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snowdice · 4 years

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Finding the Time to Study Fic 2 [Day 8]

Here is my starting post for today’s study break stories session. See this post for more details and feel free to send me asks to keep me going! It’s been a lot of fun so far! I will reblog this post with the story as I write them today. I’ll be constantly looking for ideas of times and places for Janus to have missions, so feel free to send in any you can think of at any point!

If you are a new follower or just don’t want all of these posts clogging your dash, please feel free to block the tag “study break stories” as all posts and voting about it will go there. You can still see the finished product of the story even if you are blocking that tag as I will not tag the edited chapters with “study break stories” but with the tag “folds in paper.” See edited chapters below. Chapters 2, 3, and what I have of Chapter 4 are under the cut.

My Masterpost Part 1

I also have a playlist on youtube (because Spotify didn’t have one of the songs I wanted). It’s short, and not really for serious listening, but I had fun with it.

My stomach decided to be mean to me for no reason, but I still want to try to get some stuff done. Might get suddenly distracted though so fair warning if I randomly stop posting/answering asks.

Chapter 2

The morning was just as torturous as Janus had expected it would be. He chewed through another pop-tart, this time bothering to actually check and see that it was a cinnamon-sugar one and drank three cups of caffeinated orange juice. Then, he waved his hand through the air and selected the 1st saved location on his device. He popped up directly behind his desk where he’d been standing the night morning before.

Someone, probably Remus, had shut his integrator down. He swiped a finger across the power button, and it flickered back on, scrolling through its morning start up routine.

The machine scanned through all of the data in the three main system it was connected to and sorted all information into things that concerned him, could concern him, and did not before then sorting the first two categories into order of importance. As it did, he set up his screen reader so he would hopefully not start the day with more of a migraine than he already had. It took about 3 seconds for everything to turn on and settle.

Sitting down in his desk, he dismissed the notification that Remus had finished and submitted the report from their mission the day before.

A mission had been scheduled for him today, and the details were in his inbox. A piece time travel technology had been accidently dropped by an archology student in the 1890s during a trip. It was an earlier model of emergency time travel given to time travels that would dump them back into the Registration Office in the year they originated. It wasn’t extremely dangerous, but could pose some problems, especially if someone who didn’t know what it was activated it.

Surveillance agents had tracked it down and found that it had been picked up by a local and sold. Though no one from that time had known what it was, they had identified that it was made out of a precious metal and it had been crafted into an expensive necklace. Janus and Remus were supposed to retrieve it today. It had been pinpointed that the most opportune time for the extraction was 1923 during a masquerade ball held by those who had bought the necklace.

It was a fairly low stakes mission. He wasn’t set to leave for another couple of hours, so he clicked through the rest of the important notifications and then set off to meet his missions coordinator, Rhi, in her office.

Rhi and Janus got along fairly well. She was a well put together woman who took her job incredibly seriously. It was fair as her job was to organize all information and materials from every other department and make sure the agents she was assigned to got and understood all of it. A mistake from her could lead to an agent’s death or something far worse.

This, of course, made her relationship with Remus… interesting to say the least. Janus could never place whether they were nemesis, frenemies, or mortal enemies, and he doubted he would ever know.

“Okay, but it’s the 1920s America,” Remus was already in her office arguing when Janus arrived. “There were so many gangsters! I could be a gangster. I would make a fantastic gangster! Just give me a gun, a snazzy suit with a white hat, and a buttload of alcohol. I will be running Chicago with Al Capone in five minutes.”

“Al Capone didn’t become a crime boss until 1925 and you are going to 1923,” Rhi said, sounding bored, “you aren’t going to Chicago, and as I have already stated, your cover is already decided.”

“But-”

“It is nonnegotiable, Agent Clockson,” she said firmly. Remus pouted, but seemingly accepted his fate.

“May I come in?” Janus asked.

“Please do,” Rhi said. “You have been to the 1920s before, correct?” she asked Janus.

“Yes ma’am.”

She tapped the screen on her desk in response. “In the last two years?”

“About two months ago,” he responded. She tapped something else.

“Any blacks, reds, or yellows?” she asked.

“All green.”

“Great. Do you need a refresher course on basic cultural or linguistic procedures?”

“No.”

She pushed one more thing and then swiped the check-in document over to him. He glanced at the report stating he’d had no incidents of any level the last time he visited the 1920s and had opted out of the optional refresher course, and then pressed his finger against the screen to sign it with his fingerprint.

The document returned to her side of the desk automatically. “Okay,” she said swiping another document from her left over to be in front of her. She twisted her wrist to copy it and slide copies to Janus and Remus. “Here are exact details on the time, place, and event you are going to, as well as details about your cover.” Janus scrolled through his quickly. It wasn’t as detailed as some he’d had considering this was a brief in-and-out missing, but he still took care to memorize everything on the page.

As he and Remus read through their things, Rhi got to her feet and turned to the storage compartments behind her desk.

She grabbed out two packages and when they’d both signed that they’d read and understood the paperwork, she slid them across the desk to them. “These have everything you need,” she said. “Clothes, money, and an invitation to the party you’re off to attend. You are to get changed now, have a last check in with costuming to make sure everything is in order, and then report to decontamination in 23 minutes. Your set to leave in 38 minutes. Any questions?”

“How much-?” Remus started.

“None, agent,” Rhi said.

“But-”

“No alcohol,” Rhi said. “It is the prohibition era in the United States anyway.”

“Like there’s not going to be alcohol at the rich people party,” Remus said sullenly.

She pressed her lips together. “It is an in-and-out mission,” she said to both of them, and then turned to glare at Remus. “Do not get arrested.”

“I don’t know,” Remus said joyfully. “I think I still have room for a 1920s mug shot on my wall.”

“Behave,” she said, “or I’ll report you for the cat you smuggled in from the 1800s.”

“You’d never,” Remus said. “You enjoy the cute pictures of Diesel Fuel I send you every day too much, and you know it!”

“Just… don’t get arrested.” She turned to Janus. “Don’t let him get arrested.”

“I’ll do my best,” Janus promised, standing. “Now come on, Remus, we need to get changed.”

“You just want to see me naked,” Remus replied with a wink, but he did stand.

“If I see you naked one more time in my life Remus, my eyeballs will fall out of their sockets,” Janus said, waving to Rhi as he pulled Remus out of the door.

“Kinky.”

Janus’s eyeballs almost did fall out right then and there with how hard he rolled them.

They got changed quickly, Remus complaining and saying if he couldn’t dress like a gangster, he should at least be allowed to wear a flapper dress. Janus had long ago learned to ignore his ramblings. He did seem enthused about the included mask for the masquerade. It was a silver fox shaped mask with green accents that reminded Janus of the Egyptian God Anubis.

Janus’s own mask on the other hand, was only designed to take up the left half of his face. It was mostly golden with a black swirled design. Attached to the side there was a plume of golden tipped white feathers. He had to give it to the costuming department, they did have good taste.

Once they were both dressed, they were poked and prodded by one of the costumers to make sure everything was accurate, fit right, and had been put on correctly.

After that, they went to the decontamination area to have themselves and everything they were taking with them sterilized so they didn’t accidently take any pathogens to the 1920s. They also received an oral vaccination to be sure they didn’t pick up anything from the 1920s and bring it back.

Then they were ready to go. The correct time-space coordinates had already been sent to their timepieces. With a push of a button, they were off.

Inciting Incident

Chapter 3

Janus and Remus both appeared at the same moment a couple of feet apart in what looked like the inside of a garden shed. There was already a man waiting for them a few feet away. “Sup babes,” Remy said, just like he always did. The T-Agent looked their costumes up and down and whistled. “Now that,” he said, “almost makes me want to be one of you time jockeys.”

“They wouldn’t let me have a gun or a canister of moonshine,” Remus pouted.

Remy snorted. “Sorry, babes, but that makes my job a lot easier. If I’ve gotta fish you outta the 1920s criminal justice system, I’d rather it not be because you shot someone on accident ‘cause you don’t know how to use the safety.”

Remus groaned dramatically. “Everyone is lame.”

Remy just shook his head. “Meet back here when you’ve got the necklace,” he said. “Don’t make a move until after 11:05pm and before 11:17. That’s your window.”

“We know,” Janus said. “See you then.”

“Have fun at the party boys,” Remy said and then lowered his shades to look at Remus, “but not too much fun.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Remus, already towing Janus out of the garden shed. The way had been specifically cleared for them, so they met no other people before they’d rounded the house the party was taking place and had gotten onto the driveway in front of the house.

Without missing a beat, they strolled up to the front of the house, just as a car pulled into the end of the driveway. Janus rang the doorbell, and a few moments later, a man who was clearly the butler answered the door. They handed over their invitation, and the man immediately let them in.

The party had already started when they slipped into the medium sized ballroom that had been decked out in streamers and other decorations. Janus’s nose immediately wanted to scrunch as the smell of sweat from all the dancing already going on as well as the too strong perfume meant to cover that stench wafted over him. It was by far not the worst smelling time period, but he was pretty sure some people still weren’t aware deodorant had been recently invented.

He checked his time piece which had been disguised as a fancy wristwatch for this trip. “Okay,” he said. “We have about two hours before we need to make our move. We should…”

Remus’s attention was already being dragged away by a young man who seemed to be providing guests with food. “I’m going to go ‘mingle’,” he said, winking.

“No!” Janus hissed. “Re- Richard! No!”

Yet, he was already disappearing into the horde of stinky bodies, likely to go scandalize a bunch of rich folks, and leaving Janus alone. Janus mumbled a curse under his breath that he was sure no one around him would understand even if they could make it out.

Unsure what to do with himself, he wandered over towards where the live musicians were playing jazz music, being sure to keep out of the way of the dancers. He was edging around the makeshift dancefloor, when one of said dancers must have misstepped and knocked into another one. The second man stumbled right towards Janus, arms pinwheeling. Janus reached out on instinct to catch the man as he fell.

There was a moment where the two of them just stared at each other, surprise evident on the other man’s face. He was wearing a mask that just covered the area around his eyes and the top of his nose, revealing a smattering of freckles across his cheeks that Janus imagined extended to his nose.

The mask was a light blue velvet with a flower stuck on the side near his right ear, and a trail of curled golden ribbon bobbed down around his chin. The party continued on around them, a blur of movement and sound.

“Are you alright?” Janus asked.

The man blinked up at him and then tilted his head slightly to the side as though confused, before a smile slowly grew on his face. “Oh, I’m fine Dove.”

“Dove?” Janus asked.

He giggled. “You have dove feathers on your mask,” he explained, reaching up a hand to touch one. His finger brushed the tip of Janus’s ear, “and I don’t know what else I am supposed to call you.”

“My name is Lee,” he automatically lied.

“Is it?” he asked, sounding amused. “Doesn’t seem to fit you well. I like Dove better.”

“Oh?” asked Janus. “And what’s your name so I can not call you that?”

The man chuckled. “Call me Pat.”

“Hello Pat,” Janus said.

“I thought you didn’t want to call me by my name.”

“I changed my mind.”

“Hmmm,” Pat said, finger tracing idly across Janus’s forearm which was when Janus realized with a start that he was still holding the man in his arms. He quickly went to release him, which Pat allowed with clear amusement.

Yet, instead of completely stepping away, Pat grabbed Janus’s arm. “What are you doing all the way over here by the way?” he asked. “Don’t you want to dance.”

“Oh,” Janus hesitated. “I don’t really dance.” Or at least not in the way the people around him were. He’d had basic training for this style, but it had been a while and he was a bit rusty.

“Everyone dances Dove,” Pat claimed. “At least if they know the steps and have the right partner.”

“But I don’t know the steps,” Janus said with an eyebrow raise.

He hummed. “Well, I know the dance pretty well by this point,” Pat said. “Why don’t I teach you how it goes.”

He was agreeing with the soft beseeching tone before he even realized it. Pat pulled him into the middle of the throng of people. He seemed to think, bopping his head to the music playing for a moment, before looking back at Janus. “Heard of James Johnson?”

Janus inclined his head.

“Well, have you heard his new song? Because there’s a dance that goes with it.”

He took a few steps away from Janus and started to dance. Despite his claim to know the steps, he wasn’t particularly good, but he made up for any loss of rhythm with pure enthusiasm.

Janus found himself smiling at the man, and after a few moments, joined in with the dance. Despite his lack of practice, he ended up having a better natural rhythm than Pat. Pat didn’t seem to mind that he was being outperformed, however. On the contrary, he giggled at himself the couple of times he stumbled.

When he fell into Janus’s arms for the second time that night, Janus decided he’d probably had enough dancing for the moment and pulled him off to the side to get something to drink and cool down a bit.

He watched the man take a snack and some punch from one of servers and thank him happily before turning back to Janus. Pat was easily able to keep Janus’s attention as they chatted. He was bubbly and soft, and Janus found himself enchanted as they talked.

He was explaining the steps of a different dance, a couples one. “Knowing how to perform the tango will entrance any girl you want,” Pat said, something mischievous sparkling in his eyes. “Assuming you’re that type of fella.”

“As opposed to what?” Janus asked.

Pat leaned in a bit closer. Not too much, but enough that he was definitely in Janus’s space. “A different type of fella,” he said simply, before smiling and leaning back.

Janus let out a shaky exhale and took a sip of punch. He glanced over at Pat. “Tell me about yourself, Pat,” he said.

Pat hummed in contemplation. “Well, I went to France recently.”

“You did?”

“Oui, c'était amusant, mais j'ai eu des ennuis”

“What kind of trouble?” Janus asked curiously.

“Oh, the kind with a pretty boy and crepes that were way too sweet. Anyway,” he continued. “Other than that, I mostly help out my friend. He’s an inventor.”

“And how do you help him.”

He shrugged, “Running errands mostly, and making sure he gets enough sleep, because otherwise he gets distracted and forgets. And you?”

“I’m a banker,” he said, remembering his cover, but felt compelled to add, “but I like to travel as well.”

“You do look the type?”

“And how is that?”

Pat shrugged. “I can always tell a wandering spirt from the masses, and you are easy to spot.” Pat looked at him then with a secret smile on his face, and Janus felt suddenly known, like the man in front of him had known him for years even though they’d only just met. Looking at him then, he wanted suddenly for that to be fact and not a flight of fancy.

He was brought firmly back to reality in the next moment. “Lee,” a pointed and familiar voice said. Janus’s head snapped up to see Remus, staring at him. He tapped his wrist. Janus glanced at his own wrist: 10:58pm. He just barely managed not to curse.

“I,” he said looking up at Pat. “I’m sorry, but I have to go.”

“That’s okay,” Pat said easily. “It is getting rather late.”

“Yes,” Janus agreed. “Well… goodbye.”

Pat, titled his head, a half smile on his face. “I’ll be seeing you around.”

Janus nodded, and turned away from him towards Remus. He didn’t look back as they excited the ballroom. They snuck into a small side closet for coats that wasn’t being used as it was summer.

“So,” Remus said when the door closed behind them.

“Don’t,” warned Janus.

“I’m not one to judge,” Remus said.

“Shut up.” He glanced at his watch. It was 11:02. “We’ll go in 5.”

“I have to give it to you. He was very cute.”

“We’re not talking about it.”

Remus just laughed joyfully, and Janus did his best to halt the blood rushing to his cheeks.

At 11:07, well into their window, they slipped back out of the closet, and towards the stairs as the party raged on.

Despite how Remus usually never shut up, he was able to be quiet when it counted. They snuck to the master bedroom of the home’s owners in silence. The door was already wide open by the time they got there, and Janus didn’t think anything of it. At least, he didn’t until they entered the bedroom, and there was someone already there.

He turned from the dresser he’d been standing in front of to face them, sending Janus the same smile he had down in the ballroom. Janus and Remus both froze. “Sorry, sweetie,” Pat said. “Were you here for this too?” he held up the necklace they’d been sent for. He closed his fist around the charm made out of time travel tech.

“What?” Janus said.

Pat giggled and winked. “Unfortunately, I need it a bit more than you at the moment. So, I’m gonna have to go.” Janus stepped forward, not really sure what he was intending to do, but Pat just smiled. “See you some other time, my Turtle Dove.” With a snap of his fingers and loud crack, he disappeared. The mask he’d been wearing fluttered to the ground.

Arc I: Finding Cinderella

Chapter 4

Janus was frozen in surprise for a few long moments after Pat disappeared. Which had been, admittedly, his mistake, because, while their window had technically been until 11:17pm and it was only 11:10, the loud crack that whatever Pat had been using for time travel made, garnered the attention of someone else.

“Uh oh,” Remus said, likely hearing footsteps. “Hide.”

That snapped Janus into action, but instead of hiding immediately like a sensible human being, he chose to go for the only link to the man who’d just stolen time travel tech and waltzed away, the mask.

Which was why he ended up getting arrested.

Remy tsked the moment they were all alone in the police car having come to ‘transfer Lee to another facility.’ Remus was already waiting in the front seat, and flashed Janus a smug smile. If Janus wasn’t still handcuffed, he’d slap him.

“Well,” Remy said. “At least you didn’t shoot anybody like I asked. I was joking by the way. I didn’t really want to pick you up from a 1920s police station period.”

“It wasn’t my fault.”

“Mmm, nah, ‘cause Remus managed to not get arrested this time, so you defiantly screwed something up.”

“Oh, he defiantly wanted to screw something all right,” Remus said joyfully.

“Remus,” Janus hissed.

“What?” he asked. “I’m not the horny one for once. Well, no, that’s a lie, but it didn’t affect the job this time.”

Janus groaned and leaned his head back against the seat.

Remy pulled into a seemingly random garage around 20 minutes later. “Alright,” he said. “Here we are.” He got out of the car and then helped Janus out before uncuffing him. “Here’s your ‘watch,’” Remy handed him the timepiece that had been confiscated when he’d been arrested.

Janus put it on and activated it. “Shit,” he said.

“What?” Remus asked.

“An appointment with cultural outreach has already been downloaded to my calendar for once we get out of decon.”

“Oof. Going to baby jail,” Remy laughed. Remus was cackling.

“This,” Janus said, “was not a cultural faux pas. I did nothing that indicated that I was not from this time. I am not some rookie.”

“Don’t forget cell phones don’t exist in the 1920s,” Remus sang.

“The real question is whether or not my foot exists in your…” Remus disappeared before he could finish, a smirk on his face. Janus growled. “By Remy,” he gritted out. He selected the decontamination chamber from his queue, ignoring the appointment that came after it for now.

He knew exactly where Remus would be standing when he landed, which was why he stepped forward on reentry to ram into him.

He yelped in surprise. “Sorry,” Janus said pleasantly. “I must have also forgotten landing procedures.

Remus laughed good naturally. “Aw, come on Jay,” he said, bumping Janus back, albeit much gentler than Janus had been. “It’s not a big deal. You just go talk with some crusty old college professor who is far too interested in spoons and then everything’s fine.”

“It’s the principle of the thing,” he growled. “They’re treating me like I’m an idiot who accidently invented disco in the 1920s when I was conned by some free agent time traveler.”

“‘Conned,’ Remus said. Is that what they’re calling it now?”

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“I know where and when you live Remus,” Janus said.

Remus gave him a dopey smile as the decontamination cycle finished and the door unlocked. Janus’s wrist buzzed telling him that the coordinates to the cultural outreach office were now unlocked. Instead of pulling them up, Janus walked to the door.

“Um,” Remus said, following him. “Aren’t you supposed to be going to your appointment?” Janus just kept walking towards their office. “Uh… Jan?”

“It’s absolutely ridiculous that I have to go to cultural outreach,” Janus said. “In fact, no one can make me. If they want me to go have a discussion about the definition of ‘bushwa,’ they’re going to have to have me dragged there.”

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“Mmm, I feel like The Boss won’t be too happy about that, and I have a feeling she’d be 100% down to dragging you there herself.”

“Well, then, let her,” Janus said, stalking through the door to his office. “I’m not going to…”

“Ah, Agent Picani,” the woman standing next to his desk, clearly waiting for him, said when he came through the door. “Dr. Picani was informed that there were complications with your last mission and wishes to have a conversation with you and asks that you meet him in his office at the AMO.”

“Oh, um,” Janus said, stumbling a bit before plastering on a regretful half smile. “Unfortunately, I actually have an appointment right now at Cultural Outreach. It’s mandatory and very important, and I have to go now. So, I’ll have to take a raincheck on that.”

“But-” she started, frowning.

“Remus, work on the report!” Janus said quickly as he waved his hand to bring up his timepiece display and jammed his finger at the glowing appointment card in his queue. A few moments later, Janus was at Cultural Outreach.

Cultural Outreach was not part of the TPI, though it often worked very closely with them. It was a collaboration between the government and multiple universities to help government workers, politicians, and other citizens understand and bridge cultural gaps. It had existed before time travel was invented but had expanded to also teach people who needed to time travel how to behave in unfamiliar times and cultures.

After it had to be expanded to provide for the TPI, it had been moved to Silver Mountains University. The building had once just been a museum, but it had been thoroughly renovated and there had been add-ons for office space and some classrooms. It was still a museum, however, its purpose had expanded greatly and there were many areas that were off limits to the general public.

One of these areas was the fourth floor, where Janus’s timepiece had dumped him. This was the floor that was almost exclusively for TPI agents and staff of Cultural Outreach who worked with them.

He immediately turned away from the reception area, hoping that he could escape and go sit on the university’s quad or something of the like for the next hour or so in hopes the woman his brother sent to fetch him would give up and go back to the AMO. Yet, the receptionist apparently saw him.

“Janus Picani?” he asked.

Janus grimaced and turned back towards him. “Yes,” he said.

“Is something wrong?” he asked. “You’re 5 minutes late for your appointment and seem disoriented.

“Nothing’s wrong.”

“Is your timepiece malfunctioning?”

“No.”

“Uh… okay. Well, if you sign in here, I can take you to your appointment.”

“…Fine.”

He begrudgingly stepped forward and touched the screen he’d gestured to sign with his fingerprint, and then let the man lead him down the hall.

The door they stopped at was propped open slightly, but he still paused and knocked. “Professor Eran? Your 2:30 is here.”

Janus had just a moment upon hearing the name to think that maybe there was actually some sort of intelligent design of the universe and whatever being of ultimate power had crafted it was a dick.

The door opened and Virgil Eran’s eyes immediately narrowed on him. “Janus.”

“Virgil.”

“I see you’re still late for everything.”

“I see you’re still a bastard.”

Janus saw the receptionist slowly back away in the direction they’d come.

“Why don’t you come in?” Virgil said faux pleasantly.

Janus did, because he really didn’t have much of a choice at this point unless he wanted to jump out of a window… or push someone out of a window.

Virgil turned back into his office and took a seat behind his desk. Janus unhappily followed him in and sat across from him.

He took his time pulling up whatever the TPI sent him and reading it over. “So, I see you failed your recovery mission and were arrested in 1923.”

“It wasn’t like that,” Janus said. “I shouldn’t be here.”

Virgil gave him that same suspicious look he used to give Janus whenever Janus claimed to have not eaten his hot pockets out of the freezer in the middle of the night. He’d only been lying 80% of the time. Virgil had a tendency to forget what he’d eaten in a half-conscious state at 3 o’clock in the morning.

“I shouldn’t,” Janus snapped defensively. “Nothing went wrong with anyone from the time period. An illegal time traveler screwed up the mission details.”

“Well, it is still protocol to make sure nothing slipped when agents go off script. You weren’t prepared to be in a jail cell, and it is possible that you screwed something up.”

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“I didn’t screw anything up,” Janus growled.

“Alright,” Virgil said pulling up a document on his desk. “The mission started on July 27th, 1923 at 9:58pm, correct?”

“Oh, god, we’re not really going to fill out a time sheet. I don’t have time for that today.”

“It is protocol and best that the information is documented when it is still fresh in your mind. Besides, your schedule has been cleared for the rest of the workday.” The bastard was enjoying this. He knew how much Janus hated this stuff.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Janus said, “it was the damned illicit time traveler.”

“And I will be the judge of that,” Virgil said. Janus should have just bit the bullet and had coffee with his brother. “If you truly did nothing wrong, your supervisor will see that when I send this to her.”

#study break stories #not writing

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lena-in-a-red-dress · 5 years

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Fateful Objection

A long, long LONG time ago, there was a gifset of a supercorp au where Krypton survived and Kara interrupted a forced marriage between Lena and Mon-el of Daxam. This is my take on that AU.

----

When Kara Zor el learns she would be accompanying her parents to Daxam to observe the nuptials of the crown prince, she can think of a million other things she would rather be doing. Focusing on her grant to guild council requesting funding for an expedition to the most inhospitable planet in the quadrant. Dis- and re-assembling all the Kal-ex models in the citadel. Ask her Uncle Non for the full military history of the Daxamite war, and listen stonefaced as he flatly recounts every recorded and perceived slight inflicted by Krypton's closest neighbors. But when she disembarks her family's shuttle with her parents, cousin, and Aunt Astra at her side, Kara stares in awe at the grand pyramid that towers over their heads. Non remains on duty, thank Rao, manning the frigate still in orbit. It's beautiful, in an archaic sort of way-- imposing without a single ounce of nuance. Such is the way of Daxam.

Queen Rhea herself greets them, and Kara's mother Alura accepts the welcome on behalf of Krypton and the House of El. Soon, the queen bequeaths their contingent to a steward, with instructions to be shown to the chambers they would be using for the duration of the festivities. The steward takes them the long way, intentionally guiding them past Daxam's grandest views and most impressive architecture. Naturally. Kara wonders which sites are favored for the Prince's infamously lewd parties, and which were genuinely spaces for reflection and prayer. Still, as their tour winds deeper into the palace, Kara finds more to admire. Art and sculpture that both bewitches and confounds her, slowing her steps and ultimately pausing them to study one more closely. She doesn't notice her family moving on until she blinks and finds the corridor empty to either side of her. Alarm sparks low in her belly, as her mother's voice echoes in her ears. "While we are on Daxam, we must abide by the highest laws of decorum and honor," she'd warned them, more than once. "We are representatives of Krypton, and must demonstrate as such." Getting lost in a palace would not reflect well on Krypton, or the House of El. Kara follows the corridor in the direction she'd been going, only to pause moments later when the hall forked. Neither hold any sign of her family. This time, she chooses a direction at random. Within moments a sinking suspicion gathers in her gut, as she encounters nothing but more empty corridor... until it terminates in a single door. She knows it can't be the chambers alotted to the House of Zor el-- too secluded, too plain, too chill-- but Kara swipes her hand over the sensor anyway. Perhaps, she thinks, another steward lurked inside, and could redirect her before anyone important discovers her absence. But when the door slides open, it's not a steward she finds inside. Instead she finds a bed, and a woman asleep upon it. Kara's breath catches in her chest, feet riveted to the ground as the sight of pale skin against a dark gown overrides any compulsion to leave before being noticed. Those same traitorous feet carry her inside. One step, two steps, three... The door slides shut with a hiss, and the sleeping woman stirs. Dark lashes flutter open, and before Kara can bolt, sharp eyes focus on her. "I apologize," Kara blurts, heart thudding rapidly. "I got lost, and... I didn't mean to--" "I can't understand you," the woman said in another language. She pushed herself up to sitting, rolling her eyes with a helpless, resigned shrug. "Whatever Rhea sent you here to do, just do it." The words are foreign, but they tickle a long buried interest in alien linguistics, and memories float to the surface. After a pause, Kara reaches instinctively for the words that lift to her memory. "You... are not from Daxam." That sharp gaze flies to Kara once more, widening in surprise. "You speak English!" English, yes. More of her old studies sharpen in her mind. English. A language commonly spoken on a planet on the far side of the galaxy. "Some."

Suddenly, her hands are held tightly in warm fingers, taken by the pale woman who now holds her in thrall with beseeching eyes. "Please, you have to help me." Kara freezes, alarm jangling every nerve. "You... are here for wedding?" "I am the wedding," comes the swift response, almost too swift for Kara to follow. "Rhea expects me to marry her son, but I want no part of it." "You are unwilling?" "Yes! Rhea abducted me from my planet, against my will. I have no interest in Daxam-- I just want to go home." Kara stares at her, and the woman stares back. Keen eyes scan her up and down. "You're not from Daxam, either." "No," Kara agrees. "I am Kara Zor el, from Krypton." "Daxam's closest neighbor," the woman supplies, almost thoughtful. "You share a sun." Kara nods. "My name is Lena Luthor, from a planet called Earth." Earth. That was it. The planet Astra once told her would grant Kryptonians god-like powers. For flight, speed, strength. "Kara Zor el, please, you must help me. None of the servants will even speak to me. Rhea has them completely under her thumb." Kara can only imagine, considering they were not servants, but slaves yoked to the crown. "Can you not leave?" Kara asks. The door hadn't been locked. If what Lena says is true, surely the door would have been locked. But Lena merely lifts the hem of her gown, revealing a dark band around her ankle. "I can't take it off. As long as I wear it, the door closes before I can reach it." The dress droops, and when Kara turns a horrified gaze back to Lena, the woman can't quite meet her gaze. "I'm a prisoner." Kara can't quite believe it. But she has no means to distrust Lena either. And the beacon-- the beacon lends the story credence. "Please, Kara Zor el. You're the first person to speak to me since we landed. Just-- get me out of this room and I'll make my own way home from there." Kara almost agrees, already forming a plan to find and destroy the sensor that watched for the beacon, and help smuggle the woman out of the palace. But her mother's words echo once again, and makes her shake her head. "I can't." She pulls away, only for Lena's hands to grab at her once more. "No, please, wait! There-- there has to be something--" "It would be an act of war," Kara states plainly. "I cannot." Lena stares at her, stricken. Then her features harden, and her fingers release Kara's wrist. Silently, Lena turns away, folding her arms around herself, as disappointment settles heavily on her shoulders. Helplessness settles on Kara as well. She stands, unwilling to leave but unable to help. Until... "Speak no." Lena turns only slightly. "What?" "Marriage on Krypton provide a time for dissenters to voice... objection, to the union. I believe Daxam does as well." Lena stares at her. "It is often formality, but if you speak no, it will give the delegation pause. It could... give us cause to act. Give you time." Silence answers her. Its a long chance. Kara hopes her family will answer Lena's cry for help, but-- she isn't certain they will. "Listen for 'if any shall protest Rao's will, let them speak.'" Kara says the words in the old language, the one Daxam and Krypton still share in ritual. "Let them speak," Lena parrots. Her tongue stumbles over the words, but the comprehension is there. "And then you say 'I speak no'." The delegation may recognize English, but Rhea would be harder pressed to smooth over the bride objecting in their language. "I speak no," Lena repeats again. These words are simpler, better suited to a mouth used to softer sounds. Before Kara can say anything more, Lena staggers suddenly, listing sharply into her. Kara steadies her, helping her to the bed. "Are you all right?" Lena inhales sharply, rubbing at her chest with a hand that trembles. "The food doesn't agree with me." Kara watches her anxiously, but Lena offers nothing else. She fidgets, unused to being so unhelpful. "Speaking no may be enough to stall the ceremony. It's not much, I'm sorry." Lena's features finally soften. "It's more than I had five minutes ago." She offers a sad smile. Thank you, Kara Zor el." When she leaves, Kara does so with a lump in her throat. It doesn't feel right. Daxam's reputation for cruelty towards their slaves was well known to Krypton, but this? This was beyond anything Kara ever believed them capable. Mind twisting, Kara almost doesn't see the figure coming around the corner. "Oh!" She stops just shy of collision, and blinks back her dismay at the sight of Queen Rhea herself. In an instant, Kara smoothed her features and dipped into a genuflection. "Your Majesty, please forgive me." Regal features curl into a humorless smile, as her eyes track to the sigil on Kara's chest. "The House of El. I hadn't heard they'd misplaced one of their number." "I was admiring a sculpture, and didn't realize I'd lagged so far behind, your highness. I thought they'd come this way, but I've seen no sign of them." "Oh? And what have you seen?" Danger lurks under the sweet and patient intonation. Kara lifts her chin, channeling every ounce of her mother's training to keep her expression neutral. "Nothing? Your majesty," she tacks on. "When I realized I had gone the wrong way, I thought I had found a servant's corridor. Please accept my deepest apologies, your majesty. I did not mean to intrude." A dark eyebrow lifts. "A humble Kryptonian. I never thought I'd see the day." Her words mock, but her suspicion softens to mirth. "Perhaps there is some hope for the future of our people's after all." The queen turns to one of the guards at her shoulder. "Escort our guest to her delegation." "Yes, my queen." Kara dips again, eyes downcast. "Thank you, your majesty. I shall do my best not to be so enraptured with your palace in the future." This time when Rhea smiles, Kara sees the fangs behind it. "You may admire as you wish-- simply mind your way." "Yes, your majesty." The queen strides past her, her remaining guard trailing close behind. Kara itches to follow, but the guard waiting to escort her pre-empts any thoughts of subterfuge. She follows him in the opposite direction, pretending she doesn't hear the hiss of a door opening and closing behind her. When the door opens to her own family's chambers, her mother and aunt immediately rise to meet. "Kara, thank Rao!" "What happened? Where you detained?" Kara shakes her head. "I'm fine but--" "Kara, you know how important our presence here is!" Her mother scolds. "You can't be wandering off like a child! I brought you because I believed you mature enough to accept the responsibility." Kara glances at Kal el, who sits in a small corner of the couch, wholly absorbed in his reading and unconcerned with where he was or why. "Yes, mother," is all she says. "I'm sorry." She keeps her discovery to herself, avoiding her mother's disbelief through dinner and evening prayer. It's not until the quiet hour that Kara seeks out her aunt, and finds her gazing out the window of their main reception area, gaze deep and thoughtful. "Aunt Astra?" Astra turns to face her, silver hair glinting in the moonlight. "Yes, little one." She smiles. "Come, keep your old aunt company a while." Kara gladly steps into her aunt's one-armed embrace, sharing the same view. "You're not old." "Mmm," her aunt hums. "My ego appreciates that, little one." They stand in silence for several minutes, until Kara finally gives voice to the concerns that plague her. "Does Daxam follow the same bonding rituals as Krypton?" "Yes, for the most part. They select their matches differently, but the ceremonies are largely the same." "So there will be an opportunity to dissent?" Astra glances at her. "Does this have anything to do with your quiet this evening?" Kara swallows. "Something happened. When we were separated." "What is it? If they put a finger on you--" "No, aunt. Nothing like that. I-- I followed a wrong corridor, and ended up in the bride's chambers." Dark eyebrows lift. "How strange. Is she as lovely as the Daxamites all whisper?" "Yes, but-- Aunt Astra, I think she's in trouble." Astra snorts. "And she's only just realizing the Daxamites are trouble?" "She isn't from Daxam. She says she's from Earth." That gets Astras attention. "Earth?" "She doesn't speak Daxamite-- only English. She was difficult to follow, but I think she said the Queen abducted her from her planet, brought her here against her will. Her name is Lena Luthor, and--" "These are serious allegations, Kara. Are you certain you heard what you think you did?" Kara swallows. "She spoke so fast. But... she asked for help. I'm certain of that. And I saw fear in her eyes." "And what did you tell her?" "I couldn't act. Not without inciting conflict between our planets. But I told her of the right to dissent, gave her the words to speak that might stop the ceremony." Astra considers her words. Finally, she nods. "That was a wise move." "What if it's not enough? What if Rhea skips the rite?" For once, Astra doesn't have answer for her. "Then we will find a way to investigate further. If this woman is indeed from Earth, we may have grounds to interfere. It is an indexed planet earmarked for potential colonization. An abduction could threaten our prospects-- it would behoove us to prevent such an outcome." It does little to soothe Kara. The lump in her throat remains long through the night and breakfast the next morning, and through her preparations for the ceremony. All the while, she tries not to think what preparations Lena may be undergoing that very moment. In the ampitheater, Kara and her family are afforded an unobstructed view. She sits between her mother and cousin, back straight and fingers clenched. The Prince enters first, from the east. His features are solemn, heavy. Completely uncharacteristc of the rumors that abound of his celebrity and immaturity. He looks how Kara feels-- that he knows what comes next is very wrong. But instead of relief, Kara's dread only worsens. He could stop this, but hasn't. By showing up, he proves he will be no ally to his betrothed. When Lena enters from the west, Kara knows in an instant something is wrong. The woman's sharp gaze had been piercing the day before, but now they're cloudy and slightly unfocused. Her skin is flushed, red and shining with sweat despite the chill in the chamber. When she stumbles on air, a guard takes her firmly by the arm, and all but drags her to where the Prince and Queen wait. As the ceremony commences, Kara's focus remains on Lena's profile, and watches as her eyes close sluggishly, and her chest hitches as though in discomfort. "If any shall protest Rao's will, let them speak." Kara waits with bated breath, in the stretch of silence that follows. Astra touches her knee in readiness, but one beat passes, then two, and Lena says nothing. Kara lookes closer, and finds Lena's eyes clenched shut, hand pressed against her sternum as though she hasn't even heard. She hasn't heard. "Then by Rao's--" "I object!" Kara blurts, shooting to her feet. The prince's head turns sharply, but Lena's eyes remain closed, as she inhales through her nose. "Kara," Alura hisses, but the damage is done. Rheas gaze turns on Kara, and in them she finds outrage, second to mirth. She thinks she's won. "I speak," Kara repeats. "This union cannot proceed." "It is not your place, girl. You are not speaker of your delegation." "Lena!" Kara calls, shaking free of her mother's hands. Finally, Lena's eyes blink open. "Lena!" Sluggish eyes turn towards her. "Karazorel..." The name runs together on Lena's tongue, slurred and murky. "Yes, princess, it's me. Do you accept this union?" Rhea pushes between them. In a flash, Astra stands at Kara's side, ready to defend her. "You risk a thousand years of peace, Kryptonian!" "You are the one who invited us here-- to observe the rites. We will stand witness, and by Rao if you have done anything--" "I speak no." The words come soft behind Rhea, stuttered and cottony. The queen whirls, outrage twisting her pretty face into an ugly mask of rage. "How do you know those words?" Lena blinks sluggishly. "I speak no." This time, the pronunciation is close to perfect, and the utterance carries across the entire hall. "I speak no--" Rhea's hand cracks against her cheek. The force of the blow sends Lena staggering, ultimately losing her battle against gravity to fall to her knees. Kara doesn't think. She pushes past her aunt and the guards between them, and plants her hand on Rhea's wrist, where her hand twists in Lena's hair, pulling cruelly. "You dare--" Rhea's hand lifts to strike Kara as well, but Astra is at her side in an instant, tall and imposing. "Strike her and you will only live long enough to do it once." Rhea pauses. "Let her go," Kara demands. "You have no authority here." Kara looks over her shoulder, where Lena tearfully struggles to breathe past the ragged gasps in her throat. "Lena..." She can't give Lena the words this time. All she needs to do is ask for help. The system is listening-- they would hear, and act. She just needs to speak. In English, or not. When Lena looks up at her, searching through the bleary haze in her eyes, Kara isn't certain she could even hear her. Something was wrong. "Please," Lena gasps. A hand presses to her chest, as though trying to relieve a tremendous pressure. "Please help me." The room erupts in shock and outrage. Kara releases the queen to reach for Lena, and hears Astra declare Lena safe under the protection of Krypton and the House of El until the truth of Rhea's treachery is uncovered. It fades to a dull roar, as Kara presses her hands to Lena's flushed and sweating cheeks. She's shocked to find her skin chill and clammy. "Mother!" she calls. "Mother, she is unwell!" "I-- I can't breathe--" Lena gasps, moments before she face turns ashen and her body loosens. Kara only just manages to catch her before she slumps the floor, unconscious. "MOTHER!" "Her heartrate is too fast." "I think she's been drugged," Kara supplies quickly. She turns to Rhea. "What did you give her?!" "You insult me--" "We don't have time for this," Alura cuts her off. "Astra, we need to get her back to the shuttle. We will be able to provide treatment on the frigate." The flight back to the frigate passes tensely. Lena doesn't wake up, and Kara spends the minutes with her hand tight around the human's slack fingers. As soon as Astra carries Lena into the medical bay, she activates a stasis field. "This will give us time to quarantine her condition. Sister, do you still have the files on human physiology?" Alura nods. "Yes. I've sent a Kal ex unit to retrieve them." In the meantime, the healing units hover and dart around Lena's pale frame, taking samples and running tests. When they compare the results to Alura's records, Astra's features darken. "So it's true then. Daxam drugs its people into compliance." Kara stares, horrified. "She was drugged?" Astra nods. "These results indicate she has been for some time. No doubt she proved troublesome for the Queen. But it seems she received a significantly larger dose only just recently, likely in attempt to keep her from making a scene during the ceremony." "The prolonged exposure weakened her heart," Alura supplies. "Had it been just the one dose, we might have been able to fully repair the damage, but..." "She'll die?" "We can help her recover, and Krypton's gravity differs from Earth's. It's possible it will allow her to live a relatively long life... but she will have symptoms for the rest of her days." Kara breathes deeply. "We can't let Rhea have her." "I agree, little one. But I'm afraid the decision may be out of our hands. Once she is well enough, the council will want to hear her story. If it is true Rhea captured her, Daxam will never lay a hand on her again." Alura meets her husband's gaze, and nods. "The House of El will pledge their protection. She will be safe on Kryptonian soil." The others leave, citing duties and a desire to let the healers work. But Kara stays, unable to pull herself away. Astra lingers. "I am so proud of you, Kara. You took a great risk, speaking out as you did. But you saved her life." Kara shakes her head. Her exchange in the palace repeated in her head, looping on Lena's unsteadiness and her breathlessness.

The food doesn't agree with me. "She was ill when we met. I just, didn't realize..." "You couldn't have, Kara." "I shouldn't have left her there. I should have done more to help her that night. If I had, Rhea wouldn't have had the chance to--" "You did more than anyone else did. You were a hero today." But it wasn't enough. "I want to stay here tonight." "Very well. I will sent kal ex with some blankets." Kara stays, for days as they try to get Lena's baseline to a sustainable level. When they slowly reduce the stasis field, allowing Lena to function on her own, their patient sleeps, oblivious to the political volleys exchanged in her name. To Kara's surprise, Krypton remains adamant that Lena remain where she is, despite Daxam's demands for her return.

Kara is there when Lena opens her eyes. They lift heavily, as though burdened by great weight. Her eyes slowly focus, and then sharpen to the keen edge Kara had witnessed before. "You are safe," Kara says in English, pulling the woman's focus to her. "Safe." Lena's throat bobs in a thick swallow. "The wedding..." "You spoke no. The ceremony wasn't completed." Lena's eyes close, lips pressing tightly together. "You're on my family's ship now, in orbit over Krypton. Once the council determines the fault of Daxam, you'll be allowed to land, as a guest of the House of El." Lena nods, opening her eyes. "Thank you, Karazorel." "My friends call me Kara." Pale lips lift softly, even as her eyes start to slip shut, betraying her exhaustion. "I'm Lena."

#supercorp au #daxam wedding au #kara on krypton #kara saves the day #fateful objection

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warmau · 5 years

Text

{Special} College!AU Bang Chan

*this post was commissioned | find other stray kids writing here

major: music theory & composition

minor: linguistics

clubs: tried to turn some members of the music club into a busking group called 3racha ,,,, lets just say they got chased off campus by some of the professors LOL, briefly did tango club against his will because yugyeom dragged him to it

sports: co-captain of the mens swim team

chan is the kind of college student who you meet for the first time and you think ‘wow he’s so social and popular and cool!!!!’

and then after getting to know him for a week or two

you realize he isnt cool at all - he’s social and popular - but he’s a downright GOOFBALL

he takes his studies seriously, music means the world to him and it’s obvious

but he’s also such a ,,,,,,, in the nicest terms possible,,,,,,a big nerd about it

because he’s gotten into heated debates in classes over who the best modern composers are

written long, detailed editorials that he’s submitted to the uni magazine about how much he adores the new travis scott album

and once had to be (forcefully) dragged out of a local tattoo shop by both felix and jisung

because he was sure he needed the lyrics from drakes ‘in my feelings’ somewhere on his body

quote on quote “dude, that song is a religious experience for me”

but he’s also just devoted to it

like he lives for all aspects of music

singing, composing, producing, rapping, he even tries his hand at a dance class as an extracurricular

much to the shock of minho, an actual dance major,

who got called “my son!” by chan in front of all of his other dance major friends

and has yet to forgive chan for this horror

chan actually got offered to join the welcoming committee at the university for his sophomore year

because he has this natural leadership ability, coupled with the fact that he always wants to make everyone laugh

like he goes out of his way to make freshman and nervous looking newcomers feel like they belong

even at the expense of looking or sounding like a fool

seriously, like he was showing around some of the new music theory majors and made a bunch of attempts at corny jokes

“guys, if a cow played music what would be called? A MOO-SCICIAN!”

“what do classical composing majors say when they’re parallel parking? BACH IT UP!”

“please laugh,,,,,im begging you,,,,,”

but of course,,,he’s not a goof all by himself

him and changbin see each other on the way to class and stop in the middle of the quad to do the floss enthusiastically for one whole minute as everyone watches in disbelief

him and felix agree to photobomb literally any photo woojin tries to take of himself

and just in general,,,,,they are that loud group of rowdy boys who sometimes can get too hype and loud

but it’s hard to hate them or be annoyed because let’s be honest,,,,,they’re all adorable

chan does of course have a serious side, he’s actually incredibly caring and sensitive to those around him

when jeongin and seungmin come to visit them on campus, he takes care of them

in subtle ways, but in ways that matter [he makes sure theyre doing well in school and have plans for college too]

he can tell when a friend is feeling down or is having trouble

and he always lends advice or tries to get them to come out and do something fun with him to lighten the mood

there are times in college when his own work is piling up, he has responsibilities to his major and to the swim team he’s on

but he’ll do his best to cram time in to take care of those close to him,,,,,

sometimes at the expensive of his own wellbeing

but it’s hard to tell if chan is ever upset - he covers it up with funny jokes and body gags

him and felix love to talk and switch between english and korean super fast, mostly to annoy their friends

but they also end up blundering over simple words and hyunjin just lowkey is like

“hmm chan maybe you should pick up korean as a major,,,,,but it might be hard because youre at like a middle school level right now-”

chan, pretending to faint from that burn “when did i raise such a savage little monster,,,,”

his minor in linguistics comes from his ability to pick up languages

he actually finds them fun to learn about, but he doesnt give it the same attention as he does to his music theory major

so he kinda sometimes has to go to a tutor

(he hides this from his friends because he knows he wouldnt able to live it down)

did i mention he’s co-captain of the swim team,,,,,,and he’s like oblivious to it,,,,,,, but there are literally students who just come and watch the practice to see him in swim trunks,,,,,,

jisung once came to hangout after practice and he told chan like “did you hear your friends screaming your name back in the pool?”

and chan was like huh i thought that was just in my head

jisung, looking into the camera like he’s on the office

but no again, not matter how packed chan’s schedule is, he always makes time for people when they need him

and sometimes he’s a little too self-sacrificing,,,,,,,,

also id just like to mention that he shows up to instrumental practice with his bag over his shoulder and his hair all messy and curly after he blow-dried it after swimming

and he looks cute

like mega cute

anyway

you’re a dance major who doesnt know chan all that well

you’re much closer to minho since you share a major and youve only heard of chan in stories from him

the first time you meet face to face is when the musical theory majors are tasked with organizing a song that’ll be performed by the dance majors

you’re being paired off, two dancers to one producer

and by sheer luck you and minho get put in with chan

the first thing you notice about chan is ,,,,,,

his big almost lopsided grin

“you guys know we have to win and make this the best collab this university has ever seen - right?”

minho crosses his hands and rolls his eyes from beside you

“dude it’s not a competition”

“ok, but im making it one. and we’re winning - right?”

chan turns to you, eyes bright and a bit of a dimple coming out when his smile manages to get even bigger on his face

you nod, a little shy at how friendly he’s being right off the bat

he plops down, minho following suit on the floor of the practice room and you take a second till you join them

“i think we need to make something powerful, something show stopping. i was thinking id use some old tracks from 3racha that i made-”

minho scrunches up his nose

“i dont think the professors would like that, i think theyre looking for something classical”

chan puffs out his cheeks like an upset third grader

and you cant resist a tiny giggle

chan catches it, smiling your way before looking back at minho

“well i guess we can do that. but what about something more,,,,classical meets modern,,,,,do you guys think that’d work for you two?”

you shift a little and chan points to you all of a sudden

“c’mon, you can tell me! i wanna make sure you guys are comfortable and can perform your best! so feel free to drag any of my ideas through the mud,,,,,,,or tell minho off for me”

he chuckles, earning a light punch in the arm from minho

but you actually feel a sense of relief

you were a tiny bit worried that you’d be ignored, working with two people who were already super close

but chan was putting in the effort to include you

so, you mentioned that maybe a more high tempo beat with orchestral influence could work

chan nods - whipping out his music notebook to start scribbling down notes

you notices that the pages are covered in a mix of english, korean, and musical notes

it looks like a total mess, but somehow chan gives off a trustworthy feeling

and when you guys are all done discussing, he promises to have a demo by next week

it’s when you’re gathering all your things that chan pops back in and drops a note in the palm of your hand

“my number! so we can talk about the project and stuff”

he says easily, waving one last time to you and minho before disappearing out of the room again

you stand there, the warmth of his hand is on the paper and you don’t want to think too much about it

but your heart definitely skips a small, minuscule beat

when you finally get the message from chan that the demo is done

you and minho meet up with him after classes and chan, with trembling hands, puts the music on

you can tell he’s nervous, he looks like he might pass out from holding his breath

but the moment you hear the audio - you fall absolutely in love

and just from this one instrumental it’s obvious chan is talented

when it’s over, minho says what you’re already thinking

“it’s perfect bro!”

he gets up and highfives chan, who rubs some sweat from his forehead afterwords

“now you guys have to do the actual hard part and come up with a dance”

you shake your head “this song is really great - it’s whats going to make the performance”

chan teeters a bit with his response, for the first time he’s a little caught off guard at the compliment, and you can see the reddening of his ears

“ah,,,i mean it’s ok,,,,but really you and minho are going to have to work hard to-”

he’s interrupted by the sound of the door swinging open

an upperclassmen that calls chan over to answer some questions

you stand there, holding the USB with the mp3 of the song in your hands

your mind racing with ideas for choreography

but when you turn, you see past minho whose saying something to you

and you see only chan in the blur of the rest of the room

he’s glowing, in this halo that you’re sure isn’t actually there

and you force yourself to snap out of it

because this is weird

you shouldnt see him as anything more than your partner in this project

and that’s what you do see him as

you’re sure of it

but,,,,,,as time passes and chan starts hanging around you even more

you start to be a little unsure of where he stands in your mind

most of the time it’s you, him, and minho in the dance practice room

the song on repeat as you and minho show off anything new you’ve come up with

sometimes you end up being twirled around by minho, sometimes he’s throwing you up in the air, sometimes you’re both laying on the floor making dramatic pulls toward each other

you plan solo parts for each other too

and even though chan admits he has not much experience in judging other peoples dancing

he thinks you two look great together

he’s always supportive, and he’s always being funny to lighten the mood

there’s moments were either you or minho start to panic about it all coming together

and chan is there with some corny joke

or the usual “what did i say you guys, we’re going to be number one!”

to cheer you guys up

but when you really start to worry about your feelings

is when one weekend you get a knock on your dorm door

and to your surprise, it’s not someone on your floor asking for an extra charger or an RA trying to find your roommate

it’s chan

he’s got on a training suit, the uni’s name on the back and a duffel bag you’re sure isnt big enough to fit a guitar or anything like that

“chan?”

you ask, shocked

“did you just come from practice or something?”

he laughs, “actually a swim meet - i just thought id stop by and ask if you had time to show me your solo part of the performances.”

you blank for a second

you’d thought this would be another saturday of you laying on your stomach in your mismatched pajamas

watching videos of dancers on youtube, maybe texting a friend to go out and eat

but, even after you agree, and ask chan to wait in the hall while you change

you realize this is going to be the first time you and chan are,,,,,,,,alone

thankfully one of the practice rooms is free when you get to the building

and you suddenly feel really anxious

chan slides down against the mirror and claps

“im excited, i saw minho’s yesterday and thought i should ask you out - i mean ask to see yours too. i was going to invite him, but i think he’s doing something with jisung today”

you hear chan’s voice

but because of your anxiety, the beating of your heart is much louder in your ears

he puts the song on and you try hard to focus

you know what your solo dance is - you know the moves - youve practiced it on your own

but you cant move an inch

“h-hey are you ok?”

chan sees the way your eyes have gone wide, how you’ve frozen and cant seem to snap back out of it

he gets up, stopping the song, and suddenly you feel his hands on your shoulders

you look up into his kind brown eyes

and he gives you that smile, that’s kind of silly but still somehow so genuine

“are you nervous?”

you nod slowly, embarrassed

“s-sorry, i dont know whats going on i just-”

chan gives your shoulder a gentle squeeze

“it’s fine, but minho told me that your solo is amazing. i know you can do it. just imagine that im like,,,,wearing a big clown nose or something and relax. plus,,,”

he grins

“even if you mess up - i promise im too dumb in dancing to tell”

you laugh a little and chan goes back to sit down and get the music up

this time, you focus on yourself in the mirror

and just let the song chan wrote flow through you like water

the room melts away

even chan’s presence becomes muted

and you just dance

and when it’s over, you look to see chan’s reaction

and he just looks,,,,,,,mesmerized

he scrambles to his feet, but doesnt even say anything

his mouth open, agape like a fish out of water

“i,,,,i cant tell if you liked it,,,”

you ask with an unsure tone

and chan just shakes his head, his soft curls falling all over the place

“i loved it - i didnt think it’d be that - that beautiful you know? especially to my mediocre song-”

“your song is the reason it’s beautiful”

you blurt out, but then turn a little red when you realize what youve said

even though it’s true

a dancer has to work with something good in order to create something nice to look at

and chan’s song had resonated with you

chan stops in front of you and for a second neither of you know what to say

until he puts his hand out and goes

“let’s go get lunch. all that dancing made me hungry.”

you lift an eyebrow, “but you didnt dance,,,,”

“but you did, aren’t you hungry?”

you shrug, “i could go for,,,,pancakes maybe,,,”

chan grins, and leans down

his hand takes yours and you gasp a little when he laces his fingers betwen yours as well

“pancakes it is!”

he takes you to a nearby place, and even though it’s way past breakfast and the waitress kind of stares when you two order your pancakes and coffee

neither of you really minds

because for the first time it’s just you and chan talking

and to your surprise, there’s a lot you have in common

and it just feels comfortable

he makes everything so easy and free flowing

like you guys talk about your majors, but you talk about aspirations and traveling

and chan tells you about australia with sparkling eyes and a wildly good imitation of a koala bear

and you laugh so hard you have to hide a snort when chan ends up getting maple syrup all over his chin

but he also tells you not to hide a snort, because a snort is cute

he calls you FREAKING cute

afterwords you two return to campus

but chan runs into park jinyoung, an upperclassman, who apparently works at the college bookstore

and who pinches chan on the ear and says

“instead of dates, you should be studying. but also be sure to be a gentlemen to them.”

you blush so hard, but chan is too in pain and begging jinyoung to let go of his ear to notice

you tell chan that if he has to go, he should

but chan insists that he has time - his linguistics tutor is meeting him at 7 (please dont tell minho that)

and that maybe you guys can like watch a movie before then

you stare a little and ask “w-watch one where?”

“in my dorm!”

chan grins

but a moment later it falls into an embarrassed, worried look

“i-i-i didnt mean it- li- i just - i - we could - i just - i stole felix’s netflix password so i just thought like maybe youd want to watch like stranger things with me or something - i didnt mean i - i”

his flustering is adorable

and you do end up watching stranger things on his laptop

but it’s in the common room and you guys have to share his headphones

and when it’s nearing time for him to go

he walks you back to his dorm and gives you the longest, warmest hug of your life

when he leaves, you walk right into your room and fall face first into your pillow because

was that a date

it was totally a date

but after that,,,,,,,,you and chan don’t get to hangout one on one anymore

not to say he changes how he acts around you or anything

he’s still this sunshine goofball full of positive energy

but he doesnt,,,,,show up at your dorm asking to go out

he doesnt text you outside of the group chat with minho

and you’re just left confused

because you were sure there were signs - there had to be

it’s clear as day, the memory of chan laughing - watching you as you had leaned over the table to help him clean off the maple syrup

or how he’d let you practically lay your head in his lap while you guys watched stranger things

so why did it suddenly feel like that day,,,,,didn’t happen

as the days to the performance in front of the professors get closer

you fortunately have that to distract you

alongside other schoolwork and responsibilities

minho asks you at some point if you want to come and get dinner with him and chan

but you feel like you cant,,,,so you refuse

and it’s like being around them - your nightmare comes true, but not because they exclude you, but you start to push yourself away

the last practice before the performance

you’re running a bit late to meet up with minho and chan

and when you stop infront of the door, you hear the two of them talking

but it’s,,,,,,,,,,tense?

“so you did spend time alone with them, didn’t you?”

“yeah, they showed me their solo part. it was for the project.”

“woojin says he saw you hugging them outside of their dorm,,,,,,dude just tell me straight - it was a date right?”

there’s a pause

and you realize that they’re talking about you and chan

“no it wasn’t a date. you know i wouldnt do that to you.”

it feels for a second like the air has left your lungs

it wasn’t a date?

“i dont think of them like that.”

a second twinge of pain shoots up through you, chan’s voice resounding through the room

had you really misread the signs? was he just being friendly? did you just foolishly think that the first guy to be sweet, would inevitably fall in love with you?

you feel like running away, you really do

but you know that tonight is the last practice - after that it’s just the performance

and then you wont have an excuse to see chan, and he wont need to see you either

so you take in a breathe, plaster a smile on your face, and walk in

the two boys stop talking

there’s no change in expression from minho

he just chooses to look down

but chan does his best to match your smile, but it’s so painfully forced that you cant look at him for too long

“ok, tomorrow is the day so we just have to-”

“i know.”

you cut him off, not necessarily trying to sound angry, but just wishing that this whole thing would be over

the practice goes smoothly

but everything feels like it’s being held in a chokehold

neither you or minho is dancing to your best abilities

and chan excuses himself after the first run through

and when you find yourself in bed that night, you turn on your side and stare at the blank screen on your phone

“i guess im just an idiot huh,,,,,” you mumble

the one time something nice happens, with someone i could really come to like, it always has to get ruined

chan is nowhere to be seen in the morning

minho is adjusting the shirt he’s wearing beside you and you don’t want to admit it to yourself

but you know you’ll be super hurt if chan doesnt show up

“he’s coming, don’t worry”

minho suddenly reassures

his hand hovering over your shoulder before he pulls it back

you hear the professors call you and minho out, commenting that the instrumental had been produced by musical theory bang chan

you step out in front of the panel of teachers and scan the room quickly

looks like he really didnt come

you turn to face minho and notice he looks just as down as you do

but that’s not what matters now

you have to do a good job on the performance at least

the music starts, the music chan made for you and minho, and you let it flow through you like the first time you heard it

regardless of whats happened - the music is perfect

it fits the movements of your body like glove

you and minho look like you were born to dance this dance for this song

and because you’re so focused

you don’t see the door open quietly, chan leaning against the back wall and watching

his eyes following the tips of your fingers, the bend of your waist, the way you twirl past the professors and minho

how you take what he’s created and channel it throughout every muscle and bone in your body

he had meant it

when he said you’d made his music look beautiful

and when it’s over

you face the professors, catching your breath professionally

and then you see

chan

the professors are saying nothing but good things, praising you and minho and the music

but again - the room blurs and it’s just him

once it’s over and the other dance majors are all fawning over you two

you think that maybe you should at least go over and say thank you to chan, one last time for the music

but you cant find the strength to do it right now

instead you try to get your things together quickly and get out of there

but halfway across campus, you hear someone call your name

you turn, shocked to see chan

he’s standing maybe three feet back

and you have the urge to lie, tell him you’re late for something

but you cant say anything because the expression on his face is nothing like usual

no lopsided smile, no goofy face, no sincere and gentle reassurance

it’s pain

“hey - you heard us yesterday didn’t you?”

his voice is low, and you think you can even hear it shake slightly as he asks you

“w-what are you talking about”

you play dumb, clutching the strap of your bag so hard you feel the texture dig into your skin

“you heard what i said to minho, that i didnt think ,,,,, what we had was a date. that i didnt see you romantically,,,,”

you swallow a lump you hadnt known was in your throat

you dont feel like dealing with this now - being humiliated after a performance that took every ounce of your energy

“so what if i did, i get it. it’s fine. you don’t have to pity me or any-”

“i was lying.”

you catch yourself on the last words of your sentence

staring at chan you see that his shoulders are stiff

“i lied, to minho and to myself. it’s just,,,,,i know he likes you. and he’s my friend so i want him to be happy but i,,,,,,but i ,,,,,,”

he takes a moment

and there are students walking past you

the world is moving all around

but it doesnt feel like that, you cant tell the faces apart, you cant overhear their conversations

“but i like you too and i dont,,,,,,,i dont want to hide it anymore.”

you think this should be a happy moment, a moment that overflows you with warmth

but it feels like it cant be that

not when you now know that there are minho’s feelings involved

but past that - you know your feelings

and you know that they’re for chan

so you step forward

and so does chan

until the distance is closed between you two and you look up into those brown eyes

that are always so sweet, so kind and nurturing

“i like you too. i dont want to hurt minho, id never want to see him sad. but i want you. i want to be with you.”

chan’s lips twitch a little, like he’s fighting against a smile or a frown

“i want to kiss you”

he suddenly whispers

“but i think it’ll be bittersweet.”

you agree, eyes shifting from the curve of his mouth and back up into his gaze

you both decide that the first order of business is to tell minho

you think it’l be awkward and hard

but the moment you and chan walk through the dance practice room, minho just sighs

“i already knew it.”

he announces, before even you or chan can get to the apologizing and explanations

he looks at you gently, “i didnt want you to find out this way - but dont worry. chan is the best guy and the only one i think deserves you.”

you dont even get to thank minho

because chan throws himself into the other boys hands

sobbing about how nice that was of him to say and how he’s going to do everything in his power to find minho his soulmate

and minho is just like

“please get your boyfriend off me”

you manage to pull back chan

but you’re also like, ,,, huh,,,,,,boyfriend,,,,,,right i guess he is

but just in case

as you two are leaving the dance studio you ask

“are we like,,,dating”

chan puts a hand under his chin

“well, let’s see. i like you. you like me. minho seems to not be hurt at all about this. i want to kiss you so bad im going dizzy. i think it’s safe to say we are dating.”

you giggle, lifting up to kiss the side of chan’s cheek

“there, it’s a kiss i think we can both agree on for today.”

chan pinkness, but agrees

your first,,,well second? date is the next week

you have to wait for chan to leave class and you’re surprised to see him carrying a guitar case

he explains that he isn’t all that good, but it’s part of his major to learn instruments

and when you guys grab lunch you end up having chan teach you some chords

it’s a simple kind of date, you get to talk a lot and just enjoy each others company

but of course

chan finds some way to make it funny

(like when he tries to play the instrumental to a song you said you liked and you could tell three seconds in he had no idea what he was doing)

as you two continue to go out and grow closer you come to know more about chan

than just his goofy and caring side

there’s the chan who, in one way or another, is the dad friend

you see first hand how he worries about younger friends, how he reminds felix to call his parents after finals, how he shoves all the snacks he has in his bag into jisungs hands when jisung says he hasnt eaten

there’s the chan whose a perfectionist, critiquing his own work and musical abilities to hell and back

there’s the chan who also,,,,,,is super naive and new to this whole romance thing

surprisingly, he’s unaware of how attractive he is

and when he wears a lowcut shirt under his jacket out on a date, he keeps putting his hands over the skin and getting all shy

and you’re just like

“chan,,,,,you know you’re hot right?”

and he almost hits the ceiling like

“WHA,,,,,stop joking around!”

you: “i can’t call my boyfriend hot?”

chan, digging a whole in the ground to hide in: “yo-you’re the only hot person here,,,”

but really, dating him is such a great and positive experience

because he really is your number one fan and supporter

and it’s impossible to really argue with him - because if you want to do something, chan is down for it

even if it’s something he’s new to or owrried about

you can tell he fights through his own worries in order to make you happy

which you actually tell him he doesnt have to do

you sit down with your hands on his and youre like chan i want you to be happy too, relationships are about equality

it makes him so happy he tackles you in a hug ,,,

gosh he’s like an overexcited and loveable puppy

he does this thing where you’ll just be doing something like scrolling through your phone

or looking through a magazine

and he’ll stare at you and go “i love you”

and you’re like,,,,i love you too but why are you just saying it

and he just shrugs

“felt like it”

“when do you not feel like saying it then?”

“never. i always want you to know i love you.”

is the boyfriend who claims you think all his jokes are funny

and you’re like sure :-) *shaking your head no the moment he looks away*

pulls little, cute surprises for you every now and then

like he left a teddy bear outside your dorm with a heart balloon once

or stuck a sticky note in your bag about how you’re the cutest person ever

“love you possum”

“did you,,,did you just call me a possum”

“it’s an aussie thing. plus possums are cute”

guess who got a plushie of a possum for valentines day? you did!

guess who got a plushie of a koala for valentines day? chan did!

to be honest get ready to be called every cute pet name that’s available in english, korean, and any other language chan can remember

you become known on campus by a bunch of upperclassmen when you start dating chan

like this kid named yugyeom walks up to you and is like “did chan take you somewhere fun yet!”

or you met jinyoung again and he told you to make sure chan is studying for his minor

you and chan were just sitting on the quad once, with your legs over his and his hand stroking your hair

and it was super cute and adorable

and then woojin plopped down next to you and was like

“we found old 3racha videos we want you to see”

and you’re like “3racha?”

and woojin is just like OH YOU HAVENT HEARD

chan tried to chase him off, but jisung - who isnt embarrassed of 3racha era at all - whipped out his phone and was like “let me show you”

jokingly rapping chan’s iconic lines at him and him scrunching up his cute nose

remember when chan got those little cuts in his eyebrow ,,,, you didnt say it but you were like ,,,, ok wow,,,,,how did he get even more handsome

kissing chan? an experience

he shyly admits that his knowledge is kind of limited - and at first it’s a little sloppy

but he knows what to do with his hands, you dont know how, but he pulls you close or holds the back of your neck

and you melt

but the moment you get flirty, it literally K.O’s chan

if you as much as wink at him or slip your shirt off your shoulder he turns to color of a tomato it’s hilarious

he also really likes when you sit in his lap

he always pulls you in when he has you listen to something he’s composed

or when he’s got his computer open and he’s like come watch this

and you’re like scoot over

but he’s like no, you just can sit on my lap, it’s yours, forever

swim team chan! coming out of the changing rooms with his hair still wet and shaking it so some of the water gets on you

you get to wear his team jacket :-)

chan lowkey takes all romantic holidays and stuff super seriously, like he goes all out for anything that involves couples

and even if you’re a little embarrassed by it, he’s like no we gotta do it

matching from head to toe? probably corny - but chan is living for it

you and chan mutually agreeing to dote on jeongin like he’s a baby is just a given

because you’re both busy in college, lots of dates are like getting coffee and holding hands and being cute around campus

jisung and bangchan making gagging noises in the background

but chan always muses about taking you somewhere abroad

traveling with you and just being alone

you tell him that neither of you has the money right now but maybe in the future

you bet chan is like “oh yeah, im talking about it like our honeymoon”

“h-honeymoon?!?!”

chan, covering his outh and turning red: “i ,,, uh,,,, what,,, huh,,,”

but honestly does he daydream about marrying you? im just going to let you decide that

(it’s a hard yes. of course he does. he’s a romantic fool)

OH how could i forget

the corny texts

sure there are chan’s bad dad jokes, his selfies where he’s doing dumb faces, and the usual complaining about bangchan being mean to him

but there are also the

‘forget to tell you this, but you’re always on my mind’

‘im such a mess, im thankful you still love me’

‘when the world overwhelms you, ill be there to listen to your fears’

and the one that made you nearly break your phone in half because ,,,, cuteness and corn overload

‘im yours, so you better take responsibility for that’

chan is the kind of guy who’d let you draw on his face with a sharpie or lipstick and he’d wear it outside proud because this is my s/o’s art!

if you asked him to run across town to get you cheesecake at 2 am? consider it done

he just loves you with his big heart and,,,,it’s amazing

but you love him with as much passion - and that’s what makes him truly feel like you’re the one

because you match him perfectly

slow dancing in his dorm to the sound of a self composed instrumental he made just for your anniversary

and then kissing softly with his hans on your hips and your hands on his face

and him leaning back to tell you

you’re the best thing that has ever happened to him

yeah that’s just one night dating chan, can you imagine dating him forever??????

#stray kids imagines #stray kids scenarios #stray kids au #bang chan au #bang chan imagines #bang chan scenarios #sk scenarios #sk imagines #sk au #sfw #chan imagines #chan scenarios #stray kids #bang chan #writing commissions

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terresdebrumestories · 7 years

Text

With what we have

✗ TECHNICAL DETAILS

FANDOM: Voltron: Legendary defenders RATING: Teen & Up WORDCOUNT: 14 823 words PAIRING(S): - CHARACTER(S): Takashi Shirogane, Keith Kogane, Lance McClain, Hunk Garett, Pidge Gunderson/Katie Holt, Allura, Coran, Ulaz. GENRE: Character exploration. TRIGGER WARNING(S): Canon level discussions of genocide, war and violence. Shiro comes close to a panic attack at one point, but the rest is more hinted at than outright described. SUMMARY: In which Ulaz doesn’t die, and some conversations happen sooner than they would have as a result. NOTE: I This fic takes place right after the end of Shiro’s escape. Everything up to that point happened the same as in canon, except for the bit where the Blade of Marmora uses code names because really, it’s basic spy stuff.

“He’s...gone.”

The words ring hollow in Shiro’s chest, purple void tugging at his ribs a little harder with every heartbeat, and it takes effort to stay upright even as the reality of the loss strikes him at the knees. Doc wasn’t much: he didn’t have all the answers or a ready-made solution for the team’s troubles, but he was something. If nothing else, he was a spark of hope, and that alone is hard to lose.

Behind him, Shiro hears Keith’s jacket creak as he shuffles from one foot to the other, and the wish to turn around and reassure the kid burns like fire against his spine. Shiro wants to smile and say he’ll be fine, to go back to his team and be the leader they need. He wants to tell them all he trusts Coran and Allura’s judgment and mean it.

Then again, he also wants his right arm back and his hair black and his face scar free.

“I’m sorry we doubted him,” Keith manages at last, the catch in his voice almost unbearable in its vulnerability, “he saved all our lives.”

The hole in the xanthorium cluster is still here. It floats by at a lazy pace, tearing into Shiro’s hopes like a knife in paper and bringing the red and purple light of Galra ships into the edge of his vision. Even the Galra hand hangs at his side, limp, heavy and useless. There are shards of glass in his throat when he swallows.

“I still have so many questions….”

Galra machinery is too precise to click as the fingers curl into a fist. He pretends he can hear it anyway, the sound easier to deal with than a pained yelp, a gasp, and the hiss of terror in his own voice as he tries to get one last word in, fingers digging into his shoulders—

“Do you think Zarkon is really tracking us?”

Shiro blinks the world back into focus just as the translator on his left ear beeps to announce one of the Alteans is about to speak.

“We cannot know for sure,” Allura says as she walks up to her spot at the helm of the ship, “only ‘Doc’ knew our whereabouts.”

Shiro turns too fast to remember moving. His left palm hurts.

“You don’t really think he gave us up? After he sacrificed himself?”

“Yeah,” Keith adds, “Maybe Zarkon found this place on his own. He’s probably been searching for the Blade of Marmora.”

Shiro glances at the set of Keith’s shoulders, the rigidity of his stance where he planted himself between him and Allura, and he wishes he could feel grateful for it. Instead of that, he’s almost swept off his feet by the urge to leave, lock himself in his room and forget everyone exists for a moment...just the one. Just a minute where there are no Lions of Voltron, no Paladins, no friends of his going through who knows what kind of horrors in the darkest recesses of the universe.

That would help, maybe, and he’s on the verge of giving up on this argument and call it quits when Allura steps into her pod, face set, and says:

“It’s clear the loss of this ‘Doc’ has caused you great concern but—”

“He’s still alive!” Pidge’s voice bursts through the emergency speakers.

Somewhere, very far in the back of his mind, Shiro thinks he hears Coran protest against tinkering with the emergency communication lines. There’s an air of shocked surprise around him, too, but he’s in the corridors before he can process it in full, helmet slipping in place with the ease of practice.

“I’m on my way to the Black Lion,” he announces, echoes of his voice bouncing back at him through the empty halls, “send me what you’ve got.”

“You got it,” Pidge says with a familiar shiver in her tone, “he must have found a way to delay the space pocket and evacuated his ship—his readings are really weak, Shiro.”

“Just make sure there’s a recovery tank and a stretcher ready when I come back, I’ll take care of the rest.”

Getting Doc back in the castle takes a thousand years and no time at all. One second Shiro’s in the elevator to get Black, the next he’s watching the recovery tank close over Doc’s prone form and trying not to remember the sound of a body folding metal.

After that, there’s nothing left to do but wait.

***

For three days, Shiro moves from one place to the other with no memory of walking. He must keep up with his chores, somehow, because no one complains about late laundry and there’s no trace of settling dust over the Black Lion, but there’s no memory to it, no real sensation of having done any of it. Chores vanish into thin air with a faint smell of detergent and meals pass by in the blink of an eye, leaving a vague aftertaste of goo and not much else.

The rest of it leaves his memory without a trace, the same way his year in the Galra empire left him with nothing but phantom pains in his right arm and a purple haze to light the shapeless terrors of his nights. There are flashes, sometimes. Pidge, sitting next to him, talking...about her family, maybe. Coran fretting over the tank, Hunk with a plate of food. Keith, quiet and worried somewhere nearby. Lance, as far as Shiro can retain the memory, stays silent.

Allura remains in Command and the associated level.

Shiro, he’s fairly sure, doesn’t look for her.

***

Shiro’s translator beeps off and back on again with grating regularity, struggling to keep up with Pidge and Coran’s rapid-fire debate over the recovery tank, like the two of them are so in sync they don’t even need to rely on actual language anymore. It’s probably a good thing, in itself, because the translators may have done a wonderful job of picking up English in the past few months but there are still times when they’re not quite up to par with actually learning a language.

There are times when Shiro’s fizzles out entirely, stumbling over a word no one’s used in English yet, and he has to ask for clarifications until he can make an educated guess on the missing item. Those are the easy gaps. Other times, it’s a problem in concept: an object or an unspoken space rule science-fiction didn’t prepare the Terrans for, and then they have to sit around the table and talk around if for hours on end before they can decide which English words to mash together and wrestle into something entirely new.

(Shiro suspects Coran and Allura have the same difficulties, sometimes, but at least there’s only two of them. The debates are probably less heated in their linguistic corner.)

And of course, there’s no preventing those moments when both party hear the same words but don’t quite give them the same meaning. It’s not an exclusive feature of Altean-Terran communication, really, the difficulties they’ve all had in getting used to one another’s habits is proof enough of that, but the difference in language doesn’t help any of it, and they’ve had more than one close call where Shiro found himself smoothing down far more feathers than he’d ever have anticipated.

All of that in a group explicitly made of friend and allies. What’s it going to be like once Doc walks among them? It’s not like Shiro will be in much of a state to help anyone wind down, after all, and at least one member of Team Voltron is pretty dead set in hating the man no matter what. If he can’t find a way to keep things down somehow….

“You know it’s gonna be fine, right?”

Shiro doesn’t jump at Hunk’s words, but it’s a close call. For someone his size, the kid can certainly move unnoticed which, really, should teach Shiro a lesson about his expectations of fat people and their physical abilities. Right now though, he tries to focus on Hunk’s sympathetic smile over the sound of Coran’s clicking Altean and the occasional burst of Pidge’s colorful Italian vocabulary.

“I know,” he tells Hunk, even though it’s more of a hope than a certitude, “but I’d like to try and avoid the bumps in the road, and I don’t know if that’s going to be possible.”

Hunk taps at his translator with a definite air of commiseration, and Shiro swallows around the worried grimace he wishes he could share with someone. He doesn’t have a problem with the team per se. They’re all driven, well-meaning, and disciplined enough to rally together when the time calls for it...it’s just that, with Coran’s exception, they’re also all teenagers, with Allura’s nineteen years making her the oldest one.

Sometimes it’s hard not to miss the company of Terran adults, especially when the ones Shiro needs to see the most are currently painfully unavailable.

“If it makes anything better,” Hunk offers with a contrite expression, “you know you’ve got at least three of us on your side.”

“Three?”

Pidge and Keith will definitely try and welcome Doc into the ranks, Shiro has no doubt of that. He’s their best lead to Matt and Samuel’s whereabouts, and Keith has already said he regretted doubting the man. Shiro isn’t nearly modest enough to pretend it has nothing to do with Keith’s intense brand of loyalty, but it still means he’ll make effort and that, in itself, is a relief.

Hunk’s support, while appreciated, is more of a surprise.

“Allura hates his guts,” Hunk elaborates with an uncomfortable shrug, “I get why but I’m not sure it’ll help making the cohabitation easier. I’m not promising to be like, buddy-buddies with him, but I’ll be polite, at least. I just hope the translators have enough vocabulary to understand things that aren’t mostly war-related.”

“Oh, don’t you worry your little mind, Number Four!” Coran pipes up as the healing tank beeps to announce the end of a cycle, “if it comes down to it, words won’t be necessary to get informations out of him.”

“Hey, are you talking about sticking him in a pod to steal his memories?” Lance asks from where he’s sitting nearby. “‘Cause the last time we tried that I almost got vented out the airlock!”

“An inconvenient development,” Coran concedes with a nod, “but Number Five and I have since rearranged the pods in a closed circuits, we’ll just have to scan for viruses and—”

“No one is getting in a memory pod,” Shiro interrupts through the roar of blood in his ears and the rushing of his heart, “Doc cooperated with us up until now. If there’s a misunderstanding we’ll solve it.”

They should never have done it in the first place. There are many things to say about tearing information directly out of somebody’s brain and none of them are pretty. Matt, if he’d been here, would have had a lot of Italian for them when they suggested the idea, and Matt’s Italian generally doesn’t come out for nice things.

Plus, if Shiro never sees anyone sent out to a slow, suffocating death because he was too weak not to freak out again, it’ll be too soon. No pod is most definitely a better idea.

“Alright,” Coran agrees, surprising the rest of them with his easy shrug.

He’s about to say something else, Shiro thinks, when the healing tank finally swishes open. The Galra hand’s fingertips click against its palm when they move too fast and, to Shiro’s right, a quiet shuffle of boots signals Allura’s presence with more impact than a shout would.

He doesn’t feel guilty enough about feeding the distance in their rank not to put himself between her and a slowly blinking Galra, just in case.

Doc’s confused frown doesn’t even last a second, if that, but it’s more than enough for Shiro’s heart rate to pick up and a sheen of sweat break out all over his body. Shiro steels his spine against the urge to flee and makes himself look the man in the eyes, greet him with as even a voice as he can possibly manage.

“I must confess,” Doc breathes out as he takes his tank-appropriate garments in, “I did not actually expect to wake up.”

The silk soft tones of Galra drift through the air and into Shiro’s ear, weaving themselves in the more familiar mechanics of the translator’s artificial words. It brushes against his soul like spider net in the middle of the woods, catches him by surprise and makes Shiro wish he could just stuff his ears and be done with it, but he can’t.

He and Pidge are the only ones who actively want Doc in the ranks, and it wouldn’t do for a leader to leave at that delicate a time anyway. Besides, as bad as it may sound, he doesn’t really trust Coran to herd a group of teenagers on the right path...meaning he’s stuck here, making conversation.

Oh well. It’s hardly the first time he does something he’d rather not be doing.

He waits until Doc accepts a spare translator from Pidge and fits it over his left ear with a dubious expression before he says:

“In all honesty, we weren’t sure you’d wake up either, but Pidge and Coran can work miracles with the tanks.”

“Well, I’d give my life for our cause any day, but I can’t say I am disappointed to live longer.”

Behind him, Shiro feels Allura tense at the words, and he thanks the princess’ diplomatic training for her silence even as he hurries to steer Doc toward the room their prepared for him.

It’s under surveillance, it’s true. Allura insisted on it and Coran, as usual, took her side without question. Aside from that, though, it’s mostly the same as the Paladins’: a bed and a wardrobe to the left, a desk and a wide bookshelf to the right. Shiro has no idea who got the three parchment rolls out of the library, but he’s glad for it. At least someone made a bit of an effort.

“My room’s next door,” he tells Doc once the man’s had time to take the space in, “in case you need anything. Or you can ask the others, of course, we’re all—”

“Not to sound ungrateful,” Doc interrupts with a small smirk, “but it seems to me like ‘all’ isn’t quite the right word here.”

Shiro’s lips pinch together out of reflex more than anything else, but Doc doesn’t seem to mind too much. It’s a good thing, too, because Shiro may disapprove of Allura’s attitude but she’s his teammate and his leader. If he’s forced to chose between her and Doc, he know where his loyalties lie.

There’s a short pause, and then Doc asks:

“Does my voice bother you?”

Shiro blinks, flinches in a way that doesn’t have enough to do with surprise for his taste, and stands there without quite knowing what to say.

“It seems to me like it does.”

It takes effort not to step back when Doc steps forward with an appraising gaze, the Galra hand twitching into a defensive posture before Shiro realizes what’s going on. To the left, his own arm seems mostly lifeless, and there are razor blade in his throat when he manages:

“It’s not you, it’s—the words.”

They glide out of Doc’s mouth like water, trickling down Shiro’s spine no matter how hard he tries not to hear them. They’re softer than any language he knows, full of vowels and wind-like whispers, and they settle over his heart like poison, always a beat ahead of the translators’ droning tones.

Of all the things he’s forgotten in the past year-and-some, this is is the part he dreads the most.

“Of course,” Doc replies, lowering his voice like it’s going to help with Shiro’s problem, “I assumed your crew had removed it, but I suppose they don’t know enough about your anatomy to operate safely.”

Somehow, Shiro manages to blink through the ice in his veins.

“What do you mean? What’s there to remove?”

Doc frowns again, the movement enough to make the Galra hand twitch, but it’s gone just as soon and he doesn’t sound disturbed at all when he says:

“Zarkon’s empire cares little for those who do not speak Daibazeel, and new slaves are generally fitted with neuronal implants that allows them to bypass the learning phase. You had no difficulty using the language when we first met.”

There must be some kind of airlock in Shiro’s lungs, a trap of some kind that’s stuck open because between one second and the next it’s like he can’t get enough oxygen inside, blood withdrawing from his fingers until they tingle, and it takes Doc’s hand between his shoulder blades for him to realize he’s bent over and seconds away from feeling sick.

“Deep breathing,” Doc reminds him, “it’ll come back, just keep breathing.”

There’s nothing to do but comply here, and at least the early attention makes it easier for Shiro to get back into a normal breathing, but the attack still leaves him as worn out as an intense marathon session, with far more questions floating in his head than before. Zarkon’s doctors took his arm and tinkered with his brain, what else did they do? It’s not like ethics stop them—what if Shiro lost even more of himself than he thought? What if he’s condemned to spend the rest of his life finding new things to miss, new reasons to mourn and—

“Shiro, you are panicking again,” Doc warns.

Shiro squeezes his eyes shut, and tries to remember the breathing exercises he learned from Sam. ‘Just because you don’t see the problem about flying in a sardine box doesn’t mean they can’t be useful to you one day’ he said when he first suggested sharing his knowledge. Ha. If they’d only known.

“I’m fine,” he says once he’s done and back in control of his own body. Then, because Doc doesn’t seem convinced: “I’m functional. Sorry about that.”

“Don’t worry about it. I wasn’t too happy about the implant either, and the Blade had warned me about it.”

“Wait,” Shiro starts, latching on the new topic like his life depends on it, “you mean you were in contact with the Blade of Marmora before you joined Zarkon’s army?”

“Of course. Nothing else could have gotten me to work for that man otherwise.”

A moment passes where Shiro tries to reconcile what he just learned with his image of Galras...it’s not an easy feat. Allura is more open and aggressive about her issues than he is, but he’s still aware enough to realize he’s not very fond of Galras in general. Heaven knows the sight of purple fur is enough to get his heart racing, and if he’s really honest with himself he can admit that, up until now, he’s mostly pictured the Galras as unanimously falling in line with their leader until a small minority of them realized the error of their ways and started fighting back.

It’s stupid, really, to think this way when faced with a ten thousand years old empire that spans about ninety-five percent of the known universe, but then it’s not like human brains are incapable of irrationality.

“Sorry,” Shiro says when it becomes clear Doc guessed where his surprised came from, “I—”

“Oh, you’re hardly the only one,” Doc replies with a shrug, “and you do a very acceptable job of moving past that...but perhaps this is a conversation best postponed until we can calibrate your translators to accommodate my birth language and spare you the sounds of Daibazeel.”

***

“What am I looking for again?” Pidge asks, fingers flying over the keyboard with incredible speed.

Between the glasses and the haircut, she looks almost exactly like Matt, although knowing him he’d probably make a point of highlighting their height difference. Still, if it weren’t for the voice, Shiro could almost confuse them, and the sight of Pidge in that state of intense concentration hollows something in his chest...or reveals it, rather. Like a manhole you forget and fail to notice until the beam of your flashlight brushes over it and suddenly the void is all you can think about.

Shiro looks away before Matt’s voice can crawl back into his ears.

“A translator calibration form,” Doc repeats from a few feet away, just far enough to let Hunk see he’s not trying to spy, “I’m not sure what shape it’ll take, given how ancient the technology around here is—”

“Hey, that castle got us out of more than one scrap with Zarkon!” Hunk protests, a protective hand resting on the wall next to him, “Don’t trash-talk it!”

“I was not trying to ‘trash talk’,” Doc says, hesitating on the English words, “this castle is as old as Zarkon’s empire. It is a miracle you haven’t been defeated yet.”

“Let’s not fight about that,” Shiro intervenes when it looks like Hunk is going to try and keep defending the castle’s honor, “we’re trying to accomplish something here.”

“Right,” Doc agrees while Hunk flushes crimson and mumbles apologies, “if the forms look like what we use on Naquod, they should be interactive files with text in High Daibazeel and support audio recordings.”

Shiro watches Pidge squint at the screen and mutter indistinct words of Italian under her breath as she searches for something that’d match Doc’s description. If she’s anything like her brother, it’s probably just as well they can’t translate what she’s saying. It’d make Hunk’s look of surprise even worse, and Shiro would probably end up laughing in the poor guy’s face.

“Do you do that often?” Hunk asks after a moment, his own project set aside as he looks Doc up and down in open curiosity, “Calibrating translators, I mean?”

“Not recently, but I used to work with refugees before the Blade of Marmora assigned me to my post in Zarkon’s fleet. I mostly gave out signs-to-words devices, but the principles are the same.”

“Guys, I think I’ve got something,” Pidge says as she pulls a file onto her screen.

It’s Galra alphabet alright. Shiro hasn’t seen much of it since he woke up on Earth, but he must have gotten more than familiar enough with it during his captivity because the mere sight of it is enough to clamp his stomach tight. Doc looks the document over and nods in approval, prompting Pidge to ask:

“What happens now?”

“Well, all the languages we want to use are words-based so the process is rather straightforward,” Doc explains, Hunk leaning over his work to try and catch a glimpse of the form. “The form is a list of the most used words in High Daibazeel. I’ll read them out loud individually, then translate a number of prompted sentences and let the software work out the grammar rules from there. After that it’ll only be a matter of waiting for everything to load in the processors. We’re lucky these things still have a free slot or two. I doubt I would have been able to erase a language from their system.”

To Shiro’s surprise, it’s Hunk that asks about the slots rather than Pidge. Doc is in the process of explaining the ear translators ‘of old’ only had room for about half a dozen of languages each when Shiro’s endurance gives out and he barely bothers trying to look calm when he flees the room.

He almost runs into Keith when he reaches the corridor, heart skipping a beat at the unexpected encounter. It’s far too intense a reaction for something that happens a million times in a life, he knows. Then again, with the week he’s had, he feels like he’s kind of entitled to a little bit of a freak out, thank you very much.

“Are you all right?” Keith asks, concern carved into a line between his eyebrows.

Shiro hasn’t been anything even approaching all right for well over a year now. He was taken from one side of the universe to the other, enslaved, forced to harm one of his closest friends, amputated, shoved at the head of a team of teenagers with as much cohesion as a pile of dry sand, and told to save the universe because no one else was there to do it. And that’s putting it nicely. At this point, ‘all right’ is so far beyond his grasp he’s starting to question whether he’ll ever even be okay again.

He could, possibly, tell Keith all of that. It’s not like the kid ever asked for a sugar coated version of the story, after all, quicker to look at a problem and try to figure out a solution than offer reassurance...but the thing is, he’s just a kid. Yes, okay, he’s an eighteen year old soldier-in-training with more stubbornness in his little toe than the average human possesses in their entire body and yes, he would most definitely figure out a way to grab the moon if he felt it was required.

He still looks at Shiro like a little boy, though. Wide eyes and deep frown, and the shine of something pleading at the corner of his eyes, because he needs to know there’s at least one person in this solar system he can lean on. It’s fading lately, the budding team spirit of their group rubbing away at it in steady bits but it’s still there.

Keith wants the truth and so do Lance, Hunk, Pidge and Allura, but all still need Shiro to be okay, too. They need to know their commanding officer, or the closest approximation of it they could find, will be the good man in a storm and hold his stuff together long enough for them to get over their own terror and get back on track.

Shiro would do his best to meet those needs even if it weren’t the only thing holding him vaguely upright these days.

“I’m tired,” he admits anyway. There’s no hiding that much, not this close to dinner time, and it’ll make the next sentence more believable: “I’ll be okay though. Don’t worry.”

“Are you sure?” Keith insists with a twitch of his right arm and a hint of doubt at the crease of his mouth, “with Allura….”

“She’ll come around,” Shiro tells him with a little more conviction than he actually feels, “don’t worry too much about it.”

“She’ll have to,” Keith says, more of a promise than a statement, “you were right about him. She has to see that.”

Shiro allows himself to give Keith a grateful smile before he makes his way down to the training room.

***

Dinner is a tense, if not entirely stiff affair. Shiro has to divide his time and attention between Doc and Allura, occasionally getting sympathetic-slash-apologetic glance from Coran. It’s not even a surprise, it’s been clear from the beginning that Coran is here for the the princess more than the kids, and he’s been on Allura’s side more than theirs from day one. Given Allura’s current position, it’s a good thing that she has that kind of unwavering support.

It’s just that in situations like these, it’d be great for Shiro if he could have a little help in trying to make her see things from a different angle.

Fortunately, the most notable effects of that frankly unsuccessful dinner are that everyone goes back to their own thing instead of hanging out together like Shiro’s tried to get them to do about once a week, and it takes Pidge three times to catch his attention when he rounds the corridor.

She looks worried when he finally turns back to her, her gaze searching his face a little longer than he’s comfortable with before she looks at the ground and fiddles with her glasses.

“Doc kind of let slip why he wanted to calibrate the translators for Naquodi,” she says, one foot scratching at the ground, “and I just—I’m sorry I didn’t realize. What Daibazeel did to you, I mean. If I’d known I—”

“You’d have politely asked Zarkon to keep his minions quiet?”

The Galra arm hides behind the rest of him when Shiro gives Pidge a reassuring smile. Okay, so maybe it’s a little bit of an embarrassed smile because Matt’s comfort techniques aren’t the ones he’s naturally comfortable with. Time to get back to the things he actually know how to do.

“I’m sorry,” he says, reaching out to bump Pidge’s shoulder with his hand, “that was ridiculous. My point stands though. You couldn’t have done anything about it on your own. Not before you learned to read Coran and Allura’s alphabet, anyway.”

Besides, how could Pidge even have thought of that? Shiro’s year in Zarkon’s custody is still a complete mystery. Who would have guessed he’d come out of it with issues about a language he couldn’t remember? He certainly didn’t.

Pidge looks small, though, smaller than she normally does, and much too young. She’s blinking an awful lot, too, so Shiro catches both her shoulders and waits until she’s looking at him before he promises he’ll be okay.

“Besides, this thing with the translators will help. More than you know. See? You’re already doing everything you can. There’s nothing to feel guilty about.”

Pidge nods, trying to mask a sniffle by scratching her sneakers together, and Shiro sort of wants to scream. She’s just fifteen, for heaven’s sake, fifteen! She’s practically a child, still, what was the Garrison thinking? What was Allura thinking for that matter?

Well, alright, Allura was mainly thinking about an intergalactic war she had no one to fight with and a giant enemy ship en route to annihilating planet Aurus and the seven of them along the way. It’s not like Allura herself is much older than the rest of Shiro’s teammates anyway, and unless there’s a much wider cultural gap between Altean royals and Earth, she probably did the best she could with a truly dismal situation.

That doesn’t make anything any less terrible though and, not for the first time, Shiro promises himself that if there is a God somewhere, he’s definitely getting punched at one point or another.

“Sorry,” Pidge mutters again before rubbing at her eyes, “it’s just—sometimes I forget there’s a war out there. There’s all this cool tech and all these things to learn and Lance always talks like it’s a movie and I just—I forget, okay? But then someone gets hurt or we’re attacked or I think about my family and I—”

She cuts herself off with a hoarse, frustrated shout, and Shiro’s heart breaks when he realizes she’s already beyond saving. It’s not even a surprise, really, but it doesn’t hurt any less, because Pidge’s childhood is over.

It’d be too dramatic to say Katie Holt is dead, especially when it’s so easy to find her behind that strange Matt costume she built for herself, but she’ll never be the same again. Even if everything stopped now, if they could go back to Earth and forget Zarkon, forget Voltron, forget space altogether and never look at the sky again, the war would follow her home.

There’s nothing Shiro can do about that but try and do some damage control where he can.

“I’m fine,” Pidge protests when Shiro tries to pull her into a hug, “I mean, obviously I’m not, but I can handle it on my own.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt it,” Shiro promises with utmost sincerity, “but the good part about being on a team is that you don’t have to.”

He’s relieved when Pidge accepts a hug the second time around, and not just because he needed one too.

***

“I’m not the only one who thinks it’s kind of sad,” Lance whispers, almost too low to be heard over the quiet swish of a closing door, “right?”

Shiro doesn’t quite get it, at first, but then he takes a look around the room and finally spots Allura on the opposite corner of the recreation room, with ridiculously large headphones and a thick tome of Altean literature in her hands. She’s curled up into a tight ball, every line of her body tense and displaying a very clear ‘don’t talk to me’ vibe, and the sight of it shakes something loose in Shiro’s stomach.

“Pidge said the translators won’t be reading until lunch, at best,” Lance continues, still trying to pretend he’s not staring at Allura out of the corner of his eyes, “I don’t know what I’ll do if she keeps looking like a clam all day. It’s getting ridiculous.”

Ridiculous isn’t exactly the word Shiro would use. They’re roughly halfway through the first half of the day cycle, which means they’d usually be gathered in the rec room to talk about their mornings and the things they’ve been up to until now. Occasionally, Pidge gets a cat nap in those moments, but they’re generally a time filled with innocent conversations and too many voices trying to talk at the same time.

With the translators gone, however….

“D’you think it’ll still be that awkward when the translators come back?”

Shiro blushes a little when Lance catches him staring, but honestly he’s too surprised to care. Out of all the words he’d use to describe Lance, perceptive isn’t exactly at the top of the list. Probably wouldn’t even make it to the top ten, actually. He wouldn’t have thought Lance capable of thinking that far ahead, or at the very least not willing to.

Apparently he was wrong with that. Worse, judging by his lack of reaction, Lance expected him to be.

“I know I’m stupid,” he says with a stiff little shrug, “but even I can tell this is probably not about the book.”

“Probably not,” Shiro agrees.

They used to speak Russian between themselves in the beginning. Mastering the language is a requirement to enter the Garrison, a tradition that dates back to the very first days of humankind in space, and there are things that are easier to say in Russian, or at least more of a reflex, for some...not to mention that, in space, Keith wouldn’t have been allowed to use English at all. It’s easy enough for them to switch from one language to the other between one sentence and the next, and they didn’t think anything of it until the Lions told them they were messing with the translator software.

Now, they can either speak English or leave Coran and Allura in the dust, the only two speakers of their language left in the universe. No one else understands the rise and fall of Altean, the clicking sound of its consonants that sound like a fight in Shiro’s ears, or the shortness of its vowels that might as well not be there. Lance is right: this is probably not about the book.

Which goes to prove….

“You’re not stupid, though,” he tells Lance. Then, before the kid can protest: “You have terrible timing, and you need to sort through your priorities, alright? But someone stupid wouldn’t have noticed that.”

“I—don’t think Pidge would agree with you on that,” Lance manages at last, face red and eyes carefully kept away from Shiro’s.

Well, that one, at least, will be easy to deal with.

“Pidge’s brother was selected for a history-making mission at the tender age of twenty two and she called him an idiot all the time.”

It was all siblings’ teasing, and Shiro really hopes Lance will know better than to try and discuss that with Pidge right now, but he’s still heard Matt complain about it enough to last him for a lifetime, thank you very much. Besides, it’s not good for anyone to use the Holt family as a base for how smart they should be. It’s really just setting oneself up for disappointment.

“Was he?” Lance asks, “Before he—I mean—”

“Yes,” Shiro replies, even though the word hurts a little, stings at his throat and eyes in a way he has yet to get used to, “he is. It’s completely possible to be an idiot and a genius at the same time.”

Lance’s grin is the kind that announces a bad joke in the very near future, but the proverbial bell comes to Shiro’s rescue in the form of Coran, who all but dances into the room and over to Allura, barely waiting until she looks at him before he presents her a translator like it’s a royal crown. He’s babbling about something or another and looking disturbingly serious about it when Lance decides to repeat the words he just said.

Coran and Allura stare at him like he’s just grown a second head for a second, before Coran asks a question with a suspicious raise of his eyebrow. Lance parrots that, too,throwing an imitation of Coran’s stance into the mix, and grinning harder when it only prompts Coran to look even more flustered. By the third time this happens, Coran is about ready to pop a vein, and Shiro would tell Lance to stop if Allura weren’t trying to hide her giggle into her hand.

Pleasantly surprised at the turn of events, Shiro makes a note to praise Lance for it later on, and to pay more attention to the boy’s talents. It’s easy to feel inadequate compared to people like Hunk and Pidge who really know their stuff, and it won’t do to have one or their team members develop an inferiority complex. Besides, apparently Shiro himself could stand to learn not to judge people on one single criteria.

***

“It’s a good thing you finished calibrating the translator this fast, Pidge,” Allura comments while the teams settles down at the lunch table, “we never know what’s going to happen, and being unable to communicate for too long is strategically unsound.”

“Yeah, it’s a good thing Doc knows his way around these things,” Pidge agrees, “it’d have been a lot longer otherwise.”

Shiro, separated from Allura by Coran’s silhouette on his right, can’t clearly see her features, but the pinched silence that follows Pidge’s statement can hardly be interpreted as anything positive. Shiro bites on a sigh and, when the door opens to let the last guest in, he gestures for Doc to sit on the opposite side of the table, one seat removed from Pidge so he won’t take Hunk’s chair. It’s not that he wants to emulate old fashioned ideas about who sits where, precisely. No one realized that’s what was happening until Coran marveled that they’d finally learned to take their proper places at the table.

With the present situation, though, taking that kind of detail into consideration can’t hurt.

“Honestly,” Lance says when it’s clear no one else is going to break the awkward silence, “I think we should do that more often. Coran and I had a super interesting conversation in Altean earlier—”

“You are learning Altean?”

“Oh, yeah,” Lance replies, only glancing at Doc before he turns back to the Alteans of the team: “isn’t that right? It’s like Coran says: ‘Stop being so obnoxious!’”

Shiro’s translator beeps off, the electronic voice an odd addition to Lance’s words, and for a moment everyone looks kind of at a loss for words. Ironically enough, the joke worked much better without the translators, which is a first...Shiro is kind of considering where to go from there, when Pidge says:

“I’m impressed you pronounced that well enough for the machine to get it.”

“And I only heard it once, too,” Lance replies with a noticeable puff of his chest, “I guess I’m a language genius or something.”

“Probably,” Pidge agrees with a little too much enthusiasm to be sincere, “can you say ‘sono un ragazzo infantile’?”

Shiro, who has enough experience with Matt’s use of Italian to dread the worst, half expects Lance to trap himself by trying to keep the joke going. Instead, the kid’s face goes from boastful to offended as he yells:

“¡Hey! ¡No soy infantil!”

“Ma sei un ragazzo?” Pidge replies with the cheekiest grin Shiro has ever seen on anyone.

“Do you understand that?” Coran fake-whispers.

Shiro shakes his head while Pidge and Lance continue their slightly-stilted argument.

“I didn’t know Lance spoke Italian.”

“It’s not Italian, it’s Spanish!” Both Lance and Pidge protest in accidental but somewhat amusing unison.

Hunk comes comes bearing food before anything more can be said, but at least when Shiro glances toward Allura, he finds her a little less tense than before, which he’s willing to take as progress. He goes as far as giving Lance a discreet thumb up, guilt blossoming in his chest when the kid all but glows in response.

The peace, fragile as it may be, lasts until Hunk is done serving everyone and Doc winces as soon as his spoon enters his mouth, all put spitting the thing back into his plate.

“Is the food that bad?” Hunk asks with a puzzled look down at the serving dish, “No one’s complained about the taste so far….”

“Not at all,” Doc explains after a long drag of water, face scrunched up in distaste as he gestures at his spoon: “metal tastes extremely unpleasant to my species, but I assume you do not face the same problem.”

“No, we don’t,” Keith answers with a frown, knuckles oddly white around his own cutlery, “what do you generally use, then?”

“At home, I eat with my fingers, like everyone else. Zarkon uses stone cutlery.”

“Well we’re sorry we don’t have Zarkon’s silverware.”

Allura keeps her voice low enough that Shiro almost misses the words, and by the time he turns to try and catch her gaze she’s already flushing and looking down at the table, Coran’s eyebrows drawn together while he looks at her. It’s a relief to realize neither Doc nor the rest of the Paladins seem to have heard any of that.

It’s still enough to make the Galra arm twitch with the urge to punch the table and tell everyone to start behaving like reasonable adults, thank you very much.

“For a second there I thought I’d poisoned you,” Hunk’s saying by the time Shiro goes back to the conversation, but it makes Doc chuckle:

“Not at all. I’ve always been fond of Altean cuisine.”

“How would you know Altean cuisine?”

This time Allura doesn’t disguise her voice and. Well.

She has plenty of reasons to act the way she does. She’s young, stuck in a terrible situation with little to no adequate support system. She’s lost her family, her planet and any chance at what she’d probably consider a normal life in what felt like the blink of an eye, and she’s been at war with Zarkon’s empire ever since.

She’s seen Zarkon’s soldiers hurt countless of people, kidnap her, injure Lance and Shiro to the point where their survival was not a guarantee. And then, between all of this, she’s also had to listen to countless stories of the Galra army’s cruelty. It’s no wonder she has a hard time moving on...heck, for that matter, so does Shiro!

Really, it’s almost over the top when you look at it: he’s never going to be able to look at anything purple the same way again, his opinions on facial hair have drastically evolved since he was last on earth, and even the language makes him want to run out of the room and crawl into bed...and that’s before you even get to the piece of Galra tech he never wanted but probably wouldn’t have survived without. If there’s anyone on this team other than Coran and Allura who knows what the Galra can do, it’s definitely Shiro.

He’s trying to move past it though! It’s tiring and grueling and sometimes it leaves him shaky and on the edge of collapse but he keeps going because that’s what must be done! And yes, okay, maybe it’ selfish to want others to do the same. Maybe he should just do his job quietly without expecting literal kids to reason like the trained adult he is. He’s probably being unbearably entitled just for thinking this.

He still sort of wants to grab Allura by the shoulders and shake her until she stops thinking with her wounds.

“I was born on Naquod,” Doc explains with a stiff shrug, one claw tapping at the edge of his plate, “it’s hasn’t been economically significant for a long time now, but it is quite close to both Daibazaal and Altea’s former positions. When those two planets were destroyed, the Naquol welcomed Galra and Altean refugees alike.”

It makes sense, really. Whenever there’s a huge displacement of population, there’s always at least one party willing to provide a place to stay, but knowing that doesn’t leave Shiro any less surprised.

Judging by her face, Allura wasn’t expecting that, either.

“You mean we—there are other Alteans alive?”

“I...don’t think it would be fair of me to say yes, Princess,” Doc replies, picking his words with undisguised caution, “it has been several thousands of years since the Migration, and things have had quite the time to change. There are Naquodi of Altean heritage, but your people as you know it is well and truly lost.”

“Why would Naquod take refugees from both planets?” Lance asks with a frown, “Wouldn’t it put them at risk of a civil war?”

The rest of the table stares at him.

“What? I’m Cuban! You think we don’t learn what civil wars are like in school?”

Shiro mostly thinks the lot of them need to stop underestimating Lance, but that’s neither here nor there.

“I don’t think that would have been the refugees’ first idea,” he points out, “no matter what destroyed Daibazaal, the Galra who landed on Naquod would have just lost their planet, their roots, their homes—”

“There was that,” Doc agrees, “all the histories I’ve heard say the mourning ceremonies lasted for at least ten years...and besides, the Naquol hid the Alteans. Our two people didn’t make unsupervised contact until about three thousand years ago, when the Altean Naquodi started venturing to the surface more often.”

“You mean the Naquol kept these people hidden for seven thousand years? Why?”

“Zarkon, of course,” Doc shrugs. “My knowledge of other planets’ is widely informed by his school and therefore untrustworthy, but there are numerous accounts of Daibazeel assaults on Naquodi settlements, especially in the early centuries. They were looking for Alteans.”

“What for?” Hunk asks, but it kind of looks like he’s already figured the answer out.

“Extermination. I don’t know why the Alteans didn’t fight back—”

“There were outnumbered,” Allura scoffs, fists so tight Shiro can almost pretend he sees the blood recede from her fingertips, “Zarkon had just destroyed their planet.”

“Yes, our histories agree with you there. They do also state that an Altean fleet destroyed Daibazaal first, though.”

“That was different!”

The silence that follows presses against Shiro’s ears until they start whistling, heavy and harsh against his ribs. Across the table, Pidge, Hunk and Lance stare between Coran and Allura with identical gaping mouth, and Keith’s fingers cling to Shiro’s wrist tight enough to hurt.

None of that holds a candle to the burning shine of Allura’s eyes as she glares daggers at Doc, half raised out of her chair as if to jump at the Galra’s throat. She’s shivering too, and Shiro can see her shoulders rise and fall with each of her heavy breaths, but before he can make a move to try and deescalate the situation, Coran says:

“From your father’s perspective, maybe. I am not sure the Galras would have been quite so ready to agree.”

Allura, when she falls back into her seat, looks like a distressed rag doll. The room has fallen silent enough that Shiro wouldn’t even be surprised to hear a pin drop, and even Doc looks kind of uncomfortable with the sudden shift of events.

To Shiro’s right, Coran stares straight though Lance at something long gone. There are lines around his mouth Shiro never noticed before, and when he blinks back to the present and tilts his head forward, the usual extravagance of his demeanor vanishes under the weight of age.

“I believe it is time we had a conversation about this war and how it started,” Coran says. He follows it with a sigh and concludes: “We should have talked about this a long time ago, but I was not ready to face that particular disaster, and I used your inexperience as an excuse to indulge my sensitivity and pride...for that, I am sorry.”

Shiro kicks Keith in the ankle before he can voice what looks like a rather annoyed recrimination. They can argue about the past later, if they ever have that kind of time and energy to waste. Right now, though, Shiro agrees with Coran. It’s high time they learned how this mess started.

Before he can start talking, though, Allura turns to Doc and tells him:

“I think we would rather have this conversation in private.”

“No.”

Coran pauses to make sure no one moves but honestly, it’s entirely superfluous. He’s discussed some of Allura’s orders in the past, yes, but he’s never disobeyed them, let alone encourage someone to do the same. It’s more than enough to keep the Paladins riveted to their seats and their mouths shut.

“Doc trusted us with the existence of Altean survivors which, considering Zarkon’s genocidal intentions, would put them and any who allies with them in great danger. It seems natural to trust him with this...Zarkon knows what happened then better than I do, anyway.”

Allura’s wide, wide eyes turn to Shiro as if to ask for help understanding what’s going on, and he can’t do anything but offer a helpless shrug. He’d love to help here, yes, but he’s not responsible for Coran’s abrupt change in attitude, and he does want to know what’s going on. Besides, if Zarkon was at the heart of it from the beginning, there really is no reason to keep any of what they know a secret from a spy who’s been working against him for longer than he’s been in his army.

“Zarkon was the first Black Paladin of Voltron,” Coran tells Doc with a somber air.

The Galra takes the news with more stoicism than Shiro and the rest of the team first displayed, but then again he did spend who knows how long surrounded by faithful followers of Zarkon. He’s got some practice in controlling his face.

“He was already king of Daibazaal when Prince Alfor visited him as an envoy for his mother, Queen Aleen. I hadn’t entered royal service yet, and King Alfor never shared the details of their acquaintance with me, but I do know that it did not take long before their relationship progressed beyond professional necessity. Together, they forged solid bonds of diplomatic collaboration between Daibazaal and Altea before they moved on to negotiating treaties with other neighboring planets...three rulers in particular proved to be most cooperative, and rapidly became King Alfor and Zarkon’s friends.”

“Who were these people?”

Pidge’s leaning forward on the table, eyebrows drawn together like she’s afraid Coran will stop talking if they stop paying sufficient attention. That would be disastrous, both from a strategical standpoint and with regard to their still-tenuous team spirit, but Shiro almost wishes he would. After all, they already know the end of the story.

They know nothing good is coming.

“Gyrgan, Grand Councilman of Rygnirath,” Coran recites, eyes closing as he speaks, “Elected Princess Trigel of the Dalterion Belt, and—”

“Blaytz the Giant.”

Doc flinches a little when they all turn to look at him, but Shiro suspects him of doing that on purpose, to put them at ease.

“He’s a prominent part of our pantheon,” he explains with the slightest shrug. “According to our founding myth, the Galras were stolen from the mother planet by a fleet of creatures dressed in white. Blaytz saw this and gathered them all in sea foam. He brought them to Nalquod, plucked asteroids from the sky to make them habitable lands, and told them they were were free to stay on the planet until it adopted them. That’s what Naquodi means: the adopted people.”

“Well, ‘giant’ isn’t exactly the word I’d use to describe Blaytz, although he was rather tall even for a Naquol,” Coran says with a nostalgic chuckle, “but Naquol ships relied on magic more than achievable science to make their way through space, and one of their more remarkable features was the spherical, transparent force fields that made them look like giant bubbles. And of course, knowing him, he would have enjoyed the idea of being mistaken for a trickster god immensely.”

Coran, Shiro’s sure, doesn’t mean for them to see the wistful smile that settles on his face at the memory, but it’s impossible to miss nonetheless. It’s a sharp reminder that they know almost nothing about him, except that he is deeply devoted to Allura.

The rest of his life up until the Paladins eventually woke him up in the Castle of Lions is a complete mystery.

“Did you know him well?” Hunk asks, then blinks when Coran chuckles.

“I did, yes. I dare say I knew him better than I ever had time to know King Alfor. Blaytz got me a post in the palace, but I didn’t enter the King’s personal service for several years after that. Ah, the things that can happen when the right people think you’re funny.”

Coran’s face in that moment kind of reminds Shiro of his older instructors at the Garrison, the ones who’ve been doing this job long enough that they’ve lost all reserve about sharing their most outrageous pranks with the cadets. There’s always a certain sense of nostalgia hovering somewhere around their lips when they do.

Generally speaking, it does to them the same thing it’s currently doing for Coran: it makes them look more human. Or, well. More like a real person.

“Anyway, enough about me.”

“Yeah, let’s get talking about Voltron!” Lance exclaims, and grunts when Pidge knocks him in the ribs.

“It didn’t start with Voltron,” Coran corrects, “it started with a comet. It crashed on Daibazaal a couple of years before Princess Allura’s birth. No one had ever seen the metal that composed it, so when Zarkon declared his scientists too busy trying to save an already dying Daibazaal to study this new phenomenon, King Alfor reacted in true alchemist fashion and more or less begged Zarkon to let him dispatch a team to Daibazaal.”

“My father didn’t beg,” Allura protests—softly, yes, but with no less feeling for it.

“These are the words your father used when he told shared this story with me, Princess,” Coran tells her in a gentle voice, “‘A metal no one’s ever seen before and a dimensional disruption in one place!’ he said, ‘of course I begged Zarkon to let me study it’.”

“Alright, let’s pause,” Lance interrupts with furrowed eyebrows, “what’s a dimensional disruption?”

“I must admit an explanation would be useful to me, too,” Doc adds.

Truthfully, Shiro could use one as well. He’s fairly sure Matt’s explained something like that before, but it’s been a while and a lot of things happened since then. A little refreshing can’t hurt.

“We have a similar theory on Earth,” Pidge says before Coran can reply, “though we haven’t managed to confirm it for ourselves yet. Anyway, the idea is that the reality we live in isn’t the only one; that there is an infinity of realities coexisting next to one another without ever meeting.”

“What, you mean like parallel universes?”

“Yes, Lance, exactly like that.”

Sometimes, when Pidge starts explaining science to the others, she sounds so much like her brother Shiro wonders how anyone at the Garrison could possibly miss the relation. Evidently, Earth needs to strengthen its defenses if it wants to stand a chance against aliens.

“Isn’t the keyword in this theory ‘parallel’ though?” Keith asks from his spot next to Shiro. “How does a comet crashing punch a hole between two of them? Because if all we gotta do is dig, the universe had better start worrying.”

“Things aren’t quite that simple,” Allura says, rubbing at her temples with the tip of her fingers, “from what Pidge told me, your earth scientists discount magic in their research, right?”

“Discount magic?” Doc says with an air of deep puzzlement, “How does anyone discount magic?”

For the first time since they met the Galra, Coran and Allura seem to share a certain feeling of commiseration with him. Shiro isn’t sure how he should take the fact that they’re bonding over what seems to be a sizable amount of disappointment with Earth’s techniques.

“It is a rather foolish endeavor,” Coran agrees, “but most civilizations go through that phase in their primitive stages. To be fair,” he adds when he realizes the Terrans in the room aren’t too pleased with his assessment of their planet, “magic couldn’t fully explain what the comet was or how exactly it created the Rift. It did, however, allow King Alfor’s lead scientist, Honerva, to come up with a new source of fuel which King Alfor later used to power the vessels he’d built with the comet’s metal.”

“The Lions.”

“Yes, Hunk,” Coran confirms, “the Lions were, indeed, built with the metal found in that comet, and powered with the quintessence Head Researcher Honerva found in the Rift.”

Allura, when Shiro looks at her, looks small and wide-eyed, like a child in a crisis too big for them to grasp. She knew that Zarkon was Black’s first Paladin, she made that clear enough, but if her reaction is anything to go by, she wasn’t privy to all the details until now.

Shiro, selfishly enough, is kind of glad he isn’t in her shoes.

“Alright, so there was a big dimensional hole in the middle of Daibazaal, and Alfor made a bunch of kinda magic robots,” Hunk sums up with slightly more efficiency than eloquence, “I still don’t see how that equals conquering the entire universe and trying to wipe an entire planet’s worth of species out of existence.”

“You heard Coran,” Pidge says with a displeased twist to her mouth, “Daibazaal was already dying before the comet crashed there. The impact itself won’t have helped the planet’s structural integrity—”

“But the gravity variations surrounding a dimensional distortions would only have accelerated the process,” Hunk realizes with a gasp of horror.

“So, wait,” Shiro asks, “is this what caused Daibazaal’s destruction? The Rift compromised the integrity of that planet so much it couldn’t hold it?”

“But then it wouldn’t make sense for Zarkon to go to war over it,” Lance points out. “The planet was already dying, anyway. And even if the Rift made it faster, he couldn’t blame Alfor for the comet falling there, right?”

“But that reasoning is only valid if the Rift really was the reason Daibazaal exploded,” Doc remarks. “Altean Naquodi tell stories about a great Abyss poised to engulf the galaxy, and a fleet of heroes setting out to close it.”

“You know Altean legends?” Allura asks, visibly too exhausted to put much energy into the question, “How?”

“My great grandfather was one of them.”

The room erupts in a cacophony of protests, ranging from from ‘your species were from different planets’ to ‘do you really expect us to believe that’, and for a second there Shiro has to resist the urge to just get up and leave the room. He doesn’t of course, that would be completely irresponsible, but he does think about it, and wishes Matt were here to share a Look with him over all of this.

In the end, the responsible thing to do wins out, and he ends up getting to his feet to shout at everyone to stop.

“We all need to know what went down, and we need to hear it now, not in three weeks,” he reminds the crew with the sternest voice he can muster, “so everyone sit on your debates and let Coran finish.”

For a moment there, he’s afraid people are just going to keep staring at him and forget the important thing again. Fortunately, Coran is quick to recover once Shiro sits down, and he ventures:

“There’s… actually not much left to tell? The Naquodi stories, while they obviously took on some legendary qualities as time went on, align with what King Alfor told me. According to him, something did come out of the Rift, but Zarkon and Honerva refused to close it, even when the planet’s integrity was compromised beyond repair. Even after the creatures came back, Zarkon tried to trick the other Paladins into keeping the Rift open. In the end, he and Honerva fell in and perished. King Alfor ordered an emergency evacuation of Daibazaal, which the population was neither prepared for nor warned about. According to Princess Trigel, some of them had to be dragged out of their home by force.”

“Well that certainly explains why Doc’s people think the Galra were stolen from their planet,” Keith mutters, “what was Zarkon thinking?”

“Evidently, nothing good,” Allura states, steadier than she’s been so far but harder, too.

It’s not necessarily a reassuring sight, but Shiro can’t exactly find it in himself to disagree, not when Doc himself doesn’t have anything to say against it. It’s hard to form a definite judgment, of course: Coran’s story isn’t nearly complete or exhaustive enough to allow for that, but it does give the beginning of an explanation as to why the Galras agreed to follow Zarkon’s quest for Altean blood.

Earth, after all, has seen genocides that started for reasons far smaller than the seemingly-arbitrary destruction of a planet.

“As for his death, as you can imagine, it was only faked. My father and the other Paladins organized official funerals for Zarkon and Honerva, but when Councilman Gyrgan’s retinue went to retrieve their bodies, they were gone.”

“And yet,” Coran says in a subdued tone, the fingers of his left hand twirling at his mustache, “your father personally confirmed their deaths, and with magic to boot. If they faked their demise, they used magic techniques I’d never heard of before...if anything, if that was all part of their plans to go on and destroy Altea, they missed a great opportunity by leaving before their funerals.”

“Oooh, yeah!” Lance exclaims with a hearty chuckle, “can you imagine that? Suddenly, the king’s back from the dead! He could have just pretended to be a god or something and wham, people would have just flocked to his side to do his bidding.”

“This is no laughing matter, Lance!” Allura protests, “Zarkon attacked Altea three days after his supposed death—our people barely had time to flee! Do you have any idea how horrified we all were?”

Lance blanches, then flushes, and he stammers around apologies he doesn’t quite seem to know how to form. He didn’t mean anything by it, Shiro is sure, but he does need to learn how to think before he speaks. He can’t just go around putting his foot in his mouth like that all the time.

“Okay, Lance is a dunce,” Keith sighs in a familiar ‘duh’ tone, “but he’s got a point. Pretending to come back to life during his funerals would have been a great way to get people to do what he said and believe in him.”

“You are not seriously suggesting we assume he was genuinely killed then resurrected?” Doc asks, medical indignation written in all the lines of his body, “not even magic can do that. There has to be a rational explanation.”

“Well,” Shiro says, shrugging to soften the blow, “we do have a thing on Earth called Lazarus syndrome. I don’t remember the medical reasons behind it, but the main thing about it is that the victims of it appear dead even after extended testing, and then they ‘come back’ after a while. Zarkon and Honerva could have gone through the Galra equivalent of that.”

“Besides,” Pidge points out with a pained-looking cringe, “Zarkon has apparently managed to survive for ten thousands of Altean years. Unless you tell me that’s a normal life cycle for a Galra, it makes resurrection a lot more plausible than it normally would.”

For once, Shiro doesn’t have any reservation about joining in the collective groan of despair. As if their situation wasn’t bad enough! First they were a ragtag team faced with an army powerful enough to get the universe on lock down, then it turned out the enemy was the former Black Paladin, and now the guy is immortal as well as eternal? What the heck is wrong with their collective luck, seriously?

Really, though, having hope until now was hard enough as it was. It’s been an uphill battle for the start for Shiro. Yeah, okay, the kids have been doing pretty good, all things considered, but they’re just that: kids. They may not all have had the easiest life, but while losing family members hurts like nothing else, it’s still not adequate preparation for war, let alone in these conditions!

The weight of realization sinks into Shiro’s shoulders faster than he thought possible, drags him down toward the table, and the only thing preventing him from face planting right into the metal is the Galra hand that slots itself under his forehead, the metal surprisingly cool against his skin.

Around him, the room falls silent. He glances at the other side of the table under the fingers. At Pidge and the subtle shiver of her lips. At Hunk and the way he sways from one side to the other. At Lance, and the open mouthed gap of shock on his face.

Right, no. He can’t collapse. Not here, not now. If he needs to sit down and have a good cry, he’s going to have to wait until he’s alone for that because right now, his team is counting on its commanding officer to lead the way, and he’s not about to drag them down to the ground with him.

“Well, this is wasn’t nearly as encouraging as I’d hoped,” he says, knowing better than to try and pretend he’s alright after that poorly thought-out display of weakness, “and I really hope we get better news next time, but at least now we’re better prepared.”

“Really?” Hunk squeaks, “Because from where I’m standing all of this just sounded like one terrible piece of news after another.”

“We know how the war started. We know Zarkon was obsessed with the Dimensional Rift, and that it’s where he got the formula for his fuel from.” Shiro releases a breath for a while, relieved to realize exactly how useful Coran’s story might prove to be in the long run, “We know the Lions have only been in effective use for, what, nineteen, twenty years?”

“Twenty-one,” Coran supplies, his relief and hopefulness mirrored on the others’ faces.

“Twenty one years,” Shiro repeats. “It’s nothing. Completely insignificant compared to how long they’ve existed, and they’re magical semi-sentient robots. They may have evolved in all that time. Even if they haven’t, they may well have powers Zarkon isn’t aware of.”

“And if he doesn’t know about them, he won’t know how to counter them!” Keith grins beside him.

“Which means we’ll have an advantage over him!” Lance continues.

“We also know Honerva might still be alive,” Pidge adds with a wide grin, “maybe she can help us—”

“Honerva was Zarkon’s wife,” Coran cautions, “If she’s still alive, she might very well still be helping him.”

“If that’s the case, we know we can cripple Zarkon’s machine by taking her out,” Shiro counters, “that’s not something to be forgotten about.”

“We might also have the beginning of an explanation for Zarkon’s lifespan.”

Shiro, like the others, turns to stare at Doc like he’s grown a second head, but he barely even has to run a hand over his mostly-shaved skull before he takes it all in stride. If Shiro’s being honest, he’s more than a little envious about that.

“I told you earlier that I had Altean blood,” Doc explains with a little frown, “I understand your instinctive denial. It makes little sense for species coming from different planet to be reproductively compatible, especially when Altean Naquodi have adapted to their life underwater, but it is no less a reality, and more and more of our children have mixed ancestry with every cycle that passes. In fact, in my experience, Galras can reproduce with just about anything.”

“What do you mean, anything?” Shiro asks, trying to give himself time to process the news more than anything else, “How broad a range of species does that encompass?”

“Any species whose babies could conceivably fit inside a Galra’s body. So long as the mother is Galra, everything takes...and by everything I mean I once helped a Galra soldier give birth to a green octopus.”

“I’d never heard Galras were capable of that,” Coran remarks.

Judging by her expression, neither had Allura, but then that might just be a consequence of Alteans’ approach to sex and reproduction. It’s not like Shiro knows about these things, after all.

“Well that’s the thing,” Doc replies, one claw tapping at the edge of his plate, “I do not believe it to be a normal evolutionary quality. As you pointed out, it makes no scientific sense for a species to be somehow able to produce offspring with any and all occupant of the universe, let alone for said offspring to be just as capable of reproduction….”

“So you think it’s magic,” Hunk deduces, far calmer than Shiro would have expected him to be, “right?”

“Yes. I’m not a druid,” Doc continues with a tight pinch to his lips, “which is why I could never fully confirm this theory on my own, but if what Coran said about Daibazaal’s Rift is exact, and if it is indeed the source of Zarkon’s life span, then it is possible that its presence on the planet may have affected the Galras in deeper ways than anyone realized.”

“Okay but no one’s got proof for that, do they?” Lance points out, “I mean, isn’t proof supposed to be the basis of science or something?”

“Yeah but you gotta have a theory first, before you can prove it,” Hunk replies with a shrug, “so now we think that’s what might have happened, we can try and look for proof.”

“Where?” Allura cuts in with a sharp tone, “None of this sounds...entirely implausible...but we can’t exactly ask Zarkon about it can we?”

“But Zarkon isn’t the only Galra in the universe,” Shiro mutters, more to himself than anything else, “Coran, do you know where the rest of Daibazaal’s refugees were taken? Maybe they’ll have some kind of record we could get our hands on, see if they reveal anything interesting.”

Keith stiffens on Shiro’s left, a palpable aura of tension shrouding him in a way that makes Shiro’s hair stand up at the back of his neck. He makes a note to ask Keith about this at some point, see if he can understand where this sudden sensitivity to the Galras came from, but for now he pretends he hasn’t noticed. They’ve all got their hang ups, but they can’t afford to let them interfere with their mission, not matter what.

No matter how much it may cost them.

“As far as I know the refugees were taken in by the Paladins at first,” Coran states, vivacity coming back to him and making him look like the slightly bizarre man Shiro’s grown used to. “I have no doubt there will still be a number of Galra colonies in the Deltarion Belt... Rygnirath, on the other hand, may have sought to dispatch their charges to other systems, and there’s no telling what would happen to them or their records after that.”

“At least now we know to look for them,” Pidge says with a strained smile, “on top of all the other things we need to do and look for.”

Shiro, fully aware that she’s most likely thinking about Matt right now, sends her a sympathetic look. She doesn’t look like she buys it, exactly, but how could Shiro blame her? Just because he has to put his personal quests aside to make sure the team’s needs are still met doesn’t mean she’s forced to do the same.

It’s not like Shiro himself doesn’t wish he could just drop everything and go looking for Sam and Matt, after all.

“It’ll be slow work,” Coran tells them after a beat, “we don’t want to clue Zarkon in on our intentions, and if the Blade of Marmora is as efficient as Doc seems to believe we’ll have to rely on them to take any sort of of decisive action...but I do believe we may have the beginning of a plan to defeat him and dismantle his empire.”

“And we all know what that means, right?” Lance exclaims with a wide grin and something that comes pretty close to a clap, “right?”

“Lance—”

“IT’S PARTY TIME!” Lance yells before Hunk can finish his sentence, grabbing at the other kid’s arm and tugging him to his feet, “Come on, we’ve only got ‘til dinner to get it all ready, get a’cooking man!”

“You’ve still got chores to do!” Keith protests, but Coran’s laughter cuts him off before he can really get launched on his tirade.

“Let them be, Number Four, we may have figured out how to take Zarkon’s empire down. It is a cause for celebration.”

“But we still don’t know how to get rid of Zarkon himself!”

“We’ll have to do both anyway, won’t we?”

Pidge’s eyes are on the table when Shiro looks at her, but she doesn’t sound scared so much as weary in advance, and he finds himself echoing the sentiment with surprising intensity. They’re going to try and dismantle an empire that spans the entire known universe with eight people and more bravado than anything else...who wouldn’t be tired just thinking of it?

“I’ve felt it coming for a while,” Pidge continues, “I mean...it makes sense, right? It’s not like Galra soldiers are going to drop down on the spot when we kill Zarkon.”

“Pidge is right,” Doc agrees with a look at Coran, “you encourage them to celebrate, but they do not seem to realize the enormity of the task they have ahead of them. They react like children, and you do not discipline them for it.”

“That,” Coran says with a tired, sad smile, “would be because they are children. Puzzling things in any species, I agree, but there is something to be said about letting them act their age once in a while.”

“...The fate of the entire universe rests on the shoulders of a bunch of untrained children?”

Well. To Doc’s credit, he’s taking it with a lot more composure than Shiro would be able to muster in his position.

“We’re not children,” Keith tells the Galra, but there’s no heat behind it, “and we’ll learn. Unless you’ve got someone better to suggest as Paladins….”

No one takes him up on the challenge, but Shiro doesn’t miss the way Coran seems to jolt a little at the words, or Doc’s sharp glance at Allura. He’s pretty sure what that glance means, too. He’s been wondering about the selection process for Paladins ever since Allura assigned him to the Black Lion, and finding out about Zarkon’s history with the giant bot didn’t exactly help either.

There’s nothing to do about that right now though. If they meet someone who’s clearly better suited than them as a Paladin, they’ll do what they have to do. In the meantime, asking too many questions can be just as bad as asking too few, and Shiro has no desire to get on that path.

“In any case,” Coran concludes, a little too low to be sure he meant for Shiro and the others to hear, “none of them will be children by the time all of this is finished.”

He visibly shakes himself before declaring it time for a break, and Shiro has to agree. The past week has been even more exhausting than usual anyway, and today’s conversation may have been long overdue but that didn’t make it any less of a grueling process, intellectually and emotionally. Even Coran wasn’t left unaffected: he sits up straight, still, but his face is drawn and his shoulders sag, like he’s forgotten how to lift them up somehow.

Shiro himself would kill for a nap right about now but, barring that, he does need the war talk to stop for a while. It’s not like they can go hop around Galra colonies before they figure out how Zarkon tracked them to Doc’s base anyway, and even then it’s certainly not going to be a one day trip. Might as well rest get some rest while it’s still possible.

The others must have reached the same, independent conclusion, because Doc rises to his feet with a sigh and asks for directions to the library.

“The scrolls on thermoreactive Nidhesti camouflage were interesting,” he says with a slight smirk, “but I’m curious to see if the Altean texts will yield anything about medicine.”

He leaves the room at a sedate pace and, after a few seconds and some noise about wanting to use the training room, Keith follows him out of the door. For a moment there, Pidge looks like she’s going to stick around and try to continue the discussion, but her mouth falls shut with a little click, and she sighs.

“Well, there’s nothing much we can do just now,” she says with the tone of someone who’s trying to convince herself more than others, “I think I’m gonna go fiddle with the computers.”

It’s probably code for going over what little they have on Matt’s whereabouts once again, and Shiro wishes she could find something else to busy her mind with, but he doesn’t dissuade her. Anything’s better than aimless brooding, after all.

Coran is the next one to get up, back ramrod straight despite the clear signs of fatigue in his expression. Shiro expects him to just go do whatever it is he does in this free time, but instead the man gives him a solemn look, clicks his heels in front of Shiro, and bows deep enough to show off the top of his head.

“Please accept my renewed apologies for failing to discuss this matter with you any sooner,” Coran tells Shiro with stiff resignation. “We have no way to measure the time my neglect cost us, but—”

“Coran, please,” Allura cuts in, more anguish on her face than Shiro remembers seeing before, “stop. You kept quiet on my orders.”

A look of deep unease passes over Coran’s features, something sad weighed at the corner of his eyes, but he doesn’t protest. He turns to Allura instead, letting her know he’ll be in command central running a couple of routine maintenance protocols before he leaves without any of his usual flourishes.

Shiro resists the urge to ask for all of a few seconds before he caves in.

“You told him to keep all of that from us?”

“I was hoping to protect you from this mess,” Allura says, the tone of her voice indicating she’s fully aware she’s already used that argument. “How naive of me, wasn't it? I’ll send children to war but I won’t tell them friendships can break. What a magnificent leader I make.”

“It’s okay, Allura, you—”

“How can you tell me it’s okay?” Allura protests, pushing away from the table in a painful scrape of chair against the floor. “I’m the one who chose you! I threw you at the Lions, I pushed you all through entirely inappropriate training exercises…I’ve asked you all to put your lives on the line again and again without consideration for your ages, your lack of experience, or your legitimate wishes to get back to your planet and your families! Again and again, I ask you to sacrifice everything for a cause that wasn’t even yours—”

“Zarkon conquered most of the known universe,” Shiro points out, using Allura’s words from that fateful first day right back at her, “sooner or later he’d have stumbled on Earth and we’d have been involved in all this whether you were with us or not. Fighting with Voltron is hardly a walk in the park, but I assure you we’re far safer here than we would be if Galra forces suddenly invaded our homes.”

“Even so,” Allura counters, clearly unconvinced, “if not for me, you would all be with your families.”

“Not me,” Shiro point out, getting to his feet so he can stand in front of Allura and get his point across more easily, “If it hadn’t been for the Blue Lion and your help I’d be back on a Galra ship right now. I don’t remember a lot from my first time there but it’s enough to know I’m better off here. Pidge would be no closer to finding Matt and Sam.”

Shiro has to bite on a sigh when Allura looks up at him like she’s five and hurt and hoping for a magic band-aid. She may be worried about the children she sent to war, but she’s not that much older herself, and it’s not like she’s spared her own efforts.

“Look, I’m not going to pretend the situation isn’t terrible,” Shiro tells her with the serious, honest tone he’s found works best when he’s trying to comfort someone, “and it’s true you messed up in the beginning, but that happens to everybody. You had no resources, no support, no way of knowing what was going to happen and not only did you get all the Lions back, you got us out of there alive and with enough team spirit to form Voltron. You did great.”

“They’re too young to fight a war,” Allura sighs after a beat of silence.

Shiro smiles and squeezes her shoulder, relieved to see it eases something in her expression. She’s not settled by any stretch of the imagination, not yet at least, but she’s definitely calmer than she was a minute ago. At this point, Shiro is literally ready to accept any kind of progress.

“You’re too young to be a commander in a war,” he tells the princess, “none of this is fair for anyone, least of all you, but you’re still doing great.”

“I’m just doing my best,” Allura mutters, cheeks darkening with a flush.

Shiro’s laughter catches him by surprise, but he’s certainly not about to complain about it.

“If it makes you feel better, this is exactly what I’m doing. We’re all doing the best we can with what we have.”

Allura’s eyes close and hear breathing hitches a little, but then her shoulder unwinds under Shiro’s fingers, and the smile she gives him is wobbly but sincere.

“Thank you for your support.”

“It’s only normal,” Shiro replies with a little shrug, “what kind of captain would I be if my team couldn’t rely on me?”

“You’re right,” Allura agrees, though the beat that passes before she speaks leaves Shiro a little perplexed, “but I wasn’t only talking about just now. I know you disapprove of my attitude toward the Galra spy.”

She gives a bitter smile while Shiro tries to figure out what to do with his face. On the one hand he doesn’t want to use the same blank face he’s served to the handful of truly insufferable officers in the Garrison. On the other, he’s not sure he wants to let his feelings on the matter be too obvious just now.

“I know you want us to get along,” Allura adds, sitting back down with a sigh, “but I fear you may never have your wish. His people destroyed my planet.”

“His ancestors did that.”

“Where’s the difference?” Allura asks, without heat this time.

In fact, she mostly just sounds as tired as Shiro feels, and he’s not as graceful as he could be when he sits down in the chair next to her and asks:

“Did you have countries on Altea?”

“Countries?” Allura repeats, the English word a little clipped in her mouth, “the translator isn’t working.”

“They’re like...a surface of land with a certain name where people live. Sometimes they’ve got different languages and flags. Sometimes they go to war with one another.”

“Oh—yes. Yes, we had those. Why do you ask?”

“A little over three centuries ago, Keith’s country and mine were at war. Keith’s country sent bombs to mine—the most powerful weapon the Earth had ever seen. It scared people so much, no one’s used it again since. They killed many of my ancestors that day. At the same time, Keith’s country also rounded up some of its citizens and kept them in prisoners camps because they or their families had once come from my country. Do you think I should blame Keith for that?”

“I—why would anyone do that?” Allura asks, obviously disturbed by the very idea, but Shiro doesn’t allow himself to fall for the change of topic.

“Do you think I should blame Keith for what his ancestors did?”

Allura lowers her eyes. There’s no doubt she knows exactly what Shiro is getting at, but anger and fear and resentment are hard things to let go of, especially when one’s used them as reasons to keep going for a while now. Shiro doesn’t want to presume too much of Allura’s motives, but then he does notice she doesn’t answer his question.

“Around the same time period,” he adds, softening his voice to show he’s trying to educate rather than blame, “my country invaded several of its neighbors. People were massacred, kept under my ancestors’ domination, and mistreated for any sign of dissent. Do you think I should be blamed for that?”

He nearly misses it when Allura shakes her head, but what matters is the gesture, not its scope.

Honestly, Shiro doesn’t even blame her. Maybe he’s just biased, but he can’t bring himself to resent someone who was most likely trying to make sense of the world in a way that allowed her to move forward… and things always seem to make more sense when they’re clear cut.

Besides, it’s not even like Shiro doesn’t wish things truly were that simple, sometimes. His life would certainly give him less migraines if he could just know to shoot every Galra he comes across and know he’d made the right choice, at any rate. It’s never been how life worked, though, and trying to pretend it is only leads to people getting hurt for no good reason.

“I get it,” he tells Allura, because there’s really no denying that, “I really do. But people are complicated, and unpredictable. If we start assuming we know them based on what species they are, we’re no better than Zarkon. So you and I, we need to learn to look a Galra in the eye and see who they are beyond the shadow of those who hurt us.”

Allura sighs and runs her hands over her face before he manages a shaky:

“You’re right. If I’m going to advocate for unity and freedom, I cannot turn around and point fingers at an entire species...or at the very least, I cannot do that and refuse to be judged by the same token.”

“What do you mean?”

“Honerva.”

Ah. Yes, that makes sense. They have no indication that she’s still alive, let alone where she is if that’s the case, but she did marry Zarkon and appear to follow him in the beginning of his crusade. If she’s still by his side, that makes her complicit not only in the attempted eradication of the Altean species, but also in the oppression of a solid nine tenths of the known universe, the destruction of at least one planet, and mass incarceration and slave trade on a scale too vast for the human brain to process. Should Allura be judged on that basis, she wouldn’t last five minute in any corner of space.

“Well, the good news is, if she’s helping Zarkon, you definitely have the moral high ground.”

Allura’s giggle is out of the ordinary, but it is no less welcome for the way it devolves into nervous, perhaps slightly hysterical laughter. Their position still isn’t ideal by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s mostly okay.

They’ll just have to do their best.

#Voltron #VLD Fic #Takashi Shirogane #Shiro #vld shiro #Fanfiction

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grandedameaupair-blog · 7 years

Text

> Breaking In

Karkat Ampora

Kanaya? In your hive? Aw hell no! You didn’t invite anyone in, you don’t want anyone in!

You shoot upright in your slab, where you were previously asleep on top of the unmade velvet covers, tossing your palmhusk to the side. You find yourself feeling somewhat grateful that you fell asleep in last’s nights clothes, affording you the convenience of jumping straight into your shoes and darting off in a hurried march to find Kanaya, wherever the hell she may be. You look a disheveled mess; your thick, plum back hair is all over the place, still full of last night’s gel and your fine-thread periwinkle dress shirt is rumpled and half-untucked from your slate grey slacks, but general dishevelment isn’t exactly uncharacteristic of you so it’s highly unlikely to raise any eyebrows. Typically, you would prefer to get a night’s basic grooming in before getting into a certain shouting match with someone, but you suppose that is not a luxury you shall be afforded this evening.

You dash through the wide halls, of which there are very many, into the enormous kitchen, where Kanaya kindly assured you she would be rooting through your pantry—through your fucking pantry, without permission.

You slide in, the rubber of your oxfords squeaking against the tiled floor as you catch her in the act. Your face is flushed purple and you are short of breath (running all the way to the kitchen from the far end of the south wing in five minutes is no mean feat). Panting, you point a firm finger in her direction.

Given the circumstances, we’ll forgive you for failing to call forth your usual linguistic eloquence.

“Hey!! What the hell?!!”

Kanaya Leijon

It's not as if you'd made any attempt to hide from your unwilling host. You'd already started sweeping and dusting a few of the rooms the day before, albeit with not much sleep rewarded to you for your efforts. In your mind, you'd already made your presence known in the bare, dusted footprints on the floor.

So, of course, when Karkat comes running in to the kitchen, you don't stop to think that maybe you had done more than a little trespassing.

"Good evenin', Karkat!" You stand on the very tips of your toes and pull down what seems to be old containers of tea in very fancy pouches. You turn to him as you go through them, smelling them until you find one that isn't plain to your senses.

"I was just about to make us some food. Tell me, what would you like to eat? I'm not terribly familiar with some of this equipment, but I promise you that I learn with a freefowl's swiftness."

Then you turn to go back to your search, your long plum of dusted white feathers dragging on the floor behind you.

Karkat Ampora

“Kanaya!” You hiss, plainly ignoring her question. “How—“ you look over your shoulder, as if in the direction of the front door many more hallways down, out of breath, in a proper tizzy. ”How did you even get in?”

Kanaya stands before you, cool as a cucumber, composing herself as if you begged for her to be here and she is obliging out of the kindness of her own heart—nay, she exudes a calmness and presumptuous familiarity that would suggest she has been here, for always, since the dawn of time, longer than you have. You march past her and shoulder yourself carefully between she and the pantry, shutting the doors defensively and gazing in a kind of terrified awe. Your gate was locked. So was your front door. With different keys.

Your unintentionally half-popped collar flutters in the breeze of your exasperated, mildly horrified breathing as you look over your shoulder at her, hands still on the pantry doors, following her around the kitchen with your eyes.

“How long have you been here??”

Kanaya Leijon

"Oh, it wasn't that hard," you start, undermining your own exhaustion and the soreness of your feet. "You say that as if it were some impossible feat!"

When he worms his way between you and the pantry, you almost huff in disapproval. "If you wanted something else, Karkat, you could've said as much--"

And then he asks how long you'd been here. You stop, holding some tea and spices, and stop to actually think about it.

"... A day or so? Why, hadn't you noticed?"

His fear, although not completely overlooked by you, makes you more confused than anything. It's not as if you'd gone out of your way to hide from him.

Karkat Ampora

Your eyes are wide, thick eyebrows raised, flabbergasted. Surely, she must grasp that this is breaking and entering, right? She’s obviously just being obtuse… right? The not-so-nuanced nature of this situation cannot possibly be lost on her… right?? You will attempt to ignore her troubling insinuation that breaking into your hive is easy.

“No, Kanaya,” you say, your typically deep voice unusually reedy with exasperation. “I did not ‘notice’ that you were here. It is a very. Big. House.”

“Did you not think it appropriate to drop me some kind of heads up? One eentsy little good old ‘in the neighborhood, thought I’d drop by!’ One tiny shred of forewarning? Even, perhaps,” you gasp facetiously, “a request for permission to visit? Hmm?”

You are leaning forward in her direction as you speak to her, reflexively straightening out your unbuttoned collar and quickly nearing your wit’s end.

Kanaya Leijon

Unlike Karkat, you don't lean back. You keep your eyes steady on his. He seems stressed. Perhaps this hive is too big for him to keep track of who and what comes through. It's something you'll have to think more on later, as the conversation moves onward.

In a voice too calm, too certain, you answer him very simply: "It was the will of the spirits. I cannot deny them."

Karkat Ampora

Oh good fucking god almighty. Your hands reach up to meet your face and you drag your palms laboriously down your anguished expression, a painful groan suspended in the back of your throat.

“I am certain that seems to you a perfectly valid reason for breaking into someone’s hive, but I believe even the spirits’ all-mysterious will could have taken a momentary back seat to a simple request for audience.”

You sigh, leaning back against the wall, out of the way of the pantry. You have momentarily calmed down a bit.

“For fuck’s sake, Kanaya, it’s not like I would have told you no, but I like to have the option of controlling who comes in and out of my living space, be they friends or otherwise. I really shouldn’t have to tell you this, but privacy is not a resource I come by frequently, and I happen to greatly value the sanctity of my personal space.”

You stick your hands in your pockets casually. “How long are you planning on staying?”

Kanaya Leijon

A few nods of agreement from you doesn't change things for what they are: you were ordered to come here for him and you must stay for as long as you're told. That said...

"I hadn't been given a time, unfortunately." You set the spices and teas on the table and go looking through over nooks and crannies for what else might be offered to eat here. You find a lot of alcohol and fancy glasses more frequently than you find fresh food, which worries you more than a little bit. "I had said the spirits had decided I should come here, and I must stay until they deem fit to leave. It's quite a good deal out of my hands, as you can see."

Karkat Ampora

Your expression becomes troubled again in a hurry. What the hell is that supposed to mean??

“Kanaya, I-- No! I do not see that it is out of your hands! It is perfectly, neatly, one hundred percent within your hands to recognize and respect my fucking boundaries—which I do, in fact, have, although everyone around me seems to forget this!!”

You look at her pleadingly, voice thin, hands open and out before you. “I mean, come on, we’re talking like a weekend, maybe a week, here, right?? You haven’t—“ you laugh, partially from the absurdity, and partially from fear. “ You haven’t started moving your things in, right?” You say this as a joke, which you pray is exceedingly obvious. You are not sure if she would take that notion as a joke. You are never sure with Kanaya.

Kanaya Leijon

"Oh! Nope, everything I have is already here!"

You place a can of food into his open palms.

"I've already got a new alter set up in a room out of the way -- Don't worry, I've cleaned it, myself -- and I'm ready to get started with regular house duties as needed! I think I should work on the bottom floor first, then move to the front half of the lawnring, attend to the attict -- Oh! Do you have empty chests I can move things into while I clean? It's going to take some moving around to get this all as clean as it needs to be."

Karkat Ampora

You think your jaw may actually hit the floor when she says this. Your thin veil of composure cracks entirely.

”KANAYA!!! I DID NOT GIVE YOU PERMISSION TO MOVE IN TO MY FUCKING HOUSE!!”

“What is-- why would you—on what planet is moving onto somebody’s property without asking an acceptable thing to fucking do?!! Kanaya, I need time alone, I need to have at least one place in the whole world I can fucking be alone, you don’t understand what it’s like having eyes on you all the time, I can’t do this, you can’t live here, you can’t—“

Unceremoniously, your expression of sheer panic drops. You straighten back up, brows furrowed in dawning concern.

“… Kanaya, did something happen to your hive and coven?”

Kanaya Leijon

"It's not a coven ," you say in a disciplinary tone. "And nothing happened. Just. Spirits! Doing as they do. Who really understands those spirits, anyway?"

You... are lying. On your clothes, if Karkat looks closely enough, are signs of fire damage. Your skirt is blackened with char at the already torn edges, and blotches of your body can be seen still healing from the burns you'd gotten on that night.

"Besides, it doesn't matter! Things change, it's not like I'm not used to leaving places." Oops, there's a bit of bitterness there. "In any case, I'll make sure to stay out of your way! I have my own work cut out for me, now, so you won't even notice I'm here!"

Karkat Ampora

“I’m not—“ you falteringly begin, voice a mixture of exasperation and concern, “letting you fix my hive alone, Kanaya, you don’t have to do all this, I—“

Her chopped tone is telling. You may not be a psychic, but you are a socialite, and you know a bad lie when you see one. You’ve told plenty of them yourself.

You put your hand gently on her arm, and look into her eyes, the harshness of your tone fading away to gentleness and concern.

“Kanaya, if you need help, you can just tell me. You could have just asked and I’d be happy to give you a place to stay until you got on your feet. It’s a big hive, we could live in the same walls and be acres away from each other. You don’t have to fiddle with all this bullshit about fixing the hive up and obeying spiritual demands. You’re my friend, I’m not gonna let you just starve on the street. It’s okay to ask for something if you need it. No spiritual service obligations required.”

Kanaya Leijon

You blink at him, and let the words sink in just long enough to be annoyed with them before pulling away.

"I don't need help," you snap at him. "Nor can I simply ignore their whims. In either case, I'm staying and doing as I'm told to do, regardless of who takes fancy to my actions."

You're not very good at hiding your anger. As you search and take out food, your movements are much sharper, much quicker and less concerned with being gentle with the old hive and all it holds. Thuds, laps, harsh clinks and the stomping of feet surround you and your growing tension.

"Now. Do you want to pick what to eat, or not?"

Karkat Ampora

You could tell her that she has no need to be embarrassed, it’s a cruel world that does terrible things to the trolls in it and being affected by that is no shame; you could flip around and continue begging her to have the slightest bit of respect for the last remaining shreds of privacy you hold so very dear. Clearly, neither of these things will be productive. Kanaya is in a state of emergency, and this is her way of trying to deal with it on her own terms. You are no stranger to putting up walls of illusion in order to feel okay with the mess your life has become. You’ll let her have it. No need to poke at a wound that is clearly still fresh.

You would rather not have an intruder in your house, but clearly neither of you are in a comfortable situation here, and even if Kanaya decided to live out the rest of her days here you would still be left with hundreds of thousands more sweeps to wallow in your dourness and solitude after she was gone. You lean against the kitchen island and sigh.

“The master’s bedroom over the courtyard… I don’t like it. It’s too big for me, and it overlooks that creepy overgrown skeleton garden. Hate it, truly. I prefer the seaside guest bedroom. You can take it. Should fit all your stuff and then some.”

You turn around toward her and point. “But you don’t have to clean anything. I don’t keep servants, I’m not about to start.”

“You can pick the meal, I’ll eat whatever.”

Kanaya Leijon

A few tense seconds pass as you listen to him. After you recognize his resignation with your presence, you let yourself relax as you continue your fussing. The kettle you'd forgotten about completely until now gently whistles and quickly becomes impatient with it's own steam. After a quick rummage in the fridge, you take out some eggs and some questionable looking vegetables.

"I never said anything about being your servant," you sigh, a smile back on your lips, "but I do appreciate the more official offering of board. Though, I suppose now it's less a matter of being a servant and more a matter of keeping a home clean, hmm?"

You pull up a pan -- where'd you get that pan? -- and place it on the stove, quick to heat it and just as quick to put the eggs in.

"Tea will be ready in five, deary. Get yourself neatened up a bit, you look like you've had quite a day."

Karkat Ampora

“It’s fine,” you reply, ignoring that the movement of your breath is enough to kick up dust in all but just about five usable rooms of your ancient gothic manor. “It’s clean enough.” Your ability to wave off the depth of your stagnation is nothing less than impressive.

She waves you off to go freshen up not unlike a lusus telling it’s charge to wash their hands before a meal. You roll your eyes, in more a grumpy, friendly way than a truly exasperated one.

Privately agreeing that you do look a bit rough, you excuse yourself to do as she asks, but just as you walk out the door you poke your head back in.

“Hey,” you say, flatly as you can. “… Thanks for the meal.”

#narrative #long post #hosteriumfictus

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kuroko-no-drabbles · 7 years

Text

Chapter 2: Very

Lifestyle: College AU (Coffee Shop)

Part 2 of 3

Words: 1973

AkaMomo Centric

The Friday Sun had finally peaked over the horizon, glared down throughout the day, and was now starting to set. Momoi still hadn’t called Akashi and she was staring at his number on the piece of paper he gave her while lying on her bed.

“Look, just call the guy. You’re grinning like an idiot.”

Momoi puffed her cheeks at the other occupant in the room. Her childhood friend Aomine Daiki ended up going to the same college as her and would crash in her dorm on occasion. Today was one of those days.

“Oh hush, Dai-chan!”

Aomine was the first person Momoi told when she got home from work the other day when Akashi gave her his number. This wasn’t the first time Aomine had heard about this Akashi fellow. The guy sounded too good to be true with the way Momoi went on about him. There was no way a guy that was around their age was already as successful as he was. A quick Google search proved otherwise. The guy was top of his class in high school, graduated with multiple awards and honors from the university he attended, and landed a job at one the most prestigious companies in the region days after he graduated. Top that off with his rapid climb up to the top and the guy was basically a god. As an added bonus Momoi told him that Akashi told her he coached a children’s basketball team in his free time. Ever since he took over as coach his little team had won several championships. Go figure.

Aomine scowled. The guy still seemed too good to be true.

“I don’t really think he’s as great as you say? I mean, so what if he’s accomplished all of this stuff in such a short time? He’s probably an ass.”

Momoi gave a slight smile. Aomine wasn't jealous by any means, but Momoi was his best friend.

“You’re not worried about me, are you?”

Aomine snorted. “No. Why would I worry about a dummy like you?”

Momoi just rolled her eyes and then took a deep breath. “Ok, here I go.”

She dialed the number and the phone rang. A voice answered soon after. There was no turning back now.

“This is Akashi Seijuurou.”

His voice was professional, slightly tense.

“Aka- I mean, Seijuurou it’s me, Satsuki.”

“Oh, I’ve been waiting for you. It’s good to hear your voice, I was afraid you had forgotten about me.”

Momoi noticed an immediate change in his voice and blushed at his comment. He sounded at ease and genuinely pleased with the fact that she was the one who called him.

“Oh no, I just. . .” She trailed off, not entirely sure what to say.

“You just?” He echoed.

She had a feeling he was teasing her.

“I just lost track of time,” she settled on, even though it was only partially true. She had been nervous too.

Akashi gave a small laugh on the other line. “I see. So when are you free, tomorrow?”

“I don’t work, so we could meet up at ten tomorrow morning?”

“Perfect. I’ll come pick you up.”

“Oh no, that’s ok! The university isn’t far from the coffee shop so I can walk.”

“Well then we’ll walk together, how's that?”

“I couldn’t make you do that. . .”

“On the contrary, it would be an honor. Please allow me to be a gentleman on your behalf.”

Well when you put it that way.

“Ok,” she responded softly.

“Goodnight, Satsuki. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Goodnight, Seijuurou.”

The call ended and Momoi buried her face in her pillow, hiding the tinge of pink on her cheeks.

Momoi arrived a bit earlier than their designated meetup time. A lot earlier, actually. Fifteen minutes. She just, couldn’t wait. Akashi had texted her earlier that morning asking for the best meetup spot and she replied at the front of the dorms. She felt awkward sitting outside on one of the benches outside the dorm, her book bag next to her.. People kept looking at her curiously as they walked by. Not that she blamed them, she did stand out. Or at least she felt like she did.

She looked at the the clock on her phone. Only 3 minutes had ticked by. Of course.

Akashi pulled up to the school, parking his car. He noticed Momoi sitting on one of the benches and smiled.

I wonder how long she’s been waiting? He thought to himself as he got out of his car.

She looked nice today, with her hair in a low side ponytail and her sundress a light blue color. She was cute, truth be told.

He had approached the bench but she hadn’t taken notice, her gaze wandering elsewhere.

“Good morning,” he said.

She jumped slightly, surprised by the sudden voice and turned around. He finally got a good look at her face, making note of the shimmer on her lips from her lip gloss. She looked like she was wearing a bit of mascara too. Not that she needed it, her eyes were beautiful without makeup.

“Good morning! I’m sorry, how long have you been standing there?”

“Not long, don’t worry about it. How long have you been here?”

She shrugged. “Oh, not long.”

The look on his face told her that he new she was lying. He made no comment.

“Are you ready? Do you have everything you need?”

Momoi patted her book bag that sat beside her on the bench. “Yep, ready as I’ll ever be.”

Akashi offered his hand. “Shall we, then?”

Damn he’s smooth.

“Yes.”

“Satsuki.”

Momoi looked up at Akashi as he spoke. The two were walking on the sidewalk, almost arriving to their destination. Akashi’s voice was low, concerning.

“Yes?” Momoi asked, worried.

“I don’t want to alarm you, but there’s been someone following us ever since we left the university. Short blue hair, dark skin. If he follows us inside the coffee shop I’m calling the police.”

Momoi groaned. “Ugh, no, it’s fine. Dai-chan you idiot. . .” She mumbled the last bit under her breath.

“Do you know him?”

“Yes. That’s Aomine Daiki, my childhood best friend.”

She turned around and called out to him. “Dai-chan, come over here and introduce yourself and stop following us like a weirdo!”

His cover blown, Aomine caught up with Akashi and Momoi.

Momoi hit him on the arm as soon as he walked up. “You dummy, we thought we were being stalked.”

“Hey, just looking out for your wellbeing is all.” He turned to look at Akashi eyeing him up and down, a small scowl on his face. “You must be Akashi.”

Ugh, this guy really is perfect.

“So you know about me, then?” Akashi questioned.

“Yeah, Satsuki doesn’t shut up about the handsome patron that comes into work.”

Momoi blushed, hitting Aomine again. “Dai-chan!”

The corners of Akashi’s mouth curled up into an amused smile. He wanted to probe at Momoi more but decided he could do that when they were alone.

“Are you two more than just friends?” He asked.

Both Aomine and Momoi laughed and Akashi raised an eyebrow. “I’ll take that as a no?”

“Dai-chan and I tried the dating thing once, and it just didn’t work out for us. We’ve been friends for so long that it felt like we were dating a sibling.”

Aomine nodded in agreement.

“Dai-chan’s dating someone right now anyway.”

On cue, Aomine’s phone buzzed and he pulled it out of his pocket. “Speaking of which, I gotta go. Keep out of trouble.”

Momoi rolled her eyes. “I don’t wanna hear that from you.”

Aomine gave Akashi a once over, gave some sort of grunt in what sounded like wary approval, and left. Akashi raised an eyebrow in response.

“You two seem close.”

“Yeah, he can be a pain in my butt, but I love him.”

“Shall we continue, then?”

Momoi nodded in response and they continued on.

“Oh my god, have we been here for that long?” Momoi said, looking at the clock on the wall of the coffee shop. “I’m sorry for keeping you here with me for so long.”

The two of them had been there for a few hours already, the clock showing it was almost one in the afternoon. Akashi had been a great help to Momoi with her linguistics studies, and she was already beginning to understand it a lot better with his help. Studying had led to casual conversation and before they knew it, the time had just flown by.

“Nonsense, I’ve enjoyed your company. Since it is lunch time, Why don’t we go out to eat?”

Momoi shook her head. “Unfortunately I don’t have any cash on me right now. That’s why I didn’t get any coffee here.”

“Well then, it’s a good thing this is a date huh?”

“I- it is?”

“Well I hope so, otherwise I’m going to feel foolish for thinking otherwise this entire time.”

Momoi had been hopeful that their outing was a dating, but she figured it was wishful thinking on her end. She was pleased to discover otherwise.

“Lunch would be wonderful, then.”

“Perfect. I know of a good place close by.”

At lunch, in a restaurant that Momoi would never had picked on her own because it would eat her wallet whole, the two of them talked back and forth with each other, learning more than what they could during their brief moments together at the dry cleaners.

“Enough about me, though. What about you?” Akashi nodded at her.

“Oh I haven’t done stuff near as exciting as you, like travel or learn 4 languages. I’d bore you, I’m sure.”

Akashi rested his chin in his hand casually. “Try me.”

Momoi bit her lip at the way he stared at her. “Well I mostly do volunteer work in my free time.”

“Oh, where?”

“A few places. A children’s home, LGBTQ youth center, and a soup kitchen.”

“Sounds like you’ve got your hands full. You must major in counseling, huh?”

Momoi rubbed the back of her head. “I’m that obvious, huh?”

Akashi gave her a smile that said, “Of course. I’m curious why you chose to take a class in linguistics, though. It’s not really related much to what you’re trying to pursue.”

“It just seemed like an interesting class to take, and thanks to your help I think I’m going to enjoy it more.”

“It was my pleasure. More importantly than all of this, though, do you really think I’m handsome?”

The sudden question caught Momoi off guard. “I- what?”

“Your friend said you talked about the handsome patron that comes into work, often. Do you really think I’m handsome?

“I mean, yeah. . .” She said in a quiet voice, her face flaming.

Akashi hummed in response, his eyes playful. He was teasing her. Momoi wasn’t surprised with how smooth he was, but damn? Did he have to make her heart flutter this much on the first date? Momoi wasn’t one to get nervous or blush easily, so this was completely new for her.

“I’m sorry, I pushed too far, didn’t I?”

“No, not at all! I just, don’t normally get this flustered. . .It’s a weird feeling.”

“Well I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel nervous right now either.”

Momoi raised an eyebrow. Akashi’s demeanour said otherwise. “You are?”

He nodded. “Very. It’s embarrassing how sweaty my hands are right now. Keeping myself in check in front of you is a struggle.”

“You could have fooled me. You seem as cool as a cucumber.”

“Only outwardly.”

Momoi leaned forward slightly. “So, do you think I’m attractive, then?”

There was still a blush on her cheeks, but her eyes held a spark of mischievousness. Akashi leaned forward, the gap between them narrowing.

“Very.”

#mod kayla #kuroko no basket #knb fanfic #akamomo

11 notes · View notes

arrow-guy · 7 years

Text

Language

Original request from the lovely @lady-thor-foster : Okay thank you!! Could a request a Clint or Thor fluff piece where the reader is notoriously clumsy but she’s a damn good linguist (She knows more languages than Natasha honestly) so every time she trips she shouts in a different language? Clint or Thor find it hilarious but a little concerning so they start following her around to make sure she doesn’t injure herself? Just super cute and fluffy (female pronouns please!!) Thank you so much!

A/N: Alright, so this is my first Thor fic and I’m really excited about it, so I hope I’ve done him justice and that you enjoy what I did with the prompt!! (I’ll put translations for the curses at the end!)

Paring: ThorxReader

Word Count: 3744

Warnings: None

“This is (Y/N), she’s going to be working with us as our new linguistics specialist for a while.” Steve says as I walk it into the room.

“He says a while, but it could be permanent.” I add, plopping down in an empty seat around the conference table.

“Why do we need another linguist?” Natasha asks. “We’ve got me, haven’t we?

“We certainly do have you, but we need you in the field.” Steve explains.

“I’m more of a stay at home kind of girl anyway.” I shift in my seat and lean forward, resting my elbows on the table, “I’m not replacing you, Romanoff, I’m simply freeing you up to take on missions that are more your style. I’ll be staying here, deciphering important texts, while you’re off doing your incredibly impressive spy thing.”

“Alright,” Natasha nods, satisfied.

“Good,” Steve nods to Natasha before turning back to the group. “As I said, (Y/N) is going to be working with us here in the tower for the foreseeable future. She’ll be living here while she’s with us as well. ”

“Finally,” Wanda says, a smile stretching across her face. “Another girl in the tower.”

I flash her a smile. “Hopefully I won’t be too much of a disappointment.”

Wanda perks up, her posture straightening, a smirk settling on her features. “Something tells me you won’t be.”

A head with long blond hair pokes into the conference room. “Sorry to interrupt, but I have returned.”

Steve waves the man through the door. “You’re just in time, Thor.” He says.

Thor looks at Steve, confused. “I am?”

“We’ve got a new teammate joining us.” Steve explains.

Thor’s eyes travel over the table before resting on me. I shoot him a small smile and he grins back. “Hello, who might you be?”

“I’m (Y/N), the new linguist.”

“It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance, (Y/N).”

I offer a small nod. “Same to you, Thor.”

–

“Son of a bitch!” I yell, just barely managing to catch myself before falling flat on my face after catching my foot on the leg of a chair.

“(Y/N)?” Thor calls, poking his head around the corner. “Is everything alright?”

“Peachy keen!” I answer. “I just need to watch where I’m going is all.”

His brow furrows. “Are you sure?”

“Of course. Nothing to worry about!”

“Please be more careful, (Y/N), I would hate to see you harm yourself.”

“I’ll do my best, blondie.” I grin at him and pat him on the shoulder before backing away down the hallway. “The team is still on for pizza tonight, right?”

“Of course. Stark complains when pizza night is skipped. We have made an arrangement with the pizzeria to bring us pizzas each friday.”

I feel my eyes go wide. “Wow,”

“Indeed,” He grins widely.

“Alright, well I’ll see you later then!”

“Yes,” He nods to me. “I will see you later.”

I turn on my heel and cover my mouth with my hand to muffle my giggling. Straightening out my features as quickly as possible, I head down the hall to the elevator so I can meet Tony in the lab.

–

A loud thud echoes through the hallway followed by someone shouting, “Merde!”

Thor quickly gets up from his seat in the most comfortable chair in his room to investigate. No sooner has he left his room does he find the new linguist sitting on the floor in the middle of the hallway, cradling her foot in her hands.

“Are you alright, (Y/N)?” He asks.

She looks up at the blond towering over her and grins at him.

“Yeah, I’m fine. I just managed to stub my toe going around the corner there.” She points to the corner of the wall a little ways away. “Nothing to worry about.”

“Are you sure?” He offers her a hand up and pulls her to her feet when she takes it.

She nods in affirmation. “Entirely.” She tugs at the hem of her shirt and backs away a few paces. “I should probably head back to my room. There are a few files waiting there for me to translate them and I have to grab them before I can find the texts I need to start the translation.”

“Alright,” He nods. “Do be careful, (Y/N), I would hate to see you hurt.”

“Thanks for your concern, big guy.” She says, standing on tiptoe and placing a kiss on his cheek before shoving her hands in her pockets and backing away from him. “If you need anything, I’ll be in the library like always.”

Thor flashes her a brilliant smile and nods, scratching the back of his neck. “I’ll be sure to find you if anything comes up.”

(Y/N) laughs lightheartedly before turning on her heel and sauntering off down the hallway towards the library.

–

“Himmeldonnerwetter,” I hiss, sticking my right index finger in my mouth. I was a little too hasty in opening this file and slid the pad of my finger down the edge of the beigey-yellow cardstock of the folder effectively getting the worst paper cut imaginable.

“Did you just curse in German?” Thor asks.

I look up, surprised to see him sitting across the table from me. I didn’t notice him come him.

“I, uh… yeah?” He lifts his eyebrows, surprised by my answer. “What?”

He shakes his head and looks away from me. “It’s nothing. I just wasn’t expecting to hear such a colorful array of expletives from a mortal.”

“I’m a linguist, Thor. ” I laugh softly. “I know a lot of curse words.”

“I apologize, it was not my intention to misjudge you.” He reaches out and takes my hand in his, studying the papercut. “Is your hand alright?”

“I think so, yeah. Just need to go wash it off and put some neosporin on. The cut’ll practically be gone by morning.”

“Human medicine is strange sometimes,” He says softly, turning my hand over in his.

“In all honesty, the same could be said of Asgardian medicine.”

His eyebrows shoot up to his hairline and his posture straightens. “You know of Asgardian medicine?”

I nod once, resting my chin in my free hand. “I do.”

“How could you possibly have first hand knowledge of Asgard? Humans have not yet mastered interdimensional travel.”

“I may or may not have convinced an Asgardian man masquerading as a professor at my first university to take me with him when he went home one spring break one year. I’m sure your gatekeeper would remember it quite well.”

He smiles softly, amusement sparkling in his eyes. “Strange, Heimdall neglected to tell my father that a mortal had visited Asgard.”

“Mmm,” I hum. “Funny, I asked him to keep it quiet. Seems like he’s a bit of a rebel.”

He laughs and laces his fingers with my own. “You are different than I thought you were when I met you, (Y/N). You are so much more full of life than I expected you to be.” I lift my eyebrows in mock offence. “It’s wonderful, really. It seems that there isn’t much that surprises me on this world, but you do.”

I grin widely. “Oh yeah?”

“I truly mean it.”

“Well thank you, happy to be of service.”

He chuckles softly and brings my hand to his mouth, pressing a soft kiss to my knuckles. “Do be careful, (Y/N), I’d hate to see you hurt.”

“I’ll do my best. Can’t make any real promises, but I’ll try.”

He smiles widely, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “That is all I ask.”

–

“Barton!” Thor’s voice booms through the hallway, stopping Clint in his tracks.

He turns around slowly, eyes wide, shoulders raised almost like hackles. “Yeah?”

“Have you noticed that (Y/N) gets hurt a lot?” Clint’s shoulders relax and he raises his eyebrows, crossing his arms over his chest, almost like he’s inviting Thor to continue. “She curses in a different language each time she injures herself.”

“So she’s a clumsy linguist.” Clint shrugs. “Is there anything else that’s so incredibly groundbreaking that you had to almost blow out my hearing aids to talk to me about it?”

“It was not my intention to further damage your hearing, my friend.”

Clint shakes his head. “It’s fine.”

“As I was saying, I thought her clumsiness amusing and endearing to begin with, but I find myself quite taken with her now. I worry for her safety.”

“So you’re worried that your maybe girlfriend is too clumsy for her own good?” Thor nods and Clint barks out a laugh. “I hate to break it to you, but that is the opposite of a problem.”

“How do you mean?”

“You have an excuse to hang out around her and make sure that she doesn’t hurt herself.”

Thor frowns for a moment, mulling it over. “Perhaps you are right.”

“Of course I’m right. When have I ever had a bad idea?” Thor lifts his eyebrows questioningly. “Don’t answer that.”

Thor chuckles and claps Clint on the shoulder, pitching the shorter man forward. Clint barely manages to catch himself on wall before falling flat on his face and quickly spins around to face Thor again.

“Many thanks for your advice, Barton. I will let you know if I have any success.”

“Yeah sure, okay. You do that, big guy.”

–

“(Y/N)!”

I jump, startled by Thor’s loud voice, nearly dropping my bowl of cereal. I set the bowl on the counter and scrub a hand over my face.

“Good night nurse. You scared me half to death!” Laughing I smile widely at him. “You must be in a good mood today.”

“I am,” Thor nods and leans back on the counter. “I spoke with Barton earlier, and I believe he has helped me solve an ongoing problem of mine?”

“Oh? Care to share?”

“Not presently, but maybe in the future.” He casts his eyes to the floor, smiling to himself. “Would you mind if I spent the day with you?”

“You don’t have an assignment today?” I tilt my head to the side, folding my arms across my chest. “I thought Steve had everyone on a strict training schedule. Are you saying you’re going to skip out on Avenger practice, just to spend time with little ole me?”

“Of course. Specifically if it means spending time with you.” He smiles widely, eyes sparkling.

I bite my lip, trying to hold back a grin. “Alright, God of Thunder. What’d you have in mind?”

“I was hoping that you would accompany me in a brief visit to Asgard.”

“Wait,” I stretch a hand out to him, trying to get a handle on what it is he’s offering me. “You’re seriously offering to take me back? Even though I’m human?” He nods, taking my outstretched hand in his. “I thought my kind had no place on Asgard.”

“I think it could be argued that that is one rule that is meant to be bent.”

“I think you’re just throwing your hammer through that particular rule.”

“So you won’t come with me?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t go that far.” I squeeze his hand firmly. “Just let me finish my cereal and change and then we can leave.”

He laughs and lets go of my hand. “Very well. I will wait for you in my quarters.”

“Great! I’ll be there in half an hour.”

–

A soft knock sounds on the door frame. Thor looks up only to have his breath catch in his throat. (Y/N) stands waiting, just outside his room, in traditional Asgardian clothing. He can’t bring himself to say anything, only a few croaks that were meant to be words escaping his lips.

“Hey,” She lifts her eyebrows and waves a hand in front of his face. “You ready to go?”

He shakes his head, blinking rapidly. “I-yes, of course.” He clears his throat. “You look stunning.”

“Oh,” A slow blush creeps across her cheeks. “Thank you. In all honesty, I didn’t know if they would still fit.”

“When did you acquire Asgardian clothing?”

“Remember when I told you I talked a professor into taking me when he went back?” Thor nods. “Well, he had to help me blend in somehow, and he convinced his sister to lend me an outfit. I use the word “lend” loosely because she’s never getting this back.”

“I should hope not,” He says softly, still taking in her appearance.

“What?”

“Nothing,” He says hastily, wiping his hands on the duvet and pushing himself to his feet. “Shall we go?”

–

“It’s nice to see you again, (Y/N),” Heimdall greets Thor and I with a nod. “Though I did not expect to have the pleasure for a great while longer.”

“I can’t say I was expecting to come back anytime soon either, but it’s nice to see you again, too. We’ll be keeping this little jaunt a secret as well, right?”

He smirks. “Of course. Though I cannot promise that there is not another who will not make your presence known.”

“He wouldn’t dare.” Thor growls.

“What?”

“My meddlesome brother appears to have returned.”

“Well, we’ll just have to avoid him, now won’t we?” Thor looks at me, brow furrowed, expression worried. “I can talk myself out of almost any situation if we get caught you know.”

“She can,” Heimdall says, not bothering to look at us. “I’ve seen it.”

“Fine, but we leave if he so much as glances at you.”

“Of course, safety first. Now,” I gently take his hand in mine. “Can we please explore that big ass golden city? It’s been almost six years and, from what I’m gathering, I’ve got about three hours till someone finds us out.”

“Alright, but never let go of my hand.”

“Fair enough,”

He leads me out onto the bridge and pulls me close to his chest, a strong arm firmly wrapped around my waist.

“Are we flying there?” A low hum rumbles in his chest and he nods in affirmation. “Real covert.”

He laughs loudly. “Just hold onto me. I’d hate to drop you.”

“Would be a real shame.” He hums in agreement.

In an instant, we’re in the air, hurtling towards the shining castle in the middle of the city. He lands on a balcony facing away from the prying eyes of Asgardian citizens. Thor carefully places me on the ground, holding onto one of my hands to allow me to regain my balance before letting me stand on my own.

“Are you alright?”

“I’m great,” I answer, shooting him a smile. He grins back before leading me through the doors and into the castle proper.

The doors close behind us, seemingly of their own accord. I get about three steps away before I can’t go any further. Looking back, I find the skirts of my dress caught between the closed doors.

“Zajebiste.” I curse. “Um, Thor?”

“Yes?” He looks back at me tugging at my dress, trying to free myself, and rushes back to me, carefully opening the doors to make sure that the fabric doesn’t tear. “I’m sorry. I should have warned you. The doors tend to close rather abruptly.”

I smile at him. “I should be the one apologizing, don’t worry.”

He takes my hand in his, gently lacing our fingers together. “I will make sure nothing else happens to you.”

I nod and he leads us onwards. He points out little parts of the architecture that he thinks I’ll like and allows me to peek into different rooms, explaining what everyone is doing, and then running off, giggling like children, when someone notices us and tries to engage us in conversation.

“Thor!” Someone calls after us and Thor immediately whips around, hiding me behind his back.

“Fandral,” Thor greets the man with a nod.

“We weren’t expecting you back so soon, my friend.” The man Thor called Fandral stops not too far away from us. “Who’s that you’ve got hidden behind you?”

Thor sighs softly and guides me out from behind him. I look the man over, finding him handsome, but more ordinary than Thor.

“This is (Y/N). She’s a friend.”

“Where did you find her?” Fandral asks, sly smile firmly in place. “She’s quite pretty.”

I roll my eyes. “Gay kocken offen yom.”

“I beg your pardon?” Fandral’s eyes widen.

“I know exactly who you are.” Thor looks at me, eyebrows raised. “What? I read books on Norse mythology when I took a theology class in college. I know all about your little band of merry men, and I know exactly who thinks himself a ladies man.”

Thor snorts to cover up a laugh, amusement sparkling in his eyes.

“Another mortal?” Fandral asks.

“Yes,”

“You know how your father feels about her kind, Thor.”

“I know, which is why we are avoiding him,”

“And his brother,” I add. “We’d like to avoid him at all costs.”

“Of course, that’s a given.” Fandral looks to Thor again. “Do you plan on introducing her to your mother?”

“Not this time, though I’m certain she’ll find us regardless.”

Fandral nods. “Well, best of luck to you! It was a pleasure meeting you, (Y/N).” He takes my hand and presses a kiss to my knuckles, chuckling when I scowl at him and pull my hand away. “I do hope that we’ll be seeing more of you.”

“Depends on how this visit goes, I guess.”

“Indeed,” Thor smiles at me and takes my hand again. “How would you like to see the archives?”

“Are you kidding? That would be incredible!” I squeeze his hand excitedly. “Meeting gods is nice and all, but getting to nerd out in an alien library? That’s a linguist’s dream.”

“She’s a special one, Thor.”

“She is,” Thor grins. “Come, it’s this way.”

We bid Fandral farewell and Thor leads me down the hallway. He makes several quick turns and stops in the middle of the corridor occasionally to recenter himself. We walk quickly and I manage to get my feet tangled in the skirts of my dress several times. I would have fallen over every single time had Thor not been there to catch me each time.

Thor brings us to a stop in front of two ornate double doors. When he pulls one open, the hinges groan in protest, like they haven’t been moved in years, and Thor cringes at the sound. He pokes his head through the door and glances around before carefully guiding me through and closing the door behind us.

The smell of old paper and ink washes over me and I instantly relax. I close my eyes and breathe deeply, feeling an intense sense home among the rows of ancient texts. I can’t help the smile that overtakes my face and I turn to Thor, wrapping my arms around his middle and hugging him.

“I can’t thank you enough for this, it’s incredible.”

“Would you like to look around?”

“Well yeah, that’s what libraries are for, right?”

He chuckles softly and leads me down one row. As we walk, he points out different texts, explaining where they came from, occasionally pulling a book down and letting me flip through it. The texts are incredibly well preserved and the colors and illumination are gorgeous in each book I get to look at.

“You should have told me you were coming.”

“It wasn’t a planned visit, mother. If it were, I would have let you know.”

“Holy shit.” I breathe, my eyes going wide. “The All Mother. Holy shit.”

“Who’s this you’ve brought with you?” I can hear the smile in her voice and I slowly turn my head to look at her.

“This is (Y/N),” Thor places the book in his hand back on the shelf and steps aside so his mother can look at me. “She is a colleague of mine.”

“Another human, Thor?” She chuckles softly. “You certainly have an affinity for her kind, my son.”

“Her kind, yes, but she’s different from the rest.” When he looks at me, he smiles softly, an emotion I’ve never seen from him shining in his eyes.

His mother smiles knowingly and takes a few long strides towards us. She gently cups my face in her hands and looks into my eyes. “You possess a great knowledge within you.”

“I’m a linguist,” I say, mentally kicking myself for sounding so stupid. “It’s why Thor brought me here. He thought I’d be interested in the texts you’ve collected.”

She laughs softly and releases my face. “That is not exactly what I meant. You will come to understand with time.” She turns to her son. “You have chosen well.”

Thor nods to her and pulls her into a gentle hug. “Thank you.”

“Take care of her.” She says, her tone gentle but stern. “Be sure that your brother does not spot her.”

“Of course.” Thor nods once in understanding.

She smiles at us once more before slipping past us and out of the library.

“She’s amazing.” I whisper.

“She certainly is that.” He gently takes my hands in his. “I must tell you why I brought you here today.”

I shake my head. “Don’t worry, I already know.”

“You do?”

“Yeah, I heard you talking to Clint the other day. You weren’t exactly quiet.”

“Oh,” His shoulders fall and I place a hand on his cheek, making him meet my eyes.

“I think it’s sweet, Thor, I really do. I know I’m clumsy. The fact that you brought me here as an excuse to keep an eye on me and make sure I don’t hurt myself is hilarious, but no one’s done that for me before.”

“So you aren’t upset with me?”

“Of course not,” I see a shock of black hair stalking through the stacks and tug on Thor’s hands. “But I think we should get the hell out of here before your brother catches us.”

He barks out a laugh and gathers me up in his arms before running for the door. As soon as we’re out on a balcony he sets me down and wraps an arm around my waist before pressing a soft kiss to my lips.

“We’ll get permission to come back next time.”

“Of course. But first, we have to get out of here.”

“Oh, of course.” He grins widely at me. He lifts us into the air and angles us towards the rainbow bridge.

As we soar over the city, the sun is setting, and everything is perfect.

As promised, the swear word translations:

Merde (French): Shit

Himmeldonnerwetter (German): Heaven thunder weather

Zajebiste (Polish): Basically a casual way of saying “fucking awesome“

Gay kocken offen yom (Yiddish): Go shit in the ocean

I found all of these here!

Thank you guys so much for reading! If you liked the piece please reply to the post or shoot me an ask! Feedback would be greatly appreciated!!!

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217 notes · View notes

superfreakerz · 7 years

Text

Roommate Needed

I wrote this for Nalu Day but I never ended up posting it. It's my first oneshot, which I found harder to write than multi-chapter fics. But anyways, here is my first oneshot.

Rated T for language.

Summary: AU. Lucy is in need of a new place to live and stumbles across a sketchy flyer from someone looking for a new roommate. Little did she know at the time that the sketchy flyer just so happened to be one of the greatest things life had given her.

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Roommate Needed!

Lucy Heartfilia stopped in her tracks and snatched the flyer off of the library's bulletin board. The simple, white piece of paper with those two words and a single phone number at the bottom-right corner was like a gift sent from the gods. The girl had been searching for months for a new place to live that was in her budget- her low budget, mind you.

Her current apartment was in her budget but didn't have enough amenities. The place had no air conditioning, her bedroom was cramped, there was no on-site laundromat, and water, electricity, and trash were not included in the rent. Worse than that, however, was the fact that there was no bathtub. Instead, there was a standup shower.

But worst of all was her roommate. While her roommate, Brandish, was a nice girl that Lucy considered a friend, she was a terrible roommate. Brandish was a tad lazy, saving off chores and forcing Lucy to do all of them herself. She also skimmed out on some of the rent every other month. Too kind to say anything about it, the girl allowed it to continue and picked up extra shifts at the library to be able to pay for everything. But being a junior in college, extra shifts cut into her schoolwork. Having to end working overtime, she was left unable to continue paying for so much.

Which led Lucy to where she was now.

Lucy frowned and flipped the paper to the other side to see if there was any more information. Unfortunately, it was blank. The flyer only contained a phone number, not even the name of the person renting it out. Was it sketchy? Definitely. But hey, she was desperate. It wouldn't hurt to make a call, right?

After clocking out and saying goodbye to her boss, an old man named Crux, Lucy slung the straps of her backpacks over her shoulders and ventured outside. The sky was dark and full of twinkling stars, stars that she had loved staring at. She was able to see her breath as she exhaled due to the chilly air.

Walking home took about twenty minutes for Lucy- had it not been night, it would've been closer to thirty. The walking distance to the school was one of the few good features about her apartment. Admittedly, it did make her question moving. But there was always the bus considering it was free for students enrolled at Magnolia University.

With a heavy sigh, Lucy opened the door to her apartment, ready to see what kind of mess Brandish had made while she was gone. As always, dishes were piled in the sink and food was left on the counter. The scent of weed filled her nostrils, which wasn't surprising. Brandish was an avid stoner. Lucy was offered to take a hit when she first moved in with the green-headed girl but turned her down. She wasn't into all of that stuff.

Brandish, who was lounging only in her underwear and an untied robe, lifted a hand and greeted, "Hey." Her eyes were dull, just like her voice. Though she seemed uninterested, she was actually a curious girl. Nice but strange.

Lucy waved back and smiled. "Hey, Brandi. How was your day?"

"Boring. You?"

Remembering the flyer that she stuffed in her bag, the blonde replied, "Boring so far, but we'll see."

Lucy then excused herself into her room, closing the door behind her. As any other good roommate, she had told Brandish months in advance that she was planning to move. Brandish took it well, saying that she could have another friend of theirs, Cana- a spunky brunette with a love for all things alcoholic- to room with her.

Grabbing the flyer from her bag, Lucy dialed the number into her cellphone. Biting her lower lip anxiously, the blonde listened as the phone rang until finally somebody picked up.

"Hello?" someone called out. It was a boy with a voice that wasn't deep nor too high. In Lucy's opinion, it was just right.

"U-Umm, hi," Lucy stammered. "I am calling about a flyer posted in the library about a needed roommate."

"Oh, that's awesome!" the boy exclaimed. "When do you wanna check the place out?"

"Check the place out? Don't you think you should tell me a bit about it first? Your flyer wasn't too informative."

"Well duh. That's because you're supposed to look at it in person."

Lucy scoffed. "What if your place isn't what I'm looking for? That means I would've driven there for nothing. Just tell me about it first!"

"Alright, alright. It's got four bedrooms. One is mine, one is the Stripper's- pretty much Juvia's too since she's always here- and another is Lug Nuts'. We're looking for a fourth roommate since Erza moved out."

Lucy wondered about the strange names and thought about hanging up right then and there. After all, one of their aliases was Stripper. She wasn't sure she was comfortable living with someone known for stripping. Hell, she wasn't sure she was comfortable living with a guy in the first place.

"Umm, got anything else to tell me about it?" Lucy asked, temporarily pushing those thoughts to the side.

"There's two bathrooms. Stripper and Lug Nuts share one and I would share the other with you if you decide to move in."

"About the bathroom, is there a tub?"

"Huh? Yeah, there's a tub. Why?"

"Nothing. How is the living room? And the kitchen?"

"Living room is pretty big. And the kitchen is alright but none of us really use it much. We usually eat fast food."

"You eat fast food every day?"

"Well none of us know how to cook, so yeah."

Lucy decided not to mention that she was a decent cook. She didn't want to get the boy's hopes up when she wasn't sure she was going to move in. In fact, it wasn't looking too good at the moment. Perhaps if the price was good, she would consider it. But she doubted it would be enough to change her mind about living with a stripper.

"How much is the place anyways?" Lucy inquired, expecting the worst.

"Three hundred," the boy answered.

Lucy choked on her spit and began to sputter like a fool. There was no way she heard that right. "Three hundred?"

"Yep."

"What is that, per week?"

"What? No way! It's per month!"

Lucy nearly fainted from happiness. "I'd love to check it out! Can I come by tomorrow!?"

He gave a boyish chuckle, which sent a faint heat throughout the girl's body for some reason she couldn't explain. "Yeah!" He gave her the address, which she jotted down on the flyer.

"Alright! I'll swing by after my three o'clock class. Sound good?"

"Yosh! I'm all fired up!"

Lucy was about to hang up the phone before his voice called out to her again.

"Wait!" he shouted. "What's your name?"

"I'm Lucy."

"Got a last name to go with that?"

The girl frowned and chomped down and her lower lip. She was hesitant about giving the guy her full name when this whole thing could be a scam. "Nope, just Lucy."

The boy laughed, much to her relief. "Well alright then, Just Lucy. I'm Natsu! See you tomorrow!"

With a wide grin, she replied, "Okay! See you then!"

With that, Lucy squealed to herself and hugged her favorite plush toy, a snowman she named Plue. She couldn't wait to check out the apartment. But for now, she had a lot of homework that needed to get done.

"Do you want to hang out since you don't work today, Lu-chan?"

Lucy frowned apologetically at her best friend and shook her head. "Sorry, Levy-chan. I can't hang out today. I'm checking out an apartment."

Levy was Lucy's first and best friend since she enrolled in college. She was a petite girl with bright, messy blue locks of hair that stood out among the sea of students. Well, it would have if she wasn't hidden due to her short height. She was a junior as well, though she was majoring in Linguistics while Lucy was majoring in Creative Writing. She also happened to be one of the smartest students at Magnolia University and was offered a full-ride scholarship.

"You found a place?" Levy asked, a wide grin forming on her face.

Lucy mirrored the expression and nodded giddily. Reaching into her bag, she pulled out the flyer and handed it to her friend. "I did! Get this, it's only three hundred a month!"

"You're kidding! What's wrong with it?"

"I don't know, that's what I'm going to find out today. The guy that's renting it out made it sound nice though."

Levy stopped and stared at the blonde as if she had grown another head. "Whoa, whoa, wait. The guy?"

Lucy chuckled and rubbed the back of her head. She was hoping Levy wouldn't catch that. "U-Umm, yeah. Guy."

"You're planning on living with a boy!?"

"Don't say it so loud! And I don't know… We would have our own rooms, we would just share the bathroom. And he seemed the least strange of all the people that live there."

"Who else lives there?"

"Someone he calls Stripper and another one called Lug Nuts."

"That is weird. Is that where you're heading to now?"

"Yep."

Levy furrowed her brows and gave her friend a skeptical look. "You're going to a house where a boy and his friends are waiting? The house with the sketchy flyer? By yourself? When you're a cute girl?"

Lucy groaned and dragged a hand over her face. "What is this, twenty questions? Yes to all of them."

"Are you sure that's a good idea? You know what, you don't even have to answer that. I'm coming with you."

"No, Levy-chan. You don't have to do-"

"I'm coming whether you want me to or not, Lu-chan. So we can either argue all the way there or you can accept it now."

Lucy gave a long sigh in defeat. "Well then, let's get going."

The walk was longer than they expected, taking them a little over forty-five minutes. The bus would have to be her method of transportation if she moved there since she didn't have a car and didn't intend on buying one soon.

To Lucy's surprise, Natsu's place wasn't an apartment. It was a white, one-story house in a not-so-decent condition. The paint was chipping in many different spots, there wasn't much of a yard (only a small patch of grass in front of both windows), and worst of all, there was something that looked a lot like dried blood on the front steps.

Lucy and Levy shared a glance and contemplated turning around and never coming back. Yet the cheap rent had the former hesitantly approaching the door. Raising a loosely formed fist, she was about to knock on the green door when it was suddenly thrown open, revealing a boy that appeared around their age.

Lucy admittedly thought the boy was strange looking at first, solely because she had never seen a boy that looked like him. Despite this, her heart still thrashed around her chest at the sight of him because damn was he hot. With tanned skin, the boy stood a head taller than her and peered into her eyes with his own onyx orbs. A wide grin was etched over his face, revealing particularly sharp incisors. His clothes brought a bright red hue to her cheeks as he was adorned in baggy white pants and a weird vest with only one sleeve. He wasn't even wearing anything underneath and was showing off a perfectly chiseled set of abs. The strangest thing about him, however, was his pink hair.

"Yo!" the boy greeted. Lucy was immediately able to recognize his voice as Natsu's. "Is one of you Lucy?"

"U-Umm, that's me," Lucy answered, taking a step forward. "And this is my friend, Levy-chan. You're Natsu, right?"

"That's me! Wanna check the place out now?"

"I have two questions first," she replied. "First, were you looking out the peephole or something, waiting for me?"

"What? Of course not! That's creepy! I just have really good hearing."

"You're telling me that you heard us coming? Are the walls thin?"

"Nah. Metal Mouth and I have good hearing compared to everyone else. Ice Pick never hears it."

Lucy briefly wondered about the new nicknames but decided not to question it. "Okay, fine. Second, is this dried blood on the cement?"

Natsu chuckled and shoved his hands in his pockets. "Yeah. But it's nothing weird, I promise! Stripper and I just got into a fight. Happens all the time."

"Yeah, because that's reassuring."

"C'mon, Luigi! It's no big deal, just a couple of brawls!"

"It's Lucy!"

"Ehh, whatever. You guys coming in or not?"

The two girls shared a look before shrugging. They already came this way, they should at least check it out. They followed Natsu inside the house. The design of the home was simple. Upon entering, they were in the living room. Going forward led to the open kitchen and to the left were two doors, which Lucy presumed to be two of the bedrooms. On the right were two other doors, which of course were the last bedrooms.

To Lucy's relief, the house was well-kept. There was no trash lying around, no dirty dishes, and the place didn't smell like weed. Already a huge improvement from her own place.

"You have a nice place," Levy mused, strolling around the home to get a feel of it.

"Thanks," Natsu replied, giving the short girl a grin.

"Where's the nearest laundromat?" Lucy asked.

"There's one on-site so you don't have to drive anywhere."

Lucy wanted to squeal from excitement. Taking the bus to the laundromat was one of her least favorite parts of her week. Carrying a laundry basket on the bus was embarrassing for her and perverts would always unashamedly stare at her undergarments.

"Can we see the room?" Levy asked, her eyes shining with curiosity.

"Sure," Natsu said with a shrug. He led the way towards the door to the right closer to the kitchen.

The room was decent sized, bigger than Lucy's current room. She could picture all of her stuff here. Her bed would go in the corner and her desk would be pushed in front of the window. That way, she could use natural light when she worked on her stories. So far, things were looking good. There was just one thing left to see.

"Can I see the bathroom?" Lucy asked. Upon Natsu nodding, the girl headed for the door that had to lead to the bathroom. Opening it, she found that the bathroom had another door connecting to Natsu's room and was a little cramped, but it didn't matter because there was a clean bathtub to make up for it. She absolutely loved taking long baths. Whether she was happy, sad, angry, or just bored, she would take an hour-long bath filled with bubbles to relax.

"It's perfect!" Lucy exclaimed, clasping her hands together.

"Really?" Natsu asked, arching a brow. "It's just a bathroom. And the paint is chipping off the counter, you know."

"I don't care. There's a bathtub and that's all I need."

Natsu stared quizzically at the girl. "You're weird. I like it!"

"I feel offended even though it was supposed to be a compliment."

The boy laughed, patting her on the shoulder. "C'mon, I'll introduce you to everyone else."

Lucy and Levy followed Natsu back out and watched in horror as he banged loudly on one of the doors, doing the same with the next.

"Open up, losers!" Natsu shouted. "Come meet our new roommate! Oh, and her friend!"

Lucy didn't bother telling him that she hadn't decided yet. She had a feeling it would go in one ear and out the other with him anyways.

Both doors were thrown open, bringing Lucy out of her thoughts and revealing two other boys. One was bulky with long, untamed black hair. His eyes were a deep and somewhat frightening shade of red. He wore all black and his overall image was that of a delinquent, especially with the multiple piercings on his face.

The other boy was leaner rather than bulky and his skin was paler. He had spiky, raven locks of hair and had equally dark eyes. Lucy could faintly see a scar hiding underneath his hair and over one of his eyebrows. A large necklace with a sword pendant hung around his neck. However, the most prominent- and unsettling- thing about the boy was that he was clad in nothing but boxers.

With that, it wasn't hard to tell who was Stripper and who was Lug Nuts.

"Don't bang on my door like that, flame freak," the shirtless boy said, his brows slanted in annoyance.

"What's this about our new roommate?" the other asked, crossing his buff arms over his chest and giving a hard stare to both girls, making them feel uneasy.

Natsu gestured towards Lucy and said, "This is Luigi-"

"Lucy!"

"And this is her friend, Levy. Lucy is thinking 'bout moving in with us. Oh, the Stripper is Gray. And that piece of scrap metal over there is my cousin Gajeel."

Lucy and Levy gave small bows while the boys dipped their heads. The shirtless one, Gray, continued to glance between Lucy and Natsu. The blonde turned to her friend to see how she was holding up only to find her in an intense staring match with Gajeel. Much to her surprise, Levy's cheeks were painted red and her mouth parted slightly. It wasn't hard for Lucy to tell that her friend was smitten.

"So you planning on moving in, Luce?" Natsu asked, bringing Lucy's attention back to him.

The blonde thought about correcting him again but decided she didn't mind her new nickname. It was much better than Luigi, after all. Instead, she focused on the more pressing matter. Should she move in with them?

She didn't know much about them and there was still the possibility that they were murderers or something. On the other hand, the rent was insanely cheap, her bedroom was nice, there was a laundromat, and the place was clean. What else could she possibly need?

"You know what? I'll take it," Lucy said, beaming at the boy.

"Really?" Levy questioned, finally tearing her gaze away from the boy that had her heart beating wildly in her chest. "You aren't even going to take some time to think it over?"

"Nope. I hate my apartment. I like this place. What more is there to think about?"

Levy had plenty in mind but chose not to push her friend. If this was what Lucy wanted to do, who was she to lecture her? Besides, though she found the boys strange, she had a good feeling they weren't evil or anything like that.

"Congratulations then, Lu-chan!" Levy said, wrapping her friend in a tight hug.

"Thanks, Levy-chan!" Lucy replied, her smile growing even wider. "When can I move in?"

"Whenever you want!" Natsu answered with a fanged grin. He went to his room and retrieved the contract for Lucy's lease. It wasn't anything too serious. After all, he made it himself. The main point of the contract was that he reserved the right to kick her out at any time if she didn't pay the rent or was a terrible roommate. But he doubted it would come to that.

Lucy stifled a squeal as she signed her name in neat cursive on her contract. With that, she had finally found her new home.

The next morning, Lucy eagerly got ready for her day. She didn't bother showering, knowing that she was going to work up a sweat that day. Instead, she got dressed into a pair of gym shorts and a loose tank top, slipping her feet into some tennis shoes.

It was time to finally move out.

Everyone decided yesterday that they would come help. Well, Gajeel complained at first but complied once he heard Levy was going to join in. Lucy wanted to tease him, for it was so obvious he was just as smitten for her tiny friend as she was for him.

A knock sounded at the door. Lucy quickly finished tying her hair up into a high pony before rushing to answer the door.

Levy immediately tackled her into a hug and greeted, "Morning, Lu-chan! You ready to move?"

"Yep!" Lucy answered, returning the hug. "The boys aren't here yet though. I barely slept at all last night because I was packing all of my stuff into boxes."

"It's not good to do a lot of manual labor without a good night's sleep!"

"I'll risk it just this once. Do you want to see my room? It looks a lot bigger now that everything is packed!"

Levy nodded eagerly, prompting them to rush into Lucy's room. Just as she had said, her room did look bigger. Her bed was still there along with her desk, but everything else being packed up left more space.

Not only did the place seem bigger, it was also cleaner now. Lucy was a normally tidy girl, never letting her room- or any room in her apartment for that matter- become dirty. She always washed her dishes, she never left clothes on the floor, and she even dusted every other day. But of course, there were some nooks and crannies that went unbothered. But now that she was moving, she cleaned every inch of the place so that she could ensure her security deposit.

"You're lucky Gray has a car," Levy said, situating herself onto the other girl's bed. "Otherwise you would've had to rent a moving truck."

"I know," Lucy replied, leaning against the wall. "And I'm sure Gajeel is going to be a great help. Did you see those arms of his? I'm sure he could lift all of my stuff without any trouble at all!"

"Oh believe me, I saw them," Levy answered, her cheeks turning pink. "What about you? You weren't discreet when you were checking out Natsu's abs!"

"Oh please! I barely even looked at him!"

"Whatever you have to tell yourself, Lu-chan!"

Lucy was about to retort when there was a loud knock at the door. With an eager grin, the blonde rushed out of her room again and opened the door to find her new roommates standing outside, their hands shoved in their pockets.

"Yo, Luce!" Natsu greeted with a fanged grin. "Ready to move out?"

"Yep!" Lucy answered, beaming at him. "I don't have that many boxes. But I do have my bed and my desk. We'll have to disassemble it but I don't have the manuals anymore."

"I'm on it," Gajeel said gruffly, stepping past her and strolling into her room as if it was normal. He stared at Levy, a blush spreading over his cheeks. "Move it, Shrimp. Gotta take apart the bed and I can't do that with you on it."

"Who are you calling Shrimp?" Levy shot back, glaring at him and crossing her arms. If he wasn't so damn cute, she would be yelling her tiny head off for his rudeness.

Lucy chuckled nervously, glad that it didn't escalate any further. With that, the group went to work packing everything. Lucy and Levy handled the lighter boxes while Natsu and Gray carried the heavier ones. Gajeel worked by himself, taking apart her bed and her desk with some tools that he brought over.

It took them three hours, but eventually they had finally finished. Lucy's room was completely empty and spotless after some last minute tidying up. The group of five sat in a circle on Lucy's floor, digging into the sandwiches Lucy had made for them.

Lucy and Levy deadpanned as they watched Natsu and Gajeel stuff sandwich after sandwich into their mouths, chomping into them like animals. Lucy was glad she laid a blanket underneath them in case of one of them making a mess, for food was flying all over the place thanks to their barbaric behavior. Luckily, the supply of sandwiches ran out, putting an end to their eating-spree.

"So why don't you tell us about yourself?" Gray suggested, leaning against the wall as he cracked open his can of soda. Lucy blushed from the attention she received as everyone turned to look at her. And she wasn't blind. Her new roommates were no doubt attractive, all in their own ways.

"Umm, I'm a junior at Magnolia University," Lucy said, her eyes glued to the ceiling as she tried to think of anything interesting to say. "I'm majoring in Creative Writing… That's all I can think about."

Natsu laughed from beside her, gently nudging her side. "What about any hobbies?"

"Well I like to write," Lucy admitted, her face turning red. She was embarrassed about her works and was reluctant telling people that she liked to write mostly because they usually asked to read her stories. And that was terrifying in her opinion.

"I'm going to be her first reader," Levy added with a wide grin.

"What about you, Shrimp?" Gajeel asked. "What are you majoring in?"

"Stop calling me that! But I'm majoring in Linguistics."

"She is fluent in ten different languages," Lucy added with a light laugh. "She's a genius."

"I guess you could say that."

Lucy and Levy shared a quick smile before the former turned her gaze onto Natsu, her stomach tingling just from looking at him. "What about you?"

Natsu gave her a face-splitting grin. "All of us go to Magnolia University, too. We're seniors, though. I'm trying to become a pyrotechnician."

"A pyrotechnician!? Wait, do you do experiments and stuff in your room?"

Gray scoffed. "All the time. Sometimes he does it in the living room too. Why do you think the paint on the door is new but the rest isn't? It's because we had to paint over it thanks to Flame Freak over there leaving scorch marks on it."

"That's not safe!"

"It's fine, Luce!" Natsu said, patting her on the back. "My experiments don't go wrong most of the time!"

"That's not reassuring!"

"Well you signed the lease already, so."

"Oh no," Lucy whined, leaning her head on Levy's shoulder. "I'm going to die, Levy-chan. My body is going to be blown to bits."

"My experiments are the least annoying thing you have to deal with," Natsu muttered. "Gray always keeps the damn place cold so that his stupid ice sculptures don't melt and Gajeel is always working on car parts. So it's always loud and cold thanks to them! I only cause occasional explosions."

"Oh Mavis, what have I done now."

"You'll be fine, Luce! Now c'mon! Let's get your stuff back to our place!"

Moving all of Lucy's stuff to her new home took hours and multiple trips. All of the compartments of her bed took one trip, her desk pieces took another, and her mattress required a trip of its own. Not to mention the trip it took for her boxes. But after a day of nonstop work, she was finally moved into her new home.

"Thanks for all of the work today, Levy-chan," Lucy said, hugging her friend tightly. "Are you sure you're going to be alright?"

Levy nodded. "Gray is going to give me a ride home."

"What about Gajeel?"

"Well… He'll be there too…"

Lucy smirked elbowing her friend lightly. "You're head over heels for that guy."

"Oh hush," Levy replied, glaring at her friend. "I better get going now, I have a lot of studying to do."

"Okay. Goodnight, Levy-chan!"

"Night, Lu-chan!"

With that, Lucy closed the door to her room and headed straight for the bathroom. She made sure to lock both the door to her room and the one to Natsu's as well. With an excited grin, the girl turned on the faucet and let the tub fill with hot water and poured soap into it to create a thick layer of bubbles.

Once the bath was ready, Lucy stripped and submerged herself into the hot water, hissing as it turned her skin red from the heat. Though it stung at first, she preferred her baths to be scalding hot. It helped them last longer.

Natsu paused from tinkering with a new firework he had been working on and turned his gaze to the bathroom door when he heard the faucet turn off. It didn't take a genius to deduce that Lucy was taking a bath. He swallowed thickly as fire coursed through his veins and electricity jolted within him. His new roommate was absolutely gorgeous with her golden locks of hair, chocolate brown eyes, and a curvaceous body. He couldn't help but picture her taking a bath in the bathroom he just so happened to share with her.

Shaking his head, Natsu forced himself to get his mind out of the gutter. So what if Lucy was attractive? All of his female friends were attractive! Besides, he had only known her for barely over twenty four hours. He had no right to be thinking about her in such a way.

His new roommate wasn't just pretty, however. There was so much about her that had him curious to know more. She was funny, kind, and weird. Speaking of weird…

"She's been in the bath for half an hour now," Natsu thought, sporting a frown. "I have to pee."

He waited another thirty minutes until his bladder felt like it was going to explode. He hopped towards the bathroom, his legs crossed while he bit his lower lip in an effort to keep from wetting his pants. He hadn't gone to the bathroom in hours, having worked on his project the moment he helped Lucy getting her things.

Knocking on the door, Natsu called out, "Lucy? You good in there? You didn't drown, did you?"

"Of course I didn't drown!" the girl shouted back.

"Oh. Well you've been in there for an hour and I really gotta pee."

"It's only been an hour! You can wait a bit longer!"

"Only?" Natsu asked in shock. "Wait a minute, is that why you were so curious about the bathroom? Do you usually take hour-long baths!?"

He heard Lucy groan. "Yes, okay? I love taking long baths. My apartment didn't have a tub so this is my first bath in a while!"

"Alright, alright." Natsu returned to his desk and resumed working on his new firework. With a small grin, he wondered, "What kind of a weirdo takes hour-long baths?"

It had been two weeks since Lucy had moved into her new place and in that short time, many things had happened. She grew closer to her roommates, especially Natsu, and learned a lot about them. She had witnessed- and also broke up- many of their brawls, which had always ended in disaster. What was most surprising to find out, however, was that Natsu had a severe problem with boundaries.

Ever since she moved in and the two had gotten closer, Natsu was always inviting himself into her room through their conjoined bathroom. When she locked it, he climbed through her window. If that wasn't bad enough, the boy would even try to sleep in her room despite his room being teen feet away. Some days, Lucy was too tired to bicker with him and even let him sleep on the floor.

Natsu wasn't the only one with quirks, however. Gray stripped just about any chance he got and somehow lost every article of clothing he managed to remove. It was as if they were teleported to another world, never to be seen again. His girlfriend, Juvia, was also a strange one. She talked in third person and seemed obsessed with Gray. She had even referred to Lucy as her 'love rival' when they first met and was hostile towards her in the beginnning. Lucy couldn't figure out what happened to change Juvia's attitude towards her, but one day when she was watching TV with Natsu, Juvia came out of Gray's room and gave them a long look before beaming and saying, "Juvia understands now!"

Gajeel was weird as well. Though he looked like a delinquent, he was surprisingly into all things cute, which explained his crush on Levy. She was the epitome of cute. He also played the guitar and wrote his own songs, which would've been cool had his singing not been terrible.

Lucy had also met their other friends. There was Erza, the Student Council President with a strict ruling but caring heart. She used to be the person living in her room until she moved in with her boyfriend, Jellal. He was the Vice President, shy but kind. Then there was Mira, a girl that belonged in magazines because of how downright gorgeous she was. She was also sweet and a motherly figure towards the group, but also had a match-making problem.

Lucy rubbed her temples as she walked into the library to begin her shift. She had barely slept a wink because Friday nights were reserved for movie nights. To make matters worse, her longest shifts were on Saturdays.

Luckily, the first half hour went by smoothly. Nobody needed anything from her and all she had to do was restock shelves. The quiet atmosphere of the library was a perfect environment for her and she had plenty of time to properly wake up.

Another great feature of working at the library was that Lucy didn't have to do much, especially since she was Crux' favorite employee. She was allowed to read whenever there was nothing to be done or work on homework.

Now was one of those times. Lucy left the front desk where Crux was working and headed towards the fiction area, passing by working students. A head of pink caught her attention and stopped her in her tracks.

Natsu was sitting alone at one of the tables, fisting his hair as he stared at the work in front of him with his brows furrowed and a frown sporting his face. It was clear that he was having a hard time with whatever he was doing.

This was the first time Lucy saw Natsu on campus. Her lips curled upwards into a smile as she approached him. Natsu was easily one of her best friends and she wanted to help him in any way she could. Not to mention that she may or may not have developed a crush for him over the past two weeks.

Lucy knew that having a crush on her roommate wasn't a good idea but she couldn't help it. Natsu was kind, funny, and interesting. There was so much she wanted to learn about him and the best part of her day was returning home and finding him waiting in her room already. She couldn't explain her feelings well, for this was her first time having such feelings.

Lucy shook her head, forcing her crush to the back of her mind as she sat in the seat beside Natsu, who raised his head to look at her. A wide grin immediately graced his face.

"Lucy!" he exclaimed.

"Shh!" Lucy scolded. In a hushed tone, she continued, "We're in a library, Natsu!"

"Sorry, sorry!" he whispered back.

"So what are you doing? You look like you're struggling."

"Because I am. I hate English."

"English?" Lucy repeated, her brows skyrocketing. "Aren't you a senior?"

"Yeah," Natsu answered, rubbing the back of his head. "I know most people take it their first year but I saved all the boring stuff for last."

"You sure are backwards."

"Shut up."

"Why didn't you ask me for help? I'm majoring in Creative Writing, you know."

"Well I didn't wanna bother you."

"You aren't bothering me," Lucy said, giving him a reassuring smile.

"You sure?" Natsu asked skeptically.

"Positive. Now c'mon. Show me what you're working on."

The moment Natsu stepped foot outside the library, he shouted at the top of his lungs, "I'M FINALLY FREE!"

Lucy, who was walking out with him, slapped his arm. "Natsu! Don't yell so loudly!"

The boy only gave her a fanged grin. "C'mon, Luce! Let's go pick up some food before we go home!"

Natsu slid his hand in Lucy's, intertwining their fingers and causing the girl to blush as he dragged her to the dining hall. Natsu was grateful his scarf was thick enough so he could duck his face into it, for his cheeks were equally pink.

Natsu wasn't as dense as everyone made him out to be. In fact, from the first day he met Lucy, he knew there was something different about her. Hell, he figured that out from their phone call alone. Something about her made his heart race and his body warm. Why else would he have stayed in the library for hours pretending to be working on homework after Lucy had helped him? He was just waiting for Lucy to get off.

The two picked up some Chinese food before walking to the bus stop. Usually Natsu would walk home because he had severe motion sickness, but he didn't want Lucy alone at night. So, he sucked it up and suffered for the twenty minute ride.

When they reached their home, the two headed straight for Lucy's room. Gray was out with Juvia and they had no clue where Gajeel went off. Lucy had a feeling he was with a certain friend of hers, however.

Natsu and Lucy sat down on the latter's floor, happily munching on their friend rice and chicken. They placed Natsu's laptop in front of them and watched a new show on Netflix. Lucy leaned into his side with a peaceful hum- she had long ago found out that Natsu had abnormal body heat.

Once they finished eating and their episode ended, the two shut the laptop and leaned with their backs against the bed.

"So what's your deal with the scarf?" Lucy questioned, leaning her head back against her mattress. "I've never seen you without it and it's still technically summer."

Natsu swallowed thickly, playing with the end of his scarf. He knew the question was going to come up eventually. It always did. He glanced towards Lucy, wondering if he should tell her or not. It wasn't like it was a secret or anything, it just wasn't something he chose to talk about.

"It's from my dad," Natsu finally answered. He stared at his scarf and frowned. "It's the last thing I have from my dad. Well, that and this place."

Lucy's eyes nearly bugged out of her sockets as she turned to face him. "Oh, Natsu. I'm sorry, you don't have to tell me about it."

"Ehh, it's fine. Your room used to be my room, actually."

"Really?"

"Yep. My room was Igneel's. Gray's was Igneel's office and Gajeel's was a playroom. That's where I learned to read. My dad and I also played a lot of video games in there."

"He sounds like a great father."

"He was!" Natsu exclaimed, grinning at Lucy. She could see the grief in his eyes, however, as he continued, "He got sick, though. Before he died, he got me emancipated so that I didn't have to go into the foster system and left me this place. The house was already paid off, I just have to pay for utilities every month. Which is when I started renting it out.

"Gray was my closest friend and in a similar situation, so I let him move in with me. Then after high school, Uncle Metalicana, Gajeel's old man, passed too. So then it was just the three of us. Then we met Erza and she moved in." With another smile, he faced Lucy. "And now there's you."

Lucy nodded, blinking back the tears that welled in her eyes. "Now there's me." She placed her hand over his, giving it a gentle squeeze.

"What about you?" Natsu asked.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, you aren't the only intuitive one. You are secretive over your last name, even though we've been friends for weeks now. And we live together. Even when you sighed the lease, you gave it back to me so fast that it was obvious you didn't want me to see your last name."

Lucy gulped loudly, tearing her gaze away from him. "I-It's nothing."

"Does it have something to do with your letters?" Natsu implored, pointing to a box that was on her desk. "I didn't read them, I swear! I was just trying to find your story so I could read it but then I found those. Why don't you ever send them?"

Lucy frowned and answered, "Because my mother passed away when I was a little girl. I just write them to feel connected to her. And about my last name, it's only because my father is Jude Heartfilia, owner of the railroad company that dominates Fiore."

"That's it? I thought you were a secret assassin or something!"

"Of course not, idiot! Why the hell would I be an assassin!?"

"Well why else would you hide your name?"

Lucy shrugged, fumbling with her fingers. "Most of the friends I've made that knew about my father were only using me for his money. They didn't know that I cut off all contact with him the moment I moved out and that I don't get any of his money. My first genuine friend was Levy-chan."

"Seriously?" Natsu asked, his brows furrowing. "If I were you, I would've-"

"I know, you would've beaten them up. Not everyone is a fighter like you, you know."

Natsu smirked and ruffled her hair. "You could be if you wanted to. You have one hell of a kick."

Lucy giggled and turned her head to face him again. It was then that she realized how close they were, as their faces were only inches away. Her heart felt like it had pounded up into her throat and jolts of electricity sparked through her veins.

Natsu's eyes darted to the girl's plump lips and he couldn't help but lick his own. Swallowing his fears, he slowly leaned towards Lucy, his eyes beginning to droop closed. Before they did, he saw her start to lean in as well. He could feel her breath fan his face as their lips were just about to graze.

"Oi, Lucy. You got any paper I could borrow?" Gray asked, barging into the said girl's room. His eyes widened as his jaw dropped to the floor when he saw his roommates just seconds away from kissing. "Shit. My bad."

Lucy squeaked and jumped to her feet immediately, her cheeks set ablaze. Her head was a jumbled mess as she walked to her desk, looking for whatever Gray came in for. Which in truth, she didn't know.

Natsu growled, giving Gray the nastiest glare he could muster, baring his teeth. "You're a senior in college, Ice Dick! You don't have your own paper!?"

"I ran out!" the other boy shot back. "I didn't expect you two to be making out in here!"

"Salamander and Bunny Girl were making out?" Gajeel asked, popping into the room. "'Bout time."

"We were not making out!" Lucy denied, about ready to faint. Shoving the paper into Gray's chest, she gritted out, "Knock next time."

"Will do," the boy replied.

"I'm bored," Gajeel said. "Let's play some Call of Duty."

"I'm down," Gray replied, unbuttoning his shirt.

Natsu's eyes lit up and he jumped to his feet seeming to have forgotten about the attempted kiss. "Hey! Now that Lucy is here, we have an even number of players! Let's have a Call of Duty tournament!"

"You're going down!" Gajeel said, cracking his knuckles. "Gray and I will go set it up. Make whatever this is quick, lovebirds."

With that, the two uninvited guests closed the door behind them, leaving Lucy and Natsu alone. Lucy wanted to face-palm. She was just about to have her first kiss but it was ruined. Her eyes widened as she felt Natsu interlock their hands.

"C'mon, Luce!" he said, giving her a heart-stopping grin.

"I-I don't know how to play," she replied. Her heart thumped wildly in her chest and she couldn't help but drown in his dark orbs.

"That's okay. We'll teach you! Let's go!"

Natsu began to drag her out to the living room, never letting go of her hand. Lucy glanced at their joined hands and smiled, her cheeks rosy. So their first kiss didn't happen yet. That was okay. They had plenty of time in the world.

Four years later.

"Natsu! Let's go!" Lucy shouted as she slipped into a pair of black heels to go with her maroon dress.

"Alright, alright!" her husband called back. He left the playroom, hand-in-hand with their two-year-old daughter. He was adorned in a black tuxedo along with his sacred scarf. He left his pink locks the way they were, however, rather than gelling them back.

Nashi, their daughter, sported a pink ruffled dress and had her pink hair tied into pigtails.

It had been a little over three years since Gray and Gajeel moved out, deciding to find their own places with Juvia and Levy. Since then, Lucy and Natsu and tied the knot and got pregnant soon after, eventually giving birth to little Nashi. Lucy took it upon herself to turn their home into one that Natsu had once described when she had first moved in. The house that he had grown in with Igneel.

Gray's room had been turned into an office for Lucy to work on her novels. Gajeel's room was turned into the playroom while Lucy's was turned into Nashi's room. She now shared a bedroom with Natsu. And Natsu got the whole garage to himself to work on his fireworks.

"You two are going to make us late," Lucy muttered.

"Sorry, sorry. I was trying to teach Nashi some Call of Duty terms."

To prove this, their daughter smiled and shouted, "Camper!"

"See!" Natsu exclaimed, hugging Nashi tightly as proud tears streamed down his face. "She's learning so fast!"

Lucy sighed and shook her head. "Gray's going to kill you."

Natsu scoffed. "I'd like to see him try."

"It's Yuki's birthday and we're going to be the last ones there! C'mon!"

Natsu propped Nashi on his hip and led the way out of the house. Just as he was about to pass Lucy, he pressed his lips against her forehead and gave her a grin. With that, he headed to the car and began to buckle Nashi in. Lucy smiled as she stared at her family.

And just as she did every day, she thanked the heavens that she had called the number from the sketchy flyer.

#nalu #fairy tail #natsu dragneel #lucy heartfilia #ftfanfiction #roommate needed #oneshot

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