#aagh i know it sounds dumb

[hellohoihey]

today i experienced some great stuff but also there were some kinda reckless and stupid parts there.( i was right about there being a good chance of me getting permanent hearing damage from this. )

#luckily nothing bad happened #But really don't want to unecessarily damage my ears and i definitely have a ringing sound rn #Plus internet said yes you can and will get damage from that (you dumb cunt) #Should have known i qas right about that tbh but also didn't have any earplugs on me #sayingthing #I hate this because it was a great experience but this really does bring it down (luckily i wasn't planning on a repeat anyways) #Aagh i don't know what lesson to take from this #Mixed feelings rn

[dorimena]

I seriously love Bakugou and Todoroki. Especially Bakugou in his tight winter costume in S5. And I love Dom reader and femdom more than a sub. Can I pleaseee request Todoroki or Bakugou where the reader is recording them playing with a vibrator or dildo but get overstimulated because they can't cum from the cock ring because it's their punishments since they forgot their anniversary so reader also forget to stop the toys even if they beg reader to stop in the camera.if you don't mind the request

I don’t mind~ May your sin be forgiven with this prayer (˘⌣˘人) This sounds really, really sexy, so I had a blast imagining and putting this into words.

𝔠𝔥𝔞𝔯𝔞𝔠𝔱𝔢𝔯; bakugou katsuki & todoroki shoto

𝔴𝔬𝔯𝔡 𝔠𝔬𝔲𝔫𝔱; 2.1k

𝔴𝔞𝔯𝔫𝔦𝔫𝔤𝔰; fem!reader, sex toys (dildo, vibrators, cockring), overstimulation, cam sex (recording), exhibitionism, semi-public, dom!reader, sub!character

𝔬𝔱𝔥𝔢𝔯 𝔱𝔞𝔤𝔰; balcony sex (?), threesome, whiny Bakugou, weeping Todoroki, punishment, orgasm denial, aged-up characters, Bakugou and Todoroki are both 20+

𝔰𝔦𝔡𝔢𝔫𝔬𝔱𝔢; Unravel Me by Sabrina Claudio and Fuck Love by XXXTENTACION ft. Trippie Reid somehow helped me piece this together. Sorry if there are any typos! It’s not proofread.

𝕯𝖔𝖚𝖇𝖑𝖊 𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖚𝖇𝖑𝖊

“I-I-”

“W-we! We-”

You watch as both men struggle to speak, trying to ask for forgiveness, once again. It’s the fourth time this hour, the way Bakugou tries to open his mouth wide enough to not slur his words and Todoroki tries to correct Bakugou while keeping himself coherent.

It’s cute how the smartest guys in your life seem to fail miserably in having a decent human conversation

Well, you can’t blame them either, not with the way you keep toying around with the intensity of the vibrators taped to their dicks, cum drying on the toy enough to show anyone who looks up on the balcony that these two men, with such stature and muscles, are easily falling apart.

“Speak better, sweethearts. Can’t have you guys sounding so dumb on camera, right?”

Oh yeah, and you’re even recording them, in case anyone else would want to watch the rising proheros break.

You’re not actually going to show them to the public, but maybe to their friends. Maybe Kirishima would like to watch? Kaminari? Sero? Or maybe Iida? Midoriya?

Heck, the girls might even ask some day.

But you know what makes you curious about showing this video to their friends?

The way both Bakugou and Todoroki are presenting themselves beautifully, as if they’re pro porn stars saving the wanks rather than proheros saving the day.

It’s cute, how Bakugou’s puffing his muscular chest in the air as if they were the juiciest tits ever, which they are, and how Todoroki is somehow sensually humping the air with every buzz against his furious red tip.

Your eyes stay on the screen, making sure the lighting is entering nice enough to make it seem like they’re glowing, other than their post-orgasm glow.

How many times have they come by now?

“Babes, how many times have you cum?”

They both shake their heads.

Of course they wouldn’t know. They just take what they’re receiving. They’re making up for their mistake.

You still pout, tapping the touchable screen to even out the weird lighting as another cloud covers the sun, again.

Maybe giving their punishment out on the balcony wasn’t such a good idea.

As you look down to the floor below them, seeing the once growing puddle of cum slowly be pushed by the wind to trail off towards the side of the balcony, seeping through the small opening and probably dripping feets below is what keeps you positive, happy knowing people will eventually look up and wonder ‘what the fuck is going on?’

Well, either the drying cum gives away your dirty activities or it’s Todoroki’s wailing as an orgasm is ripped out of him forcibly.

Pity nothing comes from his tip, not since some time ago.

They both thought they deserve to cum and be satisfied?

Maybe you should’ve put the cock rings on them before making them come the first two times, but their reactions and frustration with how little some cum leaves or how their body reacts with the dry convulsions makes you giggle in pride.

Pretty babes.

“Todoroki, shut up. You’ll make the neighbors look over- oh! Oh, that’s what you want? I understand.”

And poor Todoroki is just shaking his head way too fast, enough to give him whiplash, but you just snicker as you reach over to a white box.

An unfamiliar white box.

Bakugou’s eyeing Todoroki in pity, wondering what the other will have to endure as he keeps trying to fight off his orgasm.

How he’s doing it, he has no clue. But god his dick hurts.

He’s been wanting to cum for the past 30 minutes, but with the way he resents this stupid cock ring, he’d rather not humilliate himself in front of you and figure out how else to please you.

Maybe he should offer to eat you out?

The way his body is super tense and his breathing is shallow doesn’t escape your attention, less how much pity is showing itself on his face as he shakes his face in disapproval with Todoroki’s recent dry orgasm.

Good thing you invested in this double dildo.

Neither of the boys take notice with how you’re lubing the dildo that looks like it’d belong to you. It’s quite pretty, long and thick enough to hopefully please your boys.

Even if they won’t get to cum.

“Bakugou,” you start, smiling as you watch his once bright eyes suddenly darken as shock takes over his face.

What the

“Fuck is that?!” He yells out, accidentally letting his body relax as it finally submits to the vibrations of the toy, his yell turning into an unbroken series of high-pitched moans, his hips losing control with how incredibly close he is.

“A double dildo, baby. Look! It even looks like if I’d be fucking you two, isn’t that fun?”

Bakugou shakes his head, gasping ‘no, no, no!’ before he falls forward, balancing himself with his palms as he sobs through his first dry orgasm. Maybe he shouldn’t have held back for so long, not with the way his body unforgivably goes through waves of pure unsatisfied pleasure.

Todoroki, meanwhile, is nodding eagerly, eyes welling up in happy tears at the idea of getting fucked, in getting more pleasure and love from you, even if this is meant to be punishment.

But, why are you exposing them like this?

They forgot your anniversary.

Your 3rd anniversary as a throuple, the anniversary Bakugou swallowed his bite and pride to confess to you how much he loves you and how he’s falling in love with Todoroki too; the anniversary Todoroki finally let loose the dam of emotions and even if a bit tipsy, agreed he too was falling in love with both you and Bakugou, how he hasn’t ever felt so understood, so loved, so safe.

So, yeah, how dare they forget?

But if they wanna be dumb, you’ll help with that.

It’s been a while now since you’ve turned off the vibrators and since you’ve prepped them well enough to take the dildo together.

The scene in front of you is gorgeous, ethereal, sublime.

You just want to ruin them like this everyday.

“Aagh! Ugh! F-fuck! Sl-slow do-own! Haaah~”

“S-sorry! ‘m s-sorry! Ca-an’t! Nnah…”

It’s cute watching them argue a bit, how Bakugou can’t take how fast Todoroki is fucking himself back on the dildo while also pushing the toy deeper into Bakugou. And Todoroki doesn’t actually look sorry, not with how his eyes keep crossing everytime he manages to get the toy to hit his sweet spot.

He’s trying so hard to win your forgiveness by putting up with this, but it’s kind of sad knowing you’re not going to stop anytime soon, or take off the cockrings.

Not like they know anyways.

Bakugou might’ve known, might’ve noticed, with the way he’s trying to keep this dragging as slow and steady as possible; with the way his precum is struggling to escape the confines the cockring gives; with how much his red and miserably hard dick keeps jumping with every push Todoroki’s ass gives him.

You’re lounging about, resisting the urge to get off to the scene in front of you, or else they’d start begging to let them please you as apologies, and knowing how sentimental this day is for you, you know you’d immediately give in.

But this is punishment for their forgetfulness.

So, as the cherry on top of this cum covered balcony sex sundae, you’ll also forget about them.

It lasted for a while as you got bored with how neither of them seemed to be reaching another orgasm.

If only the dildo had a vibration option.

But the vibrators still taped on their dicks will have to do.

So you turn them back on, and oh would you look at that! The cockrings could also vibrate.

The pleasure-filled scream coming from Bakugou and the cute, drawled whine of your name Todoroki lets out makes you feel grateful for thinking ahead, kinda.

Now both boys are writhing against each other, different ways to let out their desperations and dying need to properly cum manifesting in either rapid fucking on the dildo to simply submitting to the minstruations of the other party.

To put it in better, shorter words, Bakugou took the reigns in fucking the dildo in such rigor and strength that made Todoroki lay on his chest, ass still up as he simply took everything Bakugou kept pushing into him, mouth opened as hiccups and drool escaped. His eyes settle onto your form, watering as more tears gather on his waterline before dropping to the ground his face is resting on.

It feels so good, so, so good he can’t believe this is punishment. Even if he hasn’t been able to properly cum for some time now, he still thinks you’re being nice with them. Must be because of the anniversary that you sadly reminded them of.

He’s trying his best to push back on the dildo, wanting Bakugou to feel just as good as him, just as fucked as him.

And everytime the toy hits him just right, Todoroki sees stars, feels an all too familiar tingly sensation as he tries to grab his dick, but when you turn the vibrator up even more, his hands just lay on the ground, nails raking as he tries gripping on something, anything.

He really, really, really needs to cum. He wants to cum.

Keep being a good boy for you.

But all he gets is a choked sob of your name leaving his mouth as his eyes roll to the back of his head, eyebrows furrowed upwards as the strongest orgasm takes over his body, he’d be convinced there’s an earthquake happening. Small whimpers of how much it hurts leaves his mouth soon after, his dick twitching pathetically as it slowly becomes purple, barely a dribble of cum managing to escape.

Bakugou is in no good shape either, loudly moaning and crying out how good you’re fucking him, how he’s taking your cock, how good he is being, to please, please, please let him cum.

But actually cum, to let him contaminate the floor even more with his sperm, to let him taste it even, if that would make you happy and forgive him.

He’s close to wailing by now, hips going impossible faster as he forgets all about poor Todoroki riding out his high.

And the moment you turn on the vibrators intensity, he gets dizzy, breath getting stuck in his throat as his brain tries to process the spiraling of his warm, hot orgasm growing too much, burning him everywhere as if it were lava.

Small sparks sound on his fingertips as he howls and gets hurled into his own orgasm, back arching and head thrown back as his eyes roll to the back of his head.

He didn’t even notice the tears rolling down his cheeks, not with how his mind only cares about how good yet bad this orgasm feels.

Not even how loud his high-pitched wails of how good it feels, how much it hurts, is enough to alarm anyone near the radius of this defiling act.

Both boys are left shuddering or twitching through their intense dry orgasm, the way their bodies react with the built up cum in their dicks, with how hot and how wreckless they’re becoming with their quirks.

Still connected with the dildo, neither move, unless it’s some pathetic hump to help drag the orgasm a little more before they try to even remember what letter your name begins with.

Bakugou’s whimpering.

Todoroki’s crying silently.

Both blinking the haze out of their vision as they remember about the buzzing, about the relentless feeling on their really, really sensitive dicks.

Bakugou’s crying now.

Todoroki’s just busy mewling like a slut by now.

And when they both turn to look at you, they gasp so loudly one of them begins choking on air and the other with saliva.

Where’d you go?!

Come back!

And ‘come back’ and ‘forgive us’ is the only thing anyone could possibly hear for the next few hours as they fuck the dildo and let the vibrators do their job in milking more and more orgasms out of them.

If only they’d look closer, they would’ve seen a post-it note stuck on the tripod of the camera telling them you went to the kitchen and that they better come crawling.

Oh well, you’re enjoying the view anyways as you sip on some liquor of your liking, turning off the vibrators as you slowly walk to the balcony.

The sun’s beginning to set. You’re not that cruel in letting them fuck each other in the cold.

The bedroom is much better, and comfier.

Perfect for you to finish the job and let them finally, finally, get their deserving orgasms.

You’ll be sure to milk out

Every.

Single.

Drop.

#✿; impurity #bnha smut #mha smut #bakugou smut #todoroki smut #bakugou katsuki smut #todoroki shoto smut #sub bnha #sub bakugou #sub todoroki #ლ; blasphemy #𝖇𝖆𝖐𝖚𝖌𝖔𝖚 #𝖙𝖔𝖉𝖔𝖗𝖔𝖐𝖎.𝖘

[dreamii-yume]

SPOILERSSS for Twisted Wonderland Chapter 6 : 1-16!!!

*rubs hands* aight it wont take long before genshin has me in its gacha hell grasp again, I just barely escaped this time— NOW ITS TIME TO SEE THE BOIS CHAPTER 6 omg— wtf happened last time lol it’s been too long

So, no voice over because of some problems which is understandable but— meh I don’t feel like reading lol So I’m watching otome ayui translations this time, because im that one dumbass student who skipped kanji class and now i cant read without sounding like im five _:(´ཀ`」 ∠): “what up im yume im way passed 19 and i never fucking learned how to read”

Also watching Hanayura Kanon stream for the rest that’s not yet been translated lol Because he’s very good at voice acting for the characters and he’s funny af lol

- OKAY OKAY— WTF HAPPENED EXPLAIN

- Fun fact : I haven’t watched Hercules yet so I legit don’t know what’s about to come lol

- Aw, that’s cute— We called over Ace and Deuce late at night AND THEY REALLY CAME OVER AAAAA

- I forgot how fckin pure their friendship is _:(´ཀ`」 ∠):

- Aight, so we actually have a huge-ass scratch from feral Grim lol That’s just fantastic, isn’t it

- FINALLY— We’re talking about Mickey and the stones my monster cat has been eating with Crowley AAAAA

- “Yeah there’s this bitch called mickey and i took his photo—“

- WE’RE FINALLY TALKING ABOUT THIS. AFTER 6 CHAPTERS.

- Bruh this crystal of blot sounds really dangerous why are we discussing this just now

- Speaking of this crystal, Crowley— you were looking for this crystal in chap one and when we asked you about wtf you’re trying to find you just went— “oH itS NothING.”

- I SUPPOSED ITS NOT NOTHING NOW IS IT

- I didnt see you searching for crystals after every chapter mr. crowley where were you 👁👄👁 dont you think it was weird that you didnt see a single one after like— five blotting incidents

- Oh so its rare i see— BRUH R U SURE ABOUT THAT grim literally found one every single chap LMAO

- Okay okay— see, he may be violent but listen— you aint gonna throw out my fucking cat okay

- Wh— THERE WAS A FESTIVAL!? Im dumb so its not just VDC LOL

- Listen LISTEN— GRIM IS FINE. HOLD UP— NO NEED TO THROW HIM OUT JUST LET ME HAVE ANOTHER LOOK AT HIM

- Aww, Ace and Deuce looked pissed about it too AAAAHH THE TRUE DEFINITION OF THE BOIS

- BRUH NO— ALL THE DORM LEADERS TO GO AND CAPTURE GRIM?? HE’LL DIE

- CROWLEY PLS— WE CAN TALK ABOUT THIS, HONEY

- #Grimportectionsquad

- “It’s bout time for them to come” Who?

- FUCKING— CROWLEY STOP SAYING ITS NOTHING— This is why this school is so fucked, you never tell us anything ahead of time _:(´ཀ`」 ∠):

- Aight he left, Ace Deuce hurry help me what you guys got

- He may be a monster but see— the worst he did is eat the whole tuna stack SO PLS HES STILL BABY AND I LOVE HIM

- THATS RIGHT DEUCE MY MAN GRIM CAN DO NO BAD I SWEAR

- HE WOULDNT EVER AGAIN I SWEAR

- Ace ヽ(；▽；)ノ The character development— im so proud of you, son

- THIS IS THE BOISSS— LETS GOOOO

- Fuck this is so beautiful— just me and the bois on our way in the middle of the night to find our MISSING CAT I—

- CROWLEY REALLY DID ASSEMBLE THEM DORM LEADERS AAAAAAA AT THIS HOUR TOO WTF

- BRUH WE CAN TALK

- Kalim Kalim Kalim Vil Vil Vil— Pls we’ve been through so much last chapter ＨＥＬＰ

- Leona…A big fat ｍｏｏｄ honestly lmao

- Ey ey riddle pls— dont make this any more difficult—

- Shut up azul stay where u are all you’ve done is nothing but chaos since you arrive so SHHH

- MALLEUS IS NOT HERE AGAIN LILIA PLS— where is he when we need him the most LOL

- Ortho, your bro where?? Also— SURVIVAL STATUS BRUH—

- YES PLS DONT HURT HIM OMG

- oh i forgot idia lives in his tablet LOL OF COURSE

- Omg he’s in the apple trees still looking scary as shi aaaaaaa pls kitty come home u just had too much catnip

- OH GOD 15m HE’S CLOSE

- “Starting operation” ORTHO WHAT TF

- EY EY EY oh good he’s knocked out sighhh

- Aight I know this has been translated but I can’t help but to look at the original japanese and im just— wtf is RTS and TAS idia i dont understand this advanced gamer otaku language

- But Idia and Ortho really do be speedrunning on who can fucking kick my cat the hardest LOL

- THATS RIGHT IDIA You understand me— Fellow cat lovers unite, Grim is very cute, he can’t do no bad

- …so can i have him back pls—

- Can we just appreciate the fact that these bois are willing to take the risk of getting their heads chopped off by Riddle by doing all this for us??

- If this isnt what you call true friendship then i dont know what this is

- Lol ambrose is going to appear in this festival again and crowley’s prideful ass is QUAKING

- WHY are we not allowed to see him crowley im sure we can handle it— We’re the BOIS. CMON

- Imagine if they just summon a fcuking— magic vet or something lol

- It’s the next day lol

- HAH ITS THE VDC LOSERS BY ONE VOTE SQUAD

- I mean the NRC Tribe— ٩( ᐛ )و

- VIL. what you have my queen

- Vil pls dont remind me that my cat isnt here but thank you for saying thank you i do not deserve—

- AWW THE ADEUCE SQUAD LOOKS SO SAD AAAAA

- Vil i miss the bad bitch but absolute oneesan energy but the apology— yeah are we gonna cry again lol

- AAAAAAHH why am i so proud— THAT vil is apologizing

- You dont need to maam what we had in chapter 5 was a fucking journey i regret nothing

- I swear if rook goes like— bitch that aint beautiful imma bonk him I WILL DO IT dont think i forgot what u did last chap

- Man i love me a man who can openly admit his mistakes MMMGH

- Rook i swear—

- Im glad that we’re not toning down ace’s brutal honesty lol

- BRUHHH I DONT LIKE IT WHEN VIL US TAKING ALL THE BLAME i mean what he said was kinda true BUT STILL

- Cheer up Vil, it’s not like it’s a complete failure anyways (；ω；) it was fun at least

- Hearing Jamil encourage Vil like this feels surreal BUT YES BOI U TELL EM

- What is this beautiful character development

- Ooff way to hit where it hurts the most vil my queen lol

- AAGH IT HURTS VIL RECOGNIZING NEIGE’S HARDWORK LIKE THIS— THE PRIDE I CAN FEEL IT ＣＲＡＣＫ

- Bruh we appreciate Neige’s impeccable smile in this household— REMEMBER WHEN EVERYONE WAS LIKE NEIGE’S GON BE A BAD BOI??? WELP—

- It was me, i was that person and i shall drown in apple juice for it

- Of course, the ultimate Neige simp already knows that lol

- Bruh the background music has no business being this sad　ｓｔｏｐ

- I hate it when vil is right sometimes omg— TRUEEE KALIM especially wouldn’t be able to stand properly on stage after knowing Neige’s own hardships aaaa

- NOO BABY DONT CRY

- Vil redemption arc??? 👀👀 you can help us cure our cat—

- !? Are we gonna get that money promised in that poster?? 👀👀

- WHAA FUCKING WAHAA VIL IS GONNA PAY THAT US??? THE WHOLE 5 MIL EACH??!! VIL CALM DOWN WHAT I SAID WAS A JOKE

- Damn vil is ＳＴＡＣＫＥＤ He really didnt want to owe anyone anything LMAO YES QUEEN

- WHA— KALIM IS ACCEPTING??? OUT OF EVERYONE HERE, I DID NOT EXPECT YOU TO ACCEPT THAT KALIM

- Kalim is making my heart go boom boom again baby boi ✨👁💧👄💧👁✨✨

- HE’LL DONATE IT TO THE RAMSHACKLE DORM BABY BOIIII

- …sumimasen kalim for having a very rundown dorm 👁💧👄💧👁 but thank you for being nice about it lol

- OKAY OKAY KALIM YOU DONT HAVE TO LIST ALL THE THINGS WRONG IN MY DORM PLS—

- THIS IS EMBARRASSING PLS KALIM IM SORRY FOR BEING POOR

- But this man be such a sunshine holy shit i cant even be mad about it lol

- AW YEAH RAMSHACKLE DORM IS GONNA GET A MAKEOVER

- EVERYONE BE DONATING THEIR MONEY TO US AAAAA Were they always this NICE

- Aight adeuce pls— y’all dont have to force yourself to donate my guys (´；ω；`) being friends is enough lol i get it my bois

- Find me a man who can make me feel like this the way Vil can

- Man if only Grim is here :’) he’d be soo happy :’)) you can have all the tuna you want buddy :’)))

- GRIM PLS ADEUCE IS WILLING TO TREAT YOU TO LUNCH BABY

- Bro this is so wholesome omg

- Im sorry but still up to this day, my understanding of Epel’s accent is still　ｌａｃｋｉｎｇ lmao

- Aight they be talking about how Rook already knew that they were going to lose from the very beginning

- The FORESHADOWING LOL The difference with how Rook said “What a wonderful performance” rather than “What a beautiful performance” sigh

- Honestly we gotta respect Rook’s resolve here lol man just knows what he wants

- Rook and Vil’s friendship lmao

- 👁👄👁 …!?

- EARTHQUAKE WTF How dare you ruin such moment—

- WHAT IS GOING ON

- EY WTF DONT DESTROY MY DORM WTF ARE YOU GUYS

- WHAT ARE THESE ROBOTS OUTSIDERS KILL THEM WITH FIRE

- They look like something that belongs to the Ignihyde dorm HUH

- Oh bruh— Vil in his Dorm Leader mode is so cool AND YES I KNOW THIS IS NOT THE TIME BUT wheww~~ Vil YAS QUEEN

- KALIM TOO AAAAAA JAMIL’S 「はっ！」SO COOL

- so SO— the dorm leader’s have a protocol for outsider attacks like this 👁👄👁 OMG THEY’RE SO HOT

- They don’t seem like our bois anymore aaa just pure professionalism at this point—

- GOD I FORGOT HOW COOL THEY ARE OMG

- HEEEYYY OUR DORM IS GETTING DESTROYED WTF ARE THESE GUYS’ PROBLEM

- We were just talking about renovating it too wtf

- AAAAAHHH HOW DARE YOU— VIL R YOU OK

- Bruh i dont know what is going on but dont touch my man’s face

- They’re targetting Vil and Jamil WHY— overblot men!!??? WHERE ARE YOU— GIVE THEM BACK

- I didnt understand what epel said here lmao BUT—!?

- THEY HAVE GRIM TOO FUCK HE’S BACK LET GO OF MY FUCKING CAT

- WHAT IS GOING ON DARLINGS

- BUDDYY >:’0000 Grimmm MY HEART—

- Are they kidnapping the overblot men?? What— the fucking absolute ｂａｌｌｓ on these robots

- God we’re getting absolutely ｆｕｃｋｅｄ in here

- AND THERE’S A CAULDRON IN THE BACKGROUND LOL DEUCE WENT HAM

- BRING ME BACK MY FUCKING CAT— >:’0000

- I thought there’s going to be a festival not a fucking kidnapping event HEY

- Oh 👀 Rook pls help

- AAAHH SERIOUS ROOK IS HOT—

- IS THE OTHER DORM LEADERS CHILLING WHERE ARE THEY KALIM PLS BE SAFE

- OH RIDDLE IS NOT ANSWERING THEY GOT HIM TOO

- Oh ghad they got him during clubs WTF HOW—

- *nervous hornii chuckling* …angry expression silver 👁👄👁 im sorry

- AAAA Dorm leaders actually be acting like dorm leaders is soo cool i cant—

- Bruh the story is all chaos what is this chapter

- Are they gonna get Leona and Azul too what—

- RIDDLE BABY Jesus christ dont overblot like this again lol

- DAMN HE STRONG FOR A SMOL BOI THO

- Whoever made these robots wtf is their deal lol TO BE ABLE TO BEAT A DORM LEADER—

- …Bruh where is our horned friend when u need him

- Silver and Sebek theorizing with dorm leaders but they took Jamil tho?? It’s probably the overblot men they’re after

- Also Malleus is probably good so you two calm down lol Lilia’s probs having tea with him right now

- Okay, Leona how are you going to get captured KING.

- Omg everything is getting destroyed wtf

- AW LEONA SAVED RUGGIE THATS CUTE AND COOL AF

- Bruh leona these are material robots— cant you just turn them into sand lol

- Oh they do have some kind of brand cmon just turn them into sand pls

- WHAT THE FUCK

- LEONA-SAN!? WHY ARE YOU GIVING UP— OJI-TAN!!!

- OLD MAN WHAT—

- *hearing leona whisper his reasons ✋ 👁👄👁 🤚 okay sir im sorry

- Damn Leona acting like a real prince right now— it’s kinda hot 👀👀

- BRUH PLS COME BACK DONT TALK LIKE YOU AINT GONNA

- BRO WHERE ARE THE TEACHERS

- THE BOARD GAME CLUB

- Idia : “bro we just chilling be cool— MY CHESS PIECE“

- “Aight ortho what’s the situation” “ｆｕｃｋｅｄ＂

- So Idia of course knows about this— why does he look like he’s so done lmao me getting the feeling this isnt the first time idia has encountered this situation before lol

- Man i want to see azul in action too but mehh— Idia told him to settle down cries

- LOL WHAT IS THIS KARONE ROBOTS

- Wait— are they taking idia too?? OH IS THIS THE DOING OF IDIA’S FAMILY

- WHERE IS CROWLEY— THE TEACHERS, YOUR IMPORTANT STUDENTS ARE GETTING KIDNAPPED

- AH THEY ALSO KNOW ABOUT THESE STYX BITCHES WHAT— and they’re just letting them GO whaaat

- Sounds to me that this must be idia’s family taking care of the overblotting students?? Like to protect Idia or something?? I DONT—

- “Gather all the dorm leaders” No, sir, they’re already gone besides my sunshine and the horn boi

- Malleus??? 👁👄👁 TSUNOTAROU

- Pls kill the robots they destroyed my place

- AAH UPSIDE DOWN LILIA long time no see lol

- Bruhh the diasomnia students are so lucky to have Malleus as a dorm leader omg

- BRUH LILIA’S RINGTONE IS SO CUTE LMAO

- Kalim sounds so desperate im so sad

- ARE WE— ARE WE GONNA MEET MALLEUS AGAINNN

- Bruh they just goku teleported their way out of the dorm lol

- AAAAHH EVERYONE IS HERE THIS IS SO FUN

- Wait jack is not here lol did they just forget about him wtf

- Oh shit we here too i did not know LMAO

- S-So are we just gonna..continue school like— like these styx bitches didnt just ruin half the school, my dorm, injure my bois, and took my cat or…???

- GASP AAAA STYX IS A BLOT RESEARCH FACILITY WHAAAT

- So that’s why leona and idia be like bro this is not worth it

- O-Oh yeah— they…they didnt know that Vil overblot— PFFT

- Malleus pls information who are you talking about—

- WHO— LILIA MALLEUS OH NO

- Ey, overblot squad are assembled lol this looks so dangerous

- LMAOO Riddle was sleeping on Leona’s lap for three hours THATS SO CUTE

- Where the fck did they take them, ITS CRAMPED AF

- Bro they’re just exposing Vil and Jamil’s overblot that’s supposed to be a SECRET LOL

- Oji-tan can sound so wise and reliable like this if he really tried lol sugar daddy energy

- Wtf these guys never thought that idia was from a big shot family??? They thought it was just coincidence that they had the same family name PFFT

- AZUL AAAA He was right there my guy BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY MAN

- oh. They finally opened— isn’t this the ignihyde dorm what

- WHAT THE FU— IDIA

- Bro— WHAT WAS THAT IT WAS IDIA ALL ALONG???

- WHAT IS THIS CHAPTER

This chapter is a fucking roller coaster like— literal 0 to 100 ＱＵＩＣＣ From having a moment with Vil and the bois to a FUCKING TERRORIST ATTACK LMAO IM HYPED FOR NEXT CHAP—

It’s been so long, I hope they released the next part soon (๑>◡<๑) I forgot how fine these men are lol at least I want to hear their voices again 👁👄👁

#twisted wonderland #spoilers #chapter 6

[hyenahunt]

Lullaby: A Gentle Nightmare - 2

Writer: Akira

Season: Spring

Proofreading: bakemonoremy (JP) & royalquintet (ENG)

Jun: (When I look this scary, all it'll take is one sharp word from me to make kids cry, won't it?)

Location: A memory, or perhaps within a dream

Jun: ......

(.....H-huh? Did I fall asleep~?)

(This looks like... that garden in ES — the Hanging Garden.)

(Why'd I fall asleep in a place like this?)

(Ahh, that's right... Come to think about it, I got hit up for some weirdass gig.)

(I'm kinda obligated to do it, or more like... it's not something I can really bring myself to reject, so I can't turn it down either.)

(I didn't have a clue what to do about it, though, so I figured I'd take a breather to cool my head and mull it over—)

(And since this place is nice and empty, I had a lil' lie-down to think through a buncha things.)

(But man, the more I think about it, the more troubled I get.)

(I just don't think I'm really cut out for something like "Junior Idol Training".)

(Me, passionately teaching lil' baby idol wannabes from kindergarten to elementary age?)

(Being filmed for something like an educational program, where I basically put 'em through Idol 101?)

(I mean, I get it. People need that kinda content too, after all, but why does it gotta be me~?)

(When I look this scary, all it'll take is one sharp word from me to make kids cry, won't it?)

(It's not like I had a decent childhood of my own, anyway.)

(So I dunno what goes through the head of a typical kid.)

(After all, when I was their age I just got put through the mill by my shitty old man.)

(I mean, if that's all they wanted from me, I guess it's not like I can't do it.)

(But to the world that'll just come off as abuse, plain and simple, yeah~?)

(Goddamn!! Aagh, I seriously don't have a clue, man! What the hell should I do~?)

(......My old man was just a foil for the legendary super idol Jin Sagami, forced into retirement after getting set up to lose to him.)

(He couldn't let go of his nasty grudge over that, so he tried to train me up to surpass that very Jin Sagami.)

(And just like that, he tried to get me to avenge him... At least, that's the impression I had growing up.)

(Who knows, maybe what my old man felt for Jin Sagami could've actually been something like love.)

(But from where I stood, it looked no different from hatred.)

(I was trained up for the sole purpose of revenge, and bided my time sharpening my fangs for the day I'd finally use them.)

(Half my lifetime just gone to shit..... My childhood was only drowned in darkness, with nothing but anger and hatred, pain and tears.)

(And they want someone like me to teach some lil' kids with all their idol aspirations and their futures ahead of 'em?)

(Just like how all the teachers at school seem to be imitating Jin Sagami these days, for some reason?)

(Goddamn~! That's dumb as hell—)

(Did some kinda asshole come up with these plans? Either that, or they're plain stupid for not doing their research on me!)

(.... But all the same, after asking Ibara about it 'cause I was totally confused, now I do get why they picked me for this project.)

(Seems like my old man's actually feeling some remorse, and now he's trying to repent or something.)

(So to atone for making my childhood an absolute shithole, he wants to help train up junior idols, huh—)

(Ibara did mention him making some kinda huge investment into an ES-run organisation.)

(Apparently, at one point my old man was an incredible idol himself, one good enough to rival even Jin Sagami.)

(He really raked in the cash back then, so he's got a surprising amount of money.)

(Until I managed to put an end to his quest for revenge, he was never in the best mental state, either....)

(Seemed like Mom wanted to keep that on the down low, though, and managed his assets one way or another.)

(So those savings my old man once earned as an idol are gonna go right into raising the idols of the future, huh.)

(Sounds great, doesn't it? But man, he should've just done that from the start, though.)

(After all, he could give back even more to the idol industry than that Jin Sagami, who retired after such a huge scandal.)

(He could've instead prided himself in having him beat there... and dropped his vendetta way sooner.)

(Damn you, Dad. Just 'cause you overlooked this one simple thing, my life as a kid was just —)

(Ugh, I don't even wanna think about it. It's all stained and tainted now, y'know~?)

(.......Well, I guess things turned out alright. After all, it’s thanks to that upbringing that Ohii-san eventually found me.)

(And now I can go all out with Eden these days, doing the things I want to do.)

(The problem now is that since my old man figured he'd do some investing, I've gotten stuck with this current job 'cause of our relationship.)

(A father-and-son pair, working together for the sake of improving children's futures.... Makes for a sweet lil' story, yeah?)

(Pouring all their efforts into helping kids along — CosPro's been stuck looking like the villains for a while, so this story'd be a good look for 'em....)

(Speaking of which, Ibara was all hyped up about it, and even Ohii-san and Nagi-senpai told me I should go for it.)

(I mean, I wanna do what I can to keep kids from going through what I did, too.)

(My dad's still a bastard, but maybe I kinda want to support him juuust a lil' now.)

(All the same... me in an educational kids' show? They're asking the impossible.)

(Considering how back when I was a kid, I'd never seen even a single ep of that kinda cheery carefree program.)

(Mm, but still... After we had a proper heart-to-heart about it....)

(...Kunugi-sensei, from the Producer Association, dug up some clips of his own children's show appearances and lent them to me, y'know.)

("I believe this'll serve as a good reference", he said.)

(I don't know a thing about him, but he's a pretty nice guy, huh~ Even though he'd been in a similar position to my dad.)

(....Hmm. Guess for starters, I should stop wearing myself out over this and just head back to the dorms to check out those vids.)

(The Reimei dorms are stupidly far from ES, so commuting's always such a pain, though.)

(Well, at least it's more productive than dozing off out here.)

(....Mm?)

(H-Huh? For some reason there's smoke coming out of the USB with the data on it? What's going on? Did I break it or something?)

(Goddamn, and it's not even mine!)

(Wait, what? Is it just me or is the smoke taking the shape of a person.....?)

Jin: Hullooo~ Whaddya need, Master?

Jun: ......Wha?

Jin: Abracadabra, Master. I'm the Djinn of the USB — ahh, the name's Jin. Pleasure to be workin' with ya.

Now, let's hear what you're after. I'll grant any three wishes you have.

It's a pain, but work's work. C'mon, spit it out.

Jun: No, um..... What? What're you playing at? Jin Sagami?

Jin: Huh. No, like I said I'm a Djinn. A Djinn named Jin-san, got it? That's the kinda story we've got going here.

Jun: Story—?

Jin: Oh, by the way. For ease of communication, a Djinn takes the form of whoever most occupies the heart of their summoner.

So strictly speaking, I'm not exactly this Jin Sagami person.

Jun: Wha? Huh? Then why'd you take the shape of Jin Sagami instead of Ohii-san....?

Jin: Hell if I know. ‘Sides, who gives a crap...

Now c'mon, let's get your wishes over and done with already. I wanna go home and crack open a cold one.

✦✦✦✦✦

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#jun sazanami #jin sagami #ensemble stars #enstars #enstars translation #s: lullaby #era: !! #type: event #status: complete #hyenahunttl

[dweetwise]

aa i wrote this ages ago and realized i never posted it anywhere! i was playing halo jake and there was this adorable baby ace rando on the team, and i had so much feels i word vomited this after the match. not one of my best but i’ll take every opportunity to get some more rarepairs out there!

word count: 3150

Jake X Ace: Just another trial fic

Jake stares at the pre-trial campfire, bored out of his mind, trying to choose between burning an escape cake or anniversary cake. The other two are waiting impatiently for a fourth survivor to join, Nea's sneaker restlessly tapping against the ground.

“Finally,” Bill grumbles and Jake lifts his head and sees… oh no. “Hey team! Good luck!” Ace cheers, a charming grin on his face as he quickly grabs a med-kit before they begin fading into a trial.

Jake's heart starts beating faster and he slaps on the ghastly gateau and quickly replaces Iron Will with Borrowed Time, forgoing his usual selfish ways for something that will benefit Ace—err, the team.

Jake spawns into the trial on Haddonfield and tries to quell his disappointment upon noticing he’s alone. He sees a totem and decides he might as well cleanse it since he's running one of Nancy’s perk that will allow for a quick heal later.

Not even five seconds after the bones from the totem clatter to the ground, Jake hears a monstrous screech from somewhere on the other side of the street. Looks like the killer already found someone—shit, please don't let it be Ace. 

Jake sprints into the nearest house and gets to work on the generator upstairs, much more motivated to make himself useful after knowing the killer is in a chase. Bill joins him, walking up the stairs cautiously.

“Looks like we're facing the Nurse, son,” the veteran grumbles. “It sounded like the Demogorgon to me,” Jake counters. He's sure it's a Demo, the old geezer should really get his ears checked. “I heard the screech. It's a nurse,” Bill argues. “Whatever,” Jake says, not wanting to start an argument. There's another screech, then a squeal as the creature gets stunned. Bill frowns. “Never mind, Demogorgon it is,” Bill grumbles. Jake doesn't take any comfort in being right, worry spreading through him as with Bill here, there's a 50/50 chance that Ace is the one being chased.

They finish the generator and Jake takes off in a sprint towards the middle of the map, Bill grumbling something about being careful. Jake hears the heartbeat get louder. He rounds a corner, and comes face to face—maw?—with the killer.

“AAGH!” Jake screams from the pain of the killer's sharp claws connecting with his shoulder, taking off into a corner of the map away from any generators.

He manages to run the killer on the fences long enough for another gen to pop, but then he's hit through a window with the killer's charge attack and hoisted up on a hook.

He sees the auras of his teammates: Bill is on a generator, Nea is searching a chest, and Ace is cleansing a totem. His heart drops a little; nobody is making a move to come get him. After a moment, Bill abandons the generator and starts sprint bursting towards him, probably running his usual perks of Kindred and Borrowed Time. Unfortunately, Bill doesn't even get halfway before he apparently runs into the killer, his pained scream echoing through the trial as he starts running the opposite way with a slight limp.

The sound makes Nea and Ace perk up, and they both start making their way to the hook. Nea pauses, nearing where Bill is getting chased, apparently spooked by the terror radius. Luckily Ace doesn’t hesitate, making a beeline to Jake's hook even as the heartbeat gets louder and Jake's Spine Chill goes off.

“In a pickle, huh?” Ace grins. “Please have Borrowed Time,” Jake grumbles.

He's pulled off the hook and feels the endurance from the perk kick in just before the killer rounds the corner and is right by them.

“Over here, you overgrown fetus!” Ace taunts, running to a pallet between Jake and the killer. The Demogorgon looks Ace's way, and all sense of self-preservation leaves Jake as he runs right at the killer, taking the hit meant for Ace. He screams at the sharp pain, but he's still on his feet and makes good distance from the adrenaline. He senses the killer looking in his direction, a chill running up his spine, before he hears the shriek of the creature being pallet stunned followed by some Spanish expletives. Jake stops to mend his wounds while Ace takes the chase, before going into a nearby locker to heal.

Before he's even fully healed inside the relative safety of the rickety doors, Ace is up on the same hook as he was before, having been forced to loop a bad area because of Jake's dumb mistake.

Jake doesn't even realize another generator is popping when he stumbles out of the locker, running straight at the hook. He gets a familiar uncanny feeling in the back of his mind, signaling the obsession, Bill, is being chased.

He reaches the hook and there's thankfully still no heartbeat.

“My angel,” Ace grins through the pain as Jake pulls him off of the hook. Jake's breath hitches at the compliment, before he remembers he's wearing the anniversary halo. He tries not to let disappointment show on his face, but then Ace is disappointing him further by walking away.

“Let me heal you,” Jake whispers. “Ace!” he hisses. His Spine Chill isn't even flickering on, and Bill is still being chased. Ace looks over his shoulder and grins, not slowing down, so Jake sighs dejectedly and follows the infuriating man.

Ace stops at the end of the street behind some obstacles to let Jake heal him. Jake still doesn't agree to this plan; sure, it's not in the open like the hook, but it’s closer to where Bill is running the killer. They spot Bill making his way to one of the nearby houses with the killer hot on his heels, and Ace tenses under Jake's touch. Jake pauses and positions himself on the other side of Ace, ready to take a hit (or ten) for the man if the killer somehow hears them healing.

When Ace is successfully patched up, Jake tilts his head back in the direction of the hook and unstarted generator next to it. Ace sighs and nods, obediently following behind him.

And then he stops to cleanse a dull totem.

“Ace,” Jake hisses, but the man pretends not to hear. Jake rolls his eyes and gets to work on the objective alone.

Bill eventually gets hooked and Jake is next, the killer bee-lining to his generator and managing to miss Ace completely because of him ducking down after cleansing the totem. What a lucky son of a bitch, Jake smirks fondly even while struggling against the Entity’s claws on a hook.

This time, both Nea and Ace are running to him as Bill finishes the second to last gen, and Nea beats the gambler to the hook while the heartbeat gets louder and Jake’s spine is chillier than a fucking snow storm. Ace stops in his tracks to give Nea a pointed stare, an eyebrow quirking up.

“I have We'll Make It!” the tag artist protests. “I have BT,” Ace counters, looking around for where the killer is coming, ready to take a hit. “Move your asses!” Jake exclaims, pushing through the pair and into the house to find a locker to heal or use Decisive if the killer goes for him.

Nea ends up taking a hit, Jake can hear her scream behind him and he runs to the second story of the house. Shit, there's no lockers upstairs! He hears Nea's cries of pain and the heartbeat is incredibly loud as she runs through the house and starts looping the car in front of it. Jake camps the upstairs window for a while, but when the killer isn't leaving Nea, he decides he needs to GTFO and leave the house to her. He walks out onto the roof of the house and drops down in the back yard—

—And proceeds to land less than a foot from Ace, hiding in the bushes, his arm bumping against the other's back during his fall.

“Holy shit!” “Fuck!” “You scared the shit out of me!” Ace says, hand on his chest.

Nea goes down in front of the house and Jake makes his way to a locker he spots right inside the doorway.

“Jake? What are you—” Ace starts, hovering in the doorway before ducking down as Nea gets hooked nearby.

The killer patrols the house, but Jake has already healed inside the locker. He just needs to wait for the killer to give up searching—

Suddenly, the killer yanks the lockers open and Jake nearly shits his pants. Ace appears back in the doorway, sprinting to him with a panicked expression, and upon seeing the man so worried for him Jake almost drops the shiv he's planning to embed in the killer's back.

Almost.

The killer shrieks from the stab, dropping Jake on the ground. He runs to the hook to save Nea, the impatient girl apparently having tried to unhook herself, the Entity’s claws already descending on her. Bill beats him to it, but even with both of them there, there’s no way they’re going to have enough time to heal her. Ace screams from inside the house, having taken a hit for them. They're all injured and scatter in different directions, and the killer, furious, decides to tunnel Nea.

Jake loses track of Bill and Ace, but a generator gets completed, Bill apparently having left one near-finished for a situation like this. Jake glances over and spots Nea running into one of the houses. Surely, she can keep the killer busy for just a little while longer.

Jake finds Bill already on an exit, coughing up blood from his injuries while still fearlessly pressuring the gate.

“What the hell's going on over there?" Bill chastises.

“Nea needs help,” Jake merely offers in explanation.

Bill heals him and shouts a “GO!” when Jake tries to return the favor. Jake sprints back into the map, hoping to find the woman.

And then he hears her go down. The killer isn’t picking her up, instead Jake hears it break a couple of pallets. When he finds Nea, she's recovering on the ground and the killer is standing right on top of her, waiting out Decisive, not eager to take another stab in the back. Jake gets seen on purpose, running right into the open, and the killer opens its maw in a threat but doesn't chase him. Jake bites his lip in frustration. Nea has started crawling, the unspoken code for only needing one last push from someone to get back on her feet. If only he could get to her—

Out of the corner of his eye, Jake sees Ace making his way over from the side. He glances at the other without turning his head, not wanting to make it obvious since Ace hasn’t been spotted yet.

When Ace nods in acknowledgement, Jake runs closer to the killer, doing a couple of circles for good measure. The killer hisses, and actually gets away from Nea to chase him. He leads the killer across the street, taking a clawed swing to the back for his troubles, while Ace runs in. The killer immediately turns around after landing the hit, but Ace should have more than enough time—

“Estúpida—why haven't you recovered!?” he hears Ace curse. Fuck. He runs back to Bill to get healed, hearing the killer lunge at Ace. There's no scream to signal a hit, and right after Nea is lifted off the ground and sacrificed on hook.

“Motherfucker,” Bill summarizes his thoughts and finally accepts healing.

Jake is worried for Ace. The man is at full health and surely has the other exit prepped, but Jake can hear the Demogorgon trying to lunge at him.

“Let's go, kid,” Bill commands, opening the exit, but Jake isn't moving, still looking into the trial worriedly. Bill huffs in annoyance and leaves.

Jake waits for the sound of the hatch opening, signaling he's alone in the trial, before exiting.

“Good work, everyone!” Ace greets them when they group together at the foggy path leading from trial to campfire. “Well, except for Nea. Crazy girl.” “Could’a saved her if she’d just recovered,” Bill grumbles.

Jake may be a horrible human being, but he doesn't really care about Nea right now. He's actually kind of mad at her for putting Ace in danger with her petty stunt.

“You did good, ángel,” Ace addresses him with a smile. “That my nickname now?” Jake asks, amusement in his voice as he adjusts the halo. “Jesus, get a fucking room," Bill snarks, rolling his eyes. Jake tenses and Ace raises an eyebrow at the veteran. “I got chased for several minutes and did three gens by myself while you two were busy fondling each other around hook.”

Ace blinks, he can see it through the sunglasses, confusion on his features. Meanwhile Jake merely glares at Bill, trying to warn him to shut the fuck up before he scares Ace away—

“So just fuck already, get it out of your systems so you’re not a liability in trials,” Bill, to Jake's mortification, finishes, lighting a cigarette in annoyance. He starts power-walking ahead of them, taking long puffs off the cig.

Jake sighs and turns to Ace, but falters upon seeing a delightful flush on the man's face as he adjusts his sunglasses, looking away from Jake.

“Well, that old geezer sure has interesting opinions on the events that unfolded,” Ace offers with a shaky smile. He's nervous, Jake realizes. “He's not wrong,” Jake blurts. Ace turns to him, looking at him in surprise. “I can't focus on the trial when you're there.”

Ace's mouth opens and then closes, and then he clears his throat.

“I'm not usually this… self-sacrificing, with the others, either,” Ace settles on. 

Jake stares at Ace's face, into his eyes that he knows are looking up at him through the shades. At some point, they've stopped walking, just standing in the emptiness together. Waiting.

“I wanna kiss you,” Jake says. He doesn't mean to think out loud, but when Ace's mouth quirks up into a smile, a real smile, he can't help but copy the action. He doesn't know which of them closes the distance first, all he knows is he has this arrogant and snarky and wonderful man in his arms that's kissing him with months—years?—worth of pent-up emotions. Fuck, why didn't he do this sooner? 

He runs a hand through Ace's hair, dislodging the baseball cap, while Ace's hand cups his cheek and the other grabs the collar of his jacket. Jake wraps an arm around Ace's waist, pulling him closer, and the man moans into the kiss and parts his lips. Jake wastes no time deepening the kiss, licking into Ace's mouth and groaning as their tongues tangle together. Shit, maybe Bill was right, maybe they should just fuck—

“AHEM,” a loud clearing of a throat snaps Jake out of it, and they're both pulling apart and gasping for air. God, Ace looks good when he's breathless and flushed and his lips glisten wetly—

Ace looks to the side and his mouth opens in shock. Jake follows his gaze and freezes; they're in the middle of camp, and the rest of the survivors are staring at them.

“Sorry for interrupting,” Jane says. “But maybe this isn't the place.” “I, uh, see, we—err,” Ace flounders. Jake couldn't really care less about what the others think, but he glances around for shits and giggles while Ace tries to come up with an explanation to Jane.

Dwight, predictably, has gone beet red, and Claudette's not faring much better. Meg's face is scrunched up in confusion, while Nea merely rolls her eyes.

“What the fuck,” Jake hears Yui mutter and whips around to glare at her. “Told ya," Bill says around his cigarette.

Meanwhile, Feng has started making exaggerated gagging noises.

“Nobody forced you to watch," Jake deadpans, rolling his eyes as he starts walking out of the camp. “You coming?” he offers to Ace.

The man jumps a little from surprise, glancing around at the others. Some are clearly holding back snickers.

“Uh, sure!” Ace apparently makes up his mind, trailing after him, and now at least David definitely chuckles.

Jake grabs Ace's hand, to which the other looks up at him and blushes, and Jake offers him an encouraging smile before throwing the finger over his shoulder at David and the others, which earns him a proud guffaw from Bill.

“Well, at least now we know what happens if one lingers after the trial,” Ace quips when they’re out of earshot from the camp. Jake hums in agreement, a little annoyed at having been teleported into the middle of camp and cutting their make-out session short. “Jake, uh… you’re still holding my hand,” Ace nervously jokes.

“Yup,” Jake says, popping the p and squeezing Ace’s hand for good measure. 

He looks around the vaguely familiar forest; he could have sworn it was somewhere around here…

“Just… letting you know,” Ace mumbles with a small grin, not making any move to dislodge his hand from Jake’s, obediently following his lead. Jake finally spots the scenery he was looking for, reluctantly letting Ace’s hand fall from his as he pushes through the last of the shrubbery and holds some branches out of the way for Ace to follow.

“Oh… wow,” Ace comments, taking in the large oak tree, its low-hanging branches making for the perfect illusion of privacy. He follows Jake into the middle of it, the moonlight flowing through the leaves and the grass rustling against their shoes as they walk. “Nice find.”

“Thanks,” Jake comments and flops down to lay in the soft grass, adjusting his halo to not dig into the back of his head while staring up at the majestic tree. Ace hesitates for a heartbeat, before sitting down next to him. The gambler grimaces a little bit, probably due to the dampness seeping into his clothes from the grass. Jake has learned not to care, since it’s not like they ever get cold in the realm.

“So… what do you want to do?” Ace asks after a moments silence, adjusting and re-adjusting the cuffs of his jacket nervously.

“I was hoping to pick up where we left off,” Jake admits, looking up at Ace’s curious face, and doesn’t miss the twitch in the corner of the other’s lips at the confession. “But we can just hang out too.”

Ace clears his throat, before reaching to remove his sunglasses, neatly folding them and placing them to the side. “I vote option A,” he says, no longer able to resist the smirk tugging at his lips.

Jake responds with a grin of his own, leaning up while Ace bends down, meeting him in the middle as their lips find each other again.

#dbd fanfic #jake park #ace visconti #dweetwrites #dbd #dead by daylight #jake x ace #parconti #i'm just making up ship names now

[kchuarts]

Flowers in Blood

A/N: This ones a bit touchy folks. I also wrote Roper a bit comical in a way just because he’s always come off that way to me? Idk it could be because I still think of House when I look at em. (I’ve been looking for an excuse to use the gif featured because idk what it is about wounded men?? They’re 10x hotter but I also feel bad??) 

Summary: A voice from the past emerges. 

Warnings: Violence and mention of death. 

Taglist: @lucywrites02​, @shiningloki​ *(let me know if you want to be tagged!!)* 

Chapter 13: Bloodroot p. ii 

“Come out, come out wherever you are little girl~” One of Travis’s thugs chimed out, holding his gun out and motioning the other three to follow in short. “Careful, she might have a bit of a bite.” He joked to his comrades. The garden was huge and not only had large rocks for Katie to hide behind, but also some various trees. “Get ready to shoot if she’s up in the trees, but do not kill her or the boss will kill us instead.” The goon said, scanning the area. 

A splashing noise had them all turn around to the area of where the koi pond was. “Zac what the hell was that?” Another crony panicked and looked around frantically, holding his gun close. 

“Come on Andrew, you cannot be serious. She’s a girl without any defenses and no back up, you really think she’s gonna get you? Dumb ass.” Zac shook his head and turned to the other two, Dylan and Jimmy. He nodded in separate directions and grinned, “She can’t hide forever…” He put his gun away and stopped in the middle of the garden, holding his arms out. “Listen sweetie, as much as I enjoy a good game this is gonna get nasty real quick if you don’t cooperate with us.” He spoke loud and clear. 

“Zac, we’ve got about twenty minutes until authorities arrive. I’ve already notified-” Jimmy began to speak before he was interrupted by a sudden dragging noise. The dirty haired man looked around, pushing his glasses up, “Where did Dylan go?” He spoke slowly. 

“See! I was right Zac!! I fucking saw it coming!! We can’t underestimate females one bit!!” Andrew panicked, letting his anxiety get the better of him. 

“That’s fucking right!” Katie came around the corner, holding her knife to Dylan’s throat and using him as a human shield. “You shouldn’t underestimate me. Just because your boss fucked me up doesn’t mean I can’t break free of his control.” She growled, pressing the blade harder against Dylan’s throat. Never before had the brunette ever actually killed another person and she wanted to avoid that at all cost. Death was something that she didn’t do well with, no matter who it was. Her breathing became a little harder as she noticed the others begin to make a formation around her. “TAKE A STEP NEAR ME AND I’LL SLIT HIS THROAT!!” She screeched, eyes wide and full of fear. 

Dylan began to squirm, trying to use his height to his advantage and eventually succeeding. He broke free of Katie’s hold only to have her knife lodged in the back of his neck. “YOU BITCH!!” He screamed, falling to the ground. 

“FUCK WHAT TRAVIS SAYS! KILL THIS LITTLE BITCH!!” Zac pointed to her, pulling out his gun and firing an entire clip at her. Andrew and Jimmy followed in short before Zac pointed to Jimmy. “YOU STAY OUTTA THIS IN CASE SHE MANAGES TO-” He couldn’t finish as a shot was fired and pierced right through his brain, killing him instantly. No one knew where the hell that shot came from and it sent the surviving three in a panic. 

Out of nowhere, Katie tackled Jimmy to the ground as she took him out from his legs. She had taken cover behind the large rock in the knick of time just as Zac had begun to empty his clip. Using her training, she wrapped her arms tightly around Jimmy’s thighs and somersaulted forward; throwing him as hard as she could. Another shot was fired, taking Jimmy out and causing Katie to take cover when yet another gunshot sounded off. 

“KNOCK THIS OFF!! WHOEVER’S SHOOTING AT US, GIMME A MINUTE!!” Dylan roared, ripping Katie’s blade out of his neck and whipping it at her. 

“A-AAGH!!” She fell to the ground, clenching her teeth as Dylan had landed a lucky shot to her right leg. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck- UGH!” A fist slammed across Katie’s face and she was sent flying backwards a bit. Her back skid across the stones in the garden and head hitting a large boulder near the koi pond. More pain seared through her body as Dylan was punching her as hard as he could, knowing that she couldn’t fight back. Suddenly, sharp pain started to prick her in certain places on her body as the knife was ripped from her leg. She began to scream from being stabbed, crying out for help of any sort. The next thing she knew was that her head was forced under the water and being held there. She could feel blood leaking from her body and Dylan’s large hands wrapped tightly around her throat as he held her underwater. This was it- This was the end of her life and it was subsequently by the hands of Travis in the most indirect way. She was too weak to fight back and her vision began to go in and out, inhaling water as she was desperate to breathe. 

CRACK!

The pressure of Dylan’s hands suddenly released, causing Katie to inhale more water as she was too weak to move. She managed to hear a faint thudding noise as Dylan’s body dropped beside her, motionless. With her vision now completely blacking out, Katie mouthed Jonathan’s name to the best of her ability and gave into the drowning darkness. At least her last thoughts were of the man who had stolen her heart. 

“Well, we can’t have that now can we.” A british man’s voice sounded through the garden and he walked towards Katie, staring at her for a moment before hoisting the drowning girl from the pond. “Sorry Pine, I’m afraid I’ll have to kiss your girl to save her. Although, I’m certainly no prince charming; not in the slightest.” Roper chortled to himself, bending down and performing CPR to bring Katie back from a watery death.  

--------

Jonathan slammed his fist across Travis’s face, dodging the other man’s swings as best as he could. Not too long ago, Pine had knocked the gun from Travis and thus ensued an exchange of fists. He panted hard, exhaustion becoming apparent from the amount of energy he exerted fighting Travis. 

“What’s the matter old man? Can’t fight anymore?” Katie’s ex grinned wickedly, panting just as hard. “I’ve got all day!” Travis lifted his leg, swinging it and knocking Jonathan prone. Having the upperhand, Travis marched over to Pine and stomped on his chest. He dug his heel into his ribs and laughed as he heard a satisfying crunching noise accompanied by Jonathan’s scream. “We aren’t so different, you and I.” He grinned, stomping again and breaking another rib. Travis socked Pine across the face over and over as he heard him attempt to speak. “YOU LISTEN TO ME WHEN I’M TALKING!! I don’t give a shit about respecting elders, I’m the alpha around here.”  He gave one last good hit across Jonathan’s face before being satisfied. 

Everything hurt, his body ached from all the straining and exertion he had been forced to use. This was exactly like the time he had “rescued” Dans, Roper's son. “Don’t hurt her.” He muttered. “Please. Don’t hurt.” He choked a little from snot and blood before being grabbed by the front of his shirt and hoisted up. Through beaten eyes, he could hardly see Travis’s sick smirk. He could care less about what was said before, all he could think about was getting to Katie and saving her. 

“Now, as I was saying before you so rudely interrupted me.” Travis chuckled, examining his fingernails on his other hand. “We’re very much from the same coin, you saw some fucked up shit in war and I saw some fucked up shit growing up. We were forced to make a decision and kill.” He nodded to himself and clicked his tongue. “It’s not gonna be long before you finally snap yourself, Pine. You’ll be driven mad with the thought of her leaving you and will come up with more creative ways to control her. That’s what I had to do, little fox was always trying to run away from her alpha. Cunning thing she is, so sweet and innocent… So fun to break and toy with.” He flicked his dark eyes up, noticing Andrew scurrying back in with a panicked look. Travis frowned and dropped Jonathan, placing his foot down on his head and pushing his weight on him. “What the fuck is it? Where’s Katie?” 

Andrew let out a sob and began to wail incoherently, pointing back and blubbering something about a shooter. “Dylan, Zac, ‘n Jim are allgoneandIhadtogetoutbeforehegotmetoothepolicearecomingand-” a firm slap was branded across his face as Travis had grown tired of his whines. 

“Will you just shut up! Fuck, you’re such a pussy!! Fine. I guess you get a pass, Pine. I can only hope that my Katie is still breathing.” There again was the sick smirk as sirens blared in the background. “I can’t wait for the next time we meet.” Travis waved and grabbed Andrew by the arm, pulling him out of the fray. 

Pine coughed hard, vision blurred from blood and sweat. “Kate… Please…” His voice was stuffy from his broken, bloodied nose. Jonathan closed his tired eyes, shedding tears that stung the cuts on his face. “Kate.” He kept mumbling her name over and over, praying she was safe. A slew of footsteps entered into the lobby but only a foreign language was spoken. Gloved hands began to assess the damage done to Jonathan, muffled Japanese clogging his hearing. 

“Does anyone speak English?” An all too familiar voice caught Jonathan’s attention in the worst way. 

Jonathan turned his head slowly, opening his eyes and taking in a rattly breath from what he was able to make out. “No. Kate.” He cried, seeing Roper walk past him with Katie’s motionless and bleeding body in his arms. “Please, Roper. Please.” He croaked, looking up at his enemy while being treated. 

“Oh dear.” Richard grimaced at Pine. “You look exactly the way I found you back in Spain 2 years ago. Tsk, nasty habit you have.” He handed Katie over to paramedics and nodded at them.  “Too bad I won’t be requiring your services anytime soon as my trust in you is completely gone. Although, I do have some news…” He knelt down, giving Jonathan a pat against his wounded cheek and received a whine from the wounded man. “Oh come off it. You know better than to whine like a little girl, Pine. Fortunately, we have a common enemy.” He paused, looking at Jonathan to see if he was still listening. 

“Kate-” Jonathan coughed, whining again from the pain in his chest. 

Richard frowned at his persistence of the girl. “She’ll be fine, only ten stab wounds and nothing fatal. She did take a bit of a swim though and I had to play Baywatch for just a tick until she drew breath again.” He got up, following the paramedics and watching Pine get loaded onto a stretcher. “Seeing as you don’t want to pay any attention to vital news I have, I will be contacting you later. Oh and by the way, your hospital fees are covered by yours truly. Consider this one last favor from me to you, toodles.” 

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

“Did you get him?” Abbadon asked, folding her arms over her chest as Roper walked into the teahouse, taking a seat across from her. 

“Mmm, no. He was busy having a tussle with Pine so I couldn’t get to him.” Richard pulled his cigarette carton out, pulling a stick from it and offering one to Abbadon. 

She waved her hand and shook her head no, “I quit eleven years ago when I found I was pregnant with my son. I promised myself I wouldn’t return to that nasty habit.” Abbadon admitted genuinely. Never in her life did she ever think she’d be working with Richard Roper of all people. Sure, they were cut out from the same cloth in terms of business, as much as she hated to be in it, but she was unaware that he also wanted to bring Daniel down. 

Shrugging, Roper lit his cigarette and took a drag from it. “So,” He turned his head away, blowing smoke in the opposite direction, “What’s with you and wanting Travis dead? I thought you’d want that slimy little bastard taken care of first… Or whatever the hell the bitch over in Korea is named. I heard you two have gotten into cat fights.” He mused to himself and eyed Abbadon, teasing her slightly. 

The auburn haired woman snorted in amusement, “I wouldn’t exactly call them “cat fights” so much as an actual fist fight. I am no angst ridden school girl despite how troubled I am.” She looked up at their waiter and nodded in thanks as the tea was delivered. Carefully, Abbadon took the kettle and poured her scalding hot tea into her cup and set it down. She tested the intensity of the heat with her upper lip before taking a sip. “Ah, excellent.” She spoke to herself, setting down the cup. “Why I want him dead is because he is obsessed with Katelyn. He reminds me much of Ulrich, my bastard of a husband. The things I was told of what he had done to her is too reminiscent of my own situation. Thankfully, Ulrich is not obsessed with me and would rather not have anything to do with me.” She paused for a moment before returning to her original plan of action. “She and Pine are the only hope I have of getting my son back.” She looked at Roper with a rather wistful expression. “Certainly you can understand me, no? You have a child of your own?” She raised her eyebrows, grabbing her tea cup and taking another sip. 

Taking another puff of his cigarette, Roper nodded and sighed. Smoke jetted from his nostrils as he did so, “Yes, I do. I also have a son whom I care about despite what his bitch of a mother thinks.” He spoke of his ex wife bitterly. “Anyways, what you’re getting at is that you commiserate with Pine’s girl? Cute little lass she is.” 

“Yes.” 

“Mhm. Abuse… I have no right to make any commentary on that seeing as I am also one who isn’t the most kind lover.” He cleared his throat, wanting to avoid that subject. “Now, the money if you please.” He held his hand out and took the payment Abbadon handed over. “Never thought I’d get to use my hitman skills ever again. I must say, I had fun with it though I nearly shot Miss O’Connor.” He stopped counting the bills as he noticed Abbadon look at him with rage. “I wasn’t intending to aim for her, I left her be just as you wanted. Poor thing almost inhaled a koi fish.” He placed his cigarette between his lips and resumed counting. “If it weren’t for me she would literally be swimming with the fishes.” 

Abbadon huffed, taking another sip of her tea and leering at the man sitting across from her. “I would appreciate it if you didn’t joke about her like that. I want her to live the life that I could never have, please be more considerate.” She finished her tea and stood, turning to leave. “I wish that our paths wouldn’t cross again, but unfortunately we share a common enemy. Until next we meet, Richard.” 

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

Sleep would not come to Jonathan that night as he tossed and turned uncomfortably with IVs and a ventilator to help oxygen get into one of his collapsed lungs. “No. No- Katie don’t go.” His voice was hoarse but laced with pain and devastation. Jonathan’s eyes were shut but he was trapped in a nightmare of losing Katie to Travis. “Stop, no don’t hurt her.” He continued to cry, causing the machine monitoring his vitals to beep as his heart rate increased. 

“Mr. Redwood? Are you alright?” A nurse walked in, eyes full of worry as she saw the pained man. Stephanie Nakamura was placed in charge of Jonathan as she was the only one there at the moment, who spoke English fluently. She was of American and Japanese descent but decided to live in Japan to find her roots. “Mr. Redwood?” She called again and began to take measures in case things decided to go wrong. 

Jonathan and Katie had been given new aliases courtesy of Richard Roper. He still wanted them to play the game and carried on with the whole “tree” last name scheme. Jonathan went by “Todd Redwood” and Katie by “Kit Redwood”. Apparently Richard thought it would be funny to also throw in an animal into their names; the fox. 

Gasping, Pine shuddered hard and coughed in pain. His eyes shot open and he looked around in worry, “Where? Where is she?” He asked in a rough voice and looked at Stephanie with panic. “Where’s Katie?” He was not yet aware of the aliases at hand. 

“Katie? I thought your wife’s name was Kit… Hmm maybe Kit is a variant of Katie?” Stephanie thought to herself before catching Pine trying to get up from the corner of her eye. “NO!! Mr. Redwood you mustn’t get up!!” She forced him back down and pressed her call button for help as he just would not stop struggling. “You shouldn’t speak either, your lung is not healed at all!” She looked over her shoulder and saw some nurses enter the room. Speaking in her native tongue, she asked for assistance with Jonathan and had him sedated for the night. “Poor man. He really is worried about his wife…” 

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

For the next two weeks, Jonathan struggled to go see Katie. He learned that while no vital organs were hit, she still had lost a lot of blood. Also, due to her inhaling a ton of water she was being monitored for any further damage. The only times that she would wake up were to scream out for help, her eyes were shut the entire time. Those screams broke Jonathan’s heart as he knew she was reliving the nightmare she went through with Travis, and now this. What made things worse was that she cried out for Cameron to save her and to not leave her. Once Pine was well enough, Stephanie allowed him to sit by Katie’s bedside. Not once did he leave her side and let go of her hand. Here he was now, sitting beside her and holding her hand. “Katie please wake up.” His thumb rubbed her hand, tears stinging his eyes. “Please.” He bowed his head, resting it on the bed. “I can’t lose you.” 

At those words, Katie’s fingers twitched and caused Jonathan to look up. “Jon...nathan.. Jon..” his name came out softly from her lips. She repeated his name brokenly and in a hushed tone, tears of her own sliding down her cheeks. “Thank… You… watching her..” 

Pine’s brow knit together and he scooted closer to her, wondering if she was losing her mind. “What? What do you mean?” 

“You… Protect her.... Cherish..” A soft smile formed on her lips despite her eyes being closed. “Little fox.” 

There was no way. Jonathan couldn’t believe what he was hearing and immediate doubt settled in. He didn’t believe much in the paranormal but what she was saying sounded like Cameron was communicating through her. With some hesitation, Pine swallowed hard and pondered if he should even give the silly idea a chance. “C...C-Cam?” He whispered. 

Katie nodded very faintly, the smile still on her face. “Take care… her heart...  Thank you, my brother.” The brunette suddenly fell limp, the smile fading from her face and monitor flatlining. 

“KATIE NO!! SOMEONE HELP!! NO!! NO!!” Jonathan screamed, standing upright and beginning to sob. “NO DON’T YOU LEAVE ME!! SOMEONE!! HELP-” He stopped as he heard Katie gasp loudly and the machine coming back with her vitals. 

Wide green eyes stared into blue ones and before Katie knew it, she felt Pine’s arms wrap around her and his wet face buried into the crook of her neck.

#the night manager #the night manager canon divergence #jonathan pine #jonathan pine x ofc #spies in love #fanfic #tom hiddleston #flowers in blood #my writing #writing

[achtung-attitude]

CHAPTER 37: Weezer - Part 2

Kilo struggles to his feet at the bottom of a hole that did not exist ten seconds ago. Toto watches him from the rim of the hole, smiling easily without any hint of malice. 

The enemy rubs his eyebrow with a spidery finger and explains, “Five years ago, yeah? There was an accident,” he says, as if sitting across from Kilo in a bar booth, “They was setting up some sort of overhead sound system or whatever, and they ended up droppin’ a couple tons of equipment from the ceiling. Made a hole in the floor. Right here, dig? The convention centre administrators were too cheap to fix it right, so they just covered the hole with plaster. Came back to bite ‘em in the ass though, cause eventually that hole opened up into a sinkhole that swallowed up six people!”  

Kilo glares up at him as he chuckles, continuing his lackadaisical monologue. “Moral of the story? It all comes back to you. No matter how deep you bury ‘em, every misfortune stacks up, until it blows up in yo’ face. My WEEZER… is just what ignites it. I told ya, you’d only get one chance to walk.”

By the time he’s finished, Kilo is back on his feet, not appearing the least bit intimidated. “I don’t give a shit,” he declares, then SATURN BARZ drives its taloned fingers into the wall of the pit. The Stand gouges a cleft of dry rock from the wall, and the wall begins to bubble and froth, turning into a thick, gravelly sludge. This effect extends upwards, reaching the rim of the pit. 

“Whuh--?” Toto says, as the ground he’s standing dissolves into a sheer mudslide, and his feet are caught up in the muck. He bolts upright, flailing his arms to keep his balance.

But while he focuses on this, Kilo ascends from the hole, having been raised up by SATURN BARZ. He grabs a fistful of Toto’s hoodie and pulls himself forward. Toto is pulled in the opposite direction, losing his balance and tumbling forward into his own pit trap. Kilo lands on the edge of the hole in a crouch at the same moment Toto hits the bottom, standing submerged up to his waist in liquid concrete. With a swift whirl of its hands, SATURN BARZ reverts the mudslide back into solid concrete, trapping his opponent in solid stone.

“Uhh--” Toto utters, not entirely sure what has just happened to him.

“Some nightmare!” Kilo taunts at him, “Damn. And here I was expecting a challenge outta you. What a joke!”

Before the Congregation assassin can say anything back, Kilo gets up and walks away, amidst a Convention floor in various stages of agony. Upwards of 300 people roll around groaning in pain, while others, unaffected, either run about or stand struck dumb, helpless among the sudden horror. 

“Jesus…” he mutters, rushing to attend to Moya. The cold sweat that formed on her flesh as a result of WEEZER’s touch has now developed into a corpse-like pallor that’s turned her bronze skin to a sickly gray. “What the hell’s happening to you?” he asks, kneeling to help her up.

“I-it’s Toto’s ability…” she answers after a brief coughing fit and spitting an absurd volume of green mucus. Her voice is scratchy, and her breath is short and shallow, but she takes his hand nonetheless, and drapes her over his shoulders.

Kilo places the back of his hand on her forehead, then pulls it back quickly. “You’re burning up! What ability could do this?!”

“It’s pneumonia…!” she asserts, “Ough, when I was 10, I caught pneumonia after staying out in the rain…! Abuela said not to stay out so long, but I didn’t listen… Agh, doesn’t matter!! Whatever it is, Toto was the one that caused this! I’ve never worked with him before, but… the ability must revive illnesses from your past to harm you in the present…!”

Kilo glances around the convention hall once more, then nods in agreement. “Sure. But what about the sinkhole?”

“Buildings can be damaged, too. And Hotel California demonstrated how a structure can have its own history and will.”

“Right. Alright…” he is quiet for a moment, then he carries her to a nearby column and sits her down against it. “Hang tight,” he says, starting back towards the pit, “I’m gonna finish that muthafucka off.”

“Wait!” Moya cries out, straining her voice. “You need to be cautious! I-if he touches you, then you’ll be caught in his ability too!” 

A grin spreads across Kilo’s lips. “Worst I ever got was a cold when I was 6! His ability might be hot shit if you had something bad like you did, but it’ll take more’n a couple sniffles to stop me! Not to mention, he’s enough of a scrub to get himself caught in his own trap! Asshole’s dead-meat already!” He says this as he reaches the rim of the pit, but finds thats Toto is no longer trapped in the concrete.

Right as he begins to search for him, Toto reveals himself, speaking from behind Kilo. “It’s rude to talk ‘bout people behind their backs,” he declares, brushing loose gravel off him, “But, I guess, I got nobody to blame but myself, yeah?”

Kilo and SATURN BARZ whirls around towards their enemy, the Stand forming a spear of solidified oxygen in its hand. It jabs the impromptu icicle at Toto’s throat, but he dodges to the side with a lazy grin on his face. WEEZER manifests in front of him, and reaches for SATURN BARZ with the same blinding speed it showed to WITCH MOUNTAIN. But Kilo is ready, as just before the mangled enemy Stand grabs a hold of his throat, the ice spear suddenly explodes into frigged shrapnel right in Toto’s face. 

The Congregation assassin winces as the icy shards pelt him over his body. “AHH!! Damn, that hurts!!” he yelps, and in that moment of distraction, SATURN BARZ lunges for him, claws aimed at his face. Toto gathers himself and sways back with footwork that would make Muhammad Ali proud, and WEEZER jerks a knuckle to the ground.

Kilo’s foot falls in the exact spot where WEEZER touched, and the ground beneath it gives way, opening into another hole, smaller than the first and shallower, only going halfway up his calf. He drops and lands flat-footed. He groans as pangs of pain run up his leg. 

“Guess two sinkholes was too good to be true,” Toto says before WEEZER lurches into a new attack. 

“Don’t let him touch you!” Moya shouts, watching all of this from her pillar. 

With a swift backhand swipe, SATURN BARZ bats WEEZER’s hands out of the way. Toto grunts as heavy ice begins to form on his Stand’s hand and the biting cold effect transfers over to himself. In the meantime, Kilo steps out of the pit trap and puts distance between him and his opponent. 

Toto raises an eyebrow at him. “What was it you said? ‘Take more’n a couple sniffles to stop me’. If you ain’t scared of what my WEEZER can do, how come you standing so far away?” 

“I’m not scared. But I’m not stupid either and I know you Congregation pricks are full of dirty tricks.”

The Congregation assassin laughs. “Heheheh… That’s pretty smart… Or it would be, if touching you was the only way WEEZER could hurt you.”

WEEZER’s hand flex suddenly, its fingers spreading and shattering the frost forming on its hand. It then launches its entire body in Kilo’s direction with a piercing screech. “BIIISHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH…”

“Shi--!!” Kilo says, raising SATURN BARZ to guard, but to his surprise, WEEZER sails right over his head and slams its palm into the wide window behind him. Then the glass begins to shudder and vibrate violently, before WEEZER peels away from it, and the window explodes inwards, showering Kilo with a hail of glass. 

“AAGH!” he yells, and SATURN BARZ tries to shield its user from the oncoming barrage of glass, but is unable to get them all, as thick shards pierce Kilo in his arm, ribs and thigh.

“That one was an accident too,” Toto calls, “Tropical storm hit Anaheim about ten years ago, tore up a tree that broke a window. Nobody got hurt that time, though!” 

Kilo winces as SATURN BARZ dissolves the glass into liquid and his wounds close up into red marks. “Shit!” he thinks, “It’s like his Stand can do anything he wants it to! Even if I don’t let him touch me, if I keep letting him make all the moves, I’m a dead man! There’s gotta be something I can use!!”

He searches with his eyes frantically around the convention hall, hunting for something to gain an advantage over this seemingly impossible enemy. Toto seems perfectly content to simply watch him, hands in his pockets, without a care in the world. Kilo grinds his teeth and scowls at him.

“Hey, come ooon, what’s that look for? I already gave you a chance, and you didn’t take it. Don’t blame me for your mistakes~…”

Kilo answers with a flick of the wrist from SATURN BARZ, firing shards of solidified water vapor at his opponent. The assassin dodges, then dodges the next batch, and keeps up with Kilo when he starts running down the hall, leaping over afflicted guests and tearing through convention booths.

SATURN BARZ keeps up the attack the whole time, flinging at Toto with frozen projectiles. WEEZER blocks them all with its unmitigated speed, its jaw hanging loose from its skull swinging to and fro with every staccato motion. 

Kilo vaults onto a table and SATURN BARZ takes its Olympian stance, forming a great ice javelin in its palm and hurling it at its enemy. It is the same kind as before, set with opposing impulses within its structure so it may explode into a smokescreen, even if WEEZER deflects it. But WEEZER does not deflect it.

Instead, it jerks its right foot underneath a convention guest with angry red spots growing on his face. The unfortunate guest’s body lifts off the ground and WEEZER catches him by the back of his neck, holding him in front of its master. The guest’s eyes clear up for long enough to see the ice spear fly at him before it impales him through his shoulder. He loses consciousness when the spear explodes, turning his wound into a bloody cavity you could see through. Toto is left completely unscathed.

“What… What the fuck did you do?!” Kilo shouts, staring in shock and disgust.

“What did I do? I… protected myself from your attack. What’s it look like?” WEEZER grips its human shield by the neck then tosses it at Kilo, who dives from the table to catch him. When he does, the diseased Stand appears and lunges for him.

“First he uses this guy as a shield, now as a distraction!? This bastard…!!” Kilo thinks. Before WEEZER can lay its mottled hands on him, SATURN BARZ strikes out with a kick to its gut that knocks the wind out of Toto. Kilo then rolls out of its range, clutching the guest’s body.

“You son of a bitch…!” he snarls while SATURN BARZ closes the unconscious guest’s wound, “What’s the matter with you!?! How can you involve innocent people like this?!!”

Toto, as ever, treats his words like a joke, laughing softly. “Haha… It’s just bad luck. It ain’t my fault, and it ain’t yours. He just happened to be here at the wrong time, and happened to get involved in our little playdate. If you take the time to worry about every little ant you step on, you’d never take another step.”

“You sick fuck…”

“What’re you getting so upset for? Human lives ain’t that big a deal,” the Congregation assassin fixes his posture, recovering from SATURN BARZ strike, “All humans are just vessels for Fate to enact its will. Even Stand users like us. Stands are reflections of the soul, but that doesn’t mean that having one is anything special. They got nothing to do with good or evil, or justice. All it means is that Fate chose us to have a little bit more impact in its design. Fate chose you, just like it chose me. You and I were always going to fight here today, and that guy, and these people, were always going to get caught in the middle. No matter how much you fight it, we both ultimately serve the same power.”

“Again…” Kilo murmurs, rising. The guest’s wound has closed over completely, forming a pale, circular scar in his shoulder. “I’m so sick of hearing you people talk out of your ass at me. All this shit about God and fate and higher beings…” SATURN BARZ takes a bow-legged stance and raises its hands over its head as its master continues “All that I could take, but worse! You all keep tryin’ to tell me that I’m the same as you. I don’t want to be mentioned in the breath as you fucking losers!!!”

SATURN BARZ claps its hand together and steam explodes out from between them. This builds into a thick fog that covers everything in a damp smokescreen.

“Really?” Toto says, unimpressed. He saunters through the smokescreen, his head bobbing up and down as he steps on bodies without a care.

#jjba #jojo's bizarre adventure #jojo no kimyou na bouken #achtung attitude #kilo staples #toto #saturn barz #weezer #ch37

[jilliancares]

Keith the Amnesiac

Summary: In which an accident leaves Keith temporarily without his recent Voltron-filled memories, and he may or may not spill a few of his better kept secrets to Lance.

Word Count: 9k

enjoy!!

~~

It didn’t make sense for Keith to hold his breath.

It was a dumb, childish reflex, one that whispered they won’t see you if you hold your breath. And that made sense to him for some reason, even though logically, he knew much better than that. Holding his breath wouldn’t make him invisible to the Galra fleet, much less his entire lion. But still, as alarms blared around him, as lights flashed, as Red growled a sort of warning in his head, he held his breath.

“Keith!” Lance’s voice cried out over the intercom. But it was too late—Red was going down, spiraling towards the planet’s surface, and no amount of tugging on the levers or stomping on the pedals would change that. Keith gasped in much needed air, watching with wide eyes as the surface grew closer and closer and closer.

His hands were sweaty on the levers, still pulling on them fruitlessly. Red, inexplicably, was purring, probably trying to calm him down or something. It didn’t work. Keith clenched his eyes shut.

—

Knock. Knock. Knock.

The sound was amplified, the knocking echoing loudly all around him. His eyes flew open as he gasped, struggling against what must’ve been invisible bonds—he felt like he couldn’t move, all of his limbs heavy. But then the blue-tinted glass around him slid open, and the feeling rushed back into his arms and legs all at once. He stumbled from the strange, person-shaped chamber, directly into another person.

“Keith! Man am I glad to see you,” said a man before him. He was much taller than Keith, and wider too, a kind smile plastered on his face. “Shiro was starting to get worried, you’ve been in there for almost three days now.”

Keith swallowed thickly. He couldn’t seem to make words come out of his mouth. His head was reeling—throbbing, really. He could hardly wrap his head around what he was hearing. He’d been in that… that glass thing for three days? Why? And who was Shiro?

“Keith? You okay?”

His stomach was twisted into unsteady knots, and Keith pushed himself away from the man, taking careful steps back. “Who are you?” he said finally. “Where… where am I?”

“What?” the man exclaimed, looking at Keith incredulously. And, okay, maybe he wasn’t a man. He seemed about Keith’s age, which was… Er, how old was he again? Wracking his brain, Keith tried to remember the last birthday he’d had. Had it been his fifteenth? That didn’t seem quite right, but then again, neither did the fact that Keith was in some foreign-looking, high-tech seeming room. If it could even be called a room—it was huge.

From what he could remember, he should be back at his house right now with his dad. He was supposed to be going to the Garrison soon, he’d finally got accepted, after months of anxious waiting, resulting in ragged fingernails and bitten lips.

“Who are you?” Keith repeated, more seriously now. Had he been kidnapped? But if he had, when? He couldn’t remember the last thing he’d been doing. It was all a blur, and when he thought really hard, it just made his head ache. “Where have you taken me? Where’s my dad?”

“Keith, it’s me. Hunk! Left leg of Voltron—you can’t seriously be forgetting me, can you?”

“Voltron?” Keith muttered, before deciding that he didn’t care about these foreign words. He had to get out of here, had to get back home. “Listen—I don’t know who you are. My dad—we don’t have a lot of money, but… he could scrounge up something to pay your ransom.”

“Ransom? What are you saying?” Hunk muttered. After carefully evaluating the man before him, Keith decided that he could outrun him. And so he ran, sprinting past him and along the echoing, metal floors, towards the double doors at the other end of the large room.

“Keith!” Hunk called after him, which Keith ignored. He skidded into the hallway, gasping more in fear than fatigue. The hallway branched off in either direction, and Keith chose randomly, darting to the left, and then the right, and then the left again. He had no idea where he was going, what he was doing, but pure panic was driving him.

“Keith,” a voice said from the ceiling, some sort of speaker system. “Coran speaking—I’d like to remind you that it’s never a good idea to train after exiting the healing pods! You can run laps later.”

Realizing that, somehow, some man was watching him, Keith stopped running, shrinking against the wall beside him. He didn’t even see any cameras, had no idea how anyone could be watching him…

“Wow!” said the same voice—Coran, apparently. “I didn’t actually expect that to work! Score one for Coran!”

Keith’s hands were shaking. He didn’t want to admit it, but he was scared. He had no idea what was going on, where he was, or who these people were. Keith inched along the wall behind him, grabbing onto the handle of the nearest door and whipping it open, slamming it back closed behind him. He pressed himself against the door, listening with all his might.

“Whatchya doin’?”

“Aagh!” Keith screamed, spinning around to face a girl sitting on a bed. She wore round glasses and a green shirt, her hair chopped inexpertly around her head and one of her eyebrows raised.

“Something wrong?”

“Yes!” Keith exclaimed, fed up. “I don’t know who any of you people are!”

“Oh no,” the girl said immediately. “You don’t have amnesia, do you?”

“What?” Keith barked. “No! Of course not!” Except, well… could he? He couldn’t really remember what the last thing he’d been doing was. And he didn’t know where he was, or who these people were, but they all seemed to know him. “I would know if I had amnesia!”

“Really? You think you would know if you’d forgotten things?”

This made Keith draw up blank. How could someone know if they’d forgotten something?

“That’s what I thought. Come on.” The girl stood up and strode past Keith, shoving the door open and walking confidently down the hall. It was evident that she knew her way around this place well, and belatedly, Keith wondered if… if he was supposed to, too.

“You’re really smart, aren’t you?” Keith commented, following along a bit slower behind her. He couldn’t help it, he was trying to take everything in. The tall, tall ceilings, the white metal surrounding them, the endless amount of doors—seriously, were they in a fucking castle or something?

The girl smiled really big when he said this, looking over her shoulder and seeming to stand a little bit taller, not that this really did anything for her. “Glad you noticed!” Keith just nodded, surprised by her enthusiasm.

They ended up in what looked like a giant control room, and beyond that, beyond its glass walls—space. Keith made a choked, surprised sort of noise.

“We’re in space?” he gasped, staring at the endless starry sky surrounding them. He didn’t even manage to take in the two other people present in the room, too busy staring past them with wide, panicked eyes. Not only was he not in Texas, not anywhere near his dad, he wasn’t even on Earth! What had he been doing in the amount of time since he’d very apparently lost his memory?

“Where else would we be?”

Keith looked up. It was evident who’d spoken—she had dark skin and white hair and… and, well, she wasn’t exactly human, was she? There were pink markings on her cheeks, and her ears looked like elf ears. Maybe this was all some crazy, elaborate dream Keith had managed to cook up, even though he usually didn’t dream.

“Uh—Earth?”

“You can’t go back to Earth!” a middle aged man exclaimed, the same voice from the ceiling—Coran. He pointed his finger at Keith exuberantly, his other hand coming up to twirl his mustache. “Not until Zarkon is defeated, that is.”

“Keith has amnesia,” the short girl explained, and both the almost-but-not-quite-humans looked at her in confusion.

“Am-what-a?” the girl asked.

“You guys don’t have amnesia on Altea?”

“What is amnesia?”

“It usually happens after a particularly bad head injury,” the short girl explained. “There’s different kinds—it looks like Keith has the retroactive kind, meaning he’s forgotten part of his past. He probably lost one or two years, seeing as he isn’t acting like a ten year old or something.”

“That’s stupid,” Coran commented. “Just remember it.”

“What?” Keith said, incredulous.

“It doesn’t work like that,” said the same girl. “He can’t remember it right now, it’s out of his control.”

“Alteans can do whatever we want with our brains!” Coran stated proudly. “Still, piloting Voltron won’t be easy if Keith can’t remember how to do it.”

“I’m sure he can learn again,” said the other Altean. “I think the real problem will be getting his memories back—no one would like forgetting part of their past. He can get them back, right Pidge?”

“Er—probably,” Pidge decided. “A lot of the time they just come back by themselves. Sometimes they don’t come back at all.”

“Don’t come back?” Keith choked. “But—”

“I said sometimes,” Pidge interrupted. “Plus, have you forgotten who you’re dealing with? I can probably make something to enhance your rate of remembrance…” she started muttering under her breath, one of her hands coming up to clutch her glasses.

“He has forgotten who he’s dealing with,” Coran pointed out, and Pidge glanced up at him and huffed.

“Whatever. I’m gonna go to the lab.” And with that, she was gone, spinning around and leaving the same way they’d come.

“Hello new Keith!” Coran burst out. “I’m Coran, and this is my niece, Princess Allura.”

“You’re a princess?” Keith managed, and she nodded.

“Our home planet was destroyed by Zarkon ten thousand years ago, but now you and the other paladins are fighting against him.”

“Right,” Keith said. There was no point trying to process the shit she’d just said. Not the fact that she was, apparently, ten thousand years old, nor the fact that he and some other pala-somethings were fighting against whatever had destroyed her entire planet. As if Keith could be doing that.

Suddenly, the doors to the control room slid back open and two people came sprinting in, a third walking behind them. One was the same man from earlier, Hunk.

“Keith has amnesia?!” said the new person beside Hunk. He looked entirely too excited by this. He pointed at Keith. “I assume I don’t need to remind you that you love cleaning and have decided to take on all of my chores?”

“Lance!” Allura reprimanded, and Lance shrugged.

“It was worth a shot.”

“I hate cleaning,” Keith protested.

“Lance, stop trying to trick Keith,” said the man standing behind Lance. He had a shock of white hair at the front of his scalp and a scar over the bridge of his nose. Did Keith have any injuries like that?! What exactly was he participating in fighting against? “You don’t remember me either?”

“Er, no. Sorry.”

“It’s nothing to apologize for,” the man said firmly. “I’m Shiro.”

“I still think that this could be used to our advantage,” Lance said seriously. “Imagine how great he would be at spy missions! Even if he got caught he couldn’t spill all our secrets!”

“We’re not sending him on a mission!” Allura exclaimed. “He has no training—not anymore, anyway.”

Keith’s head was starting to ache something fierce. It was dull and insistent behind his eyes. “What happened to me, anyway?” he asked. “How’d I lose my memory?”

For a few moments, the room was silent. Coran whistled.

“You crashed,” Shiro finally supplied.

“It was bad,” Hunk said lowly. “Like, more bad than usual.”

“Scary,” Lace muttered. He was staring straight at Keith, but his eyes were glazed over, as if he were seeing something different.

“But you’re okay!” Hunk said hastily. “And that’s all that matters.”

“I think my memories matter,” Keith argued, and Hunk looked guilty.

“Well, yeah. That too.”

It took a while for all of them to explain exactly what he’d been up to recently. Lance told him gleefully that he’d been kicked out of the Garrison (which—spoiler. Keith hadn’t even gone yet, that he could remember, anyway). It took longer than it probably should have, everyone interrupting each other to add seemingly important details of their own. But in the end, Keith could gather that he was a paladin of Voltron, meaning he flew a giant robotic magical lion that could combine with everyone else’s lions to form a giant-er robot man.

By the end of it all Keith felt like his headache might split his head in two.

“Do I have a room?” he asked. “I kind of want to lay down. My head hurts.”

“It’s right across from mine!” Lance proclaimed, before spinning and walking out of the room, as if this statement had actually been an invitation for him to bring him there. Keith didn’t care, he followed Lance out of the room and through the halls. For a little while, they were silent.

“You know, real Keith and I hate each other,” Lance said suddenly.

“Really?” Keith said incredulously. Only because, well—he couldn’t see why he would hate Lance. Have a crush on him, maybe, but hate? It was just that Lance was attractive in a very obvious way, his smile blinding, his attitude uplifting—even if he had tried to convince Keith he liked doing chores. And sure, Keith could be sullen and snappy, but that didn’t mean he didn’t enjoy the company of someone like Lance.

“Frenemies, I guess,” Lance amended. “If we’re not throwing punches we’re coming up with kick ass plans together. Or we’re shutting each other’s ideas down until one of us finally has a good one. Or we’re competing.”

Keith didn’t answer. It was just all so strange, knowing he had memories trapped inside him that he couldn’t recall.

“Shiro has amnesia too,” Lance said.

“Really?”

“Well, kind of. His is more because he’s repressed it, though. He was captured by the Galra for like, a year before we all became Voltron. And he remembers things sometimes, but it makes him freeze up. Pidge says it’s PTSD.”

“That’s scary,” Keith admitted. “I can’t believe I’m fighting those guys.”

“You’re not alone,” Lance said suddenly, looking serious. “We’re all together out there—and we really don’t get hurt too often. This—” he gestured to Keith, “—is definitely the worst thing that’s happened so far.”

“Do you think we’re gonna win?” Keith asked. “You know, against the Galra?”

Lance looked surprised by this. “Of course we are!”

“But are you just saying that? ‘Cause I mean, you’re biased.”

“We are gonna win,” Lance insisted. “Because if we don’t…” he swallowed. “If we don’t, no one can win.”

On that happy note, Lance leaned against the wall beside a door. “Next stop—Keith land,” he said. Then nodded. “This is your room.”

“Right,” Keith muttered, and reached for the door handle.

“They’re automatic,” Lance said, grabbing his wrist to stop him. Keith felt redness climbing into his cheeks. Lance’s fingers were warm. “The door handle’s are just for if the power goes out or something. Watch.” Lance stepped in front of Keith’s door, and it slid open, revealing the room beyond. It was pretty bare, save for a red jacket hanging on a hook by the door. On closer inspection, he spotted a sheathed knife on the bedside table, and a glowing green rock beside it.

“Homey,” Keith muttered, sarcastic.

“It might not look it,” Lance said, “but this really is our home. All of us—we’re a family.”

Keith stepped further into the room and Lance followed him, uninvited.

“My dad’s knife,” Keith commented, scooping it off the bedside table. “I brought this with me?”

“Your mom’s knife, actually,” Lance shrugged. But Keith’s heart was pounding in his chest, so hard it almost hurt.

“My mom?” he muttered. “We know who my mom is? Wh-where is she? Is she alive? Is she nice?”

Lance’s mouth had dropped open. It was obvious that his comment had been an offhand one, something that was considered general knowledge aboard this castle-ship.

“We don’t know her,” he managed, looking uncomfortable. Keith felt his face fall, disappointment washing through him. “I don’t know if I’m the right person to tell you…”

“Tell me,” Keith insisted. “It’s not fair that you know more about me than I do. Is she dead?”

“We don’t know that either,” Lance muttered. “It’s just—we only know—well, we just know that she’s… Galra.”

Keith sucked in a shocked breath. “What?”

“And so are you, kind of. Partially.”

“I’m what?”

“It’s not so bad!” Lance insisted. “Like, okay, sometimes you get angry and go a little Galra on us, and sometimes you get like, scary Galra teeth and shit—”

“What?”

“But it’s not a big deal!”

“You’re telling me I’m part alien-animal thing and that’s it’s not a big deal?!” Keith exclaimed. “That is a big deal!”

“They’re more human-like than animal,” Lance protested. “I mean, they speak English—which is kind of weird when you think about it, that all these aliens we’ve been meeting just conveniently speak our language. I mean, I’d know what they were saying if they spoke Spanish, you know? But it’s always English, never even some alien language, and—”

“Sorry, don’t care,” Keith interrupted. “I’m an ALIEN!”

“Part alien,” Lance corrected. “And it seriously doesn’t matter. You’re still Keith.”

“I need to go to sleep,” Keith muttered. He felt kind of… dead, almost. He just needed to lay down and forget about everything for a little while. Maybe by the time he woke up his memories would be back and he wouldn’t feel like the world was spinning too fast on its axis—not that he was even on a planet anymore, he reminded himself for what felt like the millionth time. Maybe he’d wake up and laugh at how weird it had felt to forget so much. Maybe he’d argue with Lance, like he was apparently supposed to do.

“Alright,” Lance said. He was backing towards the door. “Just—stop freaking out. I know freaking out’s kind of like, your specialty, but just try to calm down. You’d basically already figured out you were Galra by the time someone told you.”

Keith didn’t answer. He’d already climbed into his bed, fully clothed, and pulled the covers over his head.

—

It wasn’t immediately apparent what had woken him. Nonetheless, Keith found himself sitting upright in bed, feeling completely and utterly awake. For a moment he had that panic of where am I?, like when you fell asleep in a hotel and woke up in the dark room, briefly forgetting where you’d been. Except this time it was times a thousand, because Keith knew after a moment where he’d fallen asleep, but it was still strange, still different. Still didn’t feel like his life.

Keith gasped as suddenly, a sort of rumble echoed around his mind. It was like he was here, sitting in bed, but also somewhere else—somewhere on the castle-ship. With his eyes closed he knew exactly where to go, like he was following a familiar, well-worn path, one he’d traveled many times. Before he knew it, he was out of bed and out of his room, still barefoot, and running down the halls.

It was night time now, Keith was pretty sure. Although, being out in the middle of space, it was kind of night time everywhere. Except now the castle’s interior was dark, the lights much dimmer than before, not to mention the fact that no one was out and about.

He soon found himself at a door, behind which was a sort of zip-line. Shrugging and figuring he must’ve done it hundreds of times before, Keith grabbed on and let himself swing down the red-lit path. At the end of it was a car-like hovercraft, and at the end of that passageway…

“Holy shit,” he breathed. There was a giant, robotic red lion standing on the platform before him, and Keith climbed out of the car-thing to stare up at it in amazement. Sure, he’d listened as the people who were apparently his new family had explained about Voltron, about the lions, about how he was the red paladin, but it hadn’t really sunk in. Now though, standing before the red lion, he felt breathless. He felt like maybe… maybe it was a good thing that he was here, defending the universe with the other paladins.

A deep, prominent rumble seemed to echo in Keith’s chest, and he was sure it was coming from the lion itself. He stumbled forward, toward the lion, wondering how he was supposed to get in. He gasped, jumping backward when the lion moved. It roared, lowering its giant head and opening its mouth.

“You want to eat me,” Keith muttered, staring at the gaping entrance. “Sure. Right. Obviously.” He walked forward, and the moment he was inside the mouth, it closed behind him. He tumbled forward as the lion moved, sitting back upright, and landed in the pilot’s chair.

“Woah,” he breathed. And then he felt it inside him. It was hard to describe, like trying to explain the need to sleep at night or the ingrained knowledge that food needed to be chewed before it could be swallowed. But he felt the presence of the lion, in and around him, like he’d just stepped into his warm house after walking through the snow.

“Red,” he said, with sudden, vicious knowledge. He couldn’t remember his team members, couldn’t remember Lance who he argued with or Allura who was an alien, but he could remember Red. He felt like he was home—for the first time since stepping out of that pod, he felt like he was someplace familiar.

The second he felt this, Red let out a proud, rumbling purr, the vibrations rolling through Keith’s body comfortingly. Finally feeling safe and sound, more so than he had earlier, he let himself close his eyes again, curling up on his chair. Red continued to purr the entire time he was drifting off to sleep.

—

Keith woke, annoyingly, to blaring alarms.

“Attention paladins!” Coran cried over the intercom. Keith sat up abruptly, his mouth tasting like sleep and his eyes blurry, his hair matted on one side. Were they being attacked? Was he going to have to try to form Voltron with these people? Would it be instinctual, his body remembering what his mind couldn’t, or would he simply be lost and confused, becoming a liability and putting the rest of the team in danger?

“Keith is missing!”

Keith groaned in annoyance, slumping in his seat. Red seemed amused at his annoyance.

“You don’t get what it’s like,” Keith mumbled to her. “All these people are so… loud. And busy. And don’t seem to want to leave me alone.”

Letting out an amused snort, Red abruptly started moving, and Keith found himself, moments later, ejected onto the floor.

“So much for our bond!” he cried. Red flashed her yellow eyes at him before going still.

Pulling himself sleepily to his feet, Keith backtracked through the castle, back towards the control room. Alarms were still blaring, loud and annoying.

“Keith!” cried Lance over the announcement system, and Keith winced at the shrillness of his voice. “In case you forgot who you are again, I’m Lance, and you owe me a month’s worth of chores!” There was a pause, and then— “Ow!”

“You’re scaring him!” cried a Hunk-sounding person.

“He’s not scared,” Pidge said somewhere in the background. “He’s probably just lost, he doesn’t remember his way around anymore.”

Keith emerged in the control room. Across the room from him, the entire team was crowded around a small speaker system. Suddenly, Hunk dived forward.

“Please come back Keith!” he sobbed. “Don’t be scared!”

“I’m not scared,” Keith finally spoke up, and various cries of surprise greeted him as everyone spun around to look at him.

“Keith!” most of them cheered, but he thought he maybe might’ve heard someone say “mullet!” which he didn’t even have. His hair was just a little shaggy!

Apparently the team had been forced into a full blown panic when Lance had gone to retrieve him from his room that morning only to find that he was missing. Lance had run around the castle, collecting everyone and spreading the panic from person to person. By the end of it they’d been checking in rooms and under tables and even in cabinets for him (“You never know,” Lance had said).

For some reason the announcement system hadn’t been their first thought, and by the time they remembered it—and the alarms—half the team was convinced Keith was dead. Shiro seemed to be the only reasonable person, apparently sure the whole time that Keith had just snuck off somewhere to be alone, to be more comfortable.

“You do things like that a lot,” Shiro had informed Keith, as if it was something that Keith didn’t already know. But then he realized that everyone didn’t exactly know how much he knew about himself, and Shiro was just being kind, anyway. Apparently he and Keith had been close ever since a little bit before he’d joined the Garrison.

It was sad that he couldn’t remember it, but he’d apparently gotten a scholarship to the school, and he’d earned the right to train a bit with a graduated senior—Shiro. In the end, they’d become closer friends than they probably should have, and the training had managed to become a minimum, not that they’d let the school know that.

“Sorry,” Keith apologized, after everyone had calmed down after the relief of finding him alive and well. “I just—I woke up in the middle of the night. I think my lion was calling me.”

Surprisingly, this received only understanding nods. And just as soon as it’d began, the freakout was over, and everyone was expressing how hungry they were, leading the way to the kitchen as if this was just another normal morning. And maybe it was—it wasn’t like Keith actually knew.

—

“Oh,” Lance said, when the door slid open to reveal Keith. It’d been a few days since he’d woken up memory-less, and the whole team had fallen into a sort of routine. Drill Keith over breakfast to see if his memory had returned, explain things that he didn’t understand, including inside jokes that just seemed stupid, and spend the rest of the day doing random, usually separate activities—whenever Keith decided to join someone they acted like it was weird, so he assumed that he didn’t normally hang out with them like that anyway.

But he couldn’t help that he’d turned up at Lance’s door: he’d been craving attention for the past few hours and Lance was so close to his bedroom anyway. “Keith. What’s up?”

Sure, he liked to be alone sometimes, even craved it, but not all the time. He was used to living with his dad, used to spending evenings on the couch watching TV and talking to him over dinner. The rest of the team acted like it was out of the ordinary for him to even speak up half the time, much less seek out their company. It made him wonder what had happened when he’d stopped living with his dad, how anti-social he must’ve become.

Still, seeking out this attention felt different than normal. It wasn’t as if he was just bored, just wanted to hang out with someone, to talk to someone. He knew what that felt like, had done it all the time back at home. This was more deep, more guttural. Embarrassingly, it made him wonder if it had something to do with the fact that he was part Galra, like Lance had said. Maybe that was why he was even seeking him out in the first place.

“Can I come in?” Keith asked, ignoring the way his own cheeks grew red. It wasn’t like there was anything inherently inappropriate about entering another person’s bedroom.

“Yeah, of course! Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Keith said hastily. The doors slid shut automatically behind him, making him jump. “Actually… I feel kind of… weird.”

“Weird how?” Lance said slowly. “Are you remembering things?”

“No,” Keith answered, feeling guilty. He knew how badly Lance wanted him to remember, he just couldn’t help it, couldn’t make it come faster. “I just feel like…” There was no way to explain it without it sounding embarrassing. And now that he was here, in Lance’s room, he felt it even stronger. He just wanted to climb into Lance’s bed and hold him close, maybe fall asleep in his arms. Which was strange, yeah, Keith knew that but… Well, he couldn’t help it!

Suddenly, Lance’s eyes widened, and he looked very, very invested. Was this something that had happened to Keith before? Did Lance already know about it? This horrible, insistent craving for attention—had he helped Keith sort it out before?

“Er—do you know what I’m talking about? You know what’s wrong with me?”

“We call it your man-period,” Lance said casually, and Keith froze.

“What?”

“Calm down! You don’t actually like—bleed, or something.” Keith felt his shoulders shrink away from his ears, where they had risen in terrified indignation. “It’s just that for about a week every month you become really grumpy. Sometimes you and Pidge become aligned—it’s terrifying.”

“I can’t believe this,” Keith muttered.

“It’s no big deal. Usually you just terrorize us for a week and refuse to be around us as often as possible. Once you locked yourself in your room for three days straight—we had to feed you through the crack under the door.”

“I didn’t want to be around you guys?” Keith said incredulously. “When I’m feeling like this?”

Lance’s eyes twinkled with curiosity. “What’re you feeling like?”

“Like I need to be cuddling with someone ASAP.” Lance’s eyes widened. “Is that not something I would normally tell you?”

“Considering the fact you’ve been locking yourself away and suffering once a week every month? No, don’t think so.”

“Uh oh,” Keith said. “I guess I won’t like that I said that when I get my memory back.”

“But who knows when that’ll happen!” Lance cheered. “You’re safe from your internal rage for who knows how long!” It was crazy how he could just pull the bright side out of anything, but Keith just shrugged. It wasn’t like he cared whether Lance knew he was craving affection right now. He had no clue why he usually did.

“Does that mean I haven’t told you guys I’m gay either?” Keith pondered aloud. Lance choked. Keith considered that fact that maybe, he’d been keeping these things secret for a reason. Was Team Voltron homophobic?

“Oh my God,” Lance breathed. “I’m gonna have to stop you from ejecting yourself into space,” he said. “Future you, that is. Memory restored you.”

“I really haven’t told you that?” Keith said incredulously. “Why? I thought we were all friends?”

“How would I know!” Lance spluttered. Keith was just confused. He’d always been really open about his sexuality, had he hidden it when he’d gone to the Garrison? And then hidden it from all his friends afterwards?

“Oh well,” Lance said. “You can worry about that later. Come here.”

“What?”

“You said you wanted to cuddle!” Lance said, sounding indignant. “Who comes to another person’s room to tell them they want to cuddle without asking to cuddle?”

Lance had a good point, Keith couldn’t argue that. And he really was feeling horrible. It was like his entire body was trying to drag him closer to the nearest person, to wrap himself up in their skin. And so he crossed the room, climbing into Lance’s bed without reservations. He figured there was probably some way to ease into it, like sit beside the other boy and ask him to wrap his arm around his shoulder or something, but that’s not what Keith did. He just climbed onto the bed and then onto Lance, straddling him and shoving his head into Lance’s neck.

“Woah,” Lance said, laughing softly. Keith should probably be embarrassed. He was sure when he got his memories back he’d be mortified, but for now all he felt was relieved. This was exactly what he’d needed, after all, and Lance smelled wonderful, like warmth and rain and sunshine. Keith wondered when the last time he’d seen sunshine was.

Tentatively, Lance raised his arms and wrapped them around Keith’s back, holding him closer. Keith’s fingers were clenched in Lance’s shirt, twisting in the material.

“This is better,” Keith muttered. “This is much, much better.”

Keith spent the next week clinging to Lance at any opportunity. Lance warned him not to do it in front of the others. After doing which, he’d said to Keith sternly, “So in the future when you think you want to murder me, remember this, remember how I saved you from even further embarrassment.”

“Okay,” Keith had muttered, and Lance had winked at him.

“That wasn’t for you,” Lance just said. “That was for future Keith. Return of the memories Keith.”

“Right.”

Still, the difference just touching Lance made in the discomfort Keith felt otherwise was monumental. He couldn’t believe that normally he just made himself suffer through it, locking himself in his room and probably curling up into as tight of a ball as he could manage. It felt so good that even afterwards, after he stopped feeling like he might die unless he was hugging Lance to him, he continued sleeping in his bed.

Lance didn’t even question it. He was just that nice, that genuine, that he would let his amnesiac friend crawl into his bed night after night. They would wake up cuddling, and Keith didn’t even have the grace to feel embarrassed or sheepish. After all, he was just cuddling with a cute boy he’d recently met. He didn’t have any history with Lance, even though his memory-ridden self might.

“Are you sure we hate each other?” Keith asked Lance one night. They were laying side by side. Keith hadn’t slept in his own bed for a little over a week, and the entire team was growing anxious for him to get his memories back. They were even considering trying to reteach him all the drills and bonding exercises they knew, preparing for the worst. Keith was pretty sure it scared everyone else more than him, his memory being missing. Yes, he wanted it back, yes, he wanted to know what the missing part of his life had been like, but it was everyone else who was missing their friend, not him. He was just now making them.

“Not hate, per se,” Lance said. “We just like to argue.”

“Hmm.”

“You realize everything I say to you has the potential to embarrass me later?” Lance ventured. “You’ll call me a softy when you get your memories back.”

“If I get my memories back.”

“Don’t say that,” Lance said, looking at him hurriedly.

“Sorry. And I won’t think you’re a softy.”

“You will.”

“Nah. I might say it, but… I won’t mean it. I’ll probably think it was sweet of you, being so nice to me while my memories were missing.”

“And then you’ll kill me—for being so nice to you while your memories were missing.”

Keith couldn’t help that he didn’t really believe Lance. And he couldn’t help wondering how they were even fighting all the time in the first place. After all, so far he’d managed to decipher only that Lance was incredibly sweet and caring, as well as attractive and conveniently available. Apparently it was general knowledge on the castle-ship that Lance was bi.

“Lance,” Keith said quietly. “Can I… do something? And can you promise you won’t kill me for it?”

“No promises,” Lance said immediately. “Like, if you start strangling me, my awesome reflexes are just going to start happening. It won’t be my fault if you end up karate chopped across the room.”

“Okay,” Keith said, because that was good enough. He wasn’t planning on choking Lance anyway.

Before he could lose nerve, Keith rolled over, practically on top of Lance, and kissed him. For a moment, Lance was completely still, and Keith wondered if he really was about to get Karate chopped across the room—but then he was kissing him back. His lips were moving softly, sweetly against Keith’s, his hands coming up to hold his hips. His fingers were long and hot and strong, gripping Keith so securely. Keith’s hand was clenched in the sheets by Lance’s head.

And then Lance was shoving him away, both of them breathing heavily, and Keith’s face was way too hot. He’d overstepped a boundary, hadn’t he? He didn’t even know Lance, not in the way that he knew Keith.

“I’m sorry,” Keith breathed.

“You should be,” Lance muttered. “It’s your fault you’re going to murder me one day. Holding your scary Galra-sword and everything. You’ll probably scoop out my eyes first!”

“I won’t!”

“I have no objection to kissing,” Lance said loftily. “And I have no objection to you having a crush on me—it’s a great feeling, you know?” Keith was blushing now, not that Lance could see it very well in the dark. “But you definitely can’t do that until you have your memories again.”

“Okay,” Keith muttered. Now he really wanted his memories back. “That was my first kiss, you know. Erm… that I know of.”

“You’re killing me,” Lance groaned, rolling over and shoving his face into the pillow. His voice was muffled when he kept speaking. “All the embarrassing things you’re telling me are just killing Future Lance.”

“Sorry,” Keith said again. He didn’t really mean it.

—

It soon became time to activate the plan Pidge had apparently been creating all this time.

“Operation: Force Keith’s Memories to Return One Way of the Other,” she called it. This name scared him, mostly because it sounded like it could possibly be painful. Also, he felt like he had reason to not completely trust all of Pidge’s plans, though maybe that was just instinct.

It started with sensory recreation. Pidge wanted to force him through familiar motions, force him to feel things he’d felt before, to see if that would remind his brain of what he’d forgotten and make him remember. This led to him fighting against robot droids, which he was surprisingly good at, eating weird space-goo (something he’d only seen Hunk eat in the time he’d been here), and leading Lance through an invisible electric maze, which Lance was horrible at and blamed Keith for while running into the walls.

When this didn’t immediately work, Pidge went for plan number two: bonding with his lion.

“I’ve already seen Red,” he admitted. “I slept in her that first night.”

“But have you flown her?”

This resulted in Keith flying around the castle for a little while, which although it was fun, and fast, it did nothing to revive his missing memories.

“Maybe it’s because he’s not getting shot at,” Lance suggested, before apparently hitting some switch which had the castle shooting at him and making him panic (though this didn’t help his memories either).

No lion-related plan returned his memories, though they tried forming Voltron together and even made Keith use his bayard to make Voltron have a giant sword.

Pidge had more plans, of course, all of which were somehow grueling and energy draining. Even Hunk had a plan.

“We’ve all watched movies, right?” Hunk said in a tone that suggested he was about to suggest a genius idea. “I think the obvious solution is to just hit him over the head again.”

“That is what always happens on TV,” Lance said consideringly, while both Allura and Coran looked on in horror.

“Earthlings are terrifying,” Coran whispered, too loudly to go unheard.

“They’re going to kill him,” Allura agreed.

“We’re not hitting Keith over the head!” Shiro said, putting his foot down. Keith was glad, because even Pidge had cocked her head to the side, looking as though she thought this plan might work.

They all went to bed disappointed, having gotten their hopes up too high, thinking he’d have his memories back by the end of the day.

—

Keith woke feeling groggy. His head felt fuzzy and his eyelids heavy. Before he knew it, his heart was pounding, banging away in his chest at rapid speed.

Red, he thought. Where’s Red? We were falling, crashing, and then—

The memories came back to him like a rubber band snapping into place. He remembered stumbling out of the pod, remembered feeling so utterly lost and confused. He remembered meeting everyone as if for the first time, and looking back on it now felt so strange, but he was just glad he remembered. How could he have forgotten Voltron in the first place? It seemed bizarre, that something so prominent in his life could’ve so easily slipped from his mind. Being part of Voltron was his life now, it was all he was good for.

And then, worse, he remembered even more, and his stomach lurched. He was such a fucking idiot! What had he been doing, going around spilling his secrets like they weren’t secret for a reason. He hadn’t even realized that the rest of the team had noticed he became withdrawn and secluded himself on a monthly basis—he hadn’t realized it was that obvious. And the fact that they called it his man-period! What was wrong with them!?

But seriously, he loses his memory for like two seconds and suddenly he can’t deal with problems that are most certainly his own anymore? He had to go crawling to… to Lance about his weird, Galra instinctual shit?

It’d been so embarrassing the first time it’d happened. He couldn’t even figure out what was wrong with him, why he longed to press himself against Pidge when she came to his door one morning, telling him the team was going to practice together and would he like to join? He’d managed to utter out a semblance of an agreement, the whole time his body shaking just a little. He’d thought something was horribly wrong with him—after all, he was gay, and though Pidge may look a bit boyish, she certainly wasn’t. To his dismay it’d only gotten worse over the course of the week, and he’d considered the fact that maybe possibly he was dying. He’d taken to avoiding the team, gasping alone in his room and wondering why, why, why he just wanted to hug someone, to crawl under the sheets with them, when normally he flinched away from anything more affectionate than a fist bump.

When it had ended, he’d only allowed himself to believe that it might’ve been a fluke, might’ve been a space-born sickness, for a few blissful days. Because though he wasn’t Pidge or Hunk, though he wasn’t scarily smart, he also wasn’t dumb enough to think that what had happened to him might not have happened for a reason. And he knew it was true the very next month.

He’d considered the fact that maybe it was a Galra-type puberty. It didn’t seem fair that he had to go through it twice, first as a human, and then again as an alien. But he figured it also might’ve just had something to do with being in space, with being away from the atmosphere he was used to. Maybe living in the same environment as the Galra, or being near them so often, fighting them or working with the Blade of Marmora, had caused his instincts to kick start into whatever the fuck this was.

So every month he suffered. Every month he hid in his room, or trained so hard he passed out from exhaustion, or fought in Voltron with the team, the whole time wondering if someone would hug him in excitement after the battle. Because if they won—a great, exciting win, one fit for giving hugs after—it wouldn’t really be up to him whether or not he got hugged, would it? Sometimes Hunk just did that when he was too excited. Sometimes Lance would sling his arm around Keith’s shoulders, a few pointers in mind since Keith was a drop out and had maybe forgot about this Cool Pilot Fact that Lance knew. And when these moments happened during his… time of the month… he relished in them. He relished in the warm touch of Lance’s arm around his shoulders, behind his neck, in the feel of Hunk’s body close to his own, or Pidge’s small hands gripping his sleeve to show him some cool new thing she’d invented. But he still had to act like himself, still had too pull away after much too soon, which was about as horrible as it sounded.

And he’d spent all those months suffering, locking himself away, saving himself from embarrassment, only to go and get amnesia and decide he had to cuddle with Lance for a week straight.

Keith, feeling like he might throw up in his own bed (which, let’s face it, could maybe be a good thing at this point because he could drown in it and die which would obviously be a relief from all the pain he was going through) realized that this wasn’t the worst of it. He’d not only cuddled with Lance, not only clung to him at every given opportunity, he’d also told him he was gay.

WHY DID HE DO THAT?

What kind of stupid did he have to be to just do that? Clearly he could see where the embarrassment in that might lie? He was a personal guy, he liked to keep shit like that to himself, not that he had realized that when he was still living with his dad and hadn’t even really talked to someone his own age! And he’d just gone and told Lance! Like it was no big deal!

Right, two of his biggest secrets just out in the open, shoved right under Lance’s nose, probably the one person on the ship he would like for them to be revealed to least. And even worse, he hadn’t just told him these things, he’d kissed him. It was now apparent that Keith had been an idiot up until two years ago, if he was willing to kiss a person when he had amnesia and didn’t even know the whole of it. Embarrassed—mortified, really—Keith shifted over, wrapping his arms tightly around a pillow and groaned. He was going to have to eject himself into space.

“You okay?”

He was going to have to eject himself into space right now.

Had he seriously fallen asleep in Lance’s bed last night?! Why was he just remembering this now!? After remembering everything else?!

Obviously, the only action he could possibly take in this situation was to run away. And so he did. Keith struggled out of Lance’s sheets—there really were far too many—and tripped onto the carpet, making a b-line for the door.

“Where are you going?” Lance demanded.

“Space!” Keith shouted, and then he was running through the castle halls, wearing one sock, pajama pants, and no shirt.

“Keith!” Lance shouted from behind him, but Keith wasn’t listening. He was running through the castle, through blessedly familiar hallways—he would stop and kiss the floor if he weren’t currently escaping from his embarrassment—and into the control room.

“Hey Keith!” greeted Pidge. She was sitting on one of the control panels, which Allura was standing next to. “Whatchya doin’?”

There was no time to respond.

“Keeeeith! Wait up!” Lance yelled from behind him. Letting out an estranged yell, Keith sprinted to the panel that led to the red lion.

“Stop following me!” he shouted, grabbing onto the handles when the doors flew open.

“Oh!” Allura said from somewhere behind him. “I think he’s got his memories back.”

Keith was zooming down the slanted shaft, hopefully escaping from Lance—

“Not so fast!”

Keith groaned. Was Lance sliding down the shaft like a slide? One glance proved that yes, he was sliding down the shaft like a slide, and Keith debated trying to kick out at his head. Maybe then Lance would lose his own memories and tell Keith some of his most embarrassing secrets.

In the end, Keith had just jumped into Red’s open mouth and urged her to go, go, go! when Lance catapulted in behind him. This resulted in the two of them tumbling into the pilot’s seat together, Keith sitting haphazardly on top of it and Lance flung out across his lap, only managing to stay upright because Keith was holding onto him.

“Caught you!” Lance cheered.

Keith let go of Lance. He fell to the floor in the heap.

Red, who apparently had no problem whatsoever with this intruder, shot out into space, flying around lazily with both Keith and Lance in her interior.

“Traitor,” Keith muttered, and Red purred a rumbly sort of laugh.

“We need to talk,” Lance said importantly, standing up with his hands on his hips.

“You need to sit down,” Keith said instead. “I can’t fly when I can’t see.”

“Red’s flying by herself,” Lance scoffed. “Have you forgotten how bad of a liar you are too?”

“I am not!”

“There you go, lying again,” Lance sighed. “I fear you’re changed for good.”

“Shut up!”

“Seriously—are we not gonna talk about—”

“No!” Keith spat. “Never!” and after a pause: “Ever!”

“Keith—”

“If you don’t stop talking to me I’m going to make Red eject you out into space,” he threatened. “Is that what you want? ‘Cause I’ll do it.”

“No you won’t.”

“Wha—?”

“Cause you like me.”

Keith felt his entire face go brick red. Yes, he’d kissed Lance but—! He’d been… indisposed! He hadn’t been thinking straight. He didn’t really like Lance! Sure, he’d always thought he was attractive, and sure, he was hilarious and a genuinely sweet guy, but he was also Lance, and he was annoying and they hated each other! Keith didn’t like him!

“That wasn’t me!” Keith spluttered. “That was—that was—amnesia!” It was the only thing he could think to say. “I didn’t know who you were!”

“You were the same person, though,” Lance said idly. “And if that Keith likes me…”

“Shut up!” Keith said.

“Make me.” Lance winked, and he walked closer to Keith, smirking.

“What’re you—”

“Shut up,” Lance whispered, and he was kissing Keith, and it was just as good as the first time—better, even. It was his second kiss, because he’d been right the other day, he really hadn’t ever kissed anyone before. And Lance was good at this. His lips moved expertly against Keith’s, his hands buried in Keith’s hair, tilting his head up, opening his mouth with his tongue. And jesus fuck, his tongue. It was… it was illegal, to say the least. The way he was using it was like it was a weapon—it was rendering Keith weak and useless, anyway. If he were standing he certainly would’ve fallen by now.

Luckily, though, he was sitting, and so Lance invited himself onto Keith’s lap, both of his hands still tilting Keith’s head up, his tongue still plundering his mouth, his teeth occasionally nipping his lips, making him gasp and groan, making his breath hitch in his throat.

And then—laughter. It didn’t make sense. Neither of them were laughing, they were both way too occupied with kissing, but the laughter was definitely happening. It was distinct.

Apparently Lance noticed it too, because he pulled way (cheeks pink, lips red, hair a mess—when had Keith messed that up?) and frowned.

“What?” he croaked.

Keith’s eyes widened, seeing the screen behind Lance, on which all of their traitor friend’s faces grinned at them.

“Aagh!” Keith exclaimed, pointing at it. Without anything better to say, and certainly without a more intelligent way to express himself, he repeated this. “AAGGGH!!!”

Lance was just as embarrassed as he was, and they both scrambled, tripping and tumbling over each other in their haste to knock the holographic screen away, both cursing each other and their friends in the process.

By the time they managed to end their idiot friends’ incessant laughter, they were panting and embarrassed and laying in a heap in Red’s hull.

“This sucks,” Keith muttered.

“Nah,” Lance said. He was smiling. And his cheeks were still flushed, and when he looked over at Keith, he somehow managed to look even happier. “Not really.”

“Shut up!” Keith managed, the look on Lance’s face making him feel even more embarrassed.

“Okay,” Lance said, but he rolled on top of Keith for another kiss. Red purred all around them, and it was just like they were getting laughed at all over again, but for some reason Keith couldn’t find it in himself to mind.

#klance #klance fanfiction #amnesia #voltron #this was fun!!! #really self indulgent #three days ago i was like #i wanna write a memory loss fic #and here THIS IS #i hpoe you liked it!!! #<3

[pomrania]

Unspoken

((part of the Little by Little AU, and sort-of sequel to The Plush Tooka; it’s the same character))

She saw him around a few times. It was unavoidable, really; the base was only so large, so unless someone was particularly reclusive, they would probably be encountered once in a while. He hadn't seemed interested in talking with her again, so she let him be.

  She heard about him, of course. There wasn't much else interesting going on at any given time, and especially when the person in question was one of the Jedi, it was going to be talked about. It didn't feel right, but she understood why it happened.

  She tried not to watch him too intently, looking for any signs. He was more than what had happened to or was happening with his body. They all were.

  She knew what it felt like, at least somewhat. She should be better than the other people. She didn't want to be part of the problem, or make the problem feel even worse than it already was.

  She hadn't been searching for him. She found him anyways; slouched against a stack of crates, head down, scuffing the dirt with his foot. He wasn't precisely hiding, but he was definitely in an out-of-the-way location. He wasn't looking in her direction.

  She didn't have anything she needed to do at the moment. She coughed slightly; loud enough to be noticed, but not something that would sound too obvious. Hopefully.

  He looked up, and recognition flickered across his face. His vision was still good enough for that, apparently. He flashed a weak grin. "I guess you know what it was now."

  She briefly smiled in response. It was equally empty of any real joy. "Honestly," she started, "I was more surprised that your name's Ezra. It's not that... I mean, I'd been certain it was 'Ettar', so anything other than that would have been a surprise, but I didn't know what you had with.... Whatever it turned out to be, I hadn't had any strong ideas on it, so I wasn't expecting it but it wasn't a surprise, and...." That was not how she had wanted to say anything.

  She glanced over to check his reactions. He seemed more confused than offended, so it wasn't an immediate failure. She could still make something out of the situation.

  She took a deep breath. "That's not important," she said. "Sorry. There were some things I wanted to say, if I ever -- talked with you again."

  He reacted to that, it was obvious. The lines of his body tensed up, and he seemed more closed-off, although she wouldn't be able to describe how.

  "You've probably had people tell you all sorts of things, that they're so sorry or they can't imagine what it must feel like, or that it could always be worse, or you'll feel better eventually, or any bits of advice that do absolutely nothing."

  He nodded, automatically, almost involuntarily. "Kanan also said...." He cut himself off. "So, you too. What was... no, it doesn't matter."

  That was a relief. She would talk about what had happened with her, if he asked and she needed to, but she really would rather not. Those memories would always be painful; even though they no longer bled on contact, they were still incredibly sensitive. And besides, the only similarities in their circumstances were that they hurt, and their bodies had betrayed them.

  "This is something I wish I'd heard, earlier." She closed her eyes, then opened them again. "When there's something bad like this, it's only human to get mad at the galaxy for it. It isn't right. It's not fair, it shouldn't have happened. It's okay to feel angry, and it's completely natural to get mad at the people who only make it worse. Doesn't matter if they weren't trying to, it still hurts. It's okay to want to grind someone's face into the dirt when they say something they really should have known was a bad idea, if they took half a second to actually think. They're just so stupid at times, and sometimes dwelling on that fantasy was the only thing that kept me going through a shift without actually attacking anyone. Your anger isn't wrong, it's a part of you, and don't let anyone make you feel guilty about it."

  "It's not...." He shook his head. "It's a Jedi thing. You wouldn't understand."

  She felt a flash of her own anger at those words -- she wasn't stupid, how could he say that she wouldn't understand -- but pushed it back. She didn't know "Jedi stuff", and he could have picked a better way to say it, but he almost certainly wasn't in the best mental place. And going by the way his expression had shifted, there were other unpleasant things involved. Life didn't give you a break just because of problems in one area, after all.

  She'd controlled herself in the face of far worse things than somebody saying something dumb while in pain. He at least didn't mean anything by it, and simply had wanted to drop the subject.

  She could do that. She had more to say than just that subject, after all.

  "This may be one of the most awkward questions, but... how do you want people to treat you?"

  "Normally," he breathed, like the word slipped out of him as natural as his exhale, and the remembered sensation almost broke her heart.

  "I'm so sorry," she said, "but there is no such thing any more. Even if they don't know, and they act exactly the same with you as they did before, you're not the same as you were, and you'll carry that with you." That emptiness that was yet so heavy....

  "But I am the same!" he retorted, and she didn't know who he was trying to convince. "Nothing's changed with me. The only difference is that people know about it now. I never should have...."

  She was losing him. If she wasn't careful, he'd reject everything she said, thinking of her as just another person who thought they knew what was best.

  "So, uh... how about that med droid? Still the worst bedside manner in this part of the galaxy?"

  His face twisted in remembered disgust, or maybe annoyance. "'It's so fascinating'," he mimicked. "A rabid loth-cat could probably program something nicer than Noisi!"

  "Oh, you call them 'Noisi'? I've been using 'En-zero-one', but yours is shorter. Have you been bugged about getting an, uh...."

  She sighed. "Where I come from, before all this," and she waved a hand, "whenever we needed a safe and easy conversation topic, we'd just ask about the local sports team, or if we were really desperate, the weather. Can't do that here though, there's nothing much except the dokmaaagh!"

  As she had shifted her weight, her foot came down on a hard round surface that hadn't been there before. "Sorry!" she immediately said. "Dokma. They've been getting everywhere, and I'd swear they were specifically trying to trip people up."

  He grinned at that, but it abruptly faded, like he had been reminded of something. "Yeah," he quietly said. "They have been."

  There had been something about that with him, a bad experience -- probably recently -- related to "tripping over dokma". And then she realized, and felt sick to her stomach. It was hard enough to avoid the creatures when she could see perfectly. He had almost definitely stepped on one that he hadn't been able to see.

  "Sorry," she said.

  "It's okay."

  They both knew that it wasn't okay, but also that nothing could really be done about that, and asking would just make it worse.

  She pretended nothing had ever happened. It was what she would have wanted.

  He was getting uncomfortable, and she didn't want to lecture him. "L-listen, if you never want me to talk to you again, just say so, and I'll leave you alone for as long as we're both alive. Unless we're assigned to work together for something," she added, "that would be awkward."

  "No, it's... okay."

  "Okay?"

  "Okay."

  "Well then."

  She looked off into the distance, in the pointless hope that a solution to everything would present itself on the horizon. The sky looked the same as it always did. The sky didn't care about them.

  "I've said pretty much everything I wanted to say here," she said. "If you ever want to talk about stuff, or talk about anything but stuff, I'm here. And I still have some pretty extensive repair work to do, so I'll be guaranteed around for a while."

  "I'll be around too," he muttered. It wasn't intended for her to hear, so she acted like she hadn't.

  "You can tell me what a loth-cat is, and I can tell you about sports on my homeworld."

  "I'll keep that in mind."

  She hadn't expected anything more than that. She wouldn't have done anything more than that. Still, hopefully even the offer would do some good.

  "And if anyone's giving you problems...."

  "What, are you going to offer to fight them too? I can take care of myself, you know," he bitterly said.

  She blinked. "Well, I was going to say that you can rant and yell about it to me, but if you choose to fight them, I'll cover for you."

  That got something that was almost a smile. A real smile.

  "Well then," she said. "It was nice talking to you."

  "Yeah. Bye."

  As she turned to leave, he acted like she was already gone. But that was okay. She had done what she needed to; everything else was up to him now.

#fandom: star wars #star wars rebels #original content #not a reblog #writing #little by little #ezra bridger