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redbeansoups · 3 years

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Move-In Day

Cove Holden x Reader

In which Cove Holden helps you move into your brand new dorm, and wishes you farewell before your freshman year.

Takes place after Step 3.

Like it or not, your life has always revolved around one Cove Holden. One bright-eyed, silky-haired, infuriatingly endearing Cove Holden. It’s always been him, in everything you’ve done, forever a spectator and participant in one. You have never known a time without him: your classmate, neighbor, best friend and boyfriend-extraordinaire.

Even now, as you edge into adulthood, Cove Holden is all you know: seated beside you with one hand on the wheel, wavy hair tucked behind his ears, his eyes longingly on yours. He catches your gaze, and offers you a smile, full of sincerity as always.

The journey upstate had been a long time coming; a goal, ever-present, but inching along so slowly that you’d opted merely to brush it off. But as the summer of your senior year came to a close, your move-in day had sprung up on you like an unpleasant (albeit somewhat enthralling) surprise.

Cove, forever a gentleman, had insisted on driving you all the way. You’d argued against him, only to be shut down–and quite firmly at that. “If you’re going to be moving so far away,” he’d told you one night, “then the least I can do is go and see you off.” He was a much better driver than you anyway, you’d reasoned with yourself, and it’d be nice to have another pair of hands to unpack. The idea of flying alone didn’t quite appeal to you either, so, after hardly a moment’s hesitation, you’d agreed to let him tag along.

College, all the way up north–you can hardly believe you’d come so far. You’d dreamt of this for years, spent months drafting application essays and crafting resumes. Years of preparation and research, though, hadn't seemed to brace you for the anxiety to come.

Even now, sitting in the car with Cove, hands intertwined, the idea feels more like a dream than your living, breathing reality. But the car trudges along, movements never once faltering for your thoughts.

You’d be on your own soon–a stray left for dead. You’d be nowhere near Sunset Bird anymore.

Lost in thought, it takes you more than a moment to grow cognizant of your surroundings. The scenery has shifted, the sky around you having faded to a pale purple hue. The change in atmosphere is instant. High-rise buildings litter the skyline; the shopping districts, no longer limited to a single street, bustle with activity.

It feels, beyond anything else, unfamiliar.

Isolating.

Realistically, you are far from alone. Derek, having gotten his scholarship, lives right down the hall. Your parents and sister are always a call away, and your friends have never failed to remind you of their presence. And Cove, despite being far from technologically adept, is still a better texter than most–and a relatively consistent one at that.

These thoughts, at least, are reassuring.

But the fear remains–and all you can do is try and work alongside it.

You turn to Cove. The window has been rolled down; you feel the cool evening breeze against your skin, fresh and foreign all at once. His hands are running mindlessly through his hair, detangling the inevitable wind-induced knots. Your eyes flit down to his fingers drumming against the steering wheel, then lower down to his scar, the pale white mark running gently down his forearm.

Sitting there, so unaware of himself, sunset illuminating soft features–Cove is beautiful, in every possible way.

You smile, content.

The hours pass, and before you know it, you find yourself on campus for the first time.

You tap the keycard to your door, and it opens with a soft click. The two of you are met with the sight of the dorm, the yellow-tinted wood somehow even less impressive than the photos you’d seen online. Barren walls, popcorn ceilings, worn-down linoleum from decades past. Sparsely decorated as it may be, the room puts you at ease.

You let Cove move past you to enter. “What a joy.” You scoff at the drawl in his voice. “Where’d you say your roommate’s from?” he asks, his shoulders nudging the door wider. His set of boxes is significantly larger than yours, and he looks smaller than ever with the stack cradled against his chest.

“Florida,” you answer, following his footsteps.

“Oh.” He sets the cardboard down on the ground, the impact resounding with a solid thump. “I hope they won’t mind the mess we’re about to make.”

That draws a laugh out of you; you think back to all the times you’ve stepped into his room, only to find it a complete bird’s nest. “They’re not moving in until tomorrow.” Another thump resounds as you drop your own load. “We have time to clean. But don’t mess things up too bad, please. I’d like a good first impression.”

“No promises.”

You roll your eyes, and, cracking open the first box, begin the arduous process of unpacking.

“Well,” Cove says finally, brushing dust away from his hands. “I think that was the last of your stuff.”

Setting the last of your books in place, you take a moment to revel in your surroundings. Despite his messy tendencies, Cove had done a pretty good job–with your assistance, of course. All your clothes had been folded neatly up in the closet, and your posters were hung all over the walls, like a delicate reminder of home. On the desk sat two small photo frames; one with you and your family, and one with you and Cove.

“I guess so, huh,” you mutter.

There’s a weight in the air around you, and you bow your head.

There’d been too much to discuss. Hell, even now the topic was one you wanted nothing more than to avoid. The ‘what-ifs’ had littered your mind for months now, hanging over you like a constant reminder. And though Cove had tried his best to dispel them, they’d inevitably come back–and with a vengeance. You didn’t know what the future held, nor did you know whether the two of you would last. Uncertainty riddled your mind: what if he grew bored? What if the two of you lost interest? What if, after all your time together, the physical distance became too much?

His hand comes to rest on your shoulder. The gesture is light, gentle–a welcome pressure.

The tension dissipates.

You sigh, lifting your chin up to meet his gaze. There’s a softness in his eyes you’ve come to recognize as sadness. And there’s a warmth behind your own that threatens to grow hot, to liquify and pool before you. You choke back the urge to cry, stifling yourself by clearing your throat. “You’ll text me, won’t you?”

He chuckles softly at that, thumb stroking circles into your skin. “Of course. I’ll call you so often you’ll grow sick of me.”

“I’m counting on it, Cove.”

You give him one last hug, inhaling his scent and pressing your cheek to his chest. He smells like Sunset Bird, a mixture of the ocean and the beach and all the pleasantries that come along with it. His pulse, slow and steady, beats in your ear.

Devoting the moment to memory, you angle your head to plant a peck on his cheek. “Thanks for helping me move in.”

He grins at you. “Of course.” The expression sparks something strange in you, something equal parts melancholy and equal parts pride. You so badly want him to stay–you want to reach out, pull him down into the bed and sit right atop him so he might never escape your grasp.

“I love you,” you whisper, part-plea and part-farewell; you see the pain in Cove’s eyes. “Don’t get into too much trouble while I’m gone, alright?”

He lets out a breathy laugh and, shaking his head, shoots you a smile. "I love you too."

You smile, and breathe him in just once more. Then, with one last teary kiss, you let go, and wish him a safe journey home.

You’re on your own now–

But you know he’s with you, always.

A/N: Another self-indulgent piece as always, because I've fallen in love with one Cove Holden. My freshman year of college starts soon, and I guess my worries culminated in this piece. Thanks for reading, though–I hope this was alright! Any reblogs or likes are appreciated!!

#ok this was so self-indulgent i apologize... i was gonna add more angst but i held myself back #ur welcome ^^#our life #cove holden #our life beginnings & always #gb patch #cove holden x reader #cove holden x mc #reader x cove holden #cove holden fics #our life fics

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shihalyfie · 3 years

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How to meet (or reunite with) your Digimon partner, according to 02

Here’s a post dedicated to those of you who are worried or sad about Kizuna’s premise, or how the way it ends is supposed to lead up to the 02 epilogue, and are thinking of that elephant-in-the-room question of “so then how do they get their partners back?” I’m not the Kizuna staff, so I can’t say anything for sure, but I can tell you that 02 gives us some interesting leads here!

You’re probably thinking “weren’t Kizuna and the problem of partnership dissolution made after 02? Isn’t this an Adventure movie? Why are you bringing 02 into this?” Ah, but you see, that might be true if you’re thinking of it on a technical plot level, but 02 as a series isn’t as thematically displaced from Kizuna as you might think, especially when the exact same real-life incident about a kid skipping grades, the one that literally was the foundation for 02′s creation to begin with, was brought back 20 years later for Menoa’s backstory. Certainly, a lot of the plot points introduced in Kizuna are new to it, but the themes and things it wants to say about self-acceptance and how to pursue happiness have very deep parallels to 02 -- which means that it’s not much of a stretch to think that some of the answers to the questions presented in Kizuna can be found in 02, too.

While it’s true that “getting your partner back from adulthood existential-crisis induced disappearance” is not a problem that necessarily presented itself in 02, remember that we’re dealing with a lot of theme parallels here -- a Digimon is part of one’s heart, and the central characters of both narratives (Ken and Menoa) had backstories that came from the same real-life story, one that warns that pressuring a kid into “adult” situations that they’re not emotionally prepared to handle will mess them up and cause them to lose their sense of self. The answer to the question of “how to get a partner back” in Kizuna was only pursued by the very scientifically-minded Menoa, who mashed keys on the keyboard and played around with egg data to get it to work, but this is Digimon, where these kinds of fateful meetings and evolutionary moments happen because of the heart, and everyone depicted lost their partners for reasons related to mentality and not science (remember, Menoa lost Morphomon at 14). Has Menoa done any real introspection in the last eight years? Probably not.

So, back in 02, when Ken did lose his sense of self, he eventually came back to his senses and decided to reclaim Wormmon. Thanks to how the plot worked, Wormmon merely “died” and was set to be reborn at the Village of Beginnings, but...

Just being reborn by the mechanics of the plot wouldn’t do it. Ken would never be able to find Wormmon again until he accepted something else, which is...

...himself. Everything good and bad about him, what he’d done in the past, how he has to move on with that, and how to move on with the person he actually is instead of the shell of the Kaiser. And with that, he is led to Wormmon, and is able to start the process of repairing their relationship.

So the point made here in 02 episode 23 is: one will only be able to be reunited with their partner if they can accept everything about themselves and become able to move on -- something that Menoa, who forced herself into the role of an “adult” in the hopes of getting more acceptance among her peers and eventually drowned herself in nostalgia, was most certainly not doing over the course of the movie.

So anyway, we get to 02 episode 50, and the parallel becomes even less subtle -- “a Digimon partner” is given a very direct correlation to “one’s own personal aspirations and dreams”. If you look back at the entire plot of 02 up to this point, with Ken and the Dark Seed children, all of them have been shoving aside “themselves” and “what they wanted to do” in an effort to please others -- to become well-behaved, studious, athletic, whatever society expected of them, instead of what they wanted to do.

So all of the kids admit all of the embarrassing, “undignified” dreams that they’d been holding back because they’d felt that they weren’t “allowed” to have them (following Daisuke’s shameless example of admitting that he’s fine with doing something as simple as running a ramen shop), and are encouraged to be a bit shameless about it and forget what society wants them to do, instead of what they want to do. The word “belief” is brought up a lot in this episode -- it’s not just having dreams, you also have to really, truly believe in your ability to make them happen and have the gusto to follow them without restraint.

And so, this strong resolution to have “belief” allows their partners to spontaneously manifest in front of them -- and it’s all but stated that said “dreams” and said partners are equivalent, and even implied that their partners had always existed in their hearts in some form, just not able to truly appear until they fully accepted themselves. Or, in other words, you will only be able to meet your partner when you embrace everything about yourself and what you want to do, regardless of what others think or what society expects of you, and have the will to pursue it.

(By the way, yes. Spontaneously manifest. Even if most of Adventure/02 had been defined by concrete mechanics for the most of it, in the end, this is still a narrative about the human heart before anything else.)

And guess who else learns this lesson by the end of the episode?

When Oikawa, who had been childishly (hmmm) chasing after shallow symbols of his past in order to get it back (hmmmmmm) because he considered himself too much of a “tainted adult” (hmmmm, sounds familiar) back in 02 episode 48, finally comes to realize what his actual mistake was and that he should have been more free about pursuing his dreams instead of accepting Chikara taking them away from him and Hiroki, Oikawa is finally able to reconnect with the partner he’d “lost” all of those years ago (hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm). So, again, you will only be able to reunite with your partner once you accept everything about yourself and what you should do from here on out.

(Hey, fun fact: Pipimon also spontaneously appeared in front of Oikawa the moment he accepted this. Although the exact specifics of the current “adulthood” issue were probably not conceived until Kizuna, “not being able to reach a partner that you once had due to cutting your own dreams off” has precedent!)

Moreover, Menoa’s backstory seems practically engineered to make sure that she never witnessed this nor learned this lesson -- she lost her partner “eight years ago”, in 2002, the exact same year the events of 02 took place. Assuming that she lost said partner in the middle of the year (her flashback seems to take place in spring or so, when university admissions results are issued), this would have prevented her from participating in the “world tour” battles around the world in 02 episodes 40-42 and engaging with Daisuke and friends, and particularly from joining in the final fight with BelialVamdemon and therefore witnessing what happened with the Dark Seed children and Oikawa. Which means that her ability to get this cynical about partnership dissolution being “inevitable” and that there’s no way to regain your hopes and dreams was enabled by the fact that she didn’t get to learn the lesson that the Tokyo Chosen Children did all those years ago...

Let’s look at the four who lost their partners over the course of Kizuna. Where were they at the time they lost their partners?

Menoa: Considering herself spurned by other people who “look at her weird” and desperate to “live on her own two feet” and “be useful to the world”, forced herself into the role of an “adult” by getting herself to skip grades into a university setting she was unprepared for, for the sake of recognition more than anything, and ended up living a very lonely life

Taichi: Isolated himself from others for the sake of living independently and “having his own life to live”, losing focus about anything he wanted to do, and allowing himself to get slowly disconnected from Agumon

Yamato: Developed a sense of detachment from his old hobbies and started living life for a “grace period” due to lack of real focus on what he wanted to do

Sora: Started forcing herself into “obligations” to succeed her mother in flower arrangement and from her Chosen Child duties, to the point she isolated herself from others and started losing control over herself

(Funny thing: a big part of 02′s story was about finding support in others and fostering your relationships, and here we are with four people who are slowly “isolating” themselves from others...)

It’s not about “becoming an adult” and losing your partner. It’s about shoving yourself into the societally-enforced standard of an adult and losing yourself in the process, and therefore losing your ability to see your partner.

And so, by the end of Kizuna, all four of them have lost their partners -- but we also see the characters we know and love starting to follow their way to what we know is the 02 epilogue, through some very unsubtle hint dropping (retroactive hints to the careers we’re already aware of, such as Taichi’s future in diplomacy). Which means that the eventual existence of the 02 epilogue is in itself the answer to the question, because the epilogue is: everyone found what they wanted to do and pursued it, and therefore everyone eventually figured out their personal aspirations and what they wanted to do, and were able to accept and pursue it, which was established earlier as the key to meeting your partner.

By the way! It’s also revealed in 02 episode 50 that the Digital World itself is at least partially formed on “the power to materialize emotions” (both positive and negative), which is the explanation for so many phenomena over both Adventure and 02 being related to the human heart, and presumably is also why Digimon partners can even exist to begin with (they’re literally supposed to be a part of the inner self, so the power of the Digital World is what “brings them out”). All four “disappearances” on record happened with all four of them in the real world, fixated on their obligations to society and attempting to turn themselves into model citizens, but all of the above “meetings” with partners in 02 -- and Menoa making true “contact” with Morphomon (inside Eosmon) for the first time since her disappearance -- also happened in the Digital World, the world of idealistic dreams, personal aspirations, and the materialization of people’s emotions.

#digimon #digimon adventure 02 #digimon adventure last evolution kizuna #kizuna spoilers

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volturiwolf · 3 years

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The Volturi Princess - A Felix Volturi x fem!Reader Story (part 2)

No of Words: 5182

Mentions of: Abandonment, Abortion, Anxiety, Blood, Bruises, Coma/Comatosed State, Death Emotional Abuse, Emotional and Physical Pain, Gaslighting, Greece/Greek Language - with translation, Heartbreak, Italian Language - with translation, Manipulation, Murder, Pain, Panic Attacks, Pregnancy, Suffering, Suicide/Suicidal Thoughts, Swear Language, Throwing Up/Puking, Witches/Wizards/Witchcraft

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part 1

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Felix’s POV:

My days in the castle were becoming more and miserable by the minute. I couldn’t stop thinking about (Y/N), she was always on my mind. When there was a mission, I would make myself forget her for a while and would focus on my job. But in times like this, when there was nothing to do in particular, I would stay in my room for hours and hours, and just wouldn’t think about anything else, but her.

It must have been about two decades or so that she left Volterra to “explore the world”, as she said. Time is pretty subjective when you’re supposed to live forever. Yet, I was mentally counting every moment she was away. I was taking mental notes of everything that was going around here, every prank Demetri and I would pull off to annoy either Jane or each other, every important event or mission we were sent to, so I could tell (Y/N) later. I smiled at the thought of her laughing along with me, and then my smile dropped when I realized she may never even come back.

Why would she? Living with the Volturi - with Aro - controlling her life, how she should have looked like, how she was expected to act in every different situation, and, on top of that, pushing her to her physical and mental limits to declare any gift besides strength, speed and tracking must have been exhausting for her. All these years.. All these years of emotional isolation must have affected her greatly.

Aro had never been the most affectionate person I’ve met. When the twins joined the Volturi, and then the Guard, he focused on them exclusively, training and mentoring them every day to develop their gifts. (Y/N) was pushed aside, a lost cause; she would never be the powerful vampire/weapon Aro hoped he acquired all these centuries ago.

He hoped that she would manage to declare a power similar to her mother - an exceptional mind-reader (and shield, as we found out centuries later) or even a new and unique power, given her father’s lineage. (Y/N) never expressed anything “unique” for Aro’s standards, but to me, she was just perfect. We were equally strong and fast - maybe she was even stronger and faster than me, and she was also an incredible tracker, like Demetri, though he could track anyone he has ever met, just by hearing their conscience.

And now, she is gone. She had left me. I caught myself quite a few times thinking what would our lives be like, had I told her how I felt - and still feel - about her. I am pretty sure that she was feeling the same, that she felt our bond, our connection. But, just like her, I never came forward; I was never true to myself, or her; I never told her that I would dedicate my immortal life to her if that meant that she would stay here with me.

And now, I pay for it. I've been drowning in misery and pain. Not physical pain, I could handle physical pain by now. Even Jane’s induced pain was nothing compared to the kind of pain I’ve been feeling ever since (Y/N) left. I felt as if I were a mortal and my heart was ripped out of my body and stepped on. I felt as if I couldn’t breathe, though I didn’t actually need to breathe.

Demetri must have heard my sharp gasps for air, as my door opened widely, a terrified Demetri standing under the framework. He stared at my unwell state, and rushed to me, hugging me tightly. I left a few sobs and felt tears that couldn’t come. Demetri did not say a word for a few minutes, stroking my hair with his left hand and holding me with his right one. I held onto him as if I was holding on for dear life.

My mind was just blurry and I couldn’t think straight. Was that what it felt like, being away from your mate? I missed her dearly. All these years, I never told anyone other than Demetri about (Y/N) possibly being my mate, although I think Marcus would probably know already.

As my sobs started coming to an end, I was able to finally take deep breaths, and focus my mind on a particular spot on the floor to calm myself. Demetri cupped my face with his hands, trying to calm me down by saying a few comforting words. To outsiders, this scene may have looked strange, if not weird, but Demetri and I, being best friends for almost one millennium, had that kind of intimacy, and we both liked how open we could be to each other.

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and opened them slowly, feeling a bit calmer than I did 10 minutes ago. I needed to feel each moment of my pain; I needed to feel again what it’s like being apart from the only person I ever loved; I needed to remember every moment I was close to her, and then wasn’t.

“Are you feeling better now?” Dem asked calmly, still holding my face. I nodded slightly, and he let his hands fall on his lap. “Were you thinking about (Y/N) again?” I nodded again. I nodded again.

He frequently caught me thinking absentmindedly, or even sobbing slightly, but never a full-on breakdown. He took my quite big hands in his smaller ones, patting them condescendingly. I didn’t want to be pitied by others, but Dem never made fun of me for hurting, never made me feel less of the “evil executioner” I was known to be.

“I don’t know what it feels like, being separated from your mate, so I won’t tell you how to feel or act about it. I just want you to know that you can come to me if you feel down. It pains me to see you hurting, though I understand that her very absence has affected you greatly. I just want you to know that I’m here for you, and I’ll always be here for you, no matter what. You may not see it, but Alec, even Jane, worries about you and want you to be happy. We will all do whatever it takes to see you happy again, even if that means running after (Y/N)..”

My head jolted. I asked him if he was serious. “I’m not lying or joking, Felix. If we have to go after her and bring her back to you, we’ll do it. You’re our friend and we’re your friends. That’s what friends do.”

I couldn’t believe it! There was a chance that (Y/N) was still out there, and my friends were willing to help me find her. As much as I didn’t want to admit it, the Witch Twins felt like true friends to me, and as long as I had them and Demetri, I think I could do anything in this world.

Now, we just had to talk to the twins, and see what they thought of it. I don’t know if we were even allowed to drop off all the missions and duties we had here and go search for (Y/N). I know we had to take the kings’ permission before we could do anything, and I was worried and kind of terrified with the idea of them knowing (Y/N) and I were mates, and how badly in love I was with her.

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Demetri’s POV:

It was just another day in the Volterra castle. I was wandering around, having finished my duties for the day, probably for the week as well - it all depended on the Masters’ or the Twins’ mood for a “sudden, important mission” popping up in my schedule.

I wasn’t the type of person to spend their free time in the library, like the Twins, or in my room, like Felix. I vaguely remember my human life. My family was a typical middle-class Athenian family, and we were lucky enough to own a decent piece of land for cultivation. I would spend hours working on the fields, planning possible expansions and new techniques for richer crops.

I smiled slightly at the memory; that’s basically what I mostly remembered from my mortal life before Amun found me and turned me into what I am today. Before I traveled to Egypt to live with the Egyptian coven. Before Aro found me and converted me to his coven. I didn’t know how he managed to convert me then until I found out about Chelsea’s gift.

But even then, I never actually felt the need to leave the Volturi. I had a good life here; I had great friends; easy access to human blood, thanks to Heidi; I had it easy for the price I paid serving the three Volturi kings.

My train of thought was cut short when I heard quiet sobs. I wasn’t regarded as the best tracker for nothing; based on the volume of the sobs, the surrounding atmosphere, and the tone of the voice coming out, I could easily detect that it was Felix, sobbing in his room.

I run quickly, not caring about anyone walking through the corridors. I reached his door and opened it widely, not caring to wait for a response. I saw Felix sobbing on his bed, his eyes tearless but still desperate, trying to gasp for air, although we don’t really need to breathe. I rushed to his side, hugging him tightly, letting his sobs shake through my body.

I didn’t say a thing for some time, stroking his hair with one hand and holding him with my other, trying to find the right thing to say to calm him down. He held on to me for dear life, and I felt as if he was, once again, upset for (Y/N). His sobs started slowing down and he started taking a few deep breaths, trying to calm himself. Without thinking, I cupped his face, telling him a few comforting words, watching him close his eyes, and taking one deep breath.

“Are you feeling better now?” I asked him calmly, and I felt myself getting calmer as he nods slightly. I let my hands fall on my lap and asked him what I’ve been thinking about all this time. “Were you thinking about (Y/N) again?” Felix nodded, confirming my suspicions.

I caught him plenty of times not being himself - his cautious, meticulous, present self; the one who was always concentrated and focused on the present. He sobbed often these days, but never a full-on breakdown. This had me worried. I took his hands in mine and patted them, showing him that I understood what he was going through, although I, myself, never found my mate. I told him so, that I didn’t know what it was like for him to be away from his mate, but also that I would never disregard how and what he felt.

I just didn’t want him to hurt; I wanted him to know that I’ll always be there for him, whenever he needed me. And, though he may not actually believe it, Alec and Jane were also worried about him. He may have not noticed it, but I wasn’t the only one who saw that he was in pain.

Alec and Jane also saw that Felix was not his confident, straightforward self anymore, so I told them once what I suspected all along. That the absence of (Y/N) affected him way more than it affected Jane, who was (Y/N)’s best girlfriend, or even Heidi, Chelsea, and Corin, even Renata, who spent most of her time on Aro’s side, being his main bodyguard.

Without thinking clearly, I suggested that we could all go after (Y/N), find her, and bring her back to Felix. His head jolted, and looked at me in disbelief, not being sure if I was serious. I told him I was, and, at this moment, his whole demeanor changed. It was probably the first time after such a long time that I’ve seen him actually smiling, and my undead soul felt at peace at last. We now only had to inform the twins, and, probably, anyone else willing to help.

My only worry was the kings, especially Aro; he probably didn’t know about (Y/N) and Felix’s mate bond, and I don’t even know what he’ll think of it when he finds out. Now, I had other things to worry about; how to get the Twins to come with us and bring (Y/N) back to Volterra.

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“We’re in.” Jane declared decisively, Alec agreed along with a nod, standing close to his twin.

“Are you both sure about that? We don’t know if the kings will allow us to go find her. Heck, I don’t even know if I could track her. I could never track (Y/N)’s mind, like ever. We may be wandering in vain, searching for her in places she’s never been. It may take a lot of time if we ever find her.”

I wanted to be honest with them about the worst-case scenario, feeling Felix slightly squirm nearby. I turned around to face the giant. His face was a mix of pain and anger, his eyes a dark burgundy, almost black from not feeding the past few weeks. This reminded me to get him to hunt soon, whether we left Volterra or not. I turned back to the twins.

“Demetri. You know that (Y/N) is our friend, too. Alec and I would do anything to bring her back.” Jane then turned to Felix. “Whatever happens, we will all stand by your side.” Felix mumbled a small “thank you”, so quiet that only us four could barely hear, still looking down, at the floor.

“We have to go and tell them.” I announced, gulping my non-existent saliva. They all knew I was referring to the three kings, and we all knew the possibility of being denied to leave on this mission of ours.

“Let me handle this. You know they cannot deny me anything.” Jane stated and led the way towards the throne room, full of confidence and reassurance.

It was true after all that Jane and Alec, being the kings’ favourite guards, were not denied anything. (Y/N) enjoyed such privileges as well, being the continuation of Aro’s bloodline, possibly our future Queen, if the kings ever decided to step down from their royal duties.

Within a minute, Jane opened the doors to the throne room widely and stepped in, followed closely by Alec and Felix and I following nearby.

“Jane! Alec! To what do I owe the pleasure of seeing my two favourite children?” Aro almost chirped at the sight of the twins, not even acknowledging Felix and I’s presence.

He has always been too nice to the twins, the Volturi’s most powerful offensive weapons. My gift and Felix’s raw strength are nothing compared to Jane’s ability to inflict mental pain, or Alec’s ability to deprive one or multiple people’s senses at will.

“Masters, the four of us request your permission to leave on a mission. We don’t know how long it will take us or when we’ll come back, but I assure you we’ll be back as soon as we’re done with it.” Jane informed the kings confidently, and Aro’s brows furrowed slightly.

“What kind of a mission, dear Jane? I don’t remember giving you all a mission recently.” Aro seemed curious, as he nodded towards Jane to come closer. Jane obeyed, stepping closer to Aro and extending her hand towards him, who gladly took it into his palms.

A few minutes passed by, with Aro looking nowhere in particular, while he studied Jane’s thoughts, until he came back, and let Jane’s hand slowly out of his own ones. Felix tensed beside me; we both knew now that Aro knows about the purpose of our mission, and that he may also know about (Y/N) and Felix’s bond, as he stared at him with an evil smirk. He turned towards Marcus.

“Is it true, brother?” He asked the melancholic vampire to his right. Marcus seemed unamused, which was quite typical of him.

“Yes. They’ve been mates for quite some time.” He dragged his words.

Aro turned back to us. “And yet, (Y/N) chose to leave Volterra, to “explore the world”, away from her mate. Seems that their bond is not as strong after all.”

Felix was becoming more and more furious beside me. I could sense his distaste towards our master, as Aro invalidated their bond, and probably, him being his granddaughter’s mate. Felix confessed to me multiple times that he didn’t feel worthy of being (Y/N)’s mate; that she deserved a lot more than just an average vampire guard.

That’s why he never confessed his true feelings towards her, only looking at her from afar, and hoping that one day, she would confess her feelings first, so they could be together forever. Neither of them ever confessed, and, with (Y/N) being gone for quite some time now, Felix seemed to have regretted not telling her. Maybe they could have been together now, and he wouldn’t have his heart broken over her absence.

Aro’s voice broke my train of thought. “You have my permission to go find my granddaughter, but, before you go, you’ll have to make a plan. I cannot risk my guards leaving Volterra for too long. You’ll have to decide who will come with you, and you’ll have to be back as soon as you find her. No procrastination. You have three days to plan and make your decisions. Now, go, and make sure you bring (Y/N) back!” Aro waved his hand, showing us our way out of the throne room.

We never thought we had to make a plan to find (Y/N); we didn’t expect Aro to let us leave on such a mission, where we wouldn’t know if we’d even find (Y/N). But he did, and now we had to make a plan. We knew that it would definitely be Felix, the twins, and me, but we didn’t know if anyone else wanted to join us.

Word spread fast because, within a few hours, most of the guards were already trying to help us decide on a plan, whether they could or could not join us on the actual mission. In the end, we decided it would be just the four of us, and we only had to make a plan as to where we would go to search for (Y/N).

We left within 3 days, going down to Sicily, traveling across the sea, to Malta, where we found Renata’s family. When we asked them about (Y/N), out of fear of Jane and Alec, her uncle told us she visited them once, about 20 years ago. “She kept saying how she planned to travel the world, Europe, Asia, America, Africa.. Wherever she could go.” Luca kept saying.

We left immediately after that. We decided to continue with our plan, first traveling across Europe. It wasn’t an easy task; most of the continent was at war with the Ottomans, and the rest was divided into smaller or bigger countries, nothing stable or permanent yet. We passed through North Europe, traveling towards the South, traveling across North Africa, ending up in Egypt.

I met with Amun, almost 700 years after I left him and Egypt for Aro and Italy. He was neither pleased nor surprised. He was rather cautious and guarded due to the Twins’ and Felix’s presence. He didn’t ask me why I left him, but he did invite us to stay in Egypt for some time. We told him we were in a hurry, we had to find (Y/N).

“So, it is true then? Aro’s granddaughter abandoned him at last..”. He grinned.

“What do you mean “at last”?” Felix became upset quite quickly.

“You never realized it before? When Chelsea, (Y/N) and yourself came with Aro and took Demetri with you, I saw it in (Y/N)’s eyes.” We were all confused. Amun continued.

“She looked miserable. She probably didn’t even want to be here, doing Aro’s bidding. She wasn’t made to serve him and his every wish. She indeed passed by a decade or two ago. She apologized for her part in Demetri’s departure, and she stayed with us for about a month or two. I welcomed her because I understood Aro destroyed her life, just as he destroyed ours.”

“What did she want in Egypt?” Felix was becoming more anxious by the minute.

Amun continued his narration. “She wanted to learn about Egypt, the Pyramids, the Pharaohs. She told me she read a lot about Ancient Egypt; how Alexander the Great colonized Egypt and many Greeks have been living here ever since; how the Great Pyramids were built. She just wanted to see all the history from up close. She wanted to experience everything. Who wouldn’t, right?” He grinned again, like the proud Egyptian he was, having seen all of Egypt’s glory through the past millennia.

It was Jane’s time to ask the questions. “So, she just visited? She didn’t say where she was going after she left?”

“She said she wanted to go and visit places. Though, she didn’t say where she would go. I would tell you if I knew.” Amun looked arrogant but cautious. He wouldn’t risk getting on Jane’s bad side, so he chose to tell the truth about (Y/N).

“We won’t be staying then. Let’s go.” Jane ordered and ran out of Amun’s palace, Alec following closely behind her.

Felix stayed behind, and I stopped in my tracks. “If you have her and you lied to us, I swear I will rip you apart with my own hands!” Felix pointed at Amun while threatening him.

Amun didn’t seem to be phased at all. “Believe me, I wouldn’t want to get on Aro’s bad side. I already lost someone important to me.” He looked straight at me, and then back to Felix. “But, if you want to find her, you may want to find Carlisle first. She admired him, for choosing to be more human than vampire. When he visited me last time, he did mention how (Y/N) was the only Volturi that didn’t really seem to actually belong in the Volturi. She was too kind for her own good.”

Felix's jaw clenched, and I grabbed him before he managed to attack Amun. I mumbled a “thank you” to Amun, and we ran to find the Twins. My tracking skills could sense Carlisle from a distance, so it wouldn’t be hard to find him. Finding (Y/N), though, was a totally different story.

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

(Y/N)’s POV:

I woke up with a throbbing headache in an unknown place. My eyes couldn’t focus on anything in particular around me. I could barely distinguish the wooden furniture around me, and the burning fire in the fireplace. My hand traversed through woolen fabrics of different textures. Was I in bed? Was I in a bedroom? As my senses started to go back to normal, I started hearing people talking, a woman and man talking..in Greek?

“Αλέξανδρε, η (Ο/Σ) γύρισε! Το κοριτσάκι μας γύρισε επιτέλους!” (“Alexander, (Y/N) is back! Our little girl is finally back!”)

“Το ξέρω, Στέλλα. Πρέπει να την προστατεύσουμε, να την κρατήσουμε κοντά μας. Δε γίνεται να γυρίσει πίσω στη Βολτέρρα.” (“I know, Stella. We have to protect her, to keep her close to us. She cannot go back to Volterra.”)

“Τι θα κάνουμε αν την ψάξει ο Άρο ή κάποιος άλλος από τη φρουρά; Το ξέρουμε και οι δυο ότι, όπου και να είναι, θα κινδυνεύει.” (“What are we going to do if Aro or someone else from the Guard is looking for her? We both know that, wherever she is, she will be in danger.”)

“Το μόνο που μπορούμε να κάνουμε είναι να φροντίσουμε να την προετοιμάσουμε κατάλληλα. Πρέπει να μάθει το πραγματικό μέγεθος της δύναμής της. Ένιωθα τη δύναμη που είναι συσσωρευμένη μέσα της. Μπορεί να κάνει πραγματικά σπουδαία πράγματα, αρκεί να μάθει να ελέγχει τον εαυτό της και τις δυνάμεις της.” (“The only thing we can do is to make sure she is prepared accordingly. She has to learn the true extent of her power. I felt the power built up inside her. She can do amazing things, as long as she learns to control herself and her powers.”)

I was confused. My parents.. I found my parents. I faintly remember when I met them in the woods. I looked down at my body. I did not wear my white gown anymore, the one which I had once cut below the knee, so I could run around freely. I was now wearing a red dress, the vest covered in gold details. The vest’s sleeves went down, just a few centimeters above my wrists. The dress was made of silk, and it felt nice against my skin; I was finally wearing new, clean clothes and it felt nice.

I jumped out of the bed, and the dress flew around me, falling gently just above my ankles. There was a tearing to the side, which I thought was a nice detail, so I could actually run. I ran at a vampire speed towards the door and out of the room. I saw my parents talking in the living room, in front of the fireplace where another fire was burning bright and warmed up the room.

“Για τι πράγμα μιλούσατε; Σας άκουγα. Γιατί να έρθουν για μένα; Τι πρέπει να μάθω;” (“What were you talking about? I heard you. Why would they come for me? What do I have to learn?”)

My mother cupped my face affectionately. “Ψυχούλα μου, το ξέρεις ότι ο Άρο θα σε αναζητήσει. Θα κάνουμε τα πάντα για να σε προστατέψουμε, αλλά πρέπει να μάθεις να πολεμάς για τον εαυτό σου. Ήρθε η ώρα να μάθεις για τις πραγματικές σου δυνατότητες. Ο μπαμπάς σου θα σου μάθει ό,τι χρειάζεται να μάθεις για να εξασκήσεις τη μαγεία σου.” (“My little soul, you know that Aro will look for you. We’ll do everything to protect you, but you’ll have to learn to fight for yourself. It’s time to learn about your true capabilities. Your dad will teach you whatever you need to know to practice your magic.”)

“Now, follow us, (Y/N). I will teach you everything I know.” Dad took one of my hands in his and mom took my other hand in hers, and they led me outside, to the garden.

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

In the months that followed, I learned how to defend myself using my powers; how to cast spells; how to attack; I even learned how to use dark magic. And as time passed and I perfected my magic, the more magic and energy I could pump out of me, and the more I felt drawn to dark magic. It gave me an unexplainable power; a confidence that I could define my own life; a confidence that I could free myself from Aro.

My only concerns were my friends and Felix; though I was quite powerful by now, the only thing that kept me behind, trapped between what I have to do for myself and what I have to do for others, was the thought of Felix. I have already lost so much time being away from him, and sometimes, that was translated to physical pain, which I didn’t know could happen between mates. I assumed that it was the same for him as well, and I didn’t want him to be in pain.

Unlike the other vampires, I could cry, heck, I would cry for hours and hours. And that pain, that emptiness, would eventually feed the darkness in me. I couldn’t see it at first, but I started having darker, evil thoughts. I stopped feeding off of animals and started killing people. I killed people for their blood, or for fun - either way, I would still consume their blood. I was feeding my thirst and my darkness, becoming insensitive and slowly mad for revenge.

My parents wouldn’t say anything; I knew that it was part of their plan to get revenge on Aro. Unbeknownst to my mom, I also managed to copy her mind-reading, and having already copied Aro’s power, I could manage to know everything both of my parents have ever thought about. My magic penetrated her shield quite easily, and I managed to learn everything I needed to know about their plan, their lives, their abilities, and magic.

I was now way more powerful than them. I didn’t need them; they needed me - they needed me to take over Volterra. It all started as a need to take over territory and become powerful; powerful enough that they could challenge the Volturi and cease their powers, possibly manage to take me and any other powerful guard they found under their rule.

However, me finding them made their plan way easier - they knew that they could persuade me to do their bidding and join them. I was their daughter after all; we were family, and, although they didn’t raise me, they knew that I would much rather stay with them than Aro, given his past.

I didn’t oppose their plan; I wasn’t fond of it, but I didn’t mind. It could be a way to be finally recognized and appreciated. I could finally become the princess, officially, and I could take my friends and Felix away from Aro. We would be together; we wouldn’t be scared of what Aro may think of us; we would be finally free.

These thoughts pushed me day after day to push myself and my limits more. I had to become as powerful as I could ever be. The darkness was consuming my soul and I was welcoming it; I wanted to be in power; I wanted to be in control. I visualized the darkness surrounding me and consuming me; a black smoke swinging out of my body, surrounding me, and swirling around me. I could feel my eyes stink and I smelled the blood that was now oozing out of them. I felt my insides twist and turn, and I screamed in pain; my feet not being able to support my body anymore, as I fell down on my knees.

I felt the darkness “painting” my soul and turning it into a long abyss. I felt my humanity being stripped away from me, like a hand reaching out and ripping my heart out of my body and slowly crashing it. And then, it all stopped. I raised my head and looked at the world around me in a different light. The world was darker, meaner; everyone was my enemy. I would not let anyone subjugate me again; I would not be a victim anymore. I would take my revenge on the Volturi, I would make them pay.

#felix volturi #felix volturi imagine #felix volturi x reader #volturi #twilight #twilight renessaince #twilight post #demetri volturi #alec volturi #jane volturi #the cullens #the denali coven

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asukaskerian · 3 years

Note

I love Days on a Whire so much! It hits all the best tropes and makes all the characters so complex and compelling. I kind of want to ask what would have happened if, completely losing their heads to the heat, Madara and Izuna had managed to knock Tobirama up despite their best efforts. Would there still have been a chance to make peace work, before everyone went mad with baby fever/bloodline theft accusations?

eee #^__^# thank you!

and i... totally came up with a scenario for that one too... no self, you cannot write it, you do not need another endless multipart. no.

anyway here’s some babble. under the cut cause it got long.

(fallout from heat sex, discussion of forced abortion.)

so first, they fuck. Izuna is trying to hold back but he has wanted tobirama for so long and madara pumping out enough pheromones in a small enclosed space to drop a bull does not help. Tobi and madara are straight up gone.

so by the time they come down from it, it’s like ten AM and they have about thirty uchihas milling around outside the nest, plus like several elders.

thing is, the hormonal need to fuck might be gone but now it’s time for hormonal “yay new mate i like and trust you so much our babies will be so pretty”. they’re smart enough to know it’s heat-induced and will fade with time but that doesn’t mean the feelings themselves feel fake. so as they slowly come to terms with the scope of the clusterfuck this is, they start by detaching from each other but the distress scent is Not Fun so there is still some “it’s not like i’m enjoying touching you but you’ll take your ankle out of my hand only if you cut it off at the wrist first. it’s uh, so you don’t escape. yeah.”

madara very somberly promising tobi he’ll be treated as fairly and safely as madara can order done so PLEASE don’t kill your way through my men, izuna electrifyingly torn between “cannot trust a single word you say and definitely cannot trust you with my people” and “if any of them looks at you twice i will remove their eyeballs with a spoon” because, he remembers the rape threats, and if anything in that vein is even mentioned he will not handle it well.

tobirama doesn’t talk much, just agrees quietly to be taken back to the uchiha compound and send a message to hashirama later on.

it is Tense and there’s lots of elders yelling at home and tripling the number of patrols to brace for the senju coming en masse to rescue him. madara and izuna refuse to lock him up in an isolated cell because they need him in sight and they’re the only ones good enough to safely guard him, and anyway the main family’s house is lousy with safety seals and... and yeah no, putting him in one of their bedrooms would be Too Much, so he gets to be imprisoned in some hastily emptied and re-sealed other room. it’s a windowless box but it has a fire pit that can be repurposed as a nesting area so why not.

it takes about three very stubborn hours that night before izuna marches back in with an armful of blankets and pillows, daring tobi to say a damn thing about it. tobi was feeling very isolated and was not sleeping so he doesn’t snark, for once. anyway izuna and madara spend the night in that room, alternating sitting up to keep watch and nesting down with him. but not quite touching.

the next morning there’s very terse “i acknowledge that your scent is changing and this means you’re potentially pregnant even though so early in a pregnancy that might not last” and “i’m writing hashirama eventually (firm promise!) but only after the council has agreed on proceedings so we need to also talk between us”

izuna does not understand why tobirama is even still here. is it a trap? it hurts to think it’s a trap but what else can it be. madara reluctantly agrees that it’s very odd he didn’t try to at least signal his brother for help or anything. because so long as hashirama doesn’t know where he is then anything can be done to him with zero accountability.

tobirama walks them very exhaustedly through what would happen if he went back home. 1) bloodline theft means they’re right back to a war of eradication. dozens of his kinsmen will die. 2) going back to be safe but promising on his honor he’s taken abortifacent drugs and there’s not going to be babies would never be believed. he can totally genjutsu up a flat belly for seven months and everybody knows it. it’s meaningless.

so if he stays they might kill him just to be sure. (which is not something he’s gonna take lying down, he doesn’t say, but they all knows that.) but if all that’s asked of him is to stay locked up while they make him drink the baby-b-gone potion and keep him a week to make sure all is clear before proceeding to whatever diplomatic trade they must... or even trying to lock him up Forever? at this point he can escape cleanly and they’ll be pissed off but not Pissed Off and he’ll have avoided total war.

anyway the uchiha clan needs to be certain there is zero possibility of bloodline theft, or else it’s gonna be hideously horrible AND all the neighbors with a bloodline will turn on the senju too. so yes, he’s staying. for now.

izuna and madara of course agree that there can be no babies and never could have been any babies but. ow.

izuna is very “..oh ._.” over figuring out that tobirama is okay with risking his life to keep the conflict down, he kinda thought he was the type of guy to fuck off right home and be like “sweet, free reign to massacre any uchihas i come across now that my brother can’t tell me it’s overkill”. he can’t help but admire the guts and selflessness a little.

tobirama: ... also what do i tell them when they ask why nobody’s got eyes like theirs except for the enemy. and raising them alone at the edge of the clan is not... *yeah said too much, locks up again*

madara: hashirama would not let you do it alone though :(

tobi, frustrated at their obtuseness: that’s why i’d have to take them and go. how do you think it would go the first time he caught someone treating them like distasteful mistakes only good for their potential as weapons against you? the blow-up would ruin his standing. i can’t allow that. *a moment of unhappy silence* ... i’d manage fine. it can’t be that difficult.

anyway when they leave to talk to the council izuna and madara are very unhappy. both “oh no he’d be such a good clan matriarch” “except for the part where we’re enemies and none of our clan would like that yeah okay” plus izuna is aughghhg trying to tell himself tobi’s manipulating them by making himself look all noble and stuff but Oh No His Heart and madara dislikes ruining a respectable opponent and does not enjoy thinking that he and hashirama could be brothers-in-law and there could be adorable babies with crazy strong chakra if only both clans would stop massacring each other but if they were born now people would be insulting to them and see them as despicable inferior bastards. even though objectively there’s no way they wouldn’t be handsome and powerful and smart.

(he would forbid bowlcuts though. on principle.) (oh fuck he’s starting to visualize the babies.)

as expected, the council meeting is a shitshow.

it takes a week before madara manages to force in that he is TELLING hashirama they have his brother and why and inviting the senju into the discussion on what should be done, and in the meantime nobody has even given tobirama any baby-be-gone because madara can trust nobody to administer it without any extra poison or at stupid “just to be sure” dosages. it does not help the hormonal imprinting. they’ve tried not to sleep in his nest, just beside his nest but the room is not big and. hghghghfgh.

anyway madara catches tobirama having a Moment over losing his babies (which are at this point not even a certainty and still well into the spontaneous abortion stage of pregnancy) and cannot help awkwardly petting his hair or something. and then tobirama angrily starts ranting over how he does not want babies, he’s not at any stage of life appropriate for babies, they would have a shit life at his place and if they stayed with the uchihas he couldn’t even check on them so make sure they were doing well and he would go crazy not being allowed to live with them but he would go crazy being forced to leave his clan to be a fucking war prize of a breeding bitch and anyway he doesn’t even know anything about all the things that can go wrong with a sharingan or how to use it so he couldn’t even teach them properly and. and, fuck this.

madara pets him and doesn’t say anything. izuna pretends he wasn’t listening through the door.

when the reply from hashirama comes it is very not super happy. he and madara meet in secret and hashirama really wants to demand his brother back but knows just as well how badly that would go.

he says if he thought tobi would be treated fairly and eventually welcomed he would offer a marriage, but considering what madara is telling him about the threats of rape and forcible breeding they are not where he can feel alright letting his brother live at the uchiha compound with no way out.

but also if he loses the pregnancy it’s extremely likely the best exchange they get will be tobirama alive but with his tendons cut, or otherwise too maimed to return to ninja life. it’s vanishingly unlikely the uchiha council would accept any monetary recompense for freeing the most lethal of all Senju to go right back to killing them.

they go back home to think on it some more.

meanwhile izuna has been guarding a morose and very quiet tobirama and hated it so much he provoked him into a verbal fight. probably pulled out some really cruel shit to make him react because fatalistic is not something he likes seeing on tobi’s face but he hates that he even gives a fuck. anyway it goes mean, but then it goes into kissing and probably some frantic bitey sex.

madara comes home and they’re still half-naked and lying together, even though the afterglow was over a while ago. they just... don’t want to separate. not yet.

madara like: ..................... you didn’t.

he’s super angry at them but mostly izuna because what the fuck are you doing, getting more attached. tobirama manages to derail him asking about hashirama, which, he didn’t tell tobi he was meeting hashi but tobi’s got a nose thanks.

anyway izuna is exiled from the room that night. madara sits in his usual place to stand guard but tobirama doesn’t fall asleep. just kinda... very unhappy and his omega being unhappy is obviously a failure and it’s hard to handle.

so they talk about shogi. philosophy. whatever. distractions. eventually tobi sleeps and madara managed not to get any more personal, good job.

... so then he ruminates all of the rest of the night. next morning council members show up as a stone-faced group to deliver the baby-b-gone, intending to sit and watch tobirama down it, like some hybrid tea ceremony/execution.

Tobi takes his place on the cushion madara (very stone-faced because he does NOT like being gotten around like that) signaled izuna to give him, takes the cup of tea with an absolutely frozen face, and madara is like.

would you sign a contract to be our concubine, to legitimize them.

everyone: o_o

madara: filed at the daimyo’s court and sent to every other clan out there so it’s triple binding and you can’t run away with our heirs, of course.

everyone: O.O ?? and izuna 0_0!!

madara: and while you would spend the last two months here, with a few senju assistants, you’d be allowed to spend the earlier months of your pregnancy at the senju compound, provided they also host a squad of uchiha soldiers and handmaids/midwives to ensure the safety and health of our heirs. (That part is absolutely non-negotiable.)

everyone: !!! DDDDDD:<

izuna: ;___; ??? ;;____;; ??????

tobi: o___o what... the entire fuck...

madara: *sips his own tea* U.U

tobi: ... this is a way to force us all to get desensitized to each other and have peace isn‘t it

madara: >:3c

anyway it’s CHAOS but eventually they manage to chase out the council people and retire for the night. izuna ends up in tobi’s nest wrapped around his back, still looking kind of shell-shocked. tobirama stares at madara like he’s trying to read his mind. madara is smug as fuck. but he won’t get into his nest if he’s not invited, he’s not rude.

tobi: how do you plan to handle... after they’re born.

madara: cease-fire as long as they’re not weaned. they stay at the uchiha compound always. you can choose wet nurses and a guard squad from either clan for when you have to go back and forth, plus if there’s more than three babes it’ll be hard on us without any outside help anyway. by the time they’re two or three people will be used to the détente and we can shoot for something more permanent.

tobi: ... and they’ll... really be your heirs.

madara: if they’re legally recognized firstborns then why would they not? the sharingan is dominant. i admit it might be weird to have uchihas with white hair, but we’ve got some light brown and reddish brown in the lower houses already anyway...

tobi, still reeling but starting to want to laugh a bit: oh, chimerism runs in my fathers’ line, so they might only have it partly white. (izuna, dazed: Piebald uchihas.) what do we do if they have the mokuton?

madara: .. that... is another clusterfuck let’s not borrow trouble from the nearest kami with a grudge, we have upset enough shrines this month.

izuna meanwhile is still plastered against tobi’s back and totally not fighting tears or anything. he gets to... keep tobi? kind of. keep him around, not caged but. around and. hhhhh. !!?!?. babies. extremely superior babies. more family.

tobi: ... and will you want to keep access to me as... ah... your concubine.

madara: *blink* oh huh. i understand that you won’t want to be forced to, ah, share your bed with us, but it’s probably not going to be added in the contract that you have to provide us with another set of heirs, since the council is going to be raging to get us married to a full-blood uchiha set and have some pure-blooded surety heirs, but considering that would endanger our firstborns in case some extremists decide to take it into their own hands--

tobi, now officially laughing at him: madara, what i meant is: i can’t get any more pregnant than i am now. Do you want to fuck?

madara: ... #o_o#

(madara does want to fuck.)

#ABO quest #asuka writes #kinda #Anonymous

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impala-dreamer · 4 years

Text

Two Weeks Notice - Day Three

~With the world practicing self-isolation, Y/N and Dean break all the rules of social distancing and common decency as they explore an empty bunker and use the time alone to their playful advantage...~

Dean x Reader

1,645 Words

Warnings: NSFW! Role Play. Bondage. Rough. "Monster Fucking". Slight Pregnancy!Kink, Consensual Non-Con. It's all fantasy! Fluff

Two Weeks Notice Masterlist ~ My Masterlist ~ Become A Patreon ~ My Original Works on Amazon

Dean woke with a start. He felt cold, like a spirit had moved through his body, but that was impossible- wasn’t it? He blinked, clearing the dizziness from his mind and looked around the dark room.

It was hard to see anything much, the table below him giving off such a glow that it nearly burned his eyes. The table.

He was laying flat atop the War Room table, arms and legs spread out as far as the edges of the table would allow. In a moment of panic, he tried to move, twisting his arms, then his legs, but he was strapped down, solidly locked with fabric cuffs laiden with velcro on all sides.

He swallowed hard and took a deep breath to calm himself, trying in vain to remember the last thing that had happened to him.

He’d been coming home with some groceries- ice cream and chips for Y/N, when suddenly…

Nothing. It all went black after that.

He looked down and realized the cold was not a ghost, but a lack of clothing. He was fully naked and on display for anyone to see and there was nothing he could do about it. He felt embarrassed at first, but then a twitch of excitement flooded his system; he knew it was wrong, knew he was in some sort of danger, but he couldn’t help the heat that rushed down to his cock.

A clink of metal from above drew his eyes to the iron balcony.

“Mr. Winchester, good morning.”

His eyes rose to a shadowed figure looking down upon him. Light from the table washed upwards, highlighting a beautiful face with dark lashes and deep red lips.

He sneered, tugging at his cuffs once more for good measure. “You.”

She smiled like a wolf. “Me. Nice to see that I am remembered. A hero such as yourself has too many things on his mind to be remembering lowly creatures; even ones that he tortured.”

Realizing that he had no way to defend himself other than his mouth, Dean smirked and licked his lips smugly. “Lady, I can’t remember every two-bit witch or flea-ridden wolf or whatever the hell you are that I’ve taken down. I just remember a pretty face when I see one.”

A scowl turned her lips downwards and she turned, high heeled leather boots clicking loudly on the metal as she slowly descended the stairs. She wrapped a hand around the banister and Dean’s eyes were glued to the dark red painted claws afixed to her fingertips.

“Baltimore...2003,” she told him plainly, every word corresponding with a step down, a clank of metal. “You murdered my family one night...took their heads clean off.”

Dean kept his cocky attitude and shrugged. “It happens.”

“Does it?” She rounded the bottom of the staircase and turned to him.

“Sometimes.” He sucked in a heavy breath as she came at him, a vision in a tight, shining leather dress. Her tits were pushed high and bubbling over the deep neckline, her waist cinched painfully into the perfect hourglass shape. She was stunning. She was sexy. She was…

“Wait…” Dean narrowed his eyes as her face came into full view. “Y/N.”

Emerald went dark with realization as she bared her vampiric fangs and dove down, wrapping her claws around his face to hold him still. He gasped as she bit into his throat, his pulse racing to flood her mouth with precious blood.

His eyes rolled as she kissed the spot and stood back up, her nails tracing the defined lines of his collarbone and left shoulder.

“So you do remember me.” She grinned and collected a drop of blood from the corner of her lips with her middle finger. She stared at it for a moment, letting it sparkle in the light before sucking the blood and digit into her mouth.

Panting and dizzy, Dean watched her carefully, calculating his next move. “Yeah, I remember you now. You got away, ran out the back door like a coward while I decimated your entire nest.”

Y/N sneered, baring her fangs as her hand rose to grip his throat, squeezing hard. “My family,” she corrected. “You murdered them. I barely escaped.”

“Thin line between escape and fleeing,” he choked.

Seething, Y/N bent down again and tore at his neck, tongue flickering at his pulse as she pulled on his essence.

Dean’s world began to spin and he tugged at his restraints, hopefully when he heard a bit of velcro give. “Vampires are all cowards,” he went on, using her rage to buy himself some time. “I’ve killed thousands. All the same.”

The more he mocked, the harder she sucked, moving around his throat with her deadly kisses. Her hand left his throat as his breathing quickened, fingers sliding down the deep cuts and curves of his firm torso, lower and lower until Dean hissed in protest.

“What do you want from me?”

Y/N lifted her lips from his throat and smiled down into his beautiful eyes. She wrapped a soft hand around his cock and slowly began to stroke him to life.

“I want what you took from me,” she said simply. “I want a new family.”

Dean scoffed but inside he cringed, fearful to become that thing again. He flashed back to years ago when he’d received the magical blood. He could feel it flowing through him again; the power, the connection, the lust of it all. “No.” He tried his best to push it from his mind, but her hand kept his attention elsewhere.

“Tell me, Mr. Winchester, are you familiar with the idea of a True Pure Blood?” Her fingers pulsed around his cock, thumb gently stroking the swollen head.

His head rolled along with his eyes, unable to focus on an escape any longer. “What? No.”

Y/N set her tongue against the sharpest of her fangs and smiled. “It’s the theory that two virial vampires can produce an offspring of immeasurable power, creating a new, True Pure Blood child that cannot be killed.”

“Anything...can be killed.” Dean’s voice caught in his throat as Y/N massaged his balls. “If you take its head off…”

“But what if it were true? What if it could be done?”

“It can’t.” He was panting, stomach muscles tightening, arms straining. “You can’t. It’s a myth. Just lore.”

“Funny,” she teased, lifting her tight skirt and climbing up onto the table beside him. “I thought your brother was the one with the library in his head.”

“I know stuff,” he spat, turning his face from her kiss as she leaned close.

“I bet you do.” It was sweet, almost romantic, the way her lips grazed his ear. Her breath was hot and shiver-inducing as it blew across his flesh. “You’re smart Dean,” she told him in a sultry whisper as she tossed one leg over his thick waist. He closed his eyes, lost to the feeling. “Handsome, clever…” Her pussy was hot and wet as she rubbed herself against his pelvic bone. “Brave, funny…” His cock twitched against her ass, warm and throbbing. “That’s why I chose you.”

His heart nearly stopped as he realized his error. When he looked up, she was barely an inch away, her lips puckered, her eyes hungry.

He shook his head defiantly. “No.”

Y/N smiled kindly. “You have no choice, Dean. It’s already begun.”

Before he could turn his face, Y/N stuck her tongue against her canine and bit down, drawing a river of fresh vampiric blood into her mouth. She kissed him hard, forcing his lips to part with her tongue and pushing the blood into him. He swallowed without a thought and felt the surge of power overtake him.

As they kissed, exchanging the Blood, Y/N scooted back and sank down onto his cock, filling her pussy as she filled his mouth. Her nails dug into his pecs when she pulled back, sitting up to ride him fast and hard.

Dean gasped, shaking against the hard, glowing table as the Blood worked on his system. Y/N kept him distracted while fangs ripped through his gums, his eyes changing, filling with the power. He writhed below her, limbs tensing, pulling at the straps, his chest heaving as he neared the end.

“Hush now,” she soothed, running a cold hand down his sweaty cheek. “You’re gonna be a great dad.”

He roared as he came, pain and pleasure mixing into one giant explosion that nearly knocked him out.

Y/N rode on, letting go of him for her own pleasure as she felt him spill into her throbbing cunt. She came soon after, using him like a toy, cackling into the empty War Room as she shuddered with pleasure.

“Rest now,” she said, climbing off of him and adjusting her dress. “You’ll need your strength to go again in a bit.”

Dean reeled. “Again? I…”

“Oh, you will,” she assured him, planting a sweet kiss on his forehead. “We’re gonna keep going until you’ve knocked me up for sure. The True Pure Blood must be born.”

Dean lifted his head as she backed away, face contorting with sudden worry. “Uh… ok, but you’re still on the pill though, right?”

Y/N laughed, nearly doubling over as the facade was broken. “Of course! What the fuck, dude!”

He sighed gratefully and lay back down, laughing at himself. “OK, good. I’m not- that’s not- I mean… yeah… no.”

“Agreed.”

He twisted at the cuffs again and turned back to find her walking from the room. “Hey! You gonna let me go?”

Y/N shrugged and eyed him over her shoulder. “Eh… maybe later. You look sexy like that.”

He watched in arousing horror as she actually walked away, heels clicking down the hallway into the shadows.

“Ah, nuts.”

2020 Forever Tags:

@akshi8278 @alwayskeepfightingsweetheart @amanda-teaches @bakutododeku69 @because-imma-lady-assface @broiderie @burningcoffeetimetravel @cheritzie @cosicas-cuquis @covered-byroses @crashdevlin @deansotherotherblog @deanmonandnegansbitch @deansgirl215 @deanwanddamons @defenderrosetyler @dontshootmespence @emoryhemsworth @feelmyroarrrr @focusonspn @hannahindie @herbologystudent252 @ilsawasanacrobat @justcallmeasmodeus @ladyjenny19 @laxe-from-outer-space @letsby @mariekoukie6661 @missjenniferb @mrswhozeewhatsis @msjava1972 @mylovelydame21 @mysticmaxie @pilaxia @sandlee44 @spn-dean-and-sam-winchester @squirrelnotsam @typicalweirdbookworm

TWN:

@rebelemilu @pastathighs @deans-baby-momma @bobbie3939 @peachyafshawn @spencer-reids-babygirl @akrasiaev @shadowkat-83 @deangirl7695 @foxyjwls007 @bxbyizzy @chenshemesh1 @pandaxo79

#dean x reader #series #twn #dean winchester x reader

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onceinabluehanguangjun · 3 years

Text

into you like a train (1/5)

the holiday au that no one asked for :)

warnings: anxiety attacks, alcohol

| next

ao3

Lan Zhan was, to put it nicely, about to go insane.

He closed his eyes and let his head drop, his forehead hitting the counter with a gentle thunk. He was sure if he had to read one more “academic” paper with un-checked grammar and made-up facts and no bibliography in sight that his head was going to explode. His students were smart and he was definitely proud of them, but this was still his first year as a full-fledged professor and they seemed to be taking advantage of it. He’d asked his brother a thousand times if this was normal and had gotten far too many laughs in response.

“A-Zhan,” Lan Huan said, voice warm as ever as he stepped up beside him, “Give me half the stack, let me help.”

“No,” Lan Zhan insisted, sitting up straight again, “I’m going to grade all of them. It is my job.”

“If you insist,” he said, far too much amusement still there, “But the offer stands nonetheless.”

Lan Zhan took a few grounding breaths and managed to lift his pen so he could continue to grade. But it just made his brain ache and he was finding it harder and harder to keep himself up right.

“A-Zhan,” Lan Huan said again, fond amusement still so prevalent in his voice, “You should take a vacation over winter break. You deserve it! You’ve survived your first semester.”

“I don’t like vacations.”

“Ah, I know you don’t, but, ” his brother said, tapping his shoulder, “You could go somewhere remote. Maybe to one of the mountains in Yiling? It gets cold, but not so cold you’ll be miserable. And it’s beautiful up there, and quiet. Huaisang got a cabin up there last winter‒he hated it, the quiet, but I think you’d love it. I could ask him where he stayed.”

Lan Zhan slowly turned his head to his brother. He was smiling, fond and light and happy. For so many years, Lan Zhan had envied his openness and the easy way he let people in when Lan Zhan, to this day, struggled with even simple conversation with strangers and catching social cues. However, as they got older, Lan Zhan bore witness to his brother being crushed with heartbreak over and over, even getting upset over people he met in the street because of missed opportunities. Lan Zhan didn’t envy that one bit. He was very happy not feeling that towards anyone.

“It seems you’ve already decided I’m going on vacation,” Lan Zhan said slowly. Lan Huan brightened like the sun.

“Okay, it’s an early birthday present,” he said, caving far too easily, “Let me show you the cabin.”

Lan Zhan sighed as his brother went to go grab his laptop. It would give him ample amounts of silence for him to grade finals. It was also a month away, so it gave him plenty of time to get used to the idea. And, besides, he’d feel bad if rejected a birthday present. Maybe Lan Huan was right and it wouldn’t be so bad. And, if it was, he could just ask Lan Huan to never ever do that ever again.

Lan Huan came back with excitement on his face as he put his laptop right on Lan Zhan’s papers. He flicked through the pictures of the small, one bedroom cabin. It was fully furnished and looked homey‒because the owners often stayed there in the summers and rented it out during the other months. It would be so much fun, Lan Huan said.

“Why don’t you go?” Lan Zhan asked. Lan Huan gave him that look that told him he might’ve been a bit rude, but it bled away into a smile again.

“You’re good alone, A-Zhan, I’m not,” he said, “If I had someone to go with me, though, it’d be very romantic.”

“Ask Nie Mingjue,” Lan Zhan said like it was obvious. Lan Huan laughed, more jittery and forced as his face flushed red.

“Absolutely not,” he said, “I said romantic. ”

“I heard.”

“Of course you did,” Lan Huan said, shaking his head with a smile, “It’s just a good place to steal away into for awhile, whether by yourself or with someone you want to steal away with.”

“Mn.”

“You know, if you want to bring someone…”

“No, thank you,” Lan Zhan said easily. Lan Huan didn’t push, just tapped his shoulder again. “It will… be fun.”

Lan Huan hummed happily, “I hope so.”

A month later, Lan Zhan found himself on a bus to Yiling.

It wasn’t too far away, about an hour and a half to the Yiling bus station where he’d then take a fifteen-or-so minute cab ride up the mountain to the cabin that was nestled in an isolated part of the woods. However, it felt much longer than an hour and a half on that treacherous bus. He packed himself as small as he could and was so tense with everyone around him making noises of all kinds that even his noise-cancelling earbuds didn’t properly stifle all the way that his muscles were sore when he finally got away. It hurt to stretch his hand out from where it’d been clutching his phone with a death grip for the entire ride.

He figured he’d love the cabin upon first meeting if only because he’d be alone.

Lan Zhan grabbed his bag and his briefcase and waited for his cab, counting his breaths. He couldn’t wait to be somewhere without people and was considering paying his brother to drive up to get him when his 10-day stay was up so he didn’t have to go through that again.

The cab ride was easier, but he’d already been riled up and he was as rigid as ever the entire ride. He paid the driver once they pulled up to the cabin on the left side of the mountain, a light layer of snow on the ground and on the roof. He nodded his goodbye and successfully found the key and let himself in before tears pricked his eyes.

He closed the door tight and put his things down gently, his hands coming up to press into his eyes as he involuntarily cried and tried to calm himself. He blindly navigated himself into the living room and wedged himself onto the floor between the couch and the table, balling up and breathing.

He felt a little childish, but he pushed those thoughts away. It happened. It’d been happening since he was young and there was no sign of it stopping. And it could be worse, so it didn’t matter. He didn’t even need Lan Huan there to hear his words of comfort: it’s alright, A-Zhan, you’re safe and I’ll keep them away.

Perhaps he wouldn’t need to pay Lan Huan to get him to come get him.

He stayed on the floor for the next two hours, long past when he stopped crying. He’d pulled out his phone and messed around on it to keep his mind busy. His sleeve stayed over his hand, keeping a barrier between his chin and his bare palm. The cabin was cozy aside from being cold since he hadn’t turned the heater on and he didn’t really mind being there. He’d been worse places. It wasn’t as comforting as his bedroom, but he couldn’t be picky.

Lan Zhan felt his eyes grow heavy once he calmed down more, considering just taking a nap right there on the floor. The only thing that stopped him was the chill that went down his spine and the 3% battery life on his phone. He crawled over to his bag and fished for his charger, still feeling tired and a little numb. He managed to plug it into the wall and tugged a blanket off the couch, turning on the heater before wrapping himself up as he returned to the spot on the floor.

He barely had time to get comfortable again before his phone started ringing.

“How was the trip?” Lan Huan said as soon as Lan Zhan answered. His tone of voice already said he knew how the trip was.

“I’m alright now,” he said, “The cabin is nice.”

“That’s good,” his brother said. Lan Zhan closed his eyes and rested his cheek on his arm. “Have you gotten groceries yet?”

“No.”

“Are you going this evening?”

Lan Zhan didn’t answer. He should go, but the idea of venturing out sounded like the worst thing he could ever do. He just wanted to go to sleep. Maybe then he’d wake up early and go before anyone else was awake and the stores would be relatively empty.

“Do you at least have something to eat for tonight?” Lan Huan said, already accepting his lack of an answer as an answer. Lan Zhan thought about the granola bar and water bottle stuffed in the bottom of his bag. It was meant to be for the trip, but he’d felt a little too self-conscious to ever touch them.

“Yes,” he said. His brother sighed softly.

“Alright. But please go tomorrow, A-Zhan.”

“I will.”

“How do you plan to spend your night?” Lan Huan shifted, trying for a more upbeat tone. Lan Zhan shrugged and nuzzled his cold nose into his sleeve.

“Sleeping. It was a long day,” he said. Lan Huan hummed.

“Oh, right, is it snowing there yet?” he asked, “I know it’s up on the mountain, so you might get some snow.”

“I haven’t checked,” Lan Zhan said honestly. He couldn’t remember if he saw snow there or not and the windows all had curtains.

“Well remember to take pictures whenever you go outside, alright?”

“I will.”

“Well, I’ll let you go and I’ll call you tomorrow. Goodnight, A-Zhan, love you.”

“Love you too, Huan-ge.”

Lan Huan hummed softly in that happy little tone that always made Lan Zhan feel a bit more grounded. If Huan-ge was happy, then he was comfortable enough to handle the situation and A-Zhan just had to hold his hand until it was over. Maybe his hand wasn’t here now, but it worked all the same.

The phone call ended and Lan Zhan’s eyes felt even heavier. He adjusted himself to lay on the floor between the coffee table and the couch and used his arm as a pillow. He propped his phone up on the couch and adjusted his earbud before finding something mindless to listen to in the background before he opened his sudoku app.

He didn’t make it through one round before he dozed off.

When Lan Zhan woke himself up again, the entire room was pitch black now that the sun wasn’t even shining through the curtains. A small jolt of panic shot through his system as he tried and failed to gather his surroundings with his arm half numb from laying on it for who knows how long. His mind felt as if it’d been stuffed with cotton balls which was a sure sign that he hadn’t slept enough to full rid himself of the stress the bus ride induced.

Still, he managed to use his phone to find a lamp which he turned on and had to blink a few times before his eyes adjusted. They felt puffy and sore which, paired with his head, made him feel painfully young. He just wanted to lay down and have his older brother run his fingers through his hair until he fell asleep for real.

Instead, he pulled himself to his feet and tried to stretch out all the stiff parts in his body that came with sleeping on the bare floor. At the same time that his back cracked, he heard a noise outside that caused him to go very still and listen closely.

There was some shuffling and then fiddling with the doorknob and Lan Zhan was considering the logistics of suing Nie Hausiang for emotional damages. The doorknob fiddling stopped alongside a loud groan and followed by a whine and then a thud.

“Wen Ning! Open the door! I dropped my keys!” a man’s voice whined, a pathetic moan following it, “It’s cold ! Wen Ning! Wen Ning!”

Lan Zhan felt frozen as he tried to figure out what to do. Maybe if he stayed silent, the man would go away. Or maybe he wouldn’t. Lan Zhan stayed frozen in thought long enough that the man called out for whoever Wen Ning was again. His brilliant decision after that was to tiptoe to the window and peek behind the curtain as silently as he could.

It was dark outside save for the man’s phone which lit him enough to show that he was definitely not dressed for the weather. There was indeed snow and the sight of it jogged the faint memory of seeing it whenever the cab pulled up. It was colder now, he could feel it on the glass, and the man was in ripped jeans and a light sweatshirt. It didn’t take a genius to realize he was probably intoxicated and Lan Zhan couldn’t just leave him out there. What if he froze to death at the front door? That wouldn’t make for a good vacation.

After a few breaths and running over a couple of introduction lines in his head, Lan Zhan reluctantly opened the door. The man on the ground fell back with nothing holding him up and barely even groaned despite being only a few inches away from a stranger’s foot. Hazy, drunken eyes slowly trailed up Lan Zhan’s body and instantly made him want to shove the man back outside.

“Oh, fuck,” he cursed, squeezing his eyes shut and lifting his head just enough to drop his head on the ground as some sort of self-punishment, “Fuck. This is Jiejie’s cabin, isn’t it? I gave the cab the wrong address, fuck. I’m sorry, man, just, my bad.”

“It’s… okay,” Lan Zhan decided, keeping one hand on the door while the other one rested behind his back. His thumb stroked the skin between his ring finger and his middle finger, a lame attempt at self-soothing.

“This is my jiejie’s cabin, I knew she wasn’t here so I don’t know why… Look, I’m Wei Ying,” Wei Ying said, speaking oddly steady for a man who could barely get himself into a sitting position. He looked up at Lan Zhan again through squinted eyes and his shoulders and head all dropped as he groaned. “And you’re handsome because of course you are. I’m really sorry. I’m gonna, uh, call my roommate and ask him to come get me. I’ll stay outside, out of your hair, I’m sorry.”

Lan Zhan was completely silent, watching him fiddle with his phone. It took a moment for him to get the right number and for him to put it to his ear. The whole time, Lan Zhan was wondering if it was irresponsible or not to leave a drunk man outside in the freezing cold paired with weighing the pros and cons of inviting a strange man inside with him. He seemed to talk a lot which typically meant he would expect talking in response. That was a con.

“Wen Ning, I fucked up…Jiejie’s, yeah...have I told you you were my favorite today?...Ah, Didi, if you tell your sister, you'll lose the title of favorite...It did not work last time!” Wei Ying, allegedly, said to the phone, laughing with his friend about friendly things. Lan Zhan was beginning to see the appeal of leaving him outside.

The phone call ended and Wei Ying looked back up to Lan Zhan, staring for a moment before he scoffed and shook his head, swearing under his breath. He swore a lot. Con.

"He's on his way, you can just pretend I'm not even here," Wei Ying said, scooting a little further outside.

Lan Zhan took notice of his bare pale hands, his red cheeks, and the fact that his hair was beginning to look a bit wet from the snow hitting it and melting. His stomach twisted and knotted, only feeling more conflicted. It was wrong to leave him outside, even if he was annoying and drunk and strange, wasn't it? And this was his sister's cabin. What if she found out and got mad at Lan Zhan? What if she yelled at him?

What if this whole thing was an elaborate scheme to kidnap him and keep him for ransom?

Alright. Irrational. Lan Huan would invite him in without question. (Lan Huan also had a bad habit of picking up hitchhikers but that was a problem for a different time.)

"It's cold," Lan Zhan said. Wei Ying looked up at him and gave a little smile, one where his eyes got all squinty and he made a humming noise like his brother. Lan Zhan rubbed his thumb between his fingers a little harder.

"Don't worry about me, I have a high enough blood alcohol content to keep me warm," he said. Lan Zhan's eyebrows tugged together.

"That… isn't how that works," Lan Zhan said, "Alcohol can make you more perceptible to hypothermia."

"Aiya, you caught me," he said, laughing a little too loud. Lan Zhan considered closing the door on him again.

Alas, he wasn't trying to deal with a dead body.

"You can come in to wait," Lan Zhan said slowly. Wei Ying blinked up at him, tilting his head to the side.

“I don’t wanna intrude,” he said, smiling just a little. Lan Zhan looked forward, avoiding eye contact.

“It’s cold,” Lan Zhan repeated, “This is your sister’s cabin.”

A little kindness goes a long way, Lan Huan’s voice seemed to echo in his mind, good karma, you understand. Good karma. Lan Zhan would allow this man to not die on his sister’s front door and maybe he would get a peaceful week.

“Well, if you insist, ” Wei Ying said.

Lan Zhan stepped out of the way as Wei Ying pulled himself to his feet, relying heavily on the door frame to get there. He was taller than Lan Zhan would’ve originally guessed from his crumbled state on the ground; they were practically the same height. Lan Zhan stayed out of the way as he made his way towards the couch. When he caught sight of his back, Lan Zhan was a little pained to see that his jeans and his sweater were both wet from sitting in the snow and he just let himself fall on the couch. Hopefully Lan Zhan didn’t get in trouble for that…

“So, what’s your name?” Wei Ying asked as he got comfortable, smiling up at Lan Zhan who stayed standing close to the door. There wasn’t really another place to sit and he wasn’t very comfortable with this situation. His head still ached and he wasn’t entirely sure his eyes were puffy from crying. So, standing was fine.

“Lan Zhan,” Lan Zhan said. Wei Ying smiled wider and nodded.

“Lan Zhan,” he repeated as if the name just fit perfectly in his mouth. Lan Zhan kept his gaze on somewhere past Wei Ying. “Nice, suiting. So, Lan Zhan, what do you do?”

“Teach.”

“Me too!” Wei Ying nearly cheered. Lan Zhan blinked a couple times. A teacher got so drunk he showed up at the wrong house? That didn’t seem like the type of person who should be teaching. “Eh, I swear I usually don’t get this fucked up. It’s a bad anniversary, you know, so I had to get a little drunk, it happens. But I do teach! I teach the little ones, but you must teach the bigger ones. You’ve got a face the little ones would walk all over.”

“University,” Lan Zhan said. Wei Ying seemed genuinely interested as he nodded. It was strange. “Music history.”

“That’s so fun! I teach little ones basically everything, you know. Except swords. I did swords training for years, but I never got to the level where I could teach it. Did you do swords?”

“Mn.”

“Good, you look like you’d be good at it. Anyway, I teach basically all of the children on this mountain that are in primary school. The school is small, but it’s good. They like it, I like it,” Wei Ying explained. Lan Zhan furrowed his eyebrows just a little. How big was this mountain that it had its own school? Or, maybe, how localized were the people that lived here? “It’s good, you know, to have someone who hasn’t spent their whole life on this mountain teaching them. It helps prepare them for when they go down once they have to go to secondary school and then the rest of life. Some kids I’ve met have never been off this mountain, did you know? It’s so surreal to just live so confined and safe in your space with all your friends and family without all the pressure.”

Why would they rent out a cabin in a place like that?

“I live on the other side of the mountain with my friends. Had a bit of a rough time in university and they suggested coming somewhere less overwhelming would be good for me, but now I think I’m the overwhelming part of it, ha! My jiejie said she missed me, though, so they got this cabin and stay when they can. Her husband’s got money money, so I don’t even feel bad. This cabin and there’s a few more that are rented out like this which brings in tourists but not too many. It’s nice. Am I talking too much?”

Lan Zhan didn’t even know what to say to any of that. He could hardly even process half of the words he was hearing. He took a moment to find a way to say anything that sounded like a proper response. Wei Ying didn’t seem phased. Wei Ying had all the attributes to be the most overwhelming person he’d ever met, and yet there was something about him that didn’t make Lan Zhan feel pressured to speak. That was rare.

“Is it a farming village?” Lan Zhan asked softly. Wei Ying nodded enthusiastically.

“Yes! That and many of the people that live here have been here for generations and have survived solely on passed down information. They’re all children of ancient herbalists, too, so all very, very smart. My friend, Wen Qing, she’s the only trained medical doctor on the mountain, but she mixes that with herbalism, so she’s probably the smartest person you’ll ever meet, but don’t tell her I told you that. But it’s such a tight knit community, very traditional, but in a good way. Half of the children I teach won’t go to secondary school down the mountain, though, they’ll stay here and take their parent’s spot in the community,” Wei Ying rambled again. Lan Zhan nodded.

Lan Zhan listened as he spoke, rambling about different little things. It was like reading a pamphlet of the village, like he had so much in his brain about it that he rarely got to share because everyone there already knew.. He never expected input or even made it awkward. Lan Zhan decided letting him in wasn’t the worst mistake he’d ever made.

Still, when there was a soft knock at the door, he let out a relieved breath.

When Lan Zhan opened the door, the man on the other side gave a polite bow. Out of instinct, Lan Zhan did the same which seemed to only make the man turn a bright shade of red. Lan Zhan stepped to the side to let him retrieve Wei Ying.

“Wen Ning, you got here so fast!” Wei Ying said. It wasn’t fast, Lan Zhan thought, it was probably closer to 15 minutes which was decidedly not fast. Wen Ning smiled nonetheless and grabbed his arm, helping him to his feet.

“Thank you,” Wen Ning told Lan Zhan with a polite smile as he held up Wei Ying’s weight. Lan Zhan nodded.

“This is Lan Zhan! He’s nice and he’s handsome, isn’t he?”

“Yes, Wei-ge, now come on,” Wen Ning said softly, tugging him towards the door. Wei Ying twisted a bit to wave at Lan Zhan goodbye as he was led to the car. Lan Zhan questioned if he should wave back, but he took too long trying to decide and Wei Ying faced the car again.

Lan Zhan closed the door and locked it, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath.

He needed a nap.

#wangxian #wangxian fic #lan wangji #wei wuxian #lan xichen #the untamed #mdzs #my fic

18 notes · View notes

silenthillmutual · 4 years

Note

A trio of prompts that'll go well together imo: 25, 26, and 31. Burakhovsky if you can, but if you think anything goes better im excited and happy!

Wrapping arms around them when they make breakfast + Cuddling in comfortable silence before murmuring “I love you” + “You’ve got something on your lip, here let me.”

so you want tooth-rotting fluff, huh? (prompts from here)

-------

Dankovsky is far more affectionate than Artemy had assumed he would be.

Daniil. He guesses, now, that he should call the man by his first name; and Daniil seems very different, sometimes, from Dankovsky. Dankovsky works very clinically, detached; he smiles politely, holds gazes for three seconds exactly before resetting, and quotes Latin proverbs to reinforce the idea that he’s smarter than he really is. Daniil, though - Daniil doesn’t bother holding eye contact, letting himself stare off into space as he talks. He over-worries about the kids in the town, almost leans against Artemy’s body as he shifts weight uncomfortably between his feet, and mostly quotes Latin to get away with insulting the rulers to their faces.

Artemy catches the last one when they’re both called in to answer boos Vlad. And he catches it, because “up yours” is the only phrase he’d learned in class he thought might be useful later on. He makes a choking sound, and his eyes lock with Daniil’s catching a self-satisfied smirk that he could, for once, appreciate.

He thinks that’s when Daniil made his decision.

After their moment of shared understanding, a concept that still astounds Artemy at just how small a thing it was and how easy it would have been to miss, he notices that Dankovsky slips into Daniil more and more readily. At first it only happens when they’re totally alone in the hospital, and Artemy is able to write off his softer tone and careless words as exhaustion. He admits he finds the ruling families - even his own - difficult to talk to. He confides that he thinks they’re all lying to him and hiding something. Artemy finds himself saying, “They’re using your ignorance to try and sway you to their cause.”

He panics for a moment, worried the words will come back to bite him in the ass. But Daniil only removes his gloves so he can slide his hands through his hair nervously. He sighs, and says, “You’re probably right, but what else am I supposed to do?”

Artemy thinks the words, Come to me, but doesn’t say them, because at that point the suggestion feels too intimate. He hasn’t really learned to read Dankovsky from Daniil yet, even if the shift is easily recognizable. He still wears the coat and the gloves and stands apart from everyone else, keeping up a border between himself and the locals. So instead he says, “Get some sleep, emshen.”

“I will if you do,” Daniil retorts, already standing up to continue doing whatever it is he came into the hospital to do. “And it looks like you need it. You’re not just a pretty face, you know. We need your steady hands...well, steady.”

Artemy had grunted in response and started to move, catching onto the words only after too much time had passed for him to ask about them. He told himself it was just Dankovsky slipping into character again, giving out a backhanded remark to chastise him into taking care of himself. It was his odd way of showing that he cared, and thinking of it as anything else was just too much. Thinking of it for what it actually was was more than he could handle.

And he thinks its a fluke, that this is Dankovsky’s version of ribbing the way he’s used to interacting with Gravel and Grief and Stakh. Daniil’s version of it is just different because of where he’s from and his whole...thing, his whatever-it-was that made him establish his presence differently from everybody else. His Lines, Artemy guesses he could say, though he’s not even sure if that’s it. But he keeps telling himself that’s all that comment was - just teasing, just a different way of saying I’ve seen corpses prettier than you, not a real compliment and nothing to get hung up on.

He loops it like ambiance until he’s eating in the back of the hospital with Dankovsky and Yulia, lost in his mental to-do list and the status of his bound and the words it means nothing, it means nothing echoing until the actual words “You’ve got - nevermind, let me -” break through them, and he realizes Dankovsky’s ungloved hand is brushing against his mouth, thumb lingering a little too long on his lips.

There’s a smirk there, again. But it’s not particularly smug. It’s more of a lop-sided smile, like his mouth has gotten used to the movement and it doesn’t know how to produce something less sharp to illustrate what he actually feels.

It’s in his eyes, Artemy think, that he sees it. That’s where he sees Daniil, and where he sees he’s not actually imagining things. It’s also in Yulia’s eyes - or, actually, in her eyebrows, quirking up, telling him It means something.

Even with all of the evidence pointing in this direction, it still takes Artemy a remarkably long time to make his own move. Daniil doesn’t seem to mind it very much; if anything, he seems to be enjoying every one of Artemy’s startled responses to his lingered affection. Each gesture is followed with a look that Artemy can never seem to memorize properly, staring at it until Daniil’s eye contact (seven seconds, they’re up to now, before he becomes uncomfortable and looks away) is pulled elsewhere. And he’ll pull these gestures out when he’s still Dankovsky, when they’re still surrounded, smiling that sharp smile until they’ve held gazes for a moment and it softens.

He doesn’t really know what to do with this affection. Most of it’s unspoken, unquantifiable and intangible. Which is not to say there’s nothing of this bizarre courtship to hold onto. No: Daniil also sends him letters. They’re written in cursive (which Artemy hates; pretty, sure, but completely useless), most of it poetry, and some of it in other languages. Not just Latin, either; there’s French and German peppered in. He can’t tell which pieces are original and which Daniil has just memorized. A part of him wonders what else Daniil would be sending if they weren’t in the middle of curing a plague.

That same part of him lurches and drops when it occurs to him that he’s probably not even responding properly.

It’s been four days of casual, but warm touches and tender looks and poetry sent in pieces throughout the day when Artemy blurts out, awkward and clumsy, “I don’t know how to respond to you.” He does, at least, make sure that they’re alone in the hospital, or at least as alone as they’re going to get with dead and the near-unconscious.

Daniil isn’t looking at him at first when he smiles, but his gaze does direct upwards. “I don’t expect you to respond at all,” he says.

Which solves the anxiety telling Artemy that this has all been a joke, or maybe some sort of stress-induced hallucination. But it doesn’t exactly make him feel any better, because there’s no guarantee in the words that Daniil knows his efforts are appreciated. “Shouldn’t I?” he asks. “Considering...”

He doesn’t know how to say what it is he’s considering, but shakes his head, noise like a laugh rattling around in his throat, quiet. “You already do,” he says.

Artemy, of course, doesn’t know what the hell that means, or what kind of a reaction he’s giving that Daniil is getting what he wants out of it. But Daniil is giving him that look again, the one he keeps trying to see when he closes his eyes, and any other attempts at response shut off.

Maybe it shouldn’t surprise him that when he asks Daniil to stay, Daniil does. And maybe it shouldn’t surprise him that he clarifies, Stay with me. But it does, because that’s not a request he had been thinking of making. The words had left his mouth without him really thinking them through.

Those surprises seem dull in contrast to the one he feels when Daniil hums as he thinks about it, and then politely declines. Artemy feels large and clumsy and surrounded by so many fragile items when he asks, “Why not?” despite the truth of the matter being that he wasn’t actually prepared for that much of a life change in one go.

Daniil sways, slightly drunk, leaning on Artemy’s arm, and mumbles the words, “I’m not doing wooing you yet.”

It doesn’t really hit him why it all makes sense until now, when he’s kind of in a daze about everything and reflecting on the fact that it’s been an entire month and a half since the army left town. A month and one-half, and the slow pacing doesn’t feel so slow anymore. It’s only been a month and one half plus two weeks that they’ve known each other. Of course asking Daniil to stay with him had been colossally stupid.

There’s no one to notice his flush. Not because he’s alone; far from it. The streets have returned to their bustling nature and the kids are at home, but he isn’t there. He’s in a house in the Stone Yard with Daniil. Not in Eva’s, anymore, as he’s no longer a guest. And for the same reasons, Artemy has no issues pushing himself up from the bed and heading down the stairs to the kitchen. Maybe cooking will distract him from the memory of sheer lunacy that was asking a man he’d only known a week to live with him.

But his isolation doesn’t last long. If he were more poetic, he’d have some flowery way to word the fact that he’d never wanted it. Daniil wore his like protection, but where he normally distanced himself with at least a little bit of pride, Artemy’s otherness was a source of melancholy. Moments like this were never different. Daniil clings in his sleep, where he’s entirely Daniil and his guard is let down. He clings, too, when he’s just woken up, or when they’re alone together and the only part of Dankovsky the Bachelor left is his coat. The metaphorical clinging, the kind with his words, becomes literal in moments like this, and Artemy lets out a breath when Daniil’s arms go around him.

He wants to stop in his movements and hold him back, but there’s a reason Artemy doesn’t act on every impulse he feels. He reigns these in as he works on their food, feeling Daniil’s chest move in breaths against his back as he wakes up just out of sight.

Once he’s done cooking, he can turn around, no longer all that surprised at how strong Daniil’s arms are around his body.

Artemy stares down at Daniil, looking up his chest at him, and thinks about what he wants to say. He thinks about what he said, when he first came back home, to all this death and this trauma and his friends barely speaking; to his father’s death and the reason the disease came back; to not trusting Daniil or Clara or the Inquisitor or the Army and being scared shitless they’d all be killed. He thinks about how he said he wasn’t sure if he knew how to love, and there are still parts of him that think he doesn’t know how to properly. He thinks about his aborted attempts to write or research poetry and letters to send back and all the times he wanted to kiss first but felt too clumsy.

What he says is, “I made you breakfast.” He closes his eyes, and squeezes his fingers just tight enough to make his knuckles crack. “That’s not what I meant,” he says.

But Daniil, in a move so typical of Dankovsky, interrupts him, humming as he reaches around Artemy to grab a plate. “I know,” he says. “I love you, too.”

#Anonymous #hopefully this came out okay!#burakovsky #nori writes #was it too obvious this was about love languages or -#icarus.docx #mine

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yandere-society · 5 years

Note

Yandere! JK when you want to get a divorce? Thank you so much!

To Annual an Annulment

Warnings; Yandere/husband Jungkook, blackmail, personality switch

Admin/writer; Chinkbihh

Words; 1.9k

“I love you so much that nothing can matter to me- not even you...Only my love- not your answer. Not even your indifference.”

The pounding of your racing heart echoed within your own ear drums.

The sound like a rythameric drum leading up to a battle, a war cry suited for you and your nerves at the moment.

Said nervous system was overworked, causing you to leak cold sweat and stress induced quivers. Faintly, you could also hear the slight rustle of papers that were in your hand. Your shaky state having caused the noise to join your pounding heart.

Out of a nervous tick, you bit your lip and let the weight of the situation rest upon your meager shoulders. To really let the mass crush you ever so gently…

Yet, you fought back the urge to run away with every ounce of willpower you had left.

This was going to be the toughest part.

But you couldn’t back down now.

Too much was on the line.

An image of what your life would be like if you just continued to be a doormat flashed in your mind’s eye for a second. The prediction causing you to cringe as it depicted the future as not bright at all. Despite wanting to curl into bed and cry, you reminded yourself that you had to push through for the sake of your own wellbeing.

Survival instincts began to kick in.

With a new spark of determination, you glared at the strong wood of the mahogany door. You knew what laid behind it, but you still rattled a knock against it nonetheless.

“Come in.” His dulcet voice called out, a tad muffled from the barrier between you two.

You took a deep breath and opened the door to step into his office.

And what an office it was.

It was crisp and modern with greys and blacks. Very minimalist decoration besides the small longue sofa to the left of the room and the fireplace in front of it. Behind the marble desk (where he sat) was one glass wall, depicting the marvelous city skyline and the wealth of the man who called this his office.

The quiet clicking of fingers on a keyboard rang quietly within the four walls.

You took a deep breath.

And stepped further into the lion’s den.

The typing stopped as your husband looked up from the screen of his computer to see who the visitor was.

His face was cold and sharp until he identified who you were.

“Baby! Did you come to get lunch with me? Cindy didn’t tell me you were here. I should really fire her, you know?” Jungkook’s called out excitedly as his face melted into an expression that he only revealed around you; loved-sick and dazed.

Doe eyes filled with sugary molasses as they adored you with a foggy film over the orbs. His impish nose scrunched up cutely at you like one would do with a baby when cooing at them. Those pink lips of his puckered up while his face melted into a softer and more cherub shape as he gazed up at you.

Normally, any wife would be grateful for their husbands to still look at them like that.

But it only succeeded in striking fear into your heart.

He was infatuated with you.

And there was no way that he was going to let you go without a fight of some sort.

You nervously shifted your weight from one foot to another as you tried to avoid his eyeline. Jungkook was very observant when matters came to you and if he sensed a problem before you did….god have mercy.

“Um, a-actually I wanted to talk.” You told him. Jungkook’s scrunched his brows in slight confusion at what could possibly be bothering the love of his life. He waited on you hand and foot, it was his job to make sure nothing bothered you. He patted his lap in motion for you to sit on it, but you quietly took one of the seats in front of his desk; pretending you didn’t notice the anger tick of his tongue pushing against his cheek.

“What is it love?”

Like ripping off a band-aid, you decided that quick and ruthless was the best strategy.

“I need you to sign these divorce papers.”

The once powerful and confident posture of the CEO crumpled before your very eyes. His broad shoulders slackened as his face dropped any emotion that wasn’t directly related to devastation. Jaw dropped, his eyes bore into yours with the depression of a suicidal maniac who lost everything.

The silence hung in the air for a moment, each passing second causing the apprehension to grow.

“W-what?” His eyes matched his voice, watery and broken. His face looked like the reaction to someone telling him that world war three had finally broke out. In this case, these two things were equal causes for ruin in his book. Although losing you was a bit more hellish to him.

Not being able to bring yourself to words, you simply stood up and plopped the papers onto the desk before him. Broken from his frozen trance, he hurriedly snatched the papers into his hold and furiously ran over each line. As if he suspected that it wasn’t real or that you were trying to prank him in some awful way. That a ‘just kidding!’ was hiding somewhere in the fine print.

His eyes reached the bottom of the paper where his signature was needed, but instead of grabbing a pen and fulfilling the duty, he just looked back up at you in neck-breaking speed.

“Are you serious?”

You nodded.

In a rush of movement that was almost too fast for your eyes to process, Jungkook ran around the desk and got onto his knees before you. Your clammy hands were now put into his as he craned his neck to look back up at you. Tears were trailing down his face and hitting the floor, causing a beginning stages of a puddle to form underneath you two.

“Baby, you’re not thinking straight. We can talk about this. Couples have obstacles all the time, that doesn’t mean we have to give up when we face another one. It’s just a rough patch but we’ll fight our way through it. I’ll die without you, can’t you see?!” He was blubbering like a fool as the thoughts and pleads seem to come to his head at more efficiency than they could leave his mouth.

“Jungkook...this marriage isn’t healthy.” You tried to be the voice of reason. But this seemed to trigger another chorus of moans and groans as a man who had everything continued break down in front of you.

“Why?! At least tell me why?” He demanded, his face beginning to burn with frustration.

You held back your own annoyance. You thought it was self-explanatory, but Jungkook had tunnel vision with you. He only saw you and nothing else, something you had to learn the hard way whilst in the relationship. Nonetheless, you wanted to voice your reason for leaving, if only for your own conscious when looking back at this day.

“Jungkook, you cannot try to limit my communication with my friends and family while expecting me to be okay with it. That’s manipulation. That’s you trying to isolate me. And I don’t want a husband who does that.”

Another moment of silence.

Still on his knees, Jungkook bowed his head and obstructed your view of his face. The cries had stopped as he dropped your hands from his hold.

Then...a sound.

A dry chuckle deep from within his chest.

Your eyes widened in fear as you took a step back in horror.

He had switched.

Jungkook slowly got up to his feet, head still bowed as he brushed off the imaginary dust from his slacks. When he looked up to face you, the traces of a pathetic man were nowhere to be seen. The only evidence was perhaps the slight puffiness and redness of his eyes, tears long gone and replaced with a wicked smile. He quirked a brow at you and shows off his pearly whites.

“Fair enough then.” He rumbled, before walking back to the other side of his desk.

You watched with suspicion as he grabbed a pen and leaned over the paper to inspect it a bit more closely. There was not way that it was going to be this easy...

Was he really going to sign it?

“Who is your lawyer?” Jungkook asked, eyes not leaving the legal form.

The question struck you as odd but you supposed it was somewhat relevant in the divorce setting. You licked your lips and responded, “Anthony Platt.”

He uncapped the pen. “Never heard of him before.”

The small talk was odd enough to cause more tension. Something wasn’t right.

“He’s a small time lawyer.” You lamely responded. You couldn’t afford a high class one because you had to go out of your own pocket to hire one. How could you divorce a husband by a hiring a lawyer with his own money?

“I suppose this is his information right here?” He pointed to a section on the paper. You just shrugged, obviously your lawyer formed the documents so his name and number would be in there somewhere….

Jungkook finally put pen to paper.

Except it wasn’t on the divorce papers.

It was on a notepad.

You stepped closer in befuddlement to see what he was copying.

Your jaw dropped as you saw him jotting down your lawyers info.

“What are you doing?!” You shrieked, cool lost.

Jungkook continued to scribble down what he could, not once looking back up to you.

“I want to have a talk with your lawyer.”

The threat was there as you knew what ‘talk’ meant in Jungkook’s dictionary.

“Jungkook, stop this! I don’t want your money or anything, I just want to stop being your wife and to live my life! Is that too much to ask for?! Just let me go!” You exploded, two years of pent up resentment finally taking its’ toll.

Jungkook stood up and snatched the divorce papers, staring you dead in the soul with the iciness that could rival Antarctica itself.

“No, I can’t just ‘let you go’. It’s really cute that you think I can though. If you wanted to go to court, you know that my company has a board of eight lawyers with lots of experience just waiting to crush yours’. And even after we are divorced, I still have ways to get to you.”

With the papers in his hand, he stalked to the left side of the office.

His next words caused your blood to run cold as a picture was painted for you. One where Jungkook lost his wife and is willing to do anything to get her back.

“It would be a shame if something happened to your friends. It would also be a shame if your parents lost their home because they failed to pay their property taxes that their son-in-law had been covering. And it would be a shame if your siblings were to have trouble at school. It’s a crazy world out there darling. Best you have me by your side.”

He crumpled the papers and tossed them into the fireplace.

Then he turned to face you, voice chipper and face joyful as he said,

“Now that this silly business if over with, we can go get lunch. And you can tell me all about this lawyer who thought he could steal my baby from me.”

(Chinkbihh here, please let me know what you thought of this piece. I thrive off feedback bc I NEED VALIDATION ARIES SEASON SIS. Please send more requests to me and my lovely admins and I hope you all have a great day.)

#yandere bts #bts #yandere #yandere jungkook #jeon jungguk #jungkook #yandere bts fanfiction #yandere kpop #horror #obsession #jeon jungkook #bangtan boys #one shot #kpop #my writing #ask #admin chinkbihh

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elmidol · 4 years

Text

The Entangled Strings of Twin Puppets

Three Blind Tooke Part Two Precarious Harmony

Read on AO3

Warnings: nonexplicit mentions of previous noncon situations

In the long pauses before death, we seek solitude in the silence.

There are no poems, no words at all for us to hear.

Merely a look that ties us all together until at last it is gone.

Be careful not to blink, for those long pauses are fleeting moments.

Three Blind Tooke

Part Two: Precarious Harmony

Chapter Twenty-Five: The Entangled Strings of Twin Puppets

You had spent years training with the Resistance in order to deliver a kill shot to one of the New Republic’s most formidable foes: Kylo Ren. He was an enemy the New Republic had been oblivious to, much in the same way they had denied the threat posed by the First Order. That had, ultimately, been their undoing; Starkiller Base, prior to its destruction, had obliterated the entire Hosnian System, the Galactic Senate along with it. Your mother had perished that day. Your father had already passed away during the time you had been absent, though this you had not learned until after you had been taken captive by Kylo Ren. Your body was not the same after the attack that had nearly left you dead; the lightsaber wound had compromised your body. And so now you were to retrain yourself—both physically and emotionally—in order to discover a new means of killing the man that was your captor—your host.

It was ironic, that you were in some twisted way the guest of someone who had imprisoned you. Had done unspeakable things to you—all in order to break you down. The horrors of war were something that not all could understand. The sights that were faced by those at the forefront. The acts committed, all said to be for the sake of the greater good. Each side had its own idea as to what that greater good would be. There were always those torn in the middle. People so conflicted over their morals that they were ripped apart—at times, solely figuratively, while other times a literal instance of this would occur. It was not only the acts or words of the leaders of either side that led to this. For example, General Leia was the mother of Kylo Ren. The man who had formerly been Ben Solo; a fact you had learned only after being made his prisoner. You had been trained to kill him, all the while your general had not wished this. Splinter cells. Every piece working to do what they believed would help the cause.

Ultimately hurting one another. It had broken you completely in ways—to find that you could have compassion for an enemy…empathy. You despised his methods though you understood where they came from.

Both a prisoner and a guest of the Master of the Knights of Ren, you were presently alone in his living quarters. The door was locked, this you well knew, and yet it was not to keep you in. No, it was locked in order to keep out a specific individual.

You had heard much of the First Order’s General Hux prior to meeting the man. When you had spoken with him, you had eventually admitted your respect for him—as a leader, though his ideals were anything but those held by you. You despised what he stood for, and yet… It was with revulsion that you had to admit to yourself yet again that you had allowed the man to touch you, to have sex with you, and on more than one occasion. That he was your enemy was of no consequence; that did not toke the fires of your anger. It was that he had ordered the destruction of the Hosnian system, had essentially ordered your mother’s death—you had had sex with your mother’s killer.

When at last you finished with Kylo Ren, when you were able to kill the man who had stolen your freedom, you would deal with the redhead. You executed another four sit-ups then allowed yourself to lie down to relax. Your stamina was lacking. All the while Kylo Ren was healing from his injuries; his training with his Master would begin within mere days.

Patience. It was a mantra that was repeated in your head six times before you thought to yourself: the Rule of Two. This was what Ren had equated your arrangement with him to. He well knew that your intentions were to become stronger and kill him. All the while he used this as a means to strengthen himself. A façade of harmony.

The two of you.

He wanted to be the center of your world, as he had been for so long. General Hux would be a distraction, his very presence a threat to that rule of two. You grit your teeth and started to raise your torso. Another set of four sit-ups. It was taking its toll on your body, which was out of shape. Sweat dripped down your back. General Hux could not be your focus as much as Kylo Ren. That would render you sloppy, as you had been in the past. Focusing on too much at once. Not being patient.

There is no Resistance, you said in your head. The members of the Resistance would bench you if they could; take what information you were able to provide, yet allow you to assist no further.

In a way, you understood why this would be. It was not only your body that was compromised. You remained steadfast in your loyalties. Still, you could not deny that empathy. That compassion. Understanding your enemy and knowing that there were certain aspects of him that you could… You broke off that thought, afraid of it. Such a terrifying thing, learning that you could hate a number of individuals for what they did…yet care for specific members of that establishment as well.

Why did you kill my comrades? you wanted to ask despite knowing the answer. The sting would never fade. You would always sit there, shell-shocked in the face of the outcome.

You were now acting on your own. It would benefit the Resistance, the galaxy, and yet you were no longer under the rules that had governed your actions in the past. The rules of the New Republic itself. But fuck if my body isn’t resisting me...

You collapsed onto your back again. Tears of frustration stung your eyes. You had known ahead of time that it would take more than a single exercise session to get to where you needed to be. New limits. New rules. Finding a way to balance your loyalties and your heart.

The Rule of Two.

Panting, you listened passively to a quiet beeping that was coming from the device beside your head. The electronic tooke pet Kylo Ren had provided you as a form of entertainment. You reached to the side, lifted the device, and played a small game with the tooke. Your heart took a few moments longer to return to a normal pace. You felt utterly drained of energy, which caused your frown to spread further. You fed the electronic pet, set down the device, and placed both your hands atop your stomach, one above the other.

“You can do this,” you said to yourself. “Just relax. Patience…patience…”

Stars, you thought, you had been in isolation for part of your training as well as while imprisoned. With nothing to do. Biding your time. That had been before you had learned of your father’s demise. Before your mother had been murdered by the actions of the First Order.

A beeping drew you out of your thoughts. You rolled up into a sitting position as Kylo Ren was putting in the code to enter his quarters. And then you were on your feet when the doors opened—and you felt your stomach drop. The nozzle of a blaster was pointed your way. Not Ren. In the place of one monster was another. You lifted your hands into the air to show that you were surrendering—temporarily. A shiver caused your teeth to chatter together. The sweat that had poured from your body during your exercises now assisted in making you too cold.

You glowered at the man holding onto the blaster that was pointed in your direction. “As if I could not get any code that has to do with my ship, tooka,” General Hux said through his snarl. You kept your hands raised in the air for half a second longer before slowly lowering your limbs. Your eyes darted away from his face to the blaster. He seemed to want you alive, which meant it would be set to stun rather than kill. Even if you managed to wrest the weapon out of his grasp, it would do you no good; you recalled that it was encrypted to work only with his fingerprints. The redhead tilted his head back and stared down the length of his nose at you. “You will come out of this room now.”

“You’re…taking me hostage?” you asked mockingly. As if you were a free woman to begin with. You snorted at the thought.

“You may relax if you believe it is my intention to rape you,” he said evenly. You barked out a bitter laugh at that.

“No, General. You do far worse than that, don’t you?” The corner of his mouth twitched, however his expression did not twist away from the frown that was plastered there. You took a step forward towards the open door of Ren’s quarters. The moment you left the sanctity of this room, the moment you were truly taken into custody by the general of the First Order instead of the Master of the Knights of Ren—that would change the game once more. There would be no Rule of Two. There would be three of you once more at that point.

A fresh wave of sweat began to form, beading on your flesh. This time it was from apprehension rather than exertion. Forced upon you instead of self-induced. You began to slide one foot backwards only to pause in your movements. General Hux had quirked a brow, challenging you with that expression.

“Are you content with being a small tooke then?” You narrowed your eyes while you watched him, more suspicion welling up inside of you. “A tooka, at least, has claws and teeth.”

“A tooke can defeat a rancor.”

“If the rancor first consumes it. Toxic… If you plan on eliminating me as well—and I am certain you are—you won’t be so reckless.”

Kriff, you thought as your heart fluttered in your chest. Kriff…he has a point. Or is he just that eloquent? So deceptive?

“You haven’t a choice when it comes down to it. I plan on taking you, whether you’re stunned and I am dragging you, or be it by you walking out of there.” Aware that it would do your compromised body excessive harm, and thus damper your plans, to even be stunned, you slid your foot forward this time. Then, lifting the limb, you took the first step towards the redhead. He said nothing, his face not betraying anything either. The man was observing you as he had so often in the past. Calculating. He knew better than to underestimate you.

You entered the hallway, fully exiting the quarters of Kylo Ren, and the door closed behind you. By then your heart was starting to race again. What sort of sick game were you being thrust into now? This was where General Hux was the player. Perhaps you were only his pawn, as you had been in the past. He waited until you were in front of him then gestured that you keep walking. The gun was pointed at your back.

You had at long last accepted Ren’s suggestion that you were, in some twisted way, his guest—and now you were being stolen away. Another hitch in your plans. No matter, you told yourself; you would adapt to the situation, as you had been forced to do ever since your capture.

“Did it thrill you, knowing that you were ordering my mother’s death?” you asked when the pair of you turned down the second hallway. You were not entirely certain where it was he was taking you. This was not the way to the general’s quarters; you had been there enough times to know better. General Hux did not respond to your inquiry, which caused your face to grow hot in frustration. Anger welled up inside of you. Knowing better than to unleash your rage, knowing that he had the upper hand and would simply shoot you there, you addressed him in a different fashion. “I hear your precious Starkiller Base was destroyed. Good riddance.”

“It is not often I am in the company of such a bitter woman.” A pause. “Turn left here.” You rolled your eyes though you complied all the same. Where? Where? Where am I going? “I do not understand Supreme Leader’s insistence on keeping Ren, on my rescuing him before the destruction of the planet.”

Ah, is this why he’s kidnapping me? It does not seem like him to be so petty. He must have other plans.

“And you…”

“Me?” you asked under your breath, grumbling now. After your mini workout, you were exhausted, though you refused to admit this to the man. In truth, you were nearly ready to collapse.

“You survived his blade in the past,” General Hux replied. You glanced over your shoulder, stumbling your next step. “Not that it hasn’t taken its toll.”

“Do you plan on experimenting on me? To prepare yourself for battle…against Ren?” No response. Not even a twitch. “Do you fancy yourself above him? Or is it… You seem to think so highly of yourself. I don’t see you as being content with being…not only under Ren, but the Supreme Leader as well. Your ideals may be the same, but there can only be one.”

“Has Ren taught you otherwise? That there can be…two, perhaps? Sith lore holds little interest for me, tooka, but I do know enough. He is merely toying with you.”

“You’re not doing anything different. Using me to your own advantage.”

You waited, leaving off on that note to see how he would react. Once more you were met with silence. Your walk was cut short when he directed you to face a door. General Hux reached past you, typing in a code that caused the door to open, and pressed the nozzle of the gun against you to urge you inside. You did not dare disobey, not giving up hope that you could eventually kill this man and the other.

There was not much inside the room. An interrogation table, a chair, and supplies set out on a ledge. “Before your mind goes to places it need not, I do not plan on harming you either. You can be useful to me.”

“Because you want Ren dead?”

“Yes—and that is hardly a secret. Neither of us is exactly fond of the other.” You turned around to face him at long last. General Hux lowered his weapon. “You’re interested to hear what I have to say.” Your bottom lip trembled as a wave of emotions went through you. This was your mother’s executioner. “Not all Sith have only a single teacher. And Ren is no Sith. His Rule of Two is a farce. I do understand the similarities. For you to reject my help… I suppose we would have our own duo as well. Wherein we wish to kill the other. Are using one another for our own purposes.”

It was supposed to have been just Kylo Ren and you. The Rule of Two. A third party. A second Rule of Two. That did not add up.

He was ruining everything.

He was perhaps your only means of defeating Kylo Ren, who would be receiving help from an outside party as well—Snoke. In a way, it only made sense. You would be allowed to discover some of General Hux’s weaknesses as well.

“You really don’t care that you’re responsible for my mother’s death.”

“I do not.”

You curled your hands into fists and grit your teeth. It took you a few moments to gather yourself. “This plan of yours—Ren will know.”

“His paranoia will be useful. He wants you. While he says that he would be willing to kill you, I doubt the sincerity in his words. Now, I need an answer, tooka.”

“Fine.” You felt numb saying it.

There had been two.

And now there were three—soon to be four, when Supreme Leader began his training. Puppets often did not know the identity of the true puppet master. There were layers of veils and curtains, each blocking the view one needed in order to see who it was that happened to be pulling the strings. You had the unfortunate advantage of knowing exactly who was pulling your strings. Kylo Ren and General Hux were the guilty parties. In the past, the Resistance had dictated your actions. Supreme Leader Snoke was doing all he could to manage the strings that held the Knight and General. All three of you, puppets in a play. The puppet master could be murdered, could become too confident in his role. Without his puppets, he would be nothing.

Thus with General Hux revealing his readiness to play against Kylo Ren, you were happy to jump at the chance to assist him. These two puppets. The main attractions of Snoke’s play. While you made an educated guess that more puppets were behind the scenes, you would leave them to the Resistance. Your focus would remain on where you could do the most damage, be effective in any way given that you were at the disadvantage with your health as it was.

At least now you would be allowed to use the First Order’s training facilities—within reason. General Hux was clever, and you sincerely doubted he would give you too much slack. That would be a noose around his throat.

General Hux was more than happy to display the smoking gun before Ren. You. You were a plaything for either of them. A willing puppet. It was the only semblance of freedom for you. This was your mindset as you crossed down the hallways and corridors of the Finalizer. You could hardly walk straight. Exhaustion from your meager exercise routine was setting in. You were equally drained on an emotional level. How long had you been playing this game with the two?

It had been longer with Ren than Hux. The Force user had snatched you from the fires of death—quite literally.

A monster that fed on the innocent; that had been the cause of many nightmares for you as a child. It had supposedly lived underneath one’s bed. If one were to place their foot over the edge of the bed, they could feel the monster’s breath. It had terrified you when you were younger. Caused you to rush to and from the bathroom when you found the need to use a toilet. As you grew older, your monsters changed shape—they became real.

The monster you had spent years training to hunt had taken your virginity. He had raped you on more than one occasion… And then you had had sex with him of your own accord—in a way. Being that you were a prisoner, your consent would be under scrutiny by many, and rightly so. The ability to consent meant you had freedom. Ironically, Kylo Ren granted you that amount of freedom, moreso now that you understood what it meant to be his guest.

Your host and captor was in his quarters when you arrived. He was seated on the edge of the bed, his elbows resting on his knees as he took you in. No mask, you noted. “You already know.” The words slipped from your tongue easily enough, and Kylo Ren offered a simple nod in response. “If the enemy of my enemy is my friend…that would mean both you and the General are my friends.”

“Ironic…” His voice trailed off, his thought not entirely spoken. It was strange, the familiarity you felt while with him. Alone. He had kept you isolated save for when he desired your company. You had learned to enjoy his touch, while at the same time you recoiled from it. Over time you had come to understand him, his brokenness. In a former life of his, he had been the son of your General Organa. Funny; she had never revealed that her son was your enemy. “You’re a resourceful woman…and the general is cunning. I should have suspected such results sooner.”

It took a great man to admit he was wrong. You admired your enemies’ strengths. Doing otherwise would be foolish, and allow them to gain the advantage.

“That first time you forced your way into my head… Why did you memorize the memories I pushed forward to keep you away from information on the Resistance?”

“I could feel you dying,” Kylo Ren stated simply. Your mind wandered once more to the way the lightsaber had felt piercing through your flesh. The smell of burning bodies, your comrades being incinerated in order to become a part of Ren’s ash collection. You had lain there waiting for your turn. Buried underneath the corpses of your fallen allies, you had anticipated it. Had welcomed death though a small portion of you had feared it as well. “In the Force… A light flickering in and out, fading… I reached out towards you—and when I discovered that it was you, the long-distance shooter that had taken my blade, I grew curious.

“I believed you would be easy to break. That it would be no trouble to take from your mind information on the Resistance, on the cell you were a part of. Those who have attempted to block me out in the past never offered up such personal information. It is with reluctance that I enter the minds of others…”

“You enjoy entering my head though?” you asked, the beginning of your question filled with a level of animosity that dwindled as you neared the end. It was hitting you in full, the meaning behind your own words. He enjoyed you. It was not as though these thoughts hadn’t floated through your mind before; you knew a part of him cared for you. This new depth made you uncomfortable. Admitting to yourself that, had the two of you been aligned with one another, the pair of you would have possibly loved each other.

Shrinking away from the thought, you transferred your gaze to the wall behind Kylo Ren. It was so plain. Sometimes you missed being on a planet. Even when you had been with the Resistance, you had felt homesick. Home is where the heart is.

Your parents were dead. You had been fighting for them—for everyone, but for them especially. You crossed Ren’s quarters until you arrived at the surface that had so held your gaze. Kylo Ren did nothing to deter you. He remained silent; the only noise coming from him was his breathing. It was familiar to you, relaxing. A part of you wondered why it was General Hux had once more forced his way into your life. It would benefit you, to be certain; and yet, in some ways, it had come too soon. There were pros and cons to the deal you had with him. Accepting his help as you were… You shook your head again.

“Before… When you had first captured me, I had been able to exercise for a slightly longer duration before tiring. Am I worse now? Will things continue this way?” In a way, you were speaking to yourself. Yet you did not mind Kylo Ren listening in on your musings. “Accepting the General’s assistance… He may provide the medical care I need as well, which is the only way I can hope to defeat you.”

“I hardly fault you for placing yourself into a position that will be to your advantage.” Hearing him say this caused your mind to stop racing. You lifted both your hands, running them along the top of your head. “It is no different than my own training.” You half turned to stare at his back. You wondered if he sometimes watched you simply by using the Force. He had already stated that he felt for you, that that was how he had discovered you were the one still alive. Which meant he had quite probably been meditating as your comrades had been placed into that furnace.

You had dreamed of what it would have been like to be burned alive. Those were never nightmares for you. Bad dreams, perhaps; but you would not label them as nightmares. At that point in time, you had been in a poorer position, had not accepted that you and Ren could use one another. The majority of the time you were with him, you had dreamed of home. Alas, when you had returned to Naboo, it had been…unpleasant at best. A nightmare, your mind supplied.

Kylo Ren rose from the bed while you watched him. The man moved towards the refresher, into which he disappeared. You crossed the room as well. Stripping out of your clothes, you set both your hands on the mattress. You wore only your underwear. This allowed you to stare down at your scars. The one from where Kylo Ren had pierced you, and another where he had singed you in the side with his lightsaber while interrogating another Resistance member. You grit your teeth at that memory. The man had broken, spilling secrets you had insisted he could hold—you could have taken it, even if it had meant your death.

You slipped your hands along the mattress as you climbed onto the bed in full. Your abdomen was sore. Fatigue was setting in. Hmm… It’s close to time for a new chip… Could that be the cause? The endometriosis…all my internal injuries… The doctor said… Each of your thoughts trailed off, though they strung together quite nicely. You laid down on the bed, curling up on your side so that you could properly watch the door to the refresher.

It was part of your arrangement with Kylo Ren that your medical needs would be taken care of. You curled your arms around your midsection. Having believed that he was simply using the toilet, you clicked your tongue against the roof of your mouth in annoyance upon hearing the shower turn on. He would be cleaning his wounds and changing his bandages. You did not want to wait that long to ask him the questions that had arisen in your mind. Thus you shimmied to the opposite edge, dangled your legs over the side of the bed, and moved up onto your feet.

The door was not locked, not that you had expected it to be. Kylo Ren wanted to be kept on his toes with you. Allow you chances to attack—only now, you would bide your time more and not be foolish in your attempts. You pushed open the door and walked over to the toilet. You sat on the closed lid, your arms once more around your midsection.

“When will the chip be switched?” you asked, ensuring that your voice was loud enough to carry over the sound of the spray. Kylo Ren merely muttered out your name. You waited for several seconds before deciding to humor him. Your hands pushed down your panties and then you busied yourself with unhooking your bra. You climbed into the steaming shower with him.

Immediately you were pleased that you did so. The warmth felt great on your body. Ren did not make it a point to touch you, nor did he deliberately avoid you. He brushed against you here and there as he washed himself. You were allowed to remain under the spray for the most part, save for when the man required it to rinse off soap. Ren once more stepped into the spray, and you pressed your front against his back.

“A physical exam is scheduled for tomorrow,” he said. “It may not be due to the need for a replacement chip, although the possibility is likely… You’ve adjusted the way you had been exercising. You have hardly taken into consideration that the majority of your training occurred prior to your death.”

That was true, you noted, setting your palms flat against his shoulder blades. The man hardly flinched under your touch, though he did tense a little. He was not one who enjoyed others touching him without his permission. You had taken note of this; it was a reason you had always been baffled by the fact that he often had contact with you. Kylo Ren shifted around, turning so that your hands were on his chest. You tilted back your head to peer up at his face.

The scar was faint, yet it was there. Your eyes traveled along it before you met his gaze in full. “That was your fault.” That you had died—he had placed you in the care of Miovtha. And that you had lived; his reaction to your death… “Had I been on… That is to say—if either of us had been on the opposite side with the other…me with the First Order, or you with the Resistance…”

“Are you looking for affection due to losing your parents?” He often deflected when it came to anything remotely sentimental. Your eyes dropped to his chest, and you rested your head there. This man had killed his father; he had told you as much, had chastised you for even momentarily mourning Han Solo. Your hands shifted down to the light scar that was the remains of his bowcaster wound. He had used a generous amount of bacta and other ointments to reduce the visibility of the scar. In truth, it was still in the process of healing. “Mm… that isn’t it at all. You are truly curious about me… How sweet.”

In the past, you would have cursed him for implying such a thing. More and more, however, you were discovering how alike the two of you were in certain respects. Devoted to the cause; on opposite sides of this war. “Complimenting you in any manner is a waste. You’re arrogant,” you shot. Ren’s response was to grunt then cup your face in his hands. He smirked down at you when he tilted your head back so that you were forced to meet his gaze. You narrowed your eyes half-heartedly at him. “You have theorized that Snoke will not order you to kill me… He may eventually.” Your mind could not fully escape from the memory of him murdering his own father; though you had not seen it with your own eyes, your imagination provided plenty enough of a visual.

“I have already informed you, tooke: you help to increase my power. Killing you would be a waste.” Your bottom lip quivered at that. How many of your allies had this man killed? He murdered countless on the battlefield—yet your death would be a waste? It was a disgusting compliment you wished could not have been bestowed upon you. Kylo Ren’s mouth found yours. Though you did not respond, you did nothing to push him away either. He kissed you only that single time, and then left your mouth and his in close proximity. “Were you ever in love, tooke?”

Despite the hot spray of water, you felt a sudden chill. There was a sort of desperation in his voice as he posed the question. As though he wished to own you entirely, be the only individual you had ever considered spending your life with—even if another reality would have had to have existed.

“Not like that,” you said, knowing it would do you little good to lie. He had been in your mind before, and he would quite likely visit it many times more. Ren dipped his chin a fraction of an inch. His suspicions had been confirmed. The hands that were cupping your face dropped to his sides.

Kylo Ren turned around, shutting off the shower and then reaching out to grab a towel for himself. After wrapping the cloth around his waist, the Force user seized the spare towel and gave it to you. You clutched the towel against your chest. It took you a few moments longer before you fully snapped back to the present and proceeded to dry yourself.

“I will show you, Tooke, how sentiment is a weakness. It will be your downfall.”

You stared after him as he exited the refresher. You were still drying off at that point. Shaking your head, you could not help but wonder if sentiment would be his downfall. You wrapped the towel about your body, your bare feel pattering on the floor as you walked over to the exit.

“Do you believe that I won’t be able to kill you…because you were my first? Because I think about how it might have been?” You dropped the towel when you arrived at the edge of the bed. Kylo Ren, as naked as you, sat atop the blankets. He was cross-legged when you knelt at his side. Your hands were on his thigh, and you felt his gaze lingering on the two tattoos of his names. His fingers trailed along the tattoo of Ben Solo. “I used to pretend that you could be him… But no one can return to the past. It doesn’t work like that, no matter how much we want to cling onto things. I may be sentimental…but I’m learning. I understand that now.”

“You had to die to learn,” he said, his tone one of mocking.

You tilted your head to the side, cringing as you fought off a wave of pain. “You did as well. It may have been on a more…figurative level…but—“ You were forced to swallow your next words when the man’s hand flew to the back of your head, and he tugged you forward, your lips meeting his. Both of you kept your eyes open, your tongues battling for dominance. Your fingertips dug into the flesh of his thigh. His tongue pressed down on yours, forcing you to submit to him.

The moment you stopped fighting, Ren broke away. “You are afraid, tooke. What will you do once you at last kill me? The general is working alongside you for the time being, however you have to be more on guard with him… Which leads me to wonder: do you plan on using him to strengthen yourself…only to betray him first. Once he is out of the way, you will kill me—or die trying.”

You flinched, ripping yourself away from him entirely. Your heart was pounding in your chest, racing and drumming in your ears. He had read you like an open book without first invading your mind. The two of you knew one another too well. Which meant that your own suspicions were likely true: that a part of this man loved you. You gulped at the thought, the realization.

“Which memory was it?” you asked, your voice so small. Ren’s wide eyes searched your face, as though the man was looking for an out. Snoke’s pupil and you: two puppets becoming further and further entangled with one another. General Hux’s strings, likewise, were adding to that tangled mess. If the three of you were not careful, your movements would be limited and the puppet master would cut your strings—not to free you, but to instead break you, burn you, eliminate you. “Which memory made you want me?”

“How devoted you were to your parents. That you would throw away your life, your freedom…to save them.” You furrowed your brow at the mention of freedom. Kylo Ren chuckled. “Joining the Resistance meant you had to sacrifice so much. The idea of even having a family of your own… You were willing to put that off indefinitely to further the ideals of your mother and father. Your relationship with them was…interesting. The way you disagreed with much, and yet… You were so devoted.”

Ironic, that this was what he told you; given that his devotion continued to endear him to you in a way.

“I am still devoted,” you argued. Kylo Ren nodded, a smile spreading on his face. You refused to back down as you had in the past, did not lower your gaze. You were devoted: to the cause of destroying him. In a twisted way, you were devoted to Kylo Ren. “This is all a mess.”

“You have proven on more than one occasion that you easily adapt,” he drawled. You sighed and started to run your fingers through your hair. “Would you like to eat with me, tooke?”

Deflection yet again, though this time in a different manner. He acted as though he did not long for your company, phrased his requests as inquiries to make it seem as though you were the one who needed this. General Hux was not the only individual making your job more difficult than it should be. You were far too drawn to your captor in the same way he was drawn to you. Respect and longing. Neither of you could allow sentiment to interfere with your jobs. Perhaps, you thought, that was why Kylo Ren committed monstrous deeds. The man who had once been nothing more than a creature; Ren stared at you with those wide eyes, as though he was pleading with you.

“Yes,” you replied.

Ren lifted up his datapad from the bedside table, flicking through a few screens. You guessed that he was putting in an order for food. When he had finished with this task, the Force user went to his closet. He pulled on a pair of loose pants then grabbed out a large shirt and a pair of your panties. You dressed when these two clothing items were tossed over to you. Ren rejoined you on the bed, the man closing his eyes while lying beside you. You watched him.

“Why did you warn me?” His eyes reopened, and the man was staring at you with a questioning look. “All those times, hinting that I would not be free even if I escaped… You dropped hints that you were, in some twisted way, being merciful with how you were treating me. Allowing me those moments to try to kill you. Why?”

“It does not matter.”

Funny, you thought; he said that sentiment did not matter.

You sighed and looked to the door so that you could watch for the food to arrive. All the while your mind continued to sort through events in your life since your capture. How this man purposely antagonized you. Hurt you—tried make you hate him in some ways whist also dissuading you from demonizing him. He wished to be viewed as human though he respected your need to kill him. You would never give up fighting, not really. Yet you sometimes longed for death.

He’s like me… I hate it.

#kylo ren x reader #kylo x reader #three blind tooke #kylo ren smut #kylo ren imagine #elmidolfanfic #precarious harmony

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psychosistr · 5 years

Text

Don’t Cost a Thing- Part 5

Summary: Domino wakes up after his little “outburst” and looks for his partner. And then tries to figure out why said partner’s lying face down on the floor...

Notes: Some more blood and death in this chapter, but not as much as the last one.

-First Part-

Dominic stood in the middle of the bar, panting heavily as he finally began to register the finer details around him again. Blurred colors and hazy blobs began to focus into broken tables and dead or nearly dead bodies at his feet. One hand was still clenched in a fist while the other gripped one of his guns, his entire body tense and sore and positively exhausted from the flurry of movement he’d been in since he woke up.

Looking down at his hands, he made a disgusted and annoyed expression at the sight of the red liquid staining his feathers. He could feel similar stains and smears on other parts of his body and already knew he would need a LONG shower when he got home tonight.

Looking past his hands to his attire, he was even more displeased to see the current state of his clothes. The soot, dirt, and bloodstains were unpleasant, but he was used to dealing with those due to his line of work. The far more irritating part was the condition his coat was in- it was practically in tatters. Taking it off to examine it properly, he found that one sleeve was barely hanging on by a thread, one of his iconic dominos had been snapped off and the other was chipped, the buckle was bent, and there was a knife still stabbed through the bottom of it alongside some rather nasty gashes.

Well, wasn’t that just great? Steelbeak would probably make some paltry joke about how sloppy he got when he fought or something.

Wait..

Where was the loud-mouthed fowl?

Dominic looked around the bar for any sign of his partner. The last time he’d seen him, he’d gone into the kitchen to investigate an opened trap door when Dominic had felt something stab him in the neck and everything went black before he had a chance to warn the other bird. When he started to wake up, the only thing he registered was someone touching him. He shuddered briefly at the all-too-fresh memory of it, as well as the memory of others trying to do the same. Everything after that for a while was a blind drug-influenced and rage-induced blur of fury and adrenaline as he destroyed anything he came in contact with. Whatever he’d been shot with was long gone from his system now thanks to how quickly his blood had been pumping, and his earlier anger had cooled now that he was alone-

He froze when he saw something among the piles of bodies strewn about the room.

It couldn’t be…

Dominic’s coat fell to the floor, forgotten as he walked over to make sure what he saw was real and not just a trick of the light. His breath caught in his throat at the sight of an all-too familiar figure lying face down on the ground beneath the body of a pit bull.

After pulling the other body aside by the back of its coat, his fears were confirmed. There was no mistaking that combination:

Light feathers on the body with green tail feathers and a large red comb.

A designer suit with custom fitted shoes.

And a normally pristine white jacket…currently soaked with blood that was distinctly darker in three particular spots along his back.

Even without seeing the prosthetic that was his namesake, there was no mistaking it- this was Steelbeak.

The longer that Dominic stared, the more he felt a horrible, creeping sense of nostalgia consuming him. His mind kept flashing back and forth between the current bar he was standing in and a cold F.O.W.L. headquarters up north. Instead of the bodies of his enemies surrounding him, they were his fellow officers and his eggmen.

Then, for the briefest of moments, the body in front of him with deep pools of blood in his back was that of an overly affectionate but loving dog with dark fur and a bright smile instead of an arrogant but clever rooster with off-white feathers and a smug smirk.

He remembered the time he’d spent after his last partner’s death, isolated and alone with his grief for three days before being dragged back into the line of duty by high command. The hassle of relocating, moving miles away from his past and the life he’d built with his former partner. The uneasy introductions that ruffled both birds’ feathers despite how well they ended up working together-

Dominic shook his head to chase away his spiraling thoughts. He’d have to call F.O.W.L. high command, tell them what happened………wait, what DID happen?

Steelbeak had been in the kitchen before Dominic blacked out, why had he left? Had he come out to grab him or was he forced out by the enemy? Was he in the room during Dominic’s blind fit of rage? He would’ve known to stay away, but-

A dark thought crept into the loon’s mind when he caught the gleam of the over-head lights off of the pistol still clutched in his hand:

Was…Was he the one who shot Steelbeak…?

His hands shook as he scrambled to check his gun. It was loaded with the lead bullets, but how many had he fired? Had he reloaded during the fight? Darn it, he couldn’t remember, everything was too blurry! It was bad enough losing another partner he cared about, but to think that he may have been the one responsible for it was-

Movement.

It was subtle, almost imperceptible to the untrained eye, but Dominic’s eyes were very well-trained after years of sharp-shooting, and he KNEW he saw the other bird’s back move just now.

“Steelbeak…?” He questioned, having to swallow down the lump that had caught in his throat just to get the simple word out properly.

“Hm..?” There was a grunted reply before the other man’s head turned slightly to glance at him with one eye. “Dom?” Seeing his partner stare down at him, Steelbeak, much to Domino’s combined relief and surprise, began to sit up with no more difficulty than popping a few stiff joints once he was seated upright on the stained hard-wood floor. “About time you woke up. Done blowin’ your stack there, short fuse?”

“You’re…You’re alive…?” Dominic was relieved by this revelation, of course, but his mind was also still caught in its natural state of cautious disbelief.

“Gee, don’t sound so happy about it or I might start cryin’ over here.” Steelbeak rolled his eyes, his tone dripping with sarcasm as he began to unbutton and remove his jacket.

Once it was off, Dominic could see that the blood stains were deep, having thoroughly soaked through the white material, but there were no notable holes in the fabric. “So..the blood isn’t yours?” He assumed, looking to the dead pit bull he’d pulled off of his partner’s body earlier to see three deep wounds on its own back that, now that he was calm enough to think about it, lined up perfectly with the spots on Steelbeak’s coat from when it had been on top of him.

“Nah, I ain’t that sloppy.” Steelbeak stood up, his red shirt not showing the bloodstains as noticeably as his coat had. “You started hittin’, so I hit the deck- figured playin’ dead would be the safest bet ‘til ya calmed down.”

Dominic fought back the smile that threatened to turn up the corner of his beak. “Not a bad idea.” He admitted before his legs gave out from underneath him and he joined his partner in a seated position on the floor, all of the earlier soreness and fatigue returning ten-fold now that the panicked adrenaline had left him.

“Woah, ya good there, Dee?” Steelbeak asked with a cocked brow, kneeling down and giving the loon a quick glance over to check for any visible injuries. “ ‘Cause, y’know, if ya broke a leg or somethin’, I am NOT carryin’ your butt back to the car.”

“Wouldn’t ask you to, even if my leg was on the other side of the room.” Dominic sighed, leaning back against a nearby table that had been flipped over in the earlier chaos. “I’m just…tired. I’ll be good to go in a few minutes.”

“Alright.” Steelbeak stood back up, grabbing the C4 explosives and detonators from his jacket. “I’mma go plant these- keep an eye on the place, would ya?”

Dominic attempted to stand up. “I’ll come with yo-”

“YOU can stay here and take five.” Steelbeak insisted, dropping his coat by Dominic as if he were trying to make a point.

The loon glared up at his partner. “I can handle-”

“You already ‘handled’ your half of the work.” The rooster insisted while gesturing to the numerous bodies around them. He looked back down at the other bird once he felt his point had been made. “Now lemme go handle mine.” Dominic was about to refute the other bird’s statement, to insist that he could handle planting a few explosives. But, the next words out of the larger bird’s beak actually surprised him a little. “We’re partners, right? That means we share. We share the praise, we share the pay, we share the work. So quit tryin’ t’ be a one-man army and share for once, got it?”

For someone who was normally so self-centered, and for someone who was not a fan of dirtying his hands with hard work any more than he absolutely had to, the statement carried quite a bit of weight to it.

So, despite his reservations, Dominic sighed, settled back down against the table, and closed his eyes. “Fine. You get five minutes. After that, I’m hotwiring your car and going home- with or without you.”

He couldn’t see it on the lighter bird’s face, but he could certainly hear the amusement in his voice. “Buddy, you take my baby on a joyride without me, partner or not, gettin’ home’s gonna be the least of your problems.”

Dominic gave a tired chuckle and waved the other bird off. “Then get to work for both our sakes- you’ve got four and a half minutes left.”

“Hmph. Wise guy.” Steelbeak chuckled himself before Dominic heard the tell-tale clack of his shoes on the hard wood floor heading into the kitchen to plant the explosives deeper down within the facility and steal anything the deceased agents may have left behind.

Once he was certain his partner was far away from the main room, Dominic opened his eyes again and cast a tired gaze to the carnage around the bar. He’d certainly done a number on the place, that’s for sure. It had been quite a while since he’d lost control like that- though the drugs that had been coursing through his veins probably didn’t help matters any…

Glancing down at the stained white jacket beside him, he allowed his fingers to trail over the back, skimming just shy of the blood stains. Though the adrenaline of the situation had long left him, he could still feel remnants of the cold-terror that had stabbed him at the thought of losing his partner- that terror multiplied by the thought that he could’ve been the one to end his fellow agent’s life and not even realized it.

Dominic closed his eyes again and slumped further against the table, absentmindedly gripping the sleeve of the jacket as he took a few deep breaths to calm himself down.

The thought of losing Steelbeak, despite his loud-mouthed, smug, flashy nature…it hurt. It hurt in a way he hadn’t felt in several months. What that meant on a subconscious level, he wasn’t fully ready to face just yet, but it at least made one thing clear to him:

He cared about his partner. He genuinely, without a doubt, had come to care for the taller bird. Whether that type of care would shift into something similar to what he had with his previous partner remained to be seen, but he at least knew now that he cared for the other bird and didn’t want to lose him.

And to think, just the other day his main thoughts regarding his partner were how he tried too hard to buy his attention and that he wouldn’t let it work on him. What a night this was turning out to be…

Right at the four minute mark, he heard the door to the kitchen open and let go of the sleeve he’d been holding. He moved his hand back over to rest casually on his extended legs before cracking one eye open as he heard the other bird’s steps getting closer. “Finally finished?” He questioned the fowl when he came into view in front of the table.

“Yep.” Steelbeak said while planting two more bombs in the main room itself. “This place is set to go off like a theme park on the Fourth of July.” He finished setting up the bombs and glanced over to his partner, taking his condition in once again. “……” Without saying anything, he walked over to where he’d left his minigun and picked it up before making his way over to the loon still sitting on the floor. “I gotta plant a couple more things in here. How’s about you take this out t’ the car and I’ll meet ya there in a sec.” He extended the large gun towards the loon so that the handle was facing him.

Dominic rolled his eyes slightly, recognizing the gesture for what it was but accepting it nonetheless. “Fine, I’ll do the heavy lifting for a change.” He grabbed the offered handle and, with Steelbeak bracing the other end of the gun, pulled himself up to his feet. Once he was stable, he took the gun from the other’s grasp, compensated for the weight, and began walking towards the door. “You’ve got one minute left before I leave you.”

“Believe me, I know.” Steelbeak grabbed his jacket off of the ground and reached into the pocket to fish out his car keys. “Just don’t go bleedin’ out in there- I just had her detailed.”

Dominic easily caught the keys that were tossed to him from across the room. “It won’t be my blood on the seats.” He paused briefly along his path to glance down at his own coat on the ground. He debated about taking it with him, but, he decided, it was far too damaged to be reparable at that point. “It’ll just burn up, anyway..” He muttered to himself before continuing out towards the car.

With his back to the other bird, he didn’t catch Steelbeak glancing over to his tattered coat as well, giving it a thoughtful expression before walking around the bar to finish his work.

___________________________________________________________

True to his word, about a minute after Dominic had loaded the minigun into the trunk and gotten comfortable in the front seat, Steelbeak exited the bar with his stained jacket balled up under his arm. He tossed the ball of fabric into the trunk with the gun and joined his partner up front.

After driving a few miles down the street to make sure they’d reached a safe viewing distance, Steelbeak presented a remote detonator to Dominic. “Care t’ do the honors, Deedee?” He quirked a brow at the loon with a smirk.

“I thought you’d never ask.” Dominic’s smirk matched his partner’s when he reached over to press the red button.

Within less than a second the bar that had just been the sight of a rather brutal and bloody battle was decimated by an earth-shaking explosion. What remained of the building was quickly engulfed in flames, destroying any remaining evidence and bodies (be they dead or somehow still semi-alive). It was flashy and more than a bit over the top but, honestly, after the day they’d had, such a sight was extremely gratifying.

____________________________________________________________

The car ride home was sparse on conversation, but pleasant, nonetheless. They’d both had a long day and were rightfully exhausted. After calling high command to inform them of a successful mission without any major incidents, the pair were relieved to find out that they could wait until tomorrow afternoon to give their full report in person at HQ- a gift that neither of them would question given how tired and in need of some well-earned rest and relaxation they were.

Which was why Dominic was surprised and more than a little confused as to why Steelbeak merely dropped him off at the secret underground F.O.W.L. entrance to their apartment complex (handy on nights like this when agents returned home covered in blood and/or carrying less than legal items), instead of simply parking the car and joining him in the elevator.

“A little late for a joyride, isn’t it?” Dominic questioned the other bird while getting out of the car.

Steelbeak’s answer was a simple shrug. “I got a few things t’ take care of. You just go on up and get your beauty sleep- you need it more than I do.”

Dominic rolled his eyes and shut the car door behind himself. “You’re lucky I’m too tired to shoot you right now.”

“Wow, I am SO lucky- must be my birthday or somethin’.” The rooster chuckled with a sarcastic tone and gave Dominic a two-fingered salute. “Catch ya later, Dee.”

And with that, he drove out of the garage, barely giving Dominic time for a brief wave of his own. He still couldn’t imagine what on Earth his partner would want to do (or even had the energy to do) so late at night after such a draining mission, but, he supposed, once they were off the clock, their business was their own. Besides, at that moment the need to clean himself up and get some rest far outweighed his curiosity over what his partner was doing, so he spent the rest of the night doing just that- taking a nice long shower to clean the blood, soot, dust, and alcohol off before sleeping a very much needed eight hours.

<-Previous Part Next Part->

End Notes: Alright, that’s it on the death and destruction for the story, hope everyone enjoyed it ^^

Getting into the home stretch now with two parts left!

#steelbeak #dominic domino #darkwing duck #dwd

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outerspace-iiinnerspace · 4 years

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Hey! I have other things I should be writing but I’m gonna be self indulgent and write out everything about my Steven Universe ocs because who’s gonna stop me, huh?

Under cut because guess what? First I have to explain this theory I’ve got for any of it to make sense and that’ll be long.

So the first thing is a theory about gem reproduction. Gems come from Kindergartens, that’s a thing we know about Gems. But apparently they don’t only come from Kindergartens; Pearls come from the Reef and I can see other kinds being made in different ways. Ambers emerging from huge trees, anyone?

If Gems always had to be made though, then who made the first ones? Some theorists on here think it was some other species, some think it was the Diamonds, my theory is that it was all just Gems. Gems originally arose from spontaneous germination. One or two would appear at a time, eventually come into contact with others, and build a society. Since they’re basically immortal it didn’t matter that the population grew very slowly, and once they managed to develop FTL travel it’s easier than ever to search out new Gems. They would find them on planet surfaces, on asteroids and moons, even inside gas giants every so often. Even though there was a ton of research into it, no one was ever able to predict locations where Gems would form.

Eventually, though, that avenue of inquiry came to an unexpected conclusion: how to induce Gem formation. No longer did they have to travel across space to find new Gems and bring them home; just make them and here they are.

This discovery was the start of Era 1 and the imperialistic portion of Gem history. Since Gem production is resource-intensive and can’t be done indefinitely on the same planet, they had to expand and look for more planets. The Gems who were capable of making new Gems suddenly became extremely important and had all kinds of authority. The Gem population which had been growing so slowly started exploding; the parts of society in charge of integrating new Gems into it wasn’t able to cope and started just slotting new gems into all the new jobs this expansion was making. It was meant to be temporary; let that Quartz fight for a while until she figures out what she really wants to do.

(Gems don’t really have a “childhood” life stage; they come out of the ground ready to do what they do. Before, a Gem would usually be alone for some time before encountering any others and have some idea of who they were and what they liked. Now, hundreds and then thousands of new people were popping out of the ground every month, with no idea who they were.)

Over time, these “temporary” assignments became expected, then enforced, then not even worth thinking about. Of course a Peridot will work with tech. Of course a Bismuth will build. What else would she do?

The older Gems, who had existed before this age of Kindergartens and classifications, will outnumbered and growing more so over time. The Diamonds, having used their authority as the ones actually creating the other gems, took power for themselves and no one thought to doubt it. The old-timers either took their expected jobs, struck out from the empire on their own, died (Gems may be immortal but they’re not indestructible), or stuck around on the fringes of society, tolerated but not much else.

Of course “naturally occurring” Gems still come into being, but they’re rare and aren’t sought out any more. When an empire Gem comes in contact with them they’re welcomed into the fold, but there are no doubt many more out in the universe making their way on their own.

My two ocs, Ekanite and Coffinite, are both old timers. They predate the Diamonds, they predate the Kindergartens. I don’t know if the show has ever established the age of the Gem empire but the precise number of years doesn’t matter. They’re old.

Ekanite and Coffinite (the stones) are slightly radioactive, and I can’t imagine the characters would be different. Gems wouldn’t be bothered by it but their electronics are another story; there are no Kindergartens producing radioactive Gems. Why make Gems that mess with tech?

Given this, there was no easy modern era job to point to and say “Ekanites and Coffinites do this.” After millennia of kicking around, doing odd jobs, and drifting further from the center of Gem society and out near the frontier, they ended up with their career: mining asteroids.

The two of them own a ship. It’s an old, ugly clunker (”Just like us,” Ekanite jokes. Coffinite winces.) with no FTL, makeshift shielding around the controls and a cabin barely bigger than the holes they came out of so long ago. They cruise in whichever direction they feel like for as long as it takes until they find a nice metallic rock. One of them makes a spacewalk and tethers it, then off they go again until they’ve got a good half-dozen or so. Then they head back to the nearest station to drop off the ore, get some repairs, and spend a few days in port. Each trip can take hundreds of years, but what does it matter? They don’t need food or water, only enough air to transmit sound waves, and they’ve got an atomic engine that should burn for a couple millennia before it needs refueling. Life ain’t that exciting, but if they wanted adventure they’d have gone out and found some.

Personality-wise, Ekanite is the dreamer. She’s the one who gets distracted on spacewalks looking at stars when she’s supposed to be tethering a rock. Her summoned weapon is a pickaxe, but it doesn’t get much play. Sometimes she’ll use it to hammer pitons into the rock but that’s almost never necessary. Ekanite also used to mess around with art a long time ago. It was never anything fine; she just enjoyed slapping colors around. Her and Coffinite’s ship is painted inside and out with clashing blues, yellows, reds, whites, purples, and greens. If Gems have the concept of a social butterfly, Ekanite’s one. There are very few gem types she wouldn’t feel comfortable approaching for a conversation, a learned habit coming of being one of the only of her kind.

Coffinite is the practical one, keeping track of the miles and the fuel and the maps. Even if you can’t die from space, being lost in it isn’t an enticing thought. She’s the sensitive one; while Ekanite self-deprecates with ease and finds genuine humor in being an old-timer, Coffinite doesn’t appreciate being reminded. She misses the past, she misses the dabbling and dilettanting she did before a Gem was expected to have one purpose all their life. She prefers staying with Ekanite on their ship than trying to get along with other, younger, Gems. Sometimes, when a mood hits at the same times as they’re in port, she won’t even leave the ship.

Neither of them were involved in Rose’s rebellion, or the events of the series so far. They probably never picked up Steven’s broadcast, or heard the news about Era 3. If they ever made it to Earth, Coffinite would spend as much time with humans as she would. She would talk to them because they wouldn’t know how she’s different from the others, because they’re too unfamiliar to remind her of things, because they’re new. She would take on as many jobs and hobbies as she could manage, but only one at a time, and only for a few decades before getting bored. She would lay in the sun on the beach and not talk to anyone for days on end.

Ekanite would try her hand at painting again, but give it up pretty quick. She actually prefers looking at art to making it, but had no way of knowing that when the only art she saw was her own. She’d make an effort to get to know the humans and other Gems around, but get overwhelmed after a few conversations and retreat to her ship to read magazines. It’s tough to get used to after so long alone.

I had a story at one point about them finding a naturally occurring Peridot in an asteroid. Her gem had formed partially below the surface so she wasn’t able to emerge and take form for the first time until Ekanite hacked her out. The conflict was between whether they should bring her back to civilization to have a “normal” life with other Peridots, as part of the empire, or keep her with them to live out on the fringes, isolated, without the advantages of modern Gem society, but comparatively independent.

#uhh it feels good to type it all out #yknow a lot of this has been rattling around in my head since 2015 #minus the parts the show only told us about recently #of course

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kkintle · 4 years

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Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics by Richard H. Thaler; Quotes

One day on a phone call I asked him how he was feeling. He said, “You know, it’s funny. When you have the flu you feel like you are going to die, but when you are dying, most of the time you feel just fine.”

Let a six-year-old girl with brown hair need thousands of dollars for an operation that will prolong her life until Christmas, and the post office will be swamped with nickels and dimes to save her. But let it be reported that without sales tax the hospital facilities of Massachusetts will deteriorate and cause a barely perceptible increase in preventable deaths—not many will drop a tear or reach for their checkbooks.

“willingness to pay” or “willingness to accept.”

Opportunity costs are vague and abstract when compared to handing over actual cash.

The Weber-Fechner Law holds that the just-noticeable difference in any variable is proportional to the magnitude of that variable. If I gain one ounce, I don’t notice it, but if I am buying fresh herbs, the difference between 2 ounces and 3 ounces is obvious. Psychologists refer to a just noticeable difference as a JND.

So, we experience life in terms of changes, we feel diminishing sensitivity to both gains and losses, and losses sting more than equivalently-sized gains feel good.

Big ideas are fine, but I needed to publish papers to stay employed. Looking back, I had what science writer Steven Johnson calls a “slow hunch.” A slow hunch is not one of those “aha” insights when everything becomes clear. Instead, it is more of a vague impression that there is something interesting going on, and an intuition that there could be something important lurking not far away. The problem with a slow hunch is you have no way to know whether it will lead to a dead end. I felt like I had arrived on the shores of a new world with no map, no idea where I should be looking, and no idea whether I would find anything of value.

Economists don’t care whether you like a firm mattress better than a soft one or vice versa, but they cannot tolerate you saying that you like a firm mattress better than a soft one and a soft one better than a firm one.

Psychologists tell us that in order to learn from experience, two ingredients are necessary: frequent practice and immediate feedback.

Many people have made money selling magic potions and Ponzi schemes, but few have gotten rich selling the advice, “Don’t buy that stuff.”

acquisition utility and transaction utility.

Expressions such as “don’t cry over spilt milk” and “let bygones be bygones” are another way of putting economists’ advice to ignore sunk costs.

Many mentioned the advice, often attributed to William Faulkner, but apparently said by many, that writers have to learn to “kill their darlings.” The advice has been given so often, I suspect, because it is hard for any writer to do.

The bigger lesson is that once you understand a behavioral problem, you can sometimes invent a behavioral solution to it. Mental accounting is not always a fool’s game.

A good rule to remember is that people who are threatened with big losses and have a chance to break even will be unusually willing to take risks, even if they are normally quite risk averse.

Although it is never stated explicitly as an assumption in an economics textbook, in practice economic theory presumes that self-control problems do not exist.

Some early economists viewed any discounting of future consumption as a mistake—a failure of some type. It could be a failure of willpower, or, as Arthur Pigou famously wrote in 1921, it could be a failure of imagination: “Our telescopic faculty is defective and . . . we, therefore, see future pleasures, as it were, on a diminished scale.”

The economics training the students receive provides enormous insights into the behavior of Econs, but at the expense of losing common-sense intuition about human nature and social interactions. Graduates no longer realize that they live in a world populated by Humans.

I once gave a talk about self-control to a group of economists at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. At one point I used the word “temptation,” and one of the audience members asked me to define it. Someone else in the audience jumped in to say, “It’s in the Bible.” But it was not in the economists’ dictionary.

Ainslie’s paper also provides a long discussion of various strategies for dealing with self-control problems. One course of action is commitment: removing the cashews or tying yourself to the mast. Another is to raise the cost of submitting to temptation. For example, if you want to quit smoking, you could write a large check to someone you see often with permission to cash the check if you are seen smoking. Or you can make that bet with yourself, what Ainslie calls a “private side bet.” You could say to yourself, “I won’t watch the game on television tonight until I finish [some task you are tempted to postpone].”

We all have occasions on which we change our minds, but usually we do not go to extraordinary steps to prevent ourselves from deviating from the original plan. The only circumstances in which you would want to commit yourself to your planned course of action is when you have good reason to believe that if you change your preferences later, this change of preferences will be a mistake.

At some point in pondering these questions, I came across a quote from social scientist Donald McIntosh that profoundly influenced my thinking: “The idea of self-control is paradoxical unless it is assumed that the psyche contains more than one energy system, and that these energy systems have some degree of independence from each other.” The passage is from an obscure book, The Foundations of Human Society. I do not know how I came by the quote, but it seemed to me to be obviously true. Self-control is, centrally, about conflict. And, like tango, it takes (at least) two to have a conflict.

One principle that emerged from our research is that perceptions of fairness are related to the endowment effect.

“If you gouge them at Christmas they won’t come back in March.” That remains good advice for any business that is interested in building a loyal clientele.

Although it is true that in the Ultimatum Game the most common offer is often 50%, one cannot conclude that Proposers are trying to be fair. Instead, they may be quite rationally worried about being rejected.

Further research by Ernst Fehr and his colleagues has shown that, consistent with Andreoni’s finding, a large proportion of people can be categorized as conditional cooperators, meaning that they are willing to cooperate if enough others do. People start out these games willing to give their fellow players the benefit of the doubt, but if cooperation rates are low, these conditional cooperators turn into free riders. However, cooperation can be maintained even in repeated games if players are given the opportunity to punish those who do not cooperate. As illustrated by the Punishment Game, described earlier, people are willing to spend some of their own money to teach a lesson to those who behave unfairly, and this willingness to punish disciplines potential free riders and keeps robust cooperation rates stable.

Not everyone will free ride all the time, but some people are ready to pick your pocket if you are not careful.

Shefrin and Statman’s answer relied on a combination of self-control and mental accounting. The notion was that some shareholders—retirees, for instance—like the idea of getting inflows that are mentally categorized as “income” so that they don’t feel bad spending that money to live on. In a rational world, this makes no sense. A retired Econ could buy shares in companies that do not pay dividends, sell off a portion of his stock holdings periodically, and live off of those proceeds while paying less in taxes.

“Discovery commences with the awareness of anomaly, i.e., with the recognition that nature has somehow violated the paradigm-induced expectations that govern normal science.” —Thomas Kuhn

the Journal of Economic Perspectives is available free online to anyone at www.aeaweb.org/jep, including all the back issues. It is a great place to learn about economics.

If the outside view is fleshed out carefully and informed with appropriate baseline data, it will be far more reliable than the inside view. The problem is that the inside view is so natural and accessible that it can influence the judgments even of people who understand the concept—indeed, even of the person who coined the term.

Flip a coin, heads you win $200, tails you lose $100. As Samuelson had anticipated, Brown declined this bet, saying: “I won’t bet because I would feel the $100 loss more than the $200 gain.” In other words, Brown was saying: “I am loss averse.” But then Brown said something that surprised Samuelson. He said that he did not like one bet, but would be happy to take 100 such bets.

“If it does not pay to do an act once, it will not pay to do it twice, thrice, . . . or at all.”

“myopic loss aversion.” The only way you can ever take 100 attractive bets is by first taking the first one, and it is only thinking about the bet in isolation that fools you into turning it down.

One reason is that it is risky to be a contrarian. “Worldly wisdom teaches that is it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.”

Remember another of Keynes’s famous lines. “In the long run, we are all dead.”

In a rational world there would not be very much trading—in fact, hardly any. Economists sometimes call this the Groucho Marx theorem. Groucho famously said that he would never want to belong to any club that would have him as a member. The economist’s version of this joke—predictably, not as funny—is that no rational agent will want to buy a stock that some other rational agent is willing to sell. Imagine two financial analysts, Tom and Jerry, are playing a round of golf. Tom mentions that he is thinking of buying 100 shares of Apple. Jerry says, that’s convenient, I was thinking of selling 100 shares. I could sell my shares to you and avoid the commission to my broker. Before they can agree on a deal, both think better of it. Tom realizes that Jerry is a smart guy, so asks himself, why is he selling? Jerry is thinking the same about Tom, so they call off the trade. Similarly, if everyone believed that every stock was correctly priced already—and always would be correctly priced—there would not be very much point in trading, at least not with the intent of beating the market. No one takes the extreme version of this “no trade theorem” literally, but most financial economists agree, at least when pressed, that trading volume is surprisingly high. There is room for differences of opinion on price in a rational model, but it is hard to explain why shares would turn over at a rate of about 5% per month in a world of Econs. However, if you assume that some investors are overconfident, high trading volume emerges naturally.

The key lesson is that prices can get out of whack, and smart money cannot always set things right.

“the three bounds”: bounded rationality, bounded willpower, and bounded self-interest.

When people are given what they consider to be unfair offers, they can get angry enough to punish the other party, even at some cost to themselves.

The winner’s curse. When many bidders compete for the same object, the winner of the auction is often the bidder who most overvalues the object being sold. The same will be true for players, especially the highly touted players picked early in the first round. The winner’s curse says that those players will be good, but not as good as the teams picking them think.

The false consensus effect. Put basically, people tend to think that other people share their preferences.

A competitive labor market does do a pretty good job of channeling people into jobs that suit them. But ironically, this logic may become less compelling as we move up the managerial ladder. All economists are at least pretty good at economics, but many who are chosen to be department chair fail miserably at that job. This is the famous Peter Principle: people keep getting promoted until they reach their level of incompetence.

“I am not the sort of person who would steal, and I hope you are not one of those evil types either.” This is an example of what game theorists call “cheap talk.” In the absence of a penalty for lying, everyone promises to be nice. However, there turns out to be one reliable signal in all this noise. If someone makes an explicit promise to split, she is 30 percentage points more likely to do so. (An example of such a statement: “I promise you I am going to split it, 120%.”) This reflects a general tendency. People are more willing to lie by omission than commission.

(...) he said he was planning to steal right up until the last minute. The hosts reminded him that he had given an impassioned speech about his father telling him that a man is only as good as his word. “What about that?” the hosts asked, somewhat aghast at this revelation. “Oh, that,” Ibrahim said. “Actually, I never met my father. I just thought it would be an effective story.” People are interesting.

Someone turning sixty who finds herself flush with surplus savings has numerous remedies, from taking an early retirement, to going on lavish vacations, to spoiling the grandchildren. But someone who learns at sixty that she has not saved enough has very little time to make up lost ground, and may find that retirement must be postponed indefinitely.

When dealing with Humans, words matter.

standard recommendation from the Cialdini bible: if you want people to comply with some norm or rule, it is a good strategy to inform them (if true) that most other people comply.

Ethical nudges must be both transparent and true.

If you want to encourage someone to do something, make it easy.

“big peanuts” fallacy

Those looking for behavioral interventions that have a high probability of working should seek out other environments in which a one-time action can accomplish the job. If no one-time solution yet exists, invent one!

As Gene Fama often says when he is asked about our competing views: we agree about the facts, we just disagree about the interpretation.

Mark Twain once said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

#behavioural economics #economics #non-fiction #quotes #books #misbehaving #Richard h thaler #Richard thaler

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sciencespies · 5 years

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9 ways today's society is like the one that filled Earth with garbage in WALL-E

https://sciencespies.com/humans/9-ways-todays-society-is-like-the-one-that-filled-earth-with-garbage-in-wall-e/

9 ways today's society is like the one that filled Earth with garbage in WALL-E

More than 10 years after it was released, watching Pixar’s film WALL-E today is a chilling experience.

The backdrop of WALL-E and EVE’s robot love story is a dystopian society where humans have abandoned Earth to their trash and left robots to clean up while they cruise space.

When the much-loved animation came out in 2008, it was a bittersweet warning to use less, move more, and stop staring at the damn screen.

But we obviously didn’t heed it too well, because as of 2019, we already have an uncomfortable amount in common with the futuristic humans aboard the Axiom spaceship.

The one thing the film’s creators were way off on? The timeline. WALL-E is set in 2805 (humans left Earth in 2105), but according to some key measures, we might not be that far off in reality.

Here are nine signs we’re going down the same path as the humans in WALL-E.

1. We can’t stop buying stuff

Thanks to technological and social advances, every day more people are moving out of poverty and into the consumer class. We’re also living in a more peaceful time than ever before. What do we do with all that extra time, energy, and money?

We consume.

(Walt Disney Pictures/Pixar)

The average US household now owns 300,000 things; 10-year-olds in the UK have 238 toys – but only play with around 12 of them. We shop so much, we increasingly have to rent off-site storage units. And then every few seasons we throw it all out and start again.

With the internet opening up new avenues for consumption – shopping on Instagram, influencer-inspired buying, and now even publishers telling us what to buy – it’s not hard to imagine how our desire to buy new things is overwhelming the planet.

The Buy n Large tagline “Too much garbage in your face? There’s plenty of space out in space!” playing on loop in WALL-E could easily apply.

We never see the humans of the film before they leave Earth for the Axiom, but based on the waste and omnipresent advertising they leave behind, it’s safe to say they liked to shop, too.

youtube

So is there a way to keep shopping and avoid that fate? Probably not – in the United Nations’ (UN) draft Global Sustainable Development Report 2019, researchers argue that this consumerist system isn’t compatible with protecting the planet.

“Economies have used up the capacity of planetary ecosystems to handle the waste generated by energy and material use,” the report explains.

2. We’re drowning in our own waste

The major plot line of WALL-E is that Earth has been overrun with garbage, making it unsuitable for plant or animal life. The WALL-E robots were tasked with cleaning it up, while humans enjoyed a five-year off-planet cruise (which, spoiler alert, ended up lasting centuries).

While we may not have city-sized trash mounds today, that doesn’t mean we don’t have a problem with the waste we’re spewing out into the environment.

(Walt Disney Pictures/Pixar)

Pollution is already one of the leading causes of death worldwide, killing 9 million people each year and predicted to get worse. A World Health Organisation study last year found that 93 percent of children on the planet are now breathing in polluted air.

With plastic waste and rubbish choking our plants and animals, and human-induced climate change increasing ocean acidification and forest fires, the planet is becoming a less friendly place for life – even our own fertility rates are dropping.

And it’s only going to get worse, with China soon refusing to take in any of the nearly 4,000 shipping containers of waste the US sends each day for recycling.

3. We’re dominated by mega companies

In WALL-E, society has become dominated by a mega conglomerate punfully called Buy n Large, or BnL. By the time Earth is abandoned, BnL has become so omnipresent, it not only covers cities with its advertisements and discarded products, but also owns the spacecraft humans leave on. It also has the power to declare global emergencies.

(Walt Disney Pictures/Pixar)

Today, there are just a handful of megacompanies that have huge power of the rest of us and our futures, capable of driving fake news, opioid crises, and covering up climate change.

In fact, just 100 companies are responsible for 71 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

And while the whole space thing might sound futuristic, don’t forget retail giant Amazon not only sells billions of products to consumers all around the world, its founder Jeff Bezos also owns Blue Origin – an aerospace company that aims to help facilitate ‘private human access to space’.

(Blue Origin)

4. We’re lonely, despite being more connected

Humans are more connected than ever before thanks to technology, and yet we also report feeling more isolated than ever. In many parts of the world, we’re having less sex and birth rates are dropping. Twenty-two percent of millennials say they have “no friends”.

This type of empty connection is mirrored in WALL-E, where the robots are more human than the humans are.

On the Axiom, humans have digital screens perpetually beamed in front of their faces that allow them to video chat, but we don’t see any intimate family groups. No one touches (until WALL-E and EVE come along), and we don’t see couples together, or parents with children – toddlers are raised by AI in classrooms.

(Walt Disney Pictures/Pixar)

5. Obesity is on the rise

Okay, this one’s obvious – one of the most striking things about the humans in WALL-E is that they’re all fat. Just look at how the Axiom’s captains have changed since the mission launched.

(Walt Disney Pictures/Pixar)

To be fair, space reduces muscle mass and makes you puffy.

But we’re not on a dissimilar path of weight gain. Obesity rates have nearly tripled since 1975 and are still increasing.

In the film, it probably has something to do with the fact that people no longer walk. Even as babies, they use self-driving hoverchairs to get them around.

That isn’t so far fetched – with self-driving car technology moving out of the lab, and people more sedentary than ever before, it’s not hard to imagine us all sitting back and letting technology drive us around.

And then there’s this photo, taken in Walmart in 2015:

(mlevid/Imgur)

In fact, BMW has already made something that looks suspiciously like the WALL-E chair, their ‘personal mobility concept’ vehicle i-REAL.

youtube

6. We can’t stop staring at screens

I’m not just talking about social media here, but also Netflix, YouTube, Hulu… While we do use technology to connect with friends and family across the globe in ways we couldn’t in the past, the average adult today consumes five times more information daily than a counterpart in 1986.

We’re also watching close to eight hours of TV a day. Our binge-watching has even become an environmental issue.

The humans in WALL-E are just a small step up from this, with their screens now projected in front of them all the time – giving them 24/7 access to ads, entertainment, and shopping.

(Walt Disney Pictures/Pixar)

In one telling scene, two friends are chatting to each other online but never realise they’re actually right next to each other. Another woman only realises there’s a gigantic pool on the cruise ship after her screen is interrupted by WALL-E getting in her way.

Sound familiar?

7. We feel useless

In a crucial line in the film, the Axiom’s Captain B. McCrea tells the autopilot “I don’t want to survive, I want to live.” Up until that point, the only thing he’s done himself is read out the morning announcements.

The rest of the humans on board don’t seem to work at all. They’re purposeless – their roles replaced by technology and their home planet destroyed. Even back on Earth, WALL-E was left behind just cubing up waste and moving it from one place to the next.

(Walt Disney Pictures/Pixar)

Many of us don’t feel much more productive. A 2015 poll in the UK revealed that 37 percent of Brits think their job is meaningless. And scientists have predicted that roughly half of all jobs will be replaced by technology – not centuries from now, but in the next 20 years.

On top of that, we often feel powerless in the face of the climate crisis, with our best attempts at action dwarfed by the negative impacts from industry and government.

8. Going to space might be our only chance of survival… if you can afford it

The Axiom wasn’t taking people offshore as a humanitarian act – it was a ticketed, luxury cruise. There’s no mention of other evacuation missions from Earth, so if we assume the Axiom is all that’s left, what happened to the humans who couldn’t afford a ticket?

Probably the same thing that will happen, and is already happening, to those of us who aren’t rich enough to be protected from the worst effects of climate change.

Going to space is one option for human survival if our planet becomes so hot that it’s no longer habitable. But even with reusable rockets, space is expensive, and there won’t be room for everyone.

9. There’s still hope

As depressing as the film may be, there’s still hope for humanity. Life starts to bloom again on Earth. The antics of WALL-E and EVE wake up the passengers from their mindless scrolling. Captain B. McCrea fights back.

(WALL-E, Walt Disney Pictures/Pixar)

And there’s hope for us, too.

Yes, the outlook is bleak, but the science is clear – we can turn this ship around. Every degree of warming we can avoid will save lives, will protect ecosystems.

Perhaps the biggest difference between us and the humans in WALL-E is that we’re not useless – yet. We might feel it, but we still have a role to play in stopping the coming climate crisis.

In turning around our mindless consumption. In remembering that we vote governments in to serve our interests, not to protect the status quo. And we shouldn’t be scared to vote them out.

This is why we’re striking today. There is no news worth covering that could possibly be more important than reminding society that we still have a voice, and we still have power.

This article is part of ScienceAlert’s special climate edition, published in support of the global #ClimateStrike on 20 September 2019.

#Humans

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