#and instead of trying to fit it all into bullet points i just threw some quotes from our convo together | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

unorthodoxsavvy · 2 years

Text

The X-Philes: Chapter 7

Phil is a psychic. Dan is a detective. When Phil is visited by the ghost of his brother, he knows something isn't right. Can he and Dan solve the case, or will they become the next victims?

Rating: M

For Moe, who always believed I was a writer at heart. May 1941-May 2022

“No!”

Phil’s heart lurched in his chest as another shot rang out and he felt a pull deep within his chest like he’d never felt before. His eyes squeezed shut on instinct and when he opened them Dan was motionless on the ground. Until he wasn’t.

The gun had been aimed at Dan at point-blank range, shot execution style just like it had with Dr. Howell- and yet somehow the bullet had missed. Not by a hair, either. It was as if some invisible force had yanked the bullet out of its path and tossed it aside.

Stunned, the guard looked at his gun, and, sensing his opportunity, Dan rushed him.

Phil rolled to the side and got to his feet while his guard turned to try and help his partner.

Phil ran over and with all of his might lurched into the guard knocking him off balance.

The gun fell to the side and hit the ground and Phil dashed over to pick it up, dropping to the ground and rolling so his hands behind his back could pick it up and carry it with him.

“Run!”

Phil didn’t need to hear it twice: The guards, though momentarily dazed, were still armed with their riffles. Phil knew they would never make it across the desert back to the car: their only hope was getting back underground.

Phil made it to the trap door first, tossing the gun off to the side and yanking the door open still with his hands behind his back and practically falling his way down the stairs. He wasn’t sure how he’d managed to both grab the gun and open the door while still being handcuffed but he chalked it up to life-threatening adrenaline.

Dan followed close behind and Phil noticed for the first time his hands were no longer cuffed. He must have picked the lock with something while talking to Dr. Steinbeck.

In all the commotion the doctor, instead of helping his guards, had rushed back to the trap door, and indeed, there he was, waiting at the bottom, gun drawn on them again.

“You’re not going anywhere,” he sneered.

Phil grabbed emotions from deep down inside him and with his mind reached out. The gun flew from Dr. Steinbeck's hand. Stunned, he turned to summon more guards.

Dan was still running on full adrenaline and didn’t bother to process what he’d just witnessed. Instead, he led Phil back through the maze of halls, which he’d managed to memorize, until they came back to the original staircase.

They burst through the door back up to the car garage in the dessert and ran as fast as they could back towards the car, zig-zagging their paths just in case, but Phil didn’t hear the whir of bullets flying at them or see clouds of dust where they might have landed.

Phil looked at the fence that was slowly coming into focus. Reaching down once again, he pulled from something deep within him and reached out, bending the wires that crisscrossed apart and back so they could run through.

Dan grabbed the rock he’d hidden the key under and chucked it, snatching up the key and fitting them into the door lock and twisting.

Phil looked nervously over his shoulder, sweat dripping into his eyes from his brow and chest tight and heaving while Dan slid across the seats and opened the passenger side door from within.

Phil had barely managed to pull the door shut before Dan threw his beloved car into reverse, speeding backwards before turning about sharply, throwing it into drive, and getting the hell out of dodge.

*-*-*-*-*

Dan did 80 all the way until a gas station in the middle of nowhere with lights on came into view.

Dan steadily let his foot off the gas pedal and turned to pull into the parking lot. He didn’t bother to pull into a parking space, but it hardly mattered; the place was deserted, just like everything else around here. Everything except that goddamn facility.

Dan got out and slammed the driver’s side door closed. Phil watched him walk around the front of the car and yank open the passenger side door.

Phil turned his back to Dan and Dan leaned down and fiddled with the cuffs until they clicked open. Phil’s arms dropped and with a groan he slowly brought them around the front of his body, not bothering to check to see what Dan had used to uncuff him. By the time he was able to bring his hands to his chest Dan was already inside.

Phil watched out the passenger side door towards the gas station. He could make out Dan inside but couldn’t see what he was doing. It was only when Dan had exited the building with a “ding” from the door’s bell that Phil was able to see by the light of the roof over the pumps Dan had a bottle of whisky in his hand and a pack of cigarettes in his breast pocket.

“Since when do you smoke?” Phil asked without thinking.

“Not since high school,” Dan replied, setting the bottle of whisky on the hood of the car. He pulled the package of cigarettes out of his pocket and opened the lid, selecting one, while pushing the others back down with a few taps. He placed the cigarette in his mouth and placed the package back in his breast pocket and pulled out a lighter that he’d presumably also just bought from another pocket. He flicked the switch a few times until a flame appeared and brought it close to his lips, shielding the flame from the slight desert breeze that’d appeared some time after they’d gone underground. Dan flicked the lighter back shut and returned it to his pocket as well. He was telling the truth: the motions were too natural for someone who’d never smoked before.

Dan took a puff before placing the cigarette back into his mouth to rest and used his hands to open the bottle of whisky. He pulled the cigarette back out of his mouth with one hand and used the other to raise a fist holding the bottle’s neck to his mouth and take a swig. Phil said nothing.

This went on for a few more minutes, puffs of smoke followed by another sip of liquor before Dan flicked his cigarette to the ground and leaned off the car to snuff it out with his boot.

He stood up straight and screwed the top back on the bottle. Dan walked around to the driver’s side of the car and got in. Phil pulled out his phone and typed in the name of their motel, pulling up directions from their location. They followed them back without another word between them.

Dan pulled into a parking space outside the motel and he and Phil got out. Not knowing what to do with the cuffs that’d been around his wrist he dropped them on the floor of the passenger seat before closing the door.

Dan turned the key in the lock and they made their way towards their room.

The last thing on Phil’s mind had been where their keycard to their room was, but Dan pulled out one from his pocket and swiped it through the door. It flashed red. Dan held it up in the dim hallway light and squinted, grunting. Phil realized it must have been the keycard to the MedLife facility. Dan replaced it in his pocket and patted around his jeans pockets absentmindedly until he seemingly stumbled upon the correct keycard. He pulled that one out of his pocket and swiped it. The light flashed green and like so many times the night before, for by now the sun was starting to rise, Phil heard a whir and a lock click open.

Exhausted emotionally and physically Phil slid off his shoes and fell into the motel bed, falling asleep instantly.

*-*-*-*-*

“Dad!”

“No!”

BANG.

Phil jerked awake and panicked before realizing where he was. Blearily he blinked his eyes and gazed around the motel room. It was dark outside already, meaning Phil had slept for at least 14 hours straight, something he’d never done before. He’d never witnessed a murder before, though, either.

Dan’s silhouette was illuminated by the desk lamp. Phil got up and walked over to him. Dan was hunched over the map they’d used to track down his father. Drops of blood bleeded out from the page from what looked like tear stains that had fallen on top of them, washing them out in small patterns. Dan clearly hadn’t slept. He reeked of whisky and cigarette smoke.

Phil placed his hand on Dan’s shoulder.

Emotions rushed through him, strong, painful, angry, sadness. Phil tried his best to sort through them and push a sense of calm from him to Dan. He thought it might have worked, because Dan slumped, much like his father had in the desert, his body folding into itself. Unlike his father, who had crumpled into the desert sand, though, Dan’s body crumpled back into Phil’s.

Phil let Dan lean into him for a few moments before pulling Dan up from the desk and leading him to his bed.

Dan dropped into the bed next to Phil’s and finally went to sleep. Not knowing what else to do, and feeling drained from taking away some of Dan’s emotional pain and replacing it with something else, Phil crawled back into his own motel bed and went back to sleep.

*-*-*-*-*

Phil woke up to a banging at the door.

Dan stirred also and went to answer it.

From what Phil understood from the limited words he could hear, they had to pay for another day or pack up their stuff and leave. Dan nodded and shut the door. Without a word to Phil he started to pack up his things.

Phil rolled over in his bed and sat up. His head pounded. He waited for the sensation to subside a bit before getting to his feet.

He dug around in his bag for a clean pair of clothes but realized he didn’t have any more, so he grabbed what he could find and carried it into the bathroom with him.

Phil turned the shower faucet on and took off the clothes he’d been wearing for almost three days now finally while he waited for the water to heat up. When he reached his hand under the spout to check the temperature he recoiled slightly. Much too hot. And yet, a part of him wanted to ignore that, step under the water, and let the scalding temperature run over him, as if he could burn away the heaviness he felt. A rational part of his mind knew better, though, and he turned the knob back a bit and checked the temperature again.

Satisfied, he climbed in.

Phil closed his eyes and let the water run over him, caressing every part of his body with a warm touch. He hugged his arms around his chest, thankful that he could, that they were no longer bound behind his back… thankful that he could, because he was still alive.

Yes, despite everything, he was still alive.

For a selfish second he wished he wasn’t. The thought was fleeting, though, as flashes of Dr. Howell’s dead body danced through his mind’s eye. Phil squeezed his eyes shut even tighter and pushed them away.

Without having done any sort of real bathing Phil shut off the water and climbed out of the shower, grabbing a towel on the towel rack to his right. He wrapped the towel around himself and stared as his vague shape in the foggy mirror. He used the palm of his hand to wipe clean a circle at face level and stared back into his own ocean-blue eyes. What laid back there, behind them? He wished he knew.

He looked down at the palm of the hand he’d used to wipe away the mirror’s condensation. He felt a slight buzz like he’d never felt before coursing through his limbs. Had he really done those things back there? He couldn’t be sure. His mind was a haze, much like the steam trapped with him in the bathroom. Foggy.

Phil dried his hair and pulled on his already-worn clothes, including a pair of already-worn boxers. He missed having clean clothes, but at least he was alive, he reminded himself. At least he was alive.

Phil exited the bathroom to find Dan already fully packed and ready to go.

Phil threw his clothes into his overnight bag as quickly as he could, not bothering to fold them so he wouldn’t keep Dan waiting. Slinging their bags over their shoulders, they headed out of the room. Phil’s eyes flickered to the trash can on the way out, where an empty bottle and an empty carton of cigarettes lay on top of the map, crumpled up, bits of dried blood still visible through the wire mesh basket and thin plastic garbage bag.

Dan and Phil hadn’t spoken to each other in over 24 hours at this point, though a lot of that, of course, was due to sleeping. Not all of it, though. They didn’t speak as they climbed into Dan’s car and they didn’t speak when he started the engine. They didn’t speak when Dan typed in the address to his childhood home in West Virginia and they didn’t speak when Dan put the car into drive and pulled out of the parking lot. They spoke when Dan pulled into a Starbucks drive-through, Phil giving Dan his order and Dan giving his order to the Starbucks barista, but they didn’t really speak to each other.

They spent the night in another motel and though they spoke- mumbled apologizes when one got in the other’s way, things of that nature, they didn’t really speak.

In fact, they didn’t speak until almost noon that next day when Dan finally said “I’m done working the case.”

“What do you mean you’re done working the case?” Phil demanded.

“This case is FBI jurisdiction anyway. I’m just a consultant. It wasn’t my case as soon as it crossed state lines and I’m now taking the liberty of removing myself from the case as a detective and I’m handing it back over to the FBI for them to assign you a new detective.”

Phil was furious.

“That’s it? Just like that?”

“Just like that,” Dan snapped back.

The wheel jerked in Dan’s hands and the car was driven off the road.

Now Dan was furious, and he stared right at Phil. From just below his line of vision he watched the gear shift put itself into park.

Dan unbuckled his seat belt and flung the driver’s side door open, climbing out and slamming it shut. Phil followed suit.

“Do you even care about what happened to my brother?” Phil demanded.

“Of course I do!” Dan yelled back.

“But not enough to find out yourself?” Phil asked.

Dan scowled.

“Don’t you want justice for your father?”

“You keep my father out of this!” Dan slammed his hands on the hood of the car.

Phil took a few steps forward.

“And why the hell are we going back to West Virginia anyway?”

“Because I have to tell my mom that her husband is dead!”

“We barely escaped with our lives, no thanks to you-”

“My father didn’t! My father is dead!”

“-and now you want to go to the one place they know to look for us?!”

“Yes! I’m done with this case, Lester!”

“We need to find my brother!” Phil insisted.

“YOUR BROTHER IS DEAD, PHIL. You said it yourself when you walked in to MY police station.”

The words hit Phil like a freight train. Overcome with rage, he shoved Dan in the chest.

Dan was pushed back a few steps.

“That’s it, I’m leaving.”

Dan turned around to head back into the car and Phil reached out and pulled him back with his arms remaining by his side.

Dan turned around to face Phil again, this time with a right hook.

Phil felt Dan’s fist graze his left eye and shatter his nose.

Realizing what he’d done, Dan’s right hand hung in the air between them in horror and shock before reaching out to try and grab Phil.

“No!”

An invisible wall hit Dan and he stumbled back even farther this time, out into the middle of the road.

Phil was hunched in a ball, balanced on the balls of his feet with his knees to his chest and his hands raised to his face, crying. Blood poured out through his fingers and dripped down the back of his hands. Droplets of blood fell into the grass at his feet. Dan was reminded of the blood dripping down his father’s nose from the bullet wound in his head, the way his dead eyes stared into nothing, the way his body crumpled to the ground from where he’d been kneeling-

Dan wheeled around and threw up on the dotted yellow line.

Retching the last of what his stomach could pump back up Dan wiped his mouth with his sleeve and tried to stand back up slowly. He was dizzy and overwhelmed. He made his way slowly back to Phil, who was still bleeding profusely.

Dan reached into the back seat of the car, noticing as he did that Phil’s blood was splattered against his own knuckles. He grabbed a rag from underneath the handcuffs Phil had finally thrown on the floor of the back seat next to empty coffee cups and food wrappers and wiped the blood off his hand before handing the cloth the Phil to hold to his nose.

“Get in the car.”

“No,” Phil replied thickly.

“Get in the fucking car, I’m taking you to the ER.”

Phil did what he was told and with one hand holding the rag to his face he used the other to open the car door and climb inside, putting his seatbelt back on. Dan did the same, closing out of the map to his home and instead putting in directions to the nearest hospital. It was about half an hour away.

“Wh… wha…”

“Don’t talk,” Dan ordered.

Phil frowned from behind the bloodied cloth.

What are you going to tell the FBI?

The words came into Dan’s head but in Phil’s voice. He didn’t startle, though. It was almost as if he knew they were coming.

“I don’t know,” Dan admitted.

We still don’t have any proof.

“I know that,” Dan replied tersely. “Now leave me alone.”

Tears continued to stream down Phil’s face as he turned to face out the window.

*-*-*-*-*

The only voice in Dan’s head for the rest of the drive to the hospital was his own. Dan pulled around to the ER wing and sent Phil in while he parked.

By the time he’d made his way into the ER himself, Phil’s nose had been set. There weren’t many ER patients in the middle of nowhere in rural America at this time it seemed.

Phil was waiting for a nurse to return with some pain meds stronger than your typical over-the-counter Advil or Tylenol.

“Dan,” Phil choked out. His voice was still thick.

“What?” Dan replied.

“Eh pa-chents.”

“What about them, Phil?” Dan prompted, still quite short-tempered.

“Fa-wo eh pa-chents,” Phil choked out.

“Follow the patients?” Dan repeated, confused.

Phil reached out a hand. Sighing, Dan took it in his own. His mind was flooded with images of the patient records and other files they’d located in the bunkers. A new lead.

Dan sighed. “I’ll let the FBI know.”

Dan dropped Phil’s hand and left to wait in the car.

*-*-*-*-*

The nurse said it wasn’t very nice of you to punch me in the face.

Dan couldn’t help but let a small smile slip, just for a second.

Mission accomplished.

They were still on their way to Dan’s childhood home. They only had a few hours left in the drive. Phil was pouring the little energy he could muster here and there into healing his nose. He ran out quickly, though, and had to keep recharging.

“So when were you going to tell me you’re Eleven from Stranger Things?” The comment was humorous but there was no humor in his voice.

I kind of have a lot going on right now, so I apologize if some things slip my mind.

This time Dan did smile.

I didn’t know, Phil insisted.

Dan nodded.

Do you believe I’m psychic now? Phil asked in a joking tone.

“Yes,” Dan replied seriously.

Phil didn’t expect that response to mean as much to him as it did.

*-*-*-*-*

Dan pulled into the driveway, shutting off the car and sitting there still in the driver’s seat.

Dan.

Dan turned to face Phil. He seemed calmer now, less angry, and Phil hesitantly brought up coming back here again.

They’re going to be after us.

“I know.”

The only way we’re going to survive is if we take them down.

“I know.”

I need your help to do that. You’re not safe, Dan. Both our lives are in danger. Even if you walk away from this you’ll be hunted for the rest of your life, however short that may be. The only difference is you’ll never be able to find the answers and use them to try and save yourself. You’re a dead man without me, Detective Howell.

“I know.”

Dan opened the car door and got out.

*-*-*-*-*

Phil pulled his clothes out of the dryer and started to fold them neatly. He had a plan to try and track down some of the patients and talk to them, but he knew Dan wasn’t going to like it.

Phil’s nose was almost fully healed. Another day of using whatever psychic energy he had stored within him in between recharging and his nose should be back to mostly normal.

Phil couldn’t help but wonder, given everything he’d been able to do in the past few days, what else he didn’t know about himself. Just when he’d finally felt settled down, after struggling his way through puberty trying to shut out all the noise and succeeding in his early twenties only to just, in the past few years, learn how to use his gifts, he now felt like he was right back to where he was as a child: unsure of himself, his relationship with the world, what was going on, and how to control it.

It was clear that Phil drew on emotions. In a way he’d always known that. What were ghosts if not emotions trapped in time, lost in a non-corporeal form?

In a way the idea of going back to what he knew, ghosts, was comforting.

*-*-*-*-*

“You want to hold a seance?”

“Yes.”

“In the hospital?”

“Yes.”

“To contact dead patients to ask what they know?”

“Yes.”

Dan breathed out heavily.

“No.”

“Dan-”

“No, I’m sorry, no.”

“So what? You’re okay with your partner having telekinetic abilities but you draw the line at talking to the dead?”

“Yes,” Dan answered, as if the answer should have been obvious.

Phil rolled his eyes.

“At least you don’t hate me anymore,” Phil mumbled under his breath, but Dan heard him.

“I never hated you,” he frowned, wondering why the topic was being brought up yet again.

“It sure felt like you did.”

Dan had an expression on his face that Phil couldn’t quite place by itself, but with Dan’s aura he could sense what was going through his mind and what he was feeling.

Dan changed the subject.

“So, now what?”

Phil shook his head. “What do you mean?”

“So now what?” Dan repeated.

“I just told you,” Phil replied, confused.

“I mean do you have to go off and do some like Jedi training or something?”

Phil folded another shirt. “I don’t know.”

“Well what do you know, then?” Dan asked.

Phil cracked a smile. “I know if you don’t get the fuck out of my way I’m going to knock you on your ass again,” he smirked.

Dan’s jaw dropped in a smiling surprised gasp. “You didn’t knock me on my ass,” he insisted.

“Yeah, but I could have,” Phil countered.

“Fuck off,” Dan smiled.

Now it was Phil’s turn to look surprised.

“You’re the one who came over here! You fuck off!”

“This is my house!”

They smiled at each other, tension dissipated. Phil grabbed an unfolded shirt, holding it by the edge and whipping it at Dan.

“Go, get,” he laughed.

Dan giggled back and left Phil to continue folding his clothes.

*-*-*-*-*

“You’re really serious about this, huh?”

Dan was sitting on one of the arm chairs while Phil sat on the couch facing him. In the kitchen Dan’s mom was cooking herself dinner. Dan had told her not to worry about cooking for them as he didn’t know when they’d be back that night.

“Yes, I am.”

Dan was leaning forward with his arms on his knees.

“What do we need?”

“A ouija board, to start.”

Dan leaned back and dramatically reclined in the chair.

“Nooo, not this again,” he groaned.

“Dan!”

“Nooooo,” he wailed.

“We already know Walmart carries them.”

“Nooooooooo-”

Phil stood up and grabbed the keys from the side table.

“Get your hands off my keys.”

“Then let’s gooo.”

Dan sighed showily and made a gesture of throwing himself back up into a seated position so he could get up from the chair.

“Fine.”

“I’ll drive.”

Dan shot him a glare and Phil smiled, tossing him back his keys.

*-*-*-*-*

Their next stop after Walmart was back to the bunker to sort through the patient files.

“Where are we supposed to hold this seance anyway?” Dan asked, head cocked to the side with a real flashlight this time in the crook of his neck shining down on the file he was leafing through.

“Does the hospital have some sort of conference room?” Phil asked. He was sitting on the bunker’s floor legs spread apart and files in between them as well as on either side of him. He was holding his flashlight in one hand and tracing a finger along the words as he read with his other hand. His phone was out near his leg as well, playing music quietly.

“Yeah, I guess I could see if I could get us in there,” Dan mumbled, distracted.

“Connections with your dad?” Phil asked.

“Police business,” Dan corrected. He placed the file he’d been reading on top of the stack to his right behind him on the desk he was leaning on and grabbed another from the pile on his left.

“What exactly are we looking for in these files?” Dan asked.

“Besides names for people we can reach out to directly, I’m not really sure until we find it. A lot of people die in a hospital. I don’t want to have to waste my time sorting through patients who have died who aren’t related to the case. If we have a list of names, we’ll know if a ghost that makes contact with us is relevant to us or not.”

“Do you really think this is going to work?” Dan asked.

Phil closed another file and placed it off to the side.

“I’m not really sure that I have a ‘goal’ where I’ll know whether or not this is going to ‘work’ or not, either. I’ll take any piece of information they can give me. It’s not like they’re going to be buried in a mass grave somewhere; these patients had families who would have claimed their bodies after they died. I guess what I’m hoping is that if our theory is right, and they’re pulling ‘patients’ off the streets and holding them somewhere that one of these patients were maybe taken there for some reason or overheard something from one of the MedLife personnel or someone else involved that can lead us to that facility.”

“You think that there were MedLife staff at the hospital?”

“Sure. I’m sure you know that drug companies send representatives to meet with hospitals all the time.”

Dan nodded. His dad had mentioned things like that a few times, though he tried not to talk about his work with Dan much as a child.

“Plus, remember how that nurse you were talking to clammed up right after you mentioned the drug trials? She knew something. I doubt she was directly involved with the company, but look where poking deeper into things got Martyn and your father. Of course she didn’t want to speak with anyone about the case, let alone the police.”

“Maybe if we ask as just us, and not the police,” Dan thought, mostly to himself.

Phil looked up from his latest file.

“Do you really think you can separate the two?” he asked earnestly.

Dan didn’t reply.

Phil went back to skimming through his file.

“I think we’ve spent enough time down here without finding anything that really jumps out at either of us as useful information for right now. Do you want to just go through and write down all the patient names we can find and take that list back with us to reference when we get there?” Phil asked.

Dan nodded and closed the file he was working on. He looked around at the mess he and Phil had created.

“We should really put these back where we found them for convenience sake,” he suggested. Like any good record keeper, whoever had stored the files down here, presumably Dr. Howell, had organized them alphabetically.

“Alright, but when we write the list, we should sort it by first names. People are more likely to give us their first names when we ask.”

“You mean ghosts,” Dan corrected, gathering up the files he’d read through.

Phil frowned. “Ghosts are people,” he insisted. “Being dead doesn’t take away their humanity.”

“No, mass slaughtering people in the name of science does.”

Phil couldn’t agree more.

*-*-*-*-*

Armed with a list of names on his phone that they’d written down alphabetically by last name, the order they found them in, and then sorted by google docs alphabetically by first name, exhausted from spending hours in the bunker as the sun was setting over head, they made their way back to the hospital. It felt like years since they’d been there, but it was really only a little over a week.

The building loomed over them in a way Phil didn’t remember it doing so when they’d first showed up. Maybe it was because they knew more now. Knew the secrets behind these walls. Phil couldn’t help but keep his eyes on it as he shut the car door.

He waited awkwardly in the lobby while Dan put in a request for the conference room at the front desk. Crowded places had always been difficult for him. The mix of emotions, especially in a place like this, full of such big emotions like hope and wonder from new lives being brought into the world and sadness and pain from older ones leaving, the stress from people chronically waiting for things to get better or worse, the urgency in an emergency, it was all so stimulating to anyone, Phil was sure, but he was feeling everything in trifold.

The worst place for him had been when he visited Alcatraz with his parents and Martyn as a kid. The place had so much emotion tied to it even abandoned as it was that Phil threw up almost immediately when the boats docked. It was easy to blame that on seasickness, at least. They hadn’t even made it to the prison.

His hands reached in his sweatshirt pockets at his hips now and pressed the button on his earbuds nervously. He’d learned since then, how to manage. But it was still a lot, and being overworked and overtired and worried about things much bigger than himself didn’t help.

Dan walked over to him and noticed his tense posture despite their exhaustion.

“Everything alright?” he asked.

“It’s just a lot,” Phil admitted.

“Yeah,” Dan agreed, but Phil knew he didn’t really get it. No one did. He didn’t know why he felt disappointed in a way. He hadn’t expected Dan to be any different, even now.

Phil followed Dan into the conference room. Phil had packed the ouija board in a backpack to conceal it. Most people frowned on bringing ouija boards places, especially a hospital. He slipped the bag off his shoulders and onto the table. It wasn’t his usual set-up, but it would have to do. The last thing they needed was to set off the smoke alarm by lighting some candles.

“Maybe we should get some sleep first,” Dan suggested.

“We don’t have time,” Phil reminded him. “Every minute we stay here puts us more in danger.”

He didn’t understand how Dan couldn’t see that.

“You’re right,” Dan agreed, but it sounded more like a peace treaty than anything. Nevertheless, Phil took it.

Pil unzipped the bag and took the box they’d purchased out, taking the board and the planchette out of the bag.

Phil placed the planchette on the board up near the top where it wasn’t touching anything but the brand name “Ouija” and reached out his hands over the board palms-up for Dan to take. Phil noticed Dan’s face redden ever so slightly under the fluorescent light as he reached over and placed his own hands in Phil’s. Phil gripped Dan’s familiar slightly-callused hands tightly. He pushed away all the emotions he was getting from Dan to try and focus on using their shared energy to reach out further than he’d normally be able to do on his own. At this point, though, he wasn’t sure what he was capable of.

“Is there anyone here that wishes to speak with us?” Phil’s eyes were closed as he spoke, but after a beat he opened them. Dan didn’t appear to have shut his eyes at all.

Phil sighed and adjusted his position in the padded folding chair.

“Is there anyone here that wishes to speak to us?” Phil repeated. He closed his eyes and reached out, feeling for anyone. There were a lot of prescenses just on the edge of his subconscious, he was just waiting for one of them to come forward and make themselves clearer. And then someone did.

Phil dropped Dan’s hands and placed his fingertips onto the planchette. He felt a buzz as it started to move.

Phil looked down at the planchette rested back towards the top of the board.

“Do ghosts get hungry?” Dan asked, trying to temper down a smile.

“I don’t know,” Phil replied. It seemed like it was all he knew how to say anymore.

“Well have you ever asked one?”

“No.”

“What do ghosts eat?”

“I don’t know.”

“Boo-berries.” Dan finally cracked a stupid smile and chuckled at his own joke.

Phil rolled his eyes and went back to focusing on the task at hand.

“Can you tell me your name?”

Phil realized he couldn’t check the names on his phone without removing his fingers from the planchette so he nodded towards his pocket. Dan stood up and walked around the the conference room’s table to slip Phil’s phone out of his sweatshirt pocket. Phil could smell the shampoo that Dan’s mother had in her house as Dan reached over into Phil’s pocket. He tried to push that detail aside like everything else and continuing focusing on maintaining whatever spiritual connection he had going.

“What’s your passcode?”

“Ten thirty”

Dan typed away at Phil’s phone screen.

“That’s your brother’s birthday.”

Phil was surprised he remembered.

“I thought you weren’t close,” he commented.

“We were close. We just didn’t talk for a while. There’s a difference.”

Phil focused his thoughts back to the spirit board.

“Linda, do you have a last name you could give us?”

Phil looked up at Dan. Dan shook his head.

“Linda, is there anything you’d like to say to us before we move on?” Phil asked.

“I thought we were under the gun.”

Phil sent a look up at Dan.

“Being under the gun isn’t an excuse to just dismiss these people. We can ask, so we owe it to them to.”

When the ghost sensed their conversation was finished or something along those lines she continued.

“TELL MY DAUGHTER I LOVE HER”

Dan’s face grew dark and Phil knew he was missing his dad.

“Will do,” Phil said aloud and slid the planchette towards “GOODBYE”.

Phil released the planchette and shook his hands out.

“Now what?” Dan asked.

“Now we try again.”

Phil laid his hands out on the table flat again and Dan put his hands on top of Phil’s once more only this time Phil waited a moment before pushing them away. He let Dan’s thoughts and feelings soak into him.

“Stop that.”

Phil looked up, startled.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, hands twitching back automatically, but Dan kept them held firm.

“If you want to know something you ask like everyone else.”

I said I was sorry. Phil didn’t say it aloud but he knew that without even trying Dan had heard him.

Phil took a deep breath in and in his exhale asked once more “Is there anyone here who’d like to speak with us?”

Another spirit came forward.

“Can I ask your name?”

The spirit, ironically, spelled out the name “Dan”. It gave Dan a feeling he didn’t really like, but he continued to sit at the conference table as Phil did his thing, asking for a last name.

“Do we have a Daniel Raymond?” Phil asked.

Dan, the living one, checked the list.

“Bingo.”

Phil thought of what to ask next.

“Dan, is it alright if we ask about your time here at the hospital?”

The planchette dragged itself to “YES”.

“Dan, you tried an experimental treatment, correct?”

The planchette continued to rest on “YES” so Phil took that as a sign to continue.

“Is there anything you can tell us about that treatment?”

Phil grimaced sympathetically.

“I’m sorry it was painful. Is there anything you could tell us about the drug trial company?”

Phil let out a hollow laugh. “Yeah, you’re telling me. If I can be honest with you, Dan, I’m looking for my brother. He was involved with some of the legal cases of this drug trial-”

Phil’s stomach dropped. “You know Martyn?” he asked hoarsely.

Phil had to keep his hands from jerking back. “Martyn is here?” he clarified.

The planchette swung towards “NO”. The knot in his chest subsided and his breathing returned to normal. Sometimes the messages from the other side gave conflicting information. Phil shut down the line of questioning about his brother and moved on.

“Do you know of anything about a location we could look into? We found a facility in Texas, but we think there were more patients outside of this hospital.”

OUTPATIENT

“An outpatient center! Do you know where?”

PENNSYLVANIA

“Great! Thank you so much, Dan.” Phil looked up from the board. “Not you, Dan, ghost-Dan.” Dan nodded with a thin smile.

“Just shut that thing off and let’s go.”

“Is there anything else you want to say before we leave?” Phil asked ghost-Dan.

GOOD LUCK

Phil cocked his head to the side and smiled warmly. “Thanks.” He dragged the planchette to GOODBYE and flipped the board over. There was no reason to banish the spirits from the hospital: he wasn’t even sure he could if he tried, but this wasn’t his house, and if the ghosts wanted to linger around here that wasn’t any of his business or his concern.

Phil packed up the board and slid it back into his backpack, zipping it up and tossing it back over his shoulder, sliding his arms through both straps. To Dan he looked like an enthusiastic kid about to climb onto his bus for the first day of school.

“How can we trust anything a ‘ghost’ says?” Dan asked as they walked through the conference room door. “I mean what makes his information any good?”

“Well can’t we just Google it?” Phil asked. Then he stopped for a moment. “Have you even Googled MedLife at all?”

Dan stopped walking as well and Phil hopped a few steps to meet him.

“Well-”

“You haven’t, have you.”

“You haven’t either!” Dan shot defensively

“I’m not the detective!” Phil shot back.

Dan rolled his eyes.

“Fine, we’ll Google MedLife when we get back to my mom’s house.” Dan continued walking again.

“On your mom’s computer? That thing’s older than both of us.”

Dan sighed in frustration. “Fine. Then we’ll go to the library.”

They had made it out of the hospital and into the parking lot. Dan turned the key in the door to unlock the car.

“I’m kind of tired,” Phil whined, concealing a smirk. “Can we go home and sleep first?”

Dan’s knuckles tightened on the steering wheel and Phil grinned evilly out the window as Dan pulled out of the hospital’s parking lot. It was almost three in the morning. The library wasn’t open anyway.

*-*-*-*-*

Unlike when they’d first come down to West Virginia from Connecticut they were staying in Dan’s childhood home instead of a motel. It was nice living out of a real home instead of a depersonalized hotel/motel room for a change, in Phil’s opinion. Phil was staying in the guest room and Dan was sleeping on the couch.

Phil lied awake despite feeling drained and needing sleep. He stared up at the ceiling and thought of his own apartment back home. At some point he was going to have to send a rent check in the mail. He wasn’t sure how long he’d be gone when he’d left, and made sure to let his landlord know. Quite frankly, he still didn’t know how long it would be before either of them made it back to Massachusetts.

There was a soft knock and Phil turned his head to see Dan standing under the doorframe of the guest bedroom.

“It’s your house,” Phil reminded him, “you don’t have to knock.”

“It’s the guest room. You’re a guest. It’s polite to.”

Dan made his way over to the bed and sat down on the edge.

“Can’t sleep?” Phil asked. Dan shook his head.

“Guess we’ll end up falling asleep just as the sun rises,” Phil joked.

“Scoot over.”

Phil did as he was told and Dan laid down on top of the comforter next to Phil.

Together they stared at the ceiling.

“What do you think that old ghost meant when he said Martyn was there?” Dan asked.

“In the grand scheme of things, he wasn’t that old of a ghost,” Phil pointed out, “but I think he meant that Martyn was there with them, watching over them in the afterlife.”

Dan nodded. “That’s nice.”

“Do you think your dad is watching over us?” Phil asked.

“I don’t believe in that stuff,” Dan reminded him.

“You said you didn’t believe because you always thought if your dad was dead he’d reach out. He wasn’t dead, he was alive this whole time and you just didn’t know it.”

Dan shrugged. “Maybe, I guess. Old habits die hard. The older you get the harder it is to accept new things, change the way you think.”

Phil shook his head. “I don’t believe that. I think that’s just something people use as an excuse for their own ignorance. Even if you don’t understand something that’s no excuse to ridicule it. If it doesn’t affect you, just leave it be.”

Dan had a sneaking suspicion Phil wasn’t talking about ghosts anymore.

“How old do you think the oldest ghost is anyway? Like, do you think there are neanderthal ghosts?”

Now it was Phil’s turn to shrug. “I dunno,” he replied.

They sat for a moment in silence.

“I looked up that place in Pennsylvania just now. Seems like MedLife really does have an outpatient clinic.”

“This whole time we’ve been thinking that they were under the table, hiding in the shade. We never expected to find something so…”

“Close to the surface?”

“Yeah, close to the surface. What are you going to tell the FBI?”

Dan shook his own head. “I don’t know, but I’m asking them for a detail outside this house. I should have done it a while ago but I wasn’t thinking.” Dan was frowning.

“This is your first real case and you’re personally involved. You’re bound to make mistakes,” Phil offered.

“My mistakes could have gotten us or my mom killed at any step. It did get my dad killed-”

“You can’t blame yourself for that,” Phil rushed. He turned his head to the side to look at Dan lying next to him. “You didn’t know.”

“I should have known.” Dan’s jaw clenched and his eyes flicked away. It looked as if he was fighting back tears.

Phil turned his head to face back up. “If anything, it’s my fault for dragging you into this. If I hadn’t shown up at your police station your dad would still be alive.”

“Don’t say that, Lester. It’s my job to help. You did nothing wrong showing up at my station asking for help to solve a case. Without you I’d never known my father was still alive and I’d have never seen him again. You really think they were going to let him go after all that? No. There’s more to this than we know about. That’s why we have to keep digging.”

Phil closed his eyes, glad Dan had come around and changed his mind.

“I’m going to start writing up my report before we go any farther. I probably should have been writing it up from the start, but we didn’t have all the information. We still don’t. But we at least have a good starting point. We’ll head back home before heading to Pennsylvania and turn over what we have to Agent Thatcher.”

“What are you going to say about me?” Phil asked, opening his eyes back up.

Dan looked over at him. “Are you serious? Nothing, I want to keep my job. The last thing I need is a mental health eval on my record,” Dan scoffed. “Local Police Officer Claims Partner Has Superpowers” he moved his hands out from one another in the air as if he was broadcasting a headline.

“‘Claims’? I definitely have superpowers,” Phil chuckled. Dan reached over and playfully punched him in the arm before rolling off the bed.

“Alright, well I’m going to go write up that report.” Dan yawned. “Well, maybe after a nap,” he smiled sheepishly.

Phil hadn’t noticed the feeling of his own eyes growing heavy.

“Sounds like a good idea,” he said through the yawn he’d caught from Dan.

“Goodnight, Lester.”

“It’s almost 5 in the morning,” Phil pointed out.

Dan rolled his eyes.

“Good morning, then.” Dan quietly shuffled out of the room.

“Good morning,” Phil whispered back after he’d already gone.

*-*-*-*-*

Phil was laying awake in the guest bed when Dan walked in again. This time, however, he had his earbuds in. The bed was messier this time, Dan noticed, suggesting that Phil had slept in it, and it made Dan realized it’d been made before they came back from the hospital. Dan thought about his mom in the kitchen making sandwiches for them and his heart broke just a little more. He still hadn’t told her about his dad.

The feeling of being watched pulled him from his thoughts. Phil had taken out his earbuds and was watching Dan. It was eerie, the way Phil saw through people. Dan could see through people too, his natural instincts had only been heightened by his detective training, but Phil was on a whole other level. On a whole other planet.

“I finished typing up the report!” Dan waved the papers in his hand around.

Phil leaned up from the pillows and reached a hand out. Dan handed them over. Phil skimmed it.

“This says I was armed with a gun that I’d disarmed from a guard which I used to threaten the good doctor to make him let us go,” he summarized. He took his cold, blue eyes off the paper and looked straight at Dan.

“That’s because that’s exactly what happened,” Dan said, taking a step forward and snatching the papers from Phil’s hands.

Phil nodded in agreement and went to put his earbuds back in, so Dan spoke up quickly.

“Mom is making sandwiches for lunch. They should be done by now.”

Phil lowered his hands and wrapped the earbud cord around his phone and got up from the bed, slipping it into his jeans pocket as he did. He must have been too tired to change out of the clothes he’d been wearing.

“Is there anything else left for us to do here?” Phil asked as they walked together down the hall into the kitchen. Dan’s mom was nowhere to be seen and Dan assumed she was out in the back garden.

He picked up one of the sandwiches and took a bite as he gazed out the window above the sink into the backyard, scanning the lawn for his mother as he chewed. When his eyes landed on her he started to watch her for a bit. He hadn’t been home in a long time and he’d really missed his mom. Even with her dementia, it was so good to be back.

“Well, we could try talking to the hospital staff one more time and see what they know,” Dan suggested.

Phil swallowed the bite that was in his mouth before replying.

“Do you think they’re just going to clam up and close ranks again?” he asked.

Dan smiled. “Look at you sounding like a hot-shot detective. I do, yes, but we have more information now. Something we might be able to use as leverage.”

“Do you think there’s anything there we can use as leverage?” Phil asked.

“Besides suggesting they were complacent in their patients being used as guinea pigs? No, but I think that’s probably pretty big.”

Phil tilted his head to the side in agreement. He hadn’t thought of it that way. He was worried they would need more specific information, but he supposed that Dan was good enough to bluff his way through the details. After all, they couldn’t prove that the nurses knew that the drug was what was causing the deaths. People died from cancer all of the time. Depending on the drug and what it was made of, a coroner could have just written off the effects as part of the cancer diagnosis.

“Is it worth a shot to go back?”

“I think so. Can’t hurt. We’re getting the hell out of dodge after today anyway.”

“Are you okay with leaving your mother here knowing they’re looking for us?” Phil didn’t add that it was a miracle a hit man hadn’t knocked on the front door yet.

Dan waited a few moments before answering, finishing his sandwich. He wiped the crumbs off his hand on his shirt.

“I’ve asked for a detail to be sent here. I know she won’t be cooperative going into witness protection, what with her condition and all. This seems like the best move to make. No, I’m not comfortable leaving her here at all, but she doesn’t deserve to have her life upended because of all of this.” He paused. “She doesn’t have that much longer, anyway.”

Phil bet that if he tried he could probably give Dan a rough estimate, but that didn’t seem like something he should offer. There were some things that were better left unknown.

Phil slid his hands into his pockets.

“Ready to go?” he asked.

Dan took one last look out at his mother in the garden.

Yeah, I’m ready. Let’s go.”

*-*-*-*-*

Neither of them had unpacked much besides unpacking their dirty laundry and repacking it when it had been washed and dried, so it didn’t take long for them to put their stuff together. Dan gave his mother and hug and a kiss goodbye and she gave Phil a hug as well. Then once again they clambered into Dan’s beat-up vintage car and started off down the road towards the hospital.

“You didn’t tell her?” Phil asked.

Dan shrugged. “I don’t know what she thinks happened. I’m not sure how much she remembers. She’s happy. I want to let her keep that.”

Phil nodded. He understood. A part of him wished he could have let sleeping dogs lie, or in this case, sleeping ghosts. But he owed this to Martyn, and now everyone else that had become a victim of corporate greed. What was a life worth? To most people, there wasn’t a price tag that could be put on the soul. For some there was, though, and those people would stop at nothing if it meant a payout for them at the end.

The drive to the hospital was a quiet one, but it was a comfortable silence. Phil would be glad when all of this was over. He wasn’t looking forward to a long drive for a very, very long time.

*-*-*-*-*

Nurse Millwood wasn’t as thrilled to see the two of them this time.

“Nurse, may we speak in private?” Dan asked kindly.

“I have patients that need my attention. Make it quick.”

Dan guided her with an arm towards the edge of the hospital’s lobby. Phil felt it was best if Dan handled this alone. Instead, he reached out through all the chaos in his brain and tried his best to sort it out.

“We were able to find my father, Nurse Millwood,” Dan informed her quietly. The look on her face was one of shock, but once she met Dan’s eyes she knew the story didn’t have a happy ending. Tears filled her own eyes.

“I’m so sorry, Daniel,” she whispered, letting them fall instead of brushing them away.

Dan nodded and glanced away quickly, lest he start crying as well.

“We’re going after them, my partner and I.”

“Martyn’s brother.”

She had remembered.

“Yes. They’ve taken someone from both of us,” Dan remarked on Phil and himself. He looked back at the nurse. “And two people from you.”

She nodded, lips pressed thin.

“We want to put an end to this.”

The elderly nurse tilted her head to the side ever so slightly.

“Do you really think you can?” she asked.

“I have to try,” Dan insisted.

Nurse Millwood reached a hand up and pressed it to the side of Dan’s face. She felt a tear fall over the wrinkles in her veined, hard-working hands.

“Then try. And come back when you succeed.”

She took her hand back and left to attend to her patients.

Dan wiped the tears away from his face with the back of his hand quickly and looked around the lobby, but there wasn’t any sign of Phil. It was like he’d vanished into thin air.

*-*-*-*-*

Phil reached out and sorted through all of the chaos in his brain, trying his best to separate the complicated emotions and broken phrases that overlapped one another. He was still adjusting to this new level of awareness and he heard and felt more than he ever had before. Once again he was reminded of how he’d felt as a child. It was almost as if every time he took a step into this hospital he took a step back into time, a time where Martyn was alive and here and Phil was working his way through high school just trying to get by while shutting out all the voices in his head that weren’t his own.

Phil latched onto one voice in particular. It was a boy, and he was up in the oncology ward, all alone. His family was nowhere to be found. He was looking for them.

Phil felt his feet carry him towards the staircase.

Climbing up, almost in a daze, Phil found himself walking towards the door of a room that looked exactly like every other room around. It reminded him of how cold and impersonal the underground facility had been. It was different here though. People were awake, distressed, in varying stages of grief or happiness. It was much busier and therefore more lively.

Phil stood in the doorway of the room, peering in.

The shades in the room were all drawn closed and the boy sat upright in his hospital bed in the darkness. He turned his head to face Phil.

“Who are you?”

Phil took a step in the doorway.

“My name’s Phil.”

“Do you work here?”

“No. I’m a… detective.”

“You’re a detective?” the boy repeated. The closer Phil got the more details he was able to make out. The boy’s face was ashen, and it was clear to Phil he hadn’t spent much time outside. His pajamas were stripped and crisp with a shirt collar and cuffs on the edge of the sleeves around his wrists. His room was filled with an assortment of toys and cards as well as drawings on standard pieces of 8 x 11 printer sheet paper taped to the walls. The room looked lived in.

“Yes,” Phil replied.

“Are you investigating something here?” The boy asked.

“I am,” Phil responded.

“What are you investigating?”

Phil hesitated. “I’m investigating a company that’s trying unlicensed drug trials,” he said.

The boy didn’t look alarmed to hear this.

“They tried them on me,” he replied.

Phil gave him a confused look.

“They gave me a lot of drugs and various treatments to try and cure me. None have worked so far though. Instead they’re focusing on symptom management now.”

Phil shuffled his feet, unsure of what to say.

“Where is your family now?” Phil asked.

The boy turned his gaze towards the windows, but of course, he couldn’t see out them.

“They’re at work,” the boy replied.

“Phil?”

Phil turned to face the doorway. Illuminated by the light from the hall behind him was Dan.

“Sorry, I just figured…”

“It’s fine.” Dan took a step into the room. “What are you doing in here?”

“Just talking.”

“To who?”

Phil whirled around to face the bed but it was empty. No toys, no cards, and no drawings on the wall on 8 x 11 sheets of printer paper.

Phil paused for a moment, sullen, and not just a little frightened.

“No one,” he replied hoarsely and brushed by Dan on the way out to the hall.

Dan caught up with Phil at the hospital entrance, reaching a hand out to grab Phil’s shoulder and stopping him.

“What did they say?” Dan asked.

“He said they did the drug trial on him. He was just a kid.”

Phil pulled away from Dan’s hand and walked out the doors of the hospital for the last time.

*-*-*-*-*

Though both were exhausted from the drive all day they decided to skip a motel for the night and instead switch drivers on and off every few hours and continue driving through the night. It was sometime around three in the morning when Phil woke up lurching in his seat as Dan slammed on the brakes. Phil opened his eyes just in time to see a group of deer dash off into the woods on their right.

Dan mumbled an apology and slowly sped up to the speed limit once more.

Phil picked up the iced coffee he’d ordered just before the Starbucks they’d stopped at before getting off the interstate had closed at 10. Of course, there wasn’t ice in it anymore, and the flavor was watered-down, but it was caffeine, and he’d needed it for the three hours he’d driven after they’d stopped. He took a sip now and recoiled slightly at the luke-warm temperature, and he and Dan shared an amused, knowing glance.

Phil placed the cup back down in the cup holder.

“What do you think we’re going to find when we get there?” Dan asked.

Phil looked out the window at the dark trees the seemed to fly by at super sonic speed if he unfocused his eyes, and yet if he focused on a tree in the second before it flashed by he felt like he was able to absorb enough details from it to distinguish it from the next tree he landed his eyes on.

“An outpatient facility, maybe with a larger building near by that’s by-the-books.”

“Do you really think they’re taking homeless people off the street and using them in these mass-produced drug trials or something?” Dan asked.

Phil shook his head, unsure. “I don’t know why, if they have an out-patient facility, that they would also feel like they need to hide what they’re doing. Is it two different drug trials? Maybe the out-patient facility doesn’t treat people with the drugs at all, maybe it’s just something like a dialysis center or something. Treating the symptoms instead of trying to cure people.” His mind turned to the boy- ghost- he’d met.

“I guess we’ll find out.”

“I guess we will.”

*-*-*-*-*

The outpatient facility was abandoned.

They’d arrived by the morning and had headed over after stopping for breakfast in a local diner.

The building looked as if at one time it had been a functional out-patient center, but now it had fallen into ruin.

The two of them leaned against the hood of the car, parked crooked across two parking spaced so it could face the front doors directly.

“What are you thinking?” Dan asked.

Phil studied the building.

“Picture this: MedLife is a promising start-up company looking to find a cure for cancer based off existing research. Same as any other. I’m sure there’s a ton out there. They get funding, limited, but funding. They have a lab somewhere. They’re making the drug. They’re treating patients.”

Dan nods along.

“But this isn’t making any money. The drugs are just another in a long line of experimental drugs. Sure, they’ve overcome hurdles that so many other drug companies haven’t: think of how much you have to overcome to even get to human testing. You have to spend years going through lab and animal trials before the FDA will even think about letting you run a human trial. But they have, and human trials are set to begin.”

Dan nods again.

“They set up this outpatient facility at the same time as they start the drug trial in one single hospital.”

“The hospital my parents worked at.”

“Right. We already know the drug trial went horribly wrong. Patients died left and right. They covered it up.”

“But how?” Dan asked, more to himself than to Phil. Nevertheless, Phil waved the question away.

“At the same time they’d started administering the drug to patients here. Maybe these patients assumed the drug had already passed through human trials and been approved. An easy lie to make, they expected it would be the truth- just not yet. And their name was plastered right here on this building.”

It was true. They could see the imprint of the MedLife logo on the faded sign.

“When the drug trial failed funding was cut. Gone. The MedLife name was ruined. It’s one thing for your drug to not work, it’s another for it to kill multiple patients. But this happened in a small town in West Virginia. Local reporting at max, and what little information there was had been highly sanitized for the media.”

“Where was the FDA in all of this?” Dan asked. Once again Phil waved away his question. He was staring intently at the building.

“So they clean up. They move underground. The name of MedLife is soiled, no one is ever going to want to work with them again. They’re back to square one only square one had funding and could work out in the open. Now they need to hide. ‘MedLife’ is gone from the public eye, but behind the scenes the same team, or at least a close approximation or a replacement team is working. This time, though, instead of just popping up under a new name and failing a human trial in the public eye so spectacularly they’re making sure that it works before they bring it to the public eye. When the drug is ready they’ll come back to the public eye starting from square one again. Lab trials that’ll be successful. Animal trials which will be successful. Finally human trials which will be successful. But they’ll know this already because they’ve already done it.”

“How had no one heard of this happening, though?” Dan asked again.

“It was a small town in West Virginia. There are hundreds of companies all trying to cure cancer. Media was different back then. The twenty-four hour news cycle hadn’t yet been invented. Stories were covered by local newspapers and reporters on local television stations.”

“An oncologist went missing.”

“You work in law enforcement. How many thousands of missing people are out there in the United States today that no one knows about?”

“My mom wouldn’t have just given up on him like that, she would have told someone!” Dan insisted.

“Your mom was a newly single mother to two children whose father had disappeared. Do you know why your father disappeared? What better way to send a threat to the hospital staff to keep their mouth shut than to kidnap and hold the head of the oncology department hostage. Not only was a fresh pair of trained eyes needed to try again, but your mother knew if she drew any attention to your father missing she’d be next.”

Dan’s face dropped as he let the news sink in. His mother had known what had happened all along. Of course she had. And of course she hadn’t told his brother and him what had happened. They were kids, and they had been in just as much danger.

“If there was a by-the-book facility it’s closed now. It’s probably in whoever’s funding the research now’s name, waiting for when the drug trials they’re hiding are successful and they’re ready to make their grand return.”

Dan shook his head. “Who would fund something like this?”

“Think of all the power of having your name tied to the cure for cancer. Think of being one of the doctors who worked on the drug to cure cancer. Think of being the philanthropist who funded the cure for cancer. That’s worth anything to some people.”

“Even others lives?” Dan asked. It was rhetorical, of course, but Phil answered anyway.

“There are so many missing people out there because the public doesn’t care to miss them or find them. You yourself said ‘an oncologist went missing’. Someone society cares about. It’s no secret that the disenfranchised aren’t reported as missing because no one cares and the ones that do are too scared to come forward. And the ones that are the police don’t care to look into.”

“That’s not true,” Dan insisted.

Phil turned on him in an instant.

“It isn’t? My brother, a lawyer, went missing, and you couldn’t be bothered to check up on him.”

“Your claims were outrageous!” Dan argued.

“So what?” Phil defended. “I could have been schizophrenic for all you know! Does that make my concerns any less valid?”

“No,” Dan replied, but of course, he knew, deep down, that wasn’t true. It should have been, but it wasn’t. This wasn’t a fight Phil was looking to have right now, though, so he dropped the matter, and it was a good thing too, because at that moment Dan’s phone rang.

“Hello?”

“You need to come back right now.”

“Nurse?”

“They’ve taken your mother. You need to come back home now.”

#ospbb 2022 #phanfiction #phanfic #phan #savvy's writing

13 notes · View notes

mieczyhale · 4 years

Text

some random klaus / dave / klave smut and affection and angsty hcs (as of: 8/25/20)

klaus *lost his virginity at 14 *his first time was non-consensual *he was very high but also had a level of awareness. when he tells people he doesn’t remember it’s a lie. he does remember. not all of the details but enough - images of a location, the feeling of hands belonging to someone bigger than him, the pain. the crying that left his eyes red and had his siblings rolling their eyes at him the whole next day, avoiding him because of course klaus was high. he never corrected them *started having sex in exchange for money / drugs / shelter mostly on accident. some guy pays you for sucking his dick in the alley behind that one bakery’s dumpster, where the wall is warm, and things just.. escalate quickly *(it actually started when he was younger than that but he doesn’t want to get himself in trouble and he’s not a snitch so, for those reasons, it’s totally the time above that starts it. and it’s totally an accident) *he really is into a lot of kinky shit. there are things he isn’t into of course but he reaches a point where: if it’s something the person he’s with wants and they’re a client - if they pay enough there’s a good chance he’ll go with it. if they’re a partner - he’ll still go with it. because what he wants or doesnt want doesnt matter, as has been shown to him over and over and over again. people give him the illusion of choice, asking, but klaus knows better *so a lot of his kinks do come from trauma and things from his time on the streets that he won’t talk about but he doesn’t care. and if somebody tries to get him to talk about it because it’s “not healthy” (side eyes ben) he will exit the situation IMMEDIATELY *his biggest kinks, the ones he genuinely loves and doesn’t need to train himself to get off on, are choking, being told what to do, and getting his hair pulled. also: he has a daddy kink but he never brings it up. if whoever he’s having sex with does then fine - but he wont *a few of the ones he trained himself to enjoy and now actually does (usually) are hitting, degradation, humiliation, being tied up (until his kidnapping), getting pushed around and forced into position (he tells himself its like being told what to do only a little more aggressive. or a lot more aggressive. tomato, to-mah-to) *is very vocal during sex - not always genuinely *very good at talking dirty when he’s in the mood to *l o v e s sucking dick and is v pro at it dave *lost his virginity at 29 *klaus was his first.. everything *he’s been kissed before - once, when he was younger. he didn’t know her name and he’s pretty sure she didn’t know his. she didn’t ask before kissing him. part of him is still a little disappointed that was taken from him but he feels like admitting that would be pathetic *he doesn’t really know anything about sex - gay sex anyway. living through the homophobic 1950′s and 1960′s doesn’t exactly give a teen or an adult a real way to learn anything. he has a basic idea, and sometimes as a teen his brain would get uhhh creative, but that’s all *listen.. dave katz has a big dick and we all know it *he’s also very sensitive. everywhere. it’s annoying and embarrassing up until klaus gets his hands on him *and he’s not super vocal but he isn’t quiet either - he’s a fun and sexy in between *discovers he really likes sucking dick - not great at it yet but his enthusiasm makes up for that easily *is soft but also a dom-in-training klave *their first time is the same night we see them kiss in saigon *dave tops their first time, and a lot of the time. it isn’t until after they get out of vietnam and to the united states, in that era or 2019, that they try switching *everything about dave makes him seem like a top but klaus finds that putting dave on his stomach really changes that vibe quickly *the first sex act that klaus introduces dave too their first time is blowjobs. klaus loves having a dick in his mouth and dave’s is *incomprehensible noises* so he asks if he can blow him. dave admits to not knowing what he’s talking about and klaus is suddenly the cheshire cat *dave is the first ‘relationship’ he’s had where the other person actually gave a shit whether or not he came at all, let alone every time. *unlike with all previous partners klaus is very vocal in bed with dave and he’s never had to fake a thing *”dave loves making klaus flustered to the point of begging, but it has the drawback of him getting hard whenever klaus gets whiny, no matter the location” - hc brought to my attention by @anglophile-rin and i love its o much *they actually have a fair amount of semi-public sex and not all of it is initiated by klaus *dave doesn’t have any kinks that he’s aware of but he’s more than willing to try out anything that klaus wants to do *they find out together that dave is definitely into Some Things

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

KLAVE SMUT?? HCS?? IDEAS?? (a few snippets from a discussion on the topic between myself and the angel, the yee to my haw, the legendary @cowgaykermit )

“i think for klave, a kink klaus didn't realize he had that is kind of tied into the daddy kink is a praise kink. he loves making dave proud of him. but he's never had someone he wanted to make proud before, not until dave” - sara

“i'm sad about dave's kiss too : ( i was originally going to go with 'dave has never been kissed at all', because he was at least kind of aware of his sexuality and didnt want to risk leading a girl on (cuz he's kind like that), but the 'being kissed without your consent' stuck out to me more. maybe its the angst, maybe it's the personal experience..s. plural. idk but it felt like it made more sense???” - mace

“also would any of his kinks change after the torture? like he's always been into being tied up but now when dave tries it he has a flashback and he swears he doesn't know where five is“ - sara “no yeah if dave tried to tie him up, even if klaus suggested it (either not aware of the extent of his trauma mentally / emotionally or aware but thinking he could handle it) klaus would be right back in that motel room - beaten, covered in burns from lighters and cigarettes alike, cut, going through withdrawal as his dead brother stands in front of him and tries to lecture him - begging to be untied and let go, breaking down in a way he hadnt let himself during the real situation because he really doesnt know where five is. he really doesnt know anything - and dave would immediately untie him and try to bring klaus back from wherever he’s gone mentally that sounds so so terrifying-“ - mace

“and YES!! 100% dave is down to try kinks and things. he doesnt know any but klaus suggests ones he thinks dave might enjoy, and ones klaus himself really gets off on. he offers up more intense ones, more advanced ones, later on - over time - not because he particularly likes them but because he wants dave to have the chance to try everything that sparks an interest in him” - mace

“a supportive dave is the only true dave i think. like... can you imagine?? dave not supporting klaus in something??? unrealistic.” - mace

“like i don't mind fics where dave has some experience but yes klaus being his teacher and being nice and gentle with his teaching unlike when he was "taught"“ - sara

“dave asking klaus if whoever taught him was as kind and nice as klaus was to him and klaus not knowing how to answer that because obvi the answer is a resounding no but having to explain it, including his age and how he doesn't remember his first time fully and all this other stuff and he knows itll make dave sad and he can't have that because then dave is sad . also he wants dave to think nice things about him” - sara

#this isn't everything but tbh when i sit down to list out hcs i have i tend to forget everything. and that's what happened here #so i did my best to compile the ones i could remember - and the ones i remembered with the help of one (1) gay kermit #and instead of trying to fit it all into bullet points i just threw some quotes from our convo together #that i think cover things a bit more. this convo is actually much longer and ongoing but i really do not want to share the entire exchange #gotta keep some things secret ayye lmao #anyway. if / when i remember more hcs for this topic i will reblog with add-ons #but for now: hi #my anxiety over posting this is A Lot l m a o #mytuaposts

23 notes · View notes

gigilberry-wips · 2 years

Text

reasons i can see merida getting arrested that aren’t just “angry ginger throws hands”:

- went to a national park to look at wildlife, there was one instance where the wildlife got very friendly but she left them alone, walked out of park with one of the wildlife - without her knowledge - snuck into her bag and which was later found fast asleep after eating all her snacks

- chased a midnight racoon out of her apartment, racoon ran into someone else's apartment, she screamed and smacked it off with a broom, neighbor walked in during the middle of this, accidentally hit the neighbor and broke a tv, racoon somehow escaped out the window, cue chaos

- hippy looking children asked her for help locating their parents, she went with them to help them, parents ended up being drug dealers and the kids had actually been trying to sell her drugs

- climbed a tree into private property to shoo away a vulture terrorizing her friend

- got the cops called on her at 5AM for screeching when she found a half rotted shark carcass in her backyard

- a child was in her yard trying to pick a fight with her dog, so she treated it like she would one of her brothers and tossed it over the fence in the general direction of a trampoline, except the child was a PTA mom's and she threw enough of a fit to get the authorities involved

- after being peer pressured into starting a rooftop garden, she takes a stab at it on her apartment's roof only to knock over a satellite dish, which turned out to be expensive, which also turned out to be someone's private property that they didn't have a license to set up there to begin with but now she's in trouble just like they are anyways

- just won an eating competition, went outside, and promptly threw up on a police officer

- she and Jack got into a breakdancing competition outside a shop, crowd got out of hand, shop owner called the cops on them for disrupting the peace

- food was bad at a cheap restaurant, friend went to the kitchen to see if they needed help, friend took too long so Merida went to look for them, found out the staff were growing weed back there and that one was pressuring the friend into either buying or working for them, dragged said person out by the ear and proceeded to scold him in the parking lot until one of his friends called the cops and the cops arrested everyone including her and her friend

- was having a lot of trouble with a library printer, printer caught fire, could've very easily burnt down the library but at least she (mostly) saved the books from getting destroyed

- went to a museum with friends, found out from friends that the museum had stolen several of its artifacts from nearby communities, stole the artifacts back and returned them to their respective families

- a known bigot was going to lecture at her college but she and her friends rigged it so that the speakers played Anaconda instead and out of all of them she's the one who ended up getting caught and taking the proverbial bullet

- got into a loud argument with a stranger in a public place about how she was dressed - in metal band merch that the stranger was convinced was about devil worship - eventually got fed up enough that she took off her clothes and marched inside a nearby maternity clothing store

- her brothers visited and partook in Baby's First Vandalism who am i kidding that's probably not the first on the neighbor’s car which she tried to clean the evidence of before it was too late but didn't make it in time. could she have left it alone? yes. but did she want to face what would happen if her mother ever found out she “let” her brothers get in trouble? absolutely not.

either that or she'd bought something from an infomercial on a whim, some kind of "just point it in the direction you want to paint and press the button!" except the thing malfunctioned and sprayed a little more than the lawn chair she'd promised someone she'd redecorate

#rotbtd #rotbtfd #rise of the brave tangled dragons #rise of the brave tangled frozen dragons #the big four #tbf #merida brave #merida dunbroch #disney #jack frost #rise of the guardians #rotg

69 notes · View notes

harrywritingsbyme · 3 years

Note

hello sweetheart, I have a kink for daddy!h, corruption!h and a size kink too. can u elaborate pls? xx

The Stages of Corruption

A/N: My brain and puthy are about to explode for the same yet very different reasons lmao. Anyways...imma add this hot lil thing to A Series of Firsts bc why tf not?! And I hope it doesn’t suck…enjoy🙃.

Harry was obsessed with you. He could honestly say that from the moment he met and laid eyes on you for the first time, he was hooked. And yes it was for the obvious reasons of how beautiful and sweet you were inside and out. You were like a magnet, he couldn’t help but to be attracted to you in every way shape and form. But besides that, Harry was also hooked because of how cute and innocent you were. See, Harry had acquired a bit of a corruption kink. In past relationships, he’d always been with someone who had their fair share of experience in the bedroom. But with you, it was the complete opposite. After gliding right through the getting to know you’s, and the building of the foundation for you guys’ relationship, you and Harry moved right into the intimacy phase. And as if Harry had hit the nail on the head when it came down to your innocence, you weren’t well versed in the bedroom at all and you hadn’t really done anything either. The farthest you’d ever gone was a bit of over the clothes touching; which was exactly what Harry was dying to hear. He was yearning to teach you and to be the one to expose you to pleasure. He wanted to be the first thought in your mind when the word pleasure was brought up. He wanted to hear your pretty little voice beg for him and your body to quiver desperately for him. Harry wanted to corrupt you.

And over the course of time, Harry was able to do that.

For starters, Harry got you comfortable with calling him daddy in the bedroom. You’d accidentally blurted it out when the two of you were going at it a little bit. He was on top of you and between your legs, kissing down and suckling on your neck as he had a hand up your skirt that was softly rubbing you through your panties. You were so caught up in how good this newfound feeling of having him on top of you with his face in your neck and leaving marks in the process while touching you between your legs felt that he name just flew out of your mouth. When Harry heard it, his head flew up from your neck and down in the direction of your face to address what you called him. Still to this day he could remember how you got all blushy as he pestered you to say it again. Eventually, Harry was in fact able to get you to say it again and he was able to get you comfortable with saying it in general. You became so comfortable with it that you’d call him daddy in every day situations when it was just the two of you. And to make matters worse, you sounded so sweet when you said it too. This meant that Harry’s cock always perked up in his pants resulting in him needing to take care of himself. Luckily for him, almost 99% of the time he took care of himself, he did it with your help.

The next thing on Harry’s corruption check list was familiarizing you with pleasure. He wanted you to have an understanding the feelings that came along with a release and what it felt like to have an orgasm. When he made you cum for the first time, it was a completely euphoric atmosphere for you both. Harry was lying between your legs while you were completely naked against the bed, taking everything that he was giving you. He used his fingers and mouth to send shockwaves through your body. He just sucked and sucked on your cunt and pushed his fingers all they way up into you. You were squirming and whining against the bed as he continued to work the area between your legs. He pushed is fingers in and out of you over and over again as he continuously sucked on your clit and nipped at the delicious flesh of your thighs. When his fingers weren’t inside of you, his mouth was on your pussy, licking up and down your folds and pushing the tip of his tongue in towards your entrance. You were so overcome with pleasure as he did this that he had to pin your hips down to the bed in order to keep going and push you into your release. You were crying out to him (or daddy for that matter), you were pulling tightly on his hair, and you were clenching up against his tongue as he pulled you closer and closer to your release. And once he did, you were even more of a mess when he was getting you up to that point. You were crying out to him about how your tummy was warm and tight and that you felt like you had to pee and you couldn’t hold back. There were even little tears forming in your eyes from how intense it was. And when you finally let go, you were gushing all over his hand. Harry got to feel first hand your walls convulsing around his finger (he was only able to get one in since you were beyond tight) as you came. And for you, the feeling was absolutely amazing. It was like a wave of pleasure crashed down onto you and went right through your body. You wanted to feel it again and again and again; you were addicted to it.

After letting you feel what it was like to have a release, Harry helped you figure out what felt good to you and how to pleasure yourself. He kept your naked body between his legs in front of a mirror and guided your hand and the vibrating bullet he got for you between your legs and showed you how to pleasure and tease yourself. This was definitely a lifesaver when you weren’t with Harry but you were craving an amazing release. You kept the tips Harry gave you locked in your mind and you just made yourself feel good. And to make it even better, you kept your eyes shut and just imagined Harry on top of you, touching and toying with your body. You couldn’t believe that you were able to pleasure yourself on you own, and you were so excited about it that you did it all by yourself for the first time that as soon as your hands were no longer tingly, you immediately texted Harry to tell him. Your message was almost instantly met with a response of him being so proud of you and that since you were being such a big girl for daddy, he’d have to give you a little treat. With that being said, after replying with a “can’t wait”, you go straight back to your vibrator to take care of the tingling sensation that was forming in your clit again.

Now onto the fourth checkpoint on Harry’s list. By this point, you and Harry have been playing solely with you. He wanted to make sure that you were completely taken care of and he just wanted to dote on you. He was teaching you so many different things about your pleasure and you were soaking it all up and playing with it. And since you were comfortable with your pleasure, Harry figured that it was time to bring his own pleasure into the mix. When he first pulled his cock out of his pants, you were floored. You couldn’t believe that he managed to hold all of that in his pants and you were definitely skeptical of whether or not it would fit inside once you two got to that point. But knowing Harry and how he guided you through everything so far, you weren’t that nervous about it. Instead of actually guiding you through what to do, Harry let you play with his cock. You wrapped your smaller hands around him and you tugged and squeezed him. Your eyes were focused in on his cock, taking in every detail of him. You were also taking him his moans above you, they were your guide to know if you were doing something right. Now while you were playing with his cock, Harry was in heaven. Harry had his innocent little girlfriend on her knees playing with his cock. He was on cloud nine from the way you squeezed and tugged at him. He was also blown away by the way you brought your forefinger and thumb up to squeeze the swollen head of his cock between them, and by the way you pressed your forefinger down into his glistening slit. You were doing everything right without even trying and Harry was all for it. What made him burst even faster though was when you pursed your lips around the head of his cock. You weren’t expecting him to put in in your mouth the first time you touched him so that just threw him over the edge. And as he came, you were quick to pull your mouth back and just watch his cock erupt right in front of you as you took in his moans. You just watched as the streams of his thick cum spurted out from his cock; and it was a lot too, he just kept going. He came so much that your hands were covered in it since they were still wrapped around his very sizable shaft. But it gets even better. After pulling your hands away from his cock, you bring one of your hands up to your mouth to lick up some of his cum. When you first tasted it, you had to admit that the taste was very interesting to say the least. It wasn’t bad per say…it was just different. But after some more licks and Harry being completely dumbfounded above you, the taste grew on you and you went on to not only clean your hands but also his cock.

This moment was the catalyst to so many things. You went on to taking his cock into your mouth (and throat because he was huge) and even letting him flood your mouth with his cum. After practicing, you became addicted to having Harry’s cock inside you mouth. You were so addicted that if he told you to drop to your knees, you’d be down there in an instant. And Harry loved that. Another thing that was brought into the mix was 69-ing. The both of you were obsessed with giving and receiving oral pleasure so it came naturally; and it was amazing. The entire time, the both of you would be mouthing at each other and holding back so you could keep receiving that pleasure. And when you both came, your juices right on each others tongues. One final thing that was introduced into you guys’ mix was something that was highlighted on Harry’s mental checklist. Face fucking. He’d accidentally lifted his hips up into your face, sending his cock deep into your throat, causing you tog gag a bit. When he realized what he’d done, he immediately pulled your head up to check on you, and when he did, he was met with a response he wasn’t expecting. You told him that you liked it and to keep doing it. From that point on Harry’d thrust his cock into your mouth and just listen to your gags and feel your nails clawing into his thighs as he fucked his cock into your mouth/throat. What he loved the most about it was the little drops of cum that gathered in the corners of your mouth and your watery eyes once he was all done. It was perfect.

Now Harry was beyond happy with where you guys were and was enjoying every moment of pleasure with you. But the both of you had reached the biggest part of the checklist. Actually having sex. Harry was 1000% against pressuring you into it. He wanted you to be completely comfortable and ready for that big moment. And you were. After just enjoying Harry, you were ready to enjoy Harry. It was a bit daunting to think about all of him fitting inside of you but Harry always took his time with you so you were pretty confident in him doing that at this very big moment for you both. And once that big moment arrived, it was great. When you told Harry that you were ready, he didn’t just jump right in. He planned everything out for you to really have your moment. He put his corruption checklist to the side and made it extra romantic. Harry felt so bad that you were experiencing a bit of pain as he pushed into you that he was constantly giving you kisses and praising you for how well you were doing and telling you that he loved you. But even though he was focusing on you, Harry was exploding inside. You were so warm and tight that Harry could’ve came within the first 5 minutes. You were so tight that even if he wanted to slam into you, he couldn’t. He almost passed out too. It wasn’t surprising that he felt this way though. Harry definitely had a bit of a size kink. Once you’re a little bit comfortable, Hary slowly moves in and out of you. After a perfect stream of slow thrusts along with his fingers toying at your clit and his mouth against your chest, you end up releasing around him and Harry let’s go inside of you per you guys’ conversation a bit earlier.

The first time, along with a some times after that were soft and slow. They were so that you could be comfortable and used to having him inside of you. And as these times progressed on, the pleasure increased and you were getting even more geared up to take everything Harry had. Which you ended up taking like a champ by the way. Once you were all good to go, Harry went back to his corruption check list. And you two went at it. It was so good that the mere thought of it gave you goosebumps. Fast forward up to now and you two were going at it anytime, anywhere, anyway. You were screaming as he pounded into you forcefully, begging him to give it to you. Harry had his hands wrapped around your throat, pinning your head down to the bed as he dropped his hips down onto yours. What kept him going wasn’t solely your screams and how good you felt, it was also the end result of it all. He loved it when your thighs and pussy were sore and you could still feel him in your stomach as his cum poured out of you. You two were always in a daze after sex and you both were just about completely numb as well. But as you and Harry were in that state, you both were contemplating the next amazing round.

And neither of you would have it any other way. He was teaching you, your body was always quivering, and your mouth was always begging for more. And yet, there were still an infinite amount of stages on Harry’s corruption check list. This was just the beginning.

Masterlist

2K notes · View notes

butwhyduh · 3 years

Text

A Date to Remember

Damian Wayne x Superman’s daughter reader

Damian is 20, reader 19, Jon is her little brother at 18 and Kon acts like an older brother to her.

Warning: angsty and kidnapping

You’d always told Damian that the sunset on the Kent farm was the best in the world. Damian smiled a little as he drove down the long road to Smallville. Damian had thought about classic dinner date in one of Metropolis’ fanciest restaurants but you insisted on meeting him in a barn.

He felt underdressed. Blue jeans and a flannel shirt. Why did he let Jon help him get dressed? He felt ridiculous but at least he wore sensible shoes. But deep down Damian knew you world like it. And he was certainly willing to feel a little foolish for you.

Clark was off world and Lois was on a mission. Jon had his own date in the city so it was the both of you alone tonight. How long had it been since the two of you were alone without someone around? Between his half a dozen brothers and your family with literal super hearing... yeah it’s been tough. So being 50 miles from everyone was kind of a dream.

Damian pulled in the driveway with some flowers and walked up to the house. He knocked on the door only for it to swing open. Damian noticed the splintered door frame and his heart sped up. He called your name. Act like the rich billionaire son while working like Robin, even though he wasn’t quite sure he still wanted the name.

He scanned every surface and he noticed a small scratch near the back door after looking through every room. Most people wouldn’t even notice it. You weren’t there. He looked closely and saw drag marks in the gravel path to the barn. His heart was thundering at this point. You weren’t in the barn either.

You were half Kryptonian but the genetic inheritance was complicated. Jon had won the lottery with having most of his father’s powers and not being as sensitive to Kryptonite. You had lost it. Hypersensitive to Kryptonite and only some speed and increased hearing and strength. Barely about the average human. You weren’t a fighter.

Damian pulled out his phone to call Jon.

“Bit busy here, Damian,” Jon said, sounding far from amused. Damian could hear kissing noises in the background and frowned. He didn’t want to hear that.

“Your sister is missing,” he said and he heard a lot of movement on the phone.

“What??”

“The door jam was kicked in and there are scrap marks of her being dragged away. I think she’s been kidnapped,” Damian said. His voice felt tight. He, son of Batman, let his girlfriend get kidnapped. “Whoever it was clearly waited until she had no other Kryptonians around to grab her. It wasn’t a coincidence that she was taken tonight. Can you get out here? I’m calling father to try and trace her. Her phone is missing too.”

“I’m leaving in 5. Damian, if Luther has her, she can’t handle Krytonite,” Jon said, worry bleeding into his voice. “It’s like it poisons her.”

“I know. But we don’t know who has her. Let’s hope they don’t know she’s part Krytonian,” Damian said, already mentally moving on to his next step. Contact Bruce. Get the bat computer to trace her. Look for more evidence. Don’t freak out completely that she might be poisoned by Kyrotonite.

“Okay. I’m about to fly. I’ll see you soon,” Jon said before hanging up.

——————————

You woke up with a cough. You head throbbed and your stomach rolled as you laid in a bed? Maybe a couch? It was a horrible feeling but you knew exactly what it was: Kryptonite. You couldn’t forget what how that stuff made you feel. You tried to look around to see it but the room was completely dark. Night vision would be nice but you got human eyes. Your slightly enhanced hearing heard nothing but the wind outside. Okay, you were ground level or higher.

You tried to twist in the cuffs that bound your hands only to cry out. There was the Kryptonite. It was on the outside of the cuffs and you almost threw up at it touched your skin. You were cuffed with Kryptonite to a hospital bed, you figured. What other bed had areas perfect for cuffs? Your legs were equally restrained and you felt so exposed in the dark room.

Your dad was off world. He wouldn’t hear you if you called for him. But Jon might. But if you yelled, someone might come in and who knows what they would do. You’d wait a little bit longer. You wanted to fall asleep. The Kryptonite made you feel so dull. Like the first time you were exposed to it.

You were all of 4 years old. Your dad had brought you with him to the Justice League meeting. Relatively safe and Batman promised Robin would watch you. Dick was so excited to be a babysitter. You had hugged him tight enough to hurt before running to the climbing wall.

“Hey!” Called the 16 year old. “I brought games instead!”

You warily walked back over to him and card games and board games fell out of a duffle bag as he opened it. Half the stuff you were far too young for. You bent down as he scooped up his gameboy. You pulled out some games and open a side pocket to grab a small metal box. Dick sat down his gameboy carefully before turning back to you.

“Don’t open th-“ he started before you pulled open the box to show a bright green stone. Followed by you throwing up all over his bag of games. You dropped the box and sat on the floor. Dick quickly closed the box with the piece of Kryptonite and put it in his pocket. He had boroughed one of Bruce’s bags that apparently wasn’t fully unpacked.

“Dad, I don’t feel good,” you said as Clark ran over. Dick looked at you so guiltily.

“I didn’t know,” he swore. “I’m so sorry.” Bruce stood by quietly.

“We need to talk later,” Clark had told Bruce and yeah, they were mad at each other for a while.

——————————————

Jon arrived shortly in a dress shirt and slacks and he looked at Damian just as weird as Damian looked at him. They had basically switched clothing.

“Not to judge but that’s date clothing? You told me to not wear flannel,” Jon said accusingly.

“That’s because your sister wanted me to wear this,” Damian said back. “Let’s focus on finding her. Father’s calling me now. We’ll change in a minute.”

“Hello, you’re on speaker phone,” Damian said.

“Her tracker is showing a warehouse owned by Luthor Corp in downtown Metropolis,” Bruce said. “Do you need help? I can see if Dick is nearby.”

“No thanks. Jon will help me. Thank you, father,” Damian said before hanging up.

“Luthor. I knew it,” Jon said with a frown. “Wait, you put a tracker on my sister? Does she know?”

“Now is not the time. Let’s get to Metropolis,” Damian said, changing the subject while both got dressed. Jon nodded and offered his arms. “I’m not being carried like that. I’ll hold on your back,” Damian said. Jon rolled his eyes and nodded again.

As they flew over corn fields and pastures, Jon began to question Damian. “So when did you put this tracker in? Does she even know? Where is it? Do I want to even know?”

“It’s sub-dermal in her forearm and I haven’t told her yet. And it’s irrelevant right now as it might save her life,” Damian said and Jon looked disgusted. “We need to focus on saving her and then you can be her angry brother.”

“Wow...”

————————————

You moved and the cuffs burned your skin. You gasped and screamed “Jon! Kon!” You called out to them hoping one of them would hear you.

“Dad!” you cried frantic. There was no way he would hear you. “Damian! Jonathan! Conner!”

You panted and your head pounded. You were so tired. You’d lose consciousness if no one saved you. Then who knows what they would do to you.

“Superman!” You screamed desperately before finally passing out.

——————————

“Did you hear that?” Jon said as they flew towards the Metropolis skyline.

“No all I hear is wind. What did you hear?” Damian said.

“Y/n. She’s calling for us,” Jon said speeding up.

“Is she okay?” Fear bled into Damian’s voice.

“I can’t tell. I’m trying to hurry,” Jon said flying quickly towards the industrial area of the city. He landed on the roof of a warehouse. Jon’s eyes glowed as he looked through the building.

“7 men. 4 posted outside the door to the room that’s she’s being held on the 2nd floor. Her heart rate is steady and she isn’t screaming any more. Almost sounds asleep,” Jon said after his analysis.

“Probably tranquilizer. Father’s data said this building is used for research purposes. Does that fit?” Damian asked.

“Uh more like research subject holding. Maybe a small lab on the first floor but other than cameras everywhere, there isn’t much science stuff that I can scan. But also the basement is sealed off,” Jon said.

“How?”

“Lead bound. You can check it out while I rescue her. 4 guys is nothing,” Jon said making a fist.

“Hold on. Luthor would probably have her surrounded by Kryptonite. Just in case one of you look for her. And that’s the last thing we need,” Damian said. “I’ll rescue her and you look for the basement. Knowing Luthor, it’s probably an entire facility of experiments below. He just hadn’t gotten her room ready yet.”

Jon looked frustrated. “Fine. You rescue her but be careful. She is the weakest of us. She’s not invulnerable to bullets or anything.”

“Most of the people I rescue aren’t either,” Damian reminded him. “And I’m certainly not taking a chance with my beloved.”

Jon looked over to respond but Damian was already gone. Just like the rest of the bats: silent goodbyes. Jon quietly moved down to the first floor. He was working but at the same time, his ear was trained on his sister’s heartbeat. Jon might be the younger sibling but she didn’t have powers and he felt so protective.

—————————————

Damian rolled his eyes at the 5 ways he could see that the security sucks in the 3 minutes he hung out the window before climbing in. Large rafters and guards who didn’t bother to look up. Not to mention the fact that they let there be a solid wall between the set of guards which meant that Damian was easily able to jump down to knock them out in pairs without the other set knowing. If the security was any worse they would leave the door unlocked.

The door wasn’t unlocked but it was a deadbolt that Damian easily disabled. If he didn’t know any better, he’d say it was on purpose. He gulped before opening the door. What if you were really hurt? Or dead? Ignore and get in there.

Damian opened the door and he felt white hot rage. You were tied to a bed and were unconscious. You were in a nice dressy shirt and sweatpants. They’d clearly taken you while you were getting dressed. Damian wanted to kill them. He had to take a breath to help you. Jon was taking them out and Damian was on rescue. He had to stay level headed.

Even the cuffs on your wrists were inadequate. If they had attempted to restrain Damian, he would have gotten out in 3 minutes. When he was 6 years old. The Kryptonite had left nasty red burns on your skin and he clenched his jaw at the sight. Jon better be punching extra hard.

Damian picked you up bridal style and you groaned a little before turning your head against his chest. The farther he got you from that fucking Kryotonite the better you were. He took you to the roof and you started waking up.

“Damian,” you said softly and a little confused.

“Hey you’re awake. How are you feeling?” He asked looking all over your face for injury.

“Kryptonite. I hate that stuff,” you said. Damian grabbed your hand and you hissed. He looked to see bright red knuckles. You’d clearly fought at some point. He certainly knew the signs of punching someone.

“You fought back?”

“Yeah and hitting someone in a helmet and body armor sucks. I got just a few in before they pulled out the damn rock. I throw up every damn time,” you said shaking your head.

Before Damian could comment on how brave and stupid it was to punch body armor, there was a huge crash down on the first floor as someone flew in the building through the window. You grabbed him tightly.

“What the hell is that?”

“Kon. Conner’s here. I’m up here,” you yelled.

Conner flew up to the roof. “Are you okay? What’s going on?”

“Kidnapped. Damian and Jon saved me. He’s still down there actually. Can you check on him?” You said. Damian suddenly stood up.

“What if you were a distraction and the real problem is downstairs?” Damian suddenly said with clarity. The Kryptonite alone was enough to hold you down. The half ass security was to hold their attention when they rescued you. Jon was already flying back down before Damian could say more. Damian weighed his options: leave you alone, bring you with him, or stay out of it and while the last sounded nice, he’d have to go in case of more Kryptonite.

Before Damian could decide, Kon was back on the roof. “You’ve got to come see this.”

Downstairs was a lead lined basement. That alone had you nervous. Jon stood by the door. Little spattering of blood could be seen on his hands. He had a hard look.

“Warning: this is going to be messed up,” he said and you were even more worried. You walked in to see cages. Kids. Unconscious adults lay around in the hallway. “They were experimenting on them.”

You felt nauseous.

“My father is on the way. This is much bigger than I thought,” Damian said messing with his comms. His free hand was on your shoulder protectively.

There were 8 kids in cages. Bruce was running tests on their blood and investigating the area as you helped to get them out of the cages. What a terrible Valentine’s Day.

“Beloved, let’s get you home. We can stay at the farm tonight. You need sleep,” Damian said worried. You looked at him distracted.

“They’re just kids.”

“Come on. Let’s go. Kon is going to stay there too. Just for the night,” Damian said helping you up. Kon flew you both back to the farm.

“I’m going back to help. You okay, kid,” Kon asked as Damian inspected the house.

“I’ll be alright. Just help those kids,” you said.

“Yeah, of course,” he said ruffling your head. You rolled your eyes. “But seriously, the way you screamed I thought you were being murdered.”

You stiffened. “I’m fine. Thanks.”

Kon knew when to quit. Something he had learned from Tim. He gave you a big hug and flew off towards Metropolis.

“Hey. I made your bed so you can sleep,” Damian said quietly. “And a change of clothes.”

You nodded and went upstairs. Damian helped pull off your shirt and put on a sweater. He looked at the marks around your wrist and red knuckles but didn’t note any more bruises or cuts. You pulled on sweatpants and climbed in small twin bed that Lois kept for guests. The pink and yellow flowery quilt felt warm and comforting on your skin. Damian lay beside you after changing and looked at you seriously.

“What is it,” you asked.

“I was so scared tonight. I have been doing this for years and I’ve never been so worried,” he said softly and you looked down and flushed. If you weren’t so freaking sensitive to Kryptonite this wouldn’t have happened. Damian gently lifted your chin and you looked at him.

“I was scared to lose you,” he said running his thumb across your cheek. “I’m going to drive you absolutely mad because I don’t want to take my eyes off of you.”

“Yeah?” You said with a little smile.

“Uh hm. But first sleep,” he said and your body certainly agreed. You curled into him and rest your head on his chest. His arms held you tightly before rubbing your back. You fell asleep to Damian staring at you. He stared at you all night, not even sleeping when Kon came in a few hours later.

———————————

“I have to know what all that was, Bruce,” you said at the Batcave the next day. “I was in there.”

He looked at you for a minute. “They were experimenting with meta DNA. All of those kids have gifts and they wanted to take you too. There were even plans to inject those kids with your blood to see if it would affect them.”

You shivered a little at the thought. Lex Luthor and his obsession with Kryptonian DNA.

“All the records were burned. Most of the warehouse too. Your brothers were.... thorough. And Clark will be home in a few days,” Bruce added.

“Really?”

“Yes. And he’s furious at Luthor. Probably will call soon. He wanted to let you sleep earlier. We’re just running programs here. Why don’t you and Damian go upstairs,” he suggested.

“Bruce Wayne,” came a stern voice behind you. You turned to see your mother, Lois Lane, looking like she was going to beat up Batman. “You put a tracker in my daughter without her permission?”

“You what?” You said.

“Actually that was Damian. Though I want to point out that it helped save her life,” Bruce added. Lois slapped him soundly across the cheek. Bruce just blinked and rubbed his cheek.

“Damian, you put a tracker in me?” You asked shocked. You’d assumed Jon had heard you or Damian’s detective work brought them to the warehouse. Not an invasive tracker in your body. “What the hell?”

“Well I can explain..”

#Damian Wayne x reader #damian al ghul x reader #robin x reader #Damian Wayne angst #valentine fic #batboy x reader #dc #fns

503 notes · View notes

viltrumitesuperboy · 3 years

Text

A Promise (Bucky Barnes x Male Reader)

Not so much angst as I would have liked, and the reader learns to live outside of HYDRA by himself. This feels more like an origin story than anything.

Requested by: anon Can I request a Bucky Barnes x Male reader? Maybe starts out angsty but becomes fluffy? Reader could be tasked by HYDRA to kill Bucky but remembers him from when Bucky worked for HYDRA and that he loved Bucky, and Bucky helps him get used to life outside of HYDRA?

Word count: 4105

The few times you were placed under cryostasis, your last thought was always "I will not forget..." Then you'd wake up, only with the memories of being placed under and that final thought. You remembered when you mentioned it once to one of the people in your group, and they said it was just a memory hiccup. A defect. Because as far as you knew, you were a weapon for HYDRA and had always been one. Then you were back in the chair that made you want to fight more than anything. You never repeated the same mistake again.

You weren't allowed to make mistakes on missions either, and that was how you learned. To never do anything wrong if you were on a mission. There were no feelings involved in killing, as taking a life was merely a necessity, according to your handlers.

You did, however, have some feeling for one of your fellow soldiers. The difference was that he was the Winter Soldier. You usually worked on missions together, and rarely spoke, but when you did, something about you felt less like the soldier you were trained to be. He seemed to feel the same way, if the softening of his features was anything to go by. The few moments you had with each other weren't always erased, but sometimes you'd open your eyes and find yourself remembering the tiniest mischievous grin on the Soldier's lips.

You met a young girl with fiery hair with such potential, and her skills were beyond anyone her age. It took years to get to where she was. When you found out the Winter Soldier had been training her, you felt a sense of pride, and maybe something too much for the Soldier. That was not acceptable.

Little Natalia seemed to fight differently. Unlike you and the Soldier, she felt. She was more human than you both would ever be. You realised she was fighting for her survival. She didn't want to die. Her peers would not make it if she was the one to excel, because they were the weak ones. She did not fight with passion, but she fought for something else. But her heart while fighting was just as cold as yours.

"I hope I'm the first to be dismissed from training tomorrow. I hurt myself but I couldn't tell anyone," she said once.

Hope. Perhaps that was what she was fighting for. Your train of thought broke as you saw her shifting her arm. You took Natalia to a room that wasn't being used and sat her down on a chair. As you moved to inspect the misplaced bone, the Soldier opened the door to the room.

"Soldier. I heard something in this room. Report," he said.

Damn his serum. Yours wasn't as powerful.

"Natalia is wounded."

He looked behind him into the hallway and shut the door behind him, taking long strides to where you both were. He wasn't wearing his usual clothing, but a sweater over a shirt and more comfortable pants instead. He pulled his sweater over his head and bundled it up, putting it in front of Natalia's face.

"Bite into it," he ordered.

"It's fine, my pain tolerance is high," she said.

"You're a child. You can grab my arm if needed."

He held it up to her face, and she grumbled as she did as he told. You held her arm, looking to at the Soldier for approval. When he nodded, you pushed her arm back into place. As expected, Natalia screamed into the Soldier's sweater and held tight onto his metal arm with her other hand. It took a few moments for her to calm down after he pulled his sweater away.

"Natalia, how is it now?" you asked.

"The truth," the Soldier added.

"It's a bit sore but nothing sleep can't fix," she promised.

You held your arm out for her to grab and pulled her up from her seated position. The Soldier's metal arm pulled away from Natalia's grip and the other arm pressed into her shoulder to check it.

"We're counting on you. Survive," the Soldier said, and left.

Of course you were both hoping for Natalia to make it. The fact that he knew what you were thinking almost threw you off, but you were a trained soldier, and surprise was not supposed to be something you experienced. The smallest bit of compassion from the Soldier made you wonder if there was more of that from him. He was the only person consistent to your life, and he was the one thing you could rely on to be there even when you forgot things. The next wipe couldn't erase the memory of helping Natalia with the Winter Soldier. At least that was something you remembered.

The new century brought more radical ideas. HYDRA hated them, claiming that they were the supreme leaders of the world, and no one should be thinking such ideas. You only understood that it was your duty to follow. The Winter Soldier started to behave unpredictably, escaping from his handlers during missions and sometimes taking you with him. He'd have moments of muttering to himself and headaches where he just clutched his head and whispered to himself. It wasn't unlike your own, where you would constantly ask, "What did I forget? How could I forget?" You once overheard someone dressed in a lab coat say that it was the result of wiping memories. It was normal.

On one mission, he asked, "Who the hell is Bucky?" You had no answer. That was the last time you saw him in HYDRA.

Your handlers told you that HYDRA was destroyed by the Avengers. They'd have to build again, but now without any foundation. They said that the Asset was their greatest weapon, and, if their enemies had him, there would be no more HYDRA. So they gave you a mission that gave you only one chance: kill the Winter Soldier.

You were a good soldier. You had trained for years and you had trained with him. No matter what you went through over the years with the Soldier, you had to complete your mission. His death did not matter to you. Or, at least, it shouldn't have.

You kept track of him for a long time. One of his first actions was going to a museum that held a memorial for one of the Avengers. You went inside yourself one day, finding a man from the 1940's who looked just like him alongside the Avenger. He looked more carefree in the older photos, and looked less haunted like the Soldier did now. It was a handsome face, and one that you could not care for.

Every time you were on a rooftop pointing a sniper straight at his head, you found yourself unable to pull the trigger. After two weeks, HYDRA pulled you back, saying he was too well-known, and HYDRA did not have the resources to hide a death like his. Everyone was looking for him, and if he died by HYDRA's hands, it would no longer exist.

It took more than a year for the next time he was mentioned again. He had made contact with Captain America, both of whom were now refugees on the run from the nation itself. You wondered if you would have been like one of them if HYDRA had been truly destroyed.

Its foundations were weak and constantly falling apart. Someone was always dying, and no one knew who was doing the killing. You suspected Natalia had been doing it, but said nothing. After all, she was a grown woman now. Somewhere deep down, you were impressed that she had made such a big name for herself but still managed to kill under the radar. The Soldier likely would have thought the same.

At this point, him being a refugee was the perfect time for him to die, according to HYDRA. Giving the world control over these "superheroes" would align with HYDRA's ideas. For once, some of the Avengers were in agreement. Removing the Captain's main driving factor, his "James Buchanan Barnes," would further push the Sokovia Accords. You returned to your previous unfinished mission.

It was another few weeks of following the Soldier. He seemed less like you. He was different from the Soldier you knew, and emotions tore him apart sometimes. You saw him having more of his fits, but he had Steve Rogers to depend on. They were frequently close together, and you were angry seeing them like that. You were once on the Soldier's side, the person he was meant to depend on. What changed? Why did you have to kill him now?

When you had your first chance, you finally pulled the trigger. Dread suddenly took over part of you, but a metal arm flung up to stop the bullet, and the Soldier glared through the hole in the glass. You knew he could probably see your silhouette, but you were too far to catch. He knew you were trying to kill him now. Leaving now meant that he could escape, and maybe even far enough that you couldn't follow. You supposed you'd have to meet him in the middle. A packed sniper on your back and running across the roofs of the European city had you facing him, your gun pointed at his head and his metal arm at the ready.

"Look, we don't need to fight. Whoever sent you to kill me, tell them I won't kill another innocent again," he pleaded.

"I think that's the problem," you muttered, and a shot rang out.

Something else knocked the bullet off course this time, the accuracy and strength too much to be human.

"Steve Rogers," you stated. "This is not your fight."

"No, this is no one's fight," the Soldier said. "Who are you? Why are you here?"

Your mask was similar to his before he escaped HYDRA. You reached up with the hand not holding the gun and pulled it off. His eyes widened in recognition.

"They said you need to die. I'm supposed to be the one to do it," you said.

Your gun was no longer useful, so you dropped it and charged at the Captain, knocking him off balance so you could get to the Soldier. You threw punches and your entire torso into it, but the Soldier was on the defensive and blocked every single thing you threw at him.

"(Y/N)!" the Captain shouted behind you.

You whipped around glaring at him.

"Who the hell is (Y/N)?" you asked.

You felt a throbbing in your head and dropped to your knees as you clutched your temples.

Who the hell is Bucky?

"Who... who is Bucky?!" you growled, then turned on the Soldier. "You are a traitor! You need to die!"

"(Y/N), I'm Bucky. I'm your friend. We did missions together but we were forced to. You're being brainwashed by HYDRA. It's not you," the Soldier said.

His words sounded like a promise. It felt like you sat there for an hour, his hand on your back in comfort. Your head was still throbbing, but you managed to open your mouth again.

"I wasn't in the museum," you said.

"No, you weren't," Bucky quietly replied. "Do you know why?"

"We had to hide, right? There was something I felt, right here, whenever we were together, before you left."

Your hand patted your chest, and you looked up at him through watery eyes.

"Who am I?"

———

The Second World War

Bucky was dead.

That was what they told his family. You had to hear from his mother, who was the only one who knew about your relationship. You bonded with the rest of his family, mourning together when they learned that you both had loved each other. Then Captain America died, and everything got worse. Two of your closest friends had died in close succession, and one was a supersoldier. He wasn't supposed to die. You vowed to take down those who had killed them.

You sent a letter to Dr. Erskine, who Bucky once mentioned in one of his letters. You asked to help him in the war, telling him that both heroes who died were your friends and you would take their place in fighting for the war effort. Instead, Margaret Carter responded, telling you that Dr. Erskine had been in an accident a few months prior, and sent someone to bring you to a bunker where she was currently working.

Together you found places where HYDRA was hiding, different areas all around the world. You quickly learned the strategies needed to fight them on the battlefield and behind the scenes out of necessity. The first time you were on the field, you had no idea it would be your last. The rest of your group had been killed. You were captured and brought down deep into the quieter, darker confines of the bunker. Because you were already wounded, fighting would have done little for your situation. It was clear they wanted you alive.

"So nice to finally meet you. Your... friend has spoken of you," said the stranger you were placed in front of. "We have heard that you are the best in strategy. Hopefully your removal will prevent more of our branches being taken apart. You work for us now."

"What friend?"

"Your boyfriend."

His tone was hateful and goading you to become angry. You said nothing. They wouldn't give you information. If he was alive and in HYDRA's hands, you couldn't save him anymore.

"You will be moved soon for... recalibration. Take our newest recruit to experimentation."

You fought, but to no avail.

———

You found yourself in the room that you had just shot a bullet into. The sun was already up, and the Captain and the Winter Soldier stood next to each other in the very small kitchen area. The Soldier leaned with his back to the wall as he spoke with the Captain quietly, though it sounded like a disagreement.

"So are we supposed to go to Wakanda now? If they have anything to help me, how do we know if (Y/N) wants that help too?"

"All I'm saying is that it's our best chance. And if he doesn't want the help, at least we're here if he needs us. And I know how much he meant to you before... everything. I know he still means something to you now."

They looked over as you sat up, leaning against the wall behind you. The Soldier walked over and held out a hand to steady you. You nodded to give him permission.

"You're burning up. I don't think your body is agreeing with remembering things. It wasn't as bad for me but I think the serum did more for me than you."

"Just like alcohol," you muttered. "Watered down."

The Captain smiled, "Glad to see you still have a sense of humour. And it's just as bad."

You were too weak to stand up, much less throw a punch at his stupid insulting face. The Soldier laid you back down.

"We're leaving soon. You'll be resting the whole way, but we'll keep an eye on you."

It sounded like a promise, and you believed him.

When you woke again, it was in a small jet. Bucky sat next to you, his hand grasping yours. Your first instinct was to fight, but Bucky's hand seemed to ground you.

"Take it easy. We're in the quinjet and flying to Wakanda. It was a hidden society in Africa with technology beyond anything else in the world. We're hoping they can help Bucky from reacting to the trigger words that HYDRA brainwashed him with," Steve said. "Same with you."

He helped you sit up when you didn't seem to want to fight anymore. For the first time, you felt like you were relaxed. No handlers were keeping an eye on you, and you were alone with two people you could barely remember, but they just seemed like people you didn't need to fight for once.

"I'm Bucky, and that's Steve. We were born decades ago, and the world war separated us all from each other. You and I were controlled by Nazis, and Steve was found a few years ago. You weren't supposed to be in the war."

He looked solemn, and Steve gave him a reassuring smile. You watched both of them carefully.

"Keep talking, Buck. Is there anything else you remember?" Steve asked.

"When we were seeing Stark's demonstration of his flying car, I took you and (Y/N) with me. We'd gone with some girls, and two were a couple, so we could all be on a date without getting in trouble for it. Well, except for you. No offence, Steve. Didn't mean to make you a third wheel."

"None taken. I don't think any of us were really third wheels. We were best friends, and you and (Y/N) were together. And I became friends with him after."

"Aw, we're not best friends anymore?"

"You'll always be my best friend, Buck. 'Till the end of the line."

"End of the line."

You muttered, "That's so cheesy."

"Yeah, and you know what weird thing you'd say with Bucky?" Steve teased.

"I'd punch a Nazi before admitting that I love you," you recited.

"And you've punched ten," Bucky said with a fond smile. "Probably more by now."

"I'm not the same person I was before, Bucky," you said. "You're not either, but you've remembered more than I have. I don't feel like a blank slate, but I don't feel like I need to... kill you. And I don't want to."

"Everything feels like it's closing in on you all the time, right?" Bucky asked. "Like you don't know where to go, and the people you think you can trust are going to be your next enemy?"

You nodded.

"That's how I felt, too. But you trusted me before HYDRA, and you trusted me during it. If we both can get through that together, we can get through this too."

You lightly squeezed his hand.

"Yeah, maybe."

———

They couldn't help, so Bucky wanted to go under cryostasis. He felt that it was dangerous for him to be conscious. You almost thought that it was a good idea for yourself too, but you took one look at the goat currently nibbling at your shirt and felt that you still needed some time to yourself being out of HYDRA's control. Bucky gave you a hug before he stepped into the chamber, and you stayed in each other's embrace for a long time. It was the safest you remembered feeling. Steve looked at the chamber, troubled. He turned away when Bucky was inside, and you placed your hand on his shoulder in understanding. Steve didn't like the cold, and seeing his friend in the same position was painful.

The Wakandans provided for you. You worked on a farm in near solitude, the occasional patrol guards making sure that you were safe and the goats giving you a friendship you didn't know existed. Shuri worked hard on finding a cure for the both of you, and she and her brother came to see you a few times. They were both good friends to you, but T'Challa liked the goats more than Shuri did. She was too busy talking about her new inventions to spend too much time with the goats. She'd come to you with ideas about Bucky's new metal arm, asking about your own experience with the serum to get an idea of his strength and abilities.

Their technology was groundbreaking, and they managed to find a way to remove the effects of brainwashing from the mind. By the time Bucky was out of cryostasis, they'd already finished the procedure on you. You had offered to be their first in case they made a mistake, hoping that if you didn't make it, Bucky would. As all things in Wakanda worked, it was flawless. Bucky found out about what you had said when Shuri had mentioned it in passing. He was angry at first, but cooled down once he saw you. He said that it was so much like you to do something like that for the people you cared most about.

You didn't feel much different from before, but you were remembering things with less effort. Your experience in HYDRA, though terrifying, was one that you saw from your own eyes. It felt like somebody else's. Shuri assured you that it was not you, and everything that you could do under your own control was who you were. You stayed by Bucky's side until he needed to have the procedure as well. He came back to you looking relaxed, even without an arm, as if the world was revolving around him. Then you spent about an hour listening to Shuri rant about her technology, which T'Challa had to cut in to explain issues regarding the nations outside of Wakanda and the politics surrounding your situation. He finished with letting you both know that Wakanda was always open to you.

Shuri said that she still had a "broken white boy's arm" to fix, and that if either of you left, she'd hunt you down herself.

For the first time since Bucky was out of the chamber, he spoke: "Do you remember Natalia? She's Natasha now."

"Yes, and I think she's grown up well. When we fixed her arm, that was when I knew that you were just a little bit human."

He was quiet for a bit, and his hand reached out for yours. You met in the middle.

"I think we need to learn about each other again," he said, his hand clenching yours.

"Well, I think you should meet the goats first."

He loved the goats.

He loved the farm you worked on. It was big, but worked for you as someone with super serum. Bucky enjoyed working on it too, saying it was a good way to get out his energy. But mostly he played with the goats.

Bucky was better now than how you remembered him in the past. He was understanding of what you both had gone through and it was easy to communicate with him, even when neither of you wanted to speak. There was no disconnect from the Bucky then and Bucky now. It was just him. He was exactly what you needed in the past and he was what you needed in the present.

You finished pulling out weeds from the last area of the farm, checking for any diseased plants as you went. You looked up, and found Bucky feeding some of the weeds to the goats that had run up to him. They nibbled at his fingers, and he laughed as he sat on the ground to pet every single one of their heads. His hair was pulled back in a bun and the cloth he wore was saturated in the sun's glare. You picked up the weeds you had pulled, which weren't many because you worked on the farm all the time, and headed over to him. He smiled as you pulled him up from the pile of goats.

"Are we going to the market now?" he asked.

"I think I'm ready to admit that I love you," you said.

Bucky's eyebrows furrowed, then his face lit into a bright smile.

"How many Nazis have you punched?" he joked.

"Depends on how many we meet," you replied. "Did you know there are people called 'neo-Nazis'? For every single one of them we meet that I don't punch is a day that I don't love you."

"Is that a promise?"

"Of course."

"Then I promise that I'll always love you. And I'll tell you for as long as you need me to."

You both headed to the road that led into the more populated towns, hand in hand as you walked up the hill.

"I never believed in soulmates," Bucky began as he shifted to intertwine his fingers with yours, "but I think this is the closest I'll ever find. We've been there for each other when we needed each other most, and I want our future to be the same."

You didn't answer, stopping to pull him into a kiss instead. He returned it with just as much enthusiasm. When you were called to fight a world-threatening event, you were finally ready, and you did it together.

#x male reader #bucky barnes x reader #bucky barnes x male reader #bucky x male reader #bucky barnes x male!reader #bucky x male!reader #bucky x reader #bucky imagine #x male!reader #male reader #request

355 notes · View notes

sunlightnmoonshine · 3 years

Text

In the end (pt. 1)

It feels a little surreal that the show is over and I will no longer have anything to look forward to because the devil judge set such a high bar in terms of writing and character exploration that I will always hold dear to my heart. Given that its actually done, I found myself drowning in the realisation that we will never see these characters again and how I feel about where the show left them off. So this is me coming to terms with it:

1. Min Jung Ho - Snake lol. Something I admired about the writing was how they didn't try to make him all out some evil piece of shit but rather someone that had a very strong misguided belief off some strange frustrations against Yohan who was changing the legal system more radically but effectively. Which he could not come to terms with. In the end he villanised Yohan and ignored the actual problems that persisted and inevitably contributed to the problem all in a sense of self righteousness, ah sorry, hypocrisy is the better word. The show leaves him looking oh so pathetic, he can't even raise his head to meet Gaon, the boy he betrayed severely and he'll rot for the rest of his life going down in history as a hypocrite who did nothing to actually fix the system he claimed he would be the arm of justice for. Its a fitting end.

2. Heo Joong Se: Clown. The show really said he's a spoilt, stubborn arrogant joke until the end. Down to the way he insulted everyone but specifically insulted women. The way all he did in that court room was scream his head off without an ounce of remorse somehow still deluded by the fact that he's doing this for the country? But knowing fully well he's a businessman through and through and that was all he will be. I can not stress how phenomenal it is that it is Jung Sun Ah that shoots him dead. Its clear he's had it coming from her hand ever since she tried to suffocate him during the massage but it's just how randomly she does it. She's sick of him, she's aware she's going to be targeted, she's aware he's done too much behind her back and never once respected her and its in the midst of one of his screaming fits particularly screaming "I am the King" that the bullet goes through and there's silence. Perfection.

3. The rest of the clowns of the SRF : idle bystanders that turned an eye away from inherent evil and repeatedly benefitted off of their actions without an ounce of remorse yet again. But hilarious nevertheless because they really became jesters on that stage in a desperate fit to live, threw themselves away to get out a door. It's noteworthy that they spent most of their time trying to stop the other from leaving instead of quietly watching and just getting out. None of them of are capable of that, they only know to take from others. Crumbling under the systematic stage they built? Poignant. I don't really care what anyone says they deserved to die point in tow with HJS who saw human life as so unworthy of it wasn't their own. There's a reason why human trafficking is considered one of the worst of crimes, human experimentation falls closely next to it. All because they were poorer than them. Guess their greed really out did them. Tried to put on a show in a court house which was anyway all just a staged facade and ultimately they died on that stage with their masks out for everyone to see. For their people to see them throw each other away to live. If they were going to throw each other away - their own kind- what wouldn't they do to the lower class? Oof the show gave them what they deserved- humiliation.

4. Jung Sunah - I still struggle to come to terms with how she's gone and how painful everything about her was until the last minute. It's clear Sunah has been breaking for a few episodes now. She's so close to the top and she's realised how truly alone she is and she's realised Yohan will never want her the way she wants him to. She's realised every person she used to get to where she was, ended up being wasted stepping stones because she doesn't have what she wants all the way at the top and never will. The way the show has her quietly go to the experimentation centre and weep over the girl she saw herself in but someone she initially turned away from because she's not part of her bigger plan. The child she left to fall prey to the people Sunah has inevitably helped secure positions in her attempt to secure her own position. The way the show focuses on how the child has been repeatedly pierced with needles something Sunah hates the most and how she realises this is also her fault. She probably thought hey I'll get to the top and do things my way but as Yohan pointed out, ruling over trash isn't it, it'll never be worth it and she's essentially walking with a target on her back and she'll never be free because the weight of her sins will catch up to her and the rich will always be after her because she's not the same as them. She would be living on the edge forever. And she knows this.

Something I found very interesting was how she wasnt roped in on the crimes of the Dream House Project. Yohan only highlighted her crime as having killed K and Soohyun and its the frustration she feels in that moment that really gets me. It's also why I think she could never get out of the show because she killed innocent people which is highlighted repeatedly and at the time never showed remorse for it. BUT I love how the show somehow saves her from humiliation, until the end they paint her with regality and power because that is who Sunah is. Frankly she could have walked right out of the door while they were throwing a fit and Yohan would have let her because that was the terms of the game but he'd have come after her at some point and even if he didn't Gaon most certainly would have.

But it's the way the show brought it all back to how she feels about Yohan since he's the other half of what she's always wanted, the way she's happy he's alive, how she goes and stands in front of him and she's got her hand on the trigger of the gun while Yohan on the button of detonator. I believe, if Sunah had shot him Yohan would have detonated the bomb and died with them and I also believe deep down Sunah knew Yohan would somehow get out of this even if she didn't shoot him, so she really gave him the chance to get out and back to Elijah. I am not sure if Sunah couldn't shoot Yohan or if she didn't want to, and I lean towards the latter because she really liked him, it might have been ill placed desire but if things were different if she hadn't sided with the SRF in hopes of getting to the top she and Yohan might have worked things out and they would both be healing. If she only hadn't killed the innocent people to make a point... But at the end of it Sunah took her fate into her hands and I appreciate that the show gave her the agency over it, to decide not to shoot Yohan because she's finally letting go ( I stand by this but if Yohan had died Sunah would have lost - she never wanted him to die), because she won't do what the rest of the SRF scum want of her and because she's fine with going on her own terms.

That doesn't mean it didn't hurt though... I cry thinking about it because the show tried really hard to show how unfair everything was to Sunah and how if circumstances had been different, if the world had cared a bit more how she might have turned out differently. Her final moments the flashback to the one act of kindness she had needed in her life, the way Yohan really must have sparkled in her eyes, and how much she valued that moment all the way to her death because no matter what, in his own loneliness and difficulty he was kind to her. Jeez it hurts.

Ideally I'd have wanted her to live but I don't know how that would have worked out. At the end of it not all villains are evil. Some are products of the ills of the system that left them alone and let them become monsters but behind a monster there can also be a victim.

#the devil judge #kdrama #I was going to add my feels on everyone else's end #But this is already too long #and Sunah has me feeling sad

54 notes · View notes

lilac-super-nova · 3 years

Text

~ TRY AGAIN ~

DRAMIONE

WARNING: Character death! Swearing.

WORDS: 1.5K

A/N: Sorry, I changed it up a bit from the post I made about this fic the snippet of text. So, it's not exactly what I said it would be!

Hermione finally decided to go outside. The library was far too stuffy and there was a chattering group of third-year girls nearby. As she placed her book back on its shelf, Draco rounded the corner of the aisle and stopped at the sight of her standing there.

“Shit! Malfoy!” Hermione yelped quietly in surprise.

“Oh, finally,” he sneered, staring at her. “I was looking everywhere for you.”

“Of course you were! And I bet I know what you want to talk about,” Hermione whispered harshly, turning around to face Draco. “All you ever want to fucking talk about is us!”

Draco’s face registered hurt and then quickly switched back to his usual sneer. “So? You’re scared to talk about it at all,” he muttered, leaning forward so that Hermione could feel his hot breath on her cheek. “Are you scared of me, darling?”

He felt her body tense underneath him and he smiled. He tilted her chin upward and put his arm on the bookshelf behind her so that his body was practically touching hers, but not quite.

“Draco!” she gasped.”Not here!”

“Hmmm… perhaps an empty classroom?” he suggested.

Hermione tried to object but then she realized there was no point and settled for a look of pure hatred instead.

She followed him to an empty classroom and closed and locked the door behind her.

“I think we could try again. Please trust me. It’s okay, don’t worry,” Draco assured her as he sat her down on top of the teacher’s desk.

“Draco, I really don’t know,” Hermione mumbled, closing her eyes and taking Draco’s hand in hers.

“Please, darling? For me?” Draco pleaded with her, squeezing her hand tightly.

Even though she enjoyed watching him beg with her, she reluctantly sighed and nodded her head. Draco smiled and felt grateful for the opportunity. He knew he only had one chance and he had to be careful.

Draco placed a hand on her waist and leaned forward so that their lips almost met, but he paused, thinking of how lucky he was to have this opportunity and how beautiful Hermione was at that moment. He slowly breathed in and then tilted his face forward so that his li-

Hermione pulled away, hopped off of the desk, and landed with a dull thud as Draco tried to comprehend what had just happened. She had just been sitting in front of him, lips awaiting his touch, or so he had thought. Now, she seemed to be a completely different person, fierce and fiery beneath his gaze.

“Draco… I really can’t do this,” Hermione began regretfully. “You’re a good person, but I really don’t think this is going to work out. I’m so sorry, Draco.”

The realization and fact of what was going on hit Draco like a huge bullet, his heart dropping immediately and his mind drowning in despair. No, no, no, no, this couldn’t be happening! What had he done to earn this? He had been careful and slow. Was he too slow!? What ha-

“This isn’t your fault,” Hermione assured him, reading his mind. “It just doesn’t feel right to me. Do you understand?”

“Y-yes,” Draco choked out quietly, stuttering in his confusion. “I understand.”

Hermione nodded. “I wish you well. Goodbye.”

And with that she walked out, gently closing the door behind her. Leaving him with his head down, wallowing in his misery, feeling as if he had failed. Drowning in his fears, mistakes, and insecurities.

***

The next day, Draco was walking down the hall on his way to potions class and he saw Harry, Hermione, and Ron standing with the rest of the Gryffindors, waiting for the class to start. The ease she talked to them with made him feel a deep pang of jealousy and longing. She had never talked to him like that.

Professor Snape opened the door to the dungeon and all of the students filed into the classroom, sat down, and awaited instructions. Today, Draco found a table with just Pansy and slumped onto a chair.

“Where the fuck were you yesterday?” she asked, setting her bag down on the empty seat next to her. “Crabbe and Goyle are in the hospital wing, they fell down a whole entire flight of stairs. I don’t really understand how that’s possible though,” Pansy said, noticing that he had looked around.

She smirked and had a slight air of triumph. Draco wondered if she had pushed them so that she could sit with him alone. He didn’t understand how she could be so obsessed with him when Hermione Granger had turned him down twice. When he couldn’t even gain the love of a mudblood.

Shit. “I was busy doing some studying in the library… for… uh… an extra credit essay for Snape! And it took quite a long time, I couldn’t figure out a specific thing about... unicorn blood.” He pieced together. He couldn’t tell her about what happened with Hermione, she would humiliate him for loving a muggle-born.

“Oh, well, you could’ve told me. I would’ve gladly helped you with your essay, you know,” Pansy said with a sly smile.

Draco began to feel uncomfortable and there was an awkward silence.

“I’m so sorry, I just didn’t think of it at the time. Next time something like that comes up I’ll let you know, okay?” He brought his hand up to his neck and rubbed it.

Pansy simply nodded, a little disappointed. He felt like he was failing everyone in that sense. How could he satisfy the love Pansy had for him and his own need for love from a person he could never quite capture at the same time?

At the end of the class, Draco quickly made his way to the door and hurried down the hall and up to the Great Hall to eat lunch. The entrance was filled with people and Draco let out a small groan when he realized that he had come at the worst time.

As he finally made his way to the Slytherin table he noticed Potter stare at him with a mix of hatred, confusion, and pity and Draco knew that Hermione had told him about what had happened.

He chose to sit at the far end of the table, away from his friends, and waited. When the food appeared he ate only a few things and no dessert at all. He noticed that some of the other Slytherins were looking at him and whispering to each other. Draco sighed. They were talking about him, of course.

When he got up with everyone else to leave and go to their next classes, he heard snippets of conversations including his name.

“Look! It’s him, Draco Malfoy. What a fuck up. Did you hear that he’s failing all of his classes?”

“--and that he’s starving himself! Do you know why?”

“Ha! He got turned down by a muggle-born! Ya’ know, the nerd?”

His cheeks glowed red as he ran, not to his next class, but to his Slytherin dorm room. He felt like he was going to cry and soon enough, his vision was getting blurry.

He threw open the door and dragged himself over to his bed where he collapsed onto the soft sheets. There he let all of his tears out until he was done and simply lying face down on his covers, barely able to breathe through the thick fabric.

The thoughts racing through his head were tangled in each other as he tried to make sense of his feelings and compose himself. Soon enough, he knew what he must do and it made his heart go wild. He had been expecting this for a while and he finally had the courage to do it.

Draco got up and robotically walked himself over to his trunk. There, he tied almost all of his clothing into one long rope and stood at the wall, waiting. He got out his wand, and under his breath, mumbled a simple spell. When he looked up, he noticed a hook protruding from the wall a foot above him. It was next to his bed so that if he got on it he would be able to touch it with the top of his head. The perfect height.

Without thinking, Draco worked the rope of clothing and created a noose that looked like it would fit perfectly. He did this by hand. He adjusted this on the hook and made sure it was very tight and would not give way. After that, Draco got up on the bed, positioned himself, and put it on while simultaneously tightening it.

***

The thorny roses stood on that bedside table, never wilting or dying, never needing to have their water changed. The thing is, they had never been magically altered in any way and were practically perfect. The pure crimson red of their beautiful petals. The neatly sculpted thorns, sharp as a needle. The long and delicate, but strong stems, as healthy as they had been exactly a year ago. Nobody touched them or bothered them in any way because they were a monument. Some people said if you get that bed, you would end up dying that year, some said it was good luck.

Many people mourned this tragic death, but none as much as Hermione Granger.

#Dramione #dramione #dramione ship #draco #draco malfoy #hermione #hermione granger #harry potter #hogwarts #dramione fic #fanfic #hp #hp fanfic

37 notes · View notes

onechicago-upsteadrhekker · 3 years

Text

the trouble with wanting (is i want you) - part two

Friends!!!!! I’m here! I’m back!

I can’t apologize enough for the long wait! It certainly wasn’t intentional, but alas that is the life of a college student and unfortunately school comes before upstead as much as I wish it didn’t!

I hope part two gives you all the feels and makes up for the long absence, however, I do have something to share with you that may make you want to kill.

Part two turned into part three...

So, SURPRISE! This isn’t a two-shot; it will definitely be a three part story and I am happy to say that part three is written (mostly, I have to tweak a few things) so that will be up sometime next week depending on my school schedule.

Thank you again for your patience and I sincerely hope that you enjoy this chapter that contains no real plot, a lot of fluff and mutual pining!

As always, let me know what you think in the comments!

Tagging: @imjustwritingg, @anniesardors, @thetwit, @angelsjedi, @chichichicken, @carissalizz, @maya-asturias

Let me know if you want to be added to this list for part three!

Read on AO3

The next few days are filled with mandatory walking sessions, pain meds every four to six hours and Jay’s smiling face. He was the only reason why she wasn’t absolutely losing it because while she despised hospital stays in general, hospital stays in another city filled with people she didn’t know were downright insufferable.

But he’d made it go from something akin to glorified torture to slightly tolerable.

The bullet wound was starting to heal and the incision from where they’d had to remove her spleen was looking great according to the nurses and everything seemed to be on the right track healing wise, but anything regarding this thing that she and Jay had going on? She had no idea.

One would think getting shot in a different city, causing one partner to literally drop everything and come rushing to the other partner’s side would end in heartfelt confessions and relationships born at hospital bedsides.

But that’s not what happened, and Hailey was seriously starting to wonder if she and Jay were ever going to be on the same page. Or at least read the page aloud because she was fairly certain he felt the same way about her that she felt about him.

Because just partners don’t fly eight-hundred miles to be by your side even if you are hurt.

Right?

And it didn’t help that he was there with her almost twenty-four seven, giving her no time alone to process what he was telling her without words because before this, it had just been subtle glances and warm smiles, teasing words and affectionate eyes.

But this. Flying eight-hundred miles. It was tangible and real, and she couldn’t quite believe it was really actually happening, but then he was there, bringing her her favorite foods from restaurants she’d found during her time in New York and barely going back to her hotel room for sleep, staying by her side to keep her company and catch her up on five weeks’ worth of Intelligence news.

He was there for every lap around the hospital floor and every dressing change. He was there to shoo out the nurses when they were starting to get on her nerves and he was there, rubbing her hand softly when the pain of her bruised ribs made it hard to breathe.

And then there was the way she was constantly being referred to as ‘Jay’s wife’ instead of her own name much like when she was back in grade school and her teachers would call her ‘Sam’s little sister’.

He’d made quite the impression on the nurses and for some reason neither she nor Jay had set the record straight on the actual status of their relationship since that first day when he was mistaken as her husband.

(It was probably the same reason that they hadn’t talked about what Jay flying to New York meant. And to be honest, Hailey was sort of hoping that Jay would set the record straight on their relationship, if only to let her know where they stood.)

And she definitely wasn’t going to acknowledge the dangerous little thrill she got from hearing herself referenced that way or think about what it would be like for real. Nope, not a chance or she might never come back down to reality after having narcotic-induced dreams of three little words, ‘I do’s’, freckled little faces and laughing green eyes.

But then it’s so close, she can almost taste it and it should scare her, but it doesn’t.

Because she can feel it in the way he grins at her and in the way he tells her goodnight at the end of a long day of keeping her company. It’s in the way his arm brushes hers when he’s helping her sit or stand and it’s in the way his eyes hold hers for far longer than he should; his green eyes swimming with hints of the things she dreams.

But until she hears it. Until one of them gathers the courage to actually say the words and put a name to what they already know and feel, then she’s going to wait and guard those dreams carefully because she knows deep in her heart that when they return to Chicago, it will have either worked out or it won’t at all.

She’s not sure exactly when the pieces will fall into place or if they’ll even fit together but she knows they are at the point of no return. And honestly, that scares her the most because no matter what happens, it will always be Jay for her.

Because he was her home, and he had a place in her heart no one else could ever have and that terrified her because she knows that she’ll never get over him if for some reason it doesn’t work out between them.

She tries not to think like that because she’s pretty sure what she’s seen in his eyes is something that looks a lot like love, but it’s hard to be totally optimistic when it seems like the universe is always keeping them not necessarily apart, but not really together. At least not in the way she’s pretty sure both of them want.

So, she sits in her hospital bed, watching him laugh at her attempts to renegotiate her discharge date with the nurses and listens to him chatter about what Will’s been up to and how much he hated being tossed between Kevin, Kim, Adam and Vanessa while she’d been gone even if he liked working with each of them.

They’d been flying crooked he told her and that her not being there threw them all off so he’d be happy when he could take her back home and so would everyone else. In fact, they’d told her as much when Kim had facetimed Jay the day after he’d arrived in New York to get proof of life and see for themselves that she was truly going to be okay.

It was sweet and nice, and it made her realize how much she really did miss her team turned family even if she already felt like she was home just because Jay was beside her.

He was beside her and he was there with her and every time he looked at her over the beeping of the heart monitor she was hooked up to, everything else faded from view. The facetime calls with their friends, the friendly nurses checking up on her every few hours, the general hustle and bustle of hospital life happening outside her room.

It was just them and she’d be lying if she wasn’t looking forward to her discharge date for reasons other than just being out of the hospital because she knew then, she and Jay would truly be alone stuck in a hotel room in a city that neither one of them knew.

And that, she knew, would be the true test.

On the morning of the third day she’d been in the hospital, Hailey was given the news that she’d be released by that afternoon. If she was physically capable, she’d be jumping for joy but because of the dozen stitches in her side, she’d had to settle for celebrating internally.

Moving was still slow-going and she still felt overly tired far too early in the day, but she was confident that a night in her own bed (or at least the bed she’d been sleeping in for the past several weeks) would do her a world of good.

And she wasn’t going to think about how Jay being potentially next to her would probably make her sleep better than she’d ever had.

She didn’t know exactly where Jay had been disappearing to when he’d left the hospital at night, but she’d given him the key to her hotel room and he always came back looking well-rested so she felt safe assuming he was sleeping in the same queen bed she’d been occupying for the past five weeks.

Hailey wasn’t quite sure what would happen tonight when it was time for him to go to bed, but she wondered if this was the day they were going to finally get it right, nestled under the bed covers, whispering dreams and promises, her side aching but her heart so full.

“Here, let me help you with that,” Her gaze flicked up to Jay who had entered the room and was walking towards her, his hands already reaching out to help her pull on her coat. Hailey looked up at him as he focused his gaze on putting her left arm carefully through the sleeve of her jacket.

She wasn’t sure if a person could have reversed déjà vu, but the action brought her right back to another hospital room in a different city when she was still reeling from the panic she’d felt surrounding Jay’s terrifying brush with death.

When she’d helped him pull his familiar, worn black jacket over his sling right before she almost told him she loved him.

And now here they were again, except this time it was him helping her and this time she knew they weren’t going home without having the conversation they should have had then.

“Thanks,” She murmured softly, trying to ignore the way her heart raced when he briefly squeezed her hand.

Hailey gingerly sat down on the side of the bed, already worn out and sore from the morning’s activities of getting ready to leave.

“I called a taxi. It should be here any minute,” He grabbed her duffle and sat it beside her, “You sign the discharge papers?”

“Yes, thank God,” She muttered accepting the pair of Sperry’s Jay was handing her.

He chuckled softly, “You are so impatient.”

She shot him a look, “I’m sorry. And who was the one practically begging me to spring him from the hospital the minute he was awake and talking?”

He had the wisdom to look sheepish, but he couldn’t hide the wide smile threatening to take over. Clearly, they were both happy to be leaving the hospital room behind.

As Jay busied himself with packing the last few items into the duffle he’d brought Hailey the day he’d arrived in New York, he can’t help but watch her. She’s moving slowly, but she seems pretty alert for someone who got shot and had relatively serious surgery only four days ago.

Her eyes are bright if not tired and her hair is haphazardly thrown up in her signature high pony, but Jay still thinks she’s the most beautiful girl in the world and he almost tells her just that.

His mouth is open, forming the words when she turns to him after sliding on her shoes, catching his gaze with eyes narrowed in suspicion, “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

And he thinks this is why he can never tell her how he feels. She’s always taking the words away with a flash of blue and a dash of blonde because he wants his future to look like her so badly, it terrifies him. And even when he does finally find the words, he knows he will never be able to tell her with words just how much she means to him.

His lips quirk and he shakes his head, turning his attention back to the duffle to zip it up before nodding towards the open door of her hospital room, “No reason. You ready to go?”

For a second, he thinks she’s going to push, and they are going to have the conversation they need to have right here and now, but then she doesn’t and some part of him feels disappointed that they are making themselves wait once again.

He’s not even entirely sure why because nothing is holding them back now. Not really. They are finally both in the same city with no kidnappings, rigged elections or anything else threatening to tear them apart and yet, they are still walking that very fine line of partners and best friends to something openly affectionate and loving and real.

It’s almost too perfect because while he rushed here in a state of panic, not knowing what he would find, Hailey, for the most part was okay and now they were stuck here with basically nothing to do but wait till she could fly without risk of infection or complications from surgery.

He’s not sure if he should be worried, waiting for the other shoe to drop or thrilled that the universe seems to be giving them a hint that it was finally time to take that leap of faith from partners and best friends to something more.

“Hailey, you are clearly in pain.”

After the short taxi ride from the hospital, they were finally in the hotel room and now firmly engaged in a battle of wills.

Hailey was currently giving him a glare that reminded him of the way she would silently warn him from across the bullpen to not do something he might regret or when they were down to the last couple of fries during a long stakeout and he was reaching for them.

Generally, he didn’t win the fights when she wore that look but today, he was determined to stand his ground.

“Jay,” It was practically whined and while he understood her reluctance to take the pain meds she’d been prescribed, he couldn’t stand watching her in pain.

In the few times that Hailey’s been injured during their partnership, it hadn’t been too serious, and she usually had a good attitude about doing what she needed to do to recover. So, seeing her like this, pale and tired and just not her normal, spunky self, broke his heart and he wanted to do everything in his power to fix it.

Starting with the meds she’s determined not to take.

He was happy to at least see the trait that was so undeniably Hailey in her eyes because otherwise, she looked like a lifeless shell of the badass detective he knows she is. The oversized pillows she was propped against makes her seem so tiny and she almost blended in with the sheets she was so white.

If he was being honest, she was starting to look worse than she did when she was in the hospital and that definitely concerned him enough to possibly make him take her right back there or at least call Will for his opinion.

Sighing, he uncrosses his arms to move from where he’s been standing a few feet away from the end of the bed holding the prescription bag in a clenched fist.

Her eyes track his movements as he comes to gingerly sit down at the edge of the bed, leaning over on his forearm to look at her closely, “Hailey,” He shakes his head, “Please just take them. At least so you can get some sleep. You look exhausted.”

For a second, he thinks that she’s going to keep fighting him, but then he sees the weak mask she’d had in place slip, the dull look of pain and exhaustion becoming clearly present in her eyes.

“Okay, fine,” She sighs out wearily, and he’s a little surprised that she conceded that quickly even if he knew he’d already won, but then she cocks her head slightly, “What do I get in return?”

Yeah, he didn’t think he’d won that easily.

Jay pushes the flirty and slightly suggestive response that instantly pops into his head to the back of his mind. There would be plenty of time for that later, or at least he desperately hopes so because he knows that now is not the time to start anything of that nature.

When he tells Hailey what she deserves to hear, he wants her feeling halfway decent and looking healthier than she does right now.

If they were in Chicago, he would bribe her with Bartoli’s, but they weren’t. They are in New York and she’s already made it quite clear that the pizza here is a tragedy, so he doesn’t think she’d want that particular food even if he could find a copy-cat deep-dish place.

So, he goes for the next best thing, “What about some Greek? It probably won’t be anything like Greek Islands, but I’m sure I can find a decent place. I could grab you some Pastichio. What do you say?”

The way her eyebrows furrow and her bottom lip sticks out adorably makes him want to kiss the pout away, but he doesn’t.

She shakes her head, “I don’t want Greek.”

Jay bites his lip briefly and refrains from making a comment on the childish tone of her voice as he regards her carefully for a quiet second.

He would never admit it, but he knows he’s a much worse patient when their positions are reversed so he’s more than willing to put up with her stubbornness because he knows it’s just a way to cope with the pain.

And besides, he loves her. He would do whatever he could to make her feel better.

“I’ll get you whatever you want as long as you take your medicine, so why don’t you tell me what it is you’d like to have,” He pushes himself up off his forearm to sit upright, but he still holds her gaze.

She sighs carefully, picking at the covers before answering him, “A Snickers bar.”

Jay raises his brows.

In the years he has known her, he doesn’t think he’s ever seen her eat a candy bar. She could down a piece of chocolate cake at an event, or the random chip bag she’d found during a stakeout, but he doesn’t think he’s ever seen her eat the overly processed candy bar before.

“You like Snickers bars?” He can’t help the slightly disgusted tone of his words.

Hailey’s expression instantly morphs into a defensive one, “A girl can have guilty pleasures, and this just so happens to be mine. Now, you said you’ll get me anything if I take my medicine, so you’re lucky it’s not something like a new gun. Or a car.”

Jay rolls his eyes and Hailey desperately wants to swat him but she’s already in a significant amount of pain so she doesn’t think that would be the wisest decision.

“Relax, I will get you your Snickers bar. I promised, didn’t I?” He smirks a little as he moves off the bed to grab his coat that’s thrown over the back of the desk chair, “I just can’t believe I didn’t know you liked candy bars.”

Shrugging a little, she tries not to wince at the pain that small movement caused her, “I don’t indulge in them much; only when I’m not feeling good or if there’s literally nothing else to eat.”

After gathering up his wallet and phone, Jay stops in the middle of the room to regard her for another moment. He shakes his head, “What else don’t I know about you, Hailey Upton?”

She gives him a little smirk of her own, “Lots of things, I’m sure. I was once told I was aloof about my personal life.”

“And just when I thought I was getting to know the person under that tough exterior,” He feels the smile creep over his face, and he doesn’t care that he probably looks like a man hopelessly in love because he is.

He watches as her own expression softens and for just a moment, their eyes meet. A thousand words of unspoken love pass between them and he can see his entire universe in those captivating, blue orbs just as she can see a million promises in his.

Hailey shifts and winces at the sharp pain it causes her, cursing herself for ruining the moment. Those pain pills she’d tried refusing were looking pretty good right about now as the throbbing intensified around her still tender ribs.

Jay noticed her discomfort. He always does, and she could see the concern so clearly on his face it made her heart swell in love. He’s the most caring man she’s ever met, and it’s one of the things she loves most about him.

“As soon as I get back, you’re taking your meds,” Jay frowns, rubbing his thumb briefly along his hairline before dropping his arm, “I’d give them to you now, but I’m not sure I should leave you alone with narcotics in your system just in case. And besides, you need to take the antibiotics with food, so I’ll pick up something while I’m out.”

She just nods, picking up the remote for the television, “Sounds good. I’ll be here watching whatever trash I can find on TV, so hurry back.”

Jay gives her one last smile that warms her from head to toe before he opens the door and walks out.

When Jay walks through the hotel door about an hour later, he has the overwhelming urge to call out a ‘Honey, I’m home’, but he doesn’t want to wake Hailey if she’s sleeping and he’s not sure how she would respond to the term of endearment even if it is said teasingly.

It’s funny how that is the thing he feels would be crossing the practically non-existent line they have towing for the past several days. Or weeks really if he’s honest with himself.

As it turns out, she’s not sleeping but still in very much the same position he’d left her in. The TV was on, a rerun of ‘Happy Days’ playing quietly but she doesn’t seem to be paying much attention. Instead, she’s looking down at the phone in her hand, clearly scrolling through something before glancing up at him.

Her eyebrows rise as she takes in the various Target bags he’s carrying in both hands. Hailey let her phone drop in her lap, more interested in what Jay had bought because all she’d sent him out for were Snickers Bars, “Did you buy the whole store?”

He frowns at her as he finds the bag of take-out Chinese he’d ended up getting for their late lunch-early supper to set on the nightstand, “No, I did not, but I did get real food and,” He holds up the other bags he was carrying, “I got you your Snickers.”

Whatever else he’d bought was forgotten as she beamed up at him, already reaching for the candy bar he was digging for throughout his purchases. When he finally found what he was looking for, he tossed it to her, and she immediately ripped open the wrapper.

He makes a face as she bites into the sugary chocolate, “I still don’t know how you eat that crap.”

She responds with an eyeroll because her mouth was too full to make a witty comeback.

“You could at least wait till you ate actual food first,” Jay arched a disapproving eyebrow, his nose wrinkling as he watched her make an obvious display of enjoying her treat. He shakes his head and deposits the Target bags on the lower end of the bed to pull out the bottles of vitamin water he’d bought for her.

“Here, I got your favorite and a couple of new ones for you to try,” He handed her the blackberry flavored one before retrieving the pill bottles that were sitting on the nightstand beside their bag of food.

He read the instructions on each bottle then opened the oxycodone to dump one out, “Okay, you can have one right now and,” He checked his watch, “One at around seven then another at eleven.”

Hailey frowns, but takes the pill out of his outstretched palm anyway, “I hate the way these make me feel. My head feels fuzzy, and I can’t think clearly.”

Jay gives her a sympathetic smile and offers a simple, “I know” because he does know, but he also knows that if she has any hope of getting rest tonight, she needed to be well medicated.

“Maybe tomorrow we’ll try going all day without pain meds, okay? I just want to make sure you have a good night’s rest tonight since it’s your first night out of the hospital,” He tells her as he shakes out an antibiotic pill and then the iron supplement the doctor had prescribed her with for the next few days to hand to her.

Nodding, she knocks the three pills back and takes a swig of her vitamin water. Meeting his gaze, she reaches out to grab his hand and gives it a tight squeeze, “Thank you, Jay.”

The heavy tension that settles over them is now a familiar one and it’s almost comforting in a way as she tells him with her eyes how grateful she is for him.

After a few moments of silence, she clears her throat and withdraws her hand, turning her attention to the bags of stuff piled on the bed, “So, what’d you get?”

Jay blinks, shaking himself out of the trance they’d just been in as he rifled through the things he’d bought, pulling them out to show Hailey, “Well, I did some research and according to WebMD which was confirmed by my brother, weighted blankets can help with muscle soreness and speed up the recovery process.”

“I also got some ice packs,” He dumps out about a dozen before reaching in yet another bag, “And I picked up some of your favorite movies as well as a couple of pairs of fuzzy socks because I know you didn’t pack any and the hospital socks are terrible.”

The tears that spring to her eyes aren’t unexpected because the fact that he knows and remembers how much she loves wearing fuzzy socks when she’s at home decompressing tells her how much he cares even if he hasn’t really said it out loud yet.

The research, the weighted blanket, the movies, the treats, the socks; it’s slightly overbearing, but it’s sweet and it’s so undeniably him that it makes her heart hurt with the love she has for him.

She gives him a soft smile, “For someone who claims to not know me, he sure does take care of me and brings me all of my favorite things.”

“Well, after four years I would hope to know some things,” Jay smirks at her before moving to put the ice packs in the small fridge/freezer combo they had in the room.

He looks back at her over his shoulder, “But, I somehow missed your Snickers habit and it makes me wonder what else I should probably know, but don’t.”

Rolling her eyes, she watches as Jay moves back over to the bed, going for the food he’d sat on the nightstand.

“You know you’re not exactly an open book,” She points out with a wry smile.

He’s not an open book, it’s true, and even though she’s teasing him about it, she knows him better than anyone. Maybe better than even Will knows him. Maybe better than he even knows himself, and it’s ironic because the way she knows him better than anyone is more so through his actions and not his words.

She knows his heart through his acts of compassion. She knows his mind through his steady emotions. And she knows him because he lets her see the deepest parts of himself, unspoken secrets swimming in his eyes and dark memories whispered over drinks.

She knows the things that matter and the same could be said about the things he knows about her, but now that it’s being brought up, she does wonder if there are any meaningless habits she hasn’t bared witness to.

If her mind goes straight to those of a personal nature such as nighttime routines and shower preferences, then she’d never admit it.

“Well,” He handed her a container of Shrimp Lo Mein, “We’re stuck in this hotel room with basically nothing to do so,” Jay sat down on the bed, facing her with his own container of Chinese, “Let’s play a game.”

Hailey arches a skeptical eyebrow, “A game?”

“Yeah,” Jay nods as he takes a bite of his own Lo Mein, “Like one of those ‘get to know you’ games since we apparently don’t know much about each other.”

She frowns, a little unconvinced at this plan and what it could entail, but she’s curious and the slight woozy feeling she feels from the pain meds makes her ask, “What kind of ‘get to know you’ game? Like truth or dare?”

Smirking, he shakes his head, “No. Although, that could be extremely entertaining.”

“Uh-uh. No way am I drinking a bottle of hot sauce or jumping off the balcony or some other insanely difficult thing that you would think was easy,” She takes a bite of her food, trying to shake back the loose hair that keeps falling into her face, “I just had surgery.”

He’s full-on grinning now, chuckling at her impassioned response, “Nothing like that. I was thinking more along the lines of 21 Questions.”

Hailey tries to take another bite of her food, but her hair gets in the way again. She’s starting to get frustrated at the locks that keep falling into her eyes and mouth, making it hard to eat.

Sticking her chopsticks into the take-out container, she uses the now free hand to push her hair behind her ears as she shrugs, “Alright then. We don’t really have anything better to do other than watch movies and eat takeout anyways.”

The way his eyes sparkle at her answer is worth all the cheesy questions she’s sure he’s going to ask.

He stands up, shoving a used napkin into his now empty takeout container and she’s always amazed at how quickly he can down food when he wants to, “We can alternate asking questions and we don’t have to ask exactly 21 questions. It can be more, or it can be less.”

He throws his trash away and starts cleaning up the bed, moving all of the empty Target bags and the stuff he bought off to one side, “Is there anything off limits?”

She hesitates before saying no, shaking her head because while her natural inclination is to keep everything close to the vest, she knows there is nothing that she wouldn’t share with Jay if he asked her.

He makes her feel safe, and she’s constantly finding herself telling him things that she’d never said out loud before anyway, so she already knows that he will guard her secrets and feelings and thoughts deep in his own heart as if they were his own.

It’s like he knows what she’s thinking because the way he smiles at her is so gentle and the secretive sparkle in his eyes is what tells her that the same goes for him.

“You wanna go first or do you want me to?” Jay cocks his head, looking at her as he tears into the weighted blanket.

“You can go first,” She goes to take another bite of food when her hair falls into her face for what feels like the hundredth time.

She sighs internally, her frustration going unnoticed by Jay who had turned back towards the movies he’d bought, opening each of them as he tells her he has to make this first question a good one.

Pretty quickly after waking up from surgery, Hailey had found putting her hair up in its typical ponytail an almost impossible task because every time she raised her arms to gather her hair up, her stitches would pull, and her ribs protested loudly.

After several failed attempts that left her eyes watering, she ended up having a nurse put it up for her and she continued to ask for it done in the mornings before Jay arrived at the hospital to keep her company.

But now, there was no nurse to gather up her long, annoying hair when it keeps falling in her face and even though she’s stubborn enough to try it, Hailey knows if she pulls on her stitches or possibly breaks one, then she’s going to be paying for it tomorrow all because she wanted to put her hair up herself.

She sighs again, this one audible as she sets her Chinese container on the nightstand, “Jay?”

“Yeah?” He turns to look at her, his brows furrowed in concern.

Hailey bites her lip sheepishly as she snaps the elastic band around her wrist against her skin, “Can you put my hair up?”

He looks surprised for a moment before he smirks at the slight blush dusting her cheeks at having to ask for help with a task this simple, “Of course I can, Hailey.”

She hands him the ponytail holder as he walks over to the side of the bed, “But I will warn you. I’ve never done this before.”

She wants to tease him. Maybe tell him he’d better start practicing now if he ever hopes for a daughter one day, but it feels too on the nose when she wants that daughter to be hers too.

So instead, she smirks at him as he moves behind her to start gathering her hair up in awkward chunks. Hailey glances at him out of the corner of her eye, fake gasping, “Don’t tell me that the brave and noble Detective Jay Halstead, the man who jumps over moving cars and shoots sniper rifles doesn’t know how to put hair up in a ponytail.”

“Oh, shut up,” He grumbles good-naturedly, still trying to smooth her blonde hair into his loosely closed fist on top of her head, “It’s not like I’ve really had the opportunity or need to practice.”

Chuckling, she lets him concentrate on pulling her hair through the elastic and tries not to get lost in the feeling of his fingers in her hair and the warmth radiating off him. Her eyes flutter close and she marvels at how gentle he is even with the strength of his hands, well-conditioned in the act of squeezing a trigger.

And just like when making those shots, the precision in which he does everything is still there as he carefully tightens the elastic, securing her hair into place.

Hot breath hit the back of her now exposed neck and she can’t help but shiver. Before he’s stepping away, she swears she feels his hands brush her skin and she wonders if he’s equally as affected as she was by his closeness.

But before it can turn into anything, he’s smiling and settling back into his spot at the foot of the bed, gesturing to the ponytail he’d just completed, “It’s not as good as you do it, but I think it’ll pass.”

“I’m sure it’s fine, Jay. It’s out of my face and it’s not like anyone will see it,” She grins at him as she picks up her food, intending to finish it off now that her hair won’t get in her way.

Jay frowns teasingly, “Hey, and what about me? Am I not someone?”

She smiles softly in amusement, “You’ve seen me in worse states and you’re not just anyone, you know that. You’re my best friend, Jay,” She hesitates because she knows that’s not strictly true. He is her best friend and he’s her partner but he’s also the man she loves, and it would be so easy to let the truth slip out.

Looking at him, she sees something in his eyes that looks like hope or maybe anticipation and she wonders if he thinks she’s going to tell him the one secrete she just can’t seem to get out. Maybe she would have told him if they sat there for a few seconds longer, but his phone buzzes and the moment is gone before it really even began.

Hailey wonders if phones are going to be their downfall.

She thinks she sees disappointment flash across his face, but she blinks and he’s looking at his phone with a serious expression.

“Is everything okay?” Her brow furrows as she watches him type out a quick response and put the device back into his pocket.

He shakes his head, sighing, “That was Kev. The Latin Players are on the verge of waging war against a new up and coming gang called The Jets.”

Interjecting, Hailey raises a brow, “As in West Side Story?”

“Yep,” Jay lets out a wry chuckle, “Anyway, the team flipped someone on The Jets’ side, and it looks like they are possibly willing to play ball so Kev was asking for some background info on my Latin Player connect because Intelligence is going to attempt to negotiate a truce before it can escalate to a full-blown gang war.”

She groans quietly, all too aware of the potential complications and ramifications that come from this type of violence, “That’s just what the city needs. A gang war.”

He huffs in agreement, dropping his head in disgust and she can see the tension in his shoulders. Even eight-hundred miles away, the crime and the innocent people that inevitably gets tangled up in it affects him.

Hailey frowns, her eyebrows furrowing in concern. She reaches out a hand to lightly touch his bent knee, “Jay.”

He looks up at her and the empathy she sees in his eyes makes her heart swell in what’s becoming a familiar sensation. Love and pride and admiration and respect for this man she has the privilege to know.

Her eyes soften and she smiles gently at him, an earnest look on her face, “If you need to go home, go home Jay. I’ll be alright here by myself. I don’t need you to take care of me.”

If the situation wasn’t so serious, she might have laughed at the way his eyebrows shoot up in surprise, clearly not expecting those words to come out of her mouth.

Recovering, his eyebrows furrow and he shakes his head adamantly, “No way. They can get along without me. I’m not leaving here without you and I don’t care if you think you can take care of yourself because who’s going to help you change your bandages or make you take your medicine or keep you company?”

He challenges in a slightly playful manner, but the eyebrow he raises dares her to contradict him and she knows he is serious, “Besides, I need to be here if I want to keep my own peace of mind. I don’t work well without you, so I’m not sure how much help I’d be anyway.”

She knows that no matter the circumstance, Jay would always perform above and beyond the call of duty, but she also knows that this is his way of telling her that he needs her and the way he was willing to stay with her in New York makes her heart stutter in yet another way.

Before she can dwell on the feeling any further, he’s smiling again, his eyes crinkling with mischief, “Now back to the game. I think I have the perfect question for you.”

Sorry it ended in a bit of an awkward spot, but I decided to split it into two parts when I hit 10,000 words and I still wasn’t done yet lol so I didn’t know this was going to be the ending of a chapter.

I’d love to hear what you thought and stay tuned for part three!

#upstead #upstead fanfiction #jay and hailey #hailey and jay #onechicago #chicagopd

75 notes · View notes

myelocin · 3 years

Text

a house, turned to a home | kenma k.

synopsis: pondering about the potential joys in the what ifs of life. you, him, a ring, and some groceries in a cart that you know by heart. a crib, some nightlights, and the image of a house that was built for the purpose of it becoming a home.

characters: kozume kenma, you, +mentions of a babie lmao

genre: fluff, slice of life, domestic!au, parenting!au

wc: 1400+

a/n: i did NOT know i accidentally deleted this but ksdjfh,,, also hi @haiikyuuns

kozume kenma had never been a fan of the unpredictable.

not exactly the little details in life he knows he can overcome with strategy, but rather the one-sided unpredictability. the surprise parties kuroo always threw him years back, his parents giving him the shifty eyes when christmas rolled around and a box looking awfully like the gaming system he’d been eyeing wrapped under the christmas tree with his name written in his mother’s familiar handwriting.

the sentiment, of course, had always been received with gratitude from his end.

but he liked life like this. he liked how his day was planned from start to finish—not in the intricate details of the schedule you have on your planner, but a little more like the bullet points on the sticky notes he keeps posted on the corner of his pc.

a schedule like he knew point a, then b, until he eventually hit z, but reading the little notes under it wasn’t really a necessity. because after all, kenma still did appreciate the little serendipities that came with the unknown.

like now; instead of settling in bed and catching up on the sleep he knows the both of you desperately are needing, you’re at the twenty four hour supermarket pushing an empty cart through the empty aisles by the produce section. kenma says it’s because he was bored, and you looked to be having the same dilemma as him.

partly, you think, it’s true, but really you just like grocery shopping with him.

you know the pantry as well as the refrigerator back home is well stocked, but watching kenma stand in front of the cereal aisle has a familiar warmth settling in your chest. you already know what he’s going to pick; always going for either the lucky charms or cinnamon toast crunch, but always picking the box behind the one pushed to the front because he claims that it was less manhandled.

he always says it too with a grumbled sort of whisper, so you laugh every time he puts it in the cart and shoves his hands in the pockets of his hoodie.

and much like you, kenma likes these unofficial sort of dates as well. he likes the fact that whether he walks in front, beside, or trails behind you who pushes the cart, you always slow your pace and turn to look at him with the same kind of smile always so constant in your face. the kind of smile that reassures him every damn time that he’s loved.

love, like the feeling that wasn’t wasn’t quite foreign nor familiar to him over the years. he knows his parents love him, his friends, that cat he always left food out for in the neighborhood—himself towards his passions.

but with you, love was trickling.

like getting in the shower and feeling the water slowly trickle on the top of your head and pool there momentarily before it cascades down your body and engulfs you as if it were a waterfall. you had always been the steady presence in his life that he never knew he craved for this much. and unlike the other times—this time,with you, he was never terrified.

there never came an instance where he was afraid of the drop that was the inevitable on the other side of the high he was riding. he knew heartbreak could truly be as present as the love that has his body succumbing to the will of the universe in seconds but it doesn’t terrify him.

he knew that neither of you were fragile like that.

but as he passes through another aisle: where the baby food, wet wipes, and cribs looked like it would fit right in inside that empty room of the house the two of you just bought—kenma bites his lip. his fingers fidget a little inside the pocket of his hoodie—something you can clearly see, so you smile, a soft kind of smile you know you reserve just for him and push the cart a little forward so you’re standing shoulder to shoulder and staring at aisle 12.

“what are you thinking of?” you ask.

you keep your eyes trained on the box of lucky charms in the corner of the cart, next to the carton of eggs that’s surrounded by a few packets of the brand of marshmallows you’ve been liking a lot more lately. you feel his shoulder jump, not really much of a flinch, before you hear him chuckle lightly and explain that he’s just thinking of nothing much.

you smile again; you know him more than he gives you credit for.

“wanna look around?” you ask.

kenma’s already chuckling because he sees you take two steps forward towards the aisle before you could even wait for his answer.

having kids, he thinks probably is something that’s in the schedule. he thinks that it’s most likely written in a planner, though, and not in one of the sticky notes he scribbles a rough draft of his day on.

because raising kids is a lot, kenma comes to realize. truth be told, the two of you had no problem in the financial aspect of raising your children, but at the same time he knew that it was just so much deeper than numbers on a checking account, or a zero balance on his children’s tuition account.

he chuckles because the thoughts are already beginning to consume him before he even has a chance to sit down with you and talk about having children of your own.

“ken,” you call. “look.”

when he turns to face you, he’s smiling. you’re pointing towards the animal shaped nightlights on display beside the crib, your face lit up in a way he’s never seen before. personally, he thinks the lights would look in place next to the crib he saw just a few steps before in that empty room he keeps thinking about.

suddenly, he sees you, glowing and ethereal in the middle of a room, a bundle in your hands and a finger by your lips as if to tell him to hush, because a baby’s sleeping. something catches in his throat as his eyes widen in the smallest fraction. a few moments pass, and as he’s still listening to you speak about which light would look good with which other one, kenma realizes that he could get used to this.

used to coming here, in this aisle more often—maybe not when it’s at this hour of the night—talking over which furniture would look the best with whatever’s already bought and set up in the room. he doesn’t really like building the do-it-yourself cribs, but he can see himself sitting in the middle of the floor and assembling the pieces anyway.

something in his chest blooms, and when you look at him with the glint in your eye looking so much like his, kenma has his breath stolen just like that.

this, he thinks to himself, was definitely not in the sticky notes. this was definitely something that belonged to a well thought out and properly detailed planner.

“do you wanna try?” is the question he hears you ask though, and even though the background music that comes across the intercoms of the grocery store is still playing low, he hears your voice and the message it carries clear as day.

you’re smiling at him in a way that’s so sure, and so filled with love that kenma just knows this isn’t a question you’re pulling out of thin air. you’ve always been the one to hold on to the longer planner after all, so when you said that you were ready, he knew that deep down he has been too.

love, like it trickles—truly. because in a second he’s walking down the aisles and putting his usual box of cereal in the cart, and in the next—it’s this. it’s where the truth he knows he’s carried for a while is finally being laid out in the open for him to face.

and it looks beautiful, kenma thinks.

truly as beautiful as the look on your face as he relaxes his shoulders and says, “we did buy a house with extra rooms in it for a reason, right?”

220 notes · View notes

scftizuku · 3 years

Text

Why no other character besides Deku works as the main character of My Hero Academia

Deku is the only one who can be the main character of My Hero Academia. He’s one of the only people who is starting to question hero society and can understand all perspectives

Reasons on why other characters wouldn’t work: from what I see constantly people who claim that “Deku is a horrible Mc” would preach about Bakugou, Todoroki, Kirishima and Mirio being better ones instead.

Onward to why Bakugou wouldn’t work as a Mc.

Now as of how his character arc is going right now Bakugou is the deurotagonist (and is made to foil with Deku) if we were to take away Deku as a entirely from being the lead (which I’m gonna assume those who say so would want him to be a side character) that would erase the empathizes on Bakugou’s atonement arc which comes with the growth he has to undergo. As of what we know about Bakugou’s personality he’s brash, smart, and a bit perceptive. He has been a gifted child ever since a young age and people have always told him how amazing he is. For him to have OFA from the start of the series would just enforce that narrative (which from what we know already in canon wasn’t good for him as a character) it would be hard for the audience to see Bakugou go through any type of changes since OFA would be with him from the start and his early introduction showcased that he has grown up with everyones validation and them telling him that he is the best. Having OFA will just feed into that toxicity that hero society had engrained into his head.

Bakugou from the beginning of the series was someone who only saw his perspective on the matter (in a way a bit selfish) being able to understand those around you and fight against the impossible in terms of how cruel society is a theme in mha. He started off as someone who just wanted to win all his battles and be better then All Might (which again taking Deku out of the picture he would have never learned the importance of saving those around him).

Considering he already had the qualifications of becoming a hero since the beginning what type of challenges would he have to go thought? He never faced any kind of backlash for being quirkless or not being good enough.

In all honestly Bakugou fits his role perfectly as a deurotoganist so it’s hard for me to truly understand how having him as the main character would make the series 10 times better. In the case scenario that Deku is a side character the character type that we would be getting is his pre development self (basically season one Bakugou)

Summary (bullet point format)

Bakugou:

Without Deku involved as the Mc he would never be the guy he is today

The Mc version we would be getting is his pre development self

Bakugou is a emotionally constipated character which wouldn’t work for the role of Mc

Their would be no need for him to have OFA considering that everyone around him already praised him for having a quirk. It would in a way be handed to him and also feed into Bakugou’s ego that he is the best

Kirishima Eijirou:

This one won’t be long to explain as Kirishima’s personality kind of embodies a typical shounen male lead. He’s said to be one of the mood makers of the class in canon (as according to Horikoshi). In the canon storyline we have gotten his backstory during the Overhaul arc. He was a child who struggled to stand up against the villains (as we have seen Ashido do so in one of the flashbacks) he lacked confidence (which you could say is a good starter) but like Bakugou he never had to face the consequences of being told that he couldn’t be a hero because he was quirkless.

Although it would be a bit hard to tell what Kirishima would do if he were put into a situation where he would have to fight a villain and try to see their viewpoint (as we have seen from Deku and Gentle Criminal). I can add that Kirishima idolized Crimson Riot not All Might (so that in itself wouldn’t have made sense if he were to have OFA since their is no connection between the two).

One last thing but his self condience issue that he had while growing up was already tackled and dealt with in the Overhaul arc while he was fighting to protecting Fatgum (his mentor) and this already paid off for him since we have seen him save Ashido in the war arc against Gigantomachia.

Kirishima:

Didn’t idolize All Might so the audience wouldn’t really be invested in the connection he could have with him if he were to have OFA or how that starter point of idolizing someone could turn into a genuine bond.

Never was told that he couldn’t be a hero because of something he didn’t have (which that core element allowed fans to see the struggles that Deku went threw)

Not enough material of Kirishima’s perspective in terms of villains and how he feels about hero society

His character archetype if anything would be just playing it safe since their are plenty of goofy type of characters who are usually the main character in shounen series.

Mirio Togata:

Now when it comes to Mirio he’s bubbly, accepting, and inviting. Nothing wrong with his personality being explored as a main character. I’d say the issue with him being the lead would lie with the fact that if he were to step up and take on Deku’s role he wouldn’t really question the wrongs of hero society and in a way would be another All Might in that regard. What we do know is that he was a student that was under Sir Nighteye (and we all know how poorly Nighteye treated Deku in the Overhaul arc) their may be a chance that Mirio might adopt some of Nighteye’s thoughts on hero society despite being the positive, bubbly sunshine that he is. From how canon depicts Mirio he is apart of the current big 3; and was shown to be loved by everyone. From a narrative standpoint their wouldn’t be much to explore with him if he were to be the main character since he had no inner turmoil. Another point i’d like to bring up with Mirio is how he lost his quirk to Overhaul while Deku defeated him. Mirio’s fight with Overhaul was the first big fight he had in the series and considering that some people make claims that Mirio would have a better handle of OFA over Deku I just want to remind everyone that he would be more likely to have that power taken from him (which that kind of worries me). Lastly I’d like to point out that Mirio himself dosen’t face any internal conflict or have any major player that makes the audience want to explore more of his character. He kind of takes everything at face value and dosen’t question any of it which (if the theme of hero society being corrupt and going to be broken down into a healthier one is gonna happen in this series that already debunks Mirio making any type of change to whats happening to the villains).

Mirio:

Since Mirio’s introduction he has been well liked by everyone. It would be hard narratively speaking to have a main character who does not start out with a struggle (even if that hardship isn’t so huge)

His viewpoints of hero’s society would be similar to All Might as he would not challenge the corruption that the story heavily showcases in the war arc

Mirio dosen’t face any internal conflict or have anything that makes the audience want to dive more into his character (or to learn more about his thought process)

His first major fight being against Overhaul caused him to lose his quirk so it would be hard for me to believe that he can actually keep OFA without losing it.

Todoroki Shouto:

Now onward to my last person on the list. I haven’t heard to many people try to claim that Shouto should be the main character but I have seen some sad takes on it. Anyway similar to Bakugou and how involved Deku was in his atonement arc. Shouto would have never been the character we all know and love without Deku fighting him at the Sports Festival and making the claim that his “power is his.” enforcing that the quirk Shouto has is his own and not his father (which was something that we’ve seen Shouto struggle with during that arc). Now from the perspective that we sideline Deku and that he isn’t a main character we can safety say that the version of his character that we would be getting instead of his current one is in Sero’s words “early roki.”. Meaning we would have a main character who appears cold and showing a resentment towards his father (remember Deku’s involvement allowed Shouto to change as a person and for the audience to see his story unfold).

Also considering All Might needs to be present in this situation we did see Shouto watching him on tv with Rei holding him in his lap. He does admire All Might (but not to the extent that Bakugou and Midoriya do). I’d also like to add that Shouto was one of the only two students that got in U.A through recommendations (meaning U.A already saw his talents so giving him OFA wouldn’t really mean much if his potential has already been seen by others beforehand).

Now i do admit that having a character who is a victim of abuse take the reigns of the story is interesting I mean Horikoshi does a great job showcasing him and his family (and I do believe that he will know about OFA and that Deku will be the one to tell him).

Shouto:

His admiration for All Might wasn’t really explored enough (we do know that he looked up to him as a hero figure when he was a child but his love for him does not go as far as Bakugou or Midoriya)

Considering that Deku played a big part in Todoroki accepting himself for who he is and the quirk that he had.... the version of him that we would have had as a main character would be early roki

Similar to Bakugou he already has a quirk from the beginning so their would be no need for All Might to give Shouto his power

Shouto was one of the two students who gotten into U.A through recommendations so it wouldn’t make sense to not see the main character’s struggles from the beginning (as we had seen Deku take the entrance exam the first time having a quirk

Why Deku works best as the main character of the series?

Now I know what you guys are thinking “there are many thread on this discussion so why are you doing it?” I’ve decided to tackle this topic since this redundant argument keeps popping up despite Deku proving to the fandom how amazing he is as our main character.

Izuku:

Since Deku’s introduction in the series we have known that he can overthink at times and has written about all the types of heroes in his notebook (including their strengthens and weakness) meaning he’s perceptive and well informed about the world around him

His fight with Gentle Criminal showed fans that he can understand different types of perspectives while still fighting for the side of justice

Along with the second point this is such a good trait that would benefit him in his future confrontations with Shigaraki (who is the main villain of the series)

He has showcased time and time again how strong he has become and as fans we got to see him start off as a young quirkless boy whose dreams were merely just dreams to a boy holding the weight of the world in his grasp.

Him being emotional is just a bonus because he teaches young boys that its okay to cry and unlike how shounen usually is with having most of their main male characters just carry the “tough men act.” Deku embraces that side of him to be vulnerable and teach people that crying isn’t a sign of weakness but a sign that he is human

Young Izuku (middle school him) was shown to have parallel All Might when he was younger.

He is a main character who can make such an impact on other people (examples being Bakugou, Todoroki, and even characters like NightEye who once believed that the future couldn’t be changed)

This is my first serious post guys. My next post will tackle whether the series will conclude with the wonder duo (Bakugou and Deku) or origin trio (Bakugou, Deku, and Todoroki) I am talking about future hero combinations just so everyone knows.

#bakugou katsuki #midoriya izuku #mirio togata #kirishima eijirou #todoroki shouto #scftizuku: why no other character but Deku works as the main character of My Hero Academia #bnha #mha #my hero academia #boku no academia #boku no hero #deku #lemillion #red riot #dynamight #dynamite

173 notes · View notes

riseofnightwing · 4 years

Text

Once Upon a Dream - Dick Grayson Imagine (You'll love me at once, The way you did once upon a dream)

pairing: Dick Grayson x Titan! (Preg!Wifey!Reader)

request¹: When Trigon is controlling Dick, he sees Y / n as his wife instead of Dawn. So he tells Y / n what he saw.

request²: Can you write something about Dick and y/n being pregnant and he is protective over her and the baby? Thanks

notes: I joined these two lovely requests together because I thought they fit pretty well I’m so sorry the delay, I’m back at college and doing both is pretty hard but i did my very best. hope you enjoy it xxxx<3 y/e/c: your eye color

y/n/n: your nickname

“Good dreams, big boy.” I said as I put my son to sleep after telling him all the stories he asked me to. John wasn’t a hard-to-deal kid, he reminded me a lot of myself when I was younger, not the bad things, of course, only the good ones, although I wished he could inherit more of Y/n. Looking back at my past doesn’t make me that proud of who I was, but if I admire someone, it surely is my wife.

Heading to our bedroom, I entered, immediately locking my eyes for more than a second with a pair of large, Y/E/C eyes set in a pretty face. Y/N was laying down in our bed, reading her book. It didn’t matter how many times I looked at her, she would always look as beautiful as ever.

“Hey, Boy Wonder.” She greeted me with her specific -and so beloved by me- soft tone of voice.

“Hello, y/n/n” I took my shoes off, sitting in the bed, close to her. Her smell entered my nostrils as I placed a warm kiss on her neck. “How’s our baby and my wife doing?” I caressed her belly, trying to check on our kid as much as I could. Having John four years ago made me way more responsible and careful than I would imagine that I could be someday. Since it, my family had been all I cared for, the hero life didn’t need me as much as they did, or as much as I needed them too.

“We’re doing fine, he didn’t kick me like yesterday so yes..we’re good for today” she told me with a smile on her face. “But my feet, god, they’re killing me”

“Well, I think I can help you on this” I told her with a half smile

“Yeah? Show me how then.” she said and i moved to the end of the bed, sitting with her feet in my laps while i started to massage it.

She left her book on her side, positioning comfortably through the pillows

“I already told you this but..you’re the best husband in the whole world” she said

“I know that, thank you” i said, mocking her

“You’re so sassy, Grayson” we laughed together. I kept doing the massage for ten minutes when, in a matter of a second, we were interrupted by my phone ringing, showing Jason Todd on it’s screen. He was calling for a video call.

I didn’t talk to Jason for ages, what would he want now?

I looked at Y/n and she nodded at me, pointing that I should answer and I did. She got back to read her book while I answered his call, but I knew my wife pretty well to know she was still listening.

“Hey, Jay. Long time no see” I said when his face showed up on the screen. He was different, surely not the same Jason I knew 5 years ago.

“Hey, man, not as good as you, I think.” He answered, showing his legs. He was sitting in a wheelchair, I got perplexed. What the hell did happen to him?

“Jason” I had my hands covering my mouth after passing them through my hair. “What happened?”

“I was stupid. Totally my fault. Riddler and some guys were hitting jewelry stores late at night.” he spoke and I paid attention to every single word “Batman and I staked one out, caught them coming in. Should’ve gone down real simple, but I got too cocky. Big Surprise.” He had his head down, recognizing his mistakes.

“Went straight for him, Though I could take him down on my own. You know the Riddler never uses a gun?”

I nodded at him, it was true, he never did.

“Well, now he does. Bullet hit on my t5 vertebra. I still have it here.”

“Jesus.. I’m so sorry for that.”

“Gotham’s gotten worse, man” He looked at me “Way fucking worse. Commissioner Gordon’s dead.”

“What?” I was completely astonished by what I heard. How the fuck did Bruce let it happen?

“Three days ago. It was the joker, and it was bad. When Bruce finally found where he was. It was too late already.” he said “He’s going to kill the joker”

I felt Y/n’s intrigued eyes on me at this point. She knew Bruce almost too much like I did.

“He would never do that. Bruce has a line he’ll never cross”

“Things have changed, Dick. Alfred Died, I got shot, Commissioner Gordon Died.” Too much information to my own good, I wish I could still be in peace with Yn in bed like I was some minutes ago.

“Why are you telling me all of that now?” I sighed.

“Because you’re the real Robin, man. Not me. He was never the same after you left. Alfred said it. Superman said it. You were the only one he ever listened to. Maybe the only one he cared about after his parents died.” I didn’t answer him this time, it was too much.

“You need to come back to Gotham and convince him not to do it.”

What? Come back to Gotham?

“I can’t. I swore I’d never go back.I haven’t spoke to Bruce in years”

“The whole thing with Tony Zucco. You know what he’s going through. If he does it, there’s no coming back.” I looked back at him “He’s the only hero that Gotham has left.” he sighed “You’re the only one that could save him”

He said and hung up, leaving me with innumerable thoughts, innumerable questions.

I threw my phone at the sofa in front of the bed, getting up and running my hands through my hair.

I felt a pair of arms hugging me from behind

“Dick.” I heard her voice “I’m here.”

“If bruce wants to do something, he’s gonna do it. We both know that.” I said turning around to look at her. “He dresses up like a bat to fight crime. That works for him.” I spoke trying to show her my point of view, it was insane what Jason just told me.

“But this idea that I’m the only one that could save him? It’s bullshit.” I complemented, walking side to side in the room while she was looking calmly at me.

“Then, who?” she just asked

“What?”

“Jim Gordon is dead. Alfred is dead. Barbara’s missing. He fell out with Superman years ago. He’s alone.” She told me, eye to eye.

“He’s always alone, Y/n.”

“Not when you’re around, Dick. How’re you going to feel if you don’t at least try?”

“Bruce Wayne is not my responsibility.” I raised my tone of voice, being hard at what I said. Damn. I knew I had fucked up the minute I said it, so I walked to her.

“I’m sorry.” I hugged her from behind just like she did some minutes ago. “After our baby, if he still hasn’t got shit together, I’ll go. I can’t leave the three of you alone here.”

“Okay.” She said “Oh my god, Dick, he just kicked, he knows we’re talking about’im”

I smiled and moved my hands to her belly in an attempt to feel our son’s kick’s. It was crazy how much my family meant to me, remembering that I always loved Y/n and now, having a life built with her and calling her “wife” is the most peaceful feeling i’ve ever felt.

Our moment was interrupted by a little figure entering our bedroom. It was John with his sleepy face and his teddybear, “Growley” -which one Gar gave to him on his birthday- and we turned our attention to him.

“Hey buddy, couldn’t sleep?” I asked

“Growley wants to go with you.” he told me

“Go where, sweetie?” Y/n asked our older son.

“To Gotham City” He said and I laughed. Did he hear it all?

“Wow. Eavesdropping.” Y/n told me.

“But Growley is your favourite.”

“He’ll protect you.” John said and left, heading to his room, sleeping again.

“Look honey.” Y/n turned to me, putting a hand on my face and I leaned at her touch, closing my eyes, she always had the power to put my shit together when I couldn’t.

“I know that your relationship with Bruce is more than complicated, and that the last time you saw each other you said some things..But he saved you, Dick.”

“What if you’re the only one who can save him back?” I scoff.

“Baby, that’s absurd.” I told her

“But what if?” She asked me.

The next morning I was ready to take a plane to GC. I called Donna to keep here with Y/n until I got back. The bell rang and she was here. Me and Y/n went to receive our old friend.

“Hey Donn” Y/n greeted her.

“I missed you, sister.” The black haired girl answered my wife.

“Hey crazy chick. It’s good to see you. Thank you for coming.” I told her when she came to hug me.

“No problem, don’t worry, I’ll be taking a real good care of these three”

“I don’t doubt it”

We talked to each other and I was ready to leave.

“I’ll be back in a matter of a second, baby, I promise. I’ll have my phone close every time, call me if you need and i’ll be right back.”

“Dick, I’m the one who should be pretty worried by now, and believe me, I am, so please, take care in every moment of this, right?”

"Come on, it’s me. I’m good at this sort of stuff, remember?" I told her with a cocky smile.

We kissed deeply. I gave John a kiss on his head.

“Take care of your mother and your auntie, alright? That’s your mission.”

“Alright, Dad.” he smiled sweetly at me.

“Donn, call me if she feels anything different from normal, any sight of danger and I'll drop everything on Gotham and I'll be back, deal?” Donna nodded at me.

“You’re everything I have. I love you” I said in my wife’s ear, leaving a kiss on her forehead, and leaving.

Gotham was crazy, not the city I knew, the city I left back, this is the closest to hell i’ve ever got to.

I wanted to go back to my family, my pregnant wife, my 4 year old son, my house. But I couldn’t forget that once, Gotham was my home too.

The joker is almost dead. Bruce threw him up from a building and now the police escorted him to a hospital.

I followed to the place that, for a long time, sheltered me. Wayne manor, I needed to talk to Bruce. And I Tried, I told him the joker isn't dead yet and he had a chance to sneak out from darkness. But he didn’t appear so I left.

Although my conscience led me to think I should go back to the better life I chose when I burned my suit, that I should just forget about being Batman’s savior and go back to Y/n, everything kept me stuck on the city. Things happened faster than I could control.

Bruce killed the joker at the hospital. He ran before I could get him, he injured policemen. He didn’t stop at it, he Killed prisoners, nurses, guards. It wasn’t justice, it was a massacre. He couldn’t be saved. He needed to be stopped. I made his name public.

I drove an operation to get him and he killed all my team.

He wanted me to give in to the darkness. To become him.

Well, fuck you, Bruce, you win.

I killed Batman.

“Dick.” Hands on my face and a voice calling my name, it was all I could understand now.

“Dick, It was all planned by trigon” Rachel was at the batcave, where i killed batman. What was she saying? “Dick, you would never kill batman.”

“Shut the fuck up” I told her, I had to kill him.

“You’re the boy from the circus, Dick. We’re supposed to save each other.” She said and we were in my parent’s circus. The flying Graysons, my good memories showed up and I woke up.

“I missed you.”

“Rach” I chuckle.

“Welcome back.” She told me and left to find trigon.

Y/n. Her face filled my mind. Wasn’t it all real? Everything we lived, our home, our son, she was my wife for I don’t know how long and it was all trigon controlling my mind, but still, it felt so real. So good.

I had to find her.

“What’s going on?” Gar appeared with his face pretty much hurted.

“Hey, Gar, I swear I’ll tell you everything later but, where’s Y/n?”

“She’s black eyed, Dick. Outside, Don’t think you should..”

“I will get her back.”

When I came outside, all the titans were looking at Trigon and Raven, and I knew her enough to know that she’d deal pretty well with him. I looked at Y/n and she wasn’t awake, so I pulled her by her arm.

I turned her to look at me and she did.

“Y/n, it’s me, Dick. Wake up.”

“That’s me. The real me.” She had Trigon on her mind still and I needed her back.

“It’s not, I know you, Y/n. I saw you, in my vision, I had you with me so please, come back.”

Our eyes were locked, she seemed to hear what I had said and with no reluctance, she was back, her eyes weren't blacked anymore and she woke up.

“Dick.” she seemed confused. We all were.

“You’re back.”

I hugged her and she hugged me back, words were never spoken between me and Y/n, although I bet everyone knew about our feelings about each other, I never faced it, until now. I broke the embrace to look at her-

“I had you, Y/n, in my mind, during all the time you were with me and when I faced reality, it was sad that it was only a dream. It made me realize that’s enough of hiding, I need you to keep with me, because I don’t know what I’d do if you didn’t and because.. I love you.”

She looked at me as if she couldn’t believe it.

“I’m being completely honest in every word I said.”

“I’m here, Dick. Kiss me.” She said, surprising me, and I did.

“I’ve waited for this for so long.” She said when we parted our kiss.

#sleeping beauty's song #i LOVED WRITING THIS #dick grayson #dick grayson batman #dick grayson comics #dick grayson titans #dick grayson imagines #robin imagines #nightwing imagines #dick grayson imagine #dick grayson one shot #dick grayson quotes #batfamily imagines #titans imagines #rachel roth #trigon #dick grayson x y/n #dick grayson x reader #dick grayson x you

343 notes · View notes