something approaching even. “He said he saw Obi leave with--” a woman-- “someone.”

Ryuu grunts.

“He ran off with Torou, once.” She wants the words to come easy, but each one emerges from her trembling, the way her fingers are against her skirts. “On the way back from Tanbarun. That’s...that’s probably what this is. An old friend that needs help, and then he’ll come right back--.”

“He won’t.”

Each breath is a stab, deep in her chest. “You don’t know that.”

“I do.” He stands; a production with how much of him there is now. Cautiously, his hand extends, a fist hovering over the knotted wood of his desk.

It takes all her courage to take the first step, and all of it again to take the next. On and on until she’s crossed the room, hand outstretched, quivering beneath his own.

His palm opens, and into hers falls...a seed. Tiny. Blue. As clear as glass.

“An orbia seed?” Shirayuki lifts it up to the light, the plumule a hazy bead nestled in its luminous cotyledon. It’s impossible to tell by sight, but still, she’s sure-- it would germinate, if she planted it. “I was collecting these before we left.”

“I know.”

“It’s funny,” she murmurs, a smile lifting her mouth. “I never did find a blue one.”

“I know.” His explanation comes in fits and starts, a path never worn in the telling. “I had one. I gave it to Obi.”

“You...?” The thought catches in the light, just like the seed between her fingers. “Oh. Oh. But...” Her mouth curls, a silent question: why?

“I don’t know. I thought he might...” Ryuu’s shoulders twitch, as narrow as Obi’s when he first blew in with the wind. Before he settled into the man he became. “When he was ready...”

Of course. Her hand closes tight around the seed. Obi had what she needed all along. And she’d never known, not until...

Not until he was gone. “Where--?”

“I found it on my desk.” Ryuu’s fingers flex, falling by his side. “The morning after he left.”

Where did he go? the little girl asks, desperation choking her as surely as her tears. Where can I find him?

How should I know? the roses reply, thorns in their words as well as their stems. You are the one who left me buried under the ground. How could I watch him when you let us be trapped together?

“Did you...” Her mouth works, cutting itself against her question. “Did you tell Zen’s men, when they came? Do they know that he...?”

Said goodbye, she cannot say, to someone at least.

“No.” Ryuu blinks, his eyes as round and innocent and blue as ever. “They never did. Come by I mean.”

This is not the first time we have spoken of betrayal, is it? Of the wound that never heals, the jagged cut that scabs over only to be ripped open anew. The injury that teaches one to be wary, lest one be inflicted again.

But that is only after the wound is made. When it is first done...

Well, it is strange how long a heart can bear a blade through it without ever feeling the killing stroke.

“You are thinking,” Haruka remarks, with no small amount of disapproval. “I can tell.”

Shirayuki blinks down at her place setting, expecting to see broth dripped across the tablecloth, or perhaps the edge of her sleeve dipped in yolk, maybe even her tea dribbling over the edge of her cup--

But there is nothing. The white linen is pristine beneath her gold-rimmed plate, her sleeves and elbows tucked up and off the table, and if anything, her beverages of choice are picturesque in their vessels, juice beading with moisture and tea gently steaming. “What am I doing wrong?”

It, historically, has been the wrong question to ask the marquis, sure to send him into a silent huff that will stretch from first course to fifth, disapproval deepening with each sorbet. In his vaunted opinion, the fact her inexperience might cause her to trespass the unspoken rules of good manners is bad enough, but to not know precisely when and how it was done-- now that was truly unforgivable.

However, today he merely settles back in his seat, rubbing his fingers against the cloth tucked over his lap, and fixes her with his unerring gaze. She doesn’t shrink beneath it; oh no, instead something in her chest shifts, almost as if-- as if it grows.

His lips twitch, just the slightest upward tremor. “Nothing.”

Her mouth opens, then closes, stymied. “Then how did you know?”

A single, noble arch lifts. “Because you have never once stopped.”

It is to the tiger-lily the little girl turns, after the roses. They are a pompous flower, no doubt, as proud and self-important as any big cat, but despite their bluster, they are honest. The noblest flower in this garden, hearty and constant, and though they sniff when she kneels down upon their bed, dirtying her hem, they listen.

Have you seen him? she asks, heart lodged tight in her throat. Have you seen my precious boy?

“So what is it,” Haruka murmurs into his glass, “that has you so engrossed, young lady?”

Her lips press together, teeth plucking at the scar. “You told me once that I should know who is my ally, and who is my-- Zen’s.”

The rim has hardly touched his lips, but Haruka sets down the crystal, hands folding behind his plate. “I did.”

“But those are not the one two options, are they.” It’s not a question, not anymore. “Sometimes they may seem to be one or the other, or both at the same time, but really-- it’s their own, isn’t it? Everyone is just trying to do what they think best.”

“That is...” The marquis takes in a steady breath. “A very mature way to see a frustrating problem.”

“The consort has said that she is my friend,” she says slowly, each word shaken loose from her heart. “But she is also lying to me.”

“Is she?”

Haruka, she had said once, these long skirts tangled around her legs, binding fast as any chain, he’s hard to read.

Is he? Zen’s hand was cold against hers, like touching marble. Izana’s had been the same so many years ago; she wonders if it might be a problem with their circulation, perhaps passed down from a parent, but this doesn’t seem the time to ask about his mother’s medical history. He’s always seemed clear as crystal to me.

Though, he continues, mouth set in a rueful grin. After a childhood of lectures, maybe it’s easier. I can tell how stupid he thinks I am just from the degree of his eyebrows.

His brow is furrowed now, a tight knot over the bridge of his nose. There’s no angle, no lift, and Shirayuki isn’t quite sure what that might say about his perception of her intelligence. If it were anyone else, she might even call it concern.

“Is she lying to you,” he asks, posing it like Lata when he wants to ask something particularly perverse as a rhetorical. “Or are you not asking the right questions?”

Her fingers clench tight on her lap, linen rucking up between her fingers. She likes this far less than Lata’s. “Your Grace...”

Now his brows raise, shock stark on his face, “Yes, Miss Shirayuki?”

“Do you...?” The words stick in her mouth; to ask them is to admit defeat. No-- distrust. That the best interests everyone has been working towards are not her own. “Do you know where Obi is?”

I have seen no precious boy, the tiger lily trumpets, as proud as ever. Only a little girl loved by all who see her. How lucky she is to garner such attention!

I care not for me, the little girls mutters, impatient. Where do you think he has gone?

Away, away. The flower bobs beneath its own self-importance. He has been taken away. Down and gone and buried with the roses. Perhaps you are the better for it.

“No.” It’s the truth; he wouldn’t bother to lie to her. “As of now, his location is unknown, even to the king himself.”

She licks her lips, nails biting into her thigh. The orbia seed burns a hole in her hip. “Are they looking for him?”

A shadow ripples over his face, gone before she can follow it to its source. “Someone might be.”

“I mean Zen,” she clarifies. “Or Izana.”

“I know,” he replies, voice impossibly gentle from such a forbidding mouth. “I think we’re ready for the next course, don’t you?”

Innocence and ignorance, truth and illusion, trust and betrayal-- we have meditated upon each, as if they are but separate concepts that can be held to the light and have each facet revealed in turn. But surely you seen that they have all brought us here, to this part, to this singular place: a knife buried in a breast, a garden made into a cage. A girl in each, who has finally seen the truth beneath the illusion.

We should rejoice, should we not? For these girls who might free themselves, might heal themselves? But yet you do not, do you? For you know the trick of it:

A wound does not truly begin to bleed until the blade is removed. And a girl like this--

Ah, her hand is already at the hilt.

For once, Shirayuki is relieved that it is her round-faced guard that awaits her and not a more experienced one. Or worse yet, Kiki, who would anticipate her before she could get a word in edgewise.

But luck is on her side; this dear boy springs from his place on the wall, every muscle tense with anticipation, quivering to do his duty, and she-- she is ready to take advantage of it.

“Ready, my lady?” he asks, bouncing on the balls of his feet, a hound eager to be given his leash. “It’s off to the ballroom next, isn’t it? With Master--?”

“Not today,” Shirayuki informs him swiftly. “I need you to take me to the king.”

The color leaches from his face. “The...the k-king?”

She nods, tight, officious. The sort Lady Mihoko gave her maids; the sort that belonged alongside a command obeyed.

“But, my lady...” He shuffles on his feet, loath to disappoint her. “Don’t you need an appointment to see His Majesty? I don’t think you can just go right in and--”

She’s already walked past him, chin held high. “He’ll see me.”

It may seem humble before the dawn, its petals as rumpled as bedsheets, drawn over its head like a child-- but when the sun casts its fiery crown over the garden, it is the convolvulus that is ascendant. It needs no dazzling pattern, no fanciful pinwheel of petal and sepal to make itself stand above its floral brethren, but only purity of color. For there is no other here that is so purely white, that has a color so simply blue. The tiger lily might roar among the plots, but it is to the convolvulus it bends, when it rises from its nightly slumber.

The little girl watches as the sleep falls from its petals, witness to its splendor. What, it asks, ruffling its delicate mane, could have made you seek me out, girl?

There is a not-insignificant portion of her life that has been spent waiting; not in the way of most of her colleagues-- for water to boil, or a titration to drip, or even for a letter of acceptance to arrive-- but for men with nothing else to recommend them but birth to decide they’re bored enough to receive the royal pharmacist. Shidan had called it fundraising and Kazaha glad-handing, but Shirayuki can admit now, as she flies past Izana’s steward, leaving him and her guard in her wake, what it really is:

Insulting.

The view always arrests her when she enters the royal solar, and this morning is no different; the sun setting, finishing its bright arc through the sky, but the angle of it, with the windows as they are-- it sets the king’s hair alight, a halo burning.

A target, she names grimly; and she the arrow. With his steward calling her name behind her, she takes a determined step toward him.

“Have you not heard then?” Izana asks, hardly bothering to look up from his papers. “I already approved your request to be excused from dinner.”

Shirayuki hauls up short, skirts swishing around her ankles. “Dinner?”

“Yes.” His brows raise, as does his gaze, already bored. “My brother already spoke about at length this morning. So if you seek to move me as well, please note that I have already stepped aside.”

“I...” She blinks. “I wasn’t here for that.”

Interest sparks in his eyes, quick as a struck match. “Then by all means, scold away. At least--” his mouth quirks, too amused-- “I assume that is your intention, marching into my office unannounced as you are.”

“Forgive me.” The steward presses a hand to his heaving breast. “Mistress Shirayuki--”

“It a force of nature,” his master replies, mouth curling like parchment corners. “So I have often had occasion to find out. You may leave us.”

“Your Majesty--” Izana merely lifts his brows, and the man stutters to a stop. “Of course. As you wish.”

“Now,” he hums as the doors close. “Just which wind sent this storm spinning into my office?”

Bound here you might be, but I know the trick of this place, the girl says, kneeing at the bed’s edge. What roots grow here touch the roots of all the morning’s glory. And you who wake with the sun-- you keep the closest watch on the horizon.

If there are any in the garden who know of my precious boy, she continues, the breeze rippling the convolvulus’s ruff. It would be you. So tell me, please...have you see him?

“It’s Obi,” she admits, heat stinging her cheeks. “I want to know the, er, status of the search.”

Izana blinks.

Oh, how kind it would be if this confusion was feigned, if it were all just a show to drag out her loyalties; to force her to admit that even if Zen was her heart, she could not turn her back on her home. That this was simply another moment where she would show him that friendship was strength, and the walls he erected himself were merely a folly.

But there is no smug satisfaction buoying his words when he asks, “The search? Didn’t Sir Obi leave my brother’s employ months ago? The beginning of the summer, I believe--”

“He didn’t quit,” Shirayuki insists, even as the seed weighs heavy between her skirts. “He disappeared, and Zen said he had put men out to search for him.”

A flower has no face, but the girl need no smile, no hooded eyes to discern the sorrowful bent of its stem.

I am but the morning’s glory, the convolvulus sighs, and when the night comes, I fold myself tight. Your boy does not pass me in my waking hours, so perhaps it is that he travels in the night.

But what does that mean? asks the girl. Why would he only travel at night? He is but a boy, a boy, and he walks in day.

The convolvulus is quiet, swaying in the garden’s eternal summer. I do not know, he admits. I do not know at all.

“Ah.” His eyes soften, no longer the unrelenting velvet of the night, but the waves of deep water, and Shirayuki finally has cause to find out: to experience Izana’s pity is a thousand times worse than his disdain. “I am not privy to the movement of my brother’s men, so long as I do not need them in attendance. He must not have put in his last report...”

“Please.” Her hand flies up between them, earning her an incredulous lift of a brow. “It only makes it worse that you are being decent about it.”

His laugh surprises her. “So you’d like me to gloat?”

“No.” Her breath saws out of her, great heaves that shake her shoulders. “I want you to grant me leave to find him.”

“You?” His brows raise, even his eyes widen, but to his credit, he does not ask, but what could you do? Instead his mask settles back over his face without a ripple, the king staring out from behind it. “It would be a waste. I have heard from your tutors that you are making good progress. Lady Mihoko even ventured to say you might make a passable princess, if you pushed out an heir fast enough.”

Her mouth twitches. Only yesterday, she would have nearly fainted with relief, but today-- “What praise.”

There’s a stern tilt to his mouth, a forbidding set to his eyebrows; if she didn’t know any better, Shirayuki would call it concern. “As I recall, our agreement did address this.”

“Then you mean...?”

“Yes.” He nods, splaying his palms across his desk, almost as if he were bracing himself. “If you leave the palace grounds, you forfeit your chance to be the one at my brother’s side. A princess leaves such things in the hands of her guardsmen--” his mouth twitches-- “and her husband.”

You want her to go, do you not? Even now you quiver at the edge of your seat, begging this little girl to open her eyes, to keep them open, to see through the illusion and run as fast as she can. You want her to leave the garden, to break through the last of this enchantment and leave safety behind.

But tell me, what would you do, with the knife quivering it in your chest? To forget it is to live with the pain. To remove it is to be free.

An easy choice, you might say. Who could live with a blade in their breast? Ah, but do not forget:

There is no way to know if the wound is fatal until the knife is removed.

“There is something I wonder, Mistress Shirayuki.”

His musings shatter the brittle silence between them; that fragile bulwark that has kept her in his skin. Now that it’s gone, she trembles, every muscle in her body fighting the urge to cross the king’s study and shake him until decency falls it.

A hopeless quest if there ever was one. “Is there something else you could possibly say to me?”

She says it sweetly; most would hear only that-- the tone rather than the content. But Izana has not sat so long on his father’s throne by being that sort of man; no, his mouth curls, amused.

“No. It’s only...” he hums, gaze lifting from his paper. “I wonder when you started to think Obi left.”

Then what do you know? the girl says, anger and bile rising in her tone. What good are you?

A flower cannot smile, but she feels teeth when it replies, I know that it will cost you, and cost you dear.

Izana might as well have struck her. Shirayuki rocks back on her heels, only just catching herself before she trips over her own hem. “I-I...what do you...?”

“When you came in here, you first talked as you had before.” Long fingers knit beneath his chin, though he does not deign to rest on them, not alert as he is. A cat before a kill, still toying with with the prey between his paws. “You insisted on his disappearance-- the implication being, of course, that you deny his own agency in his departure. Kidnapping or coercion, one might say.”

She cannot see its teeth, but Shirayuki isn’t so foolish to believe there is no trap. “Y-yes..”

“But now you come to me and ask after my men.” His mouth quirks. “You ask for my permission.”

“Isn’t that what I’m supposed to do?” she asks, fingers clenching in her skirts. “A princess wouldn’t depart without the approval of her liege.”

“Of course.” He waves a hand, as if all those rules she spent late nights learning mean nothing at all, as if they were worth less than the paper on which they had been printed. “A princess would. But you, Miss Shirayuki, you--” his eyes spark, the way she only saw that night in Lilias as he closed the gates-- “you jump from windows. You follow a flower into a cave. If you truly believed your companion in danger, I doubt there is a single promise that would keep you by my side.”

She cannot breathe, let alone hazard an answer. Not when even a flutter of an eyelash could give her away.

“Which begs the question, doesn’t it?” His gaze fixes her to where she stand, pins through a moth’s wings. “Just what reason would make him leave?”

Me? the girl cries, already thinking of her lovely red shoes, of the boat they bought her down the river. Why me?

Because my dear, the convolulus hums. It is your fault that he has left.

The doors swing open, and the steward steps inside, sparing her an infuriatingly smug glance. “Sir Lowen, Your Majesty.”

“A moment,” the king tells him, “Mistress Shirayuki and I are nearly done her.”

The man nods. “I will tell him to await your will.”

Shirayuki blinks. “What--?” It’s trial to catch her breath, to make her heart stop pounding in her breast. “What is Mitsuhide doing here?”

“You need an escort to your dinner, do you not? I thought he would be the most palatable option for you.” Izana fixes her with a meaningful look. “I do hope you find your answers, Mistress Shirayuki.”

You don’t know me. Obi’s gaze is raw in her memory, too gold. You don’t know anything about me.

You know how he is. Zen’s smile curls at the edges, brittle, like parchment pasted to vellum. Obi has always come back on his own before.

Zen will take care of it. Mitsuhide won’t meet her gaze. I’m sure Obi will be back any day now.

“Don’t worry.” It’s a miracle that the words don’t catch between her teeth, the way she’s clenching them. “I will.”

A hand wraps around a hilt. A breath shudders. And with one, swift tug--

The blade moves but an inch.

#obiyukiweek21 #obiyuki #akagami no shirayukihime #snow white with the red hair #my fic #All That Remains #snow queen au #ans #YET ANOTHER CHAPTER #WHERE I DO NOT REACH THE END OF THIS PART #it's coming guys #really it is...#...one day....#but at least you get this small glimmer of hope #FOR NOW

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seijojoh · 4 years

Text

You Should Be More Careful | T. Amajiki

Pairing: vil!Tamaki x fem!Reader

Synopsis: In which you are saved by the indigo haired villain by some lowlife. What was supposed to be an innocent rescue turns out to be something more.

Warnings: NSFW towards the end, yandere themes, cursing, reader gets hurt, slight gore. WC: 1.1k A/N: This was a little something I whipped up for a friend from discord. I had a lot of fun writing this and Tamaki could seriously like, get it <3

How did you get yourself into this situation again? It was supposed to be a quick trip, really. Order over the phone to your favorite take out spot, walk the short five minute walk it took to get there, pick up your food and head back. Simple, right? Right - so why the fuck were you being cornered by this below average villain who was claiming to make his name known to the world in the nastiest alleyway possible?

Also your perfectly good food had been spilled onto the dirty concrete next to your feet.

“A shame to hurt such a beauty like yourself, but don’t worry. I’ll try to go easy on you, babe.” You know you should have had a better reaction. Pushed him away, screamed for help, reached into your pocket for the pepper spray you always carry with you in times of danger, but your mind could not process the means of protecting yourself when it was in an insane amount of pain.

Your body was hot, on fucking fire; not literally, but it was close enough. You suddenly began to sweat, your mouth open to suck in any cold air down your lungs just to ease the pain. What the heck? Is this his quirk? Some stupid thing that allows him to burn up his victims? There was no time to think before you fell down on all fours, your hands and knees feeling like jello as you attempted to gain control over yourself.

“I understand things must be getting hot for you, huh?” He spoke, but you didn’t hear. “What a fickle thing. This heat your feeling is from my quirk called Mind Melt. Your brain is quite literally melting from the inside the longer I am close to you. Just gotta get a good stare into your eyes for a few seconds and you’re done for. Cells begin to die, nerve conduction slows, and altogether you will stop functioning altogether. Sorry, again toots. If I could make this as painless as possible, I would,” he sighed, squatting down near your hunched over form to deliver a head pat. You were sure he could feel the intense levels of heat emanating from your skull.

“S-Stop,” you whimpered weakly, coughing up the bile and blood that surged out of your panicking body. “P-Ple...Please!”

“No can do, babes. I am gonna show these heros exactly who I am. They’ll know to fear Hot Shot! And-!” The villain didn’t even get to finish his statement before he was sent flying all the way down the alley by a very large… tentacle?

With the added distance, the heat stopped just as fast as it came on. “Oh shit,” you breathed out softly, lifting the sleeve of your arm to wipe away the drool that pooled out of your mouth.

“What the fuck?! Who the he-” you could hear Hot Shot scream from wherever he was flung to but he was cut off again by a gruelling smash, and then silence. With an unsteady head, you looked over at the noise, finding a third party standing over the villain who attacked you, foot directly pressing into his face. “Imagine being that fucking desperate that you attack an unsuspecting civilian,” the third voice chuckled, hardly budging as the man underneath him struggled to break free.

“You want to make it big out there as a villain, you’re going to have to try a lot harder than that,” he chuckled. From where you were placed, you could see the same foot the man used transform into… what is that? A chicken foot? Before you could confirm or deny, two of the sharp talons sunk into the villain’s eyes, pulling a scream out of him.

That seemed to wake you up from whatever trance you were doing. You gasped softly and shifted further away from the two, but with your body still in shock, it was unlikely you were going anywhere. Too panicked to get away from the scene, you didn’t notice when the screams stopped and the heavy footsteps started making their way towards your crawling form.

You gasped when a large and warm hand rested on your back, while the other gripped your chin to turn your head to face him. “Tsk, look at the mess he left,” you stared at the stranger whose laxed eyes bored directly into you. It was enough to make you freeze in your spot, horror shooting down your spine as you couldn’t find the means to move at all. “What a shame too, looks like he got you pretty good.”

His face was suddenly closer to yours, his indigo hair brushing against your cheeks. If you could cower away from his touch, you would. However, you sat there helpless, too weak to do anything but whimper out of fear that you would meet the same fate as Hot Shot. “Awe, don’t be scared, bunny. I’m not an asshole who’ll hurt you. No, no. I don’t do that to good ones like you,” he hummed softly, grip tightening on your jawline softly to turn your head to both sides, inspecting you for further damage.

“A-Are you gonna let me go?” It was a stupid question. A stupid question that shouldn’t have been asked. You could see with his growing smirk and his head cocking to the side that he found enjoyment in such an innocent, desperate question

“You would like that, huh?” He chuckled, bringing his thumb and pointer finger up to squeeze your cheeks, effectively puckering your lips outwards. “I could, but what if someone else comes by and hurts you on your way home? There’s no guarantee that I’ll come to your aid,” his gaze was trained over your lips, lifting the hand from your back to bring his thumb against your bottom lip. “Plus, such an innocent bunny like yourself is so badly hurt. You can hardly hold your own weight.”

It’s true. With this much shock your body was undergoing, it was beginning to shut down. Your vision was slowly becoming hazy, breathing much more ragged and your body felt uncomfortably warm still - an aftermath from the quirk used on you. A small whimper left your lips when he pressed his thumb further into your bottom lip, the tip of it just barely entering your parted lips.

Slowly, as if not to scare you any more, he moved his head closer so that his forehead lightly rested upon yours. All you could stare at was him and he fucking loved it. Special bunnies like you should only look at the ones who will promise to take care of them, look at them for aid when something is not right. And he wanted it to remain that way. Forever.

“I’m gonna take extra good care of you, my little bunny~”

#tamaki amajiki #bnha tamaki #mha tamaki #tamaki x reader #tamaki x you #tamaki x y/n #vil! tamaki #villain tamaki #tamaki amajiki x reader #tamaki imagines #tamaki scenarios #tamaki amajiki smut #tamaki smut #tamaki scenario #my hero x reader #my hero academia smut #my hero academia tamaki

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delimeful · 4 years

Text

the end of being alone (2)

donation drive commission for @bumblebeekitten for the next chapter of TEOBA, with the prompt: patton & virgil fluff! hope you enjoy reading it as much as i enjoyed writing it!

chapter 1

warnings: miscommunication, false impression of a very bad situation for like .5 seconds, recklessness, sometimes you just gotta have a good cry

The next sunrise, they set out again, this time with considerably less weaponry and considerably more snacks. Roman held point again, since he was the one with the most practical experience in tracking.

There had been a somewhat tedious argument on whether or not Patton should come, one that Roman had thoroughly lost, since it was Patton’s quick thinking and emotional attunement that kept the previous cycle’s encounter from descending into disaster.

He had acquiesced in the end under the combined force of Logan’s reasoning and Patton’s disappointed look, but that didn’t mean he had to be happy about it. After catching barely a wink of sleep between restless nightmares, he was feeling more grumpy than generous.

Still, his own irritation faded as they grew closer to the rocky cliffs where he suspected the Human was, shifting into an intense concentration on the task ahead. It was a miracle that their initial encounter hadn’t gone sour, a miracle that this Human seemed young enough to be somewhat nonaggressive, and while he hoped that whatever they had said to scare the young kit off hadn’t irreparably damaged their budding acquaintanceship, he wasn’t counting on it.

He had his underarmor on for a reason.

The other two didn’t quite share his concerns. Logan’s arms had been in an excited, information-gathering flurry practically non-stop since they set out, and he and Patton had been discussing the plants and insects in the nearby forest that were relatively non toxic to them (and so would probably be no issue for a Human), and how many nutrients they would provide. None of them knew how much or what a Human needed to eat, but Patton seemed firmly of the opinion that whatever the kid was eating, it wasn’t enough.

“Fledgelings need plenty of food and the proper nutrients to grow up healthy! A lone child in the middle of one forest can’t possibly have all the variety they need in their diet,” the Ampen insisted, feathers fluffing up at the mere idea of a kid going hungry.

“Another important factor to note is the planet itself is not the child’s home, and so may not have the necessary nutrients available at all, let alone in one localized area,” Logan added.

“You two have enough variety in those packs to weigh down a mountain,” Roman interjected, “so how about we focus on not scaring the kid off before we even reach them. Human senses are ludicrously strong, enough so that they’ll hear you two yakking a parsec away.”

They agreed to be stealthier, and just in time, because Roman was pretty sure he’d found a more solid trail than the ghost-like faded prints that seemed all to trek over the place. He gestured in Crav’n sign for the two of them to stay put and stay quiet, and then followed the fresh tracks until they came to the mouth of a small cave amongst the crevices and steep drops of the pale cliffs.

He slowly stalked into the cave, keeping his movements light and quiet even as the light grew dimmer and his vision more restricted. Before it could grow too dim, however, his gaze caught on round, un-rock-like silhouettes.

It took a moment to identify the shapes as small, limp Humlilts, all piled up around the larger Human. He nearly physically recoiled at the sight. So, this was why the small creatures had gone missing: slaughtered en masse at the hand of a Deathworlder. Not for food nor shelter, not in defense of itself or others, just for the sake of the callous cruelty and disregard for life that Humans were apparently born with.

Humlilts were small, but Patton was scarcely bigger. Once the Human got tired of playing at mimicry, would it try to add the Ampen to the hoard of bodies?

He wasn’t going to lose another family.

Almost against his will, a low, near-subsonic growl rumbled out of his throat. He took one advancing step forward, and then…

And then, a tiny head poked up from the pile, small dark eyes staring at him over a long snout.

Roman nearly tripped over his own feet, astonished. There was still a living Humlilt in there?

Before he could even finish his thought, another head appeared, and then another, until there was a sea of fluffy faces and huge ears all pointed in his direction. The undersized ungulates were fine, each and every one of them. They had simply been sleeping, all cozied up with one of the most dangerous species in the universe.

Roman felt a strange and overwhelming mixture of relief and shame, his scales flattening down guiltily. It was too late, though, the movement had already rippled through the group until it reached the Human. Their creepy mask was absent in rest, and they pawed at their eyes sleepily as they sat up to see what all the commotion was about. There was a red mark on one of their cheeks from where it had pressed against the cave floor.

The moment they saw who stood at the entrance of their little nook, all the color drained from their face. The Humlilts shifted uneasily, and Roman found himself bracing to have thirty miniscule sets of horns charging at him. They couldn’t really hurt him, but they were persistent little things, and Patton and Logan would not be happy if a bunch of Humlillts tried to drive them away from the Human before they’d even properly spoken.

Instead of siccing the plethora of tiny mammals on him, though, the kid whistled a few notes in a perfect echo of the Humlilts all-clear call, settling them down. They carefully detangled themself from the pile, trailing a few stray twigs and leaves behind them in the process. Roman wondered absently how long they’d been building the collection of plant matter that covered them.

A few parting trills later, the kid was in front of him, holding their bony shoulders firm but unable to conceal the tremor in their legs. They raised their chin up in what looked like a friendly Crav’n greeting, but attitude-wise seemed more along the lines of a challenging stance.

“No hurt,” they said firmly before Roman could say a word. “No hurt small--,” a few words in their own language here, “--small good. No hurt. No hurt. Yes?”

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Roman tried to reassure them, “I swore, remember?”

The kid stomped their foot once in… some kind of emphasis. “No hurt,” they started again with deliberate slowness, and then ended with the Humlilt whistle-greeting. Many of the Humlilts whistled back from where they were still observing the two of them. The small cavern echoed with the sound eerily.

“You don’t want me to hurt the Humlilts? The small creatures?” Roman asked, gesturing to the pile of fluff and hooves, and was rewarded with the kid seeming satisfied.

“Yes. Small good. Good good small. No hurt.”

Roman extended his hand palm up for another oath. “I vow not to harm your small good friends,” he intoned solemnly. The kid patted his hand twice, bobbing their own head in a curious motion. Roman could only imagine the sort of notes Logan would be taking.

Oh, right. He’d left the others in the bushes.

“I brought my friends, too,” he informed the kid, who blinked up at him. “Logan and Patton, remember them? Little critter?”

He said the last words in the chirps of the Ampen language, only a little strained by his accent, and the kid visibly brightened. “Little critter!”

“Wait right here, and I’ll get them,” Roman instructed, lowering a flat hand to convey wait. The kid probably didn’t really grasp it, but seemed content enough to stay put, shifting from one foot to the other.

It took no time at all to find Patton and Logan, who had progressively edged closer to the cliff face as he’d taken his sweet time in there.

“Okay, so,” he started, “I know where all the missing Humlilts went.”

---

Virgil shuffled his feet slightly, feeling the cool stone under his toes.

He should probably leave now, because even if the fluffy chirp alien really was there, they knew or at least suspected he was a human, and aliens hated humans. All of them, even the ones that looked soft like birds or cool like dinosaurs.

A soft, velvety nose poked up against his hand, and he squatted to gently pat the strange little singing puppy-antelope that had parted from the group to check on him. He couldn’t help but smile a little bit as it bumped its snout against his knee, sounding like a windchime.

Okay. Maybe not all aliens.

He looked up at the clitter-clatter of talons on rock, and then the fluffy chirping alien really did careen into view, feathers all puffed up like that very angry owl that had roosted outside his window for three whole hours one time. The other two bigger aliens came in only moments later.

Virgil couldn’t help but shrink back slightly from where he was still crouched, because aliens were weird and sometimes they did weird things that he didn’t really… get. Typically, this would be right before they started getting really mad or shaky, and screaming at him.

Before Fluff-Chirp could get any closer, though, the puppy-antelope had charged between them, planting its little legs and lowering its head so that the little horns were pointed out in warning. Virgil went still, eyes darting between Fluff-Chirp and the little creature, who he was pretty sure was the one with the white spot on its forehead, the one he’d named Susan after his nice neighbor.

The cool dinosaur alien had promised not to hurt them (he was pretty sure), but would it count if the puppy-antelopes attacked them first?

Fluff-Chirp stepped forward a little bit, and Susan let out a shrill cry like someone blowing really hard on a flute. Virgil clapped his hands over his ears as he attempted to whistle the calm-down sound, but Susan would not be budged, even as the other two aliens got all tense and twitchy.

In front of it, Fluff-Chirp stopped advancing, and instead plopped down on the ground with a soft thump. They ruffled in their bag, and Virgil was struck with the fear that they would pull out a space blaster gun to shoot Susan for trying to protect him. Hurriedly, he crawled forwards and threw his arms around the puppy-antelope (puppylope?) and hugged it close to shield it from any laser gun beams, his eyes squeezing shut.

There was a grunt-grumble from the cool dinosaur, and the click-click-click of the bunches of arms of the blue one moving around, but all he heard from Fluff-Chirp was shuffling, and then—

“Hello good morning,” the fluffy alien said. Or at least, that was what Virgil thought the birdsong-like words meant.

Fluff-Chirp always said it when waking up in their little camp, and Virgil had said it back, because that was just basic manners, especially when someone gives you stuff. Fluff-Chirp had given him a bunch of sweet sliced up fruit, kind of with the feeling of mangoes and the taste of strawberries. It had reminded him of home.

It… kind of smelled like Fluff-Chirp’s fruit now, actually.

—

Patton watched hopefully as the kid slowly opened one eye to peek over at them.

He hadn’t meant to scare the poor little guy by rushing in, he’d just been absolutely delighted to hear that not only would he get to see some Humlilts after all, but also that the kid seemed to have some company after all.

Some very loyal company, if the one threat-displaying at him was any indication. Patton was careful not to engage, particularly since further back in the cave, he could see a whole assembly of tiny, reflective eyes. Roman would probably just hold him up in the air if there was any real danger, but it was the principle of the matter. He didn’t want to upset the little guys!

Or the kid, who had finally spotted the dishes of fruit Patton had set out.

“You wanna come eat with me, little critter?” Patton offered, patting the ground near him.

“Little critter…,” the Human murmured. Their face was much more expressive now that it wasn’t mostly concealed by wood, and the kid looked painfully young. Probably no more than seven or eight sun cycles. Patton’s hearts twanged in sympathy.

Slowly, like they were waiting for the rug to be yanked out from under their feet, the kid scooted forward enough that they could grab a few pieces of the dana fruit, setting one down in front of the Humlilt to distract it. Patton eye-crinkled encouragingly, and took a piece of his own to nibble on.

“Do you remember me? I’m Patton. Patton,” he emphasized, ‘pat’-ing his own chest in example.

The kid paused mid-bite, and then swiped their wrist over their mouth before mumbling, “Patton,” back. Patton glowed with happiness.

“And that’s Logan,” he said, bolstered by one apparent success. Logan obligingly stepped forwards and gestured to himself.

“I am Logan,” he enunciated clearly.

The kid, who had stopped eating to focus wholeheartedly on this new task, scrunched his brow up. “I am Logan?”

“No, not quite,” Logan corrected gently. “Logan. I am Logan.” He cast a meaningful look to Patton.

“And I am Patton!” he added cheerfully, gesturing between the two of them. “Logan! Patton!”

“Logan,” the kid mimicked, looking at the Ulgorii and then the Ampen, “Patton.”

“You got it! Good job!” Patton noticed that the kid was very careful to keep their hands in their lap, and wondered if Humans were normally this withdrawn, or if exposure to other aliens had caused this reticence.

“Good job?” the kid echoed, wide eyed. They looked to Roman curiously, though only for a moment before dropping their gaze.

“I am Roman,” Roman surprised them both by beating them to the introductory punch.

“... Roman?” the kid offered, and got a chorus of nonsense praise for their effort. They bared their little teeth and clapped their hands together, and it took the three of them an alarmed pause and exchange of glances to realize that they weren’t, in fact, being threatened by a youngling.

“Joy? Or perhaps, contentment?” Logan was mumbling to himself. “The skin around the child’s eyes folds much like an Ampen expression of happiness, so…”

“It would make more sense to be happy after receiving praise, right?” replied Roman, who had gotten a bit bristly from nerves for a moment. Patton resisted the urge to elbow the both of them into not saying long, confusing sentences. Luckily, the kid seemed too occupied with their own thoughts to notice.

“Patton, Logan, Roman,” they recited, looking at each of them in turn. Then, very carefully, they reached up and patted their own chest. “Virgil. I am Virgil?”

There was a brief moment of stunned silence, and then Patton trilled in delight, clapping his hands in an echo of the Human’s gesture, in hopes that it would convey his own happiness and pride in the kid’s quick learning. The kid jumped, but then did that teeth-bearing smile again.

“Virgil!” he tested out, not quite getting the Human tones right, but that was okay because he could practice! “Virgil Virgil Virgil! Yes! That’s you!”

“I am Virgil!” the Human was practically bouncing in place as they matched Patton’s energy, and Patton couldn’t help but dart forward and try to bump his head to the Human’s affectionately.

Roman hissed something exceedingly panicked, but Patton was already using one of the Human’s bent legs to reach, and then he was brushing his antenna to the kid-- to Virgil’s forehead, and then the Human was lifting their arms slowly and curling them around him, and okay now Patton was a little bit concerned, but.

But, all Virgil did was lean into him slightly, arms bracing but not suffocating, and sniffle once, like they were holding back tears. Any resolve Patton had to not give his teammates stress ulcers faded away like dust in the wind, and he leaned in carefully and wrapped his arms around as much as he could reach of the kid’s shoulders and neck, which Roman would tell him was stupid dangerous because necks were weak points on Humans and they would absolutely react defensively--

Virgil promptly burst into tears, their chin coming to hook over Patton’s shoulder as a stuttering little wail worked its way out of their system. Patton made soothing nonsense croons and sung Ampen lullabies as the kid shuddered their way through a good cry, and tried not to feel too alarmed that unlike Ampens, Humans apparently leaked emotions while they cried.

Once Virgil had more or less settled down, they seemed completely wiped from the outpour of emotion, eyes drooping, body tilting to one side. For the first time since they’d arrived, the kid looked too wiped out to be nervous. Sure enough, only a few moments later, they shifted to curl up on their side, falling asleep on the cold stone easily.

Patton looked up at his teammates from where he was sitting in the center of the curled c-shape of the kid’s body, and offered them a sheepish shrug. “Well. Now we know that Humans can experience touch hunger?”

#sanders sides #ts patton #ts virgil #ts logan #ts roman #the end of being alone #teoba #donation drive #commissioned works #wibar #wibar au kid virgil #bumblebeekitten #space au #writing #my writing #i genuinely feel so soft writing this au #let virgil have hugs 2020

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trashmenofmarvel · 4 years

Text

Branded - Chapter 31

Pairing: Demon!Bucky Barnes x Reader

Summary: The memories come to an end

(This is a fan AU of Falling’s Just Another Way to Fly by araniaart . Please check out this incredible series for all of your demon Bucky needs.)

AO3

It didn’t matter that they dragged him, restrained with glyphed chains and shackles, through a glowing portal that had looked very similar to the one he’d first gone through.

It didn’t matter that their headquarters seemed to be an old manor filled with strange artifacts and old furniture.

It didn’t matter that they told him, after throwing him into a basement cell lined with glyphs, that they were a group called the Masters of the Mystic Arts.

They were HYDRA and they were going to use him like they always used him. Bucky expected Colonel Vasily Karpov to walk through the door any moment, but his only visitor was a soft-spoken bald woman. She was pale, unnaturally so, and had a very precise way of speaking. She apparently knew who he was but would only refer to him as “James.”

He hated it. Hated her sweet words given through iron bars. It was no different than how Fairbanks had treated him. Tricked Bucky with promises of hot meals, warm baths, and protection from the guards if he would just cooperate with Fairbanks’ vision.

But that’s not what the woman asked of him. Bucky didn’t know what she wanted. She would visit him, talk to him, ask him questions about his life before HYDRA. His captors had never done that before, had never encouraged him to talk about his past as a human before they managed to burn away his memories and trick him into believing he was a full-fledged demon.

It was confusing, even more so when he was moved out of the cell and into a proper room. He still had to wear the bespelled shackles that left him weak and harmless, but they didn’t beat him or taunt him or force him to feed. In fact, the woman, who called herself the Ancient One like it was an actual title, gave him a tonic that would make the hunger go away.

Bucky didn’t believe a damn word she said. He remembered the last time he’d been offered something like this from Lukin. It had been a salve that had artificially induced his next heat, and he’d been mocked cruelly before Lukin would allow his men to sate Bucky’s cursed hunger.

And now that same hunger grew so strong that eventually Bucky drank the liquid, because nothing could be worse than the agony twisting through his body. To his eternal shock, it helped. Made the searing desire in his gut vanish into a dull ache.

That was when Bucky had finally begun to believe her. This wasn’t HYDRA, and he wasn’t going to be used as a weapon again. When he’d told the Ancient One of his conclusions, she had smiled and said, “I know that must have been very difficult for you, James. I appreciate your trust.”

Bucky wouldn’t go that far, he was a long way from trusting his new captors, but when she returned the stuffed cat to him with the strange advice that he should “take care of precious things,” he was well on his way to tolerating her.

For the next few months, Bucky spent his time relearning how to be a person. He rediscovered his love of knowledge, and the Sanctum provided much of that. The books, especially. He was fascinated by the large, bound tomes that smelled like dust and forgotten time. Focusing on consuming as many books as possible was a way for him to adjust to living as a… well, as a human again.

The Ancient One had encouraged his time in the library once she trusted him with having more access to the Sanctum. The other sorcerers had wanted to keep Bucky contained in the glyph-warded cell, but she told them, “If you cage a man like an animal, expect him to act as a beast.”

Bucky was growing quite fond of her.

For the first time in a long time, Bucky wasn’t hypervigilant and waiting for the next attack, whether from HYDRA soldiers or other demons. He was healing, very slowly recovering from the decades of traumatic memories he had to sort through. It was even more confusing with the “time dilation” he’d experienced in the demon realm. Forty-eight years had passed for him when only four years had passed on Earth. It was 1995, he was in New York City, and his only acquaintances were a sect of secretive sorcerers who kept him locked up in an ancient manor.

Things could have been worse, all things considered.

Something did happen one day to dampen his spirits. It was a warm early summer day, and they were enjoying the sunshine within the Sanctum rooftop garden. The Ancient One was training him to extend his guise around his clawed feet to make them appear as if he was wearing boots. She insisted it was possible, that Bucky had already shown an affinity for magic with his ability to take away, and later they learned, share memories.

But making his demonic aspects disappear was one thing, trying to create illusionary clothing was another, and he was growing frustrated with his efforts, or lack thereof.

“Fairbanks told me my transformation was complete,” Bucky grumbled, staring at his clawed feet as if they’d done him personal wrong. “There weren’t supposed to be any more changes, but now I have to lug these things around.”

He flexed his talons to demonstrate his meaning, grimacing at the animalistic shape of them. At least with his other changes, he’d managed to guise himself enough to look human. Now, with this…

“As if I didn’t already look like a monster,” he muttered.

“Evil men lie. You know this more intimately than most.” The Ancient One seemed almost distracted, staring over the rooftop and toward the city skyline. Then she turned toward him, her smile muted in sadness. “You’re no monster, James.”

Bucky looked away, unable to look at such sincerity for too long. She really did believe what she said.

“This isn’t working.” He sat back with a huff. “I can’t do it.”

Instead of her mild chastisement for giving up so easily, the Ancient One remained silent. Bucky looked up to find her staring off to the side again, her gaze fixed on something that wasn’t there.

“What’s wrong?”

She blinked and turned back to him, giving him one of those small smiles.

“Nothing, James. Why do you ask?”

“You seem distracted.” She was never distracted. Thoughtful and meditative, sure, but never unfocused like she’d been all day.

“Mmm,” she hummed. “I thought I heard a voice.”

Bucky’s stomach dropped, mired with guilt. He’d forgotten all about his own mysterious voice. He experienced the same shade of guilt and grief whenever he remembered what had happened to Steve. Died saving the world, not long after Bucky had been imprisoned. And here Bucky was, alive and whole, and he hadn’t bothered to think about the entity, real or imagined, that had kept him from going insane in the demon realm. It had helped him remember who he was and kept at bay the devastating loneliness.

He could barely remember what the voice sounded like.

He opened his mouth to ask her to explain what she meant, but the Ancient One clapped her hands together and said, “Let us try again. You’re letting your frustration get the better of you. Focus on what you desire and shape it into the world.”

Bucky sighed and unwillingly turned back to his lessons, the weight of loneliness still lingering at the back of his mind.

***

“This isn’t working.”

You watched Bucky struggle, unable to help or communicate with him. Not like you’d done before. Trapped on the demon world, Bucky had somehow been able to hear you. Even talk to you.

You’d almost forgotten who you were in that place. It had been so easy to just be with Bucky, to sink into his mind and be so close you weren’t sure who was who. And then you’d been jostled awake when he’d had leapt through the portal. It had been agony, split in two, and you’d been torn from Bucky and forced back into your own non-corporeal state.

And that’s where you’d remained. Seeing yourself as a child lose your memories. Forced to watch Bucky feed and suffer and then be captured, but when you’d realized who had him, you’d been relieved for the first time since being trapped in Bucky’s memories.

Now that you knew the Ancient One, had witnessed firsthand how kind and gentle she was with Bucky, you were shamed by your previous jealousy. She grew on you, and after a time, you felt like you knew her just as well as Bucky did.

Perhaps that explained what happened next.

“I can’t do it.”

Bucky’s frustration was aimed at the Ancient One, but she paid him no attention. Her eyes were focused directly on the spot where you stood.

The world grew quiet and still. The wizards around you, moving to and from their tasks, were now frozen in midstride. The water bubbling up from a nearby fountain hung in the air like a glass sculpture. Bucky sat half-hunched on the stone bench, glaring at his clawed feet.

Cold fear washed through your non-spine as the Ancient One smiled.

“Ah, there you are.”

You glanced around just to be extra sure she was addressing you, but the world was still frozen. Even the air was a dead weight against your skin.

“You…” Your voice trembled, unused in so long. “You can see me?”

“Of course,” she said, addressing you by name just to make the moment more surreal. “I sensed James had a passenger. How long have you been attached to him?”

Horror, hope, terror, all of it vied for control. Your next words were a messy jumble.

“I… I don’t know. I was, we were just. He was showing me his memories, but they were the wrong ones, and I got stuck—Please, you have to help me!”

The Ancient One raised a hand, palm toward you in a soothing manner.

“It’s all right. There’s no need to be afraid. Take your time, for we have plenty of it.”

You closed your mouth and took a deep breath, allowing the tension to leech from your muscles.

“That’s better,” she said, her voice smooth and her smile kind. “We shall start with something simple. Have we met before?”

“I… no. I don’t think so.” That was something simple? “I mean, I thought you were…”

Your voice trailed off into silence. Were you supposed to tell her she was dead? Or… would be dead. How were you even able to speak to her? Wasn’t this just a memory? You couldn’t affect a memory, right?

“Ah.” She gave you a knowing look. “I see.”

Her gaze drifted down to where Bucky sat, her expression fond. She didn’t seem to be very upset with the fact she would be dead sometime in the future.

“I take it you are important to James? You must be, for him to willingly share his memories with you.”

“I… yes,” you said, following her gaze to Bucky. Even now in a strange, frozen moment, you ached to touch him again. Hell, you ached just to speak with him, for him to see you and know you again. Being a stranger to Bucky was unbearable. “He’s important to me, too.”

“I sense that is true. Perhaps more than you realize.”

After a moment of quietness, she met your eye again. Something had shifted within her, and her tone grew serious.

“To answer the question you wish to ask, this is James’ memory, but it is also your present. You are untethered from reality and trapped in a time-loop.”

“A… a what?”

“It’s very fortunate I found you at this moment, in this place,” she continued as if you hadn’t spoken. “I suspect you would have been trapped, until such a time you would have caught up to the place you had become untethered, and time would have repeated itself.”

Her eyes darkened and the smile was gone. You wanted to retreat but your feet, as they had been from the start, were unable to move.

“Journeying through time is extremely dangerous.” There was thunder in her words, quiet but frightening, and you wanted to recoil. “Who is your teacher? Surely they would not have been so negligent with your education.”

“I—“ You swallowed hard. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. A teacher? For what?”

She stared at you for a hard minute, expression never changing, and in that moment you could sense the vast, unknowable power that lingered within this seemingly frail-looking woman.

“Listen to me well, young one,” she said. “When you return to your present, seek out the Sorcerer Supreme. I will not gaze forward to see who it is, as one should not know too much of their own fate. But when you return, go to the leader of the Order, and tell them I said…”

Her gaze dropped downward, a fond smile tugging at the corner of her lips. Even though you didn’t technically had lungs, you could breathe easier now that her dark gaze was gone.

“Tell them it’s their responsibility to shape the future of our kind. No matter what tests they’ve conducted or conclusions they’ve come to, you must be taught our ways. Neglecting to do so will result in consequences like these. Or worse.”

The Ancient One clapped her hands together again, the oversized sleeves pooling at her elbow to expose her thin arms.

“Now, it’s time I send you back, yes? Oh, one last thing.”

“Oh. Uh, y-yeah?”

“When the moment comes and the obvious choice feels wrong…” She looked you directly in the eye, a piercing gaze that went right through. “…trust yourself to find a different answer. Do not doubt yourself, even while others will. Your life, and James’, both depend on it. Do you understand?”

“Uh—no,” you stuttered. “No, I don’t understand—Wait!”

Your protest went unheeded as the Ancient One moved toward you while also remaining firmly in place. A shimmering second copy of her walked across the stone, raised a palm, and shoved you hard in the chest.

Gasping and clutching your shirt, you bolted upright with a cry. You were back in your bedroom, sprawled out on your bed and panting as if you’d run a marathon.

And Bucky was staring down at you with complete and utter horror.

Next Chapter

#branded #demon!bucky barnes #demon!bucky x reader #bucky barnes x reader #bucky barnes fanfiction #my writing #my fanfiction

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trashogram · 4 years

Text

Ryuk/Reader 5

Not too sure if anyone is still interested in these or wants to be tagged? I’ll be crossposting them on AO3 though.

Your friend was beaming, up until she looked down and saw your glossy shoes. You crossed your arms as May’s face fell, not at all ready for the obvious browbeating.

“You’re wearing those?” She asked. Her brow was knitted as she stepped forward, whirling around to face you again once you’d closed the door behind them.

“If I actually do dance, I don’t want to break my ankle trying.” You pointed at May warningly. “And I don’t want to come home and have to soak bloody feet in the tub before bed.”

“It’s not gonna get that bad!” Your friend said.

She scoffed at you while making herself cozy, promptly slumping onto your sofa and pulling her bag out to rummage. You felt a stab of hurt at her dismissiveness, but instantly berated yourself. You were way too sensitive; May didn’t mean to make you feel bad.

Ryuk was standing idly in the background, staring from the dining room table. He hadn’t said much since you’d come out of your room, not that he could unless you wanted May to think you were (way) too far gone. It didn’t phase you as your stomach was twisting unrelentingly.

You felt sick. That was despite knowing that going out to a public place tonight, with a friend, wasn’t the dire crisis you’d been making it out to be. Going out wasn’t exactly your style - but neither was turning down your friend when they asked you for anything.

You knew, deep, deep down, that your inability to say ‘no’ was a real problem, but May was one of your only friends. She was outgoing and chatty, and she actually acted her age instead of like a recluse. Her vibrance made you feel light-hearted, able to set aside weighty thoughts and behave like nothing mattered.

It was a solid hour and a half before May had run off into the crowd and left you sitting in a booth.

May had left her drink unattended, but you didn’t feel too bad about offering it up. Your friend was already buzzing by the time they’d gotten in, and while the drinks were scammer-worthy expensive, you knew that May would hardly miss this one.

“Try this!” You said, sliding your back up the booth to gain some height with May’s discarded drink in your hand.

The martini glass floated out of your grasp as you watched Ryuk eye the liquid inside, unceremoniously dumping it into his maw.

“Eugh.” Ryuk grunted, some of the liquid leaking out of his wide mouth and dribbling down his face.

“What?” You shouted over the music. “You don’t like it? It’s apple-flavored!”

Ryuk’s nose scrunched in an empathetic look of disgust, and you failed to cover your laughter as you took the glass he’d held out at arms length. “Nothing about that tastes like an apple.”

You matched his melodrama with a pout of your own.

“Aww, come on! You’re being so picky.” You traded the near-empty glass for your own, still full and sloshing up to him to half-ass a toast. “It's good! You just have no taste.”

Ryuk’s golden eyes gleamed as they rested upon your open, ruddy face. He didn’t say anything more, just laughed. The sound sent a pleasant shiver crawl down your spine, while you likened it to the crackling that came when lightning struck the earth.

You smiled, feeling lightheaded with the alcohol and the fondness amix in your system. Perhaps he was the stuff of nightmares to most people, but to you, Ryuk had become a friend. And although you were unsure of whether or not you could consider your feelings reciprocated, just the thought made you happy.

You drank in his appearance. The multicolored lights bounced off the various silver bobbles that hung off his suit. His belt in particular caught the pinks and greens from above, and you studied it. It was a pretty badass belt, but it was also a practical utility even for a god of death. It was the only thing holding up his pants and loincloth as, unlike his upper body, there didn’t appear to be any stitchings between them and his skin.

He could probably take them off.

The smile on your face slowly disappeared when said thought didn’t go away immediately. Heat bloomed beneath your cheeks, and you ducked your head to stare down at the grimy table, imagination lost to far off, inappropriate places. That regular queasy sensation of considering something taboo was still there, in your brain, but the wild atmosphere laid the excitement on thick and the sense diminished.

You looked away, back out into the crowd of people, all of them completely unaware of your conundrum - as was your otherworldly companion perched overhead. There were couples in your field of vision, including May and some guy. Everything was cast in darkness down here, but you could make out the sight of your friend throwing caution to the wind and grinding on him.

Without the barrier of clothing, you were sure that May and Whateverhisnamewas wouldn’t have any trouble getting right down to it in the middle of the dancefloor.

Eyes glazing over, your attention leapt to the heat growing in your belly. The past few weeks had given you more insight into the way the shinigami felt about you. You could be wrong, of course, but you were sure that if you asked, Ryuk would definitely take his pants off for you.

You brought a hand up to your mouth, pretending to prop yourself up by the chin to hide the gasp that escaped from your lips, even with the music drowning everything out.

The alcohol was slowly working its way through your system, you finally reassured yourself, and that was likely what was causing these intrusive thoughts. Maybe this was the strange but necessary way in which your brain was telling you that you’d hit your limit.

Pushing away the glass, with its malty-green liquid all out of fizz, you started to slide out of the booth and address Ryuk once more.

“Hey, I’m gonna tell May we’re going.” You called.

You rolled your eyes as Ryuk leaned down, hand cupping over one ear as he made a show of not being able to understand you over the noise. You thoughtlessly swatted at his leg, inhibitions temporarily abandoned.

Ryuk looked at you. “Done for the night?”

Had you been sober, you might’ve questioned why he wasn’t throwing a fit over not staying longer. It hadn’t been too long, and often if you were too quick to jump at going home, your deathly partner would whine about how un-fun you were. That had to be especially applicable after you’d withheld the information about this weekend excursion -- Ryuk had vocalized how fascinating he found the idea once it finally escaped your lips… But he’d been quiet as soon as May arrived and hadn’t said more than a few words at a time since.

You hiccuped. “Just gotta say bye.”

Ryuk’s orbish eyes flashed as he looked off to the side, probably to help you find your way in the crowd, and you were momentarily preoccupied by whether or not you should ask May to leave with you. You doubted she would, but who knows? You didn’t want to leave her in a terrible situation if she was trapped --

With a startled yelp, you tripped on your way out of the booth, not accounting for the lift that you’d had to jump onto beforehand just to get into this ridiculous seating arrangement. You fell forward, sensible shoes scuffling the edge of the raised platform and one of your hands banging the underside of the table while you tried to grab onto whatever you could.

Tough luck, but even with Ryuk cackling in your ear, you registered one of his large, taloned hand instinctively snatching you by your arm.

Your eyes narrowed as you concentrated on having your feet planted firmly on the ground floor, and at the sudden dual set of voices confusing your already impaired senses.

Your shinigami was saying your name - or had started to - when another male voice rendered him silent.

“You good?” Suddenly there was a man beside you, arm outstretched and making you squeak as he used it to press you to him. He was either under the impression that you needed the support, or wanted to give you the impression that you needed it.

It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he was much too close, and Ryuk’s grip on your arm had disappeared.

“You sure do like looking at the human world, don’t you?”

The shinigami had his back turned to Armonia Justin whole kneeling down on the ground made of sand and dust. The name above his head rippled, but he was otherwise unresponsive.

“I suppose that makes sense.” Justin continued. “I don’t remember being as new as you. I’m not even sure if Shinigami can be considered young… but I’m sure that if I were young, the humans would distract me as well.”

Silence followed his words. It wasn’t much of an attempt at conversation, but then Justin didn’t care too much if he was entertaining their newest member or not. It was, in fact, a little annoying to put up with this arrogant shinigami and his bold refusal to integrate into their realm.

But then, the King had seemed so gleeful at the idea of this new guy. He’d laughed as though enjoying an inside joke while putting the body together.

Armonia Justin sat as he always did, perched on a golden throne. He was no king himself, but there was some truth to being of a more divine position in his case. He knew more than a lot of the others of his kind did.

A breeze blew by, rolling stagnant air about. “I’m not looking at the world.”

“Huh?” Justin asked.

“I’m not looking at the world.” The name above the Shinigami - Helios - rippled again as his tone changed to one of irritation.

“No? What else would you be doing while looking into that pool, then?” Justin snapped back.

“Searching.” Helios shrugged his shoulders beneath the overcoat he’d been bequeathed. “I heard that another death note was dropped into the human world.”

Justin paused, then began snickering. “Aha, yes, that did happen. I’m surprised you weren’t there to watch the show. I believe the death god who ‘dropped’ it was of interest to you at one point?”

“Are you trying to help him find it?”

It actually startled Armonia Justin when Helios snorted. He sounded as arrogant as ever, but some wounds had been scratched and the posture of the newborn tightened considerably.

“Like I would ever help Ryuk.” Helios shook his head. “No, no. I want to see who picked it up.”

#death note #ryuk #Ryuk x Reader #Ryuk/Reader #shinigami

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well-shit-im-a-morosexual-now · 4 years

Note

"Chasing Stars" fic?

TW: BODY HORROR (sorry anon but it's like really fluffy if you just ignore the demons looking demonic part)

Different first meeting AU! The Fall happens later while MC is already alive AU!

LONG POST!

MC is studying to be a professional (wildlife) photographer (I've explained why this is my hc before) and as part of a project they are staying at a friend's cottage in the middle of the countryside for a week or two during their break.

One night they see a shooting star, its exact path is followed just a bit later by another (they seem extremely close to earth), then there's two more, almost next to each other, going in a different direction. Two more going in two seperate directions and they're sure there weren't any reports of a meteor shower... The last one is so close that they actually yelp and try to duck back inside when it passes, burning a fiery trail. They feel the impact on the ground when it hits the earth, somewhere in the woods.

And then they're running towards it, their curiosity has always been their biggest weakness. They're running towards a big crater at the centre of a clearing, only a small part in the back of their brain notices the burnt feathers on the ground and the smell of charred flesh. It's only when they get to the edge of the crater do they realise whatever is in there is definitely not a rock.

Rather it's some creature. And their heart is pounding and they're pretty sure they're hallucinating and the smell of burnt flesh is now pretty hard to ignore.

It's vaguely human shaped but much larger. Its feet are sharp bird like talons, its legs are bent in such a way that it would not be possible for it to stand up straight without hunching and its hands are spindly and tipped with long white claws. It's got a pair of large, mangled, burnt wings with only a few white feathers clinging desperately to them. Its skin is burnt to the point of being a pitch black and they can see more burnt feathers along its shoulders, there also seem to be smoldering vacant holes along its sides and back. Its hair seems to be the same grey-white downy fluff of a baby bird and its body is covered in splashes of some sort of thick glittery gold substance.

It's facing away from them making a loud keening sound and trying to curl itself into a tighter ball. They take a step back, maybe to run screaming, maybe to check themself into a hospital, maybe to gather their wits before they lowered themself into the crater.

Whatever it is the creature stiffens at whatever noise imperceptible to the human ear that their step made. It slowly turns towards them. The flesh on the lower part of its face is burnt off showing a full mouth of long gleaming fang like teeth. But that's not what catches their attention. Instead it's the eyes, surrounded by what looks like undamaged human skin. Even with the slitted pupils they look painfully human and terrified.

The creature growls when it sees them, low in its chest as its back tenses as if it was seconds away from darting (not that they think it can).

And instead of running for their goddamned life like any rational human would MC is slowly lowering themself to their knees at the edge of the crater. Talking to it in a soft gentle voice, like they would a stray cat or rabbit that had been hurt/spooked.

"It's okay...look I'm not going to hurt you,,,,I'm going to - fuck what am i doing- I'm going to help you okay? I'm going to - going to go get my truck and some water and rags and we'll get you cleaned up okay,,,,,just please wait here I'll be right back"

Whatever it -he?- is it's definitely intelligent. It's still slightly snarling but they're almost sure it understood them. So they get up and slowly back away and then they're turning and sprinting. Loading the back of their pick up with blankets and pillows to make a comfy nest and grabbing their first aid kit and opting out of taking actual water they instead take wet wipes and food, a proper lamp and a bottle of water.

Then while driving (as we've established MC is v stupid pls don't ever do this) they frantically Google up how to fix broken wings and treat burn wounds also can birds grow up to be 8 feet? How big is an ostrich? What are the odds of an ostrich falling out of the sky?

When they get back to the clearing, the thing is still there and curls up into a tighter ball when it sees them and it watches them with suspicious eyes but it doesn't growl.

Grabbing some of their supplies they sit back on the edge of the crater and ask whether they can come closer. It growls. They sit back down and talk to it - him? - softly. They tell their name and ask for his. They tell him what they are doing here and asks what he is doing here. They tell him they don't have any living family and ask if there's someone out there looking for him. He keens at this and they immediately apologise. They tell him about the photos they have taken and roll the water bottle towards him. They are not sure what they expect but when he (despite struggling with his long claws) opens it with a practiced movement they aren't surprised.

They ask him if they can come closer, he growls and they apologise and sit back down. They talk about more things, stories and movies. They trace the stars and tell him any stories they know about them. They ask him if he's an ostrich. He growls. They laugh.

While their eyes are on the sky he slowly drags himself up from the crater towards them, they don't hear him despite how big he is but they do notice him out of the corner of their eyes. He sits by them and they keep talking, ignoring the heat radiating off him.

Softly he coos before placing his fuzzy head on their lap and for a minute they're frozen in place before he growls and shifts more until they start running their hand through his hair. They feel two bumps on the top of his head and wonder if he had hit his head on the way down.

Eventually with the sun just starting to peak out they manage to get him standing up, sliding their shoulder under one of his arms and hobbling over to the pick up. He's a lot lighter than he looks. They get him settled in the back and cover him with blankets and drive back to their cottage thankful that the small town centre is a bit away from them. They talk loud enough that he'd hear them the whole time

There's a bit of a struggle getting him through the door and when they (stupidly) go to fold his wings which he hasn't been moving much he rounds on them, teeth bared and arm up to strike. They both end up flinching and then he's ducking his head and not meeting their eyes and they talk him through it as they fold his wings, and wince at the pained whining sounds

They move all the furniture in the living room to the sides and put down two of the blankets and get him sitting in the middle.

They aren't sure what to do about the burnt skin, it looks beyond repair and somehow like any rawness from when they first saw him had healed into a hard thick layer, he also didn't seem to mind when they touched him. So again walking him through their steps out loud, they dip a rag in a bowl of cool water and work it along his body. The gold substance has dried a bit and flakes off when they wet it, it reminds them a bit of dried blood but there are no visible wounds/scars/damage underneath it.Whatever it came from, whoever bled gold, it wasn't him.

The holes along his body look worryingly like what they'd imagine empty eye sockets would look.

They card their fingers through his feathers, gently plucking out anything that's loose (it's most of them). After that they rub an aloe vera ointment on the places where the burns seem the worse. While they do all this he watches them as much as possible, but immediately turns around if they catch his eye.

The wings. The wings are a problem. They are frantically scrolling through their phone reading articles while a YouTube video about splinting a wing plays on their laptop but they have no idea where to start or how to splint it or with what for that matter and whether he'd accidentally rip them to shreds if they tried to and actually they're pretty sure he's watching the video on their laptop and huh. So they talk to him, they tell him the problem and they ask him if it would just heal like his burns did if they set the bone (maybe it won't heal properly but maybe at least it won't cause him pain - they tell him this too) and he's watching them with bright, considering eyes and they're spiraling a bit and rambling and then he's nodding his head and rolling his eyes and turning his back to them.

They set the bones and wrap them up as tightly as they can, he whimpers and whines and squirms but he digs his claws into the pillows instead of into them

Once they are done they bring the rest of the blankets and pillows to the floor (with his wings he'd be too big for the bed), giving him water and food (all they have is cup noodles but he doesn't seem to mind). After instructing him to sleep on his front they go flop on their bed and immediately lose consciousness.

Hours later (in the evening) they wake up and walk into their living room and SCREAM BECAUSE HOLY SHIT WHAT THE FUCK THAT WASN’T A DREAM WTF WTF WTF WHY IS HE SCREAMING TOO

After their inevitable breakdown which isn't made any better because it happens simultaneously with his inevitable breakdown. They decide (the next day morning and fuck their sleep schedule is fucked) to deal with things one day at a time.

The next week is all about cute bonding and shenanigans.

Healing is an accelerated process that only takes a few days but it's not a complete job.

The burnt skin heals into a pitch black shiny sort of leathery skin, with the skin healed they can see white markings along his front and back.

The last of the feathers fall out and new ones start growing back in. Unlike the previous ones these are a shiny black and remind them of crow feathers, they come up all through his legs, at the base of his wings, and a few along his shoulders/arms. To stop him from scratching at them they use a warm damp cloth to ease the irritation (when they'd initially just given him the cloth it had resulted with a lot of grumbling and huffing on his part until they'd taken the cloth with a roll of their eyes and swatted at his head - they'd immediately frozen because wtf was that he could probably realistically eat them but he'd only responded with a playful shove).

The bumps on his head turn out to be horns, that he's constantly trying to get them to scratch at.

The sockets and the missing skin on the lower half of his face don't heal & they should probably be more disturbed by it but for some reason they don't see it as anything too strange, it's just another part of their odd impromptu roommate.

The wings take the longest to heal and their bare skeletal form now looks more like bat wings than bird wings.

By the third day the tips of his horns are poking through his head and they distantly wondered while scratching around them if he was one of those mix & match animals from Australia like the platypus. Part gazelle, part bat, part crow and part human.

Once he heals he has boundless restless energy and is always skittering around the cottage, knocking things over like some large cat. (Part tiger?)

They have to convince him to let them file his nails so that the floor doesn't get scraped up

He's always talking. Even if they don't understand him and his words sound more like bird noises it's still him talking. If they don't listen or look distracted he'll caw at them loud and angrily.

He's very clingy and very warm. By the end of the week they find themself spending more time in the nest in their living room than in their own bed.

They don't even notice that stuff has been going missing until they one day go to kick some of the blankets outta the way and end up stubbing their toe on something hard. Underneath the blanket is a little treasure trove of shiny things from coins to the caps of pens.

He comes along with them whenever they go out to the woods with their cameras.

He seems determined to survive on cup noodles alone and honestly personality wise they're pretty sure he'd pass for one of the guys at their college.

They're pretty sure they walked into him crying while watching Cinderella, cuddled up under the blankets.

Wherever he's from they had technology because they once spent a whole hour staring at him and feeling like they were living through a fever dream while he hunched over their laptop and tapped away at it. He got caught to many many scams and they ended up getting a virus but it was worth it for that single image.

They're pretty sure he has some kind of system with the crows because suddenly there's a whole flock of them visiting the cottage and sitting around it and leaving more shiny things for him to add to his collection. They feed them just to be on the safe side.

He has nightmares. Things that leave him shrieking and growling and sobbing. They press as much of him as they can into their chest and vow to protect this monstrous creature from anything, even God himself

They sometimes catch him staring at the stars. They wonder if he misses whatever home he came from.

He avoids mirrors or any reflective surfaces. Goes so far as to flinch away from them. They preen his feathers and call him 'Pretty Bird', he grumbles and huffs and mumbles something that they think probably means 'Not a bird!' they cackle and tell him he's the prettiest ostrich they've ever seen, he shoves them and they shove back and soon they're playfully wrestling on the ground. He makes sure to be careful of his claws/talons

The first time they realise his marks glow in the dark they nearly have a stroke

He ignores them for a whole hour when they laugh after finding out he is afraid of horror movies.

Their hands are running through his hair and scratching at the base of his horns while he is curled up around them, his tail (something which like his horns hadn't been there when they first met him and honestly they feel like they're missing some sort of symbolism here) wrapped around the calf of their leg. At first they think he is growling but have to stifle a laugh, lest he ignore them again, once they realise he is purring.

They call him Star purely because that's what they thought he was and he acts like he hates it but they've seen that small stretch of human skin on his face flush at it.

No one in town saw a meteor shower.

They're not sure what they are gonna do with him, not after their two weeks end but they know for a fact they're not leaving him

Both MC & Mammon are dumb af and don't realise how dangerous the other technically could be to them

One and a half weeks later there's a knock on their door and they're pushing him towards the back of the house before they go to open it.

There's probably the most beautiful man they've ever seen at the door and they're blushing because wtf.

He's dressed incredibly well and they're pretty sure they've never seen him at the town, they take a peak over his shoulder and there's no vehicle behind him. Looking closer at him, he looks tired with bags under his eyes.

"I'm looking for my brother" he says and they're blinking because they have no idea what to say to that. The guy almost looks expectant like they're supposed to come out and say that yeah actually they know exactly where his brother is. And they're opening their mouth to actually apologise to him when there's a loud noise behind them and the man's eyes drift past them and widen.

They're panicking 'cause they know exactly what they'll see when they turn around and when they do turn he's charging towards them and the stranger and they're yelping and jumping out of the way while screaming at him not to attack the guy wtf wtf wtf.

His body collides with the guy's and they both stumble out of the door frame at the impact and they are scrambling after the two of them expecting blood and guts. But instead their shooting star is purring loudly, tail wagging, clinging on to the stranger with a death grip and his face buried in the man's neck.

The guy is somehow managing to carry the whole weight of him and is clutching at the feathers on his back with just as much of a death grip.

Maybe one of them's adopted?

The man catches their eyes and his eyes glint red and his mouth twists in the beginning of a snarl but then their roommate is shifting in his grip and murmuring something and the guy's face is softening for a split second before it hardens again and he whacks the other over the head.

The two speak in soft murmurs but they catch parts of the man's words "Father", " Diavolo", "Lilith", "worried", "human body", "Wrath", " family", "Mammon"

He's nodding his head at the man then before disentangling himself from his (older?) brother and turning to them. He takes a few steps towards them and the man says in a warning tone, "Mammon".

He ignores his brother and walks up to them

"Guess your name's Mammon, huh?"

His eyes scrunch up in a way they know means he's smiling.

"It's cute. Suits you."

And he's blushing and huffing and they're looking at his eyes that are still so human and suddenly they're hugging him tightly and he's hugging them back and they're squeezing their eyes shut and burying their face in the soft feathers at his shoulder.

"I'll miss you, try to stay out of trouble"

He huffs again and squeezes them gently.

They open their eyes wondering what the hell they're doing standing outside in the cold morning in just their pyjamas.

They walk back inside the cottage which for some reason seems much larger and emptier than it was earlier. There's a large bundle of blankets and pillows in the middle of the living room and they have no idea when they did that, they try to kick some of it away and end up stubbing their toe. Under the blankets is a large shiny pile of junk. Were they drunk last night?

They finish the rest of their two weeks at the cottage. They clean up the blankets and spend the nights in a bed that remains freezing even when they turn up the heater.

They go through the pictures they took over the last week and a half. There's some good ones but none that stand out. Nothing interesting or special

They feed the crows that frequently come to their window.

When it's time to leave they get the biggest box they can and fill it with all the junk that they'd found under the blankets. The box sits at the back of their closet when they go back home

They manage to finish all of their studies during the next couple of years and somehow manage to cover all their student debt without any problems (their friends insist that they must have made a deal with the devil to achieve it).

They take freelance jobs as a professional photographer while they work retail part time. Somehow they always seem to have enough money to eat more than just cup noodles and they live in a pretty ok apartment.

They've also taken up driving away from the city to watch the stars during the weekends

Life is good. Normal.

And then one day they're falling, ass first, into another world and meeting the most beautiful man they have ever seen.

His eyes widen a bit in something like surprise when he sees them but it's gone in a second and then he's telling them they're going to be part of an exchange program between three different realms and he's hoisting them on his brother.

And then they're begging him - Lucifer, that's his name, Lucifer - they're begging Lucifer to take them instead because one phone call with this Mammon guy and he sounds like a dick.

But Lucifer's shaking his head and he looks way too amused.

Then a loud is voice is coming from behind them, complaining about being lumped with a human.

And they're turning around to get a look at the asshole who was now responsible for their life and he screeches to a stop in front of them.

Eyes -familiar eyes, so very familiar- wide and surprised and confused, the anger dissolving from his face as his mouth opens and closes soundlessly.

And then he's saying their name, softly, softer than anyone has ever said it before.

This is posted on AO3 along with the other fake fic outlines/summaries! The link to it is pinned on my blog, feel free to leave a comment cause I feed off that shit :D

#asks #answers #obey me #obey me shall we date #obey me mammon #mammon x mc #mammon x reader #obey me!#shall we date? obey me!#swd obey me #swd mammon #om! mammon

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ashintheairlikesnow · 4 years

Text

Rise: Killan

The universe of Killan’s story belongs to @wildfaewhump. If you haven’t read their Iesin and Talvos or Pathverse stories, go! Go read! Read them or face my wrath. I have so much wrath to share.

CW: Referenced past torture, scarring, referenced dehumanization and briefly referenced pet whump, but this is not a piece about any of those things

Killan stopped, just at the edge of the rock along the riverbank, taking in a deep breath. The air was thin here, where the trees became scraggly pines that clung to rocky soil, hints of snowfall still littering the earth even this late in spring.

Leather boots covered his feet, he’d made them himself. It had taken forever to make the kill, tan the leather, cut it around his foot, sew it together. But he’d done it. Coated against the water, they kept his feet warm, but he wouldn’t have needed them, anyway.

He just never lost the habit of wanting to feign humanity, no matter how clear it was that he wasn’t human at all.

Not anymore.

Not a man.

Before, he couldn’t have stood here like this in just a shirt and pants without freezing. His fingertips should be blue, but when he looked down they were the same as always. Pale skin, roughened and scarred, but still skin - feeling only a faint chill. The dark talons on his right hand didn’t feel cold at all.

Killan lowered his eyes to look at them, clicking them together a little. The place where they’d been attached to the knuckles of his hands still held faint scarring where they’d been stitched on even as his bones blended, accepting with each addition parts that had been someone else’s body a little more easily.

Killan was so many people now, most of them fae. He was the only human left in his body but he could have told anyone who asked - cut his skin now and the blood ran pale, a pearlescent shimmer in what had once been a flat dark red when oxygen met wound.

Break a bone and find it hollowed inside, lighter weight easier for his wings to carry.

Make an incision along the wicked scar down his side and you’d find he lost a kidney and some ribs but gained other organs that weren’t there before. Killan would tell you - the wings were one life he stole, it took two for the eyes because the first set didn’t take, my hand was one along with some air sacs, the other air sacs and the lungs were another…

He was so many fae who should be alive, but instead there was only Killan Josta left to wear their parts, a child’s nightmare hiding under the bed, in the dark woods, a set of glowing eyes in the dark.

Not fae, either.

Watch Killan Josta open his eyes and see the pale color was replaced by a saturated, overwhelming blue, a black slit-pupil, eyes that would never sit in true comfort in his skin. They weren’t meant to be there. He still bled instead of crying.

Monster.

Hurt the creature and make it cry out in pain and hear two voices, two sets of vocal chords operating simultaneously, a shrieking fae scream alongside the lower human voice. Calon Nie had loved to hear both screams at once. So had the humans who had chained him down for entertainment.

Everyone was a monster, when given power over something new.

Everyone but... everyone but the ones who had saved him.

Buachaill del. Pretty boy.

Calon Nie’s pretty human, left alone to wander and stumble and plead, to make the mistake of asking for help. Captured, bought and sold, beaten and bled and sold and bought again, until there hadn’t been anything in Killan’s life but survival.

Until there had been no Killan left, that name held and hidden deep within himself. There had been only the creature, the monster, the pet the piece of fascinating conversation start the thing.

Not man or fae or boy or anything but organs and skin and wings to be bruised, broken, bloodied. Not even a favored animal.

Just a thing that knew how to keep living.

Raise your chin at the four-count whistle, hold up your hands at the three. Let them touch your talons, your wings, run their grubby fingers through the feathers you can never get clean. Feel the lash against the skin you were never meant to have for your own when you disobey. Fingers prodding and pressing at your scars. Chirp and trill for the men, the women, the children who call you the unnatural offspring of degeneracy when you were never that.

And it wouldn’t matter if you were, no one could deserve this. No one could earn this.

But this is life, this is all you’ll ever be, guard what’s left of you as deeply as you can and give them the mindless animal doing tricks for their coins, their hands, the promise that if you’re good it won’t last forever.

Feel the press of the muzzle keeping your jaw locked while you weep and beg to be seen as human again. See them lock up your voice and laugh when you try to speak and you can beg all you want, it won’t happen, they’ll never see you as a boy again.

It will never happen, and then one day…

One day, stop begging.

Slide away, into your own mind. Live for the moments where you’re fed for being good, the soft velvet of a horse nosing a carrot right out of your hand, the warmth of their breath curling up in winter stables with them. Curl up on straw and hold the chain around your neck and learn to stop crying.

Until he gives the five-count whistle.

Then you cry on cue.

Live for nothing but the hope that this day will end, because it has to, and then begin the next day living for the end of that one, too. Pray for the night because you are never alone until then.

Pray that it will one day end, and know that you are not praying for salvation, only darkness.

Until someone looks you in the eyes and takes a risk and you end up saved anyway.

Next to him, the river rushed by, swollen with a winter’s melt. The roar of water was deafening, and he couldn’t even imagine how loud it would be at the bottom of the waterfall, hundreds of feet below.

Somewhere further up there were fae courts hidden, deep inside the mountains. They didn’t want him either, but at least he wouldn’t be sold there. He wasn’t a curiosity to the fae, but an abomination, a warning, something to be feared. Something to be sent away as quickly as possible, but for all Calon Nie’s cruelty, it was only one fae that had held him captive and carved into his skin.

It had been a dozen of his fellow humans-

No. Not human anymore.

It had been a dozen or more humans who had bound his hands, forced muzzles on until he bled, sliced his skin to show the change in blood and marvel over his reddish tears, buried their hands in his feathers until he could not help but scream at the violation.

They loved to hear him scream.

Fae rejected him - but humans overwhelmed him.

Not fae either.

Killan looked down at his hands - fingers and talons, a madman’s puppet tossed aside, a piece of decoration in a human’s receiving hall, a pet kept hidden away until they tired of cutting him, a dirty slave for sale in the streets, keep him as a pet or the same way you keep a painting on the wall.

I promise you, messire, you’ve never seen anything like this! Show the man your hands, creature.

Even now, just remembering the whistle, Killan’s fingers twitched with unconscious need to obey.

The sun was rising, the sky a brilliant scattering of pink thrown up against the gathering clouds and a growing golden light finding its slow way along the world he could see below. The forest ran to the curve of the earth, and he could, with sharp fae eyes, see the smoke of chimneys in a village that would have taken him a day to climb down the mountain and walk to, but with wings…

Killan slowly flexed his wings out as wide as they would go, closing his eyes as his back straightened instinctively to balance the weight. The chill air ruffled along his reddish-brown feathers, a playful hint of breeze.

You know how to do this, the breeze whispered to him. You knew the moment he gave them to you.

He wasn’t meant to have them, but he did. They were blended into his back in a mass of scarring and changed bones, shoulder blades shifted out. On fae, the transition was seamless. On Killan, every inch of his skin told the story of screaming agony.

But the fae who had owned them was dead, along with every other one sacrificed to Calon Nie’s game. If they were anyone’s wings now, they were Killan’s.

I don’t have to be ashamed of what he did to me. I didn’t ask to be a monster.

The water burst from the confines of the earth next to him, tumbled and rolled into the air before it fell and fell and fell and crashed back down to earth below. Killan sighed softly, watching breath puff out before his face, and then turned away from the dawn.

He walked, step by silent step, back along the riverbank, watching the water running the other way, chasing the flight back down to ground. He stopped next to a thin pine tree, reaching out to touch the needles, crushing them between his fingers to release the scent, closing his eyes and breathing it in.

I didn’t ask to be this. It’s not my fault.

It’s not my fault I have new parts.

It’s not my fault I can fly.

Against his back, the breeze slipped around him again, dancing air that ran along the edges of feathers, beckoning. Beneath that, a faint shimmer of mystery. While fae and humans both looked away, Killan could call and have starsong reply, if only faintly, to his cries for help.

The mysteries recognized him as a mystery himself, not a monster. Not understood but not entirely turned away.

And he wasn’t alone, either. There were others out there who had been broken and bent to someone else’s will, who could see beyond the way he had been stitched together and know there was still a whole person inside.

Eitilt.

The breeze called again, and Killan stopped to look over his shoulder at the dawn. Farther than the sun’s light could reach, stars still shone, visible in the blue as brightly as they’d been in the black the night before.

Fly.

Killan took off running, back towards the cliffside, racing with his wings curved against his back and his feet pounding on rock. The roar of the river alongside felt like it ran with him right to the edge, where instead of stopping Killan flung himself out into space, the spray of water beside him.

Wings curved, he fell.

The air flew past his ears as he plummeted towards the earth, mysteries a song that wound around hollowed bones and filled the places inside him with air. The bottom of the waterfall came closer and closer, a frothing white spray where the water was wearing the earth down beneath dirt, beneath stone, to bedrock underneath it all.

Instinct told him things that human experience never could, and he let his body - bent and broken and twisted and remade, rebuilt, created by a fae who named himself Killan’s god - tell him when to stop.

Down and down and down and-

Now.

His wings snapped out, catching the breeze and slowing his descent, sending him forward instead of down and he trilled, beating wings heavily to head back up again. His back ached a little but he caught a current that helped carry him up, air that rested under his feathers like hands slipping around a small child to lift them up onto a mother’s hip to be carried.

The sky was not his mother, but she would be here to lift him where his own mam could not.

He burst upwards, spinning, breathing thin air as though he’d always been able to do so, human and fae lungs filtering every ounce of oxygen he needed in tandem. The sun warmed his face, and he closed his eyes against its touch. Sun on his face, stars at his back, Killan let the currents carry him a little further.

And then he dove again.

Fly.

He dropped like a stone, rushing downwards, spinning in the air before he snapped his wings out again and cut a hard left. Around him the air itself celebrated with him everything his broken body could still do, all the things he’d been given alongside what he had lost.

Sharp talons could tear apart a rabbit and defend him from attackers just as easily.

Rise.

Fae eyes saw far, farther than even the keenest human sight, and kept him safe. He could see in the dark, he could see them coming before they could see him.

Rise.

Hollowed bones let him fly, kept him lighter, along with the places added to him to hold air, to bring him higher and higher, to help him-

Rise.

Fae blood carried oxygen more easily, let him climb higher into the air, the currents under his feathers like a friend lifting him up. As high as he could go, not quite so high as a full-blooded fae but he felt the air thinning and thinning and the stars were ever closer, their song welcoming him even if the fae did not.

Ardu th’uas. Rise above.

He slowed, spinning in the air, letting starshine and sun wash all his ruined skin clean.

Leanh na realtai. Child of stars, you, too.

His heart stilled, here where the air was thinnest, with the question he never voiced. Even ruined, I am?

And every time, the certainty returns.

Even ruined, you are.

Iron and earth may be blind, but the stars see you.

Killan dropped again.

He spun with his wings pressed tightly, speeding to earth so fast the air was a scream and he couldn't find the breath to laugh. The forest below him, the sky above him, the sun and stars.

Killan Josta, as he was, should not exist.

He did, though, and in this moment with his wings snapping out to slow his descent, catching an air current that pulled him back around towards the mountains, he feels them.

Something like friends.

They were calling him back to the waterfall and the cliff and the camp in the woods where they will be waiting for him, the ones who saw beneath his skin to the boy still hiding under a monster, the man half-buried by cruelty but still trying to break free of its legacy.

They were waiting, with breakfast probably already ladled out for him.

First, though…

First Killan Josta, who had a name again, wanted to fly. One more time he climbed the currents, found the pockets of air to push him higher and higher and higher, until there was a half-breath of pause as high as his broken, remade body could go.

He let that pause draw out, listening to the stars whisper in human ears.

Sing, Killan Josta.

He trilled, a cry as much of gratitude as it was of joy, and wrapped his wings around himself to plummet to earth again.

Rise.

Killan fell, and fell and fell, and then just when he could fall no further without breaking on the earth, his feathers caught the air and he flew.

-----

Tagging Killan’s crew: @astrobly @burtlederp , @finder-of-rings , @slaintetowhump , @quirkykayleetam , @whumpallday , @whumppsychology, @doveotions, @broken-horn, @moose-teeth, @whumpfigure, @spiffythespook, @oceanthesarcasamfox, @whump-only(if you would like to be added to an OC’s tag list, please send your request via an ask! Those are easier for me to keep track of and I tend to lose requests in comments, reblogs, tags, or PMs!)

#trauma recovery #fantasy setting #fantasy whump #winged whumpee #wing whump #referenced torture #scarring #wildfaewhump's world #trauma recovery whump #killan is babey and saddest boy #wings #dehumanization reference #pet whump references #magical whump #magical setting #if you're thinking I wrote this to a single song #you are correct

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goldandbluesmiles · 3 years

Text

Acquisition

Summary: By Bruce Wayne's calculations, he still had two years to go until he could safely take over the Court of Owls, and an additional two years after that until he could turn them into something that could help Gotham instead of control it. His timeline gets accelerated when he hears about Richard John Grayson, a little boy being trained to become a Talon.

Ao3

Part 1 of Guardian Wolf

xxx

Bruce had never thought of children for himself. It would be easy to say that he never wanted them but the truth was that after losing his parents, he had refused to let himself even consider the idea. How was he supposed to take care of a child when he still felt half-broken and wrong from his parent's death. How could he take care of a child when there was an infinite sadness in him that probably had nothing to do with being an orphan and everything to do with the fact that he was just a mess. How could he subject a child to the dark ache inside of him?

No, he was best left childless even if sometimes his dreams were filled with the vague scents of small faceless pups, a hidden wish that was to never come true.

So Bruce buried his dreams deep and started his training. He travelled the world, visited mountains and desserts, met assassins and healers, and stood in front of crumbling temples and timeless treasures. He visited the league, became Ra's Al-Ghul favourite student and Talia Al-Ghul's favourite lover. Afterwards, he came back to the whispers of the Court of Owls and the hand they had had in his parent's murder. Slowly, he started to infiltrate them, turning members, sowing seeds of distrust and sending away anyone that was too much trouble. None of them exactly had clean records and while it took a lot of digging, there was always something that could be used to take their power away.

For four years, he worked his influence in the Court, gaining allies and putting on a false face. By his calculation, it would take him another two years to gain complete control and then another two turn the Court into something that could actually help Gotham instead of control it. It was a long game but Bruce was a patient man. He could wait.

Until he heard of the little boy. One of the Court's other favourites quietly informed him of a little boy that was being trained to become a talon. They hadn't injected him with too much yet since he still had to grow but they were working him to the bone.

"His name is Richard John Grayson," his informant told him

Grayson. He knew the name. He also knew that most Graysons, like William Cobb, consented to the transformation that made them Talons.

This child definitely hadn't consented.

"Has he been here the whole time?" asked Bruce

"Yes," the other answered.

Bruce cursed himself. He remembered hearing of the fall of the Graysons, remembered not paying it any attention since the talon-aged Graysons were already dead. The boy and the circus had quickly disappeared from the city and Bruce had assumed Richard would be with them.

How stupid of him.

"It's not your fault," murmured the other, quite understanding of his silences, "They kept it under wraps. Even the most loyal members do not know. Only the Grandmaster and his inner four,"

"How did you find out?" asked Bruce

The other grinned, "Everyone has a weakness of the flesh, Brucie. Mr. Crow is no different,"

Bruce raised his eyebrows at them, "I never would have expected you to go that far,"

His companions laughed, "Don't worry, Wayne. I was always going to use the sedative and I could have done it without getting naked but..."

"You actually enjoyed yourself," said Bruce, "Is the man really that good?"

"Well, if you must know..."

"Actually, no. Please leave,"

The other chuckled again, "Alright. I'm going to assume that you're going to accelerate your deadline due to this. Let me know if there's anything I can do,"

"I will," said Bruce, "And one more thing,"

"Yes?"

"Your therapist appointment?"

The other rolled their eyes, "Don't worry, Bruce. I rescheduled it for tomorrow,"

Bruce smiled, "Good. Take care of yourself,"

"You too,"

Once the door was closed again, Bruce went back to looking through the report.

It was time to make a few calls.

xxx

Deathstroke carefully deposited the boy in front of Bruce, his hands gentle despite the pain Bruce knew he was capable of inflicting. The boy seemed to be asleep, sedated most likely.

"How was he?" Bruce asked Slade, "Did he come easily?"

"He seems to be used to taking orders," said Slade, "Though he seemed bit out of it, sort of in a trance,"

Bruce nodded, surveying the little boy on the ground tightly wrapped in a blanket. From stories, he knew that the boy was a Panther shifter. He still smelled like a pup but Bruce could tell he was an Alpha.

Richard would grow up to me something formidable one day. For now, he looked small and broken, making every omega and wolf instinct rise up in Bruce.

However, it wasn't the time or place so Bruce pushed it down and turned to see a lynx and a coyote jump on the roof, only a few paces away from them. A few seconds later, Selina Kyle was fixing her hair while he had an arm full of Talia Al-Ghul.

"I missed you, Beloved," murmured the Alpha

Bruce smiled, and kissed her hair, "I missed you too, Darling,"

Behind them Slade made a disgruntled noise, forcing them to let go of each other.

"So, Lover," Selina, "What happens now? Do I need to take myself out of Gotham for a little bit?"

"You shouldn't have to but better safe than sorry I suppose," said Bruce

"What about the Court?" asked Slade, "It's going to create a power vacuum,"

Bruce smiled, "The Court won't go away. I have enough support to be seen as a hero for saving it from the attack from the 'traitors' and will be appointed the new Grandmaster. The changes I intended for will take some time but this is a start. Most of those that oppose me are currently being labelled to be exiled. Of course, I will kindly 'spare' some of them,"

Slade whistled, "And all this on an accelerated timeline. Remind me never to piss you off, Wayne,"

"Noted,"

"We should be going," said Talia, "We must not be spotted here by any lingering opposition of yours in the Court,"

"Right," said Bruce nodding, "Thank you for coming here,"

"Anything for a paycheque," Slade saluted him before jumping off the roof but not before calling out again, "Take care of the kid, Wayne,"

Bruce shook his head. For all his violence, the man could have soft spot for children.

"It's my city too, Lover," said Selina, "But I need to go look for safe transport out. Good luck,"

As always, Selina left on silent feet

"You should take care of the boy," said Talia. Her gaze almost seemed wistful as she looked at the child. Though maybe that was just his imagination.

"Yes," he murmured, "Will you go back now?"

Talia looks at him with regret in her eyes, "You know I must Beloved,"

Must. There were so many things Bruce would say to that, so many arguments that could be made. But there was a boy lying on the rooftop so he merely nodded. A gentle kiss on the cheek and Talia was gone too.

Bruce bent down and carefully lifted the boy up. He was impossibly light and easily fit in Bruce's arms.

"Alright, Pup," murmured Bruce, "What am I going to do with you?'

xxx

Alfred cornered Bruce as soon as he got inside.

"Master Bruce," said the butler, scandalized, "Please tell me that is not a child,"

"Richard Grayson," Bruce told him, "He was being trained to become a Talon,"

A look of rage passed over Alfred's before his expression settled into its normal blankness.

"I see," said the butler, "I shall ready some soup for when the young man wakes up,"

"Thanks, Alfred,"

Bruce was then left holding the small boy. On instinct, he took him to his room and gently laid him down on the bed. The space was too large for the little pup, making him seem like a deserted island in the middle of a green sea.

What could he do now? Whenever he wanted warmth he would get-

Blankets. Bruce needed blankets. The pup would like blankets. Yes, blankets.

He first raided his closet, there were some things that smelled fresh and some others that smelled like him, things he kept for when he was in heat. They still smelled like him so Bruce carefully laid them out around the little pup, leaving enough room for Bruce to slide in around him. He then took some pillows and cushions. After that, he took out some sweaters and shirts lining them in the small spaces of the structure, effectively filling it with more of his scent and closing any openings.

When he was done, Bruce stepped back and surveyed his work. Little Richard was still under the influence of whatever sedative had been given to him and was snoring softly. The blankets and other things around him would keep him safe and warm, just like Bruce wanted. Still, there seemed to be something missing. Something important. What was it?

Bruce thought back to his own childhood. He had tried to keep some of his parents' scent at first. Once it had become evident that it was just making everything worse, he had replaced them with-

Oh. He knew what he needed.

But he needed to leave the room to get it. Could he leave the pup alone? what is he woke up? What if he got scared?

In the end, the need to complete the structure won out and he ran to where he knew Alfred would be.

"Alfred!" called Bruce as he entered the kitchen, "I need more blankets!"

Alfred looked surprised to see him, putting down the spatula "Master Bruce, What-"

There was no time for questions! The pup was alone and he needed blankets quickly.

"Alfie, I really need blankets right now. Maybe something of yours and Leslie's and Richard is alone right now so I need to quickly find-"

Alfred placed a gentle hand on his arm, forcing him to slow down.

"Master Bruce," said the older Beta, "Why don't you go ahead and go back to Richard? I will find the suitable things for you,"

There was an understanding look on the man's face which was good. If Alfred understood then he would fix it. Still, Bruce hesitated. What if he got it wrong?

As if reading his thoughts, Alfred smiled.

"Master Bruce, need I remind you that I was the one who would help you with your nests as a pup?"

Bruce thought back to his childhood and nodded. Alfred was right, of course. He would find the right things and Bruce could go back to hi- the pup.

"Okay, Alfie," he said.

He quickly kissed Alfred's cheek and practically ran back to his room. To his immense relief, Richard hadn't woken up yet.

Carefully, Bruce made his way to the middle so he was curled around the little boy. Almost in a trance he pulled Richard to his chest and tucked him under his chin.

Bruce didn't know what was happening to him. He'd never acted like this before and yet he couldn't bring himself to leave the boy alone. He was so sure something bad would happen if he stayed away from the little pup too long. And as foreign as the feeling was it also felt right in a way very few feelings did.

In light of that realization, Bruce tucked Richard close and waited for Alfred to come back.

xxx

"Did he seem to be in a trance state or just worked up?" asked Leslie

"Just worked up," said Alfred as they walked to the room, "He seemed to be afraid to leave Richard alone,"

"I see," said Leslie, "Well, I don't think we have anything to worry about. It sounds like he saw a pup that could be in distress and the instinct built until he didn't know how to deal with it. It doesn't happen a lot but is quite common in people like Bruce,"

"People like Bruce?"

"He keeps a dangerously small pack on purpose, avoids pups including his cousins and obviously has some sort of anxiety surrounding the thought of children, all that builds up to feeling overwhelmed at taking care of a small pup," said Leslie, "Most do it on instinct but what do you do the when the instinct is completely foreign,"

"Hmm"

"By the way," continued Leslie "We really need to do something about the way he thinks about children. Even if he never has children of his own, it's not healthy,"

Alfred sighed, "I know. I just always thought it was something he was going through as a teenager, that he would change his mind once he was a little older and had some more time to get over his parents' death. I suppose that is on me for not seeing the signs,"

Leslie gave him a sympathetic look as they reached Bruce's room. Slowly opening the door, they found him sitting in the middle of his nest as he gently rocked the little boy in his arms. Whatever sedative had been given to the boy still seemed to be working.

Their own little boy, not grown, looked at them with wounded eyes. Leslie was reminded of the times years ago when he had looked at them like that, believing that they could fix anything. That belief ad wained over the years and the return of that look made Leslie's heart hurt. They would have to let him down all over again.

"Master Bruce," murmured Alfred, "We brought what you asked for,"

He just kept staring at them for another moment. He then looked at little Richard and then back.

"Leslie, Alfie," he brokenly whispered, "What am I doing? What's happening to me?"

"Oh my dear boy," said Alfred, sitting down just at the edge of the bed, "You're just a little overwhelmed by your instincts and your instincts are telling you that your pup needs a safe nest,"

"But he's not my pup, Alfie," Bruce sounds ready to cry, "It shouldn't feel- it shouldn't-"

"Shouldn't what, Kiddo?" asked Leslie

"It shouldn't feel this right," said Bruce, staring down at Richard's peaceful face, "He's not mine,"

Unfortunately, Richard wasn't but all those years of pushing down his wishes and his instincts meant that Brue had latched on. Leslie hated to think about what would happen once Richard had to part with him.

"Bruce," said Leslie, "For now, he doesn't have anywhere to go and from what I've heard, he's been trained brutally so let's just take care of him for now. Kind of like Lucious took care of you when I or Alfred couldn't. Think of it that way, okay,"

"Like babysitting?"

That wasn't what Leslie had meant but it seemed to be calming Bruce down so she merely nodded.

Bruce took a shuddering breath and carefully put Richard back down onto the sheets.'

"Okay," he said, "Okay, I can do that,"

Leslie shared a relieved look with Alfred. Baby steps. At least Bruce was calmer now. Once the boy woke up, they could check him over and convince Bruce to start the legal process for whatever was best for the little pup. Though, Leslie had a feeling they were going to be having an addition to their small pack.

"This is going to be difficult," said Alfred as they watched Bruce rearrange the nest again

"We'll help him," said Leslie.

He was still their little pup after all.

xxx

The Little Talon was floating on cotton candy. Very strange and nice smelling cotton candy. This was different than the other times. Usually, he woke up on the hard floor or the hard slab.

Why would he be on a cloud? Or maybe it wasn't a cloud?

Little Talon finally opened his eyes and found that he wasn't on a cloud at all. He was on a bed. A very nice bed.

Why was he on a nice bed? The beds Mr. Cobb like to get him to sleep on were always small and hard. He called them cots. They smelled like wood.

Little Talon tried moving his arms around and found that they were trapped in a blanket. He quickly untangled himself and sat up. He looked around and froze.

There was someone else there with him. A big man with dark hair and dark clothes.

This must be his new Master. Which meant that this was a test.

It wasn't like any other test he had been in though. For one, the Master seemed to be asleep.

He would wait.

After about two minutes and a half, the new Master started to move a little. Little Talon kept himself perfectly still.

The new Master opened his eyes and looked straight at him. His eyes were very blue.

"Hello," murmured the Master

Was he supposed to talk back? Taking a chance, he responded.

"Hello,"

Master smiled and Little Talon relaxed. It was a nice smile. This meant Master was happy for now.

"How are you, Richard?"

Richard? His masters didn't call him Richard. They called him Little Talon.

He didn't know how to respond and Master frowned. Oh no. Was he mad now?

"Isn't your name Richard?" Master asked

Richard? That wasn't what they called him. They called him Little Talon but...There had been the before. Before, that was filled with bright colours and happy voices. Cotton Candy and music. What had he been called before?

D-

Di-

"Dick, Master," he murmured

"Dick?" Master questioned

Little Talon nodded.

"Mama and Papa called me, Dick,"

"Do you remember your parents?"

Little Talon frowned, "I-I don't, not really. Fuzzy,"

"Oh," said Master, and then hesitated before speaking again, "Why do you call me Master?"

Little Talon frowned, "It's what you are, Master,"

"I see," said Master, "From now, I want you to call me Bruce,"

"Bruce?" Little Talon tested the word. He liked it, "Bruce,"

Bruce smiled the nice smile again and Little Talon felt happy.

"We're going to talk about some very important things, okay?" said Bruce, "So I'm going to need you to listen very carefully,"

Little Talon nodded. He was a good listener. He could be good.

"You were taken by the Court of Owls and your custody was given to Samantha Vanaver. Do you remember her?"

"Grandmaster," murmured Little Talon

"Yes. The people of the Court weren't very good people so I-"

Bruce hesitated.

"I made sure that the bad ones couldn't hurt anyone anymore," said Bruce, "I had some of my friends help with that. One of them got you out of there. Do you remember?"

Little Talon cast his mind back and a memory came to him. A large man with white hair and an eye-patch?

"Eye-patch man?" he asked

Bruce let out a laugh. Little Talon liked the sound. It was warm.

"Yes," he said, "I'm going to have to tell Slade about that one,"

Slade?

Bruce must have noticed his question because he smiled again.

"He's eye-patch man," Bruce told him

Oh.

"What happens to me now?" he asked, "Am I going to be you Little Talon now? Help you with the Court?"

"Oh, pup." murmured Bruce, "Sweetheart, you don't have to be Little Talon anymore, you can just be Dick,"

"Be Dick?" asked Little Talon. His throat felt funny so it came out all croaky.

Bruce's eyes seemed a little wet as he opened his arms, "Come here sweetheart,"

Little Talon hesitated but the room was starting to fill with a nice and sweet smell and it seemed to be coming from Bruce. He wanted to b closer to it so he complied. Once he was in Bruce's arms, he was glad he had listened. The arms were strong and felt safe. His skin felt tingly and nice everywhere Bruce was touching him so he curled even closer to chase the feeling.

"You're going to stay here now," Bruce whispered, "I'm going to take care of you. No one will hurt you here,"

"No training?" he asked

"No training," Bruce said firmly, "No cage, no cold,"

It sounded like a dream.

"Also," said Bruce, "I would like to call you, Dick. Is that alright?"

Dick. He hadn't been Dick for a while now. He had only been Little Talon but from what little he could remember, Dick had seemed like a happy boy with nice par-

There had been a fall and there had been screaming and blood. Someone had taken him away.

"My Mama and Papa are dead aren't they?" he asked.

He knew he should feel sad but all he felt was empty. Like he was light enough to be floating and the only thing keeping him in place was Bruce with his strong arms.

"Yes," murmured Bruce

"But I can still be Dick," he asked, "Even if I don't remember properly?"

"Yes," said Bruce pressing a kiss to his hair, "You can be Dick,"

"Will I remember later?"

He could feel Brue hesitate.

"You were given some drugs," said Bruce, "There is a chance that you might not remember but most likely, you'll start getting your memories about your life back,"

"I'm gonna be sad, aren't I? Because my parents are dead?"

Bruce's arms tightened.

"Yes," said Bruce, "Most likely,"

He thought about it.

"I still want to be Dick," he said.

"Okay," said Bruce.

Little Talon would become Dick again. And maybe, just maybe, he could be safe, like he was in his dreams sometimes.

Maybe, Dick could be happier and warmer than Little Talon was.

xxx

End Note:

Dick isn't completely lucid until five days later. Bruce takes this time to figure out the legal aspect. It doesn't take much to fake papers saying that he was to take care of Dick if anything ever happened to Vanessa. When Dick wakes up properly, he promptly freaks out but Bruce is able to calm him down. Dick can now properly remember his parents and starts the process of grieving, forcing Bruce to grieve too.

Oh, and they both go to therapy. Because in this universe, we are going to be healthy.

#OmegaverseSFWWeek2021 #day 1 #nesting #abo dynamics #A/B/O au #dick grayson #bruce wayne #batdad #batman

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championrevali · 3 years

Note

You said you were looking for writing prompts so how about a reverse AU type of thing where Prince Link enters a Rito archery competition disguised as a Rito (in a rito mask because the King doesn't want him fighting or competing so he does it in secret) and beats Revali (by one point) before disappearing. Now Revali is obsessed with finding out the identity of the Rito who beat him because he may or may not want to settle the score (ie court him.)

Oml I love this so much. I kinda deviated from the og idea a little bit just to work with what was going on in my head. I hope it’s okay. Also thank you to my Revalink discord friends for helping me some ideas for how to link (hehe, link) scenes, i was mega stuck for a hot minute.

I decided to split this into two parts.

(low key should I put this on Ao3?)

Italics is sign language

Word count: 1595

Ship: Revalink, Revali/Link

"Are you sure this will work?" Link asked, surveying the merchants many elixirs.

"Positive! I've tested them me'self. That elixir there will turn you into a Rito. Twenty four hours guaranteed."

Nodding, Link dropped a bag of rupees onto the counter. "I'll take five."

The merchant grinned, inspecting his new riches. "Pleasure doing business with you young man."

Link pocketed the elixirs, and hopped up onto his rented horse. The steed pulled against the reigns willfully, and Link wished Epona wasn't as recognizable as she was.

It wasnt hard to miss his royal steed, and if he had brought her he would be caught for sure.

No, he couldn't be caught. He needed to know whether his nightly training was worth it. He needed to know if he could beat the greatest archers in Hyrule.

Seeing the tall rocky formation from the stable was a great relief to the prince, as the long ride had tired him out. He dropped his horse off, and walked to a nearby pond. He squeezed his eyes shut and drank the elixir.

He probably shouldnt have been as shocked as he was when he looked at his reflection. Golden feathers speckled with light blue covered his whole body. Lifting his hand- or his wing to his light blue beak, he opened and closed his mouth in amazement.

Backing away from the pond, he stumbled a bit on his taloned feet. "How do Ritos walk like this?" Link thought, as he started his way to the village.

The older inspected the small boy up and down. "You're quite small to he in an archery competition... are you sure you can even pull back the string?"

Links feathers puffed up, embarrassed. "Yes I can..."

The Rito laughed. "Whatever you sat kid... What's your name?"

"Link." He said without thinking.

"Ah... same name as the pretty boy prince of Hyrule huh? Not exactly a common name is it?"

Link hesitated. "Right.".

The Rito waved him past the check in, towards the range. "Good luck."

Sighing, releaved, Link went over to pick out a bow. The range supplied bows so that no ones would have an opportunity to cheat.

"These are worthless pieces of crap" a voice announced near Link.

Turning to see who had spoken, Link saw a dark blue Rito, inspecting the bows.

"My bow is far superior to any of these... used bows..." the words dripped from the dark blue Rito's mouth as if he was talking about some muck on the bottom of his shoe.

"Isn't that the point though? That we all have the same quality bows?" Link inquired, curious as to why this Rito found used bows so repulsive.

"Tsk, and I suppose you also believe that it's not about winning it's about having fun." Sarcasm leaked from every word.

Link flushed, choosing to just pick up a bow and walk away. As he walked away he could feel the blue feathered Ritos eyes burning a hole in his back.

Link lined up with the other Rito, feeling utterly dwarfed by their height. He somehow kept his julian height, and was at least a head shorter than most others around him.

The blue Rito he'd ran into before was a few spaces away from him, also looking quite short next to his competitors.

The older Rito he'd talked to earlier stepped in front of the lineup. "The rules are simple. Furthest away from the target is eliminated. Missing the target is automatic disqualification, as is cheating. Good luck."

Taking a deep breath, Link adjusted his stance. This would be where he found out whether all of his training in secret was worth it.

Adjusting his stance, Link lifted the bow. It was heavier than he was used to, but his feathers seemed better adjusted to hold the weight. He pulled back the string, and let the arrow fly.

His arrow slammed in the second outer circle. Link smiled, proud that he was still in the competition.

"Tsk." Link heard to the left of him. That Rito he'd talked to earlier was looking at his target with distaste.

He had hit in the center circle, closer to a bullseye than any of the other targets. Yet he looks disappointed.

"Oh c'mon Revali, you'll get it next time." Teased the Rito next to him.

Link looked away, this Rito was too cocky for Link's taste. He nocked an arrow, preparing for the next round.

Round after round passed, Link becoming more and more comfortable with each arrow.

At last, he and one final Rito, Revali, were the only two left standing. The Rito shot him an overexaggerated, unimpressed look.

"Well I suppose we should just pack it up now... I can't imagine this will be too difficult."

Link clenched his jaw in annoyance.

"Nothing to say oh short one? Very well then." Revali turned back towards the target, tugging on the bow string lightly.

Link shook his head, turning back to the targets as well. He wouldn't let this overconfident Rito ruin this. He took a deep breath, pulling back the string.

Thunk

The echo of an arrow slamming into a tree. But it wasn't Link's arrow.

Revali was staring in shock at his arrow, stuck firmly in a tree a few feet away from his target. Link's own arrow was planted less than an inch from the center.

He had won.

"No! That was a mistake, I demand a redo!" Revali insisted, feathers fluffed up in annoyance. It might have looked cute if Link didn't know it was him the Rito was angry at.

"Revali you missed... meaning you lose... just accept it." A Ritos voice popped up from the side.

Shooting a glare that could kill, Revali slammed the bow back into the stand, and took off in the direction of the village.

After a moment of awkward silence, Link was crowded in a large mass of Rito congratulating him. He tensed, not used to having to being so crowded. Life in the castle was mostly him doing his duty of preparing to be king someday. His assigned knight and best friend Zelda and his father were the only company he was used to having.

Revali POV

Landing in the flight range, Revali cursed under his breath. "Those ridiculous bows... they're not the right adjustments... it's their fault."

He supposed the small Rito was a good opponent. Certainly was interesting compared to the usual supposed competition he crushed.

The way he held the bow was interesting as well, it resembled the bow hold of a Hylian. Perhaps he grew up near a Hylian settlement. Though that was highly unlikely. Not many Rito strayed from the village that they grew up in. Many would leave the roost and travel for a few years, but they most always returned to the village to let their family grow.

Revali smiled as an idea came over him. “Perhaps I could convince him to a rematch. Certainly he wouldn’t want anyone questioning the legitimacy of his win.”

Climbing into his hammock, Revali was satisfied that this would solidify his win, and prove that he was still the greatest archer the Rito had ever seen.

The village the next morning was buzzing with news that the great Revali had finally met his match. It took everything in him not to stop and tell the gossipers the truth, that the yellow Rito’s win was nothing but a fluke on the fault of his bow.

He took a deep breath and steeled himself. Find the Rito first, then prove that it was a mistake.

“Would you happen to know where that Rito would be? I would like to apologize for my outburst yesterday.” Revali lied through his beak.

“You just missed him.” The gossiper said, looking at him with- Oh dear Hylia that better not be pity he saw in her face. “The lad checked out of the inn not an hour ago, walked in the direction of the stable.”

Nodding, the blue Rito climbed up to one of the landing decks, and flew in the direction of the stable. Surely he would be able to catch his competitor before he got too far away. After all, not all birds had his gale.

Revali was frustrated. Not only was his competitor not at the stable. But no one had actually seen him leave the stable. The only thing to go by was that apparently his name was Link.

The last sighting of him was when he arrived at the Rito stable, yet no one had seen him leave.

Eventually Revali gave up. Moved on, he claimed. If anyone asked, he would deny that thoughts of the mysterious archer graced his thoughts every day.

And it was definitely because revali was angry about his mess up, not because he wanted to know how soft the others feathers were. It definitely wasn't because he was attractive. No, definitely not.

Shakes head head, Revali turned over in his hammock. It did no good to lose sleep over someone hed never see again.

But here he was, the day before he was to depart for Hyrule castle, thinking about that elusive Rito.

As the winner of first place seemed to be long gone, Revali was supposed to show off his skills to the royalty in Hyrule castle for winning second place. Perhaps king would be impressed and offer him a place in the castle.

Who was he kidding, of course the king would be impressed, he was the great Revali after all.

Cont. In part 2!

If yall enjoyed this and wanna be tagged for part 2, lemme know in the comments.

Thank you for this prompt kasaru_chan! I had so much fun writing it, sorry again that it took so long

@kasaru-chan @silvershadowdragon39 @imofficialbabyuwu

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hypnoticwinter · 3 years

Text

Down the Rabbit Hole part 26

It turns out, however, that I didn’t need to. As I cower and make a half-hearted, dog-tired attempt to throw myself to the side, the – well, the bird, I guess, whatever the hell it is – swoops just next to me, close enough to feel a better of greasy wings against my back, knocking me to the ground with one powerful downswing, and then it juts its claws forward and digs them into Marcus. He shrieks; his gun clatters squelchily to the gnarled floor and he flails in the thing’s grip; it’s holding him by the shoulder and by the hip, and for a moment, just a singular moment, it glares at us balefully, its squat, recessed head and luminous eyes swiveling over us, before it adjusts its grip on Marcus briefly and then pushes itself powerfully into the air again, winging into the darkness. Marcus’s screams recede quickly, and I am left open-mouthed on the ground, heart pounding, my entire body shaking as I come hesitantly off the adrenaline. Erica is trying to get a bead on the thing with her revolver but her hand is too unsteady, and I reach out for her and cry out for her not to shoot, and she glances down at me quickly. Her eyes are wide and panicked and I realize that this is the first time I’ve seen her lose her cool. Even in the hotel room she was completely locked down.

“Erica,” I say urgently, “if you shoot that gun everything down here is going to know exactly where we are.”

I give the murky ceiling a glance filled with trepidation then get to my feet slowly. My foot nudges against something – Marcus’ gun. I look down at it and then up at Erica; she raises the revolver again and points it at me.

“I’m just going to pick it up,” I tell her.

“Don’t.”

“Erica, I am not going around unarmed down here. You can either let me pick the gun up or we can just shoot each other right now and get it over with. What’s it going to be?”

A nice speech, I guess. Maybe it’d have more impact if I had more than about an ounce of energy to deliver it with. Whatever rest I’d managed to get has been depleted by now and my legs and arms and back are aching as before. I need to get out of this goddam place, I think to myself, but even my thoughts don’t have any energy to them, everything flits around very enervated and airy.

Erica is still staring at me and I bend down, very slowly, and pick the gun up. I hold it between thumb and forefinger, keeping my eyes locked on her, and then stick it slowly into the front pocket on the suit. “Alright?” I ask, and she swallows, then nods.

“Marcus,” she starts, and I look up again, shake my head.

“He’s gone,” I tell her. Stating the obvious.

“I didn’t think he’d –“ she starts, and then she cuts herself off. She wipes at her eyes hurriedly and then pulls out the PDA again, points down the slope. “That way,” she tells me, and I nod.

The way down becomes gradually easier, the slope levelling out into a long rough bumpy undergrowth of muck and slime. Mushrooms bud down here, great towering broad-capped things the size of small trees, and I feel a little safer, at least, knowing that any of the birds that might be circling above, glaring down and looking for prey, probably won’t be able to see us beneath their wide fleshy brims. They grow thick, too, leaving us to pick and push our way through them, struggling against their elastic, fibrous meat. Paths trail here and there but they are meandering and circuitous and dirty, piled with organic detritus – pieces of mushroom, guano from the birds above, foamy congealed blood from where sores in the Pit’s skin have rubbed open. The air is thick and sour and revolting and I can see Erica taking shallow breaths through her mouth. She wipes her eyes frequently but I can’t tell if it’s because they’re stinging or because she is mourning Marcus. After maybe fifteen minutes of pushing through mushroom stalks in silence I reach out for her and catch her by the hand lightly, and then flinch as she whips around, the pistol coming up.

“Relax,” I tell her quickly, showing her my empty hands, “it’s just me.”

“What is it?”

“I, um,” I start, wondering immediately why I’m bothering, “I just wanted to say sorry. For Marcus.”

She stares at me for a moment longer before she nods rather stiffly. “Thanks,” she says. The silence stretches onward until I look away.

“If you want to talk about it…”

Erica stays silent for about five minutes, and I assume that that is her way of turning down my offer. I don’t know why I even bothered, really, especially for her – why try and comfort the person holding you hostage? Stupid, Roan.

Then Erica turns and sags against a broad mushroom stalk and gives me a dark, hopeless glower. “Marcus was one of the first people who joined the little group I run back in town,” she says. I squat down on my haunches, shut my eyes and then unlock whatever lingering bone of resignation is running cordlike through my conscience and then lean back into the muck until I’m half-supine, propped against a stalk of my own. I can feel the fingerlength-deep layer squish and shift beneath my ass in a decidedly unpleasant way but the relief of not having to be on my feet any longer wins out in the end.

“The cult,” I nod, cracking an eye open to watch her. I see a spasm of anger flit across her face.

“It isn’t a cult,” she snaps, and then I see her relax and let it go. “It isn’t a cult,” she repeats, more calmly. “It was never a cult, we don’t fucking worship the Pit. It was just about – about having something there that was bigger than yourself. A frame of reference. You wouldn’t understand.”

I roll my eyes at her but she isn’t looking. My eyes hurt, rolling upwards like that. Closing them doesn’t help much. “Why’d you bring him down here?” I ask.

“I needed someone to help me. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to get the crystal by myself, I’d need backup of some kind at least. Of all of us I trusted Marcus the most, and I figured he was the most capable outdoorsman. The others, well, there aren’t a ton of them, and most of them have more on their plate. Marcus is – was,” she corrects, her voice growing raw, “like me, he didn’t have many attachments, didn’t have a ton to tie him down.”

Oh. That would do it.

“I’m – sorry,” I say, surprising myself with the amount of delicacy I’m able to muster. “I know it can be hard to lose someone you love, it can…”

I let myself trail off. Erica’s eyes have grown harder. “We weren’t lovers,” she tells me. “I felt…responsible for him,” she says. She pulls out a battered pack of cigarettes and a lighter. I feel myself practically salivating for one, despite my best efforts. Erica notices and tosses the pack to me, and I murmur my thanks and let her light it for me. I cough a little at first but then it comes back to me and I really do feel better. This and some more coffee, maybe…

Erica shakes her head. “Goddam it,” she mutters quietly, in a way I recognize so deeply I can feel it in my bones, and for a moment, just a moment, I’m able to feel sorry for her. Then I remember that she shot Elena and I can go back to hating her.

“I’m sorry,” I tell her again. I try not to think about what Marcus must have felt, feeling those foot-long talons sinking into him, probably dying from the instant they had gone in. It would have crippled him, that one in the shoulder, he would never have been able to use it effectively again without a lot of surgery. I wince to myself, thinking about it. And then the other one in the gut – it must have been horrible. A horrible feeling, knowing that something like that is about to do something to you that you can’t stop, can’t fight. It makes me shudder just to imagine it.

I look around warily; so far we haven’t seen any of those massive pale lizards but I can’t imagine they’d be any less aggressive than the birds. They have to eat something, after all, and if they’re that huge they have to eat a lot of something.

“Tell me the truth,” Erica says. “Are you working for the Company?”

I blow out a big sigh and open my eyes, stare at her. “You really think I am?”

“Is it the FBI, then? What is it?”

“I’m just somebody who was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” I tell her. “I’m just down here to take photos.”

“Makado wouldn’t have sent you down here for that,” Erica says. She sounds very confident. “There’s some angle she’s working, there’s some reason she’s got you down here. What are you –“

“How well do you know Makado?”

Erica shrugs. “Well enough, I guess.”

“What’s her middle name?”

“Not that well.”

I toss the cigarette on the ground. “If I’m here as part of her plan, it’s as a pawn. That’s all.”

“How reassuring,” Erica says dryly. “What about that blonde commando friend of yours, what’s the deal with you and her?”

“I thought it was obvious,” I murmur, and Erica laughs.

“Is that your partner?”

“Um. Well, I guess that’s one way to describe –“

“You know, your secret FBI partner.”

“Will you just let the whole FBI thing go?” I growl. “Fuckin’ Alex-Jones-ass –“

“I know the FBI is in town,” Erica says. “I think they’re investigating Makado. Or something she had to do with.”

I stop, look at Erica. She doesn’t appear to be joking, or leading me on. Her gaze is narrow but even. This is something she believes.

“This isn’t some, like, tinfoil hat shit, is it? Because if –“

“I don’t know what shit Peter talked about me while you two were shacked up –“

“We weren’t shacked up –“

“Whatever,” Erica says, getting to her feet. She rounds on me, points an accusing finger at my slumped form. “I have it on very good authority that the FBI is here in Gumption. Peter might have talked about his sources inside the Company but I have my own, ones he didn’t know about, and they all tell me that something big is about to go down. This crystal thing, this is Makado’s Hail Mary shot.”

“What even was your plan, Erica?” I ask. The cigarette got me a little perked up at least but I can feel the fatigue lurking behind my eyeballs whenever I’m not focusing. “You come down with two people and get in a shootout with ten? What was the idea?”

Erica makes a sour face at me. “For your information,” she says, “I have a little more than just one other person on my side. And the plan was, I paid someone in security a lot of money to plot the route you guys were taking, so that it would pass through a path that has a sphincter with an exposed nerve ending right along the route you were slated to take on the return trip. We were going to hide there, wait until everybody but the one with the crystal came by, and then tickle the nerve and trap them on our side while we locked everyone else out. Then it’d have been easy to grab it.”

I frown. “Erica, how big do you think this crystal is?”

She gives me a nonplussed face. “Well, it’s –“ she starts, and then her eyes widen. I frown and then turn my head slowly, glance over at where her gaze seems to be going, and see the massive snub-nosed head of the pale, eyeless lizard that has pushed its way through the mushroom stalks and into our clearing flare its fist-sized nostrils and surge forward towards me.

I shriek and roll to the side, scrambling away from it through the muck, and to my immense surprise the lizard freezes and then takes a hesitant step backwards. It opens its mouth and a broad flat tongue flutters outward briefly. Its teeth are widely spaced, flat little enameled pegs like those of an elephant or hippopotamus. Herbivore teeth.

Wait a minute.

I look at the lizard, watch it closely. I open my mouth again, make a short hissing sound, the same kind I might make if I were trying to get a cat to go away from me, and it freezes again, mid-step, retreating backward. It has a narrow, shovel-like head, like one of those weird salamander-like lizards that live in pools in caves and have grown blind and pale and fat down there in the darkness. I don’t recall what they’re called.

“Erica,” I whisper, glancing back at her. She’s gotten to her feet, gotten her hand halfway to her holster. Her eyes flick down to mine. “They’re fucking herbivores,” I tell her. She looks at me like I’m crazy.

And then the lizard bulls its way further into the thicket and fixes its jaws around a particularly thick and succulent-looking mushroom stalk and bites it hard enough to snap it nearly in half. A froth of syrupy white sap or dew spreads over its thin lips as it eats, and then when it’s done it trundles off into the murk, leaving a trail of snapped stalks and giant flattened footprints.

“Well,” I say, getting to my feet. “Maybe not herbivores. Fungivores? Is that a word? Whoa –“

I break off. I feel utterly strange for a moment, like I’ve caught a bad headrush, but it fades after a moment.

“You alright?” she asks. I wait for a moment, probing the inside of my head like a sore spot in my mouth, but I nod.

“Yeah. I don’t think these spores are doing me many favors,” I say, rubbing my fingers together; everything down here has a fine layer of them, like a greyscaled snow, a light misting of it everywhere. It makes me a little nervous but I don’t see any way to avoid it, any way to protect myself. We’d left my helmet back in Oyster’s Shame, Erica had made me leave it so I couldn’t be tracked.

“Better hurry, then,” Erica suggests, and I nod, and then we push onwards.

It’s hard work, but we get into the groove of it eventually; it’d be easier with a machete or something, but even without it the mushrooms aren’t as bad as trees or saplings or even the kind of jungle undergrowth and brush machetes are intended for. The mushrooms are soft and pliable, at least the young ones are; you can push them aside and the only thing you have to look out for is making sure that you keep a grip on them so they don’t spring back and whack you in the face. It’s easier with two people, and as Erica and I coordinate we begin to pick up the pace, at least until we get deeper into the – let’s call it the Fungal Jungle. It’s a stupid name but it’ll do. There, though, in the depths, the mushrooms are far too large to deal with in the same manner, but they’re spaced further apart, the vast trunks hardening and crusting and thickening so that you’d need a chainsaw to make space and fit between them with any degree of comfort. We end up forced onto the beaten paths and game trails that dot here and there between the stalks. There must be something here other than the lizards – hell, there must be an entire ecosystem down here, an entire food chain with the birds perched right at the top. The lizards must be like water buffalo or something, only maybe less aggressive, more cautious; that one we’d ran into earlier certainly seemed more inclined to flee than fight, even though it knew we were there. Or perhaps the only predators it has are the birds, maybe whatever other four-legged freaks there are down here only prey on each other and not the lizards.

Olms, that’s what they’re called. Except olms have only got two legs, I think, and they’re aquatic. Maybe they’re related? Distantly so?

My mind’s wandering. I let it to keep the tedium and physicality from sinking into me, soaking into my bones. As long as I can keep daydreaming about something cerebral I can stay sane. On alternating occasions I think having to think is the worst and the best thing about life.

We take breaks, we take frequent swigs from our dwindling supply of water, and I become more and more convinced that I’m never going to make it out of here, that I’m going to die to something really fucking stupid and I’m going to end up as a skull stripped bare along with a couple of other cracked bones in an overgrown owl pellet somewhere up in the canopy, just like Marcus, just like Erica. I ask her more questions about her plan, about the FBI, about anything I can think of to try and divine whether or not she’s a lunatic, but she either refuses to answer me or gives me responses that are infuriatingly sane and reasonable. They were going to strip the tracker from the crystal – easily enough, apparently, it comes with a quick-release – and then take the same way out as they went in and then fade, take the crystal somewhere far away and hide it so that the goddam gummint couldn’t take it and break it and make things worse everywhere for everybody. Of course they could have gotten away with it, she assures me, the Company’s funding is so lax that they’d never dare mention that they let one of the crystals get away, much less by a redneck clandestine operation like that.

I want to cry. I want to talk to Elena, I want to hold her. I hope very fervently that she’s okay, that she’s making it out, that everything is going to be okay for her. I maintain a faint hope that at some point the cavalry will come charging in with guns blazing but the more I listen to Erica talk with a faint derision about the absolute state of the Company right now, the more I doubt it. They won’t waste time or money on me, just mark me down for missing, presumed deceased, and forget about me. The only person I can rely on is me.

Can I do it? I muse ponderously, in between shallow breaths, calculate my odds and fudge in my favor as much as I can. I’ve got a stitch in my side and sometimes I put my hands wrong and Erica has to wait for me to reposition my grip to the side of a fungal thicket so she can pass through. She bears it with patience; she’s tired too, I can tell. But the PDA tells us the crystal is close.

The Leechman will be there, I tell her, and Erica shakes her head, stays silent. I can tell what she thinks of the Leechman; she doesn’t believe me. But when I had said it earlier she had reacted differently, she’d gotten a little spooked – she knows of the Leechman, at least, that’s for sure, but she’s convinced herself I’m mistaken. How could I be right? The Leechman isn’t real, doesn’t exist, it’s a fairy tale.

And then, when we push past the next line of mushrooms and out into an unexpected clearing, we find the Leechman in the flesh, twelve feet tall and just as wide, carrying the crystal like an awkwardly-shaped package beneath its arm. It stomps along, a faint glutinous slopping noise coming accompanied by the crushing thuds of its writhing feet. I look over at Erica, feeling faintly triumphant, and see her staring, open-mouthed, not so much at the Leechman, but at the trunk-sized, five-hundred-pound crystal it’s lugging. She shuts her mouth eventually and looks over at me. “I guess I see why you kept asking how big I thought it was,” she says, and I nod.

“Well, you did keep saying you had a plan,” I point out, and she squats and buries her face in her hands.

“Fuck,” she groans.

Out there across the clearing I hear a high whooping shriek and watch as one of the birds stoops, wings folded, at the Leechman, which seems to raise its abraded, conical head and regard the thing diving at it, and then it drops the crystal and reaches up and plucks the bird from the sky. “Holy shit,” I murmur, and Erica sits up and comes to stand next to me.

We watch in silence as the Leechman pins the struggling bird down on the floor and then vomits a stream of leeches into the bird’s clacking beak. I swear I can see the bird bloat a little just from the sheer volume streaming into it. It goes slack finally and the Leechman lets it go and turns and picks up its crystal and then just walks away into the forest. The glossy shine of the leeches disappears and then all I can see of it is a trail of mushrooms being pushed aside and snapped like candlesticks, and then it is gone entirely. The bird, meanwhile, has staggered to its feet and after a moment of what I can only describe as confusion, spread its wings and fluttered shakily into the air.

I look over at Erica and again feel a pang of sympathy for the woman. I don’t know where it comes from or what it’s doing inside of me but I feel it anyway, and I don’t want to. I heave out a huge sigh and nudge her; she looks up at me with a glum face. “Why don’t we just go?” I ask her. “I know it isn’t what you wanted but that thing is probably going to do a good job of keeping the crystal out of the Company’s hands as well.”

She nods after a moment. “I just don’t like thinking that Marcus died for nothing.”

I don’t have anything to comfort her with, so I stay silent. After a moment I can see resolution in her face. She gets up and stretches and then points. “It’ll be useless trying to do more today. Why don’t we see if that station over there is still liveable? We can stay there tonight and make a fresh start tomorrow.”

I stare at her for a moment, trying to register the combination of words in my brain, before I turn and follow her outstretched hand and see, off on the other side of the clearing, squatting evilly like a swollen tick, an overgrown and abandoned ranger station, clearly of an older model than the similar one up in Oyster’s Shame, but even so a mark of human habitation, a mark that someone somewhere was insane enough to build down here. That, I think, is what I found most disconcerting about the entire place – that lone ranger station, the one singular piece of evidence that someone had come before…

“Wait,” I mutter, as Erica fumbles with her pack. She glances up at me, starts to ask what the matter is, and then she sees what I’m looking at and quiets as well.

There is a flickering orange glow of firelight from one of the station’s shattered windows, and as we watch a shadow, man-sized and shaped, passes heavily along the far wall and then vanishes. Erica and I stare at each other as the significance of what we’ve just seen sinks in, and then she has drawn her revolver and is stomping off towards the station without even bothering to wait for me.

* * *

We enter the station as cautiously as we can, the muzzle of Erica’s revolver advancing ahead of her as she leans around corners, checks all the darkened spots. The station is a mess – it’s clearly been abandoned for a long time. Everywhere there are tiny stalks of growing mushrooms, and things have been living and shitting and dying in here for quite a while. The fire is just in the other room; I can hear it crackling. Erica and I glance at each other and then she nods and we burst around the corner. There’s someone there in an orange suit just like mine, his back to us, but after a moment, just from his frame, from the way he holds himself, I recognize him, and it’s like lightning has struck me.

“Oh my god,” I blurt. “Peter! You’re alright!”

Peter’s head lifts and he drops the can of food he had been holding to the floor. We must have startled him. “Peter!” I say again. I’ve almost reached him by now; I didn’t even realize I had gone to him, I hadn’t even thought about it. I am so relieved I could almost cry. Peter’s alive! Peter is –

Peter turns then and what is staring at me from behind his one remaining eye is nowhere close to being Peter. I can feel my gorge rise as I stare and I hear Erica jump, hear the high, throaty beginnings of a woman’s scream as she comprehends what we’re looking at.

The Leechman has gotten Peter. About half of his head is left, and it lolls at a sickly angle; his neck is broken, clearly. Sprouting from the right side of his body like a bouquet of flowers, tucked awkwardly into the shoulder of the suit, wriggling slowly over each other like a mess of eels, are leeches, thousands and thousands of them, tiny ones, large ones, ones like snakes, ones ribbed and venous and pale and dark. I can feel myself screaming as he reaches out for me, his eye dark, dull, glazed, the leeches sprouting from his neck wriggling in anticipation, and then he has bowled into me, knocked me over onto my back, and then he is on top of me trying to force his fingers into my mouth; they taste like dirt and mold and decay and I am going to vomit –

The revolver thunders one, two, three times, and I feel him shudder with the impacts, and though they knock him around a little he is clearly far beyond the point of being able to be put down by bullets. That hole in his neck yawns wider and leeches start to pour onto me and I scream, then snap my mouth shut, close my eyes. They press against me, bite at me, and I scrape desperately at my face, trying to clear it. Their teeth are sharp and they bite in and hang on for dear life. I am making horrible strangled screams through my gritted teeth because I know they want to get inside my mouth and do – and do whatever it is they do, and I realize that some unhinged part of me is trying to beg Peter to stop, trying to do anything to get him to stop –

I hear glass shattering from the left and a strange high-pitched shrieking sound, and something thuds into Peter very fast, and it is warm, insanely warm, very near to me. I still have my eyes shut, I can’t see. He is screeching, a long, drawn-out, hissing thing, and he gets to his feet, I can feel him get off of me. I sit up and claw the leeches away, crush them between my gore-slick fingers, toss their deflated bodies aside, and then I can finally see – Peter has gotten lit on fire somehow. He is staggering around the room, a bowlegged shuffling gate probably as near a sprint as he can get, slamming into the walls. He looks as though he’s headed for Erica and she, panicking, tosses the revolver at him – it bonks into his head and snaps it back, and he changes his course, and finally trips over the makeshift firepit he – it – had made in the center of the room. He collapses over the smouldering blaze, and then writhes until the movement and that horrible noise finally stops.

There is a crunch of broken glass off to the right and I look over and nearly give myself whiplash with the doubletake – Klaus, of all people, is clambering in through the window, taking care not to cut himself. He has a bright red flaregun in his hand and I realize what must have happened. “Oh, thank god,” I blurt, and Klaus’s eyes rest on mine for a moment, but he doesn’t smile, doesn’t say anything to reassure me. I start to frown, start to ask what the matter is, but Erica is stepping out, a wide smile on her face. “Klaus,” she says, “you got here right in the nick of time.”

Klaus crouches and picks up the revolver, examines it casually. “This is yours?” he asks, glancing up at Erica. “Hi Roan,” he adds, finally, but something about this is still odd, there’s something strange. I look over at Erica.

“Do you two…know each other?”

Klaus laughs, but it’s rather mirthless. Erica offers me a hand and I take it shakily, let her haul me to my feet. She gives me a shaky grin. “I told you I had sources,” she says.

Erica reaches out for the revolver and Klaus holds it up. It looks as though he’s aiming it at her and for a moment I see a flicker of uncertainty in her eyes, but it passes quickly, and she takes a step closer to him. “Klaus,” she starts, “give me the –“

He shoots her. I see the slug tear a chunk from her throat and she spins and flops to the floor. I scream, and some force of instinct made me hunker, my hands up to cover my face. I take them down, start to straighten, and then scream again as I see Klaus aim the revolver at me next. I cower there, waiting for it, before I hear the snap of a firing pin on a spent cartridge. I look up and see Klaus staring down at the revolver, a faint curl of disgust on his lips, before he tosses the gun aside. It clunks to the floor next to Erica and she shifts faintly, moaning. Her voice is thick and awful and terrified.

I get to my feet shakily. “It was you,” I say, staring at Klaus. It’s all coming together, it’s all starting to make sense. I can hear Erica choking quietly at my feet and I step around her, move closer to him. His eyes are dark and calm. The pit of my stomach is crawling and I recognize it as the same itchy feeling of anticipation that I used to feel back in Oklahoma whenever I stepped into the dojo for sparring day, two hours every Thursday. “It was you the whole time,” I tell him. “Wasn’t it? You lured her down here, fed her false information, made her think the crystal was something easily portable, told her that bullshit about a sphincter with an exposed nerve.”

Klaus spreads his hands modestly. I pull Marcus’s gun out, train it on him. His eyes flicker down, then back up again. He’s ice-cold, doesn’t even flinch. “You’re going to shoot me?” he asks.

“Erica said the FBI were in town, investigating Makado,” I tell him. “Are you with them?”

He nods after a moment. “She’s going down,” he tells me. “Hard. They finally got enough to nail her with. Letting people into the Pit, working with Peter,” he nods to the charred corpse over to the left. “Shit, I don’t know the full list of charges, I’ve been undercover here so long, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they could get the death penalty for her.”

I shake my head. “Fuck. Why did she send me down here, then? Why did she –“

“You’re an insurance policy,” he tells me, rolling his eyes like it’s obvious. “You’re somebody who’s got a strong sense of curiosity, a drive to figure out the truth. You hear what they’re going to slap her with, you’ll know it’s bull, you’ll try and get to the bottom of it. She figured we wouldn’t be able to get to you down here, but…” he grins. “She didn’t count on me.”

I swallow hard. “I’m a US citizen,” I remind him. “I’ve got rights.”

“You’re a statistic,” he corrects me gently. His hand whips out, smothering mine, and then he’s torn the pistol from my grasp. He laughs at me and then ejects the magazine, tosses it and the gun aside. It lands with a clunk near the fire.

I am, I notice, sweating. My eyes are very wide.

“You’re one of several hundred people who die every year trying to get in here,” he tells me. With exaggerated care, he takes the knife from his belt, holds it up to the light, knocks an invisible speck of dirt from its side. “Mostly indigents,” he says, taking a step towards me. I take a corresponding step backwards. “Nobody anyone would take any notice of.”

“Stop,” I tell him.

“Or what?”

Then he lunges and I am fighting for my life.

Ali told us back at the dojo once that there are no winners in a knife fight. It is such an intimately dangerous kind of fight to have that it is nearly impossible to come away from one without being hurt one way or another – the difference will be whether you’re the one who ends up in the hospital or the one who ends up in the morgue.

But if you don’t have a knife…

If you’re in a real fight, one where you need to murder the fuck out of someone with extreme prejudice before he succeeds in doing the same to you, blunt force trauma isn’t the way to go unless you can bring a lot of it to bear in a short period of time. But I have nothing, I haven’t got a brick to slam on his head, I haven’t got anything, just my fists, while he has a wickedly sharp eight-inch bowie, and if he sticks that in me, one way or another it’s game over.

Erica has died at some point; some detached portion of my brain heard her last rattling gurgle before she fell silent and took note of it, but I couldn’t say when – time has elasticized itself, stretched like taffy. I can feel my heartbeat like drums in my head, deafening, and all I can see is Klaus, his wiry frame enormous, slashing at me as I back off further and further. He’s cautious, he knows that I could still do some damage to him if we end up grappling, but he knows he has a massive advantage as well. Sooner or later I won’t be able to back up any further and then he’ll have me.

So I don’t wait. On the downswing I lunge after him and seize his wrist. He punches me in the face with his other hand and my head snaps to the side beneath his knuckles and stars burst in my eyes, but I cling to his wrist doggedly and then bring my leg up with as much force as I can muster and knee him in the balls. The air shoots out of him and he staggers but he won’t let go of the damn knife. We struggle for a moment longer before he kicks my feet out from under me and I land hard on my back. I take a few gasping breaths and try to scramble away. The gun is just there ahead of me, its polymer grip gleaming in the flickering firelight. I can see the yawning emptiness of the magazine well but even so I grab it and train it on Klaus. He has murder in his eyes. He points the knife at me.

“You stupid fucking bitch,” he says, his voice thick. “You don’t have any bullets - !”

I can see him swaying, a little like a tiger about to pounce, and then my finger finally curls inside of the trigger guard and squeezes the trigger, hoping against hope -

The roar of the pistol is like thunder, even if it’s just a little shitty nine-millimeter, and I scream with the surprise of it, with the shock of it, and then I remember – Marcus kept a round in the chamber. I had only noticed after – after Euler, and then I had completely fucking forgotten. When Klaus took it away from me he never racked the slide to clear it, he just ejected the magazine.

He’s choking on his own blood now, the knife forgotten. I shot him through the throat, just like he got Erica. He looks at me and tries to say something but just gurgles instead.

I leave him in there, leave all three of them in there, Erica and Peter and now Klaus, and sit down on the steps up to the ranger station. I leave the door open behind me in case I need to scramble back inside if a bird spots me. My cheek is still throbbing like hell and there is a mess of blood all down my front. Not all of it, I suspect, is mine. I look down at my hands and watch them shake, and then I make fists, squeeze them as hard as I can, until my nails are digging into my palms.

And then, amid the mushrooms and the lizards and the birds, who knows how many miles deep, sitting at the bottom of the rabbit hole and staring at the tiny pinprick of light above, I can think of nothing sane to do but weep.

END OF BOOK TWO

Continue with Part 27

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#mystery flesh pit #writing #writeblr #alt lit #disaster #mystery #Michael Crichton #caving #thriller

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monstersandmaw · 4 years

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Embers - Male dragon shifter x reader, Chapter Twelve (v.light nsfw)

Can you believe that this story is nearing 20k words now in total? It's going to start winding up soon, with only two chapters left. Thank you for the support you’ve shown me for this long-running series - I hope you enjoy what remains of their story.

(Old Trollbridge is based on Cambridge, UK. Also, in the UK, the ‘first floor’ is what Americans call the second floor; I only remembered this difference after my trip to Boston last year, so I thought I’d mention it, haha…)

No warnings, mostly sfw with a bit of very light kissing, and about 1700 or so words.

One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven

The night of the fundraiser rolled around eventually and you decided that since Mikaeïl would be helping to set things up beforehand, you would simply meet him there. Old Trollbridge was an ancient city, its history stretching back nearly a thousand years, and the university structure was unlike almost anywhere else, except for perhaps Oxenford or Dunholme, with almost thirty individual colleges where students were based and where some of the learning was based, while the majority of their lectures took place in the larger department and faculty buildings. Mikaeïl’s college - where the dinner was being hosted - sat on the old, sluggish, shallow river which coiled lazily through the buildings of the city which had grown up around it over the centuries.

More than a little outmoded in many ways, and highly intimidating to the uninitiated, the college which had been chosen for the evening was one of the oldest in the university. It was here, in the fellows’ dining room, rather than the communal hall, that the dinner was being hosted in order to raise funds for two charities supported by the Law Faculty, and more specifically, the criminology department.

Despite having worked in Old Trollbridge for the past five years, both as a free-lancer and part-time for the graphic design company, you had never set foot inside one of the colleges. It felt like sacred ground somehow; inaccessible to your profane feet. This one was built of a mix of warm sandstone and weathered brick and flint, and as you stepped into the archway that housed the Porters’ Lodge, a large minotaur wearing a dark green waistcoat with the college insignia exited the office and smiled out you. “Here for the dinner?” he asked, glancing at your smart outfit.

“What gave it away, the nerves or the clothes?”

“Both?” he laughed and raised his hand, pointing at an archway across the grassed court from the lodge. “Head over there. Follow the signs, and you can’t go wrong.”

“Thanks,” you said, swallowing the huge lump in your throat. Your heart raced. This was not your usual environment. At all.

It was Mikaeïl's, however, and somehow it didn’t seem so intimidating then. He made his home within these walls, and had done for over a century apparently. He even had a set of rooms in college, but he rarely used them. You began to look around you more closely then, at the mullioned windows and the Virginia creeper climbing up the drainpipes in the corners of the courtyard, and at the faces of the one or two students who passed you by as you made your way around the paved courtyard.

A gnoll with a chunk missing from one ear gave you a wide, toothy grin and a friendly wag of her tail, and a moment later a naga slithered out from a doorway, looking a little unsteady, with a dryad at his side, laughing loudly. The pair were more than two sheets to the wind, but it was a Friday night and you supposed that they worked hard here; they deserved a night off like everyone else.

A moment later, however, and you were walking through the doorway into the part of the college usually reserved for fellows and lecturers only, and a rather nervous looking young human, again wearing the college colours, stepped forwards to take your ticket from your hands. “It’s on the first floor,” she said, indicating the lift and the staircase which sat side by side. “Can I take your coat?”

“Uh, thanks,” you croaked, shrugging out of it. “Is everyone else here already?”

She shook her head. “A couple more to go,” she smiled, taking your jacket and hanging it on a rack to one side.

Nodding, you headed upstairs.

Pausing in the doorway to the panelled dining room, which was immediately opposite the lift, your breath caught in your throat. Mikaeïl was standing the far side of the room, talking to a handsome, young-looking orc in a manual wheelchair, and both had exquisitely beautiful champagne flutes in their hands. While he looked like a classical statue come to life, Mikaeïl had been right when he’d warned you that he would be almost a different person when you saw him in this context.

His back was ramrod straight, his mouth was set in a hard line, and he looked like he was about to breathe fire all over the poor orc. You recognised the signs now as intense social discomfort, and your heart went out to him. Bless him, for all his two hundred years, socialising had never become something he had learned to enjoy. Perhaps it was because his kind had been hunted almost to extinction by orcs and humans about five hundred years earlier, and shifters like him had learned to keep to themselves.

The moment you entered the room, however, he shot you a quick sidelong glance, reptilian eyes drawn to the movement, and then did a very unsubtle and obvious double-take. His shoulders dropped an inch, and his breath caught in his chest. Well, that was an ego boost for you for sure. Smiling, you made your way around the beautifully laid table and stood shyly beside him.

“Hi,” you murmured, glancing nervously between him and the orc.

“You look incredible,” he murmured, leaning close and kissing your cheek before introducing you as his partner to the orc. “This is Gharak. He’s halfway through a PhD in geophysics.”

“Wow. Nice to meet you,” you blurted, shaking the orc’s enormous hand before sliding your own around Mikaeïl’s waist. He tensed beneath your touch, but then laughed softly.

“I think we’ll be starting soon. Almost everyone is here…”

The murder mystery dinner wasn’t quite what you’d expected, but it was mostly pretty fun. The people who had bought tickets were… astonishingly wealthy. Like… you’d thought that Mikaeïl with his inherited wealth was well off, but most of these people were in a different league. The food was sublime, unlike anything you’d ever tasted even at Kiriavin’s cellar restaurant, and you found it an effort to wrench yourself from your meal to play along with the loose ‘script’ of the evening.

Mikaeïl was seated across from you, beside an older human woman who wouldn’t stop fawning all over him. If it hadn’t been your boyfriend, it might have been funny, but as it was, your heart went out to him. He’d whispered to you during the pre-dinner drinks that she was a major benefactor, not only to the department but to the university itself, and knowing this, you knew he couldn’t rebuff her attentions.

He did his best to weather it, but at one point he caught your eye and the look in his hard, golden gaze was so miserable that you found yourself instantly mouthing the words ‘I love you’ to him across the third course of the dinner.

At that, his cheeks flushed gently, and he mouthed back, ‘thank you’.

When it was finally over, and the mystery - such as it was - had been solved, you bid goodnight to Gharak, who had been sitting next to you and who had been an absolute blast, and crossed to Mikaeïl. He was standing with one hand gripping the back of his chair so hard you could hear it splintering beneath his fingers, and as you placed your own hand over the top of his, the tension washed out of him.

“You alright?” you asked. “I think that went pretty well?”

He nodded. His hair was tied back in a severe bun, with what looked like a solid gold hair pin topped with a dragon holding it in place, and his dinner jacket fitted him to perfection. He looked like the subject of an oil painting, and just as uncomfortable still.

“Mikaeïl?”

He inhaled, his nostrils going wide. And then his hands were on your jaw and he kissed you so hard you saw stars. The room was empty now, and as the two of you kissed, he growled softly in that low-frequency rumble that you could feel in your ribcage. It filled the room and made the glasses rattle and ring on the table. His hands began to shift again, copper claws growing as colour rippled up his forearms beneath the crisp white shirt, talons pricking into the fabric of your own clothes before he could stop himself.

“Mikaeïl?” you murmured again. “Let’s go?”

He nodded.

“You want to come back to mine or…?”

“I don’t care,” he said. “I just want you. I can’t believe how amazing you were tonight.”

“Me?” you asked. “I barely did anything… I just played my role of poor starving artist - hardly imaginative, I might add -” you said with a playful glint in your eye, “And the others solved the mystery themselves…”

“Not that,” he snarled dismissively, his lips rising on one side to show his elongated canines. “You knew…”

“Knew what?” you chuckled affectionately, bringing your fingertips to his slightly pointed ears and tucking a wayward strand of his fiery hair behind it, gently enough to make him shiver visibly.

He swallowed and kissed you again in answer. When he was done, he pulled back and said, “You knew when I got overwhelmed. How?”

You had to laugh at that. “Your body got all tense - well, even more tense than usual - and you looked like you were considering incinerating her where she sat…”

“I wouldn’t want to destroy a Chippendale,” he said flatly and you burst out laughing, tipping your head back. A second later, he raked the very tip of his clawed thumb down your throat and your laugh changed to a groan.

“Let’s get out of here,” you said, and he nodded.

“Your place is nearer…” he added, nipping your thrumming pulse with his teeth as he kissed your neck.

You didn’t argue.

“By the way,” he added as you took his hand and left the college behind you.

Glancing up at him, you smiled. “Mmm?”

“Are you free next weekend? I have a surprise for you…”

Your eyebrows sailed high. “What kind of surprise… You know I’m not wild about surprises…”

“Bring something warm to wear,” he said. “That’s all I’ll say for now.”

Part Thirteen

—

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#exophilia #dragon shifter #dragon x reader #male dragon x reader #male dragon shifter x reader #gender neutral reader #male dragon #embers

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unluckyadept · 3 years

Text

Character Journal Entry: Felix

{July 15th, 2021T}

[The page is marked in a very unusual way:

The (bright red) symbol of a (the, rather) Dragon with arrows pointing up on either side and two lines underneath it, followed by a dash, and then the numbers “26-1021”.]

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

It’s Another Long Story.

As I look back on the last year or so, I feel as though I have greatly [aged/grown/matured/wearied]. So much has been stolen.

But I think, to properly tell the story, I must start from where the first one left off.

It’s A Long Story, but you know that one, don’t you? The story of my destiny.

Destiny is the mark you leave on the world…

…and Fate is the mark the world leaves on you.

You can defy destiny, but you cannot fight fate.

=-=-=-=-=

[He was very glad he was able to see again. It was still taking some getting used to, particularly since his sight was not exactly stable; the imbalance of energy that caused the blindness was still an issue, particularly under fire in the battlefield.

Still—it was a great improvement from where it was before.]

=-=-=-=-=

You know, the reason that I needed to tell that story in the first place was to explain how the death of Prox’s last Warriors of the Dark Age

=-=-=-=-=

[The memory was all too vivid in his mind.]

[He could still remember those final words.

He crossed out the line and started over.]

=-=-=-=-=

You know, the reason that I needed to tell that story in the first place was to explain how the death of Prox’s last Warriors of the Dark Age

My relationship with the Proxans has always been a bit complex, at least in my mind. Other people view it differently. I know Jenna and Sheba in particular always held a very different view on my relationship with Saturos and Menardi in particular… and I won’t offer excuses for what any of the last four of the great Warriors did… to me or anyone else.

It’s no secret that I disagreed with their methods, and we argued—outright quarreled, in some cases.

But the whole truth is important to know. Context is necessary to explain to other people why it is that I have the outlook I do—to show them on what I base my opinions.

That’s why I needed to explain—I needed to explain why I was distressed at their deaths, even though they had come very close to killing me.

And to do that, I needed to start with when I first came to Prox—and, well, to go back that far?

It’s A Long Story.

=-=-=-=-=

[And he hoped that someday he would have the time to tell it in full, before his connection to his younger years faded from vivid memory. It was much harder now to remember his boyhood than it was ten years ago… and he knew that the memories would only grow more and more faded as his mind and heart were tethered to his adulthood rather than his childhood.

Yet another intellectual casualty of violence and anarchy…

Once the war ended and order was restored to the continent, he could turn his focus and energy to personal matters… and the completion of his memoirs among them.

The Venus Adept shook his head and returned his focus to the letter.]

=-=-=-=-=

That story is a tale of how I was forced to adapt to a role I had initially rejected—

Well, the first of such times where that sort of thing happened. Or would it be more accurate to say I was never given leave of the role, and it took me a while to accept that fact? That would probably be closer to the truth.

It’s A Long Story. Just one of several. That story began the Year of the Storm—the night I almost drowned in the river (again) and was rescued by Saturos.

I’ve read his journal entry on what happened, and I must say: it was very evident that the loss of so many of his peers had a profound impact on the man. And it was the death of the Kalt Islander that hit him the hardest, for that man was an ally who had chosen to aid them in good faith out of loyalty and solidarity; he was a respected outsider, but still an outsider… not under any obligation to risk his life for their sake, let alone lose it.

Before the storm, it was my dream to become a miner and work with Isaac in the Altin Mines. We would use our Psynergy in secret to accomplish more than a non-Adept ever could, and boldly face danger in the “outside” world, rather than keep to ourselves in the shelter of Vale.

I don’t judge those days harshly; I was only a child, and had no exposure to life outside of Vale except through Kraden, and he focused on literacy and mathematics more than anything else… at that point, anyway. The truth is that we were taught to look down upon “outsiders”; we were taught that we were superior because we had power, and that underlying attitude lent itself to Pride.

Combine that with a child’s limited understanding of the world and a boy’s dreams of independence and strength… and such a mindset was probably the best one could realistically hope for, as it was still based in a desire to protect and to serve.

After the storm—or rather, after I recovered from the storm… I was forced to accept reality, and the reality of the world was far more demanding than my imagination was ever prepared to consider.

When I first came to Prox, we didn’t know what would happen to us. We didn’t know what they wanted of us. And the only thing I knew was that it was my fault to begin with—if I hadn’t been so stubborn and overconfident in my abilities, we would have been far clear of the boulders and no one would have been at the docks when THE Boulder came crashing down.

It was a bitter weight for a child to carry—to know his actions had cost everyone around him so greatly, and may have been the death of his younger sister.

=-=-=-=-=-=

[He paused for a moment, glancing up in thought.

He was getting distracted, wasn’t he?

…Well, so what if he was? He was under no obligation to censor himself on such matters.

Still—he would keep talking in circles if he didn’t keep the point he was getting at in mind.

And he had to let out a huff of amusement at the reminder—

Because that was why he needed to tell that story in the first place; it had all been building up to that moment in Mars Lighthouse.]

=-=-=-=-=-=

It’s A Long Story.

The story of how I came to be in that moment, that dark hour, at Mars Lighthouse. Why I was there, what I wanted, why I cared.

I don’t know if I’ve ever had the chance to state that outright—and it is rather important, so I suppose I best state such things plainly.

=-=-=-=-=-=

[He hesitated for a moment, frowning. A bit of ink bled into the page at his extended reluctance to say the first thing that came to mind.

And even now…]

+=+=+=+=+

"Too slow!”

[Felix looked up angrily, biting back a remark. Karst looked down at him, lowering her scythe to rest against his throat.]

“Always too slow! How you ever managed to catch a Talon Runner is beyond me.”

[Felix was silent. The bruise from the day before was still darkening. He knew another slap might cause permanent injury; Proxans were far stronger than they realized, and did not understand how much damage they caused against someone who didn’t have their perpetual leather-hide armor…

…not that he felt THIS pair would have cared, even if they did truly know it.]

“Let him go, Karst.”

[The touch of death’s blade lifted, the chill of steel leaving him. The unlucky Adept tried to breathe steadily, waiting for permission to bandage his bleeding arm.]

“Now… Felix… tell us what you did wrong.”

[The boy gritted his teeth and spoke sullenly.]

“I tried to block her from hitting my face by bringing up my arm to protect me.”

“Heal yourself before you bleed all over the forest.”

[Felix didn’t need to be told twice. He felt very irritable as he got to his feet—

But Mendari grabbed his cape, jerking the Valean forward as he used Cure on his injuries, briefly startling him in the process.]

“I never said you could stand.”

[He glared back silently.]

“At least you are learning to hold your tongue, I see.”

+=+=+=+=+

[Felix grimaced ever so slightly, placing a hand to his cheek.

And ever so briefly, it brought another memory to mind—]

+=+=+=+=+

[There was a harsh noise as his captor suddenly lashed out—literally—and streaks of pain sliced across the left side of his face. He had unwittingly cringed and recoiled against the pain, so his shoulders and wrists were also left sore, and his sense of dignity damaged as blood ran down his face.]

+=+=+=+=+

[He forced himself out of such thoughts by clumsily getting out of his chair and walking over to the door to lean against it.

It took a moment for such thoughts to run their course enough to come back to the present, and he sighed.

It was considered offensive—not that that meant much in and of itself, given those who found literally everything offensive were far more prolific and prevalent than he had the patience to grovel to—to even mention the existence of such experiences. And certainly, he had a deep empathy for those who had suffered in such a way.

But he didn’t have the patience to keep silent anymore; it was a dark scar of the past, and he would not censor it for the sake of those who would demean him for exposing the damage caused by how he had been treated.

Leaving the writing aside for a moment, he made his way over to a window and contemplated the whole situation.

It had been almost a fortnight since they finally destroyed the outpost at the Gondowan Passage. They had been at open war with the Tolbi Empire since the night they bombarded the city in an attempt to rush in from the flank and overwhelm their prey.

He had since heard that there was a word for such a tactic, as described in the languages of the mountains—

And he had to say, having been on both the receiving end and the initiating end of such a “lightning war”, he was very relieved that his OWN recent military campaign had been successful.

Suffering through the sudden attack on the Western domicile of Lalivero’s capital city was a literal nightmare—his body could sense the large boulders being hurled down at them, prompting his mind to inflict him with reliving the day of The Storm. The enemy was well underway in destroying civilian residential districts by collapsing buildings and setting the streets aflame—well underway by the time he was able to pull himself together well enough to take to the skies with Arizona and go after their war machines they were using to demolish the city before sending in their ground forces.

He hadn’t quite had the experience to serve as context to explain his instinctive UNDERSTANDING at the time, but… when he had seen just how much manpower they had brought with them near Lalivero for the purposes of simply overrunning the city to take a swift victory, he understood that they would not withstand very long if the Tolbi could conduct these “lightning war” tactics via unfettered access to the region. No… they had a massive army, and had deployed a much greater force than Lalivero was prepared to handle. The region was meant to be protected by the river and the desert; bypassing the desert and neutralizing the river in order to swiftly strike at the cultural and economic capital of the only free peoples in that part of Weyard would have been a guaranteed total victory, if it had not been made impossible.

Having learned more about the wars of other worlds, he had a better understanding now of such matters. It was a risky strategy, one that relied very heavily on proper communication and firm discipline—one that was high risk-reward, especially when conducted in a setting where the transport of supplies would be a critically deadly weakness in the case of failing to shatter an enemy’s defenses.

He was lucky that he was able to take advantage of the downsides of such a tactic, back then; they were not prepared for a counterstrike and were ill-equipped to withstand a counterattack. It was for that reason that he was not only able to quickly destroy the smaller force actually attacking the city, but also cut off the larger force that was stationed at the ready only a few hours away.

It had been an altogether horrible experience, especially considering what happened after the Tolbi got their hands on him. And it was not one he would be willing to try on enemy soil; otherwise, he would not have DESTROYED the outpost at the Gondowan Passage… but rather, seized it for his own.

No; he was willing to take advantage of taking them by surprise in order to cut off their supply chain, but he had no intention of risking any more than that. Not with the current situation.

The unlucky Adept slipped his fingers into his hair, feeling like his eyes were weary. Perhaps that was due to the strain from the blindness, but it almost just felt like he had seen too much in his time, and his own eyes felt exhausted at recalling such visions of terror.

Because he could remember—]

[He could remember the screams, the fire, and the overwhelming sense of all-consuming evil.

He could vividly recall the helpless terror of those around him.

He could remember.

He would never forget. Never.

Two decades from now, and he would still remember that terrible autumn day—

The day they were dragged into war against an enemy that hated them just for existing, and would stop at nothing to terrorize them into submitting to a ruthless, intolerant, brutal, murderous regime of hateful Pride.

He would never forget.

And he would make sure no one else forgot it, either.]

[It took some while for the weight of it to fade, and then he just felt contemplative.

It wasn’t until after eating some dinner and washing up that he returned to his desk; at that point, he just stared up at the ceiling for a while.]

It’s Another Long Story…

[…But right now, there was only one thing on his mind.]

+=+=+=+

"{Keep your spirits up, lad. Too much for you to do to be dwelling in darkness.}"

+=+=+=+

[…Almost five months to the day—not that he learned about it until weeks later—

And he still…]

({…I just want to hear your voice again. Just… just one more time. Just one more time…})

#cje #unluckyadept #neshirys #It's A Long Story #It's Another Long Story #owutz

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owl-with-a-pen · 3 years

Text

TOWER TRAINING - A CHEEKY SNEAK PEEK OF CHAPTER 63 OF MY FIC “ALL THE WAYS TO SHOW I CARE” (The full chapter will be available on my AO3 later this week)

A prompt for Harmony (Mina Loo)

Summary: A training session to build Nia’s skill in precognitive combat turns out to the be perfect chance to get Brainy to open up about certain emotional struggles.

Nia stood against a rocky and unforgiving terrain, dust blasting off of nearby surfaces into fine powdery swirls, startlingly bright against the glare of the static blue sky.

It was harrowingly beautiful. Totally alien. No matter how many times she saw it, she never thought she would get used to it. She could almost imagine the crunch of that foreign soil beneath her feet, the chill that probably ran through the bones of every prisoner who occupied its space.

She hissed suddenly, correcting her stance as something impossibly fast moved past her. A blur of washed out, ghastly colour, though Nia didn’t need to get a good look at it to know what it was. What it always was.

The Phantom rounded on her again, and this time Nia was able to capture its face, the horrible gape-jawed scream that seemed to be permanently affixed to its mouth. She backed up uneasily, gauging its distance. Once she was certain she had it in her line of fire, she threw her arm out, dream energy scorching her fingers as it tumbled through the filtering system on her gloves, spiralling outward in a vibrant blue swirl.

But, the thing was too fast. Before she’d even let her energy fly, the Phantom was already out of sight again. Nia gritted her teeth, darting her attention around the simulated room, clenching her hands.

“Do not aim for where it is,” Brainy instructed, his voice echoing from somewhere at her back. “Aim for where it will be.”

Nia bit the inside of her cheek. Training was getting more intense by the day, but this session was way harder than any before it.

She knew why. In less than twenty-four hours, she’d be travelling back in time to Kara and Alex’s high school alongside Brainy. Not only did they have to be prepared for anything the past might hit them with, the second they had a piece of Kara’s DNA, Nia wouldn’t just be fighting a simulation any longer.

They didn’t have time to waste. She had to get this right. But, figuring out where the hell the Phantom would spring out from next was proving to be incredibly difficult. If Brainy could just lend her the foresight with his differential calculus, she’d know exactly where to aim her throwing hand.

But, this was something she needed to learn alone. Brainy couldn’t be by her side at every moment.

It didn’t mean she had to like it.

“That’s easier said than done,” Nia gritted out, narrowing her eyes as she waited for the Phantom to show itself again. She could hear her heart thundering inside her head, frustration and fear practically swarming inside her gut. At least she could use those emotions to her advantage – they made her far more tempting bait to lure the Phantom back out from hiding.

“Dream energy comes from within,” Brainy continued, “what you do with it is entirely within your control.” He sounded as though he’d moved, which wasn’t surprising. He’d been circling the outskirts of the simulation grounds this whole time, reviewing her progress with his arm folded loosely behind his back. “Focus is paramount to success. Losing your focus-”

Nia yelped.

“-will be fatal.”

Nia hadn’t even realised that another Phantom had been tracking her until it was too late. Even if these simulated Phantoms weren’t progeny like the ones Prime had created the day before, they clearly travelled in packs.

Nia jerked suddenly as the creature’s talons shot out towards her, throwing up a shield of blue in a last-ditch effort to defend herself. The sudden shift in balance sent her off kilter and before she could right herself, she tripped, landing awkwardly on her side.

The shock of the impact rattled inside her, which only made her frustration that more potent. After all, Nia knew what Brainy was referring to when he spoke about losing focus. Recently, it felt like any time she had a good hold on her powers, her visions would be right there to knock her back on her ass. It didn’t matter that the Midvale visions had passed now she had a clear lead, it would only be a matter of time before another took its place. And then what? How the hell was she supposed to focus when she couldn’t even see clearly ahead of her?

The hole in her heart her mom had left behind seemed to grow deeper every day.

But then an impression of static coalesced at the far edge of the Phantom Zone simulation, and a moment later, Brainy stepped through the haze.

Something inside Nia’s chest eased seeing him there, calming a fraction of her irritation.

This training wasn’t like their previous sessions. For starters, Brainy wasn’t acting quite as reserved. Nia knew that he’d been dealing with a lot since he’d removed his inhibitors, and even more now that he was free to be himself after he’d given up his ruse against Lex. Before, he’d been doing everything to hold back his anger about the trial, his pain over Kara, but even after he’d let those emotions out, he clearly had no idea what to do with them. Yes, he’d begun to substitute donuts with healthier snacking throughout the day, but Brainy was still in clear need of that crutch, and Nia knew he was struggling far more than he ever wanted to admit out loud.

Brainy kept it well hidden during their training, although there was something far more open about his expression than there had been before. He smirked when he reached his hand out to her, offering his support.

Nia smiled back, taking his hand as she pulled herself back up onto her feet.

“Do you see where you went wrong?” Brainy asked the second she was upright, dark eyes scanning her intently.

“My focus?” Nia rolled her eyes. “I get it, Brainy. I want to be focused, too, but I can’t control when I have a vision. I can’t even control what I have a vision of.”

“Interesting,” Brainy mused. “When you have a dream, do you try to curb it to fit your situation?”

“Only if it’s dire,” Nia muttered, folding her arms. “After you—” She forced herself to take a deep breath, swallowing hard. “When you got attacked by that Phantom, it was just me and Alex against a hoard of those things. I knew that if I lost my cool, if I stumbled for even a second, Alex would pay the price and then we’d all die. I gave Alex a clear route to get to those lost souls, but then my vision hit me again, like it was trying to mess with me or something.”

Brainy ran a hand along his jaw, brow furrowed. He gestured to her thoughtfully. “Your dreams get more frequent the longer you ignore them.”

“I wasn’t ignoring them,” Nia said, a little more forcefully than she’d intended. She sighed. “It was just… I didn’t understand them. The same thing happened after you started working for Lex.” She laughed weakly. “I kept dreaming of you, and I had no idea what it meant.”

“Did you try to understand them?”

“I--” Nia bit her lip, glancing up at Brainy awkwardly. She grimaced. “With you? Honestly? No. I- thought it was just you getting inside my head.”

Brainy’s expression softened at that, although Nia was certain she saw something pained flicker behind his eyes. He took a step closer to her, almost secretively, folding his arms. “And your dreams of Midvale?” he asked, lowering his voice.

“I didn’t… I mean, there wasn’t time to look into it. If we all hadn’t connected the dots together, I’d still be no closer to understanding it.”

“Dreams are a powerful tool,” Brainy said slowly. He wasn’t quite watching her any longer, instead his gaze seemed to be focused on a task far outside of Nia’s grasp. Then, he blinked, glancing towards her decisively. “I… I watched Nura go through similar struggles at times,” he admitted, before quickly clearing his throat, “and though what I can speak of her must remain minimal, I can assure you that she found a way through her struggles in the end as well. Quick-fire visions can occur during battle, but you must not let that deter you. Your mind needs to remain open to the dreamscape at all times.”

Nia’s mouth fell open. “But, what if the vision I have has nothing to do with the fight?”

“Then it still holds importance,” Brainy said firmly. “However, I calculate that a large reason why your dreams are attacking you in this manner is because you are not allowing them to help you. You have made liberal use of your other powers in battle.” He made a small flourish with his hand. “Your dream energy, for example.”

“Thanks to your gloves,” Nia said, bumping his shoulder. “And of course I do, Brainy. Dream energy can actually hit stuff.”

“And your astral projection,” Brainy added, his lips twitching fondly. “After all, I would not be stood here without it.”

Nia blinked at that. Brainy rarely mentioned the incident at Leviathan’s ship since it had happened. Not that she could blame him. Even still, hearing it now reminded her again of how close she’d been to losing him.

And how close they were suddenly stood now. Close enough they could have been touching.

Nia’s face warmed.

“But,” Brainy continued thoughtfully, “when it comes to your dreams, you still view them as a hindrance unless you are specifically looking for something.” He quirked a brow, taking her shoulder. “Your visions do not work that way; they are a part of you, and they will work with you, but only if you allow them total access.”

She could feel Brainy’s fingers squeeze firmly against her. Nia swallowed. “I don’t know how.”

Brainy smiled and he lifted his chin, eyes glittering proudly. “Let’s try an exercise.”

#supergirl #supergirl fanfic #brainiac #dreamdox #nia nal #brainiac 5 #ao3 #i'll probably do some more editing for this but getting part of it out there at least motivates me to finish up the chapterr #and yes. it's been a WHILE since I updated this fic. very sorry.#but this chapter's probably gonna be quite long so hopefully that makes up for it

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yandere-daydreams · 4 years

Text

A Yandere!Toshinori/OC piece for the very lovely @evaesis, as a follow-up to this oneshot. It’s always so refreshing to work with new quirks and powers, and it’s even more refreshing to use those new quirks and powers to beat up Endeavor. If only because I can, honestly.

Word Count: 3.5k

TW: NSFW, A/B/O Dynamics, Physical Violence, Non-Consensual Touching, Delusional Mindsets, Mentions of Kidnapping and Stolkholm Syndrome.

Kit didn’t care for Enji on the best of days.

It was a matter of contention, really, a difference in morals that proved to the fatal factor in their association. She understood his current rank, his effectiveness as a Hero, but Kit couldn’t help but shudder and bristle any time they were in the same room. Call it animal instinct, but she didn’t want to be near him, much less spend any elongated amount of time alone in his company. Not when she could help it. Not when she had Toshinori.

Needless to say, she wasn’t pleased to find him sitting in the living room when she woke up, pouring over case files with her mate sitting on the other side of a low coffee-table, talking about villains and statistics and all the logistics she never had an affinity for. Not angry, but unpleasantly surprised, a feeling that didn’t improve when Toshinori smiled and asked her to come sit with them, if only for a few minutes. He said she was a Pro, too. That her insight was important, and she should join them.

The ‘or I’ll put your quirk-canceling cuffs back on again’ was only implied. For her pride, she assumed.

And that was why she was now seated on a loveseat much too small, next to a man much too big and much too focused on the file in front of him, one he didn’t seem to notice was deemed inconsequential in their earlier discussion. If he noticed, though, Kit couldn’t tell, watching out of the corner of her eye as Enji tried to seem interested in anything except her. Toshinori had been gone for a minute or two, off to make tea and take a call from another detective who needed his assistance, leaving Kit to wallow in awkward silence to her heart’s content. She didn’t have a problem with it, not if she was being honest. As far as she was concerned, it was better than speaking to him.

Surprisingly, Enji was the one to break the tension. “How long will you be staying with Yagi?”

She grit her teeth. She’d never been kidnapped in the eyed of the public, her sudden disappearance masked as an extended medical leave, eventually becoming an early retirement as she accepted her situation, but the question still irked her. As if Enji had suggested she planned for her bond to be temporary. “We live together,” She said, her agitation poorly veiled. “I don’t plan on leaving, if I can help it.”

A nervous glance towards his file before he discarded it, an anxious rub to the back of his neck. He straightened his back, but there was nothing respectable about the long, silent second he took to scan over her, his eye lingering far longer than they should’ve. “And you’re happy with him?”

“He’s my mate.” It felt more like a declaration than a reason, not that she had a problem with announcing it. He had to right to know. “I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t.”

“Of course,” He muttered, his voice heavy with grudging acceptance. His continuation is nearly inaudible. “I can smell him all over you.”

Oh. Right. She crossed her legs, then uncrossed them, leaning against the arm of the loveseat. She’d almost forgotten about Enji’s… view of omegas, or at least the omegas he deemed worthy of his leering gaze. His divorce was recent, but his separation had been the topic of gossip for years, not that it made a dent on his oh-so-spotless reputation. There wasn’t much to talk about, not when the details were brushed under the rug as quickly as all of Enji’s other scandals. She’d already gone through extensive measures to keep her name from being added to that growing list. With this in mind, she refrained from indulging him with a response, her concentration soon dedicated to the swirling patterns dyed into the floorboards.

That didn’t stop Enji from going on, though. She wasn’t sure why she thought it would. “He’s getting older, you know. Retirement does strange things to Heroes, makes them…” He trailed off, rolling his wrist in some vague, abstract gesture, hinting at something she didn’t want to know. “Less attentive. They start to get distant, and before long, they’re throwing themselves into the newest public welfare project, or an up-and-coming charity. They try to keep themselves busy, even if they refuse to make a full-blown comeback.” Another pause, this one accompanied by a wayward glance. “Bonds don’t tend to last very long, under those conditions.”

Kit fought to keep her expression neutral, but her quirk betrayed her, tails curling and bristling as her ears flattened against her scalp, blending into a mess a snow-white hair. She wanted him to stop talking. “I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

“You never do.” He moved an inch towards her, then another, stopping just short of her side. Instead, his hand came to occupy the space between them, forming a much-needed barrier. “I’d just be prepared for the eventuality. Yagi’s a… He’s a good man, of course, but it never hurts to have another plan. Just in case things don’t work out.”

Another inch, broad fingers soon resting on her exposed thigh. Exposed skin he shouldn’t have been touching.

“Just in case.”

She wasn’t sure what it was. His tone or the slight, professional frown ghosting over his lips, but something, something about the way he looked at her, spoke to her, touched her… It was bad, it was repulsive. She had a mate. She had a mate she was loyal to. Toshinori took care of her, and even after all she’d done to him, he loved her. Enji wasn’t her mate. Enji didn’t look after her. He had no right to say a word about her relationship, no one did. They didn’t know what Toshinori did for her, they didn’t know how little she deserved that kindness. Enji didn’t know, and neither did anyone else. They didn’t deserve to. They hadn’t earned it.

She almost didn’t know the rage building inside of her, more volatile than any she’d summoned during the heat of battle. That familiar warmth emanating from familiar flames, striking at her humanity until it gave way, melting her composure like wax just begging to be sculpted. It was a painless process. One moment, she was human, and she couldn’t imagine being any other way, and the next she was changing, shifting, turning into the monster she’d only seen on newscasts and blurry pictures in sketchy magazines, the uncontrolled beast she loathed having her name tied to. It didn’t feel wrong, though, not this time, it didn’t feel forced. She guessed it never did, in the moment.

The regret would come later. She’d be able to live with it, later.

Right now, it felt good to bare her teeth, to dig still-sprouting claws into the back of Enji’s hand and tear down, razor-sharp talons separating skin from muscle and making it impossible for him to pull away before she allowed him to do so. Instinct took over in a matter of seconds, consciousness becoming little more than a thick, gauzy haze pushed into the back of Kit’s mind, soon forced into submission by an array of reflexes and urges and desires, raw, primal desires. She felt the loveseat’s cushion tear under her feet as she reared back, now on four legs and more focused than her actions than their repercussions, a set of wide, vulpine jaws soon locked onto the first part of Enji she could see - his forearm. He could’ve avoided her easily, but he was in shock, too stunned to fight back, and her teeth had sunk through his flesh in a matter of seconds. Biting back a pained groan, a ball of flames burst to life in his free hand, the fire soon pressed against her side, forcing her to release him as the smell of burnt fur filled the air.

Abruptly, Enji was on his feet, clutching his injured arm to his chest, but Kit didn’t want him to go anywhere. Why did he get to leave? Why did he get to run away? She never got that choice. She never got to hide when things got hard and loud and violent. She didn’t see why Enji should, either.

She didn’t think. She just lunged at his chest, jaws open and aiming for his neck. In an effort to restrain her, large hands locked around her body, her muzzle, anything he could get a hold on, but the power of her attack still sent him stumbling backward. Suddenly, they were falling, time beginning to slow as Enji’s back hit the large, glass table decorating the center of the room. She’d forgotten about it, in her haste, but the damage was impossible to ignore, now, a stark crack knocking her out of her haze a moment before she could rip the man’s throat out. Her awareness returned quickly, flowing in like the sense of regret quickly overriding her vengeance, but it didn’t matter. Flying shards of glass and wood cut into her skin, some finding a place to root, some not. It didn’t matter. White fur was stained with a deep red in a matter of seconds, injuries made worse as Enji pried her limp body away from his, pitching her into the debris, something long and jagged finding its way into her thigh as she landed.

She didn’t try to get up, her energy sapped as thoroughly as her will to fight. Enji was still standing, though, panting and bleeding and marching towards her, heavy footsteps like gunshots to her ears. She considered standing, continuing on the fight despite her stolen strength, but what was he going to do? Maim her? Kill her?

She couldn’t say she wouldn’t like to see him try.

But, it was a fleeting hope. As Kit’s eyes closed, her vision having gone black around the edges ages ago, she heard a door open, a hitched breath, then yelling. So much yelling.

Enough to make her welcome sleep, as it drowned out her remaining senses.

She was sore, when she woke up.

It was an aching pain, the kind that needed too much rest and too little scarring for Kit’s taste, pulling a muffled, disgruntled grunt from her lips as she sat up. She wasn’t surprised to see the minimalistic furnishings of the master bedroom - Toshinori’s bedroom, although they shared it more often than not, these days. Glancing towards her chest, she found that she’d been stripped of what was left of her clothes, the tattered remains replaced with medical tape and gauze, each flex and flinch revealing some new bruise or cut she’d have to be wary of for the next few days. Weeks, more realistically, but she tried not to think about that.

Instead, she concentrated on the rustling in the next room over, movements poorly concealed in an attempt to not disturb the peace. She didn’t call out, choosing to bite the bullet rather than delay the inevitable. Swinging her legs off the bed, she made her way to the bathroom, finding Toshinori sitting on the edge of a tub too big to be considered anything but overly-luxurious. He turned as soon as she crossed the threshold, but chose to scan over her silently, testing the water before he spoke. Trying to see if she was still frenzied and feral. It was all she could do to smile, digging her nails into the doorframe unconsciously.

“I… I’m ready, if you want to get it over with,” She started, watching Toshinori’s expression carefully. He looked surprised, if anything, but it was understandable. It’d been months since she did something bad enough to warrant discipline. “The punishment, I mean, for attacking Endeavor.” She paused, averting her eyes, her voice barely audible when she continued. “I’m sorry. I really, really don’t want you to be mad at me.”

He frowned. Then, he laughed. “I’m not angry.”

Her lips parted, no sound coming out, but Toshinori only chuckled, gesturing for her to come closer. She obeyed without a second thought, a fully prepared bath coming into view, steam still rising off the top of the water. She didn’t have to be told what to do, stepping in and taking his hand, tugging him towards her when he showed no signs of following, a playful smile pulling at the corners of her lips. Toshinori relented without an argument, and a moment later, she was settled in his lap, her head resting against his chest as he idly traced the shape of a smaller wound, just to the left of her spine. She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t have to, either. Her concern was palpable, whether or not she chose to voice it.

“You know about the security cameras,” Toshinori explained, kissing her shoulder between words. They were soft little things, as careful and as matriculate as she’d come to expect from Toshinori, but she melted into it, letting out a low, languid purr as his lips brushed over her mating mark, the bruised area still sensitive to the touch. “I saw what happened. Enji tested you, and you defended yourself. I can’t hold that against you, not when I wasn’t there to stop it.”

“I’m your mate,” She mumbled, the words little more than a hum. “I don’t want anybody else.”

“Of course.” Another kiss, this one longer, drawn out. She felt her ears perk up, standing on edge. Ready and waiting for any lingering sensation. A long finger trailed down her spine, and unconsciously, Kit bucked her kips against Toshinori’s thigh, the water abruptly becoming more of a menace than a helping hand. He chuckled, the sound muffled by their proximity. “My loyal, beloved mate. My perfect mate. I couldn’t have asked for a better omega.”

Her response comes in the form of a whine, pitiful and high-pitched. They hadn’t been… they hadn’t been intimate since her heat ended, and although the memories were blurred and cloudy, only accessible through rose-colored glasses, but the desire was natural, the longing as instinctual as breathing. Without thinking, she ground against him, the tiny amount of friction rushing straight to her core, to her exposed, dripping cunt. Toshinori wasn’t oblivious to the atmosphere, either, something hard soon pressed against her pelvis, giving him away before those soft, light grunts slowly working their way through his lips ever had a chance to. Kit couldn’t help but laugh, nuzzling against him, his reactions filling her with a sense of confidence she’d come to miss. “My alpha.”

Nothing needed to be said. She pulled away, wrapping her arms around her neck and straddling him properly, only hovering above him for a moment before she sank onto his cock, trusting the hand resting on her hip to guide her. She moved slowly, taking her time to feel every ridge and curve and foreign sensation, all of it so much more vivid than it’d been, last time, so much more real. There was no rush to satisfaction, no need to race towards a climax, and she let herself savor it, slotting her chest against his and pulling him into a kiss. Slow and steady seemed to be the order of the night, but Kit was forced to pull away as she bottomed out, a handful of light, breathy pants interrupting the steady silence. Kit closed her eyes, attempting to adjust to his size, and Toshinori brought his hips up in short, shallow thrusts, getting her comfortable on his cock. It was a passing courtesy, though. When he leaned back, his eyes meeting hers expectantly, she knew what to do.

Experimentally, she ground downward, her pants quickly turning to whimpers as she began to roll her hips in earnest. It didn’t take her long to build up a rhythm, bouncing in Toshinori’s lap and targeting that special, spongy spot inside of her, the one that had her seeing white around the edges of her vision, the pursuit of her pleasure becoming an end that needed to be met. As she worked, Toshinori’s hands ran over her, starting at her waist and trailing up her sides, Kit shuddering despite the room’s nearly over-whelming heat. To say he groped would be a disgrace, it was too caring for such a casual name, too focused on her needs. Each knead was tentative, focused on drawing the longest whine from her throat or the loudest moan, heat rushing straight to her core with every movement, forcing her to arch her back and keen and melt in the palms of his hands, whether or not she wanted to. She wasn’t opposed, through, burying her face in the crook of his neck, if only to hide how flustered she’d become.

It was an invasive thought, at first. How smooth his skin was. How there wasn’t a mark where there was supposed to be. It took her a moment to realize why, and another to come to a resolution.

He didn’t have a mating mark.

She needed to fix that.

“T-Toshi’,” She stuttered, his name coming out shakily as he fucked into her, making up for her distraction with an erratic, enthusiastic pace, despite his disadvantage. Still, she forced herself to continue, not trusting her voice to hold out for much longer. “You’re not… I need to bond--”

He didn’t let her finish, kind enough not to make her explain herself. “It’d be my honor,” He muttered, wrapping his arms around her waist, drawing her closer. Her was the one to pull her in, this time, to kiss her so sweetly and so lightly, she almost wanted to deepen it, to turn the gesture from reassuring to intimate. She didn’t have time, though, not as Toshinori straightened his back, meeting her stare as he went on. “Are you sure, angel? You’re still injured, you might not be in the right mindset to do something so… permanent.”

“That’s why I want to do it,” She responded, unperturbed by his caution. Subconsciously, she ran her tongue over her canines, keen for an omega, but dull compared to Toshinori’s. Sharp enough to do the job, hopefully. “I don’t want to leave you, anymore. I want to be here. And… I want you to know I’ll be here, too. You can trust me, and I want you to know that. I’m done trying to run away.”

A sharp breath, followed by a hasty nod. That was all the permission she needed before picking a spot on that tender patch of skin and biting down. Blood, thick and warm, flowed over her tongue, but the metallic taste was blocked out quickly by the sudden rush of something euphoric into her veins, hormones flooding into her mind and blocking out everything else, pride and common sense included. It felt good, right, and briefly, Kit wondered why she hadn’t done it sooner. Had if felt this good for Toshinori? She wanted to dig her teeth in deeper, leave a bigger mark, make sure everyone knew he was claimed, he was bonded, he was hers. Hers, hers, hers.

Toshinori didn’t seem immune. It might’ve been the adrenaline rush or its accompanying emotions, but the next time he was fully sheathed inside of her, his hold on her waist tightened, keeping her in place as his cock twitched, singling his upcoming end. It couldn’t have come at a better time. Already, Kit felt herself tending up, that familiar heat rising to her skin as her toes curled and her nails dug into his shoulders, just in time to feel hot, burning cum stain her cunt as Toshinori pistoned his hips harshly, making sure she was filled to the brim.

Her strength didn’t last much longer, and soon, she was resting against his chest, her grip around her mate still iron-clad for minutes before she dared to let it loosen. Exhausted by both her injuries and her recent excursion, she hardly noticed as he took her into his arms, her body weightless for a moment or two as he carried her back into the bedroom, both uncaring that they were still soaking wet and dotted with open wounds. Toshinori left, for a short time, returning with towels and bandages and painkillers to be used generously the next time she woke up. Still, he didn’t waste time slotting himself into her arms, and she didn’t oppose the development, simply holding him closer and taking everything in, from the distant scent of herbs in the air to the feeling of silk against her back, welcoming and embracing.

Idly, she opened her eyes, running her fingers through damp blonde hair and letting him lull into her palm, but her attention soon fell to the ring of bruises forming at the crook of his neck, the shape of her teeth perfectly engrained on each blackened spot.

Kit couldn’t help but smile. He was hers, now, almost as much as she was his.

Her alpha.

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