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sweetyyhippyy · 3 years

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Late Arrival. Spencer Reid x Reader.

(Not my gif)

Summary: Spencer is coming back home after an out of state case runs long. You fall asleep waiting for him, and when he finally does come home, he sees your outfit and there is no way he can’t wake you up for a proper homecoming.

Pairing: Spencer Reid x Fem!Reader

TW: Brief mentions of masturbation (male and female), sleepy sex?? (I don’t know how to refer to it), calling Spencer daddy (duh), fingering, reader trying to be dom and Spencer teasing, unprotected sex, creampie, a lot of praise kink.

Word Count: 3.2k

A.N: I saw @fics4arainyday put that she wanted someone to write this concept, so i did! I hope you like it! Also, I’m bad at ending fics so 😬... sorry!

link for lingerie I refer to: x

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It had been 3 agonizingly slow weeks since your fiancé had been home.

Being engaged to an FBI profiler wasn’t always easy. The days, even weeks being apart, Spencer coming home at all hours of the night too exhausted to stay awake and spend time with you, missing birthdays, holidays, anniversaries being states away on those occasions.

But in all honesty, you still wouldn’t have it any other way.

Nobody else could make you laugh the way Spencer did. Nobody else could make you think the way Spencer did. Nobody could lovingly annoy the crap out of you the way Spencer did. And most importantly, nobody could fuck you the way Spencer did.

He has been gone for 3 weeks, but the week before he left, there wasn’t a lot of sexy time going on since you were busy with your own job. It was the occasional quickie before having to rush getting ready for work in the morning, a quick mutual masturbation session on a lazy weekend, but no real “wake the neighbors” fuck that you were so desperately craving. Keeping a healthy sex life was important to both of you.

So when you got the call from Spencer that the case was finally over and he would be coming home that same night, you knew it was go time.

You didn’t have much self control when it came to online shopping when Spencer was gone, what else were you supposed to do? The goldfish you two had as a pet wasn’t much company.

So you had treated yourself to a few new pairs of lingerie. Spencer was going to love all of them, but there was one in particular that you knew he was going to lose his mind over. It was baby blue see through with a floral pattern throughout the slip. It left very little to the imagination but that was your favorite part about it. Technically you were supposed to wear some sort of underwear but the slip looked better without it.

You took a hot deep shower and pampered yourself a few hours before you knew he was going to be home, that way you were nice and relaxed and ready for his arrival. You kept your hair simple since Spencer would be pulling at it all night. But you did put some makeup on just to enhance Spencer’s favorite part of your face, your eyes.

The mood of the room was set; the bed was perfectly made, the candle you had given Spencer for a “just because present” called “Bookstore” smelling like mahogany, leather, and coffee; lit on the bedside table. It was meant for him but you enjoyed it much more than him. All that was missing was Spencer.

You looked at the time on your phone, only 10 more minutes before Spencer was due home. You lay on your side of the bed, flipping through tv channels to find something to watch to occupy your time.

***

Spencer turns the key to turn the car off, he drops his hands from the steering wheel into his lap, letting out a deep sigh. He could have been home over 3 hours ago but the jet back home was having engine issues, so the team had to fly through a regular airport… which meant waiting for a flight.

The case wasn’t particularly a rough one emotionally, it was just long. Spencer missed you like crazy within the first few days of being away. Late night phone calls weren’t the same as physically being with you.

Spencer grabbed his satchel, leaving the rest of his baggage to lug up to the house until tomorrow when he had enough rest. As he’s walking up the driveway he can see the light on from the kitchen, signaling you were awake and waiting on him. He knew how much you hated waiting, so by now he knew you were seething with rage. There was about to be a lot of apologizing he was going to have to do. Spencer unlocks the front door, dropping his bag next to the front door and kicking his shoes off right next to it.

“Babe?” Spencer calls out, removing his jacket and hanging it up on the back of the couch. He listens for an answer, but all he hears is the slight murmur of the tv from your bedroom.

Spencer begins to unbutton his shirt as he walks down the hallway to the blue hue of the tv shadowing onto the floor. He steps into the room, spotting you curled up on top of the comforter fast asleep. Before he could appreciate how adorable you looked, softly snoring, he noticed the little outfit you were wearing. You laid there on your belly, one leg straight while the other bent up on the pillow next to you.

He scans your body through the see through fabric, spotting the lack of underwear on your lower half while your butt was fully exposed to him. You were practically a step away from being naked. He quietly walks over to the bed and touches the hem of the slip and carefully hikes it up your butt, not earning a reaction from you.

Spencer quickly sheds his shirt off and throwing it off to the corner of the room along with his dark slacks, kicking them off quickly. Spencer carefully climbs into the bed behind you, laying on his side and palming himself through his boxers to get himself hard, which really didn’t take much as his eyes rake over your body and his imagination runs wild about all the things he was about to do to you. He hisses as he strokes himself harshly, his cock growing harder every second.

Your body shifts next to him, a low grumble coming from your mouth as you shift in bed onto your side, your ass now completely facing him.

Spencer’s eyes widen seeing you move, he didn’t want to get caught stroking himself less than a few inches from where he wanted to be. He finally scoots closer to your body, resting his hands on your bare hip, your skin a little cold from the lack of bed sheet or clothing on you. He lines himself up with your entrance, slowly slipping in between your folds, not yet sliding in. He rubs the tip of his cock up and down you, finding you were already a bit wet.

Your whole body jumps a loud gasp filling the room which makes Spencer pull himself back. Your head turns quickly behind you to look at Spencer, a little glimmer of fear in your eyes. “What the fuck?” You whisper yell at him.

“I’m home. And I see you left a present for me.” He says, whispering in your ear. “Is this okay?” He asks, his hand moving down your thigh and lifting it slightly for easier access.

“I don’t know. I’m pretty annoyed you were so late. I’m kind of not in the mood anymore.” Your voice was laced with sarcasm as you cocked your eyebrow at Spencer.

He licks his lips, a smirk on his face appearing as he picks up on the little game you’re playing with him. “No? Well I think I have some apologizing to do.” Spencer says, moving the strap of your outfit out of his way, kissing up your shoulder and over to your neck.

Your eyes flutter closed at the feeling of his soft lips pecking at your skin, a low hum coming from deep within your chest.

“You know I missed my girl so much while I was gone.” He says, his hand traveling up the underside of your outfit all the way up your stomach and up to your breasts, kneading one in his large hands as he spoke in your ear. “I missed waking up to you.” Kiss. “Seeing your beautiful face.” Kiss. “Hearing those sexy moans about how good daddy makes you feel when I’m touching you.” Kiss. “And how wet you get without me even trying.” Kiss.

You were putty in his hands, the game of trying to be tough was no longer working, and Spencer was fully aware of it.

His hand leaves your breast and goes back down to between your legs, his fingers running over your inner thighs, intentionally skipping over your core.

You whine as his fingers tickle you, scooting your body back against him. “Spence.” You pathetically whine, taking his hand and leading it to your throbbing middle. You keep your hand on top of his as you feel him play with your slit, feeling all the wetness that was seeping out of you.

“You want me to touch you?” He asks, kissing the spot below your ear.

“Please, baby?” You beg, turning your torso enough to look at him, pouting your bottom lip out ever so slightly.

His fingers part your lips, finding your bud immediately and slowly drawing lazy circles around it. Your body reacts immediately, relaxing against his body as he massages you. Your hand moves back to tangle in his hair, pushing his head closer to yours, your lips meeting for the first time in 3 weeks. His fingers continue to work their magic, as you two heavily make out with one another; his tongue slipping into your mouth and yours into his.

Your body quivers as Spencer drops his fingers down to the pool of wetness between your legs, two of his fingers slipping inside.

You pull back from the kiss, gasping loudly. “Fuck.” Your eyes flicker to his face, your mouth agape.

“It amazes me how tight you are. I’ve been with you for almost 6 years and it’s always so amazing.”

You moan in response, not being able to form words at the moment.

The room is filled with the sounds of the wetness Spencer is drawing out of you and your breathy moans. Your high was coming quicker than anticipated, Spencer could feel it in your body and could see it in your face.

You cling onto his forearm, keeping him in place. Spencer liked to play games like denying you of your orgasms, but you weren’t going to let him this time. Your eyes rolled back in your head as you fought to keep them open but you were far too overstimulated at this point. The knot came undone as you clenched around his fingers, a string of curse words and desperate moans fall from your mouth as you ride your high out.

“That’s it. Good girl.” Spencer coos, still slowly drawing what you have left out as you try to regain your breath. He kisses your cheek and moves his fingers out of you carefully. “Do you want to taste?” He questions.

You roll over onto your back, nodding your head and grabbing his hand, bringing it up to your lips, and letting him slip his middle and ring finger in your mouth. You swirl your tongue around his fingers, sucking on them harshly.

Spencer looks at you in admiration as you look up at him with innocence in your eyes. “I love that I’m the only person that knows how much of a dirty girl you are.”

You open your mouth to let his fingers free, smiling at him. “And I like that I can be your dirty girl.” You say, wrapping your fingers in his curls and bringing his head down to kiss him. “Come here, I want to give you your welcome home celebration.” You say, moving him off of you.

“Normally I’m all for that, but I need to be in you. I’m not going to last long if you use your mouth.”

You sit up on the bed and get up onto your knees, pulling Spencer up to sit up too. You straddle his lap, cupping his face in your hands, rubbing both of your thumbs on his cheek, feeling a bit of stubble in his face. “You look tired, my love.”

Spencer smiles, wrapping his arms around your back, pulling you into his chest. “Not too tired to finish.”

You laugh, kissing him softly. “No? You can go all night? Multiple times?” You teasingly question.

“We can test that theory tomorrow. But right now, we have 3 weeks worth of tension we need to work out.”

“Can I ride you?” You ask.

“Be my guest. I like the view.” He smirks, laying back down against the mattress, his hands gripping both of your thighs.

You get into position, holding his cock steady while you lower yourself down slowly.

Spencer rolls his head back on the pillow, grunting loudly as he feels your tightness around himself. His hands move up your thighs and under your outfit to your hips, gripping them tightly.

You rest your hands on his chest to keep balance, slowly starting to rock your hips against him. Your eyes stay glued to him, watching how his lips were parted and light moans were falling from him. “Do you like that?”

Spencer nods his head, his eyes focusing on your chest bouncing up and down in rhythm of your movements on him. He was trying to focus on anything else in the world to prevent himself from cumming too early.

“Tsk, tsk… words baby.” You tease, scratching his chest with your nails. “You never don’t know what to say.”

“It’s cute when you try to be the one in control.”

“I know I’m cute. You tell me quite often.” You retort with a wide grin.

Your comment earns a laugh from him, playfully rolling his eyes at you. Spencer begins to buck his hips up quickly, taking you by surprise. His fingers move the straps down your shoulders, helping you move your arms out of the straps as you continue to move on top of him. He moves the top half of your outfit down under your chest, his hands like magnets and begins massaging your breasts.

“Fuck, daddy,” You whimper, holding his forearms as he fucks into you. “That’s so good, you’re so good.”

Spencer sits up, letting you take control again. His thumb finds your clit, starting to rub it slowly, his soft brown eyes watching you melt into his touch.

Your eyes roll into the back of your skull, small whimpers leaving your mouth. You lean your body forward and nuzzle your head into Spencer’s neck. You start to kiss his pale skin, raking your teeth against it.

“Mmm, fuck.” Spencer moans out, applying more pressure to your clit as he feels a small pinch on his neck. “You going to cum for me again, pretty girl?”

“Not yet.” You whine in his ear.

“I’m going to move you. I want to fuck you.” Spencer says, moving your body off of his, earning a whine from you as his cock leaves you. “Bend over for daddy.” He says, helping you lay flat on the mattress while your butt is in the air, facing him. “Mmm, you’re so pretty, my girl.” He says in a low voice, both of his hands kneading your ass.

You whine pathetically, pressing yourself against him. “Daddy, please.”

Spencer smiles, grabbing his cock and slowly sliding back inside you. “It’s cute when you try to take control, but even cuter when you’re a whiny mess.” His hand grips the back of your outfit to hold onto as he fucks you from behind. This was his absolute favorite way to have you because of how hard he could slam into you, but the reaction you gave was even better.

Your hand finds his wrist and holds onto it as he thrusts into your dripping pussy. He could feel how you were coating his cock every time he drew himself back out of you. “I love your cock.” You mutter out.

“This is your cock, baby. You take it so fucking well.” He grunts out, now struggling to keep from exploding. Anytime you fully submitted to him, he was done for.

You had such a strong personality outside of the bedroom that most people wouldn’t believe you were submissive 9 times out of 10.

“Am I your good girl for taking you so well?” You question, looking behind you to look at Spencer with innocent eyes.

His heart and cock fluttered at both your question and your eyes, you always played the innocent card so well. He grabs all of your hair in his hand and gently pulls it back toward him, making you whimper again. “You’re always a good girl for me, my love.” He responds. “Such. A. Good. Girl.” He thrusts into you harshly with each word.

You start to rub your own clit, bringing your second orgasm to the surface for the second time tonight. “You’re going to make me-fuck-me cum. Don’t stop, please don’t stop, daddy.” You were gasping as you spoke, desperate for your release.

“Cum for me, let go my girl.” Spencer says, taking over for your fingers to help bring you to your height. He rubs you quickly, trying not to lose it before you.

Finally you feel your walls clench around his cock, both of you moaning loudly. You moan Spencer’s name along with multiple curse words as he continues to rutt into your sensitive hole.

Spencer pulls out quickly, rubbing himself as he feels his own climax coming to a head.

“No, come back. Put it back in me, please.” You whine, reaching behind you to find Spencer’s cock and lead it back into you.

“You want me to cum in you? You want it inside you?” Spencer groans, seconds away from losing it.

“Please. Cum in me, Spence.” You beg, meeting his thrusts.

Spencer thrusts one last time before he spills himself inside of you, his grip on your hips squeezing as you slowly stop throwing your hips back against him. “Fuck, you’re so good.” He whispers, his eyes shutting as he feels the tip of his cock tingle.

Both of you stay in place as you try to regain your composure. You can already feel your eyes flutter closed, heavy from being tired. Spencer finally pulls out of you, making you hiss and lay flat on the bed.

“Baby, come on, we gotta go clean you up.”

“No.” You whine, closing your eyes again.

“You need to use the bathroom and clean yourself up. We have this conversation every time you’re too tired to get up. Come here, I’ll help you.”

You poke your bottom lip out into a pout as you reluctantly get out of bed, holding Spencer’s hand as you walk into your bathroom together. He helps clean the mess inside you up with a wet towel before leaving you alone to use the toilet.

Once you’re all settled, you walk back into the bedroom, finding Spencer getting the bed ready for both of you to lay down. You wrap your arms around his waist and hug him from behind tightly. Spencer happily hums, reaching behind himself to touch your arm.

“I love you.” You say, giving him a squeeze.

“And I love you.” He says, pulling you around to give you a kiss on the lips. “Do you want to sleep?”

You nod your head, climbing into bed first and getting comfortable right away as you watch Spencer slide in next to you, laying on his side to face you.

You grin ear to ear, kissing his chin. “Hi baby.”

“Hi pretty girl. You good?” He questions, lightly touching your cheek. You lean into his touch and nod. “I’m perfect.”

Spencer brings you into his chest, his fingers rubbing small circles into your shoulder. “Yeah, you are perfect.”

#Spencer Reid #spencer reid smut fic #spencer reid fan fiction #spencer reid fan fic #matthew gray gubler #matthew gray gubler fluff #matthew gray gubler fan fiction #matthew gray gubler smut

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fishfingersandjellybabies · 3 years

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Still a Little Bit Yours (Part 1) - fic

Characters: Jon Kent, Damian Wayne, bit of Tim Drake and Maya Ducard Pairing: jondami Summary: Damian broke up with him, out of the blue. It didn’t make any sense. But, as it turns out, there’s a reason why it didn’t. A/N: Damian and Jon are in their mid-twenties and no longer go by Robin or Superboy (but not really Batman or Superman either, Tim’s last line is kind of a joke.) Title, and maybe vibe of this part, is based on ‘A Little Bit Yours’ by JP Saxe.

Part One | Part Two

The phone almost slipped from his fingers.

Damian…did Damian just say what he thought he said?

“…What?” He whispered near breathlessly. “W-what did you just say?”

“I said I think we should see other people.” Damian replied calmly. “It would be for the betterment of both of us.”

“Since when?” Jon snapped, anger flaring immediately, but instantly morphing into confusion and sadness. His heart breaking by the second.

They’d been together for three years. Secretly pined after each other for the two years prior to that. Had recently talked about moving in together. Had been happy.

Jon was so, so sure they’d been happy.

“Since…recently.” Damian hummed blankly. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking.”

“And the thought of doing this in person didn’t occur to you in your fucking contemplation?” Jon snapped. “Christ, Damian, we were just talking about getting an apartment!”

“I’m sorry if I hurt you. I know this isn’t what you want.” There was a hint of regret in Damian’s voice, but not enough for Jon’s liking, so it only fueled his growing anger further. “I…I don’t know what else to say.”

“Oh, really? Three fucking years and this is all you have to say?” Jon hissed. “I know you’re emotionally constipated, Damian, but…god. This is low. Even for you.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, you’re not!” Jon shouted. A store clerk nearby glanced at him. And that was right, he was in the grocery store. He’d…forgotten. Forgotten the whole world existed, forgot it was collapsing around him by the second, as Damian hummed those words. “Because if you were sorry, you wouldn’t have fucking done it this way in the first place!”

He heard a mother a few aisles down murmur to her children to not use language like that. That people who talked like that were pathetic.

“I…I don’t know what your game here is, Damian.” He whispered harshly.

“It’s not a game.” Damian promised. “I respect you too much to play games with you. I’m just trying to be honest.”

“But you don’t love me enough to break up with me in person, apparently.” Jon countered. He closed his eyes, wouldn’t allow the tears to fall. “I…Damian, I’m going to hang up on you right now. I…I don’t want to say something I might regret.”

“That’s fine.” Damian promised. Then again: “I’m sorry, Beloved.”

Jon scoffed and pulled the phone away from his ear. He hit the call end button so hard the screen cracked under his touch.

…Great.

He stood there a moment, trying to take deep, even breaths. But it wasn’t working real well. Each breath was trembling, and it’s like his lungs suddenly didn’t work, couldn’t hold any air.

Did he do something wrong? Did he say something? They’d fought before, all couples do. They were getting better at communication, Damian was coming out of that emotional shell the League of Assassins put him in.

They’d kissed yesterday. Jon had held him in his arms, had kissed his nose and told him how beautiful his smile was. Damian had laughed and held Jon’s face, stroking his thumb along his cheek.

And now…now they were here?

“…Honey?” Jon jumped as a hand gently touched his elbow. He spun to find an old woman in an apron matching the store’s color scheme glancing up at him. “Are you okay?”

The world around him came whooshing back. He was in the middle of the grocery store. He…he was sobbing in the middle of the grocery store. Fat, ugly tears rolling down his face as he practically crushed his phone in his hand.

“Do you need me to call someone?” The woman whispered.

“No, I…” He gently placed his shopping basket – half full of this week’s groceries – on the floor and backed away. He clumsily ran his nose along his sleeve, a trail of snot left in his wake. “I’m alright. I’m…I’m sorry.”

He turned and barely stopped himself from flying out of the store.

Jon laid in bed for two days, exhausting himself racking his brain, trying to figure out what happened, what changed, what he did.

He texted Damian, almost exactly twenty-four hours after the fateful call, but the other never answered. Never answered any text Jon sent. Or any call that he drunkenly made after that. Didn’t even give him the knowledge of being left on read.

He cried a few times, threw things a few other times.

None of this made any sense.

He thought about going over to Gotham. Walking up to the manor and banging on the door until someone answered. Thought about staging a protest until Damian agreed to see him, if the door answerer wasn’t said boyfriend.

…Ex-boyfriend.

Tears welled up in his eyes every time he thought of the term.

Ex. Boyfriend.

Jon closed his eyes, buried his face in his pillow. Honestly, he thought they were going to get married. He thought they were going to be together forever. He wasn’t ready to plan a life without Damian, not yet. They were supposed to grow old together, die minutes apart like in the movies. Holding hands until the end.

He didn’t lose Damian to death, like he always thought he would. He didn’t lose Damian to space or assassins or even to grief in the potential loss of Bruce or Dick. He lost Damian because Damian…simply didn’t want him anymore.

God. They weren’t supposed to break up after three years. They weren’t supposed to part ways in their twenties. They weren’t supposed to end things for no reason.

He thought he’d gotten pretty good at reading Damian. His ticks, his quirks. What upset him, what didn’t. He thought he was an expert. The world’s leading expert in Damian Wayne.

Apparently he was fooling himself.

He sighed, pressed his face further into the fabric of his pillow. Tried to ignore the memories threatening to overflow. Of he and Damian in this bed. Kissing, cuddling, lazing. Of Jon promising Damian the whole world, and Damian countering with the whole universe instead.

He wondered if he should call Kathy. Or Maya. Hell, one of Damian’s siblings. See if Damian had talked to them, if they had seen any signs. If they knew of anything going on.

He just burrowed under his covers, and kept his eyes closed.

In the end, he didn’t tell anyone about the breakup. Not even his parents. There were intergalactic wars starting and government coups commencing – they had more important things to worry about than their youngest’s love life. And judging by the fact he hadn’t heard from any of the Bats, he had a feeling Damian didn’t mention it to his family either.

Just as well. They were adults. They could handle this as just that. Adults.

So he wallowed in self-pity for a few days, but eventually forced himself up. Took a deep breath, dried his own eyes and distracted himself with continuing his life. Focused on his job, on heroing. The world kept turning, even if he and Damian weren’t together.

His heart hurt less as the days passed on. Not by much, his heart was still utterly shattered after all, but it didn’t hurt as much to inhale. Didn’t hurt as much to smile. Didn’t hurt as much to get a text or a call and it not be Damian.

Damian never answered when Jon tried to contact him. The first few days were understandable, but now the texts were housekeeping. Do you want your shirt back? I think you left Alfred’s cat treats here. I have a box of your stuff and your apartment key, if you’re in town soon, you can stop by and get it.

And still, like always, nothing. Damian was always stubborn, but now he was just being downright rude. It’d been almost a month now! Surely if someone as emotional as Jon could somewhat start to get over it, someone as stoic as Damian had probably completely forgotten about it by now!

He huffed as he watched a couple walk by the park bench he was sitting on, taking the momentary surge of frustration-induced courage to hit the call button on his (recently fixed) phone and hold it up to his ear.

They wouldn’t have to talk. This was just tying up the loose ends. Getting rid of the sentimental things. Getting rid of things that didn’t belong to him. That was all. That was all.

But the line didn’t even ring. It went straight to voicemail. And the frustration turned to hurt. Did…did Damian change his number? No, impossible. It still went to Damian’s voicemail, his phone was just off.

But Damian never turned his phone off. No hero did, and especially no one in the Wayne family. They were always on call, even when they shouldn’t be.

So, for Damian’s phone to be off…was he avoiding someone? Avoiding Jon?

He lowered his phone to his lap and stared at it. He was one of those people who put emojis in people’s contact names. Damian’s name was surrounded by the pink, growing heart, and the cat emoji that looked like Alfred.

He didn’t have the strength to take those away. Not yet.

He swallowed the lump in his throat that he didn’t realize was there, and put his phone back in his pocket.

He’ll just ship Damian his shit, then.

He shouldn’t have. He really shouldn’t have. It’d make him the crazy ex. The ones Taylor Swift wrote songs about.

But at least once a day, he found himself listening. Tapping into his powers and listening for Damian’s heartbeat.

He didn’t do it often while they were together. Mostly because while together they were almost always together. Physically. So he could just reach out and hold Damian’s wrist. Put his ear to Damian’s chest. Watch the pulse as it beat along Damian’s neck.

It was a coping mechanism back then, used to calm himself. When the world got too much. When his day was bad. He could just focus on Damian’s heartbeat in any form. Drown the rest of the noise out.

Damian’s heartbeat now sounded far away, but Jon didn’t feel like pinpointing how far. It was slow and even, and that almost made him angry. Damian was calm. Damian was relaxed. Probably sitting at his easel drawing without a care in the world, while here Jon was listening for him like some kind of fucking lost puppy.

Every time he listened, it was slow and steady.

Stupid Damian, he’d think as he tuned his powers back out, furiously go back to whatever he was doing. Stupid relationships.

Relationships were overrated. Damian was overrated.

“He what?!”

Maya’s shriek had Jon pulling the phone away from his ear with an amused grimace. He laughed as he switched the audio to be on speaker, and absently opened an app on his phone.

(A…dating app.)

“You didn’t know?” Jon hummed. His friend had called to ask some questions on a man she was tracking, someone who rumours said was from another planet. Kathy hadn’t known of the solar system, so she was trying the next best alien. As they talked, something about a crime scene came up, and she asked if Damian could help, if Jon could give him the phone. He had to break the news. “I thought you guys talked like…every day.”

“No way.” Maya scoffed. “Once a month, if that.” Jon could hear the frown in her voice. “And we did talk about a month ago. Maybe a bit longer. He didn’t say anything. In fact, he told me you guys were going to move in together, that he wanted me to plan a trip back to the States for a housewarming party.”

“Well…life comes at you fast, I guess.” Jon chuckled bitterly, remembering that call. He was in the room for that call, dozing in Damian’s arms, half listening to their conversation. He sneered at the choices the app was giving him. None of them were very attractive. “Because about a month ago was when he called it off.”

“Huh.” Maya mumbled. “I’m so sorry, Jon. If I’d had known that’s what he was planning, I would have beat the shit out of him. You were the best thing to ever happen to him, for gods’ sake! What the hell did he willingly throw it all away for?!”

“Your guess is as good as mine.” Jon shrugged. This potential match wore a shirt that said Joker’s Biggest Fan on it, and Jon cringed instantly. “He didn’t give a reason. Just said that it was for the betterment of both of us, and that he was sorry.”

“Fucking turd.” Maya sighed. “I’ll call him here in the next few days, and see if he’ll tell me anything.”

“Good luck.” Jon drawled. “He hasn’t answered a single text or phone call since he broke things off. And I don’t know if that’s to just me or everyone.”

“You ask one of his brothers? Which one’s friends with your brother again? Jason?”

“Tim.” Jon corrected. He hesitated on this potential match option. Just stared. It was a woman. Dark hair, tan skin, standing in a desert. She was beautiful. And she reminded him of Damian. “And I haven’t seen or talked to any of them either. No cases have taken me out to Gotham lately.”

The next match had sharp eyes, ones that said they were smarter than everyone else. Cocky. That was like Damian too.

“Eh, they’d probably cover for him anyway. They’re all a bunch of freaks like that.” She grumbled. “Are you…doing okay?”

“I’m fine.” Jon lied, and he knew Maya heard right through it. “Time heals all wounds and all that. Better every day.”

“Oh, Jon…” Maya sighed sympathetically. Jon didn’t even have it in him to be embarrassed at her pity. Not when the next person on the app was standing on a rooftop, flag tied to his neck, blowing gloriously behind him. Looking far too much like every hero persona Damian’s ever been. “Hey – I’ll be back in the States soon. And I promise, I’ll make my first stop coming to see you so we can get drunk and stuff ourselves with pizza and scream about what an asshole Damian is. Okay?”

The next match was posed in the photo in a fencing match. Damian. The next surrounded by Great Danes. Damian. The next playing a violin. Damian. The next wearing a Batman costume at a Halloween party.

Damian.

Damian. Damian. Damian.

He sighed and closed the app. Stupid.

“Yeah. That sounds like exactly what I need, Maya.”

“Great. It’s a date.” She paused a moment. “Love you, dude.”

Jon hesitated, because he hadn’t said those words since Damian. Hadn’t thought them. Hadn’t wanted to think them, not for anyone. Not for family, not for friends. Not for a single person in his life. Still left in his life.

“Love you too, Maya.”

Jon wasn’t a dreamer. He didn’t know if it was his Kryptonian side, or just how he was, but he didn’t dream often. And if he did, if he remembered them, it was only flashes. Only later moments of déjà vu. Never full sequences. Never lucid.

But…this.

They were in Kansas, out in one of Pa’s fields, lying among the wheat. Damian was flat against the ground as Jon laid over him, kissing him as hard and deeply as he could. They both had their arms around the other, grips tight and unyielding. Like if one of them let go, the whole world would disappear.

He doesn’t know why, but it was a noise Damian made. A quiet moan, and his fingers digging desperately into Jon’s shoulders that snapped him out of it. Made him realize.

This wasn’t real.

He began to lean back, pulled his arms from Damian’s shoulders to steady himself. Damian shifted too, but only to hold Jon’s face, to try and chase his lips.

“No, I…” Jon stuttered, his body wanting to do just that. Dive back in and devour Damian whole. But his mind didn’t let him, forced him to continue back until he was on his knees. “We can’t.”

He got to his feet and backed up a step, half turning away. Couldn’t bear the sight of Damian lying in the dirt, shirt half open and hair disheveled, chest heaving from arousal and exertion. “…Jonathan?”

“You’re not real.” Jon almost whined, running his fingers through his hair.

“Is that so?” Damian scoffed. “Since when?”

“Since I know we haven’t been back to Kansas in like a year.” Jon sighed, turning back. “Since I just remembered you broke up with me.”

“Absurd.” Damian laughed. Jon glared down at him, watched as Damian stood, and wiped the dust from his butt. “I would never do such a thing.”

“Well…you did!” Jon spat. “And over the phone! Not even in person!”

“You’re not listening to me.” Damian scolded. He raised his sharp gaze. “I would never do such a thing.”

“…What?” Jon whispered incredulously. “I just…I just told you that you did! And I…” He snorted, shook his head. “You’re not even real. Why the hell am I even trying to argue with you?”

“Because despite what you tell those around you, you miss me.” Damian sauntered over to him with a smirk, and poked at his temple. “Now I need you to use that big brain of yours and focus on what I’m saying. What it means.”

Jon looked down sadly. Gently reached up to take Damian’s hand in his, and turned so he could kiss his palm, could hide his face against Damian’s hand.

Damian just smiled warmly, stepped closer into Jon’s space. Cupped his other hand around the side of Jon’s throat. “Please just remember.” He begged softly. “I would never do such a thing. Never.” He leaned up on his toes, and pressed their foreheads together. “Not to you, Beloved.”

Jon leaned into the gesture, and parted his lips to kiss Damian again.

But then he woke up.

He woke up in the dead of night, with tears streaming down his face, and the memory of the dream burning against his skull.

I would never do such a thing.

“But you did, Damian.” Jon sobbed, clutching his pillow, curling his knees to his chest. Because it felt like his heart was going to tumble out, all the pieces that it had shattered into were going to come spilling out onto his sheets. “You did.”

He didn’t go back to sleep.

Jon let out a low growl as he stomped out of the café. That was a bust. That was a huge fucking waste of his time.

But that’s what he got for trying to jump back into the dating pool.

The girl seemed nice enough in their limited texting interaction. She was cute and not purposefully looked nothing like Damian. She was bubbly and loud, and also not purposefully acted nothing like Damian either.

(Totally not purposefully. Totally.)

But he’d just spent the last hour listening to her rant about conspiracy theories that were already disproven one hundred times over, and rave about how Lex Luthor was the best and coolest and smartest person to ever exist, because he was rich and going to get them all to Mars. She never stopped to let Jon talk. Never stopped to take a breath for herself either.

Needless to say, there’d be no second date. He’d frankly excused himself with a lie to get out of this one early.

(And she’d already texted him about how great of a time she had, and she couldn’t wait to see him again, despite still sitting in the restaurant ten feet behind him.

Jon didn’t like to ghost people – not like certain ex-boyfriends of his – but this one…he couldn’t wait to.)

So it must have been fate that he chose that moment to leave. Not a few minutes before, or decided to suffer through the rest of his rendezvous. Because as soon as he walked out of the café, he spotted one Tim Drake coming out of the building across the street.

Funnily enough, Tim spotted him at almost the exact same moment. Except instead of waving or smiling like Tim normally would, his face visibly paled and his eyes widened, like Jon was the last person on Earth he wanted to see.

Jon frowned when he saw Tim glance around, like he was looking for an escape route. “Tim!” He called before the other could do just that, glancing up and down the street before jogging quickly towards him. “Hey, wait up!”

Tim took a step backwards, like he was going to try to bolt, but in the end stayed where he was, waited for Jon to reach him. Quickly pulled his phone out and scanned the screen before pocketing it again. “Hey Jon…what, uh. What’s going on? How are you?”

“Oh…been better. But trying to stay positive.” Jon laughed knowingly. Tim didn’t react. “How’s the family?”

“Good. Busy.” Tim shrugged. “Lots of, uh…stuff to do. You know how it is.”

Jon nodded, and the two fell into an awkward silence. Tim pulled his phone out again, but quickly threw it back in his pocket.

“How’s…” And Jon didn’t want to ask, but he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t curious. Wasn’t desperate to actually know, instead of guessing and assuming. “How’s Damian?”

But to Jon’s the surprise, at the sound of Damian’s name, Tim seemed to practically deflate. He threw his hands across his face, began shaking his head. “God, Jon, I’m so sorry. I know we should have called, or kept you in the loop or something. But we didn’t want you to become a target too or get hurt, or…”

“What?” Jon cut off, gut suddenly dropping. “What are you talking about?”

Tim peeked between his fingers, eyes narrowed. “…What are you talking about?”

“I…I haven’t talked to Damian since he broke up with me.” Jon murmured. Tim’s eyes instantly widened even more in surprise. “I just…wanted to know if he was doing okay?”

“Damian broke up with you?” Tim whispered. “When?”

“Um, I don’t know a month or so ago?” Jon shrugged. “Why? Tim, what’s going on?”

“How did he break up with you?” Tim demanded, suddenly all but lunging at Jon. His eyes darted between Jon’s desperately. “Was it in person?”

“No, it was over the phone.”

“What day?” Tim asked, almost giddy now. “What day did he break up with you, exactly? What day did you get that call?”

“Uh…” Jon pulled out his phone, and went to the call feature. He scanned the list until he found the one he was looking for. The one that ruined his whole life. “The seventh.”

“What time?”

“Like three or four in the afternoon?” Jon huffed. “Tim, why is this relevant? What happened?”

“Have you talked to him since then?” Tim continued, undeterred. “In any way? Text? Call? Carrier pigeon?”

“What? No! I…I tried calling him a few times, to return his stuff and all that, but he never answered.” Tim suddenly backed away from him, running both hands through his hair, like a case was just blown wide open. For the third time, Jon asked: “Tim, what the hell is going on?”

Tim hesitated for a moment, then looked Jon dead in the eyes. “Damian’s been missing for a month.” He said plainly. “He disappeared on the morning of the seventh.”

And just like that day on the phone, it felt like the world was being swallowed into a black hole beneath him. That the universe was disappearing around him, that it wasn’t real.

He could barely breath. “…What?”

“He, Duke and Cass were on a case in France. Without warning all three of them went radio silent. When we got there, we only found Duke and Cass half dead in a vineyard. They said they were attacked by a…a shapeshifter or something, lured them in by transforming into members of the Justice League. That they saw the shapeshifter and their crew dragging Damian away, but they didn’t see where to, or even what direction.”

Jon’s head was spinning.

“We’ve been looking for him day and night ever since. And when you didn’t come looking for him…” Tim winced. “We assumed he’d told you that he would be away on a mission, potentially for a long time. So your absence didn’t concern us. In fact, like I said, we were grateful. We didn’t want you getting wrapped up in this too, and potentially hurt.”

Jon was barely listening anymore, too wrapped up in what he’d just been told. That Damian had been missing since that day. That the reason Damian’s heartbeat sounded so far away was because he was, he was somewhere in Europe. That he wasn’t answering his phone because he was being held captive.

…That it wasn’t Damian on that call.

I would never do such a thing. Never. Not to you.

“…Beloved.” He murmured. Tim instantly stopped in his ramblings.

“…What?” Tim asked.

“On the call, when he broke up with me. First, he never gave a reason, which I thought was crazy. I guess…I guess it makes sense now.” Jon said thoughtfully. “But before we hung up. He said ‘I’m sorry, Beloved.’”

“…So?”

“That’s what Damian had me as in his phone. Not my name.” Jon explained. “Why would he still call me Beloved if he was breaking up with me?”

“…He would have said your name.” Tim said, the truth dawning on him. “The kidnapper wouldn’t know that. They wouldn’t know your name. So they called you what you were listed as.”

“And recognized that I was someone important to him.” Jon finished. “But…why? Why call me just to…break up with me? Why call me at all?”

“I don’t know. We can think about it later.” Tim was instantly back in detective mode, holding out his hand. “Give me your phone.”

“Why?”

“Because we can track where that phone call came from.” Tim wiggled his fingers impatiently. With his other hand, he pulled out his own phone, typing furiously with his thumb. Jon realized that’s why he was checking it so much, that’s why he was in Metropolis at all. He was looking for clues for Damian, anywhere he could. “And that might take us to where this bastard took my brother.”

“...Need a ride to the Batcave?” Jon asked with a sheepish smile. “…The sooner we get there, the sooner we can track this fucker and find Damian.”

Tim pursed his lips in thought, clearly not thrilled at the idea of including Jon, not after they all tried so hard to keep him detached, but eventually returned the grin.

“Get us in the air, Superman.”

#jonathan kent #jon kent #Damian Wayne #jondami #Tim Drake

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cauldronofmorning · 3 years

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Okay so.... I've encountered your tags about "the talking scene between trapper and hawk in dr pierce and dr hyde the stuttering the grabbing the not blinking how another of hawk's coping methods has bitten the dust#trapper being soft parental but annoyed and how he needs to check out while hawkeye needs to save the entire world"... if you have time, Go off! I would love that 2000 word essay and your opinions.

It’s a bit of a mess and would probably get a C- if I handed it in, but! Dr Pierce and Dr Hyde and how it shows the difference between Hawkeye’s and Trapper’s coping methods.

Context! Alan Alda wrote the episode, mental health is important to him (not to psychoanalyze an actor, but he had depression before the show and his mom was schizophrenic) and there’s a quote on how Hawkeye didn’t actually change much in the eleven years, just had his coping methods beaten down.

So throughout season one, Hawkeye and Trapper have mostly been ignoring the trauma of a war. Hawkeye naturally ended a movie with a speech about propaganda (Yankee Doodle Doctor) and Tommy tells them (Sometimes You Hear The Bullet) about a kid who should have been the blonde hero in a war movie actually dying and not hearing a bullet, forcing them to actually quietly think about it. But for the most part, they can distract themselves with booze, pranks and women, and Hawkeye can still draw a straight line between his tenuous sanity pre-war and the place he’s in.

There’s also two important episodes in season two before Dr Pierce and Dr Hyde, that make the war more personal for both of them. The first is Radar’s Report, where a scared prisoner contaminates Trapper’s patient by knocking the blood over. Trapper’s sulkier throughout the episode, obsessed with how it could have been okay if it weren’t for that incident, and less indulging of Hawkeye’s girl of the week problem. His patient doesn’t make it, and he makes a beeline to the POW’s tent, maybe would have killed him if Hawkeye hadn’t bought him back to reality. “That’s not what we’re about.”

The second is For The Good Of The Outfit. This one has a village bombed by American military and Hawkeye/Trapper run afoul of previously decent sounding generals trying to shut them up from talking about it, including passive aggressive threats to send them to the front, and specifically to Hawkeye, intercepting letters to his dad. It’s okay by the end of the episode, but he’s still livid when he finds this out.

In comes Dr Pierce and Dr Hyde. The episode starts with Hawkeye already slightly dissociated from a long shift, thinking it hasn’t ended, and Trapper having to gently take him by the arm and guiding him out of the OR, telling him he was taking the chest cases “like he was their only hope”. Hawkeye wanting to save everyone keeps popping up throughout the episode; here, when he’s stumbling into Henry and his ego filtered through deprivation making him think he’s the only one who can do chest cases, the scene I’m getting to, and the end where Trapper and Henry sum him up.

As much as Trapper is “let’s get drunk to deal, okay?” kind of comfort in comparison to BJ who can actually talk about emotions, if not necessarily knowing the best way to deal with them (Hawkeye has a type and it’s repressed blondes), he’s soft with Hawkeye – gentle touches, firmly telling him to go to sleep, indulging that chopper noise is just thunder – until he figures the best way to get his friend to rest is to sedate him behind his back.

The thing with Trapper is that while he might be a bad husband, cheating on his wife with no shame (but he keeps bringing up that Hawkeye is more perverted so that might make it easier for him to deal with, see the couple of times he glares at Hawk for flirting with Henry/a male patient, Divided We Stand, The Trial Of Henry Blake, Check Up, Life With Father, Adam’s Ribs), he’s a good father who ran into a minefield for Kim and tried to go AWOL for Cathy and Becky. That’s not to say he always treats Hawkeye like a child, that would be weird considering how much flirting they do, but when the other man is manic or badly affected, Trapper’s first instinct is to be parental.

After Hawkeye in his doubletalky way admits to Radar he’s compulsive and psychotic (sidenote: his symptoms of strong emotions, not being able to think clearly and too many spirals to name actually bear that diagnosis out, instead of just using the word when one thinks another is behaving badly), he wanders around the camp like a ghost, making notes about corpsmen with guns and nurses checking patients in post-op.

As Hawkeye often does, whenever he finds something out, or thinks he has in this instance, he has to tell his live-in boyfriend of the season immediately, and if he can’t sleep then neither can anyone else. He sits on Trapper’s bed, extremely close and not blinking, and jostles him awake. Already Trapper’s slightly panicky, as no matter what he says about being the mellow one, any time there’s shouting or loud noise in the swamp, he always wakes up with a start. Even when he sees it’s Hawkeye it takes him a few seconds to process and get back into his role.

Hawkeye’s very sad and very quiet. For the past seven minutes, even though he’s dissociated, exhausted and not doing well, he’s still trying to do his normal thing of turning his anger sideways and being snarky or being a clown bottom for the gaggle of nurses. Going back to one of Trapper’s good qualities is that he’s a decent parent, Hawkeye can regress emotionally into being like a ten year old (incidentally, the age when he had the most trauma pre-Korea, with Billy, his mom dying, guilt over not wanting dad to remarry and at some point losing his virginity), both for funny like in Picture This and for sadness.

So he’s finally noticed that he’s in a war zone and he’s too tired to make jokes about it or distract himself from it. Trapper already sounds frustrated but still listens, telling him to go bed before he drives himself crazy. There’s been a few takes that Trapper would get sick of later Hawkeye, and given how much they really can’t talk to each other that often, even just a mention of Hawkeye’s will when he has to go to the front makes Trapper shut down and Hawkeye cover with a joke, that’s probably true. They’re both messes, but for now Trapper can give Hawkeye someone to lean on.

“If I thought I could stop it just by going to sleep, don’t you think I would try?” Hawkeye does a twitch of the head, still unblinking, and that’s just really asking Trapper to understand and take him seriously. Also the wording, he’s not saying he can stop thinking about it just by going to sleep, or stop feeling anything just by closing his eyes, although both of those are implied. He makes it very clear later on (Letters, Preventive Medicine, Blood Brothers) that he feels like he’s as bad as the war – god and martyr complex combined – and if he can’t fight against/blame everything on that then it’s time for some self loathing.

Trapper does actually pay attention and gives him some advice. Definitely not great advice, but advice nonetheless, to close his eyes when things get unbearable, and to keep checking out when it keeps happening. This can’t work for Hawkeye, who’s had a guilt complex ever since he was a child, but it’s how Trapper copes. The next episode when Kim’s mother turns up for the boy, after a time of being actually open, he goes right to dismissive snark. Plus in season three’s Mad Dogs and Servicemen, another one on how differently Trapper and Hawkeye deal with things, he shrugs that he pretends he’s not there all day along.

Hawkeye’s stuttering a bit at this point. Words are important to him, it’s why you should probably leave him a note even if you’re a man who 1) wants to forget about Korea as soon as he arrives in Boston but won’t 2) wants desperately to believe he’s straight but isn’t 3) cares through physical touch and can’t think of what to say for seventy two hours. Wordplay is important to him too, and he admits to Sidney in the finale that his brain thinks too fast. Obviously exhaustion is going to put his brain and mouth out of sync, and considering how he sounds like he’s going to cry in the mess tent when he can’t even get words out to Frank Burns, it makes him all that more helpless.

“Somebody, and it wasn’t you or me, started this war.” It’s the “whoever the them, we were always us” of it all. It’ll be more important in the third season, and what happens in Welcome To Korea, but Hawkeye has taken it for granted that he and Trapper will stay co-dependent no matter what happens or who they come up against or how their time is running out. Much how he probably didn’t tell Trapper about the abandonment trauma he’s suffered before, Trapper always reassures him to come back soon, or no charge for leaning on him, or it isn’t a Christmas goodbye, and doesn’t want to share real feelings.

Beyond that scene, with Hawkeye dragging himself off to be a hero, assume that everyone who tries to take care of him really just wants to sleep with him, and cry while singing, Trapper tries to sedate him while he’s not looking. He’s tried being parental, he’s tried the repression advice, it’s time to be passive aggressive for Hawkeye’s own good. Or what he thinks is Hawkeye’s own good. It’s not especially great on Trapper’s part, but a similar thing happens reversed in Mail Call, where a drunk Trapper tries to go AWOL and as soon as he’s distracted laughing at Frank, Hawkeye locks his bag away so Trapper won’t be tempted again. Both of them are repressed messes who can’t really talk to each other.

When that sedation attempt ends up in Frank falling over, Trapper goes to Henry to be the worried macho boyfriend. Like with the only comedic dancing allowed and not the time in Officers Only when a genuine offer gets turned down, being protective over Hawkeye where he can hear can only happen when it’s for fun/likely no real danger.

At the end, Trapper and Henry sit by Hawkeye’s bed when he’s finally asleep and talk about him. Kindly, but they know he’s unstable with a hero complex. Like Mulcahy said in season eleven, the camp has a lot of experience with not dealing with reality, and even Trapper says in Iron Guts Kelly that one man’s reality is another man’s fantasy. Nobody has the capability to talk about this yet, and Sidney and Hawkeye only really become friends in O.R. Hawkeye will wake up and he and Trapper will pretend this never happened.

When Adam’s Ribs comes around, and Hawkeye has a manic episode over needing to eat something that isn’t liver or fish, Trapper and Henry are again the ones looking after him, comparing him to their kids and Trapper in the background both snarking over Hawkeye’s slippage in sanity and looking out for him. It’s not as quite high stakes as Dr Pierce and Dr Hyde, but they’re still worried about him.

To end this out, Trapper and Hawkeye and mental health is a fun thing to look at. Neither of them are particularly emotionally intelligent yet, Hawkeye just kind of a self absorbed mess and Trapper finding it easier to be a reassuring rock and keep his own struggling to himself, and they keep things from each other while also taking past each other, but they comfort each other with jokes and distractions that only they can understand. The repressed clowns are trying, even if it does all end with a borrowed kiss and only just barely missing each other.

#hawkeye pierce #trapper john mcintyre #mental health tw #dr pierce and dr hyde #mash #piercintyre #gene-ious

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youllallriseintheink · 4 years

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A Symphony of Nightmares, part 3

Yeah... this is gonna be thematically empty compared to the other two because I didn’t plan it from the beginning, but if you wanted to know about what happened to Sammy, here’s the answer.

—-

“Okay, Sammy,” Joey whispered tenderly to his now-inky boyfriend, “here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to go home and get some pictures of you. I’m going to put you through the ink machine, and you’ll come out just like you were before, alright? And then we can experiment with the ink machine again, and then go home, and it’ll be like nothing ever happened. Everything is going to be fine. Alright?”

Sammy spoke the words he words he’d wanted to say since for days. “Why did you do this to me? Why did you leave me here alone?”

Joey pulled back awkwardly. “Well, to answer your second question, I thought you were dead! I’m ecstatic that you aren’t! And you won’t be sick, now, either! Can you just... not ruin the moment?”

Sammy nodded. It was best not to anger Joey until they’d done the ritual at least.

“See you in a few,” Joey chirped awkwardly before heading out for the pictures.

Right now, Sammy needed Joey to change form and escape this dungeon, but was Sammy going to do after? Well, he supposed, leaving would be difficult for all the same reasons as before. Joey would probably fire him if he left, he had no home, since his paycheques had been going into a joint bank account, getting his money would be a royal pain. But he couldn’t stay. Could he? Stay with the man who had forsaken him like this? Sammy realized then that he still didn’t know why Joey had done this.

After Joey returned, he directed Sammy to draw up a sacrificial pentagram while he set up the ink machine. Though Joey usually drew the pentagrams as he was the more experienced visual artist, this was a pentagram that Sammy had drawn, to his slight shame, two or three times before. After the last mark was was made, Sammy stood back and pondered his handiwork. He’d never once thought about what it was like to lay in one of these. And he couldn’t quite do it, even though he knew what was going on.

“Well? Lie down in it,” Joey ordered.

It was as though Sammy’s body was fighting him as he finally did so. “I think you’ll have to hold me down, Joey. I’m scared.”

“Okay,” Joey replied gently.

Sammy lay on his stomach and closed his eyes so he wouldn’t see Joey coming. He could feel Joey’s hand press down on his back and the other one lift up his chin. The cold metal sunk into his ink as Joey sliced him ear to ear. It was very unpleasant, but not painful in the sense that it would have been for a human.

The next thing Sammy was aware of was falling out of the ink machine nozzle and straight onto the floor. Joey helped him up and looked him over. “Hmm... perfect! How do you feel, Sammy?”

Sammy looked down at himself. He was himself again, just less detailed and in black and white. He was wearing his favourite outfit, and Sammy pulled on one of the sleeves to find that it had sensation- it was a part of him as much as his fingers. “Alright, I guess.”

“Alright. I’ll let you run the show tonight. Who do you want to sacrifice first?”

“Actually, Joey, I’m not feeling up to it. Can we just go home?”

“Sure,” Joey replied. Sammy didn’t say anything on the way home. He wasn’t thinking particularly hard about anything, either. He was emotionally exhausted and numb. Joey tried to kiss him goodnight, and Sammy complied with it.

The next few days, Sammy would pretty much spend every second he wasn’t at work either moping in his sanctuary or in bed. It’s not as though he needed to eat anymore. The thought of leaving the relationship seemed exhausting. Even staying at work late to play music in his sanctuary and avoid Joey seemed exhausting. Sammy knew nothing would change until he made it change, but he felt paralyzed.

Three days in, Joey was getting frustrated. This wasn’t fair. Life had given him the false hope that he could get his partner back and then dashed it into pieces by giving him this lifeless waste of space instead. To gain insight on Sammy’s condition, Joey has even molded one of his ink creations into an Alice for an interview. The ink creature, with Alice’s consciousness in the forefront and a whole 24 hours of life experience, did not report any fatigue or other physical symptoms that could explain Sammy’s behaviour, leading Joey to the frustrating conclusion that Sammy’s issues were purely psychological. Did that mean that Sammy was just permanently broken now?! Well, not if Joey had anything to do about it. He went to their room. “Sammy, you’re getting out of bed this instant,” he demanded. “We’re going out, we’re doing spells, we’re getting drunk, and we’re going to have a night just like we used to have, you hear?”

Sammy didn’t have the energy to fight Joey, but the last thing he wanted was to see Joey drunk or with a powerful tome in his hands. It was crazy, but Sammy wouldn’t have felt safe that way. “Another time,” was all he said.

Joey grabbed Sammy by his collar and attempted to pull him up. It was a pretty pathetic display, since while Sammy was as thin as he had been before his inking, he was now made of dense, heavy ink and weighed almost twice what he used to. Joey settled for turning Sammy to face him. “You are going to be my partner again, you hear?” he growled. “Everything should be going back to normal!” His voice wasn’t a growl now, it sounded desperate. “We got this second chance, I just don’t understand-!” As he said the last word, Joey punched Sammy in the ribs. Sammy wasn’t hurt, not much at least. After a few more frustrated blows, Joey came away with bloody knuckles and Sammy was unhurt. Joey glared at him briefly, a bit of shock in his eyes, before storming off. Sammy could hear the sound of breaking glass and a slamming door.

After a minute of listening to complete silence, Sammy got up and made sure Joey was gone. He found the glass from a wine bottle and pieces of a broken mirror, from where Joey had hurled one against the other, but there was no trace of Joey. The broken mirror reflected the grey tones of Sammy’s body, decorated with Joey’s blood.

I’m an ink creature. He can’t hurt me.

Sammy checked again just to be sure, and then started a hurried job of packing up his things. Sammy knew he was being ridiculous, but it seemed to him like Joey could be back at any moment, and he felt like a scared animal in his own home. After his things were together, he went through every drawer in the place, gathered all the money he could find, and left. It was a bitterly cold February night, and the cold hurt Sammy worse than it would have as a human. He wore no coat, because that wouldn’t have helped him anyhow. But the cold did not stiffen his fingers, he did not shiver, and Sammy was certain that it could not kill him. A black car that looked like Joey’s drove by, and Sammy turned away, hoping to hide. Don’t be stupid, Sammy thought to himself. I can’t hide, and he can’t hurt me. I’m an ink creature.

Sammy stayed at Norman’s that night. The next morning, he quit his job over a call made from a pay phone, and immediately went to the police. It would be a long road to recovery for Sammy, and he would most likely never get his human body back, but after Joey had taken everything from him, he wasn’t allowing him to take a single thing more.

#Bendy and the Ink Machine #a symphony of nightmares #sammy lawrence #joey drew #my fanfiction

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subnova-scion · 5 years

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🟊⟅⸉ IM GONNA TALK ABOUT NOVAVERSE CYM AND WHAT HAPPENS AFTER CAUSE I HAVE THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS LETS GO ⸊⟆🟊

During the final confrontation with White Diamond, not only were the CG’s unable to help Steven, they were turned against him. If the B-team had come in at that moment, they would’ve been turned against him, too. Can you fucking imagine? Seeing your family and friends slowly being possessed? Screaming, howling in agony as they’re turned against you? And you can’t do anything to stop it? And all you’ve got to back you up is your human friend who the person controlling everyone else thinks is disposable? And will not hesitate to try and kill her?

And you’re just a child?

Yeah!!! Steven doesn’t just end up having nightmares about being ripped apart from his gem once this is all over! He also has nightmares about the White Puppets. He had to see them turned! Every adult figure he’s ever trusted and loved had been turned against him by a villain who LITERALLY TRIED TO KILL HIM NOT EVEN MINUTES LATER. LIKE. WHITE DIAMOND DID THAT, KNOWING THAT THE ‘HUMAN CHILD’ PINK WAS ‘HIDING IN’ WOULD PROBABLY, IF NOT UNDOUBTEDLY, DIE.

“I’m tired of this shit, Pink. Time to end it and kill the organic parasite so you can’t run from your problems anymore.”

This is why Steven’s relationship with White Diamond in NOVAverse will be far from canon. He will always be scared of her!! AND THAT’S THE TEA!

As for the attempted murder, Steven barely remembers what happened when it comes to getting his gem removed and seeing his other half. Because when his gem was taken out it was, uh, very bad. Like,, from a gore standpoint. He only remembers vague feelings and images. Both halves experienced the same event, but from their own separate perspectives. One half was bleeding out, though, and your memory kind of takes a back seat when you’re LITERALLY DYING. So Like? He remembers it? But it’s mostly one sided, through his gem half. And that’s why it feels so bizarre when he tries to remember what happened. It feels like an extreme case of out of body dissociation.

Meanwhile, Yellow and Blue and the CG 3 couldn’t remember anything. They didn’t know what was happening, just what they were feeling as White was controlling them. It was severely emotionally and physically painful, and that’s all they knew! So they had no idea what happened, and the crystal gems freaked out when they were freed from White’s control and saw the state of their kid. Because there was still blood!! Everywhere! All over him! And Connie! Since she had to carry Steven over to his other half while he was BLEEDING OUT WITH A HOLE THE SIZE OF HIS FIST IN HIS GUTS.

And these two kids were too relieved and in shock and generally traumatized to answer their questions! They couldn’t even begin to process what exactly had nearly happened to him. Nova had already started to dissociate as soon as he was whole again? Cause his brain was like: ‘Haha gonna just black most of that out and go numb to protect you and keep you functioning through this hellish experience lmao.’

Considering he was almost killed for like the 12th time in his 14 years of life, there are VERY obvious reasons as to why he began falling into a state of dissociation, but what he started dissociating from first is deeply rooted in what happened to him. The first thing he dissociated from was his feelings. See, after his human half sustained serious damage, guess which half has to kick into higher gear to keep him alive and functioning after going through awful trauma?

The gem half. Which is well… Numb. We see that PINK!Steven literally cannot process emotion other than the intense, overwhelmingly negative ones. That sudden outburst, the literal grief and rage of a young god that is sick and tired of everyone wanting his mother to be alive over him. Quartz (That’s what I call Nova’s gem half) didn’t hesitate to strike at all of Nova’s loved ones. He had no attachment. He was doing what he needed to do to protect himself and his other half so they could be whole again. Everyone else was an afterthought.

And that’s how you know Quartz is different. Because the human half, and even as a whole, Steven puts everyone else first. Human Nova (who I call Universe) is literally bleeding out and he’s crying out for his other half to stop because he’s hurting them. But that half is a part of him. And it’s a part he’s been needing to get in touch with for a long time. Considering Steven puts others before himself even to his own detriment, and the reactions of his human half only solidify this fact, if his gem half was anything like that, Steven could have died. He couldn’t afford to strain or distract himself trying to help or protect others. He needed to help himself. Save Steven. That was the objective.

And even as two halves are united again, the gem half is still more or less handling the reigns because of how straight wrecked the human half is at the time. It’s still working to protect himself as a whole. And the first sign of this emotional change is shown in the first thing he says to white after she tried to murder him.

“I am a child. What’s your excuse?”

See, now that he’s been reunited with his other half, he has all the emotions and feelings his human half provides, too. So he’s able to actually lay down some sick burns and common sense without going absolutely apeshit and creating craters with his screams. And this boy didn’t leave quietly with ‘If you let everyone else be whoever they are, maybe you can let yourself be whoever you are, too.’ No. That didn’t quite happen in NOVAverse. Yanno what happened? Yellow and Blue confronted White first, and since she had yet to regain her composure, she was shaken and defensive.

They almost started fighting all over again. They were all terrified and scrambling in fear of the unknown. Until White’s attention was on Steven again. Because, who is this little creature supposed to be if they aren’t Pink??? What the fresh fuck is going on?! Now, we all know PINK!Steven is Mcfuckin Pissed. The gem is back-loaded with thousands of years of emotional turmoil and trauma, most of which isn’t even his own. And this is related to WHY he initially goes off on the diamonds, too.

Because he goes off on them defending Pink Pearl.

Steven had to relieve through so many of his mother’s memories of abuse, and her painful memories of regret regarding what happened to her best friend??? So to actually see Pink Pearl okay and looking like herself again was so important to him. He didn’t just go 'welcome back’ and pat her on the shoulder, HE HUGGED HER AND HELPED HER TO HER FEET. HE WAS IN TEARS. He walked her over to the CGs and said, “ You’re coming with us. ”

LIKE. SHES BEEN SUBJECTED TO MENTAL AND PHYSICAL TORTURE FOR +8,000 YEARS??? GET HER AWAY FROM WHITE. And when White managed to regain her composure and what he was doing caught her attention, she asked him what he could possibly be doing taking her pearl? That’s when Nova went off.

“ She was never yours. She was my mother’s best friend and you took her away and turned her into a puppet and used her as an emotional manipulation tactic to keep my mother under your thumb.

You have kept her like this for thousands of years. It’s time she comes home with us so she can finally start to be herself again. Far away from you.

Die Mad About It.”

Boy put his foot down not just on that, but about his mom and why she left, and why he came here in the first place, that he needed White’s help. And everyone was in such shock and was so overwhelmed and lost because of what just happened that they listened to what he had to say and they did what he told them to! They didn’t know what else to do or how to move forward now that their worlds have been turned upside down!

The night they got back to Earth, the diamonds had to hang around for a while because Steven and Connie are a mess and the CG’s have to take care of them before anything else happens. They have to get them checked out (thanks Dr.Maheswaran.) It was determined they were both in shock, but Connie wasn’t too badly injured. Steven, however, spent the night in the hospital due to blood-loss. He was in enough pain that he had to take it easy and mostly stick to staying in bed. It was fine, as he was majorly exhausted and slept like a rock.

His nature as a demi-gem allowed him to heal faster, but the human half was still seriously damaged. He has to take painkillers and not be too physical for a while. He also has a sicknasty scar around his gem because it was ripped out so that’s Neat. When he uses his powers and his gem glows, you can really see the scarring. It looks something similar to what it looks like when his body comes into contact with destablizers. (He decides to wear bigger t-shirts from now on. He doesn’t want it to be exposed, and he doesn’t want his family to see it)

Then, the next day was the big Bubble Bath. They were all up late, so the healing party happened the following afternoon. Once he was cleared, they checked him out of the hospital, and went straight to the fountain to meet up with the diamonds and finally cure corruption. The water from the fountain helped him heal more, too, so he was feeling better already. He loved meeting all these new friends and was so relieved it was all over. But after a few hours, as it usually is at parties, he just kept talking to so many people and getting distracted and, god, he just couldn’t leave.

Yanno? You just keep trying to leave a party but someone or something keeps sucking you back in. All the people there. How loud they all are. Using his voice becomes exhausting. Thinking becomes exhausting. People talking to him becomes like nails on the chalkboard? Suddenly, everything is so irritating and blurry and painful and so, so loud he feels like he’s going crazy. And when he finally has a quiet moment to himself to be mindful of his own state he’s like, “Oh. I’m having an anxiety attack in slow motion and probably experiencing sensory overload. Cool.”

He’s so mentally overwhelmed and burnt out that he just felt himself having a meltdown at ¼th the speed and knew it would speed up or blow up if he didn’t leave. They had to take him home and he just went to bed. From that day on, for another week or two, Steven is under the constant watch of the Crystal Gems and doted on. He didn’t particularly mind some affection, because he was just so relieved to be home. To be safe. To be alive. Understandably, his family and friends were worried, of course they were. How could they not be, with the state he was in after that fight?

He looked like a dead boy walking, clothes and limbs absolutely bloody. They hadn’t the slightest clue what happened after White Diamond took control of them, and they could only look to Steven for answers. Steven always told them he doesn’t really remember what happened, which is only partially true, and they say that since then, he hasn’t seemed like himself. They say that in the aftermath, that he acted strange and cold, that now he seems ‘far away’ and is too quiet.

While that was true, it was only the case at a certain point because Steven found it harder and harder to be around them when they looked at him like he could die at any second and talked to him like they want to scrape the inside of his skull with a spoon.

See, Nova is struggling with his emotions a lot more now, in terms of emotional detachment and his literal demi-god power showing through in his personality a bit more? He was BORN a fusion, but reflected his human half more than the gem half for so long because he wasn’t in touch with gem stuff for the first 10 years of this life.

This is why he couldn’t use his powers for a long time. But NOW that he’s come so far and has seen his gem half for what it really is, seen himself for who he really is, it’s changed the cognition of the human half. So now that they're whole, the gem half and all the Diamond Powers are like, ‘Hello, I am here now. I am also you.’

And both halves are struggling to balance the whole self out again. This is why his Pink Power™ is more obvious from this point onward. It’s the “Light of his gem shining through”, as White Diamond put it. Now, Steven himself doesn’t know this, so he can’t put his finger on why it’s so hard to talk, why he feels distant, not only from his family, but his own feelings.

He needs time alone to work through them, to try and understand what exactly happened, and why he’s feeling so odd. At times, he feels simply… indifferent to everything, some kind of numb. But there is another uncommon feeling that frightens him more; Anger, it rises within him frequently, so much so that he almost feels bad about it when it does. He was never one to feel this way so easily before.

Not to say he doesn’t have things to be angry about, to be emotional about. He’s angry because wasn’t even allowed to leave the house by himself for a whole week. He hadn’t seen Connie since they got back, and it seems that he could never get enough time with his father, the only other person who being around would make it easier to breathe. Every conversation with the gems eventually leads to being about what’s wrong, the questions Steven couldn’t answer, that he doesn’t want to answer. It’s hard to express this when they’re each being their own ways of overbearing about his well-being, and his anxiety is off the charts.

The question of the Diamonds and what they were going to do, how they were going to continue, looms over him. It’s such a source of his stress that he has as much trouble falling asleep as he does staying asleep the whole night through. He has to know what’s happening. What they’re doing. He couldn’t just leave them be and expect things to not go back to how they were before. At times, he feels like he has to go back to Homeworld, but how could he?

Especially if he told his family what happened to him? Steven knew that if he did, that they wouldn’t let him, and who knows what else would happen. Truthfully, he’s afraid they wouldn’t see or treat him the same anymore. He feels like he has to be okay as soon as possible so he can do what he feels needs to be done, but the longer this goes on the more he feels like he’s having a meltdown in slow motion.

The peace he was hoping to have after going through such a harrowing time is yet again out of his reach… and it’s getting harder and harder to swallow his slowly boiling frustrations.

#🟊⟅⸉ᴏᴏᴄ⸊⟆🟊

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amanda-teaches · 6 years

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Witness Protection

Summary: When you witness a murder, protection comes from a very surprising place- your boyfriend, who’s really an undercover DEA agent. Can you put aside your problems with Dean’s lies long enough for him to keep you alive?

Pairing: Dean x Reader AU

Word Count: 3960

Warnings: intense, high adrenaline situations; violence and threats on your life; minor character death; shooting and blood; some trauma; swearing

A/N: This is for two challenges. The first is Angelina’s Roll the Dice Challenge for @atc74, and my prompts were One of your main characters must be a coach of some kind, Must take place on a train, or a train must be one of your locations, and Someone has to have a flat tire. The second challenge was Rapunzel’s Tangled up with Supernatural Challenge for @eyes-of-a-disney-princess. My prompt there was “Did I ever tell you I have a thing for brunettes?”, which will be bolded within the fic. Honestly, I struggled a bit with this one, but I really, really love how it turned out, and I hope you do too!

You never would have dreamed that when you took a plush, private, gymnastics coaching job, it would end with you on the run for your life.

How did you end up running through a dark forest in the middle of the night, dodging tree branches and spider webs with two hired killers right on your heels? Simple. You’d just witnessed your boss murder someone. That’s right, Jackson Carson, the sweet, single father who’d been nothing but nice to you since the moment he’d hired you to coach his six-year-old daughter, had just shot a man right between the eyes.

You’d never imagined when you’d returned to the house unexpectedly, after finding that your car had a flat tire, that that’s what you would see, but, you had. So, now, you were running for your life and the only place you could think to go was the one place you truly felt safe: your boyfriend, Dean’s.

Luckily for you, he only lived about a mile from the Carsons, but, by the time you got there, your heart still felt like it was going to burst out of its chest. Flinging the door open, you slammed it behind you and quickly turned the deadbolt before spinning around and screaming your boyfriend’s name. “Dean!”

He instantly tore out of his bedroom, clad in just a t-shirt and a pair of boxers, the panic in your voice cutting right through his sleep-filled fog. “Y/N? What is it? What happened?”

You opened your mouth to explain, but all that came out was a hysterical cry, and, within seconds, Dean’s arms were around yours, holding you up as you broke down into his chest. “Hey, hey,” he whispered. “It’s okay, baby. Just breathe. Tell me what happened.”

You tried to take his advice, to stop crying, but you felt like you couldn’t catch your breath. “You’d never believe me, even if I tried.”

He pulled back and gently gripped your chin, forcing you to look up at him. “Try me,” he prodded softly, breaking down the last of your defenses.

“I saw...I saw Jackson...” You paused, taking a deep breath. “Dean, he killed someone.”

You expected Dean to deny it, to say that maybe you were just mistaken, but instead, he did something that completely shocked you: he believed you. “Son of a bitch, Y/N. You saw him do it? Did he see you?”

“Did he...wait what?”

His eyes hardened and he swore under his breath. “Did he see you, Y/N?”

“Yes, yes. He saw me, Dean, but I don’t understand. I just told you my boss killed a man. Why aren’t you more surprised?”

Dean shook his head. “There’s no time for that now. Come on, we gotta move.”

Dean pulled away from you and instantly began to bustle around the living room, grabbing anything he could get his hands on: strewn about clothes, his wallet, even the picture frames. Then, he paused, looked right at you, and pulled out his phone. You were about to ask him what in God’s name he was doing when he said something that made your heart fall in your chest.

“This is Special Agent Winchester, badge number 3554. Y/N’s been compromised, so I’m making the call for an immediate extraction. We need a safe house prepped.” He paused for a second to listen into the phone as you tried in vain to catch your breath.

Special Agent Winchester?! No, no. Dean’s a mechanic, not a special agent. This can’t be happening, this can’t be…

“Y/N.” Dean’s voice jarred you out of your spiral, and you looked up to find him holding a small duffel bag. “It’s time to go.”

“What?” you stammered, suddenly regaining your ability to talk in a big way. “No. No way, Dean. We’re not going anywhere until you tell me what the hell is going on.”

He shook his head and grabbed your arm. “Y/N, there’s no time. We gotta go…”

You ripped your arm out of his grasp and stepped back, folding your arms across your chest in the process. “Dean, I just saw my boss murder a man in cold blood, ran for my life from two crazy thugs, and heard my mechanic boyfriend, who I thought I knew everything about, call himself Special Agent Winchester. I’m barely holding onto my sanity as it is, so you better make...the...time.”

Dean stared at you closely for a moment, as if weighing his options, before he finally decided on the right course of action. He stepped towards you, reaching his arms out, the same arms you had once felt so safe in. “Look, Y/N, I never wanted you to find out like this. I was gonna tell you, but I….”

You held up your hand, your heart hardening at the words that seemed to confirm your worst fears: whatever this was, he was involved. “Cut the crap, Winchester. Just tell me the truth.”

Dean seemed to deflate right before your eyes, but he stepped back, giving you your space. “The truth? Fine. I’m not a mechanic. I work for the DEA.” You gasped softly, the sound getting caught in your throat as he continued. “Your boss, Jackson Carson, is an arms dealer, and a pretty notorious one at that, but he’s careful. We couldn’t pin him on anything, so the agency decided to send me undercover. They figured the best way for me to get anything on him would be to get close to someone who had access to him, someone who works for him, someone like…”

“Me,” you finished, your voice a breathless whisper. “You were going to get to him through me.”

He nodded, his eyes falling to the ground, where he stood in silence, giving you the chance to put it all together. “So, this,” you muttered, gesturing between the two of you, “all of this has just been one big lie? The way we met, our relationship, everything?! I was just some damn cover?!”

Dean’s eyes widened, and he looked up at you in horror. “Y/N, no. No! It was all real, baby…”

You shook your head, tears gathering in your eyes, and held out your hand. “Don’t you ‘baby’ me, Dean, don’t you dare. Not now.”

He closed his mouth, waiting a moment before trying again, speaking softly this time. “Y/N, I know you don’t believe this right now, but what we have, it’s real. It wasn’t supposed to be, believe me, and it sure as hell made things a whole lot more complicated, but what I feel for you is real. Hell, Y/N, I lov…”

“Don’t,” you breathed weakly. “Don’t.”

He nodded again, his body straightening and his eyes hardening, closing him off from you, before he held up the duffel bag again. “Look, I know you hate me right now, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. We still need to leave. I have a safe house waiting.”

You snorted. “Ha! If you think I’m going anywhere with you, you really are crazy. I think I’ll take my chances with the psycho killers.”

You turned and started to walk towards the door, but Dean was in front of you before you could even take a step, his broad chest blocking your path. He moved in close, pinning you to the spot with his intense gaze. “You aren’t going anywhere, Y/N. These guys, they’re not playing around. They’re professionals, and they won’t stop until they’ve found you and killed you. There’s nowhere you can hide, nowhere you will be safe, except with me. So, I’m sorry, but I don’t give a damn if you want to come or not, you’re coming. Now.”

Your jaw dropped at his impassioned speech, and all you could do was nod as he shoved the duffel bag into your hand. “Good,” he growled, taking your free hand and pulling you towards the door. “The safe house is a good 12 hours away by car, but we’re taking a train. We’ll be there by morning.”

“What,” you scoffed, “you couldn’t find anything closer?”

He looked down at you and gave you a half smile. “We didn’t exactly get a lot of notice, bab...Y/N,” he finished, catching himself. You felt your heart clench at his dropped endearment, but you shrugged it off. It was your choice to distance yourself, and you knew that you couldn’t back down now. How could you ever trust him again? No, after this was all over, you knew what you needed to do: leave Dean Winchester for good.

By the time you got on the train, it was nearing midnight, and you were exhausted, physically, mentally, and emotionally. You were so tired that you didn’t even object when Dean told you there was only one room left on the full train that you’d have to share. It was a nice sized room for such a small space, with two bunk beds, so you were willing to let it go and put up with it, especially since it was only for the night.

After all, you had much bigger problems than sharing a room with your soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend, and those problems all came rushing back to the forefront of your mind as soon as you and Dean were safely in the room and he pulled out a short, brown wig.

“You need to wear this.”

You laughed, the exhaustion making you practically delirious. “What? No! I’m not putting that on.”

Dean rolled his eyes. “Come on, Y/N. What if they find us? You want them to recognize you?”

You put your hands on your hips and narrowed the eyes. “Okay, how about you put on the ugly, uncomfortable-looking wig and I’ll go in disguise as a full-of-himself, lying DEA agent?”

Dean scowled. “Y/N, I swear, if you don’t stop fighting me on every damn decision, I’ll…”

“You’ll what, Dean?” you challenged. “You’ll break my heart? No wait, you already did that.”

Dean sighed hard, and dropped his head, tiredly rubbing circles over his eyes. “Y/N, please, I’m just trying to keep you alive. Please stop fighting me, at least for tonight. You can hate me all you want tomorrow once you’re safe.”

You bit your lip, closed your eyes, and took a deep breath. He was right. You knew he was right, but that didn’t make any of this any easier. “Fine. Give me the damn wig.”

He threw it to you and you bent over, gathering your hair in a bun before pulling it on, standing up, and straightening it. “God, I was right. This is uncomfortable.”

You looked up when you heard a deep laugh to find Dean smiling widely. “What?” you groaned. “Is it that bad?”

“No, no,” he insisted, unable to hold back his laughter. “Really, you look good.”

You rolled your eyes. “Yeah, right.”

“No, really!” he reiterated. “Did I ever tell you I have a thing for brunettes?”

“Shut up,” you shot back, but you couldn’t help but smile as you turned away to adjust the wig. You could feel Dean walking behind you, but before you could turn back to him, the train lurched, throwing you to the ground.

You screamed Dean’s name at the same moment he screamed yours, but he couldn’t catch you as you fell, hitting your knee on the bed as you went down. You muttered an expletive and tried to right yourself just as the power went out, plunging the room into darkness.

“Dean?” you cried out, hoping he was still nearby but unable to see anything in the pitch blackness.

“Yeah, baby, I’m right here,” he whispered, and, in a second, his hands were on you, strong and sure, pulling you towards him. “You okay? Are you hurt?”

You could hear the worry and underlying panic in his voice, and it made all your romantic feelings come rushing back, overwhelming your senses. No matter how hard you tried to hate him, you just couldn’t flip a switch on love. “I’m good,” you whispered, matching his soft tone. “I’m assuming that wasn’t supposed to happen?”

“Nope,” he muttered, “but, it could just be an engine problem. No reason to panic.” But, despite his calming words, you could feel his arms tighten around you, and you knew he was worried.

“What should we do?”

“Nothing. We stay here until the lights come back on and then I’ll check it out. I’m sure it’s just some incompetent conductor who pressed the wrong button or something.”

As if on cue, the train groaned again and the emergency lights flicked on, casting the room in a pale light, allowing you to finally see Dean, who was just inches from you, holding you in his lap on the middle of the floor. “See?” he whispered, with a soft smile. “Nothing to worry about.”

You nodded slowly as your eyes fell to his lips, so close you could practically touch them. He licked them once, causing a soft moan to fall from your lips, something you knew he had heard, because his whole body tightened around yours with a groan. “Y/N…”

“Dean…” you breathed, letting your body take the lead as you leaned in, your face now so close you could feel the burn of his scruff. But, before you could kiss him, a loud crash sounded, and the door banged open, startling you out of the moment.

You tried to look over, see what had made the noise, but Dean was up in a flash, lifting you and pushing you behind him as he pulled out a pearl-handled gun you hadn’t even known he had. “Dean? What…”

“Thugs,” he whispered to you, silencing you immediately. You held onto the back of his flannel, staring at the criss-crossed checkered lines and trying your best not to start screaming as he walked you back until the bed was at your back and he was at your front, blocking you entirely.

Then, he just waited.

It seemed like ages that the two of you stood there, but you knew it had had only been seconds before a very familiar-looking, giant of a man burst through the open door, launching himself with a wild scream at Dean, who easily blocked his punched. He responded with a swift kick to the giant’s gut that had him on the floor, despite his size advantage.

It took the attacker a moment, but he got right back up, charging at Dean until two quick shots stopped him in his tracks. You screamed and shut your eyes, trying to block out the sight, until you felt Dean’s warm hand on yours. “Come on. We gotta get out of here. Keep your eyes shut. I don’t want you to see him.”

You nodded, latching onto the calm, steady timbre of his voice as he took your hand and guided you out of the room. As soon as you were clear, he told you it was safe to open your eyes, never once dropping your hand.

You found yourself in the hallway outside your room, the emergency lights still pulsing steadily, making it seem much eerier than it had 20 minutes ago. Looking around, you felt dread creeping up your spine. There had been two men chasing you, so where was the other one? “Dean,” you whispered, prodding his back with your free hand, “he wasn’t alone.”

“I know, babe.” He nodded, confirming that he understood. “Just stay close, ‘k? I’m gonna get you outta here.”

He began to move slowly and steadily down the hallway, keeping you pinned to his side. You were almost to the door leading to the outside of the train when a rough hand yanked you back, ripping you away from Dean before you even had a chance to scream. One arm wrapped around your waist, and the other around your neck, harshly gripping you against a solid, unyielding body.

“Dean!” you screamed, but he was already turning, pistol raised, a deadly look on his face that would have scared you if it hadn’t been directed at the man currently holding you hostage.

“Let her go,” he said, his voice even and firm, free of any panic or hesitation.

“Not gonna happen, pretty boy,” the man behind you said. As he spoke, his hot breath ghosted over your ear, sending a repulsed shiver down your spine. “This little lady saw something she shouldn’t have. Now, we’re gonna deal with her, and then we’re gonna deal with you.”

“I’d like to see you try,” he growled, his stance never wavering. “Let her go and maybe I won’t put a bullet between your eyes, you son of a bitch.”

“I think you’re the one who should be worried about that, Agent,” a smooth, confident voice announced from just behind Dean just as Jackson Carson pressed the barrel of a gun to the back of his head. “Now, I think it’s about time you took your gun off my man, don’t you?”

Dean sighed heavily before he raised his gun into the air so Jackson could grab it. “Smart choice, Dean.”

He tossed the gun to the lackey holding you, who caught it with one hand while keeping his other arm anchored around your waist.

“You know, Carson,” Dean said, his hands still in the air, “I knew you were scum, but I didn’t think you were the type to kill a man with your daughter still in the house. That’s low, even for you.”

“Yeah? Well, I didn’t think you were the type to fall for your mark either, Dean, so I guess we were both wrong. Tell me something though- was the sex worth it?”

“You shut your mouth, you bastard,” Dean yelled, earning a sharp kick to the back of his legs that sent him to the floor with a cry of pain.

“Dean!” you screamed, struggling against your captor’s hold to get to him. “Leave him alone! I’m the one you want, not him.”

Jackson looked up, his eyes connecting with yours, a sadistic smile on his face. “Awe, looks like the bitch fell in love with you too. How sweet.” He looked down at Dean and grinned. “That’ll make it even better when I kill her right in front of your eyes.”

Dean roared, a primal scream of anger tearing from his lips as he surged up, knocking Jackson off balance and the gun right out of his hands. It skittered across the floor, but Dean grabbed it and fired at the man holding you.

The bullet hit him right between the eyes, the impact knocking you both backwards onto the ground. You screamed and scurried away from him, watching as Jackson raced towards Dean, grabbed his arms, and wrestled him to the ground. They turned over and over, both of them throwing punches in an effort to gain control the gun. You watched in horror, as Jackson got the gun away from Dean, aiming it straight at his heart, and you did the only thing you could do- you grabbed Dean’s gun from where it laid next to you and fired.

Your aim was true, the shot sailing straight through the air and right into Jackson’s chest, making him stumble and look down in shock at the growing bloodstain. He looked up at you again, raising his eyebrows and opening his mouth in surprise, before collapsing, his eyes shutting for the last time.

With shaking hands, you scooted backwards, staring horrified at the gun in your hands, while Dean crawled over to you and quickly took it, pulling you into his arms. “It’s okay, baby, it’s over. It’s over.”

You let yourself fall into his arms, barely even hearing his words as the images of blood and the sounds of screams echoed in your mind.

Dean got you off the train as fast as he could and “commandeered” a police vehicle to drive you back to your apartment. Now that the danger was over, the safe house wasn’t necessary. You didn’t speak the entire ride, numbly staring out the window, not even seeing the passing scenery you were staring at or Dean’s worried looks your direction.

Once you got home, you headed straight for the bathroom and shut the door, leaving Dean behind. He followed you, knocking a few times, but you ignored him, starting the shower and not even bothering to remove your clothes before you stepped in.

You had to get this blood off of you, to get clean. That was the only thing that mattered.

You stood there, under the stream of water, until long after it had run cold, but you didn’t notice, too caught up in your own mind to even hear Dean come into the bathroom. It was only when he climbed in behind you and wrapped his still-clothed arms around your body that you let yourself break down, the tears falling freely. He let you cry, just holding you, his forehead pressed against your hair until you were spent.

Once you were done crying, he gently reached around you and turned off the water, lifting you up and cradling your wet body against his. He carried you into the bedroom and placed you down on the bed. You let him softly strip off your clothes and change you into a t-shirt and pair of sleep shorts, never once speaking and him never once forcing it.

It wasn’t until he’d also stripped off his wet clothes and climbed into the bed next to you, drawing you back into his arms, content to just hold you and rub circles up and down your back, that you were ready to talk, the sound coming out as barely a whisper that only Dean could hear. “I’m a killer.”

“No,” Dean avowed forcefully. “You are the furthest thing from a killer I have ever seen, Y/N. They were the killers. You did what you had to do. You saved me. That doesn’t make you a killer.”

“It doesn’t?” you whispered.

“No, it doesn’t, and I know it doesn’t seem like that right now, but it will. Just give it time. Besides, none of this is your fault, it’s mine.”

You drew back, looking up at him, his deep green eyes meeting yours. “What are you talking about?”

“You never would have been in danger if I had done my damn job, but instead I let myself get distracted.” He paused and brought a hand up to your cheek. “By you. Y/N, falling in love with you was never part of the plan. I lost my focus, and I put you in danger. All of this, all of it, is my fault.”

“Dean, it’s not your fault. It wasn’t your fault my boss was a killer arms dealer, and it wasn’t your fault we fell in love.”

Dean’s eyes widened. “We?”

“Yes, we, Dean. I tried to deny it, I tried to turn it off, but I can’t. I love you. Even if you lied to me about who you are, I don’t care. I can’t stop loving you.”

A grin of pure joy spread over his face, shining right into your heart. “Really?”

“Yes, really, Dean,” you said with a laugh. “But, if you ever lie to me again, I will do something not very nice to your Impala and you better believe…”

Dean cut you off with his lips on yours, melting you into him, your hands wrapping around his neck and up into his hair. He growled into your mouth and pulled you against him, before pulling back and burying his face into your neck. “God, I love you.”

“I love you, too,” you proclaimed, your voice already breathless. “Now and forever.”

Forevers- @hamartiamacguffin @mrsdeanfuckingwinchester @katymacsupernatural @impandagrl @cyrilconnelly @impala-dreamer @castielhasthetardis @jarpadandjensenaremyheroes @shotgunintheimpala @be-amaziing @jalove-wecallhimdean @there-must-be-a-lock @mysterious-398 @hannahindie @emoryhemsworth @ohmychuckitssamanddean @wi-deangirl77 @carryonmywaywardcaptain @ericaprice2008 @masksandtruths @jpadjackles @roxyspearing @squirrel-moose-winchester @sweetpeamoose @babypieandwhiskey @deans-dirty-writer @roxy-davenport @heyitscam99 @starry-chaos @spnbaby-67

Dean Tags- @akshi8278 @whimsicalrobots @dean-winchesters-bacon

#dean winchester #dean x reader #dean fanfiction #dean fanfic #dean winchester x reader

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type-a-nomad · 6 years

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the rest of my week

Off the bat, for anyone reading this, the fact that I am starting to combine days is a very very good sign. It means that there are not enough particularly dramatic events going on in a single day so I wrap up the themes. So, yesterday was my first day actually volunteering at a project. The first half of my day was spent at an Educare center called Ruthy’s. An Educare center is basically a preschool/kindergarten for kids from ages 1-5. We were supposed to leave at 8 but, naturally, we didn’t leave until 8:30. We all piled into a small blue car and drove into the Township, Dunoon. Driving through, it’s not necessarily scary during the day, but the level of poverty was just as breathtaking as expected. We pulled into a two-story concrete house and the other two volunteers and I hopped out of the van. When we walked in the gate about 30 4-year olds were sitting on the rug clapping there hands and chanting “teacher teacher teacher!!!!!!!”. They were all wearing red and white. One of the boys was wearing all which with a huge red bowtie. Me being me, I couldn't remember any of their names. I loved the first hour. Kids clung to my legs and wanted hugs and kisses. At one point, I had a kid sitting on each of my legs while I'm sitting, a kid in each of my arms, and two little girls playing with my hair. These kids LOVE straight hair. It’s the highlight of their day I think. Especially because I’m blonde, I think it reminds them of the disney princesses they all have on their small plastic backpacks. It really made me think about how representation is so important. When I was little, I really took for granted the fact that I could dress up like Cinderella and actually feel like I looked like her. If you’re black, that’s not a feeling you really get on even close to something of the scale that I had it. It sounds small, but when you are a 4 year-old girl, a Disney Princess is as close as you get to Jesus Christ himself. Inside the Educare center, there was one large room, maybe 20x15, and then two smaller rooms both around 12x10. In the two small rooms were the little kids. There were 15 kids in each room, one all under the age of 2, the other all under the age of 4. In the big room there were about 30 kids who were all around 5 years-old. A lot of the kids had marked on their skin, as if they had the measles or smallpox at a young age. This bothered me, but was not entirely unexpected. The thing that was the most upsetting was that several kids were almost entirely emotionally or socially shut down. While 99% of the kids were thrilled to see the volunteers, a few were just unresponsive. I would sit with them for 10 minutes and they wouldn't say a word to me. It was very clear that they had suffered a traumatic experience to make them this way. It was really worrying to see a child, barely four years old, already haunted by and trying to cope with an experience that has left them so scarred they refuse to even talk to their teachers or young volunteers. They were shut-down to the point that the teachers would have to physically move their hands to get them to finger paint, or drag them to get them from one room to the next. Otherwise, they would sit looking into their laps, silent and apparently numb to anything going on around them. One girl, named Princess, was like this. She was around 5, with long braids and a pretty, pink dress on. I sat with her for over thirty minutes. I kept asking if she was okay. She would never respond. About 20 minutes in she started opening up a bit, moving her hands or shaking her head when I asked her questions. I gave her a hug and she started crying and holding onto my neck. I don’t think any of the other teachers noticed. By the end of the three hours I was entirely emotionally and physically exhausted. Even though the kids were fun and happy, having so many kids in such a tight space gives no room for discipline. The crazy ones are able to affect everyone because there’s no way to separate them. So all it takes is one kid to go wild and you’ve lost the whole group for 10 minutes. I realized fairly quickly I do not have the stamina to be a pre-school teacher and I am much better at working with either babies or kids older than 10 than I am 3-5 year olds. They’re just old enough to realize their independence, but too young to actually internalize the idea of authority or even general organization. It was like a very long, chaotic, mental exercise and I think, externally, I handled it well. Internally, I needed two ice creams and a back massage to recover from the whole thing. Unfortunately, that was not an option. When I got back to the hostel, I made myself a grilled cheese and put on sunscreen, as I was due to teach 14 year olds how to swim in 90 minutes. When it was time to go, I was feeling almost halfway recovered, which felt like better than I ever would have hoped. I piled in the van with the kids who had just been picked up from school and we all headed down to the beach. There were so many volunteers that we each had our own kid to work with. I was paired up with a 13 year old girl named Brandy. She was quiet, sweet, and goofy. The first thing we did was teaching them how to float. I have taken swim lessons all my life and realize that I have totally taken for granted how terrifying the ocean is if you don't know how to swim. She was so insistent that I not take my hands off her while trying to help her float because she was afraid she would sink and drown, even though we were only in 3 feet of water. Eventually, we got them all floating and then started working on flutter kicking and doggy paddling. During the summer in Cape Town, the largest cause of death among children is drowning. So far, the organization I am working with has trained 1,400 kids how to swim. That’s 1,400 potential drownings eliminated. By the end of the day I was absolutely exhausted and starving. For dinner we had a BBQ kind of thing called a potjie (pronounced poi-key), and one of the things we cooked was OSTRICH MEAT. Not even kidding. Apparently it’s very popular down here. Needless to say, I did not eat that much. Thursday morning I was supposed to go back to the daycare but because I was so incredibly tired, I changed my activity to fundraising instead. Nothing interesting really happened during the morning except a slow emotional and physical recovery on my part. In the afternoon we took 12 eighth-grade boys out and played soccer. They were so happy. I am not sure if I have ever seen somebody smile as big and genuinely as those kids while they were playing. They just had a great time. You could tell they really thought the female volunteers were cute. It was adorable (I realize they would be appalled if they heard me refer to them as “adorable”). They kept passing to me even though they know I don’t play at all. Every single other person on the field was better than me because soccer is such a bigger deal in non-US countries and I was the only American volunteer (I have only met 2 other Americans out of the 90 other volunteers). For dinner I had a meatball sub and was so hungry after that I walked down to the mini-mart and got an ice cream bar and some chocolate. Friday was killer. I went to a new daycare called Honeybee’s, which is notorious for being the craziest, poorest, and most disorganized out of all of the daycares. There were 75 kids in a 3-room house. It was chaos. Each room was roughly divided by age group and somebody in each room was always crying. The thing I noticed here that was more intense than the first daycare was the possessiveness of the kids. I don’t have a reference to compare them to from the US, but these kids were so appalled by the idea of sharing. It struck me so blatantly from the moment I started working with them. You could not get them to share their toys ever. I physically piled legos or cards or blocks in the middle of the table to get them to build something together or play together, and the second I moved my hands from the blocks, it was a scramble for who could sweep the most up into their arms before somebody else got them. The desperation, even for toys, was breathtaking. For snack, their parents are supposed to give them a piece of fruit in their bags. Some had a normal piece of fruit, but others had genuinely rotten fruit given to them by their parents. Rotten to the point where I felt horrible giving it out but the main teacher made me. The respect they had for this particular teacher was amazing. The second she left the room, all hell broke loose, but when she was there yelling at them, they were transfixed. One of my co-volunteers, Linda (around 60 years old and from Canada), was telling me that she knows why the teacher commands respect: she beats them. Linda told me about one time the woman took her belt off to adjust her sweater that was stuck underneath and, once she took it off and all of the kids saw, the entire room fell absolutely silent in fear. That’s the kind of environment these kids go to school in. A lot of them have bumps on their faces that I can’t really tell where from but it’s clearly some kind of illness. One boy in the youngest room had a face that was completely bloody. The entire area around his mouth and chin had really really deep gashes and cuts on it and there was a pink paste that was spread on top of it that I assume was supposed to help with healing the wounds but it looked to me like it was just getting all over his shirt. The best piece of news I have from the experience is that I figured out how to get them to all sit down and listen. First I yell “everybody put your hands up!!” and everyone does because they like following physical demands to get their energy out I think. Then I ask them to do a little wiggle, then quickly put their hands down. Then we repeat it until I am sure everyone is listening. Also, when I read them books for story time, I read in a really low voice and asked them what colors things in the drawings were to keep them checked-in. Further, whenever they would shout out the answers, I would say I couldn't hear them unless they use an “inside-voice”. Their favorite part of the day was when we took them outside to the small, sandy playpen across the street. I chased a few of them around and whenever somebody hit somebody else, I would pick them up and hold them while they cried and cried, clinging to me and never wanting to let go. It does not seem like these kids get a lot of hugs, so I try to give them out as much as I can without completely throwing off the lesson. The thing that upset me most during our outdoor playtime was how quickly the kids would start making guns out of sticks and papers lying around and pretending to shoot each other and people passing by. Their awareness of violence is breathtaking. When I got back at 12:30pm, 4 hours later, I made myself a meatball sandwich (which was really exciting because I usually don't have access to meat or protein until dinner time) and then proceeded to pass out for 6 hours because my head was pounding so hard consciousness wasn't really an option. So, anyways, I am still alive, starting to get to know people at the program, and settling in a bit. I will start posting photos soon. I am just too tired to even edit this piece so fancy media will be coming as soon as I start increasing my stamina for my daily program.

-Q

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foursprouthappiness-blog · 6 years

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He Just Wanted What Was Best For Me

New Post has been published on http://foursprout.com/happiness/he-just-wanted-what-was-best-for-me/

He Just Wanted What Was Best For Me

God & Man

When we met, he told me how much he adored me for being so ambitious, so independent.

“You’re not like other girls. You’re so smart and strong. You’ve accomplished so much. I can actually have a conversation with you!”

I was young and I didn’t know that men who said things like this, were not men you should have around. I brushed it off because he was right. I was smart and strong, and his opinions about me didn’t matter to me. He was a witty law undergrad, and he made me laugh. I enjoyed his company. Pretty soon we were dating.

I continued being the girl he claimed to adore, only a more extreme version. I steamed ahead with my own successes, while emotionally supporting him as he quit his job to pursue his dreams. We talked about building a future together. I helped him start his dream business, a box gym, and having been a strategist at one of the biggest global gym chains, I was able to talk him through the process, step by step. Having spent much of my career coming up with names for businesses, I did the same for him. I built his brand, developed his strategy. I held him while he sobbed at night over the erratic nature of entrepreneur-life, comforted him through the fickle nature of customer retention, pulled out charts and graphs to show him that this was a predictable part of the startup phase.

“Nobody turns profits immediately,” I reassured him. “It’s going to be okay.”

I took control of the parts of the business he couldn’t, often without him knowing, because I didn’t want him to stress out further. Because I had experience that he didn’t. Because he was childlike and fragile, despite his muscle and brawn, and I wanted to protect him.

Because I wanted what was best for him.

But I wasn’t super woman. I was working a full-time job, writing books at night, maintaining my own part-time business, pursuing my own dreams. The macro- and micro-managing took its toll on me. At some point, I suggested he take over the parts of his business I was handling, or make me a partner in it. Like a strong, accomplished woman would do.

He got angry.

“I didn’t ask you to help with any of it,” he snapped.

This was the first time I felt reality tilt. I distinctly remembered him asking me to come up with a name for his gym, to find a designer to design his logo, to set up his website. Because he had never had a proper job or bank account, we ran all his digital ads through my credit card. My address was listed as the primary address on all his email servers, his Google alerts, his business and search ratings. To this day, six years post our break up, they still are. Why?

“Can you help me with this? I have no idea how to do it.”

We’d been in his car when he said it. It was a sweltering summer’s day, and we were turning into Strand Street near the Cathedral in Cape Town. I was busy putting the exchange servers for his email into his phone.

“Is it working now?” he asked.

“Yes. It’s working.”

“Thank you so much,” he replied. “I don’t know what I’d do without you, my lioness.”

That’s what he used to call me. Lioness.

On another occasion, he would interrupt me while I was at work with a phone call.

“How do I get a sign made in the shape of our logo?”

It would take me an hour to tell him which printers to go to. To ask for something called a ‘die-cut’. To choose a light wood, so that it could be mounted. I reminded him of his Pantone, so that his colors would all match up.

“Thank you, my lioness. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“I never asked for your help.”

After that day, when I’d asked him for some help, some acknowledgment, he started distancing himself from me. I would hear from his friends that he’d say, “She’s just not much of a homemaker. She’s a little bit… crazy.”

He was right. I was too busy running half his business, as well as my own. Winning awards, writing a book that would go on to get four and five star reviews. Managing his emotions.

It left little time to care too much about cushions and vases. And honestly? It was making me a bit mad. I would collapse on weekends, exhausted.

“Why do you sleep so much?” he’d ask. “Are you depressed?”

Sometimes I wondered if we occupied the same reality.

He came from a wealthy family. His father had bought him his first home, and hired an interior designer to decorate it. He’d never worked three jobs. He’d never really had a proper job, to be fair. I was sympathetic. He just didn’t understand, I told myself.

I cried. A lot. Mostly on my own, but sometimes I’d cry in front of him.

“Why are you so emotional?” he started saying.

“You really shouldn’t drink that much Coke Light.”

“You look ridiculous in those glasses.”

“Are you really wearing those pants?”

He’d look at my body in a bikini, push his lips to one side.

“Hmm. I think this is the smallest you’ll get.”

I was tiny. Shrinking. Inside and out.

So small, I’d stopped questioning what was going on.

So small, I’d started believing him.

He in turn, got bigger every day, pushing heavier weights, downing Creatine protein shakes, obsessively staring at himself in mirrors.

“Maybe if I stop eating avo I can cut some calories…?” I mumbled.

But he’d tuned out, absorbed in his phone, editing pictures of himself. Choosing a filter for Instagram that would make his abs look the most cut.

“You should really stop posting pictures of yourself on the internet,” he said to me at some point. “You’re starting to look a bit vain.”

One night, on a weekend trip to attend the wedding of close friends, we were eating dinner, and he finished his food before me. Suddenly he stormed out of the room, slamming plates, doors.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, concerned. “Are you okay?”

“I can’t listen to you chewing anymore.”

I didn’t finish my dinner. I got into bed and stared back of his head. I hated myself for chewing so loudly that I’d pushed away the man I loved.

I resolved to chew softer. To be quieter.

Softer. Smaller.

I started speaking less and running excessively.

Ten kilometers became twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen.

Twice a week became three, four, five.

“Running doesn’t make you thin,” he said. “Only strength training makes you thin.”

Thin.

I’d been a runner long before I met him. Exercise had been a source of joy for me, a way for me to reconnect with my body.

“But I run because I love it.”

He’d snorted.

“Might as well not bother.”

At home, I would stare at myself in the mirror.

I’d spent much of my life dealing with body issues and eating disorders, something running had soothed and solved. Had it all been a waste of time? At lunches with his family, I’d stare at his sister’s shoulder blades, poking out of her skin like coat hangers; a tiny, delicate pterodactyl in Country Road dresses.

“Men actually find strong women sexy,” he’d say, directly contradicting himself.

His sister would peck at her food, pushing it around her plate.

“Are you really going to have another piece of cake?” he’d say to me.

I began dissociating, detaching from the endless emotional push and pull.

“I just want to help you. I just want what’s best for you,” he’d say.

I believed him. I needed help. Faced with the apparent disaster that was me, I’d cry.

I’d cry and cry and cry.

“I think you should see a psychologist,” he said. “It’s clear that you have problems. You have pain you need to deal with.”

At this point, I believed him. The pain was real.

I went to a psychologist, who told me that he was toxic, his behavior controlling. This wasn’t what I wanted to hear, though. I was the problem, I explained. So I stopped going to the psychologist. But my boyfriend did not like this.

“You really need to sort yourself out,” he said. “It’s those friends of yours, they’re a bad influence.”

I’d long lost the will to argue. I began seeing my best friend in secret.

“I’m glad you’re not hanging out with her anymore. Let’s face it, she’s a slut. You know I’m only saying this because I love you, right? Because I’m concerned for you.”

“I know,” I said, through tears. “I know.”

My gran died a month before her 99th birthday.

He didn’t come with me to the funeral. He went to gym, instead.

“I’m going for a new PB today,” he’d texted me that morning. “I’ll let you know how it goes.”

When I called him on my way home, I asked if he could help me carry a chair I’d retrieved from her room in the retirement village, a keepsake by which to remember her.

He was waiting outside my apartment when I returned.

“I smashed the workout!” he said. “Record time. How was the funeral?”

I can’t remember what I said. What do you say?

Great. Awesome. There was cake. Cool party. My gran’s dead.

When we got inside, I opened the balcony door so my cat could go outside. He stepped out and found an ashtray. I’d smoked a joint a few nights earlier, with my now secret bestie, trying to ease my grief. Trying to sleep better. Trying to get by. What happened next is a blur.

He erupted into a rage. He smashed the ashtray, pushed open the door, stormed out of the house.

He yelled something, I can’t remember what. I remember feeling fear; physical, emotional. There was swearing. I tugged at his arms, he shrugged me off. I stood in front of his car as he tried to drive away. He revved his engine, me sprawled across the bonnet.

“Just talk to me,” I pleaded.

We were that couple. Neighbours peered out of their windows. After he drove away, he refused to take my calls for two weeks. When he finally did, he was the one sitting crying in my lounge.

“I don’t think I can do this,” he said. “I feel like I’ve been chosen, by God. Like, this gym is my calling. I need to focus on it.”

And just like that, I realized I wasn’t the crazy person.

He still runs his gym. The other day I saw he put up a post, thanking everyone who’d helped him get to where he is. My name isn’t listed there. Like so many women who’ve built the careers of men, I’d been erased.

It’s okay. I doubt he did it maliciously.

He probably just wanted what was best for me.

#Happiness

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simplymorganunedited-blog · 7 years

Text

Just Trying to Understand: Peter’s Story

Update: 1 week 5 days. It’s still not okay.

My dad calls me every day. He’s worried, I can tell by his voice, and by the fact he calls me twice a day.

Real Talk: I don't know how to reassure him that I’m okay, because I’m not really sure that I am.

Flashback: 1995-2013

Mom is my world. Dad is a pleasant, nice man who buys ice cream. He works a lot, and is a little scary. He’s less likely to let me have what I want and he has more rules. Mom is better.

I have pleasant memories of times with my Dad. We used to walk to the mail whenever he was home, and we’d stop at the Banff Clock Tower and get a gumball, literally every time. They cost 25 cents and they had one of those cool cause and effect gumball machines. (There’s and actual name for it, but it’s escaping me right now.) It was so fascinating, even on the 200th gumball. The pink ones were the best. I loved watching the 6:00 CTV news with him, on days when my mom would work nights, because we would get to eat in front of my TV (RARE occasion in my household). It was always pork chops, pork chops and peas and pesto pasta.

He wasn't around much, and most of my memories are of times with my mom. This wasn't his fault, just our circumstances. I felt like I didn't really know him. He was a nice man, a pleasant man; someone who I knew loved me very much. But her. I told her everything. She was the one I ran to, cried to, screamed at, loved with all of myself.

September 2013:

Me, Mom, and Dad. The living room.

“Morgie, I have cancer.”

*World implodes

May 11, 2014:

Me and Dad. Red Deer Hospice. Room #2.

He’s crying. He should be. He reaches out to hug me.

I pull away.

I felt utterly abandoned. I had this gaping hole in my life. Not only had I lost my mother, best friend and adventure buddy, but I lost the one person in my life I felt like I could truly talk to. How on earth was I supposed to relate to this 54 year old mechanic? How could he understand me? How could I understand him? How the f**k were we going to survive?

A lot of questions. No answers.

July 2014:

One statement: “Mom should be here. Not you.”

It broke him.

I wish I didn’t say it. I wish I didn't think it.

I wish I didn't mean it.

We lived our lives around each other those first few years. Never really speaking, never really interacting. I missed a lot of hugs. I missed having a genuine connection with another human being; someone older, that I could talk to. But how could I talk to my DAD about how I didn't think boys liked me, or I felt awkward because a lot of my peers had started drinking and partying and I felt left out? Like honestly, how do you ask your 54 year old Dad for advice about that kind of stuff?

I’m sure he missed it too. I’m sure he was so afraid, so unsure about doing something wrong; wanting to reach out to me, needing to talk, but not knowing how. I was too selfish to see it at the time, too blinded by my own anger, my own grief, to see him for what he was, what he is.

My Dad: The kind of guy who makes his own memes to cheer me up when I’ve had a bad day. (These almost always include pictures of owls, or cowboys from the Ponoka stampede) The kind of guy who makes me laugh out loud when he calls out hipster couples at coffee shops for being “f**cking weird.” The kind of man who drives three hours just to have coffee with me on Father’s Day. He makes me a cheesecake every year on my birthday. (Homemade, not store bought. Like the real deal) He draws a cat on every little note he leaves for me, because he knows it makes me smile. He always tells me to check my oil, which drives me crazy, but I know he does it because he loves me. He is the kind of man who sticks it out, through cancer, ED and everything in between, without a thought for himself. That’s who Peter Jenkin is.

August 7, 2015:

“Hey Dad. I need to talk to you about something when you get home.”

He blamed himself. Of course he did. He was supposed to know, supposed to see, supposed to understand, he should have sent me to get counselling, he should have been more open, he should have communicated more, he should have listened, he should have done more research, he is so sorry. The list could go on forever.

It broke my heart. How could I tell him; you didn't do this. Mom didn't do this. I didn't even do this. My brain did this. It’s no one’s fault. Dad this isn't your fault.

I used to tell people, “My dad can fix everything, except the crack of dawn and a broken heart.”

And me.

He couldn't fix me.

Real Talk: It’s been hard. It’s been hard to be open, to be candid, to be raw with my father.

I have spent my life perfecting myself, to everyone around me. I always have to be the best, the brightest, the most amazing. So, how do I show someone whose approval I crave over everyone’s the blackest, most broken part of myself?

I just want him to be proud of me.

I also just want to protect him. I constantly feel like I’ve let him down, by being this way. He has had to deal with so much, be so strong, hold our entire world on his shoulders. Alone. He’s had to do it alone.

This breaks me.

So, how do I talk to him? How do I tell him when I’m struggling; because I know he’ll up until 3 am worrying, trying to figure out how to help me, blaming himself for not knowing how? How can I protect him from that?

I just don't tell him.

This hurts him more.

Catch 22.

“Morgie, I just want to understand.”

So, how do I explain to him? How can I teach him what it’s like to hate yourself? How can I tell him about the times I stood in the laundry room while he was sleeping upstairs puking my guts out because I was terrified of ice cream? How do I tell him that the cheesecake he makes me for my birthday every year causes me unending amounts of anxiety?

How?

I know it hurts him. I know he’s worried. I know it scares the living hell out of him. I know he wishes she was here, just like I do, because she’s the only one in the world that could fix it.

June 2017:

“Dad, he left.”

“Oh honey, I’m so sorry. Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m alright. Plenty of fish in the sea right?”

*Hangs up phone. Breaks down crying.

We haven't talked a lot since. I don't really know what to say. How do I tell him that it's been so much worse, that I don't want to eat? How do I explain to him how stressed I am, or that I’m emotionally, physically drained? How do I tell him that they sent me home early from work with heat exhaustion?

I don't. Because he’ll worry.

It hurts him. He worries anyway.

July 2017:

“Morgie, I just want to understand.”

Dad, I don't understand either.

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