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chemdisaster · 1 year

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yet another fanfic for the cat dad au. hotguy admits his feelings for ariana griande on live tv. it all works out in the end

A crash sounds through the flat, followed by quick steps and the slamming of a door.

Sitting on the floor assembling a jigsaw, Ariana sees Kitten's ears perk up. A moment later, the eyes follow, snapping upwards, pupils dilating. She knows what it means. Scar is home, and Kitten is excited.

And so is she.

She walks out into the hall, ready to greet her friend, but there’s no one to greet. Instead, shoes are strewn on the floor, a jacket thrown haphazardly beside them, and Scar is nowhere to be seen.

Confused, she looks over to her left—and the door to Scar’s room is closed. That’s a thing that doesn’t happen often, so she’s immediately worried.

Peeking out from behind her legs, Kitten asks, “Where’s Scar?”

He sounds disappointed. Ariana crouches down to his level and curls her fingers around his head. Kitten immediately leans into her touch, closing his eyes.

“Why don’t you go and work on that puzzle, huh, kitty?” she says, gently scratching behind his ear. “Scar will come back and be amazed by the progress you’ve made.”

Nodding eagerly, Kitten brushes up against her a couple of times and races back to his jigsaw.

Standing up, Ariana smiles fondly before pausing to check her phone. She hasn’t touched it all day, too busy hanging out with Kitten to care about the usual stream of notifications, but clearly something happened at Scar’s work and it would be a good idea to try and find out what before she actually talks to him—

The smile slips.

As a public figure, she always has her notifications muted. Right now, she doesn't know whether that's a blessing or a curse, because her phone is blowing up.

Fumbling with her pockets, she fishes her earphones out and unties them as fast as possible, jamming an earbud into her ear and clicking on the first clip she can find.

She's met with the sight of flashing lights and gathering crowds, and immediately Ariana feels her heart skip a beat when Scar comes into view. Dressed as Hotguy, he's radiant as ever, and no amount of seeing him can stop every look from feeling as if it's the first one.

Shaking herself out of her lovesick thoughts, she tunes into the audio—just in time to hear a reporter ask, "Hotguy, what can you say about your relationship with Ariana Griande?"

Oh. Oh stars.

"M-my what?"

"Well, you're together, aren't you?"

A step back.

"I—I don't know what you're talking about."

"Come on,” the reporters smile. “It's clear from the way you look at her. You love her, don't you?"

"No, I—"

"Hotguy, your feelings towards Ariana have never been a secret. So come on, the public wants to know—who asked who out?"

Hotguy takes another step back, looking uncomfortable.

"Uh—no one asked anyone out. She doesn't—we're just friends."

"Friends don't look at each other the way you look at her. There's no way you two aren't dating."

Lights flash and Hotguy shrinks in on himself, hands coming up to fiddle with his necklace.

"No, we aren't—we're not dating. We're not."

"It's obvious you are, though. You can keep your secrets, Hotguy, but the fans know—"

"Look, you can say what you want about me, but don't touch her, okay?” he finally snaps. “It doesn't matter if I'm in love with her, she doesn't feel the same, and I'm not going to stand for you all spreading lies about her."

"So you do love her?"

"I—I—"

The clip ends there.

Despite her composed nature, a stutter goes through her chest.

She knew that Scar had a crush on her—it's hard not to pick up some things, with how flustered he acts around her—but this is different. Hearing Scar admit it, especially like that—and he said he loved her. The word he used was love.

Ariana doesn't think anyone's ever used that word for her and meant it.

Putting her phone away, she takes a breath to calm herself and walks up to Scar's door. Her emotions are all over the place, but she knows above everything that she has to talk to him—now.

Unsurprisingly, a knock yields no reaction, and after taking another deep breath, she spreads her fingers and pushes the door open.

Inside, it's empty, save for a Scar-shaped lump of blankets that makes warmth grow in her chest as she approaches it. Sitting on the edge of the bed, Ariana places a hand on the lump and it jerks, making a weak attempt to scoot away.

"Scar," she says softly, rubbing his arm.

For a moment, the lump is silent. Then a tiny voice mumbles, "I'm gonna drown myself."

Amused but also concerned, she asks, "Why would you do that?"

Scar doesn't answer. Instead, he burrows deeper into the blankets. Ariana gets the sense that he's trying to make himself look like he's not there.

If so, he's failing miserably. He'll never stop being there for her.

"Scar."

There is a long moment of silence, in which Ariana can feel her concern growing. Being forced to reveal a secret is never fun (even if it was only ever a secret to one person), and especially on live TV—

She tries her best to ignore the butterflies fluttering about her stomach. Looking at the man before her, she thinks she still fails.

Finally, the silence is broken, "Just go away."

"Why?"

Scar sits up, swivels around to face her and starts to explain, hands thrusting up and down, "Because I'm pathetic. And I know you agree, and so do I, I think so too, and it's okay if you leave."

Listening to his frenzied stammering, Ariana feels a tentative, trembling kind of elation start to blossom in her throat.

"I'd prefer that, in fact," Scar continues, unaware as her fingers start to shake, "it would be better than this, than pretending that you don't hate me when I know you do, why wouldn't you, after what you just found out—"

"Scar," she cuts him off. "I'm not leaving."

"But—"

Ariana grabs his face with both her hands and kisses him.

Scar freezes. Slowly, his hands come up to weakly grapple at her arms and she feels his entire body shudder in her hold. He doesn’t make an attempt to pull away, however, and so she stays as she is, mouth pressed to his, joy growing in her lungs.

The kiss lasts for only a few moments, but it might as well be eons before they break apart. Inhaling, tasting Scar’s breath on her tongue, she opens her eyes and looks.

Scar’s face is soft, eyelashes still half-lowered, previously unseen freckles standing out on his cheeks—by the stars, Ariana has never been more in love. Tucking a strand of hair behind his ear, she finally says, a tinge of humour entering her voice, “Maybe the reporters were right after all.”

Breaking out of the love-induced trance, Scar giggles softly, “You can’t say that.”

“I’m Ariana Griande, I can say whatever I want.”

“Yeah,” he breathes, staring unabashedly at her lips. “You can.”

Ariana goes to kiss him again, but he catches her wrists in his hands.

“You’re sure?” he asks, and suddenly he looks painfully uncertain. She knows that Scar doesn’t think he deserves anything good, and it’s clear that he’s having trouble believing that this is real.

She’ll do whatever it takes to disprove him of that notion until it may as well have never existed.

“I’m sure.”

Scar relaxes and presses his forehead to hers. She wants to feel his lips on hers again, but she leans closer to him and contents herself with the heat of his breath against her open mouth, the pressure of his hands that come to settle on her waist.

A soft purring reaches her ears and she smiles. Kitten must be delighted.

And stars, so is she.

#my first time writing romance #also i was miserable for half of this so if it's not as good as my other works then yeah #two reasons #my writing #gtws #gtwscar #goodtimeswithscar #grian #ariana griande #hotguy #hotguy scar #i adore hotguy on another level #scarian #desert duo #scariana #hermitshipping #cat dad au #scariande

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radioactivepeasant · 1 year

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Fic Prompts: Snippet Thursday

We return to the Gremlinverse, a bit after Daxter has been rescued because I'm not done with that part yet. Long post incoming.

"Jak?" Damas paused in the hold of the air train and looked down with confusion. "...what are you doing?"

The boy sat with his eyes tightly shut, face scrunched up in concentration. In his hands he held Damas’s staff.

"I'm trying to remember something," he grunted.

A pang spasmed through Damas’s heart, and he winced. Jak's memories -- or lack thereof -- seemed to be becoming an increasing source of insecurity to him.

Taking care to broadcast his movements, Damas crossed the hold to sit beside the boy on the bench seat.

"Don't try to force them," he cautioned, "Let your memories flow at their own pace."

Jak opened his eyes and scoffed. "Why can't I do this?! Mar can remember, so why can't I?!"

He wanted so badly to have the same connections as Mar. To be able to point to a specific place and say "this is where my people are". To have someone who didn't see him as a burden and investment to be pawned off on others -- someone who actually wanted to claim him as their own.

And even if he did unearth some memories, Jak feared the distance he felt from them. Even if he were to remember his parents, even if Damas proved to be someone he actually recalled, would Jak still have any emotional connection to him?

What if he was no longer capable of loving like Mar did?

Unaware of the hurricane brewing in the boy beside him, Damas laced his fingers together under his chin and blew out a breath.

"Mar is...for him, there are only two years between him and his memories. For you, there are twelve. That is a long time, Jak, and your other experiences have buried them. Sometimes, as we get older, our early memories come to us in flashes. But it's not your fault if they don't."

Moving slowly and steadily, he laid a hand on the crown of Jak's head.

"You are still you, with or without those fragments. And you will always have a place with us."

Jak's fingers tightened on the haft of the staff until his knuckles stood out, starkly white against rosy brown. For several seconds, he did not speak. But he didn’t shrug off Damas’s hand, either.

After nearly a minute had passed, Jak turned to look up at the king with haunted eyes.

"I had them sometimes. The flashes, I mean." He swallowed hard. "But...I don't know if they're real. I made up so many things in that prison, just to stay sane. How do I know I didn't just make these memories up?"

Damas smiled at him. It was a bittersweet expression, but hope hovered at the corners.

"Well," he said softly, "why don't you tell me about them? I may share some of those memories, if they took place before your kidnapping."

Jak quailed. "But what if they're not real?"

There wasn't a good answer to that, and they both knew it. Though he wracked his brain for something that wouldn't sound dismissive of Jak's traumatic amnesia, Damas was left with few options.

"Perhaps," he said carefully, "You can think of them as things you want to do, rather than things you have already done? If there are any memories that don't match, I see no reason you can't make them real."

It wasn't much comfort to Jak, but he appreciated the effort. Damas was trying. He'd been trying, since the moment he walked into the Naughty Ottsel. The least Jak could do was try as well. He resisted the childish impulse to lean against Damas’s side -- he wasn't ready for that yet, no matter how much he might wish to be -- and tried to work up his nerve. Twice he opened his mouth and shut it again, and the third time he managed some stumbling, stammering sounds that trailed off into silence. Damas didn’t push him to try again; he waited as patiently as Daxter always had.

Finally, Jak felt like he could force the words out without immediately thinking of the worse memories surrounding the snippets of what might have been his past. He swallowed hard three times, and brought the staff closer to his chest as if it were a favored toy.

"I...sometimes see this...rock. This...this really big rock. There's paint on my hands and I'm really happy about something. I'm not sure what I'm doing."

He glanced nervously up at Damas.

The king leaned back against the hull and stroked his chin. "Big rock..." he murmured, "And you said there was paint? Was it all over your hands, or only in spots?"

Jak squinted as he tried to grasp at the memory. "Uh...I'm not sure. There was a lot though. Kind of blue-ish."

"Ah!" Damas snapped his fingers. "I think I know what that was."

Shocked, Jak twisted on the bench to face him fully. "You do?!"

Damas nodded, and Jak thought he looked wistful.

"There's a couple different boulders around the city that children like to make marks on. Sometimes, when your mother and I had a lot of work to do, some of the teenagers would take you out to play. More than once you came home covered in paint."

He smiled softly.

"You followed those kids everywhere. They...they took it hard when you were taken."

Jak thought of Mar, tagging along at his heels when he was in his older body. "That tracks, I guess."

So that had been a real memory, then. That meant he couldn't immediately dismiss the others as figments of his imagination, either! Emboldened by this knowledge, Jak reached for a memory that used to drive him -- and his adoptive uncle -- crazy back in Sandover.

"Okay, okay. Um...ah this is going to sound really stupid."

"Fire away," Damas retorted.

Jak made a face. "Okay...uh...it's a polka-dot crocadog toy that smells like polished leather. I think its name was Poppy Croc."

At this, Damas physically jolted. His head whipped down with an incredulous expression.

"You still remember Poppy Croc?" he asked in surprise, "After all this time?"

"Ohhh." Jak leaned forward. "Well, I guess that's why Uncle never knew what I was talking about. I thought he gave it to me and I lost it or something."

"It's still in the nursery," Damas replied, still sounding mildly stunned. "I don't know if Mar will share it though."

Grimacing, Jak waved the idea off. "I'm too old for toys."

He sounded like he was repeating something that someone else had told him.

"Anyway, what kind of name is Poppy Croc?"

"You couldn't pronounce polka-dot," Damas answered dryly.

With a thump, the air train hit a pocket of turbulence. Across the hold, Sig opened his eye and grumbled, then readjusted his grip on Mar. The preschooler slept like a rock, completely unaware of the rough air their transport flew through.

Jak watched them for a second, then returned his attention to Damas.

"So...the paint rock was real, and the stuffed animal was real. That's...more than I expected."

"An encouraging sign," Damas said.

"Maybe."

Jak twisted his grip on the staff.

"What about- okay it's...not a good memory. I think it's real, because I don't know why I would make up a scenario of being so upset about someone leaving that I cried until I threw up. I don't even know who it was! I just...really didn't want them to go."

Damas visibly winced at that. For several seconds he was quiet. Then he sighed heavily.

"I...remember that."

"Oh. Uh...Why was I crying so hard?" Jak squirmed a little in his seat.

The words seemed to stick in Damas’s throat for a moment. Then he frowned.

"Your- your mother is a deep-sea angler. She helps provide a massive portion of the city's everyday diet. But- well, every now and then she has to be out at sea overnight."

This was the first time there had been any talk of mothers. Jak's spine stiffened and he latched onto the present tense "is". He -- or rather, Mar -- still had a mother. A mother! What was that like? Neither he, nor Daxter, nor even Keira had ever had one growing up.

"Does she um- does she know about-"

Jak motioned to himself, and then to Mar.

"Aye." Damas tugged at his short beard. "She's steward of the throne in my few absences from the city when Sig isn't present. That's why I was able to infiltrate Haven at all."

Abruptly, he let out a sheepish chuckle.

"She hates it when that happens. And honestly, it was as much her right to come for you and Mar as it was mine. But I know secret ways into the city that she does not, so it fell to me."

"So I- I really did throw a fit until I puked over her going to work?" Jak cringed. "Daxter can not know about this."

Damas leaned back and folded his arms across his broad chest. "You could hardly be blamed. You adored your mother."

"Will I still love her?" Jak wondered.

When Damas flinched, he realized to his horror that he'd voiced the thought aloud.

The king -- his maybe-father -- was silent for a long time after that. And when he did speak again, there was a roughness to his voice that spoke of uncomfortable amounts of emotion.

"Love is-" he cleared his throat. "Love is an action, young one. It is not a possession to be lost or won. It's something we choose to do, though we all show it different ways. But it has to grow; you can't just turn love off and on like a switch."

He tipped back his head and loosed another sigh. "I...certainly hope that you and your friends will grow to care about us and our city-"

"I probably will. I get attached too quickly when people don't treat me like garbage," Jak interrupted with a kind of resigned nonchalance. "That's why I trusted the guy who ended up being the metalhead Swarm King."

Damas’s cheek twitched noticeably at the mention of Kor, but he gamely attempted to finish his thought.

"-but I will hold no expectations over you. You are not required to address us as your mother and father if you do not see us as such. And we will do our best not to hold you back on account of your stature."

He paused.

"Well, you will not be permitted to enter the Arena and earn a gate pass, but that would have been the case regardless of which body you inhabited. It is forbidden for anyone under the age of eighteen to enter the Arena of Death."

"The Arena of what?!"

Jak let go of the staff with a clatter.

"Why do you even have that?!"

Across from them, Sig snorted, badly stifling his laughter. Noticeably, he did not come to Damas’s aid. Instead, he settled more comfortably in his seat and raised his brows expectantly.

Aiming a dirty look at Sig, Damas did his best to explain.

"Before I was king, it was a strictly gladiatorial arena meant for pure bloodsport. Now we use it to determine citizen candidates' merit as warriors."

"By making them kill each other?" Jak did not look impressed.

"Not other candidates, except in cases when someone has a score to settle." Damas waved a hand and realized that this didn't sound much better.

"It's- alright, look: out in the desert there are many dangers, but you can boil them down to three: ambush by Marauders, dangerous environmental elements, and metalheads. If you want a gate pass out of the city, first you have to prove you can handle those dangers in a controlled environment."

"Still sounds weird to me," Jak grumbled.

He scooted just the tiniest bit closer -- pretending not to notice he was doing so -- and tapped his fingers together.

"Alright, this one I know has to be made up: a river inside a house."

Damas’s smile returned in full force. "Four for four, that's right, too."

"What?" Jak blinked. "No it's not!"

"Yes it is!" Damas smirked at him. "My throne room is an indoor oasis. That's where your mother taught you to swim."

"Mar can already swim?" Jak looked over at the sleeping child and pulled a wry face.

"Good thing we never took him with us to the waterfront. He would've given Dax a heart attack."

Then he leaned back -- ignoring the brush of his shoulder against Damas’s side -- and tugged at his lip. "I know there are more flashes. Little broken maybe-memories. But they're like...textures. Smells. There's probably other detailed ones, but I can't remember."

He shrugged.

"I...didn't actually expect any of them to be real, I-"

He cut himself off and looked away, suddenly keenly aware that his control of his emotions was not the same as it had been before the young Precursor's "blessing". He didn't have a name for what he was feeling at the moment, but it was big, and confusing. He had confirmation that he'd had a life before Sandover -- and it was incredibly validating, he wouldn't deny it -- but he was...sad? But at the same time excited? He was afraid to let his guard down and possibly be rejected yet again, and yet he was relieved to have identifiable common ground with Mar's father.

He wanted a father, but he was afraid of having one turn out like Praxis or Samos. He wanted a mother, but he feared disappointing her with his altered nature.

"Um...what about thunderstorms? I think of music when I think of thunderstorms, but that might be something from back in Sandover," Jak said in an effort to distract himself.

"Hm." Damas shook his head. "We didn't have many thunderstorms in Spargus when you were a toddler; you were born during a dry spell. That must've been the coastal village, then."

He tightened one of his bracers and quirked his lips to one side.

"We're nearing summer now. We won't see much rainfall -- if any at all -- until harvest season. Just a lot of damp fog."

Jak wouldn't admit it out loud, but he hated foggy weather. Too dangerous to go out on the water, or exploring. And at night, everything hid from view and he could feel the eyes on him everywhere. It just felt clammy and wrong. He only went out in the fog in Haven when Daxter was with him. Daxter's eyes had been better suited to the low light as an ottsel then. They probably weren't anymore.

As if on cue, Daxter dropped down the ladder to the cockpit with a thunk, wearing a goofy smile. By his flushed face and the pink smears on his lips, Jak had a pretty good idea of why he and Tess had been hiding out up there. That poor pilot, stuck listening to them make out! Jak grimaced, and Damas looked amused.

For his part, Daxter hung from the ladder, humming snatches of showtunes in a dreamy, distracted kind of way. It was not, Jak realized, wholly dissimilar to that time he'd gotten into Krew's booze stash.

Damas shook his head, but his eyes twinkled.

"Sig," he said pointedly, "Go get your boy before he daydreams his way straight out of the hatch."

Sig laughed heartily and reached out to snag Daxter's sleeve as he stumbled past. "First kiss is a doozy, huh, kid?"

"Uh-huh," Daxter sighed happily.

Jak snorted. "Hey loverboy, are we over the water yet?"

Daxter blinked slowly, then flushed and cleared his throat. "Ahem! Er, we're about five minutes from the southwest edge of the Wasteland island. The pilot said he'd drop us at a temple or something?"

"Precursor monastery," Sig confirmed, "Anybody traveling to the mainland leaves a vehicle up there if they're smart. It's suicide to walk all the way home."

"How did you hear anything the pilot said over you and Tess trying to glue your faces together?" Jak teased.

Daxter sank onto the bench beside Sig and Mar. "You'll understand when you're older," he retorted.

"I am older," Jak answered primly, "And I don't think I want to understand anymore."

Damas conspicuously turned to the side and made a valiant attempt at disguising a laugh as a fit of coughing.

#jak and daxter #jak and daxter sig #jak and daxter mar #dadmas #king damas #gremlinverse au #based on the fact that a vivid memory i thought happened when i was 3 was actually a year and a half earlier #in hindsight that does explain the height of the peacocks in that memory lol #hurt/comfort #Damas is trying to be a good dad #mentioned daxter/tess #i realized recently that everything you fight in the Arena is stuff you run into later in the desert #so im pretty sure the doylist reason for the arena of death is a desert survival tutorial for the player #figured I'd just incorporate that into the story #fic prompts #writing prompts #free day thursday #snippet thursday

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