#i even got some wax seals to do the odd one here and there for the a e s t h e t i c of my fave OC atm | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

kushami-hime · 1 year

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Yo! I was imagining a scenario where dragon king bakugou receives a mysterious gift box which reads "come closer to me and you will see" and as he moves that box closer to his face that box opens and sprays fae dust all over his nose and the reaction is so quick that he drops the box and begins sneezing like crazy and somehow due to that fall the off spray button gets broken so...the scene unfolds like this...bakugou cant stop sneezing..fae dust keeps on spraying..and we (half blood servant) cant stop staring 👁👄👁..although he is almost yelling at us to do something but we really dont want him to stop...also i love it when the nose is so irritated that there are rapid ,desperate, mini sneezes before the actual mega sneeze..so can you write some headcannons or probably a whole fic based on this one..that would be really appreciated^v^ hime

This ask has been in my inbox for like a year and I WANTED to write it but never found time or motivation to. Well! Ive been shadowbanned and IDK how long itll be until its fixed (Tumblr Support get off your ass already) so until then, here we go! First fic in ages!

Surprise!

Dragon King! Fantasy! Bakugou & Half Dragon! Servant! Y/N

CW: Servant! Reader, Master & Servant roles, fantasy setting, sneezy angry B/akugou, K/iri being a good boy, Submissive Listener, one mention of fictional slavery, closeted snzfucker! reader

As usual all characters are aged up to 18+!

"Mm. This is…odd."

Before you, was a box. A small, wooden thing. Could have held jewelry or coin inside from the shape of it. You weren't an expert in these things but the ever knowledgeable King B/akugou was one to educate you when it came to the outside world and all its inhabitants. Curiouser and curiouser.

Without so much as a messenger or even a carrier pigeon, this box had been left at the doorstep of his majesty's southern palace, deep within the mountains where no mortal dare venture. You peaked out into the open, looked left and right, and even in the clouds for some sort of clue…but there was not a soul! The only thing stuck to this small box, was a letter sealed shut by a stamp meant for royalty. And surely you, a mere dragon half blood, were not going to anger his majesty by rooting through a package that was meant for his eyes only. That man's anger knew no bounds.

“Hey! Y/N!” A familiar voice caught your ear, belonging to a tall and muscular dragon shifter. His ruby colored eyes looked you up and down with warmth. “Oh, K/irishima. I received this for his majesty but…there was no courier.” You said, caressing the box in your hands. K/irishima pursed his lips into a thoughtful pout, before noticing the wax seal, “Must be important if it’s got that seal on it.” Better get it to B/akugou quickly, in case he’s expecting it!” He advised. Right! You’d rather not keep his majesty waiting, especially if it was something direly important, and especially so, if there was a time limit. With a quick bow you tucked the mysterious chest under your arm and quickened your pace, only to find his majesty lazing away in his parlor room. With his strong body laid down over a soft looking fur rug, his vermillion eyes gazed over a book he didn’t seem all too interested in. You knew that look…the Dragon King was bored stiff. You almost made the mistake of walking right in without announcing your presence.

With a free hand you smoothed out your apron before speaking up, “Ahem…your majesty.” Your voice came across as meak, and your long tail curled behind your form. He gazed towards you, waiting to hear what you had to say. “A package has arrived for you.” You said simply, holding the box in your hands. A flicker of interest crossed his usually irritated features as he sat up, and held a hand out. “And who’s it from?” He asked, his tone still as dull as his mood. You hesitated for a moment as you wondered over, “I…um…I do not know.” You admitted, avoiding his eyes as you stared down at the box. “Hah?” His brows furrowed, “What do you mean you don’t know? Someone MUST have handed it to you.” He stared at you while you shook your head. “No, your majesty. When I exited the main gate, I couldn’t find anyone. Not a soul.” You admitted. His lips pursed into a familiar scowl, “Give it here.” He almost snatched it from your hands, which he dwarfed with his own. “Mm?” He grazed the seal with his fingertips and jumped to his feet, taking a seat at a nearby table to get a better look at the surprise package. You followed suit as he removed the sealed parchment. Again, his brows furrowed, but with concern. You thought of the worst. A declaration of war? An old enemy announcing their return? Perhaps greedy humans who wished to raid his castle for the endless supply of gold he’d been hoarding over the course of his elongated life? Your hands tampered with the hem of your apron as you watched your master open the letter. You didn't even notice that you'd been holding your breath.

“Come closer to me, and you will see…the hell is that supposed to mean…?” He already seemed irate. “Perhaps a riddle…?” You offered your input, but Bakugou simply scoffed at the notion. With a glance towards the box, he took off whatever brown string was left to hold it closed, and picked it up to look inside. But what happened next was…well, unexpected to say the least.

A shimmering cloud of dust erupted from the box, and enveloped your master, coating him in a layer of glittering gold right down to his bare neck and shoulders. A gasp escaped your lungs as you watched the box clatter to the floor, the lid snapping off. Even then, it continued to gradually release the golden dust into the room, and all over the floor, like an ornate fountain. Bakugou snarled, gasping for clean air as his calloused hands tried to wipe away the dust covering his face. A slew of curses waterfalled from his lips while you panicked and attempted to clean up the mess.

“Y-your majesty! Are you alright? I-I’ll try to…-Oh…oh nono this is…” It was easy to tell just from the smell, and the way it felt in your hand. This was not just dust. This was fae pollen. And after the interesting trip into the fae woods but a fortnight ago, realization caught up quick. Almost as quickly as Bakugou’s breath began to hitch. It all happened so quickly you could barely gather your thoughts before he’d started sneezing. His chest muscles bulged before he snapped forward with a powerful explosion, which sent more of the fae pollen flying through the air and traveling to every corner of the room. All you could think of to do was to snatch your apron off, and rush to his side to start wiping away whatever pollen was on his bare skin. He didn’t fight you on this, as he was busy fighting with his nose instead.

“Hh-! Hh-EeDD’ZZSsshUUu!! Hii-IItt’SSHhhuuOOo!!” He wouldn’t dare sniffle, knowing damn well it’d make things worse. His mouth fell open, and his sharp nose twitched with a pink hue spreading to his flaring, itchy nostrils, “HHh-ISSHHHuuOO!! H-Hh-ESZzZZshhUuu! Hh–hHZzcHH’CHuue!” His muscles spasmed under your touch. “Y-your majesty…a-are you…-!?” His red eyes were hazy with tears that threatened to break free and roll down his cheeks. The flush across his cheeks was, dare you say, a lovely shade. And the more he sneezed, the pinker and pinker his slender nostrils became. The bridge of his nose furrowed harshly while his eyebrows pressed together.

“Hh-EeeSSHHUUuuee!! G–Ghh–IDZZzSSHuuuee!! G…rid…of–! HH-InNxXnN–Uuughh!! Uu-HHrr-ESsHHUUuooo!!” A fine mist shot from his mouth and nose and into the air, mingling with the fine particles of fae pollen that tickled and tortured your master, practically bringing him to his knees. “Hh-!” His teeth bared as he bent at the waist into his elbow, “HKK’GnnNNT! HH-KNNXXxt!!” Two rather painful stifles came from him, resulting in a pained groan.

“M-master you’ll hurt yourself if you do that…” The words escaped before you could even stop him. Truth be told, you adored seeing the Dragon King sneeze. To see such a strong and unstoppable force of nature be brought down by fae dust was a joy to watch…and practically a pleasure. A mix between a snarl and a snort came from him as his unfocused, hazy red eyes stared you down, “T-tha-Hh-! Hh’IHTssSShhchu’uh…!! Is…an – Hh-!” Bakugou panted helplessly, covering his mouth and nose with his shaky hands, “ Hh’GNxxT-Chew…Hh-HaH’ETSSHhhuuoo!! NOW! Half bre-Hh-EdDdsshuu!! Ha-Hhh-Half b-...bree-EE’EsSHHuu! -Hahh-! e’SShhuuooOO!!” His fingers glistened with wetness from his fit, and you could see it dropping to the floor. Your heart quickened in pace before you picked up the still overflowing box. You didn’t know any magic! How were you supposed to stop this!? All the while, B/akugou is clutching the edge of the table behind you, bracing as this hellish fit of sneezing wracks him to his very core. As you stared back at him, even his toned abs convulsed and twitched with each hitching breath and explosion. Big and small, long and short, you’d never seen him afflicted in such a way. By this point he was using your apron to save whatever dignity he had left. “Hh-! AaESSsHHuuuee!! IsshhUu! ISSH’UUuu! Hh-Hih-!! HehH’ESSHHUUuooo!! DAMN it!!” You could tell, if he ever managed to find out who sent this thing, they were going to die by his hand.

No matter how hard you tried to put the lid back on, it was as if a switch had been flipped and was broken off. You panicked, wondering if his majesty would release his anger onto you instead of the prankster who caused him so much anguish. But, as luck would have it…the gods were on your side. Amidst all of B/akugous sneezing, the commotion had alerted K/irishima, who rushed into the room. His usual peppy smile was traded in for an agape mouth. “W–...??” He was utterly flabbergasted, but that was understandable. Before you could utter a word, Bakugou beat you to it.

“S-Shitty s-Sca–AAhh’HHssHHuu!! IssHHeewww!! T-the b-Oo’-...Box-! EsSZZsshhuuu!” You could feel the wet spray from his breathless sneezes hitting the back of your neck and your tail. It sent a shudder down your spine that anyone would have noticed. It didn’t take long for Kirishima to realize what had happened. He rushed to your side and picked up the box, before whistling for a few of your colleagues. “Get this thing as far away from here as possible! Choke it with a counter spell if you have to, just get it outta here and get this mess cleaned up, OK?” Even while barking orders, E/ijirou still managed to sound pleasant and kind. The others quickly whisked away the dangerous box as a few stayed behind to try and help clean up the mess. And with that covered, you rose to your feet to rush to B/akugou’s side.

“HHhdt-EssZZSShhhuuuoOOo!” Your head snapped to the side as you were coated in his majesty’s discharge. The spray was cool on your skin but nevertheless…a bit uncalled for. A pitiful moan escaped from Bakugou’s wrecked throat, before he snapped forward again, “Hh-HHDZzSShhuuuooOOO!!” Again, enveloping you in spray, for which he had no intention of apologizing for. His nostrils stung as the source of his agony was finally removed from his presence, before you pulled a clean handkerchief from your pocket and offered it to him. “B-blessings, your majesty…” You croaked, watching as he snatched the cloth from you and blew his nose into it quite messily. He was indeed upset…K/irishima sighed, “Well…Guess we should find out just who sent that little care package, huh?” He grinned nervously, watching B/akugou’s shoulders quake. “HH…Hahh–IDSShh! HhETtSSHHhuuuuooo!! The goddamn NERVE…” Smoke rose from his mouth, “K/irishima…start tracking down every damned fae folk you can find…” He seethed, his nose still eagerly dripping into the now filthy hankderchief.

“When I find the worthless BASTARD who did this…I’ll wipe him off the face of this Earth…Not even the GODS will be able to SAVE him!!” He turned around, eyes burning with unbridled rage. It almost scared you. His right hand man quickly bowed, “Yes, my King! At once!” He took the hint, and quickly fled the room. Now, it was only the two of you, and the remaining servants.

“And YOU.” Instinct took over, and you immediately went down onto hands and knees, bowing to him. “I sincerely apologize for my hesitation, Master. It will never happen again.” B/akugou had been kind enough to liberate you from poachers and slavers of enchanted folk, and the last thing you wanted to do was to make him mad enough to throw you back where he plucked you from. A wet snort came from him before he sniffled, rubbing his exhausted nostrils which squelched at the touch. “...I’ll find a fitting punishment for you. Now stand. And get this MESS cleaned up!!” He spat, hiding his still tickling nose behind the well used cloth, “Hh-Hh’EssHHH!!” He groaned, "And for Gods' sake, bring me another damned handkerchief..." With that, he'd left the room. His loud sneezes echoed from the corridor even after he'd slammed the door behind him. It could have gone much worse, but as you helped the others contain the remaining fae pollen…your mind began to race…just what kind of punishment did the dragon king have in store for you…?

#kushami asks #kushami writes #snzfic #snzfucker #e/ijirou k/irishima #k/atsuki b/akugo #b/akugou k/atsuki #dragon king b/akugou #snzblr #snz kink #snz fic #m/ha #b/nha

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cheerfulmelancholies · 10 months

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Mysterious New Member-Chapter 4

Tezz suppressed a yawn as he closed down his computer's windows. The program he'd been running couldn't quite interpret what the markings meant, but the closest it had come was comparing them to Greek, though even that was a stretch based on some of them. An odd finding for symbols found etched on the walls of an alien structure. He was certain to have quite a few sleepless nights trying to figure it out. Tonight, however, would not be one of them. He exited his lab to go get some shuteye.

The following morning saw the team able to eat breakfast and go about their morning routines before a Storm Shock opened later in the afternoon. Vert, Tezz, Sherman and Spinner, Agura, and Stanford blasted through the portal to find themselves in the middle of a jungle-like Zone. They were immediately greeted by Kalus and his Vandals, who wanted a rematch from their last fight and were rather at home in the environment.

Roughly forty minutes later, with some well-played moves on BF5's part, the Vandals were once again beaten and the team rode through the Earth portal with the Key.

Vert sealed the portal and returned to the Saber, spirits high.

"Man, kicking Vandal butt sure makes a guy hungry," Stanford commented. "Who's up for dinner at Zeke's?"

"Only if it's an extra large, everything topping pizza with anchovies and pickles," Sherman replied, licking his lips.

"Come on, little bro! You can't put anchovies on pizza. I can accept everything else but that."

As the rest of his team bickered about the best choice for pizza toppings, Vert led the way back to base. After dropping off the Key and gathering the others, they headed out to Zeke's Diner.

They finished two hours later and while they were still getting out of their usual booth, a deep, uneven rumble sounded from just outside.

Stanford, having been closest to the window, parted the blinds to take a look. He gasped.

"What's wrong?" Vert asked, turning round to see the red-head's face lose some of its color.

"Isn't that our little spitfire pulling up?"

Vert and Zoom moved between the others to look. There the jet black Camaro sat, a space away from the Tangler, engine grumbling. Its paint was freshly waxed and it looked pristine as ever.

The scout was the first to speak. "What should we do? I really don't wanna get in her way again after the last time."

"Just cool it, guys. This is just a diner, there's nothing weird about us being here. Act natural, okay?" Vert backed away from the blinds before she could spot him.

"I take it that's the girl you chased down by mistake?" Agura asked, not missing the way the three boys' expressions changed to sheepish.

"We told her it was just a misunderstanding," Vert explained. "Besides, this is all just a coincidence." Was it though? The town she was headed towards was in the opposite direction of Handler's Corners. There was no logical reason for her to be all the way out here. Still, he wouldn't lose his cool. They were in their street clothes and as far as anyone was concerned, they were nothing more than a bunch of young adults with project cars. As long as they didn't seem suspicious, she'd have little reason to confront them.

He led the way out of the diner, striding out like he hadn't just been spooked. He eyed the Camaro as it idled several spots down. He pretended not to take notice and hopped into the Saber. As the others got into their cars and Zoom his bike, Vert spared another glance at the odd one out. He could tell Agura was wary as the Tangler lowered her seat, and as she sat down she gave a not-so-subtle stare at the Camaro next to her.

The tinted windows revealed nothing.

Vert backed out and hit the road, the others following shortly after. When they were no longer in sight of the diner he relaxed.

"Well, that was weird," Spinner said when the silence became too much. "I thought you said she was mad at you."

"She was," Vert answered. "Maybe she got a little frightened at the sight of all of us."

"I'm just glad she didn't get out to confront us," said Stanford.

Agura hummed. "What was she even doing there though? She lives miles away from Handler's Corners."

"We have no proof she actually lives there," Tezz piped in. "Perhaps she was visiting family and stopped by at Zeke's on the way back. We don't know anything about her. It's possible she may live in Handler's Corners and we're just unaware of it."

"Let's just try not to let it get to us," Sherman warned. "After the last time..."

Vert didn't miss the dig. "You're right, Sherm. Let's just forget about it." They sped in the direction of home.

Sometime into the evening, Sage called them down. "I have picked up another anomaly," she said, bringing up a screen. "I'm sending the location to your cars. Be careful, whatever it is, it's mobile."

The team nodded and ran to their vehicles.

"It's heading East," Agura reported, eyes on her dash.

"Now it's going South," said Sherman.

"Northwest," Tezz said seconds later. He scrutinized his screens. "That can't be right... Its output is dropping. If we do not reach it soon, it will vanish again."

"Alright, guys, full throttle!" Vert charged ahead. He steered the Saber in the direction of the anomaly, changing course whenever it did. Eventually, his sensors stopped picking it up. "Speed up," he called, slamming the accelerator. He would not let them get away again.

Sherman frowned at his dash. "I got nothing, Vert. It's gone."

"Over there!" The Tangler swerved left and raced towards a car with its lights off. A black car.

"Is that...?" Vert turned on his high beams. It was a Camaro. He grit his teeth.

"Her trajectory matches that of the anomaly's last known location," Tezz supplied.

"I knew it... After her."

The entirety of the Battle Force was after her, perhaps that was why she slowed to a stop and allowed them to catch up. She kept the engine running just in case, though they made no move to surround her this time. She watched the leader–the blonde guy from before–take determined strides towards her. She rolled her window down.

"Having another identity crisis?" she questioned his disgruntled visage. "How many jet black Camaros do you know?"

"You've got some explaining to do," he responded. "We've been getting some weird readings out here and they're coming from you."

She quirked a brow. "What's the matter? Haven't you ever been rejected before?"

"Her car is still letting off some unusual energy," came Tezz as he approached. "It's strange, the frequency doesn't fully match that of the anomaly moments ago, but it is still impossible for an ordinary car to cause such a thing." He came to a stop next to Vert. "Perhaps you are not aware, but there is something different about your Camaro in particular."

She gave him an unimpressed look. "Yeah, no kidding. Every time I drive it I get chased down by a bunch of desert weirdos. Hell if I know why."

"We aren't trying to hurt you, it's just that-" He had to step back to avoid taking the door to the abdomen while she got out.

Tezz, who had been too busy fiddling with his scanner, wasn't so lucky.

"I don't know what you call running people off the road, but where I'm from that's a pretty hostile move." Slapping Tezz's arm, she added, "Get that thing away from me and my car or else I'll put it somewhere that was better left unknown." She gave them all a wary glance. "Who are you people?"

"We're just, uh, filming for a movie," Spinner said from atop the Buster. He gulped when she narrowed her eyes at him.

"Do you really think I'm that stupid? I'll ask you again. Who are you and why. Are. You. Chasing. Me?" She looked back at Vert. "What kind of 'readings' are you even talking about?"

"Um..."

"And what do you mean my car's abnormal? You're the ones with project cars gone wrong. That one has a snow plow in the desert," she said, gesturing to AJ. "Just what are you freaks up to?"

Vert contemplated what to do. He couldn't keep playing the fool, they'd gotten too involved now. He glanced back to the others to find them just as lost. He sighed. "Maybe you should come with us. We can explain everything back at our base."

She laughed, the sound strained and hysterical at the same time. "Seriously? I'm not following you creeps back to your 'base.' I don't need to watch too much TV to know that's a bad idea. I'll take my chances out here, thanks." She made to get back into her car.

"There must be some reason you're out here," Tezz argued. "Aren't you looking for answers?" She gave him an odd look that he couldn't interpret.

"Depends whether or not you actually have any," she said after a pause.

"I think we will," Vert answered, "but we can't give them out here. If you come with us, we'll explain everything."

She glared at him, wary. "Diana," she said at last. "Diana Linden."

"I'm Vert Wheeler. And this is my team." He pointed out the rest of the Battle Force one by one, watching her nod after each introduction. "We're the good guys, okay?"

She pursed her lips. "Lead the way," she said as she fell back into her seat. "But if any of you tries something, I'm bolting."

He nodded and headed back to the Saber, motioning for Tezz to follow. They took off, the Camaro trailing back a few paces, and rode to the Hub.

Chapter 5: here

Chapter 3: here

#my writing #hot wheels battle force 5 #bf5 #fanfic #writers on tumblr #creative writing #mysterious new member

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iwadori · 3 years

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When they neglect you for another girl Part 4 (Sakusa)

Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five

Word Count: 2.6K

Genre: Angst to Fluff

masterlist

AN: YES I DID PUT MYSELF IN THIS STORY! SUE ME. This is basically inspired by a random conversation i had w the great @teesumu, so this is basically for you doll <3

Sakusa:

You and Sakusa have been together for a around 10 years and love eachother immensly.

However recently Sakusa has been busy and you havent really had much time together lately as he claims been busy doing loads of visits with his new agent.

But of course, being the loving partner you are you wanted to revive the spark in your relationship.

You have been seeing a lot of people on social media posting their aesthetic ‘picnic dates,’ and you knew that this was something that appealed to you before it was ‘on trend.’ Kiyoomi immediately came to your mind once you had the idea of going on a date. You knew that you haven’t be around each other lately, as Kiyoomi always had either a ‘meeting’ or some sort of ‘interview’ that his new agent “Empress” has set up for him.

You didn’t really know Empress that well, just that she was ‘good at her job,’ a ‘hard and dilligent worker,’ and a ‘raging hottie’ with Atsumu’s opinion being the last one. You weren’t suspecting her to have any malicious intent towards you or Kiyoomi, since you knew that he had a great judge of character. But it was just odd, that every time Kiyoomi was running late or having ‘super-secret’ conversations on the phone it was always because ‘my agent set up this,’ ‘my agent set up that,’ and that’s what left you a bit wary.

As you were scrolling through your phone you see a calendar updating saying : Next Week‘ A DECADE AGO WE FELL IN LOVE.’

10 years. How could you forget? You and Omi have literally been together for a decade. You think back to the decade of madness and love you’ve been through together, smiling fondly to yourself but then you think about where you are now... barely even talking to each other, only mainly seeing him when he comes home from work.

You need to fix this. Or at least make an attempt to get you and Kiyoomi talking again. So, the only thing you can do, is plan that picnic.

You spent the rest of the day planning your anniversary picnic. ’It’s going to be great,’ you think to yourself, you have a list of all Omi’s favorite foods you're going to make him and bring and you are probably going to pick up a few board games and maybe even get some paint supplies. You and Kiyoomi used to paint a lot together, with the two of you not being the best of painters, but you enjoyed eachothers company non the less.

Everything was sorted...for the most part. All you needed to do was get Omi there, and it’ll all be okay. Right? As you were bubbling and looking for more picnic inspo, you hear your front door open which made you even more excited to tell your boyfriend your plans.

As you rush to go greet him, you see he’s on the phone making you roll your eyes. “No Empress it won’t work, we need this sorted by next week. Okay? Next week.” he says in an agitated way. He hangs up the phone and sighs, shoving off his duffel bag.

“Hey Omi, how was your day?” you say a bit hesitant, noticing his annoyed mood.

“Fine” He said dismissively, aiming to walk past you aiming for your bedroom.

“Oh well I have something amazing planned for ne-” you try to say following after him.

“Can we not do this right now Y/N,” he says again turning too look at you making you frown a bit, all you wanted to do is surprise him with your plans and have a day out with him. After noticing your sad look he finishes with “it’s just that Empress she’s bee-”

“I don’t want to hear about her.” you say bitterly folding your arms, Empress is the last person you want to hear about right now “God Omi can’t you just care about me? For once.”

“I do I-”

“You don’t anymore,” you say, with all the emotions and feelings you’ve been just supressing from a while coming up. You don’t even know how you got from point A to B with this conversation, but there's no stopping now. “I feel that, for a while now we haven’t been how we were before when we were just Y/N and Kiyoomi. Instead of how we are now. Just Y/N. Then Kiyoomi and Empress.”

After hearing his agents name, Kiyoomi’s name contorts to confusion “Empress? What does she have to do with anything?”

“How can you not see? For the past month all it’s been is ‘Empress this’ ‘Empress that,’” you complain “Having your super secret conversations with her, like god Kiyoomi can’t you see a problem with this?”

“It’s not like that Y/N, we’re just work partners” he says looking a bit annoyed “Just business.”

“Just business? So Kiyoomi, what were you talking about on the phone earlier” you say with your voice slight accusingly.

“Umm I, I can’t really say?” he says more of a question then a fully assured statement. You squint your eyes at him and scoff.

“What is going on with you Omi?” you say “are you cheating on me with her is that it?”

“No, no of course not Y/N! How could you even ask that?” he frowned at your question making your chest hurt, since deep down you knew he could never do that to you. Could he?

“Well tell me then, what were you talking about?” you ask again.

“I can’t say..” he finishes

“Well I can’t stay.” you say and his face goes back to confusion “Here. With you.”

“What do you mean Y/-”

“I need a break or something. I just can’t be here right now.” You start to rush and pack a big of things whilst Kiyoomi just stands there.

After you pack up your stuff, you look back and see Kiyoomi just there. Standing. You were upset, you kind of wanted him to rush after you and beg you not to leave, but he was just there. Standing. So you put the hand on the door and just before you leave you turn back and say “bye Sakusa, see you later?” to which you see him slightly nod at.

When the door shut, Kiyoomi starts to cry. After hearing you call him by his last name really twisted the knife that was already in his heart. You haven’t called him that since you were like 15. He knew what you wanted; he knew you wanted him to rush towards you and beg you not to leave, but he didn’t. He couldn’t. But what he could do is call the one person he only could call.

After a few rings, he hears “What do you need Saku?”

“She’s gone, she left.”

“What do you mean she’s gone, did you tell her?”

“No I didn’t tell her. And that’s the problem, Empress she think-”

“Saku, don’t worry about it. I’ll handle it.”

“You’ll handle it?”

“Don’t I always?”

He couldn’t argue with that, he just had to trust that Empress could sort it. “And also, don’t spend the week with your head up your ass crying, you’ve got a lot of grovelling to do kiddo.”

He nodded even though she couldn’t see him, as he knew that what just went down needed to be resolved, fast.

Meanwhile, on your end. You’re a mess. Sobbing all the time, tissues are your best friend, you’ve been waiting just waiting for a message or a call, or some form of communication. You just wanted to feel wanted by your boyfriend (can you even call him that now.)

You spent the rest of the week at your parents, immersing yourself in your work and doing ‘self care’ things, trying to forget all about the argument you and Kiyoomi had.

One day, you receive a letter, it wasn’t delivered by a mail man though. It was slid under your door, in a golden envelope sealed with a red hot wax seal. It read:

‘Dear Y/N,

My sweetheart, im sorry for how the week has been and I know a letter with only a fraction of how I feel won’t make up for how I acted that day. But im inviting you to join me at the Gardenia Botanical Gardens at 2 pm tommorow, to celebrate our 10 year anniversary.

I know there is a big chance, you may not want to see me and I understand but please. I love you, so so much, that words can’t even describe. But I need you to see me apologise and I need to make it up to you.

I hope to see you there, I’d wait the whole day for you. If you don’t show, I understand.

Sincerely, Sakusa Kiyoomi

P.S The theme is ‘summer hot day, tea with the queen’ - Atsumu’

You smile at the letter, but wonder if you should actually go or not. You did want to see him of course and get this all resolved, but you had your own plans for your anniversary which wouldn’t of been spoiled if he didn’t withhold his super-secret phone calls.

It took you hours to contemplate on what to do, but you decided to just sleep on it and see how you feel tomorrow. In the morning, you knew what you wanted to do. Of course, you had to go, at least to hear him out and see if he really did cheat on you or not. For all you know he’s inviting you to tell you that he’s going to run away with his agent and his secret kids they had together. You shook the negative thoughts from your head and just repeated your mantra ‘hope for the best and prepare for the worst.’

When you got there, you didn’t exactly know where he would be but he said ‘botanical gardens’ so of course you decided to just wander around there. It was nice walking around and just smelling the roses, and seeing the pretty scenery.

“Excuse me ma’am,” you hear someone say tugging on your leg “um that mister over there told me to give you these.” Looking down, you see a small boy who looked about the age of four with a crumpled up bunch of roses handing them to you.

“Oh thank you,” you say giving the kid a head pat “where is this ‘mister’ might I ask?”

“He’s over there!” The kid pointed behind him and you look to see Kiyoomi sitting under a white gazebo which is surrounded in your favorite flowers and the table is filled with food.

You walk over to your ‘boyfriend,’ with him not noticing your present yet. When you reach him you say “I think she stood you up buddy,” you joke making him jump abit startled.

“Y/N!” he exclaimed, instantly beaming “You came you made it!” he stood up and pulled you into a hug, which you return before you remember why you came here in the first place.

“Oh I-” he says awkwardly

You decide to sit down pulling him down with you. You kind of sit there in uncomfortable silence, for a while until you both say.

“So I-”

“What are yo-”

You both laughed at your simultaneous comments, before Kiyoomi looks at you letting you speak. “What did you want to bring me here for?”

“I didn’t want, what happened last week to happen Y/N I-” he says looking a bit panicked “It wasn’t supposed to go this way.”

“Then how was it meant to go Sakusa.”

“Y/N, please don’t call me that, I know I made you upset but pleas-” he starts before getting distracted again “Y/N, I called you here to say a few things..”

“Them being.?” you ask a bit impatiently.

“I love you. I love you so much, you don’t even understand. Ever since I saw you at my volleyball game in our first year, in the stands just cheering us on. I knew that from that day, after I scored the winning point and our eyes met, that we were destined to be together. I just love you so much Y/N”

“Omi I don’t understand I-”

“Just let me finish please, It’s taken a while for me to say this. And trust me, there’s been so many times when I wanted to just say ‘hey Y/N let’s get married,’ but I couldn’t I was scared, and I wanted it to be perfect, so perfect. Because you deserve the world Y/N. That’s why I got Empress to help, I know that our conversations may seem odd, but I love you and she knows that she just wanted to help trust me. And she did, all this wouldn’t of been done if it wasn’t for her. But anyways Y/N what I waned to say was I love you and I love you and I-” he rambles on loosing track of his words.

But in the midst of his speech, you hear all that you needed and responded with the only way you can.

“Yes.” you say simply, with a growing smile on your face.

“Yes?” he repeats confused “What do you meann ye- ohhh" Kiyoomi blushes embarrased that after all that he ended up ruining the thought out proposal he wanted to give you with his ramble.

“Im sorry Y/N, I didn’t mean to say it like that I wanted it to be perfect and I-”

You shut him up with a kiss making his eyes widen as he reciprocates it anyways.

“What did she say?” you hear someone shout from a far, and you look over to see the MSBY Jackals all standing there with shit eating grins on their faces.

“I said yes!” you yell back, to which they all cheer and rush towards you guys giving you both hugs and slapping Kiyoomi on the back.

As the boys celebrate Omi finnally do what he’s been planning for ages, you get approached by Empress who awkwardly walks up to you. “ I didn’t want to leave the impression that me and Saku were any sort of thing?” she says

“Yeah I think it was definitely a big misunderstanding, it’s just that Omi was never around and whenever he was he was just talking to you and you know how it is.”

“I definitely know, I’d feel the same way if my boyfriend did that to me.”

“Oooh boyfriend?” you ask her feeling nosey on her romantic life.

“Yeah boyfriend. You know iwaizumi hajime... the trainer?” she says smiling a bit when she said his name.

“The trainer! Nice.”

The rest of the night was fun and was basically an engagement party for you and Omi all you and friends just partying and celebrating yours and Omi’s love for each other. “Omi” you say getting his attention “Happy ten year anniversary babe”

“Happy anniversary, I can’t wait to spend the rest of my life with you.”

After the party you spend your months now planning for a big fat wedding, with the help of your new found bestie, Empress (who you obviously misjudged from the start.) You and Omi could never be happier, every thing was back to how it was before, maybe even better. And you definitely spent at least two Saturdays a month going out for picnics and it was now a tradition in your relationship, so in the end you did get your ‘aesthetic picnic date.’

AN: WHAT DID U GUYS THINK??

#haikyuu x reader #haikyuu x reader comfort #haikyuu fluff #sakusa x you #sakusa headcanons #haikyu angst #sakusa fluff #sakusa x reader #sakusa oneshot #haikyu sakusa #signedwithane😌

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sunflowerdaisybee · 3 years

Text

In The Woods | Technoblade X Reader

Summary: Technoblade meets an odd person while looking for his horse

Genre: None really :/

Pronouns: They/Them

A huff escaped Technoblade's lips as he searched for Carl, the horse had gotten spooked and ran off into unfamiliar territory. Techno was quick to go after the horse but Carl was most definitely faster.

"Fuck, how far did he run?" Techno took a second to stop and look around, hoping to spot the horse somewhere within the trees.

"If you're looking for the horse he's down by the creek over there." The voice chimed out from behind the piglin, prompting him to turn around. With no hesitation, he swung his sword at you, though rather than connecting with your figure his sword whipped right through a gathering of butterflies.

"That's not very nice, I was simply trying to help you." Your voice came from his side this time and again with no hesitation he swung. And once again he hit nothing and instead was met with a swarm of fluttering butterflies.

"Who the hell are you?" Technoblade frantically looked around, though there was no one in sight. His aggravation only intensified, not only was Carl missing but now he was being punked by some random jerk.

"Well maybe if you weren't constantly trying to kill me I'd tell you." Technoblade looked upwards, finally seeing you rather than butterflies. You were sat atop one of the higher branches in a nearby tree, legs swinging lazily and gaze trained down on him.

Watching him carefully you jumped from the branch, landing on the ground too softly for his liking.

"What the fuck are you?" Techno raised his sword, pointing it in your direction.

"First it was who am I and now it's what am I. You never seem to stop asking questions. Well since you're oh so eager to know, I am (y/n) god of all living creatures. It's a pleasure to make your acquaintance Technoblade, god of blood." Rather than lower his sword Technoblade only raised it higher and got more angered.

"How do I know you aren't lying, and how do you know who I am?" With a sigh, you stepped forward and moved the sword away from your face, only for Techno to put it right back where it was.

"Well obviously turning into butterflies and jumping from great heights isn't something that just anyone could do, and I know who you are because I've spoken with a little birdie friend of yours." You let out a soft laugh, finding humor in his distress.

"You know Philza?" Techno lowered his sword, but still kept his guard up in case of a surprise attack.

"Well of course, what other bird would I be talking about? Anyways back to your horse." You let out a long and loud whistle, then simply stood there for a moment.

"What was that?" Though before you even needed to answer, Carl came galloping into view.

"Carl!" Technoblade was quick to greet his four-legged friend, glad that he was ok. Upon turning around though Techno found that you were nowhere in sight. Where did you go? Were you even real in the first place?

Deciding not to think on it too much Technoblade hoped onto Carl and started on the ride home.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Getting home was easy, as was putting Carl away. Though what made going into his home so difficult was that white letter taped to his door. The envelope had no markings on the outside, the only key to who it came from being the butterfly stamped into the wax seal.

Rather than go into his own home Technoblade marched over, and into, Philza's home. Not even bothering to shed his cape or boots Techno marched right over to where Phil stood in the kitchen and started speaking.

"Have you ever met a god by the name (y/n)? They're the good of all the animals or something like that?" A surprised look crossed Phil's face before he nodded and smiled.

"Ah yes, I do remember someone like that, though it's been a while so we've talked last. Why do you ask?"

"Because I met them today. They knew who I am and helped me find Carl, that's not why I'm here though. They somehow left this letter at my door and I want to know why."

"Well did you read it? How are you so sure it's them?" Phil looked at the envelope in Technoblade's hands and quirked a brow.

"I know it's them because of this," Techno raised the letter and pointed to the wax seal.

"It's the same butterfly as the ones they turned into. And, uh no I didn't even think to read it, just came right over here." Technoblade contemplated reading it, what reason would you have for sending him a letter anyway.

In one swift motion, Philza reached over and yanked the letter from his hands. Now with it in his own hands, Phil immediately opened the envelope and pulled out the paper inside. Though before he could unfold and read what it said, it was yanked from him by Techno.

"The letter's for me, not you." With that said Techno cast his gaze downwards towards the paper, might as well read it now.

The letter was short, only a few lines written on the paper. In summary, it said that (y/n) was thankful for Techno's appearance and that they stop by sometime soon, whether intentionally or not.

After reading that letter Techno handed it to Phil, he was sure the winged man would want to read it anyways.

"Hm, maybe you should." Techno looked confused at Phil's words.

"Should what?"

"Go visit, not only will the change in scenery be nice but it would be nice for you to have a friend."

"I have friends."

"Not counting me and the syndicate." Technoblade rolled his eyes, what does he need friends for. He has Phil, the dogs, Carl, and the syndicate, he doesn't need anything more.

With a quick goodbye, Techno grabbed the letter and left. Though as he undressed and changed into nightwear for the night he couldn't help but think of (y/n). Technoblade had never read anything about them in any books or heard any stories about a nature god by that name.

With one final sigh, the piglin climbed into bed, determined to find out if you are who you really claim to be.

#mcyt x reader #mcyt x you #mcyt x y/n #dream smp x reader #dream smp x you #dream smp x y/n #Technoblade x reader #Technoblade x you #technoblade x y/n #mcyt x male reader #mcyt x gender neutral reader #dream smp x male reader #dream smp x gender neutral reader #technoblade x male reader #technoblade x gender neutral reader #x reader angst #x male reader #x gender neutral reader

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missblissy · 3 years

Note

OMG the aquarium one was so cute, can you please write a little more after that? They start dating and maybe Alastor start reading Reader Books? Have a nice day/night :)

((Thank you nonny!! And I would certainly love to!!))

It had been months since you first met Alastor, and to say that wasn't the best day of your life would be a lie. Because you got to meet the only boyfriend you had ever learned to love this much, and this quickly. However, life had it's ways to make everything so impossible. Alastor was from New Orleans, Louisiana, and you were from Buffalo, New York. So the reality was you had a long-distance boyfriend.

Alastor worked a lot and traveled a lot for work. So any chance he got, he'd visit you. Oh, but you were never allowed to visit him. He'd always make some excuse. His home was dirty, that he hadn't cleaned. Then you found out he also had roommates, roommates he didn't want you to meet for whatever reason. He said they were an odd bunch of "children." Though later he explained they were friends from college, but they certainly acted like children. He told you their names at least. There was Angel, who was the college dropout, and the local bum who lived on Alastor's couch. Then there was Charlie, and her girlfriend Vaggie, they were in their last years of Med School together and lived in Alastor's apartment-like attic. Lastly, there was Husker, and Nifty. Husker was an old high school friend of Alastor, and Nifty was an old childhood friend.

He loved visiting you, however. It was never for long, a few days here and there. Maybe a week if you were extremely lucky. But when he did visit, you were on top of the world. He'd spoil you rotten any chance he got, whether that was buying you something you really didn't need, or constantly taking you out for dinner dates. There was an amusement park not too far from where you lived, so occasionally you'd go there too. Alastor was not a thrill seeker so he'd never ride any rides, but he was happy to make you happy and glad to see you enjoy yourself.

Much to your dismay, however, Alastor started reading your book series, and he even made sure to read your one-shot books. He found out you were quite the poet and got the idea to start sending you letters when he wasn't around, or when he was home. They were sappy love letters filled with the gushy kind of mush you'd see from the mid-century. He wrote in Shakespearean, pressed flowers into the letters, and even sealed it with a wax press. How could it get more romantic than that?

Something else you started to do was listen to this infamous podcast he was so proud of. He ran it with his friends, Charlie and Angel included, along with Rosie, who was technically the co-host. They talked about all sorts of things, current new media, war-torn lands across the world, memes and funny TikToks that were trending, and even have well-known guest stars for interviews. He got over three million listeners on Spotify, which was the only streaming service you could find his podcast on. Alastor told you that he had a very large grudge against Youtube and would never lower himself to such a platform.

Eventually, after what felt like lifetimes (it was only a little over a year after dating) Did you FINALLY get to visit Alastor, and see his home. He was so proud to show you, New Orleans. He took you to every single one of his favorite bars, and diners. He made sure you got to taste the finest local cuisine and knew every local hangout spot. He wasn't lying either when he constantly said his house was a mess. You were very taken away by the fact that his home looked like a frat house. It wasn't.... dirty... or disgusting. Just... busy... and full of other people and their things. Nifty made sure everything was clean, like clothes and dishes, etc. But the house was very packed, very loud, and filled with people coming and going constantly.

It was nice though, to finally be in his world. It felt like he was going to keep you at an arms-length forever. You would visit him once a month, and you took turns going back and forth between each other's homes. But eventually, and much to your surprise, he asked you to move in. But only if you wanted to, he understood that you'd be downgrading from your waterfront house, where you lived alone with your two cats. You were so in love with Alastor, and his world, and his friends, and everything about him, that it never once felt like a downgrade for you. So of course you moved in if only a few weeks after he asked.

#alastor x reader #alastor x you #alastor #hazbin hotel #hazbin hotel alastor #hh alastor #hazbin #hotel #hazbin x reader #modern!au #human!alastor #alastor headcanons #missbliss writes #blissy writes #anon #ask

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giftofwonder · 3 years

Text

Cirque de Yuuie - MHA Various x f!Reader

A/N: Hey guys! So this is going to be a multi-part series of one shots. Each part will be a different character. There might be smut, we’ll see what happens. This is the introduction to the plot and characters. Some characters might have multiple parts as well. Let me know if you want anyone specific and also if you’d like to be added to their tag list! Also, let me know what you think! Feedback is always appreciated.

Intro

Your eyes cracked open, taking in the deep midnight hues that were cast over your room. Pale moonlight bathed everything in a faint glow.

You shifted, rolling to look at the clock on your bedside table. You groaned, pushing yourself up to sit on the edge of your bed and turned toward your open window. You could hear the boisterous chatter from the streets below. A cool breeze swept in and danced along your heated skin, and you welcomed it with closed eyes and a soft sigh.

Each night you found yourself waking up restless and antsy, unsettled. You’d sit in the confines of your room, and then dress and make your way to the tavern across the road. Tonight was no different.

Your tired limbs trudged across the cobblestone, pushing through drunken bodies that reeked of liquor and sweat.

You grunted as you pushed open the heavy oak door, finding it just as congested as outside. Bodies littered the room heavily, the music and laughter so loud it left your ears ringing. You weaved through the empty spaces and took a seat on a stool by the bar.

“The usual?” You heard a voice called out.

You glanced up, locking eyes with the bar tender as you gave a faint smile and nod.

A glass was slid in your direction a few seconds later, and you wondered if he’d already had it ready for you. You figured that must be the case, it was routine at this point.

“No luck sleeping again, huh?” He said, leaning across the counter as you nursed your drink.

“Afraid not, seems like this is becoming my normal.” You gave a dry laugh, trying to offer up something lighthearted.

“Seems like it. Something troubling you?” His head cocked to the side.

“Just the usual, nothing too bad.” You said, shifting your glass around in your hand.

“Come on now, you waltz in here every night and drink, people with problems that aren’t too bad don’t find themselves perched on one of my stools this often.” He whispered, his gaze intense as he inched across the counter toward you. His hushed voice was lost in the roars of the crowd around you, but you could hear him clear as day.

He wasn’t wrong. You had to give him that. The cluster of people surrounding you dispersed as groups made their way to exit back to the street.

Mummers still resounded around the room, but in the now much quieter atmosphere, you felt yourself relaxing. You leaned forward, propping your elbows against the chipped counter and braced your cheek in your palm.

“I just feel...I don’t know...an overwhelming amount of disinterest in my life. I wake up, I work hard and long days, I come home, eat and bathe and sleep. It’s a never-ending cycle that I’m doomed to repeat each and every day. It all just feels so lackluster.” You said, your voice soft as your eyes gazed at nothing.

“Well, that is quite the conundrum. Might I ask, why don’t you just do something else?” He quipped back with a grin.

“If only it were that easy.” You sighed, eyes slowly drifting back to him.

“Isn’t it, though?” He asked, a mischievous gleam in his eye.

“Is it?” You asked, brow furrowed in confusion.

“Hear me out, I’m no stranger to a hard days work by any means, but I like what I do.” He shrugged.

“Making drinks?” You pressed.

“No, I watch people. Get to know them, help them sometimes. You work in a pub and you meet a lot of people, hear a lot of stories. People get a bit of alcohol in them and suddenly their lips become uncontrollably loose.” He chuckled.

“So you’re nosy, then?” You spat back, a smile turning the corners of your lips.

“I prefer curious, it sounds much more pleasant.” He offered.

He turned and grabbed an envelope from behind him and slid it across the counter to you. It was unmarked, other than the intricate wax seal holding it closed.

“What’s this?” You asked, taking it and inspecting the “CdY” ingrained in the seal.

“A chance to escape.” He shrugged, and then leaned back abruptly, hands grasping glassware and a towel to polish the crystals surface.

“What do I owe you?” You asked, standing and grabbing your coin purse.

“Nothing. This ones on me.” He waved his hand.

“Well, thank you. I appreciate it. By the way, what is your name?” You asked, tucking the envelope into your pocket.

“Shinso, now get out of here and go off to do whatever it is you do when you stumble out of here each night.” He called, waving his rag at you. You smiled at the mirth lighting his eyes, offering a wave as you turned and made your exit.

______________________________________

You plopped onto your small wicker chair, it’s grooves lining up with your back perfectly, molded to your body after the countless hours you had spent hunched over in this seat.

Calloused fingertips reached to caress a fine silk that you’d never be able to afford. You pulled it to you, laying it across the table ahead and dug the patterns for a dress from the chest beside you at your feet.

You were a seamstress, and a fairly popular one. Women and men from both high and low society sought you out to tailor and craft their garments.

You had stitched an amazing collection of clothing, from simple gowns to the most intricate of pieces. Your customers had often boasted about your work, that you were able to create anything.

Until recently, you had been doing fairly well for yourself. You had purchased a home of your own, a massive feat for an unwed woman, especially one in her early twenties.

In the last six months, that had changed though. There had been civil unrest, looting and fighting at the capital. The local government had pushed back, increasing taxes heavily. With that blow came another, a new tailoring business on the other side of town. It offered cheap labor, using children from the orphanage as virtually free hands. The turn around was quick, much faster than the length of time it took you to produce a garment. But the quality was terrible. They used cheap labor and cheaper materials.

The first time you had seen their work, you had laughed till tears brimmed your eyes. However, the quick production and cheap cost had ended up hitting you hard. While the wealthy had no issue having you fashion something for them, most everyone else had flocked to them. It wasn’t terribly hard to do a simple stitch. To take in a gown or a suit. Suddenly, you found yourself praying for work as the jobs got fewer and fewer.

Meanwhile the heightened taxes left your coin purse extremely light. You hadn’t struggled like this in a very long time.

You finished the silken garment, folding it delicately over your arm as you took it over to the rack to hang.

Once hung, you patted off your apron and felt the crinkling of the forgotten envelope tucked in your pocket. You pulled it out, fingers dipping into the paper to tear it open. The red of the invitation was so bright, a high quality velvet lined in gold trim. You then wondered the status of your friendly barkeep, but chalked it up to his large amount of connections. Surely, a drunken man could be persuaded into giving an invitation in exchange for a free round.

Your eyes scanned along the paper, reading the fancy script that outlined the details of the event. You scoffed as you made your way back to your chair, shaking your head as the invitation was tossed onto your table.

A few moments passed before you picked it back up and read over the card again.

______________________________________

Your heels clicked against the pavement as you approached the large gate before you. You were in a state of awe at the lights and music making the night feel alive.

You stopped at the ticket booth, met with a disgruntled employee who looked half asleep. His thick yellow quilt was pulled taunt around his body and his hollow eyes stared at you with something akin to annoyance.

“Welcome to “Cirque de Yuuie”, admission is ¥220.” His bored voice stated monotonously.

“Oh...I actually have an invitation.” You said, giving a weak smile.

He held your gaze for a moment before he quirked a brow, his eyes scanning over you before he gave a sigh and a shrug.

“Alright, give it here.” He held out his pale hand, and you gently placed the invite in his palm.

He quickly pressed a stamp to your hand and shooed you away, so you turned and entered in through the gate.

______________________________________

You had wandered around the grounds for a while, but saw no familiar faces. It was odd, not even children were present. The cost had been rather high to enter, perhaps it was an adults only event.

After you had completed your lap, you were not too far from the entrance to the large tent in the center of the area. Red and white fabrics were draped beautifully, tied off with an intricately woven gold banding.

As you went to step forward, a large wooden pole cut in front of you, you gasped, your head shooting up to find a cheerful looking clown above.

“Whoops! S’cues me miss! Almost stepped on ya there!” He laughed, his painted lips opening to reveal his bright smile.

“Oh, no I’m sorry! I was enthralled by everything and wasn’t paying attention.” You waved him off.

“Ah don’t worry about it, it’s a beautiful night, and the tent looks great! I’ve been distracted by it myself! The names Mirio, by the way.”

“Y/N, it’s nice to meet you.”

He nodded and stepped to make his way off back into the crowd.

“HEY WAIT!” You heard a loud voice call out, and not a moment later, two more clowns turned the corner. One with green hair raced along side a blonde with large sunglasses and a lightening-shaped black streak in his hair. They were tailed by a very awkward and scared looking mime who ran behind them silently looking like he was going to be sick.

“Come on, Amajiki! Hurry up!” The blonde clown yelled behind him, causing the mime to flinch and pick up the pace. You laughed at their antics, they were definitely a good source of entertainment.

“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! THIS IS YOUR ANNOUNCER: PRESENT MIC, PLEASE GATHER TO THE MAIN TENT AS THE FESTIVITIES ARE ABOUT TO BEGIN.....YEAAAHHH!!!!” A loud voice blared through the speakers overhead.

You pushed through the gathering crowd, entering through the fabric doorway. The ceilings were vaulted, and you were amazed by how large it seemed inside.

Chatter broke out amongst those around you as you passed a sign that read “Yuuie’s Spectacular Freak Show!”

You followed the corridor, peering in the labeled rooms as you passed by.

“Strongest Men Alive! All Might and Red Riot!” Inside the room were two muscular men. The blonde man was tall, looming over the crowd as he smiled and flex. The redhead was laying on a bed of nails, and a crazed looking woman with pink hair walked across him while he looked on unfazed.

“One Body- Two Men! Twice!” A man sat, arguing with himself, the crowd would call out questions and he’d answer two opposing ways, often breaking out into an argument. The crowd giggled and taunted as he yelled seemingly to himself.

“The Vampire: Toga!” Your stomach twisted as you watch the girl give a cat-like grin and chug a vial of blood. Shackles held her to her spot but she called out to the audience, telling them to come closer and let her have a drink.

“Invisible Girl: Toru!” You blinked at the empty room, rolling your eyes as you pushed past to the next stall.

“Frog Woman: Tsuyu!” A girl in a green dress crouched in a pool, her long tongue falling from her mouth as her large hand gave a wave. You couldn’t help but notice her webbed fingers and the faint croaks.

“Worlds Largest Woman: Mt Lady!” An insanely large woman sat on her knees, smiling and chatting with the audience. She was beautiful, but had to be at least 9’ tall.

“World’s Largest Man: Fatgum!” A very large man sat in the center of the room smiling and waving as he let children drift into his stall and eat from the various sweets lining the table beside him. Though the adults around you spoke insults quietly, you couldn’t help but think the man looked very kind. You smiled softly at the sight of a child hugging him in thanks before returning to their mothers side.

“Bird-Man: Hawks!” A young man laughed loudly, his beautiful red wings flapping as he gave a slight show to those who watched. Many looked on in awe and wonder, and women swooned at his charm. His feathers seemed to almost sparkle and while you noticed something mischievous in his gaze, you were mesmerized nonetheless.

“Dabi the Dragon and the Indestructible Bakugou!” This room was larger, and smoke poured out. You were curious about this one, as there was no crowd gathered out front. You only saw one person, a rather attractive but angry looking man, growling as he noticed you. He rolled his eyes as he lit off explosives in his hands.

Your hands shot up to cover your eyes, before peering out to see the man looked fine, bored even.

“That was amazing!” You exclaimed.

“Course it was!” He sneered.

Suddenly, the curtain behind him rustled and another man emerged from the darkness. He was shirtless, his body scared in burns that wrapped around his torso, arms and face. His black hair spiked wildly, just like the blonde beside him. He smirked at you, sauntering toward you before lifting your chin with his index finger.

“Want me to put on a show for you, doll face?” He whispered. You nodded mutely, feeling much like the mime you had saw earlier that night. He chucked and stepped back. His hand grasped a bottle and he turned his back toward you, taking a large swig from the drink.

He abruptly turned back, and blue flames shot from his mouth and filled the room. You could immediately feel the immense heat and no longer wondered how his scars came to be.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his arm, giving a small cough before grinning at you.

“Well, what’d ya think, princess?”

“It was amazing! Does it hurt?” You asked.

“Hmm? Nah, not really. Just burns a little.” He snickered at his joke while Bakugou rolled his eyes in the background.

“I also do a bit of sword swallowing.” He added, stepping in close to you.

“Oh, yeah? That’s a neat talent to have.” You spat back awkwardly.

“I could teach you, after the show that is. I’ve got a good one for you to practice on.” His deep voice said in a hushed tone, hot breath hitting you as his hand gripped the crotch of his pants.

You stumbled back quickly, mumbling about needing to find a seat, and then ran off to the main room of the tent.

Your heart was pounding as you took an empty seat in the front row that had your invitation number on it.

The lights around you dimmed and the seats behind began filling quickly. People chatted amongst themselves until the music changed and the curtains at the far side of the tent were drawn.

A pale looking man with light blue hair and red eyes slowly walked out, taking center stage.

“Welcome. I’m so glad all of you came to join us for the show.” His hoarse voice spoke out loudly. His eyes dragged along the audience, taking in those around him.

“My name is Shigaraki and I’ll be your host tonight. You’ll see things that you never imagined, acts of wonder put on display before you. Prepare to be in awe and amazed.” He cheered, giving and eerie grin.

______________________________________

Halfway through the show, they called for an intermission. The lights brightened as people stood and flocked outside to grab drinks and food.

You stayed put, reflecting on the show so far. There had been an amazing act with tightrope walking, acrobats and aerial silks. They had been called “Children of the Sky” by those sat around you. Aoyama, Mina, Uraraka and Nejire were their names.

Then there had been the father and son act of fire performance. Enji and Shouto Todoroki. They danced with fire and spun batons and hoops that were blazing. Their act would have been more enjoyable if the father had been quiet, but instead every few moments he’d call out to his son correcting his posture and moves. Mid performance, Dabi had joined them on stage. His blue flames shining brightly in contrast. He had quickly noticed you and his eyes lit up as your stomach filled with dread.

He marched over, pulling you from your seat as gasps and whispers of his damaged skin rang through the crowd. He didn’t seem to notice. Or didn’t care. He had spun you around, dancing as his azure fire lit his arms. You were worried you’d be burned, but the fire never touched your skin. He brushed his arms with his hands, extinguishing the flame, as the music had haunted. You watched the smoke rise from his skin as you frowned, but he simply took your hand and pressed a chaste kiss to the back of it before walking away.

You heard a voice rasp out “fucking show off” before seeing the angry blonde, Bakugou, take off after him.

Now you sat, watching a small man with balls on his head. He wore a jesters outfit and juggled before those left seated in the crowd. Slowly he made his way to you.

“Hey, how do you know Dabi?” He asked bluntly, wonder in his eyes.

“Oh, I don’t. Not really. I saw him in the freak show. That’s all.” You said, uncomfortable with the small mans leering.

“You actually watched him?” He asked dumbfounded. “No wonder he’s all over you.”

“What do you mean?” You asked perplexed.

“Uh hello, he’s gross looking. Definitely not as attractive as someone like me.” He beamed at you. You stayed quiet, unsure of how to respond and afraid to break the poor guys dilution.

“Hey I also do puppet stuff, you wanna see?” He asked, tone chipper.

“Oh, no that’s okay-“

“Okay cool, watch this!” He cut you off, pulling a small puppet from his suit. He dropped it and it limply hit the ground, the string much too long for him. The puppet dragged around weirdly as the jester spoke in a high pitch, giving the wooden body a voice.

You blinked, watching the train wreck as the doll slid through the dirt, getting jerked around by the man before you. He picked up the puppet and threw it at you, it landing in your lap. Then he pulled the string and yanked it back to the ground. You abruptly stood and walked away, hearing him call after you, but you only quickened your pace.

Once outside in the fresh air, a loud bellowing laugh burst from your lips. That was the weirdest thing you’ve ever had to deal with and you had been holding in laughing in the strange boys face.

“Seems like you’re enjoying the show.” A voice cut in.

Your head quickly spun, meeting the red eyes of the ring leader.

“Yeah! It’s nice, you guys are doing an amazing job!” You scratched your neck, feeling the hairs on your arms standing at the sudden tension as the mans smile fell.

“You weren’t invited here.” He stated.

“I...well I was given an invitation.” You replied.

“It wasn’t yours though. It wasn’t meant for you.” He said, eyes blank as his head cocked to the side.

“No, it wasn’t. I don’t know who it belonged to. A bartender gave it to me.” You explained.

“Hmm, is that so? Well, do enjoy the show then. But do me a favor, sit in a different seat when you go back in.” He sneered, and then he was gone as quickly as he had appeared.

You headed back inside, choosing a different seat in the front row that had been unclaimed earlier.

The music roared again as the clowns, Midoriya, Kaminari and Mirio, put on a show. Kaminari was being shocked while Midoriya rode around on a unicycle. Mirio stayed on his stilts and walked around the stage dancing and doing tricks. The trio was truly fun to watch, and then the mime, Amajiki, was shoved forward. A spotlight hit him as he stood frozen in fear.

“Come on buddy, you can do it!” Mirio whispered loudly in support.

Amajiki took in a big breath and lifted his arms, hands shaking as he formed an invisible wall in front of himself when a box hit him in the head and a drunken man “booed”. Amajiki immediately rushed to the shadows, pressing his face into the wall of the tent as an air of dread surrounded him.

“Uhhh...look over here!” Midoriya yelled out, pulling the attention of the crowd as he gave a large shock to Kaminari. Kaminari then “beeped” and “booped” and drooled as he wobbled around. The audience cheered and laughed.

Finally it was time for the final act of the night, the mysterious and powerful Mr. Compress.

A spotlight roamed the stage, and in a cloud of smoke he appeared. He wore a mask, top hat and yellow overcoat. His cane tapped against the floor with each step he took.

“Tonight, I will make you question everything you know about the world. Everything you believe to be real!” He called, and the crowd went wild, hooting and hollering.

He started with a few jokes, one about how he wasn’t the type to pull a rabbit from his hat, but then his hat shifted and he took it off. He pulled out the first rabbit, and then another, and then two more. You laughed at his seeming confusion. Finally, he plopped his hat back on his head and called out Bakugou to the stage. Bakugou marched to him, stomping his feet and crossing his arms as he came to a stop beside the magician.

Mr. Compress draped a large piece of fabric over the man, and then quickly pulled the cloth back to reveal a confused looking Shouto.

“I was just over there.” Shouto said, pointing to the other side of the tent.

“Yes! And now you’re over here!” Compress smiled, giving a grand wave of his arm.

“Aren’t I the one doing the magic then?” Shouto said blandly while Compress laughed.

“Alright then, do another trick for us.” Mr. Compress said, his tone amused. Shouto stood there silently, expression blank.

“I’m-“

“YOUR FIRE! USE YOUR FIRE SHOUTO!” His father yelled from off stage. Shouto glanced behind him, annoyance radiating from him.

“No. Nevermind. Just put me back where i was.” He said to Compress. Not a second later, the cloth was thrown over him and pulled off to reveal what looked like 100 butterflies.

The crowed oohed and awed in response, and you felt your eyes widen in amazement as well. It was so quick, you were trying to understand the trick, but could hardly wrap your head around it. This guy was good.

He went through a few more tricks, each a little better than the last. Finally he called for a volunteer from the audience.

Many hands shot into the air, while yours meekly raised. You weren’t one who gravitated to the spotlight, in fact, you had no desire to go onto the stage and have everyone’s eyes on you. But, you had promised yourself you’d let go for tonight and do as the bartender recommended. Escape.

Perhaps he could sense your distress, or maybe it was just because you were the closest to him, but he slowly walked toward you and extended his hand.

“If you wouldn’t mind, I’d love it if you could assist me madam.”

You smiled, cursing inwardly at yourself, as you took his hand and let him pull you to your feet and lead you to the stage.

Red Riot ran over holding a heavy wooden chair, one you might find used as a throne.

Compress lifted the bottom of his mask and pressed a kiss to the back of your hand, much like Dabi did, before directing you to take a seat. You did as you were asked, feeling the heat of the light on you, thankful that it’s blinding light prevented you from being able to see the crowd.

Mr. Compress started his speech about defying nature, and the use of powerful magic.

“Do not look away for a second, it is imperative you see your reality bent before you. With the help of my beautiful assistant, I will show you that the limitations we set for ourselves are often just an illusion. Anything you can think of is possible!”

He turned toward you, pulling the yellow coat from his body and leaving himself in his black vest and pants, the orange shirt beneath now visible. He pushed up his sleeves and held his hands outstretched toward you. You felt the chair jerk and sucked in a breath. It lurched again, and soon you were floating above the ground. You kicked your feet and smiled, trying your hardest not to shift in the chair.

Then the lights flickered, and a spotlight fell from the ceiling, crashing into the empty seat that had been assigned to your invitation.

In the moment of chaos, the chair dropped harshly, cracking against the ground as the impact tossed you to the side. You grunted, the wind knocked from your lungs and your eyes unfocused after smacking your head in the fall.

Screams were heard as the crowd panicked and scattered, the roars of animals following after them.

A harsh tug lifted you back onto your feet, and in the darkness you could see nothing, but allowed the person to drag you from the tent as your head spun.

Your mind was trying to process as you were pulled into a trailer, and as your body met the cot inside, you fell unconscious.

#dabi x reader #bakugou x reader #mr compress x reader #shigaraki x reader #mirio x reader #amajiki x reader #midoriya x reader #todoroki x reader #fatgum x reader #aizawa x reader #shinsou x reader #hawks x reader #kirishima x reader #all might x reader #endeavour x reader #kaminari x reader #mha x reader #bnha x reader

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babbushka · 3 years

Text

Happily Ever After (Part 1)

Flip Zimmerman x Reader

10k; Slow burn, strangers to lovers, hidden/secret identity, falling in love, first kiss; cw: Kidnapping, sword fighting, archery, near-death experiences

A/N: I originally was going to upload this as one big oneshot, but then I got carried away and it became too long. So here is part 1, part 2 will be coming tomorrow, which has a much darker tone/set of warnings, please keep that in mind! Thank you to everyone for voting on my 5k Follower celebration polls and allowing me to write this story! I truly couldn’t have done it without you :)

Available on AO3

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Once upon a time, in a land far away, there was a magical kingdom known to all as Springs Valley. It was a peaceful and prosperous kingdom, nestled deep in the heart of a mountainous range. Though the villages were small, they were happy, for they were ruled by their beloved Queen and her husband, the Prince. The monarchs treated the villagers fairly, and justly, ruling with a kind yet firm fist from their castle, a grand building called the Purple Palace. And if there was one thing that the monarchs taught above all, it was that the power of goodness and love, would always triumph over evil.

This is the story of how one man fought against all odds to start anew, to find his heart, and earn his crown.

Of the many small villages that co-existed in Springs Valley, there was only one that could be considered the Capitol. It was called Pike Peak, and that is where our story begins. Pike Peak was nestled on the outskirts of the Purple Palace, so named due to the land surrounding it: vast waves of lavender which swayed like a tide in the breezes that traveled through the Valley. The fields stretched from the edge of the palace all the way to the village, and so no matter where one stood in Pike Peak, the castle was always in sight, its crystal walls glittering in the sunshine.

From his home high up in the mountains, just on the edge of the village, Philip Zimmerman awoke every morning to the rainbow beams of light that the sun bounced off of the crystal walls. A humble carpenter, these bright rainbows lured Philip out of bed each morning, and called him to begin his day toiling away in his workshop.

On one particular morning, Philip awoke with a thorn in his side. For over thirty years, he had lived and worked in this home, crafting all manner of things from wood. His father had owned this workshop for eighty-years, and his father had owned it for nearly as long prior. Though in life there were no certainties, one thing could be counted on: Philip was born a woodworker, and he would die a woodworker.

“Another day, another order.” Philip huffed to himself that morning, wishing he were doing something, anything, else with his time.

He wasn’t ashamed to be a carpenter – no of course not! He’s good at it, the best in the village they say. It’s an honor to be the best at something, Philip thought as he stretched and set some coffee atop the stove.

It’s just that…well…it sure would be nice to have someone to share that with, wouldn’t it? He’d never tell a soul, but often when Philip is hard at work assembling the orders that have been given, he lets his mind wander to another world, a different world, where he could be something other than just the man who fixes a wobbly table or loose wagon wheel. A world where he could be a Knight in shining armor, have a beautiful maiden to call his wife and keep warm at night.

He loved living in the village, of course he did. He loved the townspeople and the quaint living, the fresh bread traded for baking paddles carved by his own hand. But as Philip turned his gaze to the Purple Palace, glittering and shimmering in the distance, he had to believe that there was something more to life than this.

He had to, otherwise what was all this for?

And he didn’t know, but looking out through your window in that very same castle high above him, a certain someone was thinking the very same.

Though the walls were made of crystal, mystery shrouded the Purple Palace. No one from the village had ever been allowed inside, so naturally rumors spread across the Valley, of what could be hidden away. One such rumor was that of a Princess, cursed for all eternity to remain bound to the palace grounds. No one had ever even seen this Princess, but still, the rumors remained.

Little did the Valley know, but there was indeed a Princess, although she hardly ever felt like it. Never allowed beyond the boundaries of the East Wing, she spent her days keeping herself company, occupied with her books and her art and her music. It was music most of all which she loved, so much so that when she thought no one could hear her, she would sing in the early hours of morning. The King and Queen had told her it was for her own safety, that she would surely be kidnapped or held for ransom by the neighboring Kingdom – and so out of fear, inside the castle she remained.

It wasn’t so bad, she reasoned, living in the castle. She had all her needs tended to, anything she wanted was given to her. New beautiful dresses and shoes, books and instruments and the latest entertainments, whatever food she desired were all brought to her at the snap of her fingers -- but what she craved most of all, more than any delicious meal or fine gown, was love.

Love like that which existed in the books she read to pass the hours wasting away in her bedroom. True love, pure and sweet. So every morning she sang, her window open, hoping that one day someone might hear her, and she might find the love she was after.

But Philip did not know any of this. Shaking the daydreams out of his head and turning away from the palace, he began to busy himself with the day. He dressed in the clothing that his meager peasant’s salary could afford, and drank the black coffee he had brewed. Leaving his small kitchen to check the post, Philip braced himself for another slew of orders – and new orders there were.

Every day it seemed as though something new in the village needed mending, or replacing. He had come to expect the same requests day after day. However, what he had not braced himself for, what he could never in a million years have expected, was a thick envelope sealed with purple wax, stamped with the crest of the royal family, sitting on top of the pile of mail.

Rushing into the small house once more, Philip tore open the envelope and could scarcely believe what he was reading,

“Dear Mr. Zimmerman, we have heard the wonders of your skill and have decided to commission your talents to build a grand centerpiece for the upcoming harvest festival,” He read aloud to himself, his eyes growing wide with every word, “By royal decree, we invite you to the castle for a consultation.”

Philip took a moment to process the offer, eventually coming to the conclusion that could only be described as, holy shit.

Abandoning his tasks for the day, Philip at once set off towards the Purple Palace.

Though it was early in the day, the path to the palace was filled with villagers, going about their lives in the same orderly fashion as they always had, the very same that Philip did. Philip wondered if they had dreams of grandeur, or if it was only he who was going through this mid-life crisis.

“Good morning Mr. Zimmerman!” One portly fellow, the butcher, waved to him. “Thank you again for the cutting blocks you made me, they work like a damn charm!”

“You’re welcome, I’m glad to hear they are holding up.” Philip gave a friendly nod and waved back.

“Flip? Flip! Over here!” A young boy called to him as he passed through the village square, “Check out this new trick I learned!”

Out of nowhere, this child ran up to him and threw a large stick his way. Expertly, Philip caught it and began to at once deflect blow after blow from his young opponent’s stick. The young boy waved his around and around, acting as if it were the mightiest of swords.

Allowing the boy to overtake him and knock the stick out of his hands, Philip heartily laughed as he fell to the ground with a theatrical flair that had the child bursting into a fit of giggles. Philip tried not to allow himself to grow bitter over the years, never having any children of his own. The village children were good-natured and friendly, if a bit chaotic at times, and it always reminded Philip of what could have been.

“Very good, keep that up and one day you’ll be fighting for our crown.” Nevertheless, Philip always encouraged the children whenever he saw them, so he got up and with a ruffle of the boy’s hair, continued on his way.

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Glittering in the morning sunlight, the Palace was even more intimidating up close and personal. Guards standing by the door inspected him with raised eyebrows, but the moment he showed the seal on the envelope, the gates parted for him to pass through. As they opened, Philip hesitated – he had never been inside the palace before…no one had. He did not know what he was going to find, or what it would be like, but as the rainbows sparkled across the lavender fields, he knew there would only be one way to find out.

Every bit as magical as Philip had hoped, was the answer. He tried not to gawk at the mesmerizing architecture, seemingly clear and yet reflective all at once. Everything in the palace felt fragile and yet formidable, it was a disorienting experience. His disorientation only grew, as when he made his way through the entrance hall, he found none other than the King and Queen waiting for him atop their tall thrones. Philip knew what they looked like of course, their faces were on every piece of coinage and sent across the Valley by way of statue and tapestry, but much like the palace had seemed, up close they were intimidating.

At once, Philip bowed deeply, not wanting his first interaction with the monarchy to be his last.

“Mr. Zimmerman!” The King’s voice boomed loud and proud through the grand throne room, “How good of you to join us after all. We had hoped you would find our offer compelling.”

This friendliness was unexpected, and Philip, with great hesitation, stood back up to his full height. The King and Queen smiled at him, warm and welcoming.

“Yes your majesty, but I wonder, why me?” Philip had to ask, clutching the envelope in his too-large hands.

“Why not you?” The Queen challenged with a knowing smile, “It is no secret that you are the most talented carpenter in the Valley, and such talents do not go unnoticed by the crown.”

The praise brought a blush to Philip’s cheeks, and once again he averted his eyes. He wished his Ma were still here with him, if only she could have seen him now, being asked to make something for their monarchs.

“What would you like for me to build?” He wondered aloud, hoping it was not out of turn to be so direct with the royals.

“A wheelbarrow, one large enough to hold all the lavender for this year’s harvest.” The King did not seem deterred by his questioning, and had his answer ready to reply.

Philip’s eyebrows shot up at that notion, and through the crystal walls, he stared out into the sea of lavender just beyond. It seemed to stretch endlessly, for miles and miles all around. Philip had heard tales of the ocean but had never seen it himself – he imagined this was not dissimilar.

“That would be big indeed, I’m afraid I don’t think I would have the room to construct such a thing at my workshop.” Philip admitted, suddenly feeling ashamed at his own humble dwelling.

“You may live and work here for the duration of the build, if you so desire. I daresay that our workshop will be more than satisfactory.” The Queen offered at once, something that the carpenter had only ever dreamed about.

“It would be an honor, your majesties.” Philip agreed straight away, his hands already itching to begin carving and chipping and sanding away wood.

“Then we expect you to get started at once!” The Queen gave him a dismissing nod of her head, and he bowed deeply once more, before being escorted out of the throne room by palace aides, and down towards the East Wing.

And with that, Philip began constructing the largest and most impressive wheelbarrow that the Valley had ever seen.

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His routine was the same every day, for twenty days and twenty nights: in the early morning before the dawn, he would hike out into the forest to collect his wood. Chopping down only the most perfect of trees, Philip hauled logs and trunks across his shoulders back to the workshop, where he would use all the tools, space, and materials that the palace had to offer. He would not leave until very late at night, his hands cramped and body exhausted, but it was the most wonderful work he had done in a long time.

It was backbreaking work, especially for only one man, but every evening when he rested his head on the narrow bed in a small room just off the workshop, Philip fell asleep with pride in his chest. The singing helped, of course. Every morning, instead of awaking to rainbow beams of light shining through his window, he woke to the sweet song of a fair maiden. He did not know who she was, or even where she was, for the sound bounced around the crystal walls and made it appear as though she existed everywhere and nowhere.

Songs of longing, wordless melodies filled with a yearning for something which Philip had never been able to voice himself but that he could feel in his own soul, carried him through the day. It was a delight, a privilege to hear the music when it came, and a sorrowful emptiness when it finished.

Working by himself as he always had, alone in the workshop like he always was, he felt as though that maiden sang for him. He had grown so attached to the voice in fact, that when the wheelbarrow was complete and sent out to hold the year’s lavender harvest, Philip cast a yearning gaze up to the stars himself hoping that by some miracle, the maiden would reveal herself to him, and he could thank her for the beauty that was her voice.

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The festival began at sunrise, and though Philip was in good spirits, he found that he could not join in the immense excitement of those around him. Seemingly the entire town had awoken to celebrate; booths were constructed in the main square, and music and dancing were already underway.

In the center of it all, was the wheelbarrow, a structure larger than Pike Peak’s largest building. Standing nearly thirty feet tall and seemingly just as wide, it had been rolled out by palace guards and filled with lavender harvested from the fields, it truly was a sight to behold.

“Flip, it is marvelous.” The baker congratulated him, pulling him into a tight squeezing hug.

“How amazing, one of our own working for the King and Queen!” The cobbler stared at the magnificent sculpture in awe.

“Will they commission you again?” The blacksmith wondered aloud hopefully.

Of all these comments and questions, that one was the only thing that occupied Philip’s mind. Not for the prestige, or for the money, but to hear the voice of that fair maiden once again, to be able to work by the sound of her voice once more.

“That I cannot say, I hope to inquire about that when I receive my compensation tomorrow.” He replied, before sticking his hands in his pocket, and leaving the large gathering to go find a quiet place to smoke his pipe.

So lost in a daydream about the maiden was he, that he did not make it very far before someone collided with his firm chest at such a speed that she toppled onto the ground with a startled gasp.

“Oh shit!” The poor maiden groaned. Belatedly, Philip realized that she was holding a hot coffee fresh from one of the breakfast stalls, and immediately began to search and ensure that she had not been burned.

“Please forgive me!” Philip apologized at once, flustered in his own right, feeling like a fool and concerningly asking, “Are you injured?”

The maiden simply looked at him, and Philip felt as though all time and space came to a standstill. She was, undoubtedly, the most beautiful thing he had ever beheld. Even with her torn and tattered hem and her dirty apron, Philip could feel the tides within him change.

“No, no I’m quite alright. I should have been watching where I was going, the fault is mine.” Dazed, the maiden seemed just as affected by Philip as he was of her, and he pulled her gently to her feet.

“I don’t think we’ve met before, are you new to the village?” His own voice sounded a thousand miles away to his ears, too captivated in the presence of such beauty.

“Hm? Oh! Yes,” She began to stammer, nervous about something. “I, um well you see I come from out of town. I heard there to be a large and impressive centerpiece for the festival, and I wanted to see it for myself.”

“You heard about the wheelbarrow?” He blinked, chest pounding.

“Of course! And I find it absolutely magnificent, seeing it up close like this.” She replied with an honest smile, “Whoever made it surely is an expert at their craft.”

At this, Philip’s heart soared! This beautiful woman had heard of him, had heard of his work. His heart began to beat harder, faster than before. All at once, any worries he may have had about the quality of his craftsmanship vanished, all in the wake of this one person’s praise.

“Do you really think so?” Philip swallowed around a lump in his throat, and all too softly, the maiden nudged the back of his hand with her own.

“Yes, I do.” She whispered, a sparkle of sorts in her eye that made Philip sure he had to be dreaming, that sort of sparkle that told him she knew exactly who built it. Biting her lip for a moment, she looked around and continued in that same hushed tone, “I fear that I am not familiar enough with your village to know my way around this festival, would you accompany me?”

No one had ever asked Philip to accompany them to anything, as a friend or…or otherwise. And the way she was looking at him, he knew that this was most certainly an otherwise.

“It would be a privilege.” He offered her his arm, which she gladly accepted, and back to the festival they went.

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Pike Peak knew how to throw a party, this was extremely evident to the young maiden as Philip led her through the main square. Everyone had donned a costume of sorts, masks and hats and funny tunics made to look like the buds of the lavender flower which they were celebrating. Music played happily and people danced, children ran about shouting out in joy as they chased one another, and merriment was abundant.

As they walked through the square, Philip brought the maiden down towards the merchant stalls, where craftsmen like himself had goods on display for purchase. It wasn’t just those in Pike Peak who attended the festival, no no, people from all over Springs Valley made the journey to partake in the festivities, and the merchants knew it. Philip had of course seen all these goods before, but it was evident that the maiden had not.

She stopped in front of one stall belonging to the Jeweler. Kept in wooden boxes made by Philip’s own hand were one of a kind necklaces, rings, earrings, and bracelets of purple stones that shone in the late morning light.

“Would you like one?” Philip asked her gently, when he noticed her staring at a particular pair of earrings.

“Oh I couldn’t possibly.” She replied with an embarrassed shake of her head, about to move on from the stall.

“Which pair? Please, allow me.” Philip reaches out to grasp her wrist to prevent her from leaving, wanting to give something to her, wanting to do something nice for her. He didn’t have very much money, but he knew that he would soon be paid for his commission, and decided this beautiful woman was worth the expense.

“Those.” Entranced, she pointed to an ornate set.

Philip had to admit, she had wonderful taste. The earrings were set in gold, small hoops from which stones dangled. The first and largest stone was oval shaped, and from it six smaller circles in two rows of three sat nestled in gold as well. And then, dangling from them, three oblong purple stones twinkled and clinked together like windchimes as Philip picked them up.

“How much?” Philip asked the Jeweler, who eyed him with joy.

“For you, who has done so much for me? Take them as a gift, I insist.” The Jeweler put her hands up as if to say she would not be convinced to change her mind. She regarded the maiden then and told her, “Without this man’s talents, I would not have a studio to make my designs in.”

The maiden grinned at Philip, who only blushed deeply from the kind words spoken about him. Turning to him, the maiden pushed her hair away from her ears.

“Would you put them on for me?” She asked, and Philip had to will his hands not to shake as he did just that. She did not even wince when he tightened the earrings a little too much, and the two chuckled together out of shyness when she corrected it, before addressing the Jeweler and this handsome man, “Thank you, they’re beautiful. I shall never take them off.”

With that, Philip and the maiden continued along their way, exploring more of the festival.

Surely he was delusional, he thought, he must have been. Because every now and again, he felt the barest brush of knuckles against his own, a tentative invitation. He is about to have a crisis about it, when she speaks softly and does it again, the careful nudging of her fingers against his.

“Won’t you take my hand?” She whispered, turning those bright eyes of hers onto him, stunning him with her beauty.

He grew self-conscious, regarding his own palms. Covered in callouses and blisters and bandages were they, cut up by splintered wood and burned by hot glues. They were a peasant’s hands, dirt still lingering under the fingernails, scarred from a lifetime of efforts. Her hands were soft, he could tell just by looking at them, at the smooth supple skin that kept ghosting over his own.

“I fear that you wouldn’t like them, they are rough from years of woodworking.” He admitted, and much like he had felt in front of the King and Queen, he feels shame.

But she only took his hand with a confidence that shocked him, the electric feeling of her fingers weaving through his own making the hair on the back of his neck stand up.

“You are mistaken, my good sir.” The maiden gives him a smile, soft and sweet, “It is because they are rough that I would like to hold them.”

Philip could do nothing but blink.

Could this be…? Could it be the very thing that he had longed for for so long? A person who accepted him for all that he was, and all that he was not? With the way she looked at him, Philip felt his heart begin to pound, growing larger in his chest. She, lovely and gentle as she was, wanted to hold his hand, his dirty scarred hand – never did Philip think he could have ever been so lucky!

In that moment, it was as if the festival disappeared entirely, as if there were no other villagers in the square aside from him and her. He was lost in her eyes, in her smile. Sweating and nervous, Philip let his eyes close and began to lean down, compelled to offer her a kiss. Terrified, he held his breath as adrenaline surged through his body, for though he had his eyes closed, he felt her leaning in towards him, felt her lips just about to press against his own when –

The wailing of a small child snapped them both out of their moment of intimacy, and Philip opened his eyes, seeing a young boy with big fat tears spilling over his cheeks clinging to the maiden’s apron.

“Oh you poor thing!” She opened her arms for him and scooped him up, balancing him atop her hip in a manner that has Philip so endeared to her that he cannot even be angry that their moment was interrupted. She pet down his thick curly hair and bounced him gently, all the while soothing him, “Don’t cry, what is the matter?”

“I’ve lost my Mama.” The little boy hiccupped and cried, and the maiden gets a determined look in her eye straight away.

“We’ll help you find her, won’t we?” She asked Philip, and he was so dazed by the sight of her kindness that he barely recognizes his own voice when he speaks.

“Yes of course -- ” Philip began fully prepared to do just that, before a frantic looking woman appeared out of the crowd.

She had another child on her hip, this one much younger than the boy that had stopped crying once he saw her. The family resemblance was striking, and Philip kicked himself for not recognizing the boy.

“My precious baby! Oh thank you so much -- Flip, madam, how can I ever repay you?” The cobbler’s wife cried tears of relief when the maiden let her son out of her own arms, the boy running back to his mother.

“Don’t be silly, I’m only glad it did not take long for you to be reunited.” She replied. Now that her hand was freed, it once again twined through with Philip’s, an almost subconscious decision that Philip had no intention of bringing up, lest she change her mind.

“Bless you, oh bless you.” The cobbler’s wife surged forward and placed a kiss to each of their cheeks, before gently scolding her son as they walked away, “Darling what have I told you about running off, you gave me a heart attack!”

In the wake of the momentary drama, the maiden couldn’t help but smile at Philip.

“Your name is Flip?” She inquired, and Philip kicked himself – he had never actually introduced himself after all this time.

“It’s a nickname.” He corrected, before bowing with good manners like the gentleman he was as he said dramatically, “Philip Zimmerman at your service.”

“That’s a strong name. You wear it with pride, I can tell.” The maiden laughed at his theatrics, a sound which warmed his heart.

“It’s the only name I’ve ever had.” Philip mused, “So I suppose I have to, don’t I?”

“I suppose so, yes.” She chuckled at him softly, her eyes kind even though they were teasing. He felt no malice from her, and therefore allowed the jests to go unreprimanded.

At the thought of jesting, Philip was reminded of the stages which had been constructed in the now-harvested fields of lavender. Stages where jesters and comedians alike tried to rouse crowds, nestled among smaller stages where those who felt lucky could try their hand at various games and competitions.

“Come, let me show you more of the festival, there are games to be played.” Philip squeezed her hand adoringly, watching in delight as her eyes lit up.

“Games! Oh that sounds wonderful!” She breathed, and Philip could have sworn that he never felt more alive than when he began to run, tugging him along towards the promise of entertainment like that which she had never before seen.

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

Hours later, many hours later, when the sun had gone down and the crickets had come out to play, their songs filling the air with a symphony of chirping, Philip sat conflicted. He never wanted this evening to end, because he knew that once it did, this woman that he had decidedly given his heart to would have to leave him…and if she only came to visit for the festival, he did not know if he would ever see her again.

The two of them found themselves sitting alone near the drinking well, after enjoying the last of their dinner together. The maiden was even more beautiful in the moonlight, if such a thing were possible, and Philip spent a great deal trying to figure out how to express that. She didn’t seem to mind the silence, her eyes closed as she rested her head against his shoulder, comfortable with the tranquility.

“I must confess, I have never met anyone like you before.” Philip said eventually, his voice quiet.

“Nor I to be sure.” She replied, the pinky of her hand gently looping around his much larger one. When she spoke again, it was with a breathless sort of sadness that told him she didn’t want to leave him either. Plaintively, she looked up at him and sighed, “Oh Philip…”

“May I kiss you?” He dared to hope aloud, hoping that this time they would not be interrupted.

The smallest of smiles graced her lips, and she gave him a gentle nod. Joy simmering underneath his skin, Philip leaned in and pressed a small, chaste kiss to her lips. She was every bit as sweet as he had imagined she would be, and when she sighed against his mouth and allowed her lips to part, Philip thought he was going to pass out from the way her tongue welcomed his in.

Like that, the carpenter and the young maiden kissed underneath the stars, the last of the festival dying down in the distance. By the drinking well, Philip’s heart soared, as he cupped her cheek with one of his rough palms, and she only leaned into it, nuzzling her face further.

“I’m afraid.” She admitted with a whisper when they broke apart, only far enough to breathe, their foreheads and noses still touching.

“With me, you have nothing to fear.” Philip promised, not knowing why she should be afraid, but wanting her to understand that should she allow him, he would protect her from any kind of harm, from now until always.

He needn’t say the words, for she heard them anyway, and leaned in for another kiss, one that he was happy to give, one that he found himself always willing and eager to give.

So wrapped up in the embrace were they, that the clock-tower struck eleven times nearly unnoticed, until on the twelfth time, the maiden pulled away sharply, eyes wide, afraid.

“Shit, is that the final evening bell?” She scrambled to stand, pulling herself away from the warm arms that had surrounded her.

Philip frowned, confused, worried for her. Was this what she meant by afraid? He had so many questions, only getting so far as “Yes but – ”

“I must go! I’m sorry – ” She interrupted him desperately, regret and terror and sadness plaguing her voice.

The maiden began to dash away, and Philip chased after her, managing to take her hand and pull her towards him with a plea.

“Wait! Please wait, please don’t go.” Philip cupped her cheeks and felt the cold of dread flood through him, realizing belatedly that -- “You never told me your name!”

“It’s (Y/N)!” The maiden ducks out of his grip with a look of despair, torn between wanting to stay and needing to leave. “I must go, or else I’ll be in trouble, big trouble.”

Against his better judgement, Philip releases the maiden. He wouldn’t dare disrespect her wishes, no matter how desperately he wished that she could stay with him.

“Will I ever see you again?” He chased after her still, not wanting to let her out of his sights just yet.

“I hope so.” She threw him a pained glance over her shoulder, her voice breaking as tears stung at her eyes, “I’m sorry!”

“That’s okay – I’ll, I’ll find you!” Philip promised, his voice carrying out into the night, “No matter how far you go, I’ll find you.”

With that, the maiden was gone.

On the far edge of the village, where the town met the mountains, Philip stood alone. He looked out at the vast expanse of the wood beyond him, and let out a deep sigh.

Just then, he noticed the moonlight twinkling on something that had fallen to the ground. Picking it up, he realized it was one of the earrings that he had given her. It must have come free from her ear in her haste, and carefully, ever so gently, he picked it up and cradled it in his palm.

“I don’t know how, but I’ll find you.” He said to the earring, before clasping his hand around it and bringing it to his lips for a kiss.

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

The next morning, feeling a dark cloud of sorrow and frustration beginning to form over his head, Philip dressed himself and began his trek to the palace once more. As part of the negotiations, the King and Queen of Springs Valley had told him that they would pay him his commissioned fee after the work was completed, so that he would not run off with the sum. He thought this perfectly reasonable, although really, who was he to argue with the royals?

The only thing keeping him in a good mood was the anticipation of this payment, which he had, through the night, decided he would use to travel and find (Y/N), which he had silently pledged his devotion to.

He figured she must be in one of the neighboring villages, which weren’t all that far away. Using the payment from the monarchy, Philip decided he would purchase himself the materials and means to ride across the Valley in search of her. But when he got far enough into town on the walk passing through so that he could reach the Purple Palace, he noticed that everyone was gathered in the town square, a concerned hush fallen over a crowd.

Frowning, Philip stood at the edge of this crowd, and tapped the shoulder of a young man to get his attention.

“What’s going on?” He demanded to know, for this was no merry enjoyment of a festival, no no, this was a concerning sort of apprehension and worry.

“Haven’t you heard? There’s been a kidnapping.” The young man explained, growing more impassioned with every word, “Someone has taken the princess! The princess from the Purple Palace! I always knew she was real, apparently the king and queen received a ransom note from King Felix of the Forbidden Forest -- and are on the verge of waging war.”

At this news, Philip staggered back a few feet.

The rumors of the princess were true? She was real? And she had been kidnapped?

Philip didn’t have much time, it would seem. He needed to get his payment and get out now, before any war were to begin. He needed to find the beautiful woman that stole his heart, and make sure she was safe from harm. Without so much as even a goodbye, Philip broke into a running pace, his mind clouded as his feet carried him to the palace.

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

Bursting through the doors, he bowed deeply, out of breath yet respectful.

“Your majesties, I have heard of your tragedy and I am so sorry to hear that such a thing has come to pass.” Philip broke royal protocol by speaking to them first, wanting simply to get what he came for, and get out of their hair.

The royals were, by all accounts, despaired. The Queen wept on her throne, her face buried in her hands, and the King’s sadness manifested in a snappish, “What do you want?”

They were no longer warm and welcoming as they had once been, but Philip could not blame them; their daughter was taken from them after all.

“I come to fetch my payment, for the commission.” Philip boldly requested, making the King frown.

“Your what? No I don’t think so, not now.” He waved the carpenter away, shocking Philip.

“…With all due respect, your majesty, you promised – ”

“I said no! There is war to be had, the money will go towards that instead. I do not expect you to understand.” The King shouted, before his shoulders sagged and he slumped back in his throne.

Philip chewed on his lip for a moment. He could see the palace guards approaching him, ready to throw him out, ready to haul him and drag him out if necessary…but Philip needed that money. He needed it so that he could search for (Y/N). So, without thinking, he blurted out the only solution his mind had thought of:

“What if there need not be a war?”

The King and Queen both looked at him then, eyebrows drawn in confusion.

“I beg your pardon?” The Queen, with her scratchy sorrow-filled voice demanded of this…this…this peasant.

Philip stood tall and strong under their gaze, squared his shoulders and lifted his chin.

“Allow me to retrieve the princess.” He requested, and tried to ignore the snickers and incredulous chuckles of the palace guards behind him.

“You!” The King scoffed, feeling like the cause was well and truly hopeless. “Why you wouldn’t last one night out in the Forbidden Forest, let alone make it all the way to King Felix’s fortress.”

“Allow me to try. Give me five days, if I have not returned by then, assume me dead and send your armies.” Philip insisted, “But if I do return with the princess, I expect double the payment for my commission.”

This was a risk, he knew, but he was certain it was something he could pull off. He knew the mountains like the back of his hand, he spent his entire life in the wood! He knew the paths and the trails, and most importantly, with King Felix expecting an army, he would never suspect a lone carpenter to be of any threat.

The Queen seemed to be thinking the very same thing, because after a moment or two of shocked silence, she stood up from her throne and descended the many steps which kept her elevated. She descended those steps with grace and poise, and when she finally stopped in front of Philip, he got down on one knee.

Placing a hand on Philip’s shoulder, a move which stunned everyone in the royal court, the Queen promised softly, “My boy, if you return with our princess, I will grant you anything your heart desires, and on that you have my word.”

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

And so, Philip’s journey began.

Riding atop the gentle steed that had accompanied him on many a trip into the mountains, and equipped with nothing but his carpentry tools, Philip set off discreetly, quietly. There could be no fanfare, no one in the village could even know what he was up to, lest the evil King Felix catch word.

He had put a sign on his workshop’s door saying that he had gone out of town, but he did not say for what. It felt slightly wrong, leaving the village without another word like that, but all the while he kept one thing in mind: the sooner he rescued the princess, the sooner he could begin to search for his lovely (Y/N).

The mountains were quiet for a long while, the better part of the day in fact. He and his horse had ridden through the winding trails that so many before him had traveled, trails that were easy and comfortable. He wasn’t very far outside the village yet, so things were relatively tame. It wasn’t until dusk began to fall, that he noticed a steady plume of chimney smoke up in the distance.

A chimney meant a house, which meant possible shelter for the night. Philip allowed himself to hope that perhaps the owner of the house would give him refuge, even if only for a few hours – and was so caught up in his daydreaming that he did not notice when a man jumped out of a tree a few feet in front of him, landing on his feet skillfully.

“Halt!” The man said, holding a hand outstretched, startling Philip’s horse.

“Woahh!” Philip tried to calm his steed, and when the beast was no longer threatening to buck him off its back, Philip cleared his throat and tried to be amiable, “Good day to you sir, what – ”

“None shall pass without besting me and my bow.” The man cut Philip off, making him raise his eyebrows.

“…Excuse me?” Philip sized the man up for a moment.

He was handsome, a well styled afro and neatly groomed beard denoting him as a man who prided himself on his appearance. His clothing followed suit in such a fashion – well tailored and made from expensive materials like silk, a brocade tunic shimmered in the warm light of the golden hour.

“You are trespassing on my land, and if you wish to leave with your life intact, you must best me in a test of archery.” The man did not budge, and Philip did not know how to proceed.

“But I have not bow nor arrow.” He explained, to which the man’s proud posture fell a little flat. For how could there be a competition if the competitors were not equally matched?

“Oh.” The man scratched at his beard for a moment or two, trying to come up with a solution. Eventually, he snapped his fingers with an elated smile that showed off brilliantly white teeth, “Well in that case, you may borrow some of mine!”

The man beckoned Philip to follow him, and with only a small amount of hesitation, Philip followed. What lay before them was a grand home, constructed of the most sturdy stone. A family crest that Philip did not recognize waved from flagpoles atop the home, but Philip didn’t need to recognize the crest for him to know that this was a noble home. This became increasingly evident as the man lead Philip to a field where a shed sat – a shed that looked larger than his entire home.

“What’s the test?” Philip asked, having gotten off of his horse and walked up to the man.

He handed Philip a beautifully constructed bow, and three sharpened arrows. He then pointed to two targets way across the other side of the field, so far away that Philip had a hard time locating them at first.

“Best of three shots, whoever gets the most bullseyes is the victor.” The man announced, and Philip gave a single nod in agreement.

It was no secret in the village that Philip had some of the best eyesight around, he needed to. Spending so many hours staring at intricately fine details in his woodwork had sharpened his skills considerably, but more than that Philip also hunted for his own food, as much of the village did. Nearly every weekend Philip went into the mountains to shoot, and every weekend he was successful.

This man did not know that, but it did not matter. The only thing that mattered, was Philip getting this over as quickly as possible so that he could be reunited with his maiden.

Stepping up to a line of dirt in the field, the man allowed Philip to take the first shot. He steadied his aim, took in a deep breath and fired – bullseye! Philip gestured to the man, who went next. With expert precision, he too shot his first arrow directly into the bullseye of the target.

Philip went again, and again he scored a bullseye, so precisely in fact, that this arrow managed to split straight through the previous one. Shocked, the man looked Philip up and down, as if trying to recognize him from a past archery competition. Philip only gave him a shrug, and watched as he too split his previous arrow into two pieces.

Each man only had one arrow left, and Philip knew that this was the one that mattered most. If he struck his bullseye, he surely would be allowed to pass. Closing his eyes, he focused not on the setting of the sun, or of the breeze in the air that evening brought, but of his (Y/N). He visualized her smiling face, her lips upon his, and released his bow into the air.

It soared through the great open field with precision and struck the target with a determination that Philip mirrored in his soul. He cracked one eye open, and saw that the arrow had indeed landed on the bullseye! Not nearly as well as the other two arrows had, but it was undeniably a success.

With a huff, the man raised his own bow and arrow for the final time, and pulled back a little too forcefully out of anger at being bested – causing the bow to snap and the arrow to go flying rogue.

“Dammit!” The man shouted, stumbling backwards, his hand in pain from the recoil of the broken bow.

“Look out!” Philip urged, because what went up must come down, and Philip charged at the man, tackling him to the ground, knocking him out of the way of the arrow which was making its return to Earth directly in the spot where the man had been standing.

Bewildered, the man looked up at Philip with admiration, as he stood away from the nobleman.

“Here, let me help you up.” Philip insisted, “Take my hand.”

“What is your name?” The man asked, accepting the offer and allowing Philip to haul him to his feet.

“Philip Zimmerman, but call me Flip. Yours?” Philip gave him a hearty pat on the shoulder to make sure he was alright, as the two got their footing. The men looked at the arrow in the ground, noted how it had buried itself deep.

“Lord Ronald Stallworth, but you may call me Ron.” Ron replied, with a polite nod of his head. “You are a most accomplished archer, Flip. Where are you headed? I don’t get many visitors out this way.”

Philip looked around, looked over his shoulder, wanting to make sure no one was around to hear.

“The Princess has been kidnapped, and I have been tasked on a secret mission to retrieve her.” He explained, hoping that Ron would understand his urgency, “I’m sorry about your bow, Ron. But I must be going now.”

Philip began to walk back towards his horse, when Ron surprised him by jogging to catch up, walking alongside him.

“Wait!” Ron called, stopping in front of him for a moment to make Philip pause. Ron put his hands on Philip’s shoulders in a friendly gesture, and then pointed to himself, “You are a good man, Philip. Allow me to join you on your quest! I know these woods well, I could be of assistance to you. Two archers are better than one, wouldn’t you say?”

“Why do you want to join me?” Philip frowned. Ron was rich, he had a luxurious home and accommodations, surely that would be more comfortable than a rugged trip up the mountains.

Ron chuckled at his question, and scratched at his beard once more.

“To tell you the truth, it’s pretty fucking boring here waiting for someone to pass by for a challenge. And you are the first man who has ever bested me, I am eager to see where your journey takes you. Where it takes us.” Ron looked hopeful, and Philip reasoned that he was right, two archers were better than one.

“I’d be happy to have you join, Ron.” Philip agreed, officially adding a new member to his party.

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

Not only did Ron allow Philip to spend the night in his large home, but he also ordered his kitchen staff to cook a grand meal for them to enjoy. Philip was grateful for the strength, particularly as Ron was rich, and had no worries about running out of food any time soon, so the portions were large, and there was more than enough leftover to be packaged for the road.

“So, a princess, huh?” Ron asked around a bite of venison, thoughtful and yet slightly confused.

“Yeah, that’s right.” Philip sighed, slightly annoyed at this interruption of his plan to find the maiden.

Ron frowned into his potatoes, confessing, “I didn’t know that we had one.”

At this, Philip let out an honest laugh and shrugged, chugging a large gulp of sweet mead.

“To tell you the truth? Up until this morning, I didn’t either.” Philip admitted, which made Ron laugh too. They cheered goblets, and indulged in another drink at the situation before them. “I thought the whole thing was a bunch of bullshit rumors, but then there it is in the square: Princess Kidnapped.”

“The reward must be great then, for you to go on such a dangerous journey alone to retrieve her.” Ron noted casually, but Philip shrugged.

“Only that which I have been owed, is all that I’m asking.” He replied cryptically.

Of course he had decided he would give Ron a portion of the money for his help, but he didn’t necessarily want anyone knowing just how big of a reward it truly was. In any case, Ron was a Lord, and probably spent that very amount on a month’s worth of goods.

“I wonder what your wife must think of such selflessness.” Ron replied with a grin then, making Philip’s mood soften.

“I…I have no wife to speak of, though I should hope that if I had, she wouldn’t find fault in me for it.” Philip’s voice was quiet, thoughtful. He hadn’t really allowed himself to think about it, about what would happen should he find (Y/N).

Now it only seemed logical, the most obvious step, for him to court her and hopefully, one day, marry her. But that was a dream, one that Philip couldn’t get too ahead of himself to dwell on. He needed to make it back with the Princess alive first and foremost.

“Forgive me.” Ron’s voice too quieted, and he cleared his throat, “It’s just, I can see the love in your eyes, I was wrong to assume.”

“What do you mean?” Philip asked, a frown dipping between his eyebrows.

Ron mused and mulled over a bite of roasted vegetables, tried to best explain himself. He eventually settled on the truth: “It affects everyone differently, love. But every lover I have ever known as the undeniable sparkle in their eye, as do you.”

“Well…there is someone…” Philip admitted, a blush blooming across his cheeks.

“Ah-ha! Tell me all about her my good man.” Elated, Ron clapped his hands together once and let a happiness light up his face.

“Her name is (Y/N), we met last night.” Philip blushed deeper, reminiscing in the fantasy that had been their time together at the festival. “I am hoping that when all this is over, I might find her and see her again.”

“Well then, we must get our rest and leave at the first light of morning! For it is a long journey to the forbidden wood, and then a long journey back.” Ron replied.

Encouraged by his enthusiasm, Philip ate the rest of the food on his plate with a newfound vigor. Perhaps he could do this, he reasoned. With a man like Ron at his side, who had such skill and obvious charm, the two of them could be unstoppable.

When the dinner was over, they retired to their respective rooms, and Philip allowed himself to let sleep wash over his mind, thoughts of his fair maiden dancing in his head.

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

The next morning, true to his word, Ron woke Philip at the break of dawn. During the night, his servants had prepared a bundle for which Philip and Ron would travel, including the leftover food, canteens of fresh water, and a change of clean clothes. Additionally, Philip was provided with a bow and a set of arrows to use all his own. Philip was grateful for it, and the two set off in amicable company, listening to the sounds of the trees and nature sing around them.

They managed to cover much ground in the morning, passing the time by talking of themselves. Ron told Philip all about how his family came from a long line of nobility, and that he inherited the estate from his father. Philip told Ron all about how he too in a way, inherited his trade from his father. Though they came from different places, the two found more in common with one another than they found differences.

All in all, it was a wonderful friendship that had begun to form, and Philip and Ron found themselves in a fit of laughter at a joke Ron had told, when they came to a large stone bridge that sat high up above a gorge of water. Standing in front of the bridge was a tall man, with long sandy hair, and an expression on his face that told Philip he meant business.

“Halt!” The man said, his voice commanding of attention, “Who goes there?”

Philip and Ron looked at one another, and as Ron had a higher rank of authority, he was the one to reply.

“We are Lord Ron Stallworth, and Flip Zimmerman, who speaks?” Ron asked in return, and the man straightened his posture, before bowing slightly, not realizing he was in the presence of nobility.

“I am Jimmy Creek my Lord, owner of this bridge. If you wish to cross, you must pay the toll.” Jimmy introduced himself, making Philip look at Ron.

“Do you have any money on you?” Philip whispered, assuming the answer was yes, and being unfortunately surprised when Ron gave him an embarrassed wince.

“Shit, no. Didn’t think we’d need it for such a short trip, you?” Ron whispered back, making Philip’s mind race to find a solution.

“We have no coins to spare. May we pass by another means? Or perhaps I could send money to you once we have returned?” Philip asked, hoping that Jimmy would be reasonable. He looked like a reasonable sort of fellow, anyway.

Jimmy thought on this for a while, before brandishing the sword that he kept on his hip. The metal glinted in the afternoon light, throwing sparks of sunshine all around as he twirled it and whirled it around effortlessly.

“If you can best me in a fight, then you may pass.” Jimmy announced, and Philip chewed on the inside of his cheek.

“I haven’t got a sword.” He replied honestly, and this stumped Jimmy, for what travelers did not move through these mountains without a sword?

“Oh. Well in that case, you can borrow one of mine.” Jimmy snapped his fingers then, and beckoned Philip over to him as he walked back to a small hut near the bridge.

It was humble, made of stone and wood, and looked similar to one of the dwellings he might see in his own village. Philip waited outside while Jimmy rummaged through his hut and eventually emerged with a sword for Philip to use.

The sword was beautiful. Obviously crafted with care, the grip happened to be the perfect size for Philip’s hand, the jewel crusted pommel and cross-guard weighted just enough to counter balance the long blade. Philip wondered where a man like Jimmy came across such a thing, as he gave it a few experimental twists and spins.

Philip had virtually no training in swordsmanship, except for that of the surprise attacks that the village children waged on him. Jimmy was no child though, and this made Philip gulp, doubting his chances – until Jimmy began to run at him full speed ahead, and the only thing Philip could think about was winning.

Swords clanged, great big sparks flying into the air as they went after one another again and again. Jimmy may have been older, but he was nimble, quick on his feet. Philip found he could not use his sheer size and strength alone, although this certainly helped him. Dodging and ducking away from Jimmy’s blows, Philip pushed pushed pushed Jimmy back, until the two of them began to move down the bridge.

Below them, the gorge rushed with water furiously hungry, white frothy waves of grey-blue water crashing and smacking against craggy cliff walls. Out there on the bridge, the wind had no place to buffer against, and both men began to realize that one strong gust of wind could very well send them over.

The sounds of their swords echoed through the gorge, as did their grunts of effort from trying to best one another. Jimmy would lunge, and Philip would jump back, waiting for a moment to lunge himself. Their swords met in a flurry of silver metal, blade swinging expertly and with deadly precision.

He thought of the children in the village, thought of the way his beloved (Y/N) might interact with them. How she might cheer them on as they attacked Philip in the very same manner that Jimmy now was. Spinning his sword in the same way that he had watched the young boy from the village all that time ago, Philip managed to generate enough momentum in his arms to block every single sharp and quick blow that Jimmy sent his way.

Back back back Philip pushed Jimmy, his arm muscles flexing and his feet planted on the ground – until he gave Jimmy a particularly harsh swing of his sword, and in the effort to block it, not only did Jimmy’s hand lose its grip on his sword, but Jimmy stumbled backwards and fell, the wind striking at the worst possible moment, sending Jimmy over the edge of the bridge.

“Oh fuck!” Ron’s shout traveled from the other end of the bridge where he waited with the horses, watching with wide eyes, a hand clasped over his mouth as Philip ran to the edge.

Jimmy was dangling precariously close to death, his hands scrabbling for a grip on the rough and rocky side of the bridge that did not promise much purchase. The wind howled and whipped up the spray of water from a thousand feet below, a taste of the certain death Jimmy would face should he fall.

“Quick, take my hand!” Philip shouted over the rush of the wind and water and the pulse in his veins, letting his own sword clatter onto the stone of the bridge as he reached out.

Without hesitation, Jimmy grasped the offered hand and Philip hauled him back onto the bridge safely, Philip’s muscles making quick work of the effort. Exhausted from their fight and this momentary scare, the two men simply laid on their backs on the bridge, catching their breath.

“You spared me?” Incredulously, Jimmy regarded Philip who was not more than a few feet away on the narrow structure of stone.

“Of course, why should I kill you?” Philip replied, a friendly smile teasing at his lips.

“Thank you, Philip. You are a good man.” Jimmy said seriously, and Philip blushed, he wasn’t sure about all that, it’s just, who was he to end a man’s life? Jimmy glanced at the beautiful sword that “You can keep that, you’ve earned it.”

Philip too looked at the sword, at how beautiful it was. Because really, the thing shone in the light magnificently, the jewels sparkling and shimmering in the rays of the sun. Philip was entranced, absolutely entranced by it, but he could not lay around and stare at it all day. He had a princess to rescue, and a maiden to love.

“Are you sure you’re alright?” Philip asked as he stood up, helping Jimmy up too.

“I’m sure.”

“We’ll be on our way then.” Philip gave him a nod, and then gestured for Ron to come over with the horses and join them, eager to continue on their way.

“Wait! Allow me to accompany you on your quest?” Jimmy asked, eyes wide with a sudden anxiety.

At this, Ron and Philip looked at one another and then back at him, a slight frown on their faces.

“Why?” Ron asked, looking him up and down, wondering what Jimmy was suddenly so anxious.

“Truth be told, I’m really sick of sitting around on this fucking bridge. My father sat on this bridge as did his – but I never wanted to. This is my chance at something new, something different!” He then turned to Philip, “I see you have bows and arrows, but in combat you’d be best to do with an extra swordsman, and that I can provide. Besides, you’re the only person to ever give me a run for my money like that – I respect you.”

Philip understood that feeling all too well, the ache in his bones for a different life than the one that was promised to him. He had been given a chance for this quest, and now he could do the very same for this man, he could give Jimmy a chance of his own.

Looking at Ron to gauge his reaction, Ron looked back, and then nodded with a great big grin, “Oh I don’t see why not, welcome to the group.”

“Thank you! I won’t let you down!” Jimmy excitedly hugged them both, his long sandy-blonde hair blowing in the breeze as he ran back to his hut just on the other side of the bridge.

When he came back, he had a horse of his own, and a bag already packed. Philip smiled, he must have had this bag packed for quite some time. It made something inside Philip’s chest warm – one was never too old for adventure, a truth that continued to make itself evident.

“Say, where are we headed anyway?” Jimmy asked, sheathing his sword in the holster on his hip.

“To the forbidden wood, to rescue the princess that’s been kidnapped by King Felix.” Philip responded, sure that no one could hear them up on the bridge the way they were.

Jimmy frowned and looked at Ron, scratching the back of his neck and asking, “We have a princess?”

Ron burst out laughing and slapped Jimmy on the back, “That’s what I said!” ---------------------

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

Tagging some friends! Part 2 will be up tomorrow :) @mochabucky @sacklerscumrag @artsymaddie @bitchydecisions @direnightshade @reyloaddict55 @thembohux @kylorenswhxre @sunflowersinthesnow @babayagakeanu @safarigirlsp @rennasiance-mama @steeevienicks @mousemakingjam @the-unmanaged-mischief @materialisthicc @drake-bells-waxed-penis @slut-for-harri @littleevilme13 @erys-targaryen @leillaa @hswritingrecs @miabelay11 @han68000 @rosi3ba3z @chapterhappygirl @loverofallthings

#flip zimmerman #flip zimmerman x reader #flip zimmerman/reader #flip zimmerman x you #adam driver fanfic #adam driver #adcu #blackkklansman #flip zimmerman fanfic #5k follower celebration #my writing #fairytale au #storybook au

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jadedxrealityw · 3 years

Text

-Fragile- George Weasley x Female Reader

☼-☪-☼

Kody: I know another George x reader, fight me. This is based around the quote “She was not fragile like a flower, she was fragile like a bomb” -Rahul Singh Rathour.

Summary: George Weasley falls for a Slytherin girl who was an expert at keeping her negative emotions hidden. He was her little light at Hogwarts and kept her sane for the most part. Until one day when she’s pushed over the edge.

House: Slytherin

Possible Triggers / Warnings: mental breakdowns, child neglect, manipulation, shit parents, panic attacks.

☼-☪-☼

She was not fragile like a flower, she was fragile like a bomb

maybe you should have seen a therapist when you were little. Bottling up emotions was considered self destructive by most sane people, but it had become second nature. Growing up with parents who were always fighting, you just learned to keep things to yourself, so you weren’t a burden.

it was odd, despite all the shit you were put through, you were still kind. You were still yourself. You found comfort in fellow housemates like Draco Malfoy. You avoided him since he seemed like a snob, plus he was younger then you, but all that changed once you found him crying in a broom closet.

the school year had only just started and he explained to you that his parents had been bickering with each other the whole time while shopping for new books. You didn’t speak a word of your family to him because you felt like it would take attention from his problem. You didn’t want to be selfish

you and Draco soon became friends after that, but even as you two grew closer you never told him about your problems. You continued to bottle things up, which didn’t make much sense, since you had someone to confide to, maybe you had gotten so used to hiding your inner demons.

you had heard of the Weasleys, pureblood family who had a lot of children. All of them different in so many ways, but exactly the same. The one who had caught your attention was George Weasley. Him and his brother were always up to something that involved a potion.

lucky for you, you were always brewing a potion when you had freetime. Due to all the stress and not having a way to let it go, you would make yourself a draught of peace to keep your emotions in order. it worked for the most bit, it only lasted a couple hours so you only took it during classes.

☼-☪-☼

6th Year

you were stirring your elixir with a utensil when the creaking sound of the door opening caught your attention. You look from the cauldron and towards two ginger haired twins that were giggling and whispering things to each other that you couldn’t hear.

“Alright you grab the stuff we need- oh”

both of them had looked up at you, freezing in there spots. “I’m guessing you're not supposed to be in here?” you spoke, going back to stirring. They both looked at each other before Fred Weasley spoke up “Your not going to say anything are you?”

you simply shrug your shoulders before placing the utensil on the table “I could care less, as long as you don’t say anything either” you say. The both of them grin before Fred goes to the cupboards to gather his needed ingredients, leaving you with George.

he casually steps over to you and leans over your shoulder to look into your cauldron. He didn’t have to lean at all actually, he was much taller then you. “A draught of peace? Feeling stressed lately?” he questions, cocking his head to the side in a curious manner.

stressed was an understatement , but he didn’t know that “Something like that” you respon, figuring if you gave him a vague answer he’d take that as a sign to leave you alone. George only seemed more curious “How mysterious” he mumbles lowly to himself before leaving you to your potion.

eventually you fill up about five vials full of potion and put your cauldron back in it’s respective area. Once you pocket the vials, you leave the twins to there mischievous task and you were on your way. That was your first encounter with George Weasley.

☼-☪-☼

five vials only lasted you a week, so later on a friday night you snuck out of your dorm and into the potions classroom. You had on a grey hoodie, black leggings, and fuzzy white socks, something you wore to sleep in. It was comfortable.

today was especially stressful for you because most of the Slytherin house was irritated, which meant they were short with there words and snappy. The twins had pulled a prank on the Slytherin house by leaving pastries for them inside the dungeon.

the Hufflepuffs would usually leave treats for Slytherins so it wasn’t strange, but it was actually a spiked cauldron cake that turned their hair different colors. You were one of the lucky ones since you had woken up late, never getting the chance to eat one.

once you entered the classroom, you were met with a ginger boy. George Weasley, the twin who kept his orange locks shoulder length. It was how anyone really told the difference between the two. Fred cut his long ago and George had not, pretty simple.

“Oh, you again. Hello” he spoke before going back to chopping up some ingredient. His casual tone ticked you off more than you’d like to admit and you just scoffed, going to collect your items. The wizard seem to notice your behaviour “Bad day?”

you grab the cauldron from the shelf, exhaling deeply “Yes actually. After the stunt you pulled on Slytherin” you reply, irritation seeping into your tone. A very cocky grin made a way onto his freckled face “Oh? Then maybe you shouldn’t have started it”

your grip of the cauldron tightened. Any tighter and you might smash it to pieces. Placing the cauldron down harshly, you turn your head to face him “Look whatever feud you have with a couple Slytherins isn't my damn problem, mess with them not the collective house. It’s rude”

as soon as you finished speaking you put your face in your hands. So much for not stressing out. You shake your head a bit to push away any remaining thoughts then go back to what you were doing, collecting whatever you needed. George on the other hand looked a mix between guilt and confusion.

he felt guilty because it was true, he could have just pranked the two or three Slytherins he was initially after, but he didn’t. He was confused because you had blew up on him so quickly, almost like you were holding it in for so long that it was waiting to be let out?

“i guess i got carried away this time. I apologize- wait what’s your name?” George suddenly asked, realizing he didn’t know who you were exactly. All he could guess was that you were Slytherin by your previous statements, which surprised him a bit since you seemed....nicer.

once you were settled at a table you looked up at the 6′3 boy “Y/n, i accept your apology, George Weasley” you say then look back down at the table. George lets out a small chuckle “I guess i don’t need to tell you my name then. I must be very popular then” You couldn’t help but snicker at his smugness.

“yeah i guess you are”

☼-☪-☼

7th Year

and ever since the beginning of sixth year, you’d meet George and sometimes Fred in the potions classroom to chat while you made potions. You loved the times you could hang out with twins, they always made you laugh when you had a bad day.

but you cherished the times you got George alone. you just connected with him a different way. Whenever you worked on a potion he would push your hair out of your face or stand behind you, looking over you shoulder. The small touch sent ripples through you that you had never felt before.

at first you thought maybe it was because you had thought of him as your friend, but whenever Draco or Fred had touched you you didn’t feel anything. Soon enough he started his casual flirting which included him complimenting your looks or how good you looked in a certain outfit.

it made your face feel hot and your stomach feel all queasy like you had bug or something, but you were never actually sick. After searching the library for possible answers you overheard Hermione Granger talking to Ginny Weasley, they were talking about what they felt when a certain guy talked to them.

increase in heart rate, sweaty palms, queasy stomach, etc. Then they said one thing that changed your perspective “Don’t you hate being in love with someone, it’s so heart wrenching” you spent the rest of that day in your dorm room stressing out like usual, but this time is wasn’t over your parents.

now you had two things on your mind, your parents and George. A weird mix for sure. You were in love with George? How could this of happened? but you knew exactly how this happened, that Weasley twin used his charms and good looks to seduce you.

what a bloody menace.

now you were sitting at the Slytherin table in the great hall. Draco sat next to you, chatting it up with Blaise and his boyfriend Theo. You were just about to take another bite of food when an owl, a familiar owl flew over the table. It had a letter in its claws.

once it passed over you it dropped the letter. You reach up and catch it in your hands “Ooo a letter” Draco comments, wiggling his eyebrows like a dork. You roll your eyes playfully and nudge his shoulder. He chuckles and turns back to face Blaise once again.

you turn the letter in your hands, the wax stamp catching your attention. It was the initial of your last name, which meant it was from your parents. Great. You pop off the wax seal and slip it into your robe pocket before taking the sheet of parchment out of the envelope.

‘Dear Y/n, your father and i have read your recent grades and we are utterly disappointed. You’ve only gotten an Acceptable in all your classes. Do you know how embarrassing it is to have a child who can not excel in anything? your the reason me and your father have been bickering so often. For the upcoming break you will be staying at Hogwarts and studying everyday and night. We also found a journal in your room with all the horrible lies you write about us. Don’t come back until you learn how to be a grateful daughter’

well that killed the mood. Why did they read your diary? What kind of parent does that? Was it really all your fault that your parents fought? “Aw poor Y/n? Do mommy and daddy not love you anymore? How does is feel princess?” you had almost forgotten that you were sitting next to her.

she was a Slytherin girl who didn’t like you because you weren’t a pureblood and because your parents only acted like they cared so much about you in public. You figured out quickly she was jealous of what she thought that you had, loving parents.

you neglected saying anything back to because you heard that her father was locked up in Azkaban a little while ago and admittedly felt bad for her, but for some reason the way she said it. The way she was so smug with her words just rubbed you the wrong way.

your whole life you’ve let every negative thought fester and build up like a disease. It was like a pot of boiling water that was about to bubble over and spill out. You hadn’t taken any draught of peace either in a couple hours because lunch was usually peaceful for you.

this poor girl was going to get the anger you’ve held since you were a child and you would feel guilty for it later, but the lid on your metaphorical bottle had popped off. You stood up from your seat and looked down at her, surprising her and Draco.

“Listen here you stuck up bitch, i can’t fathom a reason as to why you have to fuck with with me constantly?! You think this shit is a one time thing?!” you stop momentarily to throw the letter at her face. She swats it away, her face draining of color from embarrassment.

“Try living with them for 17 years and then you’ll figure out that they only act like your family in public! They send you huge gifts on your birthday to make sure other people see! You have no right to harass me like you do! I wish i had loving parents!”

the girl sat there stunned. What could she say anyway? That she was sorry probably, but you most likely wouldn’t have accepted that answer at the moment. You had caught everyone's attention at this point with your loud, harsh words. Even the bright honey colored eyes of George focused on you.

angry tears had forced their way out your E/c eyes despite your efforts in trying to hold them in. You look around the great hall, looking at all the eyes staring back at you. Without a second thought you rush out the great hall, hearing two distinct voices shout for you to come back.

☼-☪-☼

breathe

breathe!

why was it so hard to breathe? Were your clothes tightening or were the lungs in your chest failing on you. You rush outside into the empty courtyard, gripping your robe to tug it away from your skin almost as if it was choking you. You start to pull at your clothes more.

you remove your arms from the sleeves of your robe and drop it on the grass beneath you. Still couldn’t breathe. Reaching for the bottom of your vest you slip it up and over your head and drop it on top on your robe. Lastly, you tug at your tie to loosen it.

you were still hyperventilating.

“Y/n?”

turning around you saw the familiar honey colored eyes look down at you. A face of confusion and sadness n his freckled face. George Weasley. No, please you would only complicate your emotions more, but you wanted so badly to be his embrace at the moment.

he decided for you, cause as soon as he saw your tears. He felt his heart tug harshly.

“Oh darling” he started, his voice broken and raspy like he was about to break out in tears as well “Come here” he finished and held his arms out for you and that was enough for you. You rush into his embrace and are instantly meant with calming scent of burning wood, and wood from a broomstick.

your wheezing noise worried George and he started to rub your head “Darling you need to breathe okay? Your going to faint if you keep doing that, in and out okay?” he inhales loudly so you could hear and you copy his actions, doing the same when he exhaled.

after a couple minutes you were breathing just fine, but you still felt terrible. “Everything's all my fault. i tried so hard to be a good person, but it’s never good enough. I didn’t burden anyone with my problems and hid them away- i just couldn’t do it anymore”

your voice cracked, the lump in your throat going away. George pulled his head away that was resting on top of your hand and used one of his hands to gently force your chin up to look at him. He used the other hand to reach in his back pocket.

George pulls out the same folded parchment that you had read earlier “This? You believe this rubbish? Y/n you are the most interesting girl i’ve ever met and i wish you had told me about this. I’m your..friend and i want to help you. Listen, you are strong, brave, and anybody would be lucky to just breathe your air”

you cracked a small smile at his words which seemed to make his face light up as well. “Thank you George. I suddenly feel very faint” you say, your voice barely above a whisper. “Probably from crying so much darling. Let me take care of you for the rest of the day, okay?”

“Do i really have a choice?”

“Not really, no”

☼-☪-☼

George took you to his dorm- oh wait. he actually carried you to his dorm. He didn't want you to actually faint and hit your ‘pretty little head’ on the hard floor. His words exactly. The rest of the day was spent of him feeding and you and making sure you were hydrated.

after asking only once you opened up to him about your parents and there expectations. His face of horror was enough to make you realize that what was happening to you wasn’t normal. After you had finished talking it was almost like a weight had been lifted from your shoulders.

you felt free.

it was towards the evening time and you didn’t want to intrude any longer. “Thank you for helping me, it’s getting pretty late-” “You sound like your leaving?” George cut you off just as you stood up from his bed, looking at you with pleading eyes “Stay? Just for the night?”

“What if a professor sees me when i leave the next morning and where would i sleep?” you question, crossing your arms over your chest. George shrugs his shoulders “It's saturday tomorrow no professors will be checking and you’ll sleep in my bed, with me. I promise not to be to handsy darling”

a cocky smirk grew on his face, making your stomach twist and turn just like all the other times before. You began to stumble on your words “Uh- i- i don’t have anything to wear” you huff. His smirk seems to grow wider, if that was even possible.

“you can wear some of my clothes of course-” a knock cuts him off and he look towards the door “I’ll see who that is and send them away. You get dressed, i won’t peek” George sends you a cheeky wink before going to the door. what a dork.

nonetheless, you go over to his dresser and began to dig through the drawer while he went over to the door. Once he opened it, you couldn’t help but listen in. “Hey Freddie” George says in a sing song voice. Fred Weasley. “Hey, it’s saturday. Potion time”

potion time?- oh for pranks. Was he going to leave you to go make potions? you pick out a burnt orange jumper with a ‘G’ initial and black sweats “Actually i can’t tonight? Maybe tomorrow?” he replies, making Fred’s face twist in confusion before astonishment.

“Oh! You have a girl in there don’t you!” he said quite loudly, making George shush him quickly. You began unbutton your uniform shirt. “Lower your voice, i’m not tryin to get caught because of you” he replies. You place your shirt on a chair next to you and slip the jumper over your head. It was huge on you.

Fred stifles laughter and leans against the doorframe “Who is it” he says, making you freeze for a moment. George raises a brow “and why would i tell you that?” he questions while you push your skirt down your legs, kicking it away with your feet. “Oh because i’m your brother? Your twin brother George”

they were adorable. You pull the sweats on and tie the strings so it was resting snuggly on your hips. “yeah yeah whatever, bye Freddie” George begins to close the door “Aw come on don’t be like that-” he shuts the door on his brother and turns back to look at you.

“Sorry about that-” he froze in place, his eyes taking a mental image of how you looked. He could die at that moment and be content with life. You notice his weird face and looked down at the outfit “I’m sorry, should have i have picked something else?”

he didn’t say anything and just stepped towards you until he stood inches in front of you. He reaches up to grab your face, his thumb caressing your cheek. You also noticed a small smile on his face that was slowly growing into a grin. “George?” you ask, your voice a whisper.

he tilts his head a bit as his golden eyes scan your face “Can i kiss you Y/n?” he asked, catching you off guard. He wanted to kiss you? Did you want to kiss him? He made you laugh, smile, and feel like you were the only witch in the whole wizarding world.

yeah, you definitely wanted to kiss him.

you nodded once and that was enough for him. He dipped down to your height and plants his lips on yours. The calming scent of burning wood invading your nose once again. You respond quickly and kiss him back, feeling his goofy grin, still such a dork.

the kiss was sweet and gentle. George’s heart was beating at a million miles a minute and so was yours. Air, you needed that to live. You both pull away from each other, gripping onto each others clothes. When did that happen? “You are breathtaking darling, literally actually”

you snort at his dorky compliment “Way to kill the mood Weasley” you comment and he chuckles lightly before looking into your eyes “I know today hasn’t been the best for you and this might make it worse, but- i am so in love with you darling. I have been since the first day we met last year”

you couldn’t believe what you were hearing, but at the same time you were waiting for it after that kiss. “I love you too George, you giant dork” he smiles brightly as he scoops you up in his arms for a second to throw you on the bed. you gasp as your back connects with sheets.

he climbs in next you “I take back that promise about being handsy, get ready to be my teddy bear darling”. You feel the fuzzy stomach thing again- or whatever it was called. you watch as he shuts off the lamp and grabs the blanket at the bottom of his bed.

“i think i’ll manage” you reply as he places the sheet over your body and his. George turns his body towards you and grabs your waist “Tonight? yes, in the morning i have you all to myself as well and i don’t plan on letting you leave” he smirk was screaming what his intentions were the following morning.

your face must have been super red. “yeah you wish” you mumble, which makes him snicker. He knew the effect he had on you. “Night darling” he says and kisses your temple sweetly. You smile and lay your head on his chest, falling asleep in his embrace.

☼-☪-☼

Taglist: @the--queen-of-hell @sonbelleame @moonpi3 @dracosathenaeum @pxroxide-prinxcesss

☼-☪-☼

Kody: It’s 5am?! oh shit- well anyways peace lmao.

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lady-of-the-lotus · 3 years

Text

“I’m trying,” says Xue Yang bitterly. “I’m trying, and it’s still not good enough for you.”

Xiao Xingchen sinks his fingers into the dirt. Crawling over his cheek is a beetle, moving over his lips, trailing along the curve of his nose.

Xue Yang watches the beetle’s process, the muscles in his jaw growing tighter and tighter, fixating on the insect as it nestles in the dip of Xingchen’s left eye.

“I’m trying,” he repeats, and Xingchen thinks of the tongues, of one particularly small tongue at the end of the row, and hears himself saying, “You’re not trying very hard.”

Xuexiao - E - AO3! - Read on Tumblr - Ch. 1 - Ch. 2 - Ch. 3

Chapter 4 - Rot

Xingchen wakes to Xue Yang bending over him.

He shoves him away, scrambling backward. “Get off me!”

Xue Yang settles back against a tree. “Don’t do that again. What if I hadn’t caught you?”

Xiao Xingchen manages to roll over onto his side, getting a better look at Xue Yang. Xue Yang is stripped down to his inner robe, face streaked with blood, crimson liquid seeping through the green silk at his side.

He grins weakly down at Xiao Xingchen, teeth red. “One of those fuckers got me,” he says ruefully. “Guess I shouldn’t have shown off so low on blood.”

“You didn’t have to kill them all. And you killed some townspeople too, I saw you…”

Xue Yang’s head droops forward, as if he’s too weak to keep it upright. He doesn’t seem to have heard Xingchen at all. “Lend me a hand, will you?”

“I can’t move…”

Xue Yang groans. “Figures.” He slides over, sprawling over in the grass beside Xiao Xingchen, and lies still.

Xingchen rolls over as much as he can and laps at the blood running from the gash in Xue Yang's side. He drinks until he’s strong enough to sit up. Xue Yang is still unconscious, lying in the exact position he fell in.

With clumsy hands Xingchen cuts bandages from an extra robe in the qiankun pouch. He washes his wounds as best he can with the small amount of water left in the canteen and binds them. Finds a medicinal pellet in Xue Yang’s sleeve, makes him swallow it, places a rolled-up robe under his head.

He sits up with Xue Yang all night. He’s surprised when Xue Yang opens his eyes at dawn and begins to struggle to his feet.

“Well, that was fun,” he says. He’s on his hands and knees, as if too weak to get all the way up. “But let’s not do that again for a while, shall we?”

“How do you feel?”

“I’m fine. I’m always fine. I'll go find some water."

“Don’t strain yourself.”

Xue Yang eyes Xiao Xingchen narrowly. “Is that supposed to be sarcasm?”

“Am I ever sarcastic?” Xiao Xingchen lies down. It’s obvious they won’t be traveling today.

“Let me put down a blanket for you.”

Xiao Xingchen shakes his head, inhaling the dirt beneath his cheek. There’s a blowfly crawling across his temple, just visible out of the corner of his eye. “I prefer this.”

“But—”

Xiao Xingchen closes his eyes.

“I won’t be able to give you blood for a few days. Or anything else.”

Xiao Xingchen nods slightly.

Xue Yang shoos the fly off Xingchen’s face. “I’ll wake you up as soon as I can.”

Xiao Xingchen could get up and bring Xue Yang the water, if he wanted to, but it’s been too many days without yang and he has no will to stir. Besides, he likes lying on the ground and doesn't want to get up. A dead tree frog lies a foot from his face, and he spends the morning watching a trail of ants swarm the bloated carcass, mesmerized by the endless black dots as they march back and forth through the grass.

He’s asleep when Xue Yang returns, and wakes late the next day. Xue Yang is sleeping beside him, face white, chest barely rising and falling.

It’s because of me, Xiao Xingchen thinks groggily. Because of me he’s too weak to heal, to seal his meridians and stop his bleeding…

What if Xue Yang were to die...?

Oddly fitting, rotting side-by-side for eternity…

But he reaches out, lays a cold hand on Xue Yang’s throat. Either he hadn't taken enough blood the day before to return him to full strength, or the blood isn't working as well as it used to, becuase his fingers are too numb to sense a pulse.

Xue Yang stirs at his touch. “You need something, daozhang?” he murmurs.

Xiao Xingchen closes his eyes again.

It’s morning when he next opens them. He’s lying on his stomach, one arm extended, something sharp digging into his back.

Pain in his ear, something tearing at his hand.

A snapping sound.

Rustling of bushes, feet thudding on the forest floor, the whistle of a blade cleaving the air.

“Get off him! I’ll fucking kill you—”

A bird-like squawk, a whirl of black feathers. The smell of blood. Something cradling his head, touching his ear, his hand. The sound of muffled cursing.

Xiao Xingchen drifts off.

It’s night when he next wakes. Xue Yang is on top of him, planting a soft kiss on his forehead as he slides out from between Xue Yang’s legs. They’re surrounded by a wall of reeds and grasses, the air heavy and sweet, a stork winging its way past the moon.

“Welcome back,” he says. “Here.” He lifts Xiao Xingchen into his lap, holding his arm to this mouth. Xiao Xingchen dutifully sucks blood from his veins, sensation flowing back into his limp body.

There’s relief on Xue Yang’s face as he lays him back down on a blanket covering the damp ground.

Xiao Xingchen sits up. His limbs feel oddly… loose at the joints. He looks around, keeping his left eye closed. A half-dozen yellow talismans are pinned to his robes.

“Every little bit helps,” says Xue Yang, reaching for them. “Or doesn’t help, in your case. Here, I’ll—”

Xiao Xingchen reaches up to brush him away, and freezes.

The little finger on his right hand is missing.

Nothing but a bandage-wrapped stump.

Raising his gloved hand, Xue Yang grins at him. It doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “We match now.”

Xiao Xingchen stares at his missing finger. “How...how long was I asleep?”

“Two days.”

Xingchen glances up at the moon, shining brightly down on their little clearing in the tall grasses. “There’s a full moon. It was waxing last I saw it. And—is this—we were in a forest—”

“Three days.”

“Three weeks.”

Xue Yang folds his arms defensively. “I woke you up as soon as I could. I almost thought you wouldn’t wake at all, I’ve been trying for days—”

“Were are we?” Xingchen's sounds strange, and he reaches up to touch his left ear as he speaks. There’s nothing there, just a soft, slippery ridge of missing flesh.

“Fine, so we flew a mile or two or hundred or whatever.”

Xingchen looks around. Laid out on a second blanket are rows of—

“Are those tongues?” he asks. His voice is strangely mild, emotions still deadened. Slowly he begins removing the talismans from his clothes.

Smiling to himself, Xue Yang settles back, tossing his knife in the air. “Would you like to see them?”

“Why…why are they all laid out like that?” And dozens of small animals, too. Water rats, birds, frogs.

Xue Yang nudges one of the talismans with his bare foot. There’s one pinned to the smallest of the tongues, and dozens more lining the neat rows of tongues and swamp creatures. “Do you want to hear?�� he asks, and dives into an explanation without waiting for a response. He’s always animated, but he comes to life as he explains the talismans he’s created, how he devised them, and his current experiments.

“…keep them fresh, and they are fresh, except…”

Xiao Xingchen only half-hears him. He’s too busy watching him, the moonlight lighting up his far-too-pretty-for-what-he-is face, and thinking, not for the first time, about Xue Yang’s immense wasted potential.

What could Xue Yang have accomplished had he only been taught properly? Been guided down the proper path? Given a solid cultivation foundation and the opportunity to channel his genius and creativity for good?

What could he still accomplish?

Xue Yang is explaining how he fixed Xiao Xingchen’s shattered soul and channeled his qi into Xingchen’s corpse. He’s using his hands to speak, drawing shining red symbols in his own made-up alphabet as he explains what, even from the limited amount Xiao Xingchen absorbs, sounds brilliantly innovative.

Perhaps it was a good thing he had never had a formal education. From what Xingchen has seen since leaving the mountain, education, after a certain point, is just another way to enforce a set way of thinking, inhibiting free thought and encasing minds in narrow little boxes. A traditional cultivator couldn’t have accomplished half of what Xue Yang had achieved.

Xue Yang has stopped talking. He seems to be waiting for a response.

“That’s very impressive,” says Xiao Xingchen, vastly understating things.

“For a demonic cultivator.”

“For anyone.”

Xue Yang’s grin nearly wraps around his head, then winks out like a snuffed candle. “Doesn’t matter. I failed.”

“They look fresh to me.” Xiao Xingchen takes a closer look. “There are extra tongues.”

“I killed more than just the bandits, remember? You were all bent out of shape about it.”

“Do you want to pick a fight?”

“If you’re disgusted by the tongues, just say so.” There’s no trace of animation left on Xue Yang’s face. If anything, there’s an odd dead look in his eye as he sits cross-legged across from Xiao Xingchen and stares unblinkingly at him. “Don’t pretend to be interested.”

“I am interested.”

He doesn’t understand why Xue Yang throws this knife suddenly, spearing one of the tongues, or understand the sudden nasty change in Xue Yang’s tone. “Know who that one belonged to? That old man with the fucking eggplants!”

Xiao Xingchen shakes his head. “You needed it for your experiments.”

“How do you know he wasn’t alive when I took it?”

“I…I suppose I don’t.”

“Then stop faking it!” Xue Yang snaps. Xingchen wonders how long this has been building inside him and what spurred it to finally erupt. “Stop faking it all just because you need me right now! I knew you were a hypocrite, but I thought you were at least an honest hypocrite—”

“I’m not—”

“Liar! Were all those things you said in the inn just lies too?”

Xiao Xingchen can’t remember exactly what he said. Something about not wanting him to be hurt—

Xue Yang produces another knife from his sleeve. He seems more comfortable with a blade in his hand. “I was an idiot for believing you, I knew it at the time!”

Xiao Xingchen looks at the extra tongues. Xue Yang follows his eyes.

“I saved them all from those bandits, so if a few people got in my way, what of it! They would have been dead without me, I saved them, their lives belonged to me—”

Xiao Xingchen looks down at his hand, runs a hand over the bandage covering his finger stump. “I saved your life; does your life belong to me?”

“Had you killed me back then, think of all the lives you could have saved! For all we know that old man with those stupid eggplants would have gone crazy and poisoned half the town; they should be thanking me for killing him!”

Shaking his head, Xiao Xingchen pushes aside the blanket so he’s lying on the swampy ground and breathes in deeply. All he wants to do is sleep. Shut out Xue Yang’s voice. Sink back into oblivion, nestled in the tall sweet-scented grasses…

“I’m trying,” says Xue Yang bitterly. “I’m trying, and it’s still not good enough for you.”

Xiao Xingchen sinks his fingers into the dirt. Crawling over his cheek is a beetle, moving over his lips, trailing along the curve of his nose.

Xue Yang watches the beetle’s process, the muscles in his jaw growing tighter and tighter, fixating on the insect as it nestles in the dip of Xingchen’s left eye.

“I’m trying,” he repeats, and Xingchen thinks of the tongues, of one particularly small tongue at the end of the row, and hears himself saying, “You’re not trying very hard.”

Xue Yang hunches forward, a curtain of hair covering his face, digging his nails deep into his scalp and pulling his hair hard enough to hurt. He looks up through the curtain with red-rimmed eyes that almost glow in the eerie orange moonlight.

“Fuck if I care,” he says. “I’m going to go get some water.”

“Xue Yang—”

“Oh, just shut up! I should have left you unconscious!”

Xiao Xingchen turns over on his back. Better this way. More of his body touching the earth. “Are you coming back? Or are you going to leave me here to rot?”

“You’ll rot whether I leave you here or not—”

And suddenly Jiangzai is out, and Xue Yang is hacking at the tall grasses around them. He lays waste to the walls of reeds before falling to his knees, supporting himself with Jiangzai, teeth bared, breathing heavily.

Xiao Xingchen watches him without moving or flinching.

“Well?” he says as Xue Yang stabs the earth with his knife, raking a deep gash in the moss-covered soil. “Are you coming back?”

“Right, you need me!” Xue Yang stabs the ground, slashing it again and again with his blade as if trying to make it bleed. “How do you like it, daozhang, being bound to someone you hate?”

“I don’t hate you,” Xiao Xingchen says quietly. “Do you hate me?”

“I wish you had stayed dead, I wish I had never brought you back—”

All Xingchen can feel is pity. Xue Yang sees it in his eyes.

“Don’t look at me like that!” he snaps. “You say you don’t hate me? Fucking liar!”

“I don’t hate you,” Xiao Xingchen repeats. “I don’t know why, but I don’t.”

“How about this, then? I killed your precious A-Qing!”

“I know,” Xiao Xingchen says quietly.

Xue Yang drops his knife. “You know?”

“I saw her name on the talisman. I guess you were telling the truth about needing a name, and actually learned how to write it..."

“And you don’t…you don’t care?”

Xiao Xingchen closes his eyes. “Of course I care.”

Xue Yang grabs his wrist, shaking him, forcing him to look him in the face. “And,” he grins, “whose eyes do you think are in your head?”

A chill creeps down Xingchen’s spine as he reaches up to touch his eye.

Xue Yang is laughing now, a manic laugh he doesn’t seem to be able to control. “Just giving you back what was yours! I killed him before you woke up. Tossed him in the same ditch I tossed A-Qing. I’d say he wasn’t yet cold when you opened your eyes, but he’d been cold ever since you stabbed him through the heart!”

And suddenly Xingchen needs to feel. Needs to be choked by the shock, the hate, the grief.

A-Qing and Song Lan deserve it.

He wrenches his wrist away from Xue Yang. He’s weak, but Xue Yang’s fingers slide easily off his slippery, waxy skin. He shoves Xue Yang on his back and straddles him, the mere sight of Xue Yang lying beneath him in just a thin inner robe activating his muscle memory, his cock springing to life.

“Ah, there’s the daozhang I remember! Want to go over to the marsh? You can half-drown me again—”

“Shut up shut up shut up—” Roughly, he thrusts into Xue Yang as Xue Yang continues to giggle, not bothering to take it slow. Tears slip down his face as he thrusts into him, splashes of blood on Xue Yang's chest. "Just shut up—”

“Ah, see, this is what I’ve been missing all these weeks—”

“Stop talking, for once in your life, just stop talking—”

“I’ll do you one better: I’ll do my hair up all stupid, and you can pretend I’m Song Lan.” Xue Yang laughs harder, as if this is funny, body shaking beneath Xiao Xingchen's. “You ever fuck him like you’re fucking me?”

“Be quiet!” Xiao Xingchen thrusts harder, trying to shut him up, but Xue Yang only arches his back flirtatiously, one leg raised onto Xiao Xingchen’s shoulder, a demented smile plastered over his face.

“Was that a yes, daozhang?”

He closes his hand around Xue Yang’s throat. “Stop talking about him, and stop calling me that!”

“You fuck him in your fancy free inns? Pin him down and pour filth in his lily-white ear?”

“Stop talking—”

Xue Yang pries his fingers from his throat. “Were you the one to corrupt him, or did he corrupt you first? You seduced him, didn’t you? Just look at you, you’re like a dog in heat, there’s no way you didn’t make up some perverted priest ritual just to get your di—”

Xiao Xingchen slaps him across the face.

Xue Yang reaches one hand up to splay over Xiao Xingchen’s chest. “Did Song Lan like that? Did you choke him too? Bite his lip so hard you could suck his life out through it?”

“I never so much as touched him!”

“Too bad. He wasn’t a bad fuck for a corpse; was probably a lot more fun when he was alive—though knowing him, he was just as boring when he had a tongue—”

Xiao Xingchen freezes, then turns Xue Yang onto his stomach and fucks him from behind. He doesn’t want to see his grinning face, doesn’t want to pretend this is anything other than a necessary interaction, two animals rutting in a swamp out of necessity—

Xue Yang is still laughing.

Xingchen pulls Xue Yang’s robe down over his shoulders down to his waist. Digs his nails into Xue Yang’s back, leaves long scratches in his scarred skin. Several blackened fingernails come off in Xue Yang’s flesh, and his fingers feel loose where Xue Yang pried them off his throat. He spreads his purple-red hands over Xue Yang’s wiry muscles, pressing him down into the damp, fetid soil.

“Disgusting—”

Xue Yang stops laughing and Xingchen comes abruptly, the sigil on his chest glowing brighter as he fills Xue Yang. He pulls out with a shamefully wet sound, bloody cum oozing out of Xue Yang and dripping to the grass.

Xue Yang rolls over onto his back and Xiao Xingchen, suddenly weak with exertion and the flood of new emotion, falls forward on his hands, framing Xue Yang.

As his palms hit the earth, his head snaps forward slightly, and suddenly one eye goes dark.

Xue Yang scrambles out from under him. A look of shock has frozen his face. He cups his hands, staring.

An eyeball lies nestled in his palms.

Xingchen reaches up to touch his left eye.

It’s empty.

Xue Yang’s mouth opens and closes a few times. “I—I should have sewn it in better—”

Xiao Xingchen pulls his robe closed and holds out his hand.

Xue Yang drops the eyeball into his cupped palm.

“What’s happening to me?” Xingchen asks quietly.

His emotions are in full bloom, but somehow instead of anger, or horror, or shock, all he feels is resignation over what's happening to him and regret over what he'd just done. Knowingly done, unlike that time in the stream...

Silence, just the rustle of the tall grasses in the warm evening breeze, a distant splashing in the nearby marsh, a trill of a night bird.

“I think you already know,” says Xue Yang finally. Slowly he reaches into his sleeve, pulls out a long white bandage, and ties it at an angle over Xingchen’s eye socket.

“Now you look almost like your old self again,” he says.

Xiao Xingchen holds him at arm’s length, swallowing hard. “Xue Yang, how—how long have you known?”

“Rather roguish, your new look. I like it.”

“Xue Yang…”

“I can try sewing the eye back in, if you’d like, but I don’t think it would take…”

“Is that what you were doing these past few weeks? Trying to stop me from rotting?”

Xue Yang winces at the word “rot.” He squirms away from Xiao Xingchen, sitting facing the swamp. Xiao Xingchen wonders if Xue Yang chose this spot to hide the smell of his decaying flesh.

“Doesn’t matter,” he says. Xiao Xingchen can hardly hear him. “Didn’t work, clearly…”

He lies down, his back to Xingchen.

Xingchen lays beside him, resting a hand on his arm, his eyeball still enclosed in his other hand. The skin over his knuckles is very thin, with small gas bubbles rising under the delicate bones along the backs of his hands and soft purple lines running up towards his wrist. Blackened lesions mottle his skin, eating down to the bone in some places, and his remaining nails are brownish gray.

He starts to remove his hand, but Xue Yang reaches up, closing his gloved hand around it.

“I didn’t mean to kill A-Qing,” he says, so low that Xingchen has to strain to hear him. “She just bled out so quickly after I cut her tongue out—she was trying to bring cultivators—I tried using a talisman, but it…it clotted the wrong blood…”

“There’s no excuse you could possibly give to make me forgive you for what you did.”

“I turned her into a sentient fierce corpse.” Xue Yang turns, mangled hand still on Xiao Xingchen’s rotting one, and looks at him. “She’s out there somewhere. That was the truth. Practically alive…”

Xiao Xingchen closes his remaining eye. He hates how that does make a slight difference. “Did you truly abuse Zichen?”

“I cut his eyes and tongue out, if that's what you mean.”

“You know it’s not.”

Xue Yang wrinkles his nose, gazing up at the scraps of cloud drifting past the full moon. “I never laid a finger on him. He’s not my type.”

“And was that the only reason?”

“What are you getting at?”

Xiao Xingchen is suddenly tired. So very, very tired. Dealing with Xue Yang is like dealing with a pet fox who keeps killing his chickens. “You understood what that man in Tanzhou did to his wife was wrong,” he says, "at least on some instinctive level. Unless you were simply guessing at how I’d feel on the subject and using it to excuse yourself.”

“Right, wrong, it’s all the sa—”

“Don’t start that again. You knew it was wrong despite the fact that many people wouldn’t think so. You—”

“I’ve killed children.”

“I know.”

“I’ve made you kill children.”

“I know.”

“And you don’t care?”

“Of course I care.”

“Then say something better than ‘I know’!”

“There is nothing I can possibly say to that that would express how I feel.”

“Why is killing children worse than killing any other person?” Xue Yang bursts out. “They would have died in another fifty years, at most. So I sped it along a little!”

“Is that truly how you feel?”

“Why isn’t it how you feel? If you think about it, early death is a mercy! And once they’re dead, it makes no difference to them.”

“Their family—”

“I killed the rest of the family, too. The Changs, all dead. Villagers, all dead. Nobody to mourn them. And it’s not like I would have cared either way, but it wasn’t like I went around killing random children for fun.”

“I never said you did.”

“Entire families, gone, just like that!” Xue Yang snaps his fingers. “As if they never existed, so what difference does any of it make? Some of them should be thanking me. Dying of gout at sixty is worse than being killed quickly at twenty.”

"Gout isn't fatal."

“Missing the point, as usual. So they would have died of something peasanty like plague or gangrene. Really, dead is dead. I don’t understand why you care. I really don’t.” Xue Yang looks legitimately puzzled. “It doesn't affect you. It barely affects them.”

Xiao Xingchen shakes his head. Xue Yang is gazing at him intently, eyes burning with frustration, as if he doesn’t understand why Xingchen is just lying there calmly and listening to his poison.

“You knew what that man did to his wife was wrong,” Xingchen repeats, “meaning you do have something in you that points in the right direction, telling you right from wrong, something not reliant on law or social customs. And you simply choose to ignore it.”

“You think too highly of me. A first.”

“ ‘Highly’! Meaning you know it’s something desirable!”

“I’m just using your own shitty rhetoric. Are we done? I’m tired…” Xue Yang looks up at the moon again, filling his lungs with the fetid swamp air that, to Xingchen, smells sweet.

“No. Xue Yang, why did you hold onto A-Qing’s tongue all this time, and turn her into a sentient fierce corpse?”

“Because I—” He stops. “Getting sneaky, daozhang, throwing in these questions.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Don’t call you what?”

Xingchen shakes his head. “Never mind. Why did you spend six years trying to bring me back, and the past three weeks camped out here on a swamp trying to stop me from rotting?”

“Stop saying ‘rot’!”

“Xue Yang, I am trying to understand you.”

Xue Yang is playing with the long tendrils of hair framing his face, not so much as looking in Xiao Xingchen’s direction. “Are we done?”

“Why did you leave Song Lan alone?”

“I didn’t leave him alone. Are you deaf? I cut out his tongue—”

“Xue Yang.”

“Well, he wasn’t you!” Xue Yang explodes. “Is that what you want to hear? You were coming back soon, I just…” I only wanted you. Perhaps even, I couldn’t betray you like that. “I kill people. I don’t hurt them. It’s not like I enjoyed hurting A-Qing.”

Xiao Xingchen can’t let such a blatant lie slip past. “You enjoy killing people. I have every reason to believe you enjoy hurting them as well.”

“That’s not what I meant by that.”

Xiao Xingchen wonders what Xue Yang went through while living on the streets, to make someone like him not want to “hurt” people in that way. He can imagine some of it. Xue Yang had practically told him, that night in the inn...

There’s an odd quivery look on Xue Yang’s face. As if realizing this, he gets to his feet. “Are we done? I’m thirsty.”

“Xue Yang…”

Xue Yang takes a step, wincing. “Be more careful next time, won’t you? I’ll be walking with a limp for a week.”

“Don’t do that, don’t turn everything into a joke or vulgarism—”

Xue Yang flies off through the grass.

Xingchen picks up A-Qing’s tongue and follows him. His legs are weak, but he pushes his way through the chest-high grasses, finding Xue Yang sitting on the edge of the water, arms wrapped around his knees.

Xingchen kneels at the edge of the water and buries his eye and A-Qing’s tongue in the soft sweet-smelling mud. It’s a beautiful warm night, the dazzling gold moonlight glimmering off the wide stretch of marshland. Dark clumps of tall, graceful reeds grow from the rippling water, with the hushed sounds of the night creatures carrying clearly over the water. The song of the crickets, the chirping of frogs. A stork strides through the water not a stone’s-throw away, gleaming white in the moonlight, and stars speckle the deep purple sky, brilliant and clear, here at the edge of the earth.

Xingchen imagines stepping into the shining gold water, letting it close over his head, envelope him, embrace him.

One more dead rotting thing…

“Does it hurt?” Xue Yang’s voice breaks the stillness. “Your eye.”

Xiao Xingchen touches the blindfold. He wonders if it’s the same one he used to wear, kept by Xue Yang all these years. “No.”

“Maggots hurt.” Xue Yang glances down at his gloved hand. “I know.”

Xiao Xingchen swallows. “I’m fine.”

“And your hand and ear?”

“Not much.”

“I shouldn’t have left you alone. Those vultures—”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

Xue Yang rests his chin on his knees. He looks more worn-out than Xiao Xingchen has ever seen him, as if the gamut of the night’s emotions have wrung him out and left him empty. “I don’t know how to fix you,” he confesses, his voice almost inaudible.

Xiao Xingchen sits down beside him. He doesn’t think those words have ever passed Xue Yang’s lips before.

“I tried,” says Xue Yang. “I really tried…"

Xingchen looks down at his black-mottled hands. Even in the moonlight he can detect their soft, half-slimy, half-waxy coat.

As he watches, a fly lands on his hand, and another, and another. Or perhaps they had been there all along. He can hear the buzzing of the nearby insect life feasting on the swamp’s rot, drawing life from death, and he’s suddenly reminded of the fungus growing on the dead fox in the Coffin House courtyard, the writhing white maggots making a home in its carcass.

Creating something new.

“You’ve carried this too long on your own,” he says. “Let me take it from here.”

Xue Yang tilts his head slightly, eyeing Xingchen with dark-circled eyes. “You know how to stop the rot?”

“No. But Shifu will.” And she might be able to fix you, too, he wants to add, but doesn’t dare.

“And you know how to find her mountain again?”

“Promise me you won’t bring up your past grievances with her when you meet.”

“I promise, I promise!...” Xue Yang rests his head on Xingchen’s shoulder. He looks very young, small and almost fragile. “I promise, Xingchen…”

It’s the first time Xue Yang has used his proper name since he’s woken. It’s strangely nice to hear. Xingchen, the person, decaying as he is, instead of Xiao Xingchen, the daozhang.

They sit in the stillness, watching the golden moonlight reflected in the water as it moves along with the moon. Listening to the splash of the frogs, the rustle of grass, the call of the night birds.

Surrounded by the sweet scent of rot.

Xue Yang falls asleep with his head in Xingchen’s lap. Xingchen trails his withered purple fingers through his hair, along his jaw, letting his hand rest on his head.

He does not sleep.

He’s at home here, among the decay…

One more dead rotting thing.

They leave the swamp the next morning and travel across the open countryside. Xingchen is too weak to fly, but Xue Yang holds him when he can despite his own growing weakness. Xingchen needs more and more blood just to stay upright, needs Xue Yang’s yang every night, every morning, needs to rid himself of tainted yin, just to keep his mind half clear.

One night he forgets where he is, rises, wanders off, trips, falls.

“Xingchen!” Xue Yang helps him to his feet. “Be careful—”

Xiao Xingchen’s hand comes off in his.

The same hand Xue Yang had pulled him by back in the bandit village what seems like a lifetime ago, he remembers the next morning, after Xue Yang pulls out of him and settles back on Xingchen’s legs.

Xue Yang is staring down at him with a hazy look in his eye.

“I shouldn’t have grabbed on your hand like that,” he says, reaching out to touch Xiao Xingchen’s wrist stump. He'd bandaged it during the night, but dark brown juices have seeped into the still-damp material, staining it with sweet-smelling liquid. "I keep pulling at your hand—”

Xingchen closes his eyes. “It’s not your fault, and I can’t feel anything…”

Xue Yang presses his forehead to Xingchen’s. Xingchen’s skin is still slippery to the touch, still covered in rancid black spots where the reddened flesh has necrotized. “We’ll be there soon,” he says, “won’t we?”

Xingchen nods.

Xue Yang kisses him. He doesn’t seem to notice the blowfly eggs hatching in Xingchen’s mouth, the rice-like maggots living in his empty eye socket, the beetles in his nostrils, the flies that swarm his body and lay eggs on his oozing wrist stump.

Flies that settle on Xue Yang’s own face, attracted by the slimy rot rubbed off on his skin.

It’s late afternoon when they arrive at Baoshan Sanren’s mountain, days later, weeks later.

Xue Yang collapses to his knees at the foot of the mountain. He’s been too weak to fly these past few days, with deep purple circles under his sunken eyes and white hands that tremble as he fixes Xiao Xingchen’s hair every morning.

“Is that it?” Xue Yang asks, looking up at the mountain. “It’s nice and all, but—”

“Wait.” It’s grown harder and harder to speak, Xingchen’s tongue swelling in his mouth, his throat muscles growing soft and loose under the hot sun. “Here.” He fumbles with his white jade hairpiece, but can’t get it out. "I—this—”

Silently Xue Yang gets to his feet, slides the hairpiece out of Xingchen’s topknot, sets it in Xingchen’s hand. Xingchen covers his hand with his fingers before he can remove it, nodding at him.

“Magic hairpiece? I like it. I used to have a gold one that—”

“Shh.”

Xiao Xingchen nods again, stepping forward on legs held together with gauze. Holding the hairpiece, they step through the invisible barrier.

All around them the mountain bursts into sudden radiance, the tall spirit gathering grasses around them sparkling with gold light. The air is thick with curling mists, catching the golden radiance and diffusing it, surrounding them with a warm yellow glow.

Xue Yang opens his mouth as if it speak, then closes it.

“Come,” says Xingchen.

They walk up the mountain, wrapped in the glowing mists.

Just a little farther now to the spot he remembers so well.

A pretty forest glade, gently shaded from the sun. Tall spirit-gathering sparkling with gold light, soft green moss carpeting the bank of a small stream, tiny white mushrooms growing on the fallen logs. Slender trees bent to trail their leaves in the water, the air sweet and warm and lightly perfumed.

Just a little longer...

He stops when they reach the stream that flows up the mountain, flows up past that secluded forest glade.

He turns and touches Xue Yang’s arm, doing his best to articulate. “One last time, before things are set right.”

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to…”

“I want to.” Xingchen slips his robes off as they settle down in the grass. Xue Yang kisses him, heedless of the fact that his lower lip has been half eaten away by insects, showing a row of teeth in shriveled gums. The kiss is long and slow and deep, his hand slipping down between Xingchen’s legs.

Xingchen gently presses him down into the shining gold grass and lowers himself onto Xue Yang. They don’t need oil, his insides smooth and slippery with decay.

“Soon,” he says. “Soon...”

Xue Yang gazes up at him, one hand on his arm, breathing in deeply, as if he wants to fix Xingchen’s scent in his mind, remember the way he looks now, rotting and desiccated with maggots in his mouth, his eyes, nestling in the soft skin under his cock and under his arms. The tip of his nose eaten away, the bones of his jaw visible through the decomposing flesh.

Xingchen leans forward, sinks his teeth into the curve of Xue Yang's throat, and drinks.

The sigils on their chests glow brighter as he rocks forward, the blue and red spirit light mixing with the golden radiance around them.

He drinks deeply, taking more blood than he has in weeks, filling his throat with Xue Yang’s lifeblood as Xue Yang comes, filling him with his yang. He remains locked in place on top of Xue Yang, arms around him, lapping at the blood trickling from his throat. Xue Yang’s hand is buried in his loose hair, lips brushing the rotting purple skin of his throat, breath warm on his ear stump,

He can feel Xue Yang now, more clearly than he ever has till now. Feel his desperation, his fear, his desire to be—consumed—

He drinks until Xue Yang’s hand falls limply to the grass, his pulse slowing. Drinks until he knows Xue Yang is too weak to follow him.

He can drink him to death, if he wishes. Absorb all of him, the good, the bad. Take him into himself...

"Xingchen." Xue Yang moves slightly beneath him. “Take it all. Find her…”

Xingchen raises his head. He rises, draping his robes over the shivering Xue Yang.

“Don’t leave me here!” Xue Yang grasps at him, bloodless fingers clutching at his arms, crushing the small white mushrooms sprouting along Xingchen’s limbs. “Take me with you,” he says weakly. His eyes are bleary and sunken, lips gray. “I can carry you to Baoshan Sanren—”

“Shhh.” Xingchen kneels beside him, raises him up. It’s like maneuvering a large limp doll. “I’ll always be on the mountain.”

For the first time since he’s woken, he fixes Xue Yang’s hair, braiding the sides, looping it around the topknot, using his mouth as a second hand. He slides his white jade hairpiece into the topknot and lays Xue Yang back in the grass.

“She’ll find you, now,” he says. “She’ll know I sent you.”

Xue Yang tries to move, can’t. “Don’t—don’t—”

“Let her help you.” Xingchen kisses his forehead softly, leaving a smear of red on the ivory. “Don’t forget me, Chengmei.”

“Xingchen...I…” Xue Yang makes one last struggle, but the exertion is too much. His eyes slip shut and he lies stretched out in the spirit gathering grass, covered in Xingchen’s white robes, the jade hairpiece gleaming gold.

Xiao Xingchen removes the jade flute from the qiankun pouch and, naked, drifts along the stream, up the mountain, towards the glen. He’s feeling weightless, almost as if he’s floating. The light around him grows brighter as he nears the clearing, surrounding him, filling him as his legs give out and he collapses to the earth.

He lies on the mossy bank, green and black flute resting beside him, sunlight streaming through the trees. The wildflowers are in bloom all around him, their perfume mixing with the sweet smell of decay. The damp of the soil, the song of the trees, the deep roots spreading through the earth, all surround him. Flowers he’ll soon nourish, trees he will slowly feed, fungus he’ll one day nurture.

Consuming him slowly.

The earth hums beneath him, around him. Embracing him, enveloping him.

Welcoming him home.

The breeze has picked up, rippling through the grasses, rustling the trees, caressing his bare skin, soft and warm.

In the distance, he thinks he hears a familiar voice on the wind, calling his name.

Xingchen! Xingchen…

Smiling to himself, Xingchen sinks deeper into the earth.

The inherent eroticism of losing an eyeball atop your lover

liked it? AO3...or even spare a reblog?

#mdzsnet #xiao xingchen #xuexiao #heed the tags #the untamed #cql #theuntameddaily #fytheuntamed #fymdzs #katie after dark #Consume Me Slowly

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ollieofthebeholder · 3 years

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I Remember the Fallen, Do They Think of Me: A Rusty Quill Gaming fanfic

Also on AO3.

They’re none of them in very good shape, really. Well, except for Skraak, who seems to have managed to avoid getting a finger or tendril laid on him the whole time they were in Svalbard. He seems fine. The others might be fine physically, but that purple migraine that came out of the floorboards in the Council chamber did a number on their spirits. Cel’s the worst off, although they’re doing a bit better since their mutagen wore off, but they’re still edgy and tense and more strung up than usual. Azu just looks marginally grumpy, which isn’t a good look on her. Zolf almost wants to say something about how this party only has room for one sourpuss, but he probably won’t be able to make it sound like a joke, and it isn’t really a joke anyway, and Azu is quite capable of taking his head off, literally, if the mood strikes her. Which it well might. She looks like she’s itching to kill something and Zolf isn’t keen to be it. Hamid mostly looks tired, as well he ought with all the spells he cast. There’s a part of him that wants to compliment Hamid on his conduct back there, on strategic use of his spells to help his party members and keeping his head and not only finding the kill switch but figuring out how to use it to save them all, but it probably won’t come out right. Hamid will probably think he’s being condescending or something, or use it as an excuse to pick a fight. They’re both tired, really. And Zolf is feeling every one of the blows he took; nothing a good night’s sleep won’t cure, he supposes, but at least that’s the worst of it for him.

So he doesn’t protest when Einstein teleports them back to Other London and Wilde insists they get some sleep in the back of Gragg’s old tavern rather than risk breaking the surface in the state they’re in. Skraak does, and surprisingly, so does Azu, but all Zolf has to do is point at Cel, looking miserable, and they back down.

“Got a room upstairs,” Gragg says, pointing upwards. “Lots of room for you all. I’ll be down here. Oh—Mr. Smith, right?”

“Yeah?” Zolf frowns at Gragg.

“Letter came for you. From the Poseidon lot. Their messenger said they thought I’d know where to find you.” Gragg shrugs, a little helplessly, and holds out an envelope. “I didn’t, but you’re here.”

Zolf sighs and takes the envelope with a muttered “thanks”. He’s done with the Poseidon lot, has been for close to two years now, but it seems they’re not done with him. He looks over at the others. “Go lie down, the lot of you. I’ll see what this is all about and then I’ll be up in a minute.”

“Surely it can keep until the morning, Zolf,” Wilde says. “Or whatever passes for morning right now. It’s kept this long.”

“Rather not try and sleep with this hanging over my head,” Zolf replies. “Won’t be but a minute.”

“Hmm.” Azu looks at him, then nods once and starts shooing the others up the stairs. Gragg gives him a nod, too, then disappears into the back.

Once Zolf is alone, he sinks down onto a barstool and immediately wishes he hadn’t. It’s not that it’s uncomfortable, or that it’s too tall for him, or even that now that he’s sitting he doesn’t want to get up. It’s that the last time he sat on one of these stools, it was less than twenty-four hours after meeting Hamid and Sasha (and, unfortunately, Bertie), back when he was still just a mercenary, or a Cleric pretending to be a mercenary, or a mercenary pretending to be a Cleric, or just a disillusioned and drifting person desperately looking for something to believe in. Back when Other London was a bustling city full of people trying to live their lives and Gragg wasn’t responsible for anything more than having enough food and drink to last the night. Back before Zolf doomed the world.

He allows himself precisely five seconds to wallow in the guilt of the past, then props his elbows on the bar and turns the envelope over in his hands. ZOLF SMITH, CLERIC is scrawled on the front in extremely shaky, spiky handwriting, along with a series of letters at the bottom that’s obviously in some sort of code, since it’s got far too many X’s and no vowels except a couple I’s. The back is sealed with some very old wax that looks like someone literally just dripped a candle on the envelope and pressed a seal into it. Zolf sighs as he recognizes the shape—it’s a dead match for the ring he still wears on his own finger, his last connection to his family. The Spade of the Harlequins. This letter might have been passed on by a member of the Cult of Poseidon, but it’s coming from a Harlequin.

Probably it’s Curie, writing to say she isn’t dead after all, although why she’d write to him of all people is a bit beyond him. He’s also not sure why she would feel the need to emphasize his Cleric status on the address. But...whatever. Might as well get this over with.

He slides a finger under the flap of the envelope and loosens the seal, then pulls out the folded papers within. It’s a thick sheaf and surprisingly heavy, and when he unfolds them, something slips from between the pages and lands on the bar with a thump and a clatter. Zolf looks down and sees a dagger, etched with some arcane symbols he doesn’t recognize. Great. A magic dagger. That bodes well. He huffs at it. If they want him to identify it, they’re going to be out of luck; that’s not his area of expertise. Maybe he’ll ask Wilde or Hamid in the morning.

He turns his attention back to the letter. It’s the same scrawl as the front of the envelope, scratched out in some places, odd splatters of ink in others, and there are a couple places where it looks like the ink’s run a bit. Gods, he hopes he’ll be able to read this.

Less than a line in, and his blood runs cold as the rest of the world drops away.

Zolf -

It’s gone bad. It’s all gone real bad. I don’t know when this letter’s going to get to you, except I know it’ll be sometime after you left in Prague because—well, you left. You wouldn’t have left if you knew all this before. But it all went wrong, and I need you to know what happened.

It didn’t go wrong right away. At first it was kind of okay. Hamid and I went out and tried to see how many restaurants we could go to, and that was nice. It helped us both, I think, because we both missed you already, but neither of us said anything about that. Like if we pretended it didn’t happen, it wouldn’t hurt. And it worked, at least at first. And then we found Bertie at the last one we went to, and he was causing a huge mess, you know what Bertie’s like. You were right about that. After that it just kept getting worse.

I woke up the next morning and I didn’t feel good again. Everything was bleeding again and I looked kind of bad, but I pretended I was okay and Hamid and Bertie didn’t notice. Well, Bertie never noticed anything that he didn’t want to, but Hamid, I think he was still upset. I dunno. Anyway, I went to the Temple of Artemis to get healed. The lady there wasn’t like you, she didn’t really make me feel all that...I think that’s just what the Artemis lot are like, though. Everyone I’ve met who’s from Artemis, they do what needs doing and go on to the next thing. I didn’t know that then, though. Anyway, I asked her why it kept happening, why I kept waking up hurt, and how to make it stop, and she made me tell her a bunch of stuff and then said it was because I got brought back to life wrong and I’d have to go to a Temple of Aphrodite to get healed right.

Then there were zombies. Loads of zombies, and they were attacking in the middle of the square. We went to fight them off and that’s when we met Grizzop, he’s—he was a Paladin of Artemis, and he helped us fight them. Bertie had this ring, he said it was supposed to make the undead go away, but instead it made them come closer to him. It made me come closer to him, too, and that was really not a lot of fun, Zolf, I didn’t like that at all. I fought it, though. I fought it really hard and it mostly worked. But there were loads of zombies, and even though we fought them off okay, the four of us, I was real worried about you. Part of me wanted to go find you and make sure you were okay, but I knew you didn’t want to be found, so I had to trust you would be all right. Grizzop said he was supposed to be hunting down a rogue mage that was probably making all the zombies, and we were still supposed to go up to the University and stuff, so we said we’d go with him in the morning.

Everything opened up again overnight, so I had to get healed a bit. Hamid kept asking me if I was okay, and I kept telling him I was, partly because I knew he couldn’t do anything to fix it and partly because I’m just so used to pretending I’m fine when I’m not, and partly because I didn’t want to worry him more than I had to. We went up to the University like we talked about, and it just kept getting worse and worse. Mostly by Bertie being Bertie, but also because the rogue mage, Franz Kafka, he had a book that came from Rome and it drove him crazy. He was a Harlequin, the council told us, and they were all Harlequins too, they had rings like yours and Rakefine’s, and they’d kind of lied to Grizzop because they didn’t want people to know it was one of them doing the zombie thing down in the city, but they asked us to go take care of it and we said we would. So we went back down to Prague and fought loads of stuff. We had a map with all the plague pits on them, Kafka was raising zombies out of them, so we decided to try and clear out as many as we could. Hamid had got tickets for the opera and the ley lines crossed at the opera house, so he thought Kafka would choose to try and spring his trap there, but Grizzop and I said it’d be better to take out the zombies before that. We got him to agree in the end, kind of, but we didn’t manage to get all the zombie pits cleared out before the opera was supposed to start.

It got really, really bad at the opera, Zolf. I don’t know if you were still in Prague then, I don’t know if you heard about it, but it was real bad. The basement was full of zombies and Grizzop and I tried to fight them off, but there were so many and a couple of them were really big and even though I had all these bombs I made and Grizzop had his bow and arrows and all that, we couldn’t kill them all, so we had to run up to the top. Then when we got up there, we found out that Hamid was right, that Kafka had tried to attack at the opera, and everybody was frozen and Bertie and Kafka were both flying and facing off each other, and Hamid—Hamid was gone. He was nowhere in the theater, and when I got to the stage I saw his bracelets and what was left of his clothes looking like they’d been torn apart and I knew, I knew Kafka had killed him somehow, and it was my fault because I wasn’t there to help him. And Kafka didn’t just have Bertie, he had Hamid’s sister—she was singing in the opera, it’s why Hamid wanted to go so bad—and he told Bertie that he had to pick whether he’d kill Bertie or Aziza. Don’t think it’ll surprise you which one Bertie picked.

But Kafka cheated. He killed both of them. I wasn’t fast enough, I couldn’t stop him—I tried, Zolf, I tried so hard, but even with Grizzop shooting arrows at him I couldn’t kill him fast enough to stop him from killing both of them. And, I mean, I kind of would have wanted to kill Bertie myself, or let Hamid do it, or at least let Hamid yell at him a lot, but even though Bertie wasn’t a very nice person, he didn’t deserve what happened to him. And his sister—she was just singing. She was just there and doing what she loved and Hamid was so proud of her, Zolf, and Kafka killed her just because he could. It wasn’t right. The guards finally showed up, but they were too late to help. Bertie was dead and Aziza was dead and Hamid...

Well, Hamid wasn’t dead after all. Grizzop found him on the roof of the opera house. Kafka put a spell on him and turned him into a monster, and the monster ran away. So at least he didn’t hurt anybody and not know it. He’d have hated that. I’d have hated that. Grizzop would’ve just killed him, I think, and then I’d have really been alone and I don’t know what I would have done. But he didn’t and I wasn’t, not then. They fixed us up and we had to tell Hamid about what happened. I didn’t tell him about Bertie getting to pick. He was hurt enough by what happened. And we almost got arrested or kidnapped or something like that by the Cult of Mars, but Wilde showed up and got us out of it.

As bad as Hamid wanted to go home with his sister and make sure Bertie was taken care of and all that, when they gave us a job to do, he agreed to do it before Einstein teleported us to Cairo. So then we went into Newton’s study and found his pocket dimension, and it turned out that there was somebody working there who’d been working with Kafka and Edison on Mr. Ceiling, or on something like Mr. Ceiling anyway. And it turned out that she was an old friend of Hamid’s. I think they were dating once. She really didn’t like him anymore, though, so even if she hadn’t done the work that meant Mr. Ceiling could happen, I wouldn’t have liked her, because she was really nasty to him. And he just stood there and took it. He didn’t fight her and he didn’t argue with her and he didn’t try to stand up for himself. He just kept saying she had to come with us.

You’d be proud of him, I think.

Anyway, after that Einstein sent us to Cairo. We wound up in the middle of a real bad sandstorm—Hamid thought we were probably in the middle of the desert, but then it turned out we were on the main street and not that far from the Temple of Aphrodite. That’s when we met Azu, and that was a pretty good thing, but that was the only good thing really. They told us at the Temple they’d been having lots of really bad weather, like they were having in Dover when we were there. I like the rainstorms a lot better than sandstorms, but it still wasn’t fun. And that was the easy bad thing.

This part’s not easy to talk about, and it feels really selfish when I think back on it, because I didn’t handle it in a way that you’d be proud of. I went to talk to one of the healer people about whether or not they could fix how I kept waking up hurting and that the person at the Artemis temple had said I was a little bit undead. He checked me over and said that I wasn’t just a little undead, I was really undead, and that I only had about a month left before I turned into something else. Hamid and Grizzop called it a lich—I hope I’m spelling that right, it’s not like they ever wrote it down, but that’s what it sounds like. Grizzop said they were evil, but Hamid kept saying that maybe I would be the first non-evil lich. Which, I mean, I guess that would have been okay, but...

Eren Fairhands said there were only three ways to fix me—to die all the way and go for a resurrection, to get a necromancer to follow me around and do magic on me to keep me just plain undead, or to get this artifact called the Heart of Aphrodite that the Meritocrats had all locked up because they don’t want powerful magic just floating around for anyone to use. I told Hamid and the others that I didn’t think they’d agree to let me use something that powerful, just for me; Hamid insisted they might because we’d saved the world a couple times, and also his other sister worked for the Meritocrats so maybe it would be okay. But I didn’t believe him. The world doesn’t work that way for people like me, you know? And the other two options...I might have trusted them if you were there to do them, but not someone I didn’t know, or a god I didn’t know.

Anyway, we went to Hamid’s family’s house. Hamid was really scared about seeing his family again, but, I mean, it had to go better than seeing Barret did for me, right? And it sort of worked out okay, at first anyway, but everybody was real upset, not that I blame them. They had the funeral the next day, and it went okay, but a tall figure in a hood like the one that hung out with Barret showed up. We watched it and then it disappeared, but it was after Hamid’s brother, and we didn’t want him to lose anybody else, so we were trying to protect him. And then it came back and we attacked it and we managed to kill it, but I just, I didn’t handle it well at all. I fell apart and then I just shut down. I think I gave up. I decided I was just going to die and that was all there was to it.

Like I said, I don’t think you’d be very proud of me for that. I had options, even if they didn’t seem very likely, but there was still a chance and I should have held onto that. You would have. But I didn’t and that means I did a lot of things I shouldn’t have done.

Hamid’s brother was working for Barret. Kind of. He got in debt and he owed Barret money, and Barret wanted him to rob the bank that Hamid’s family works for to pay him back, but things went wrong and someone died. That’s what Barret gave Hamid the ring for, he wanted him to give it to his brother, but Hamid wouldn’t because he’s a good person and he didn’t want to make his brother suffer. But because someone died, the bank was going to arrest him, but Hamid’s father said he would take the blame instead. Hamid tried to make him not do that, tried to make him see that his brother needed to face the consequences, but his father did it anyway. Then Hamid came back and told us what was happening, and he asked us for advice, and I said a lot of really mean things about his family. Well, all of us did, I guess, but...it’s different with Grizzop and Azu, you know? They didn’t know him. Not like I did. I said a lot of things I shouldn’t have said because I was upset and scared and hurting and I wanted to make Hamid feel that way too, and I shouldn’t have because he already was and I should have known that and it wasn’t fair. I won’t say I didn’t mean what I said, because I did, but I still shouldn’t have said it. And I didn’t mean it about Hamid, at least. He’s a good person, Zolf, he really is, even with what he did before, and he wanted us to help him and all Grizzop and Azu would say was that his brother and father deserved to be punished and I said they could get away with not being punished because they were rich and...

I wish you were there. You would have known what to say, what to do. You wouldn’t have made such a mess of it like I did.

I thought about you a lot that night, about what you would have said and done, and the next day when we went down for breakfast, I tried to do like you would have. I asked Hamid and Grizzop and Azu how their talk went after I left, and Hamid apologized to them for trying to keep his brother out of trouble and mucking it all up, and then he told us what happened to him. He got kicked out of university because someone he thought was his friend tried to get him to make a potion as a prank, but he wrote it down wrong and then the not-friend made it bigger and a bunch of people died, so he joined up with you—us—to try and make up for what he did. He was really worried that all he did was make things worse, because he said you didn’t think what we did in Paris helped, and then he didn’t think he helped at all in Prague. But he did, and he’s trying, and Grizzop said that was what was important. And I pointed out how much better he’s gotten since we met, because I meant it but also because I think you would have said it too, and he said it helped, me saying that. So we had a little bit of good, at least. And Hamid said a lot of really nice things about me when we met Apophis later that day, and Apophis agreed that we could use the Heart of Aphrodite to fix me. And it worked, Zolf, it really did. I’m good as new. Better, even, Fairhands even grew my finger back for me. For a little bit, everything was great, and the only thing that would have made it better was if you were there too.

And then it went bad again. We had to go to Damascus because there was information in the vaults when we got the Heart of Aphrodite that Edison was doing a bunch of stuff with the factories there, and that it might be involved with the Simulacrum and everything. The first factory was run by goblins and they were real proud of what they were doing, and they even gave me a dagger made of adamantine. When we went to investigate the other factory, though, they wouldn’t even let us in and it was really suspicious, so we sneaked in in the middle of the night to have a look around. They’d fired all the people who worked there and they had monsters in the warehouses to guard them, and they were building things like the Simulacrum. Loads of them. We had to fight our way out and then, well, we were going to go back to Damascus and find Wilde and tell him what was going on when someone showed up at the door with two more of those tall things like we killed at the funeral, and I think it was one of Bertie’s friends, you remember those people with the carriage from the Simulacrum unveiling? Wellington. Him. Anyway, Grizzop shot at him and he went away, but then they dropped a body in, only it wasn’t dead. It was Barret and he was tied up and beaten up.

You’d be proud of Hamid. He was all calm and serious and firm, just like you used to do when you were getting information out of bad people. I half expected him to threaten to drown Barret in a bucket. Would’ve loved to see the look on his face if he did. Anyway, Barret eventually told us he was working with the Cult of Hades. They’re the ones who suggested he get in touch with us about the Serpentines, and they’re the ones who helped him take all the kids out of Other London that got sent to Paris to be used for Mr. Ceiling. Then he told us the Cult of Hades had infiltrated the Meritocrats, and that he had too, and he gave Hamid a list of names. Grizzop and Azu wanted to just kill him. Hamid thought he should be arrested, but then they asked me what I wanted to do with him. If you’d been there, I’d have said he was a good candidate for a sacrifice, but...that didn’t seem right. Not just killing him. It’d be too easy to be just like him, and I never wanted that. So Azu and Hamid took him to Damascus to give him over to the Artemis lot to be put in prison, and they said they’d talk to Wilde and come back while Grizzop and I stayed and watched the factory and made sure nothing else bad happened. I went and checked one of the warehouses, and it was like it was raining in there—there was an aqueduct and they were piping water through, which I thought was weird because water was so expensive and hard to find in Damascus. Wilde showed up and asked us to show him the warehouses, then said we had to go because he’d arranged to have the factory destroyed. He said things were getting really bad, that there’d been the riots in London and Other London and a whole bunch of other places too, and that with the Meritocrats being compromised he didn’t trust anyone but our group, which kind of made me feel good and bad at the same time.

I like Wilde. Didn’t think I would, but I do.

Anyway, Apophis came in and turned the whole thing into glass, but there was steam coming up from a crack in it, so we slept on it and then investigated in the morning. There were pipes and tunnels and all sorts of things, and we almost got caught in a couple traps, but we came through okay, and then we found the secret part of the factory where they were making the outsides of the Simulacra (Hamid called them robots, I kind of like that better, actually). It turned out they were stealing the river, too, to make the factory work, so we started destroying it, because they were evil, or at least using evil things to do the work. It was all going so well for once. We were really doing good, even when we had to fight off an assassin that kept trying to turn us into stone.

And then...and then we got a weird magic message. I can’t really explain it in detail, maybe Hamid can tell you about it better, but the Cult of Hades sent us a message and told us that we needed to stop, or else. When we tried to argue with them, they showed us what they’d done.

They took our families.

Bi Ming, and Azu’s big brother, and one of Hamid’s little brothers, and a goblin who must’ve been important to Grizzop (I never got the chance to ask him about that). They had them tied up and trapped, and they said they were in Rome, and if we didn’t go and rescue them they’d...

Well. We weren’t going to let that happen, were we? We couldn’t. At least Hamid and I couldn’t. I think Azu was a little torn, because her brother can take care of himself and all, but Hamid and me, we couldn’t wait. We thought we’d pop back up, tell Wilde what was going on, get him to send in people to take care of it, and get on to Rome. We knew it was dangerous, but we had to. Grizzop argued with us about it, he said the mission was more important, and in the end he stayed behind and took care of everything while we went on to Rome with Einstein.

I’m sure you’ve heard about Rome and what it’s like. You’ve been loads more places than Hamid or I have, you’ve got to know the stories. I don’t think you can really know what it’s like unless you’ve been there, though. Best way I can describe it is, remember when we got across the Channel and you were telling me about that place you sailed through in a storm once, where you could see all the shipwrecks and things? Like that, but on dry land. Nobody lives there but monsters and the ghosts of memories. The air felt bad, and it did weird things to magic, too. Sometimes Hamid’s spells worked really well and sometimes they didn’t work at all and sometimes they were normal, it didn’t make any sense. Azu couldn’t do many spells at all, because her magic comes from Aphrodite and the prayers weren’t working. She said it was like Aphrodite couldn’t hear her, but I think now it’s the other way around—that Aphrodite could hear Azu just fine, but Azu couldn’t hear Aphrodite’s reply, and I think that’s worse. Because it means whatever was strangling Rome wanted people to feel like the gods abandoned them, but also wanted the gods to suffer knowing that people who believed in them and all that were desperately reaching for them and they couldn’t do anything but listen.

It wasn’t easy. It was hot and hard to move around sometimes, and things kept attacking us, all kinds of monsters. Einstein was basically useless, so it was just Azu and Hamid and me having to fight, and I was really glad I wasn’t trying to do this and also not turn into a lich, ‘cause not being able to heal would’ve been really bad. Worse for Hamid, though. He nearly blew himself up and it scared me half to death, but I was honestly too happy he was safe to really yell at him for it. We hid out in a basement overnight to sleep and heal, and the next day we found the place where our families were being kept...kind of. We had to sneak into this big building, and when we got in, we found a big purple cloud, like a hole in the universe or something. I don’t know the details of the magic, that was more Hamid’s thing, but the people we loved were inside it, and there was this Paladin of Apollo there, too, someone who apparently knew Bertie, and he went in there and got stuck. Grizzop got there with Eldarion, she’s—she was my teacher when I was in prison, kind of in prison anyway, and she wanted me to stop running around getting in trouble and go back somewhere safe, but I told her I wasn’t going to do that. Eventually she gave in. Einstein said he’d wait for us to teleport us out when we got out safely, we didn’t know how long it would be, because the magic led to another plane and time might not move the same way there.

Actually getting everybody out wasn’t so hard. It was like a puzzle. I kind of like puzzles, actually. We had to fight a couple monsters, nothing too serious, except one of them broke my favorite ice dagger and I was kind of upset about that. But Bi Ming was okay, and so was Issak, and Azu’s brother, and Grizzop’s friend, and even Ed. We got everything and we got together in a circle and Eldarion transported us back.

And that’s when it went really bad. At least for me.

I couldn’t hold on. There was just so much going on, and my hand slipped, and then I couldn’t grab Bi Ming’s hand quick enough to stop from getting ripped away from the group and getting lost. I didn’t come back with the others.

But, obviously, I’m writing this letter to you and it’s going to get to you, I know it will, so you know I’m not dead and I didn’t go to another reality or anything like that. I landed on the floor, and I recognized the floor of the place I’d been in before, just...newer. Brighter-looking.

I went back in time, Zolf. Grizzop too, his grip slipped too. He said Eldarion stepped out of the circle before we left the other dimension—there were too many of us, she couldn’t guarantee she’d get everyone back safe if she didn’t let go, I think—but she’s not here, so I don’t know where she ended up. But Grizzop and I came here. To Ancient Rome, in the days before it was destroyed. Literally days. I’m alive, I’m healthy...and I’m trapped two thousand years before I was even born, or anybody I love.

It’s still fresh, I don’t know if I can talk about it, but I’ll try. We tried to help, Grizzop and me. We went looking for the Cult of Mars, and the Cult of Hades, to try and take them down and see if we could stop Rome from being destroyed and the world from getting bad in the future.

We couldn’t.

We tried, honest we did, but the fight...it was too much, it was too bad. I think I should have died, but Grizzop took a spear that was meant for me. And then he kept getting hit, but he wouldn’t stop, he was trying to take down the captain. He did, but...but they killed him. I was right there and he went down and then they knocked me out and when I woke up I was strung up from the ceiling like I was going to be fed to something and there were all these dragons and Grizzop was still on the floor and he was dead and I wasn’t and...

I can’t, Zolf. I just...I can’t. Not now. Maybe, maybe someday I can, but not today.

The point is that we didn’t stop the cults, and we didn’t stop the dragons, and we didn’t save Rome, and we didn’t save the world. Maybe we couldn’t have. And Grizzop died and I didn’t. I checked when I got free, after the dragons got away, but I’m not a healer and I’m not magic and I’m not...there was nothing I could do. And I couldn’t even take him with me. I had to leave him there or I wouldn’t have got out.

I think I shut down again. I don’t remember a lot of the walk out of Rome. I just remember telling this man we’d met—his name is Cicero—I told him to show me the way out, and I followed him, and I made sure he didn’t die, because he was the only person I knew anymore and I was not going to lose anybody else. And along the way, there were—there were other people trying to leave, trying to get away, and I just, I grabbed them and I brought them with us, because I wasn’t going to leave them behind, because I couldn’t. Maybe I couldn’t save everybody, but I had to save the ones I could.

That’s all we ever can do, right?

We found a place. It’s...it’s a home. It’s warm, and dry, and safe. I can stand on the roof and see for miles around, but it’s close enough that I can get supplies if we need them, and bring in more people. Refugees from Rome, mostly. People who need a place to be safe. There aren’t as many as maybe you’d think, a lot of people just stop here before going on somewhere else, but some stay. Mostly kids. The ones with families, parents and kids, most of them go on after a while, but the kids who don’t have anywhere else, anyone else, they stay, and I’m trying to take care of them. Trying to teach them a bit.

It’s all been a way of marking time, really, up until now. I know, in my heart of hearts, that Hamid and Azu and the others made it back safe and sound. And I know Hamid won’t give up on me. Every day I’ve been expecting to see him, or a magical effect of some kind. Something to get me home. I’m trying to be patient, trying to tell myself that just because time’s going on for me doesn’t mean it is for you lot. It’s not going to be instant, it’s not—it’ll happen, I keep saying. I’ll get another chance. I’ve just got to wait.

But today, I—Cicero and the kids, they surprised me with a party. I’d told them I didn’t know when my birthday was exactly, which is kind of true because the months aren’t the same here, but I didn’t think about it until today. I got back from a supply run and they’d set up a celebration for me. Cicero told me that since I couldn’t remember when I was born, they’d decided that my new birthday was the day he met me, the day my new life started, I guess.

It’s been a year. A whole year.

I made it through the party, somehow, but as soon as I could I got away and came up here to my room. I was upset and scared and missing you more than ever, you and Hamid both, and I thought suddenly that maybe you didn’t know I was alive, that maybe Hamid thought I was lost and didn’t know where to find me, so I was going to write Hamid a letter at first, but...but I really wanted to write to you.

I really needed you.

I’m a little bit calmer now, though, and I’m thinking a little more clearly. Maybe writing all this out helped some. I just imagined I was talking to you, and that helped, too. I’ve never been all that great with words, but I’ll try here. There’s some important stuff I think I need to say.

Hamid and I were the same age, did you know that? We talked about a lot of stuff while we were going to the different restaurants in Prague, and one of the things we talked about was our birthdays. We thought it was kind of cool that we both had the same birthday. We were both twenty-three.

We were kids, Zolf. Just a couple of dumb kids who thought we were grown up. I’ve got a bunch of dumb kids of my own now, and I know what I’m talking about. We thought we knew everything about everything, and it’s probably one of the reasons we didn’t always get on so much. We both thought we knew how the world worked, and because the way I saw the world and the way he saw the world were so different, we both thought the other didn’t know anything about anything. I’d never been out of London—I’d barely been out of Other London—and Hamid, for all he’d been places, he hadn’t really seen the world, just the part of the world that rich people let their kids go. We had a lot to learn.

We needed you. I don’t blame you for leaving, I know you needed that too, and I meant what I said about how none of us were forced to be there and you could leave if you wanted to, and we both trusted you’d come back when you were doing better. And maybe we both thought we’d be okay on our own. But I thought the whole world worked like Other London and Hamid thought the whole world worked like Cairo and Cambridge. Azu and Grizzop both saw how they thought the world should be, but the difference was Azu didn’t realize that it wasn’t like that, I think, and Grizzop just tried to make it like that. But you knew how my world worked, and how Hamid’s world worked, and how the rest of the world worked, and when you were there, it was a lot easier to see things how they really were and not just how they would have been if we were where we were used to, you know?

But it’s not just that. I didn’t get to be a kid, not really. And now that I think about it, Hamid didn’t really either. I had to be a thief and he had to be a banker’s son, and there were rules and things we had to do and things we were expected to be, and we didn’t get to figure out who we were and who we wanted to be. But you let us be that. You made it safe for us to start figuring ourselves out, even if it upset you sometimes, but you were there to catch us if we went too far. And even when you yelled at us, I think we could tell you weren’t really mad. We both had a lot of growing up to do still, even if we didn’t think so, but we weren’t going to do it without someone to show us how. And you’re the only person either of us ever met who was willing to do that for us.

I don’t know if you can get me back. I know I can’t get back to you from here. Magic isn’t what I’m used to, or the people who can do that kind of magic...don’t. I keep thinking about something Apophis said, about how the Meritocrats took a lot of magic things away from humanity because only the rich people could get at them, and I wonder if it’s not something like that, that I’m just not rich enough to get to someone powerful enough to send me home. But I think I’m going to have to wait, and hope. I’m not giving up that hope, because I know you wouldn’t want me to, but...but maybe there’s a reason I’m supposed to be here.

These kids, they need someone too. Like I did. And right now, I’m what they’ve got. If I leave, I don’t know what’s going to happen to them. So this isn’t me saying “don’t keep trying to find me”, this is me saying that if you can’t get me back...I think I’ll be okay. I just keep asking myself, every time I run up on something that I’m not sure about, I think, “What would Zolf do?” And so far I’m not doing too bad, except for the part where I had to tell Maximus he couldn’t threaten to drown his little brothers and sisters in a bucket every time they annoy him. I’m doing my best, though. That’s all I can do. I’m trying. I’m trying to be you for them.

And it’s a little bit like I’ve got you here with me.

But Hamid doesn’t. He doesn’t have you and he doesn’t have me, and his sister and his friend died, and his father and his brother are going to prison, and someone he thought was his friend doesn’t care that she was doing work that got used for horrible things. He’s still just a kid really. And Azu’s solid, but she’s not what he needs. She sees the world in black and white. Either you’re her friend, or you’re her enemy, and if you’re her friend, you’re a good person. Hamid needs somebody who sees him for who he is, and cares about him as a person and not as what he can be or do. He needs you.

So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to finish this letter, and I’m going to take it to the Temple of Poseidon up in the town, and I’m going to ask them to find a way to get it to you. And then I’m going to come home, and I’m going to get all the kids together, and I’m going to tell them stories. I’m going to tell them about the ocean and the rain, the stars and the sand. I’m going to tell them about monsters and mechanical men and magic. I’m going to tell them about Azu and Grizzop and Wilde and even Bertie, my friends, and I’m going to tell them about Hamid, my brother, and I’m going to tell them about Zolf, the best dad I could ever have asked for.

And what I want you to do—it’s a big favor, but I’m hoping this letter won’t get to you until you’ve had a chance to get right. I want—no, I need you to go find Hamid. Maybe it hasn’t been very long, maybe you’re getting this right after we left, in which case, go to Rome and meet him when he gets back. Or maybe it’s been a bit and you’ll need to ask Wilde. He’ll know where to find him. Tell him I sent you if you have to, if he won’t listen to you, but please, please go find Hamid. He needs someone to be there for him, and I have a feeling you need someone too. Someone who believes in you, too. I’ll feel better knowing you’re together, that you’re helping each other, keeping each other safe. Tell him I’m sorry, for what I said about his family. Tell him I miss him, and I love him. I miss you, too, and I love you, too. I mean that with everything I have in me.

We’ll see each other again. I know that. In your time or mine, in this world or the next. I know I’ll be able to see you both again. And I hope that when I do, I’ll be able to look you in the eye and know that I made you proud.

Love always,

Sasha.

P.S. I want you to have my fire dagger. It’s probably not safe to have around just now, it being magic and all, and I want you to have something to remember me by.

Zolf lowers the last page of the letter slowly to the bar top. For a long time, he doesn’t move, just stares at the sheaf of papers and the dagger without really seeing either of them.

Then he takes a deep breath, slides off the stool, and trudges slowly and quietly up the stairs.

The upper floor of what used to be Gragg’s tavern consists of what can only loosely be described as “rooms” because there are two walls, each going about a third of the way across the room, dividing it into nominally two separate spaces. There are a few crates of supplies scattered about, mostly blankets from what Zolf can see in the half-open ones, but one of them has Skraak curled up inside, sound asleep. It’s not hard to find the group, in a sort of nest of blankets tucked up against one of the dividing walls. Azu lies on her back, one arm flung over her face. Cel’s hair is just visible over the edge of a ball of blanket up against Azu’s side; Zolf can’t see their face, but he guesses they still feel pretty terrible. Sumatnyerl sleeps on her side on the opposite side of Azu, back to the party and face to the dividing wall. Einstein snores lightly, cuddling Azu’s outstretched arm like a teddy bear. Even Wilde is there, half-sitting and half-slumped against Azu’s side, a blanket loosely draped over his lap and one hand resting in the space next to it, looking for all the world like he was trying to sit up and wait for Zolf but fell asleep anyway.

Hamid is nowhere to be seen.

Zolf tries to tamp down his instinctive panic. There’s only one way in or out up here, unless Hamid climbed out a window, and he wouldn’t do something like that. Nothing could have got up here without Zolf hearing it, he’s sure—well, okay, he was lost in the letter, it’s possible, but surely the others would have heard something. Hamid’s got to be nearby. He’s just...not sleeping with the others, for some reason. Maybe as he gets more dragon-ish, he gets more like the kobolds and prefers to sleep somewhere he can’t be found easily. Maybe he just doesn’t want to sleep on the floor and has figured out how to make himself a little bed, or found a bed somewhere.

Unless an assassin with Sasha’s level of skill but no morals sneaked in through the window. Unless there’s another thing like the thing they fought in Svalbard that burned their clothing and damaged their spirits. Unless the one Hamid sucked into the kill switch got out somehow and attacked him. Unless Hamid did do something stupid, maybe testing out a new spell he’d discovered or ability he’d developed...

Zolf moves as quickly and quietly as he can into the other half of the room. It’s been mostly picked over and cleared out, those few boxes remaining pushed to the sides of the room. One, a longer and narrower box than some of the others, is up underneath a single window at the far end of the attic space. And there, sitting atop the box, is Hamid, staring out the window even though it’s pitch dark and he can’t possibly see anything.

Inhaling sharply with relief, shoulders relaxing, Zolf crosses the space. He’s still trying not to wake the sleepers, but he’s pretty sure Hamid can hear him. He sits at the other end of the box from Hamid. “Hey,” he says quietly.

“Hey,” Hamid says. He sounds the way he did in Paris after they destroyed Mr. Ceiling for real—weary and beaten-down. The thought makes Zolf hurt all the way through, partly hating himself for the person he was then and partly because Hamid’s got no reason to feel that way now and partly because it makes him think of Sasha, not that she’s far from his mind right now.

Hamid turns away from the window and looks in Zolf’s direction; he can’t possibly see him in the total lack of light, but Zolf can see him just fine. He almost looks worse than he sounds, and Zolf has a brief moment of wondering if he’s hurt worse than he’s letting on before he convinces himself he’s just being alarmist. It’s just the shadows and dim lighting making things seem worse than they are, combined with the stress of the last day.

Now that he’s here, Zolf has no idea where to start. He tries to think of the best way to begin, then gives up and decides to just say the first thing that pops into his head. The words that come out of his mouth remind him why it’s a bad idea to do that. “Did you seriously almost blow yourself up in Rome?”

Several emotions play across Hamid’s face, too fast for Zolf to read in the darkness. He expects a shrill protest, or an angry denial, or a stammering justification, but to his surprise, Hamid simply sighs and nods. “Sort of? We were fighting something invisible. It had just attacked me, so I knew it was near me, and Azu and Sasha weren’t, so...I cast a fireball centered on me. It should’ve been fine. I can stand up to fire pretty well, so I thought even if I couldn’t get out of the way fast enough, I’d be okay. But something in Rome made magic go...weird...and it was more powerful than I thought it would be. I got lucky, I guess.” He looks up at Zolf, and this time the look in his eyes is easy to read: guilt. Zolf’s not sure why. “When did Azu tell you about that?”

“She didn’t. I—” Zolf flounders for a moment. There’s got to be a better way of saying this. Finally, he just sighs and hands Hamid the letter.

Hamid makes a weary, practiced gesture, and Zolf blinks as the by-now familiar tiny dancing lights appear between them. Hamid blinks, too, then flinches. “Sorry,” he mumbles and starts to make the gesture to dismiss them.

Zolf reaches over and stops him. “It’s—fine. It’s fine,” he tells Hamid. “Nothing out there hunts by sight. Gragg says they can’t get in buildings anyway. I trust him. You’re fine.”

Hamid swallows and nods. Now that the lights are there, Zolf can see him a little better, and he reevaluates his previous assessment. Hamid does look worse than he sounds. He looks either ill or injured, with dark hollows under his eyes, which have a slightly bruised look to them, his skin ashen. There’s a smudge on his forehead of dirt or slime or blood or some combination of the three, he looks like he’s run his hands through his hair in frustration or despair, and his ever-present eyeliner is smeared down his cheeks.

It hits Zolf all at once that he’s literally never seen Hamid not perfectly groomed. Even in the catacombs under Paris, when he’d been injured and panicking, his first instinct had been a shaky prestidigitation to clean himself up. He fusses over his appearance more than anyone Zolf has ever met, with the possible exception of Wilde, and he remembers that Wilde always looked worse off than he was when he couldn’t use his own prestidigitation. It’s no wonder Hamid looks sick. Zolf resists the urge to comment on it and simply waits.

Hamid sucks in a sharp breath as he starts to read, and even more color drains from his face. His eyes fill with tears, but to Zolf’s slight surprise, they don’t fall. He smiles briefly a couple of times, barely more than a flicker, but Zolf also sees him retreat slightly into himself. And Zolf can tell when he gets to the part after they got separated coming back to Rome, because Hamid’s hands start shaking, ever so faintly.

When he reaches the end—apparently—he stares at the paper for a long moment, much like Zolf did, then takes a deep breath, folds the letter back up, and hands it back to Zolf. Zolf isn’t sure whether to be impressed or worried that Hamid hasn’t dissolved into a complete emotional mess.

“She’s right,” he says softly, and his voice is choked and shaking, but he’s not actually crying. “I was just a dumb kid. Still am, I guess.” He looks up at Zolf. “I keep—I think I’m getting better, and then I do something utterly stupid because I think I know what I’m doing, and then I argue with you when you call me out on it. And then I have the nerve to act like you’re—” He chokes off the word and looks away, taking a couple more deep breaths.

Zolf realizes, all of a sudden, what Hamid is doing. He’s trying to stop himself from crying, because he doesn’t want to be overly emotional. He’s trying to be sensible and practical and, well, grown-up about this.

Before he can say anything, Hamid looks back up at him. “I’m not—I’m not trying to justify why I’m right. I just want you to know where I...” He swallows. “When I was growing up, if I made a mistake or—o-or did something wrong, no matter what it was or how bad it was, all I had to do was admit it was wrong and apologize, and everything would be forgiven and it would go away. Like it never happened. And you—you’re kind of the opposite? At least, that’s how it looks to me sometimes. If something goes wrong, it’s in the past. Apologizing for it or—or acknowledging that it might have been a mistake doesn’t change that it was done, so there’s no reason to. Just...move on and try to do better the next time. And I know that’s the better way to handle it, but—”

“It’s not,” Zolf interrupts, his voice thick with emotion. “It’s—look, I don’t have all the answers either, you know. I act like I do, but deep down, I’m just as scared. And I don’t always know the right thing to do. When we were in Paris, I spent three days in my room wallowing, blaming myself for everything that went wrong, every mistake I’d ever made, not just the whole Mr. Ceiling thing, you remember that? The more we went on, the more I questioned everything I’d ever done, and by the time we got to Prague, I couldn’t get away from the doubts. So I walked away, from Sasha and from you, because I didn’t trust myself not to repeat my mistakes. And then Wilde tracked me down and told me you’d gone to Rome and you were gone and...” He swallows hard. “Look, you know how Sasha talks about her...shutting down and just blanking out? I did that, too, I reckon. I blamed myself, thought if I’d just stayed you’d have been okay, but...at that point, Wilde needed an ally and I needed a purpose, so I shut out the past and focused on the present. And it was easier to live like that, for a while, so I just kept doing it and it got worse.” He tries to smile. “There’s got to be something in between, right? Something between ignoring the past and dwelling on it?”

“Yeah,” Hamid says softly, looking down at his hands. They’re dirty, too, smeared with plant matter and ichor and grease, but he doesn’t seem to notice. “And there’s got to be something between acting like acknowledging a mistake makes it all go away and acting like—”

“—like not acknowledging it also makes it all go away,” Zolf completes. “And I think there��s got to be something between ‘this was the only right answer’ and ‘this was the right answer with the information we had so it’s fine,’ yeah? Like your fireball in Rome. You didn’t think that was the only solution, did you?”

“No,” Hamid whispers. “It was a calculated risk. And I didn’t think about magic going...screwy. But I wouldn’t have done it if Sasha or Azu or Einstein had been close enough that it would have hit them. I was the only one in danger, so I thought it would be okay.”

Zolf’s heart lurches, and he has to try twice before he can speak. “If you ever decide to do something like that again...just make sure I can’t see you, all right?”

Hamid looks up at Zolf and attempts to smile. “So you don’t have to yell at me?”

“So I don’t have to maybe watch you die.” Zolf keeps his voice down with an effort. “I can’t—I can’t do that, Hamid. Seeing Wilde’s body after the crash, I—that was bad. That was real bad. If I’d had to actually see it happen? I don’t know that even pushing things into the past would’ve helped. And next to Wilde, you’re the person I’d like to think I’m closest to. I don’t want to watch anyone die if I can help it, but you? Please don’t make me do that.” He swallows hard. “It’s why I took the risk of having us jump into the plant. I thought it would just...lead us straight through to wherever it was connected to, but it was that or watch you torn apart by a bunch of evil trees, and I was not going to risk that. So yeah, it was a bad idea and if I’d known what I know now I would have tried to come up with a third option, but with what we knew then, it was the best hope I had of not losing everything I cared about. Again.”

Hamid makes a tiny, pained noise that sounds like it might be a sob and goes straight to Zolf’s heart. He presses his lips tightly together for a moment, obviously forces back an emotional response, then nods. “I promise. And—and I promise not to yell like that again. I’m sorry. I am. I got scared and I took it out on you and that wasn’t fair.”

“I accept your apology, and I forgive you. And I’m not great with the whole...talking thing, but I promise I’ll try in the future.” Zolf takes a quick breath. “I do forget how young you are sometimes. And I don’t mean that as an insult, just...I forget you don’t always have the experience of the world to understand why I make the decisions I do, and then I get annoyed with you for questioning them, and that’s not fair, either. I’m sorry for that.”

“You don’t—I accept your apology, and I forgive you,” Hamid half-whispers. Zolf can tell he’s not just parroting the words, he’s sincere about them. And he appreciates that Hamid stopped himself from saying you don’t have to apologize. Because Zolf did have to apologize, and they both know it. Hamid looks down at the letter again. “She’s right about that, too. I did—I do need you. I’m...you make me a better person.”

“No,” Zolf says, putting the weight of an entire lifetime’s experience behind his words. “Nobody else can make someone a better person. You make you a better person, Hamid. I just believe you can be one.”

Hamid’s head comes up abruptly, and he stares at Zolf in genuine shock. Zolf is terrible at...people, and emotions, and all that, he doesn’t usually get them, but Hamid’s emotions are so close to the surface and so genuine that even he can read them. Nobody has ever told Hamid anything like that, ever, and Zolf is the last person he would have ever expected to hear it from.

And something inside Zolf breaks.

He reaches out and pulls Hamid into a hug, tighter and more desperate than the one he gave him right after the first quarantine all those weeks ago. Hamid hugs him back just as tightly, burying his face in Zolf’s shoulder. Zolf feels the tears begin hitting his skin, reminding him in a remote, distant way that that purple thing dissolved his shirt and coat and he’s sitting around in nothing but his breastplate, but he pushes the thought out of his mind for the moment.

“She’s right,” he says into Hamid’s hair. “I am proud of you. You stood up for yourself, and you stood up for Sasha. You didn’t give in even when it would’ve been the easiest thing in the world. And back there, in Svalbard? You did a good job. You kept your head and you didn’t argue, you figured out what that device was and how to use it. And you made sure the rest of us stayed safe. I might argue with you, I might yell, but I will never not be proud of you.”

Hamid cries harder. His emotions are usually loud and messy, but whether because he’s trying to keep quiet or for some other reason, his tears are silent. “I missed you,” he whispers, the words muffled into Zolf’s shoulder. “I missed you and I was scared something would happen to you in Prague, and then I got back from Rome and Einstein told us how long it had been and what was going on and I was scared you were dead, and then I saw you again and I was—I was so angry at you and I don’t know why—”

“It’s because I wasn’t there,” Zolf says with a rare flash of insight. “It’s because I left and suddenly everybody around you started getting hurt and dying, and then you came back and everything was different, and you didn’t know what was going on. You were confused and scared, and when you get scared these days you get angry. And I was there to be a good target. You couldn’t be angry at Azu because Azu was angry too, but me—”

“You were safe,” Hamid says softly. “I—I trusted that I could be angry at you, because I knew you’d—you’d let me be angry and we could still be friends after I was done.”

Zolf tightens his arms around Hamid, recognizing the truth in his words. “I missed you, too, you know. As soon as I walked away, I regretted it. If I could’ve taken you both with me, as stupid as that sounds, I would have, but I had to be on my own to get right. But I hadn’t been gone three days before I knew I’d be back. And then you were gone, they told me you were gone for good, and I—I wasn’t lying when I said I’d mourned for you both, but I never gave up hope. I’ve been studying the planes—I was determined, when I had a moment, I was going to go looking for you. I just, I couldn’t leave Wilde and...”

“No, I get it. I get it.” Hamid squeezes him again, then eases back and manages a weak smile up at him. “Thank you. For trying. For not giving up. Maybe...maybe that’s the only reason any of us made it back, was because you had hope.”

“Maybe.” Zolf settles back as well and manages a smile back. “I’m not giving up on her, just so you know. Even though we got that letter from her when she was older...I’m not giving up. Maybe someday...”

“Yeah. Maybe not any time soon, but someday.” Hamid wipes his eyes with the back of his hand. The gesture makes him look impossibly young. “I’m not giving up either. I can’t. She wouldn’t have given up on us.” He pauses. “Zolf—she didn’t know you weren’t with Poseidon anymore.”

“Yeah, that’s probably why the letter came through the Poseidon lot,” Zolf says. “They’ve probably been looking for me since I walked away, so to speak.”

“No, I mean she didn’t know you weren’t with Poseidon. If she lit a candle at the Temple of Artemis for Grizzop every year, and her letter to all of us came through the Cult of Aphrodite...Zolf, what if that’s why Poseidon kept trying to help you?” Hamid’s eyes are wide. “Because Sasha asked him to? Would—is that how it works?”

Ice water floods through Zolf’s veins, and he mutters a word in Dwarfish he hasn’t said since the cave-in. “It might. I don’t know. I’m not—”

“No, I’m not—I don’t think you should go back to him. I mean....clearly he wasn’t—maybe he was Sasha’s god, not yours. I just...wondered, that’s all.” Hamid rubs his face. He looks like he’s lost a fight with a fireplace, there’s so much dirt and kohl smeared over his cheeks.

“Maybe...Hamid, you sure you aren’t hurt?” Zolf gestures to his own face. “You...look a mess.”

“I...oh.” Hamid looks embarrassed. “Sorry, and I—it’s all over you, too. Here.” He snaps his fingers, producing the familiar flurry of handkerchiefs, which set to work on both Hamid and Zolf.

Zolf unbuckles his breastplate and sets it aside, wincing at the sticky sound as it peels away from his chest and the last fragments of his shirt and jacket fall away. “Thanks,” he says. “For the record, though, I wasn’t...complaining about you looking bad or whatever. I was just worried. Last time you didn’t immediately come out of a fight and tidy yourself up was...”

“Paris,” Hamid completes softly. “I know. I-it did feel...a bit like that, I guess. I just didn’t...I don’t know.” He glances over his shoulder uncertainly towards the other part of the room.

Zolf glances over, too. “They’ll be okay,” he assures Hamid, thinking he’s worrying about Cel. “Once I’ve had some rest, I can meditate and get access to a couple spells that’ll help. You and Azu, too. You said it hit you some?”

“Yeah,” Hamid says with a heavy sigh.

The handkerchiefs vanish, and Zolf sighs, too. “Right. C’mon, let’s go in the other room and get some sleep. You want to use the lights so you don’t trip?”

Hamid hesitates, for just a second, then says uncertainly, “N-no. No, I’m—I’m fine.” He snaps his fingers and the lights disappear. “Um...after you?”

Zolf stares at Hamid. He’s usually a skilled liar, almost on par with Wilde, but either because he’s tired or because of what that thing did to him, he’s not doing a very good job of it right now. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing!” Hamid protests, even less convincingly.

“Hamid.”

It’s all he says, but it’s enough. Hamid’s shoulders slump. “I just...I don’t think I’m welcome in there right now. Azu’s mad at me. A-about the kobolds and—”

“Hey, hey, it’s okay,” Zolf interrupts. “She’s asleep right now, so she won’t be yelling at you. And she’s not....feeling well, is she? Whatever happened to you three, she’s—she’ll be fine once we get that taken care of.”

“She meant it, Zolf. She just wouldn’t have said it if she wasn’t...like this. And she wasn’t wrong.”

“She might not have been wrong, but that doesn’t mean she was right,” Zolf says firmly. He puts his hands on Hamid’s shoulders and looks him in the eye, despite knowing Hamid probably can’t see him. “Just like Sasha. Just like me. Just like you, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Hamid whispers. Tears fill his eyes again. “I—I really didn’t—I shouldn’t have yelled at you like that, Zolf. I’m sorry. I just—I guess I was still upset about what Aziza said and—”

“Wait, who—?” Zolf suddenly realizes that he wasn’t the only one who went through what he went through when they jumped through that plant. His shoulders slump slightly. “I’m sorry. I should’ve—we should’ve talked about this, but—”

“When have we had time?”

“Yeah, exactly. Look, I—when we jumped through that plant, before it tied us up and we fell through those planes?” Zolf sighs heavily. “I was back in the mines. With my brother. He blamed me for leaving, tried to convince me he’d still been alive when I...” He swallows. “So I was...kind of raw, too. Even though it was nothing I haven’t been saying to myself for decades. Even though I knew it wasn’t really him.”

“It wasn’t?” Hamid’s voice is small and fragile, like he was in the catacombs.

“Oh, Hamid.” Zolf hates this, hates every minute of it. “No, it wasn’t—it wasn’t them. Whoever you saw—your sister, right? The one who died in Prague?”

“Yeah. She—she said it was my fault she died. And that I hadn’t done enough to—after. That I was still making everything all about me and not—”

“Yeah, if it had really been her, she never would have said any of that, ‘cause it’s not true,” Zolf interrupts. “You were humming in the garden. I heard you. She was walking with you. That was really her. I could feel my brother with me too, I kept willing him to go away. Cel and Azu, I’m sure they were with someone they’ve lost too. What that—that thing showed us, that was a twisted version of them. Something to make us regret, make us give up. They were lies, Hamid. What happened to your sister, that’s not your fault. You did everything you could. Kafka’s the reason she died. Well, and maybe Bertie too.”

“I didn’t know that,” Hamid whispers. “About him—about Kafka giving him a choice.”

“Tell you what.” Zolf squeezes Hamid’s shoulders. “When this is all over, we’ll go find a necromancer, find where they’ve got Bertie buried, and have him turned into a zombie so we can kill him again ourselves.”

Hamid actually laughs, a bit wetly. “Only if you take the first shot.”

“Sure. We’ll use Sasha’s dagger.” Zolf pulls Hamid in for another hug. He’s not usually the touchy-feely, sort, but it’s just the two of them right now and Hamid’s one of three people he’d be willing to hug like this.

The fact that one of those people is someone he may never get the chance to hug again—or at all—makes his heart ache, but he tries not to think about it.

Hamid hugs him back, and Zolf feels him relax. After a few moments, he pulls back and manages a smile up at Zolf. “Thank you. For all of it.”

“I couldn’t have done it without you.” Zolf smiles back, then slides off the box. “Come on. You need rest.”

This time, Hamid slides off the box too, and he matches stride with Zolf as they head back into the other room. He starts to go off to one side, but Zolf doesn’t let him. Instead, he grabs a blanket and pulls him over to join the pile that is the rest of their friends. Hamid looks reluctant, but he doesn’t argue. Zolf’s glad. He’s tired and strained and really doesn’t want to have to try to choose which of the two people he cares about most he’s going to try and protect tonight.

Wilde half-stirs when Zolf settles down next to him, but doesn’t fully wake, just shifts slightly to lean against him and shoves the blanket in his direction. Zolf tucks the blanket he grabbed around Hamid before accepting the other half of Wilde’s blanket, and he doesn’t object when he feels Hamid’s head drop onto his shoulder.

“Night, Dad,” Hamid mumbles, sounding more than half asleep.

A lump comes into Zolf’s throat. He has to try twice before he can choke out the words. “Night, Hamid.”

With one hand resting on Hamid’s head and the other gripping Wilde’s hand tightly, Zolf closes his eyes and drifts into sleep, feeling, for the first time in almost two years, like some of the grief has been lifted from his heart.

#ollie writes fanfic #rq gaming #rqg #Zolf Smith #hamid saleh haroun al tahan #angst and feels #spoilers for the entire podcast #we love our grumpy sea dad

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wlntrsldler · 4 years

Text

unrequited (draco malfoy/ cedric diggory series)

PROMPT: You and Cedric grew up together. After the tragedy of the Triwizard Tournament, you’re left feeling empty without your best friend. Draco Malfoy steps into the picture. Will the feelings be reciprocated? Or will it be unrequited?

WARNINGS: MAJOR CHARACTER DEATH, angst, fluff, sadness???

PAIRING: draco malfoy x reader and cedric diggory x reader; hufflepuff reader

WC: 2.3K+

UNREQUITED MASTERLIST

PART 5

You were sitting in Potions by yourself, none of your friends having it during this time of the day. Students were trickling in the classroom, most not opting to spend their few minutes of passing period in their next class. There were only about three other students who sat in their seats, waiting for class to begin. Professor Snape sat at his desk in the front, glancing up at you once in a while when he felt your eyes burning in his direction.

You took out the tattered journal Mr. Diggory gave you, smiling down at the obvious wear and tear. You hadn’t had the heart to open it since you first received it. A part of you almost felt wrong reading Cedric’s thoughts. You never asked him if you could read his journal when he was alive, no matter how often you saw him scribble in the thing. You knew he would’ve let you read it if you wanted, but you figured you never had to. He told you everything without being asked.

You did the same back, minus the part that you never told him how you felt. Besides that, you told Cedric everything. If you had a journal, you’d happily show him. You’d just make sure to not write about him at all. You decided to read it but promised yourself that you would stop if you stumbled upon something you knew Cedric wouldn’t share. Although, there was only a small amount of things that he wouldn’t share with you.

You flipped the front cover to reveal the first page. Low and behold, in Cedric’s messy handwriting, the one that littered your books with notes and tips, read: “If lost, return to Cedric Diggory. If you can’t find me, return to Y/N Y/L/N. I’m almost, always with her.”

A picture of the both of you was taped securely under the words. Parts of the parchment were ripped off, showing that he replaced the photo a few times. In the picture, you two smiled for the camera, grins reaching from ear to ear. As the flash subsided, you two burst in laughter, blinking rapidly as the flash burned both your eyes. Behind you was his house, his dad’s silhouette appeared on the window of the kitchen. The picture was taken the summer before the Triwizard tournament. Your last summer together.

You watched the picture replay a few times before turning the page. On the corner of each page, with no fail, was the date of his entry. The first entry was his first day at Hogwarts. His handwriting never changed over the years and you laughed at that. You skimmed through the page:

“I got sorted as a Hufflepuff. I’m so excited.”

“The Weasley twins are quite funny.”

“I lied, they’re really funny.”

You chuckled a bit, reading his little commentary on the margins of his journal entry. His entries were greatly detailed and so lively. It made you feel like he was sitting beside you, telling you all the stories himself. You read it in his voice, the voice you missed so deeply.

“You didn’t tell me it was your birthday yesterday.” You heard a voice say from beside you. You looked to the side, expecting to see your usual Ravenclaw partner, but instead was greeted by Draco’s neutral expression. You closed the journal and tucked it back in your bag.

“I didn’t think I had to let you know.” You responded, shrugging your shoulders. You started to take your things for the class out of your bag, trying to ignore the overwhelming scent of his expensive cologne. “Why do you care?”

“I don’t.” He said, almost too quickly. He cleared his throat, opening his Potions textbook. “Was just expecting you to say something about it.”

“Well you made it clear that you didn’t want to participate in a conversation with me.”

“Glad you got the memo.”

“Plus we’ve been classmates for years now, Malfoy. You would think that that would be enough time to learn my birthday.”

Draco scoffed, “I don’t pay attention to you enough. I don’t have time to think about pathetic, little Hufflepuffs.”

“But you have time now?” You inquired, pushing his buttons.

“Forget I brought it up.”

You rolled your eyes, already irritated at the boy’s mood swings. It was really odd how he would start conversations just to shut it down right after. You shut your book, rather harshly, and glared at him, “I see my partner making her way over here. Please get out of her seat.”

“No.”

“Move.” You stared him down, not wavering. You were not in the mood to deal with Draco today. You had no time for his constant annoyance and incapability to make his mind up about how he’s going to treat you for the day. You didn’t want to give the class a show similar to how you cornered him, and damn near hexed him, in Dumbledore’s office.

He mimicked your expression, inching closer to you. His hair was brushing his forehead, the color reminding you of the same one you saw last night. His eyes were piercing, the color alone more than enough to intimidate anyone. Draco breathed out, his breath hitting your face. “No.”

“Move or I swear I’ll he-”

“Mr. Malfoy,” Snape’s voice boomed throughout the half-empty classroom. All of the other students in the room stiffened at the sound of his voice. Always so demanding. “Ms. Y/L/N. Your bickering is getting on my nerves. Resolve your issue or I’ll take points away from both of your houses.”

You cowered in your seat, mumbling an apology, and opted to focus on today’s assignment. You heard shuffling from beside you and saw Draco get up from his seat, shooting daggers at the Ravenclaw girl as she made her way beside you. She said a quick greeting to you, not wanting to hold conversation with Draco staring at the back of her skull so intensely. You returned the gesture and placed your Potions book in between the both of you, a habit you’ve grown accustomed to.

It took a while for the students to pile in the classroom. The entire time you tried to focus on your work, trying to plan out your day to dedicate some time for homework and assignments. However, Draco’s constant muttering about Merlin knows what made it particularly difficult for you. You looked over your shoulder, seeing Draco carefully open an envelope he pulled out from the inside of his book.

The wax seal indicated it was from his family, his father, you assumed when you watched his face drop in terror. His face turned paler than ever before as his eyes scanned the parchment. He held it up, as if he couldn’t believe what he was reading. You could almost make it out with the way the sun was shining through the parchment, almost making it see-through. You could pick out a few words: “This summer… familial responsibilities… honor.. chosen.. your time…” You almost read an entire sentence before Draco loudly slammed it onto his desk.

“Something the matter, Y/N?” He asked through gritted teeth, obviously catching you as you tried to read his letter.

“No,” You responded, eyes unable to look away from the parchment he placed down. “Nothing.”

“You should pay attention.” He saw your eyes drift down. He quickly folded it, stuffing it back into the envelope, and gave you a condescending smile. “Wouldn't want you to fall even further behind than you already are.”

“Today, we’ll be creating Amortentia.” Snape started, walking around the room to scold any students who didn’t have their books open. “Does anyone know what Amortentia smells like?”

“It’s different for each person.” A Gryffindor from the back of the room answered.

Snape nodded and started to create it. You and the Ravenclaw- Merlin, you really should remember her name by now- started to take notes. Snape explained things quickly, almost making it difficult to keep up with. You took a look around the room, seeing how some people were invested in the potion while others couldn’t care less. Your eyes drifted towards Draco, wondering if he would be one or other.

His eyes looked past you, focused on Snape. Huh, you thought, wouldn't have pegged him to be a romantic. You stared at him for a few more seconds, watching his hands scribble down on his parchment, his eyes not having to look down to make sure he was writing correctly.You glanced down at his notes, not surprised by his neat penmanship. It was even neater than yours.

“Ms. Y/L/N,” Snape called from the front of the room. You blushed furiously when Draco broke his gaze on Snape and saw you staring at him. You turned back around in your seat, growing more flustered as everyone stared at you. Snape walked over to you, Amortentia in hand. “Since you refuse to pay attention, what do you smell?”

You barely had to take a sniff before your senses were filled with a scent you’ve grown fond of. Chamomile and honey and Cedric. You smiled, biting the corner of your lip. The scent was overwhelming. It was like he was beside you.

You picked up his cologne a week after he died, wanting to feel like he was still with you. Although the scent of Chamomile and honey reminded you of him, it still didn’t feel quite right. Cedric always brought his own scent, a lovely scent, in addition to the cologne. It was different when he wore it.

Your face twisted when another faint smell started tickling your senses. It was soft, barely there, but you could smell it. It wasn’t anything that you would pick up for yourself, nor would Cedric. You tried to sniff it one more time, hoping that the scent would reveal itself. But once you did that, the scent was gone, almost as fast as it came.

“Y/N, what do you smell?” Your partner asked, breaking you from your trance.

You realized you still haven’t answered and everyone in the room was waiting for your answer. You cleared your throat, “I smell Chamomile and honey.”

Snape nodded and walked around the room to let others take a go at it. Your partner gushed about how it smelled like ocean and fresh flowers. You absentmindedly nodded your head, trying your hardest to pay attention to her ramblings. Snape continued his trip around the classroom, holding the Amortentia tightly in his hands.

As he made his way back to the front of the room, you heard Draco call for him softly. Your curiosity got the best of you, tuning out your partner next to you to focus on the conversation behind you.

“Professor.” Draco called, motioning Snape to approach him.

Snape came closer, placing the Amortentia on the table before leaning in, “Yes, Mr. Malfoy?”

“Can I speak to you after class?”

“Is there a problem, Mr. Malfoy?”

Draco was silent for a second before speaking again. “Just had a few questions about the potion.”

Snape nodded, picking it back up and walked to the front. “Stay after class, Mr. Malfoy.”

The rest of the time flew by. You were still trying to remember the faint scent you smelled earlier. Not knowing really bothered you. The name of the scent was on the tip of your tongue, if only you could’ve smelled it one more time and you would've known with certainty.

When Snape announced that class was over, you said goodbye to your partner and packed up your things. A part of you wanted to stick around and hear what Draco was going to ask Snape. Surely, he understood the potion. He was one of the smartest students in your class and his notes were always so well done. Draco never has problems with his academics. This incident really puzzled you.

You decided not to risk getting caught sneaking around by Snape, or worse, Draco. You walked towards the Great Hall, the pestering thought of not knowing what the scent was or what Draco could possibly have questions about occupying your brain the entire time.

As the students walked out of Snape’s classroom, Draco nervously waited for the professor to address him. Snape looked up from his desk, cocking an eyebrow at the boy’s demeanor. He was acting a bit out of character. He motioned for Draco to approach him.

Draco adjusted the strap on his book bag and walked over to Snape, eyes glancing at the Amortentia every other second. “I think the Amortentia doesn’t work on me.”

Snape put his quill down, folding his hands. “I don’t think anyone is immuned to Amortentia.”

“Well, I must be.” Draco insisted.

“Elaborate, Mr. Malfoy.”

“When asked Y/N what the Amortentia smelled like to her,” He trailed off, pointing at the potion. “She said she smelled chamomile and honey. And I’m sure she was referring to Diggory-” He said, voice harsh when saying Cedric’s name. “But I smelled the same thing. Chamomile and honey. And truthfully, sir, I don’t believe I have feelings for Diggory. So that means that I must be immune to it somehow.”

“Mr. Malfoy, you are one of the brightest students in Hogwarts.” Snape complimented, leaning over the desk to say the second part of his message. “But you sure are daft.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Mr. Malfoy, have you noticed that in the wake of Ms. Y/L/N’s grief over the loss of Cedric Diggory, she has done some things to help her cope?”

“Yes, sir.” Draco nodded, confused by where Snape was going with the conversation.

“Alright. Are you aware that one of those things is wearing his cologne, causing her to sport his scent?”

Draco’s face paled, then turned a bright shade of red. His eyes widened, realizing that he just confessed something to his professor, without knowing that there was something to confess. He stuttered, “I-uh…”

“No trouble, Mr. Malfoy,” Snape dismissed him with his hand, shooing him towards the exit. “Enjoy the rest of your day.”

TAGLIST IS OPEN! SEND AN ASK!

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mira--mira · 3 years

Note

Madara and Hashirama for the ask meme 👀

Hashirama

What I love about them:

I really love Hashirama's stubborn optimism. I say "stubborn" here bc I think after a certain point of pain in misery in someone's everyday life, in some way it is a choice to remain optimistic despite that suffering. I don't characterize Hashirama as constantly happy and he can recognize the more realistic/pessimistic possibilities, he just refuses to accept them. I have it in my notes for OoT but haven't worked it in verbatim but Madara would call him "ruthlessly optimistic " and while that's tinged with Madara's own bias, I think it fits quite well.

What I hate about them:

Hashirama is stubbornly optimistic LOL. It's a double-edged sword and I think by the time he reached adulthood in a canon setting, Hashirama was so desperate for there to be peace he maintained his "everything will work out" attitude when he otherwise shouldn't have. There were the concerns with Madara and the Uchiha, his own brothers views that he certainly should have recognized could become a problem, and, after depending on when Tobirama took on students/how old they were, the possibility of biases being passed down and a Danzo like figure coming to power. However this was not Hashirama's responsibility alone to fix. I don't think, despite his love, Hashirama alone could have kept Madara in a village that hated him and a clan that distrusted him. Tobirama was an adult and let his own bias pass under a veil of "logic" and passed that, either intentionally or unintentionally down to his students. None of this is Hashirama's fault, but I think part of the canon story being a tragedy was he was blinded by a bright, hopeful future that he failed to see the early signs right in front of him.

Favorite Moment/Quote:

"To me, Madara was like a gift from the divine."

Even thinking about it makes me melt. It's so sweet and really emphasizes how much Madara means to him. 🥺

What I would like to see more focus on:

In fics? Hashirama's mental health and how his childhood affected him. Most of the long fics I've read focus on Madara. Which I understand, Madara has an arc into becoming a villain while Hashirama is just kinda "there" and it's easy for him to fulfill a support role to helping Madara in canon Au fics. A sort of unshakeable, always optimistic stone for Madara to depend on and stop his downward spiral into villainy. But, what makes hashimada so great for me is that Madara and Hashirama are equals. There will be times one falters and needs to depend on the other, and they're capable of giving each other that support. It'd also be great to see Hashirama struggle yet continue to choose optimism and compassion time after time because that feels more weighty and important than an eternally optimistic characterization that never wavers.

Headcanon wise...this isn't something I've found but desperately want to see (and will come up in all of my own aus) is the connection between the god tree and the god of shinobi who's famed ninjutsu is wood release and who's cells can be used for everything under the sun and are specifically needed to control the gedo statue / ten-tails. 👀 Look when I got back into Naruto and only vaguely knew about the war arc plot I thought Kishimoto was Doing Something with that. He was not. I am.

What I would like to see less focus on:

This is pretty much mentioned above but Hashirama as mainly a support for Madara rather than getting his own (non romantic) arcs in long canon Au fics. Headcanon wise, this is such a small nitpick, but Hashirama constantly being the one described as warm whereas Madara is cold. The big tree can *retain* heat, but he pales in comparison to Madara's ability to *generate* heat.

Favorite pairing with:

Hashimada (Hashirama x Madara)

No one should be surprised. I can wax prose about this for days but it's about ultimately finding someone else in a terrible world that *understands* you that you can grow with and support. I'm a sucker for friends to lovers and battle couples so guess what's right up my alley?

Favorite friendship:

Canon/BoaF- Hashirama & Mito

I know Madara & Mito is more popular, and I do love their dynamic but christ Hashirama needs friends outside Madara and Tobirama and I think they'd be good friends. Canon!Mito would provide a good level-headed perspective and wouldn't have the messy, complicated history like the three founders have together and it'd be good for Hashirama to get a break from that. BoaF!Mito and Hashirama are cousins their relationship eventually progresses to a sibling-like bond. They’re quite protective of each other and gossip endlessly together. Mito’s not as good as gardening, but they do it together and incorporate Uzumaki sealing techniques for certain houseplant decorations. Mito also might know about Madara 👀

OoT-Hashirama & Sakura or Hashirama & Sai

His and Sakura's relationship is p similar to how I would characterize his and Mito's but with the added hilarity of Sakura being his "student" yet having 0 deference for him once they actually get to the "teaching" part (surprise: Hashirama's most uttered lines are "you do the thing, you know the thing, you know you just...do it. The thing. Madara "translates" a lot of their sessions.) Hashirama and Sai antagonize each other constantly and he *will* tease Sai into oblivion as any older brother would. Tobirama never reacted to Hashirama's mischief in ~fun~ ways and he felt bad about messing with Itama, who was even more emotional than he was and Kawarama, who hero-worshipped him. Sai is the perfect "if anyone messes with you I will personally make them regret being born yet *I* will tease you mercilessly to my hearts content" kind of little brother.

NOTP:

Hashitobi (Hashirama x Tobirama)

I don't do incest. At all. Even "non-incest" aus where they aren't technically related squick me out.

Favorite headcanon:

Hashirama can Speak to the trees.

Either humorously or seriously, I love this kinda, sorta, maybe not quite human power.

Madara

What I love about them:

Madara is kind and does his best to do what he thinks is right. The “kind” point is a lot of Hashirama talking/flashbacks and the “good” intention behind the Infinite Tsukuyomi. Making everyone a “winner” in the dreamworld, while absolutely insane and full of holes, is odd for a villain’s motivation. His role in the war arc is mostly focused on watching him wreck absolutely everyone he comes into contact with but I love Hashirama’s flashbacks and the glimpses of kid!Madara we get. Madara believed in his philosophy from a lifetime of pain that ended in him losing everything and being manipulated but he was still seeking a way to “help” the most people he could. He’s such a rich character that makes it easy to want to imagine other what-if scenarios where things turned out just a bit differently.

What I hate about them:

Madara takes all responsibility onto himself. This is more speculation because we don’t get Madara’s POV of his childhood or any significant scenes with the clan. However, I think this is one of the primary roots of most of Madara’s problems. If he blamed himself for mistakes that weren’t technically his, he could get into a cycle where he only blames himself and doesn’t seek help/support when he should have and purposefully reduces his support circle because he becomes paranoid that he won’t be able to protect them. A smaller issue that is both about Madara and not is he didn’t fall victim to the Talk no Jutsu, but was Madara aware of what was happening when he was possessed(?) by Kaguya? I forgot but if he wasn’t...I don’t think he’d agree Hashirama’s way was the right way at the end, merely his way was wrong. Because, in Madara’s point of view, the village may have been “better” (used very loosely) than becoming food/power for an alien goddess but it wasn’t good. It wasn’t the solution. Hashirama saying they were both wrong in some way saved the scene but Madara still jumped back to Hashirama’s dream being the right one too quickly imo.

Favorite Moment/Quote:

“What are you going to do about the second [meteor] Onoki?”

I’m sorry, that was just hilarious. We see this man slaughter an entire division and drop a meteor from the sky...two kages desperately try to stop it and it looks like they managed to succeed and he just...cool. What about the second? Really cemented Madara is Here and he is Dramatic. A close second fav is him flying across the battlefield to confront Hashirama only for the “I’ll deal with you later” line.

What I would like to see more focus on:

I really love it when fics fill in the blanks of Madara’s childhood/his time with the Uchiha so that’s always a plus for me. The other thing is Hashirama calls Madara a “fundamentally kind man” and according to Tobirama the Uchiha feel love “too deeply” so I like fics that do focus on these aspects of Madara’s personality while staying true to his prickly demeanor. For headcanons I love, love, love exploring kekkei genkai/ninjutsu/genjutsu and how they individually affect people/clans. Digging deeper so that “fire affinity” means constantly running hot/pushing into possibly having fire resistance/unable to distinguish “too hot” / or even affinity acting like a secondary blood type so even if two people had AB blood if one had a water affinity and the other fire their blood would be incompatible. Also the mundane ways powers can be used (I have some Ideas for non-combat genjustu applications that the Uchiha use and those will come up in OoT 👀)

What I would like to see less focus on:

This again kinda ties into the Hashirama segments, but Madara completely depending on Hashirama and Hashirama alone for happiness. Especially in long AUs where he’s still in Konoha but has a poor relationship with the Uchiha. That’s fine starting out! But if the fic ends or doesn’t seriously work on improving that relationship it just sits a bit weird with me bc I don’t think Madara could be truly happy in that situation. (NSFW start) The other thing I see commonly is Madara is extremely passive/submissive in bed with Hashirama which is...weird to me? There’s also a reoccurring thing where he doesn’t have a lot of experience but Hashirama does and this leads to embarrassment and the aforementioned passive/submissiveness. I understand lack of experience can be embarrassing and I do believe Madara could be embarrassed, but instead of withdrawing into himself I think he’d push through it with something close to bravado and his usual single-minded intensity, for better or worse. I do think Madara usually bottoms in his and Hashirama’s relationship but both of them are as enthusiastic about sex as they are fighting and neither is especially submissive or dominant. (NSFW end)

Favorite pairing with:

Hashimada (Hashirama x Madara)

See absolutely everything else 😂

Favorite friendship:

Canon/BoaF- Madara & Naori or Madara & Hikkaku

I really like focusing on the Uchiha clan and exploring the dynamics within it. We get nothing about Madara’s early life outside of Hashirama so this is almost completely speculation. For the angst of canon, I like Madara being close to his clan only to lose them after his friendship with Hashirama is revealed bc he awakened his sharingan over Hashirama and that can’t be easily hidden. For BoaF, a large part of it is exploring the clans’ cultures before they made the village so this necessitates actually fleshing out said clans. Naori and Izuna are v similar in personality and both live to prank Madara and annoy him, but they hardly ever team up bc they start squabbling amongst themselves. Hikakku is stoic and calm in contrast to Naori’s mania and Madara’s intensity but he keeps track of every little favor and Madara dreads the day he’ll act on them because he knows it’ll result in something embarrassing for him. But like all BoaF!Uchiha, they’re fiercely protective of one another and you really don’t want to insult the wrong person.

OoT - Madara & Naruto or Madara & Sai

I really Madara and Naruto’s dynamic, it’s very entertaining and fun for me to write and they’re both positive influences on each other. Madara gets more people to smother with his brand of affection and Naruto gets early recognition and training. Their weird non-training shenanigans (coupon collecting, gaming, etc.) also is p amusing. Madara and Sai have a similar relationship but I really like writing theirs from Sai’s POV bc he insists that he doesn’t feel close/like when Madara treats him like a little brother when he really does.

NOTP:

Madatobi (Madara x Tobirama)

Logically, I know why this pairing is popular. Fanfic is saturated with the enemies to lovers trope yet emotionally I Do Not Understand it. Personally, I don’t enjoy toxic relationships, to read or write. And, to me, that’s what a close canon Madara and Tobirama pairing would be. Tobirama tried to convince Hashirama to kill him, he killed Izuna, even if it was in war, and I don’t think Madara could or would get over that. If Tobirama has similar attitudes about the Uchiha it makes it worse. AUs exist to rewrite this, of course, but I still don’t enjoy their romantic chemistry. At best, I like Tobirama and Madara as reluctant frenemies who insult each other and try to one-up each other.

Favorite headcanon:

Madara is fire proof.

I have a whole rant about this in OoT’s author notes 😂 Sasuke’s Amaterasu should have been a serious threat when it hit him. Instead the man just lets his clothes fall off then kicks their asses. He’s fire proof.

In response to the ask game:

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writingithink · 3 years

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Improbable Multiversal Transcending Temporal Spacetime Event Pairing: Metacrisis Tenth Doctor/Rose Tyler Rated: T Word Count: 7,101 Summary: The best way to show someone you care is to blow up their job ... right? Notes: I'm back! And it's not a Tangled Timelines update (sorry!) But it is something? I've had this in my WIPs for awHILE now, and when I was cleaning my studio the other night I found a planning page for it in a random tote bag and was like ... oh yeah. And the ending just came to me and I love it when that happens. Hopefully there will be another chapter up for Tangled Timelines soon, though!

As always, infinite thanks to my wonderful beta, @hey-there-juliet who is fine with me randomly sending her fics at all hours and with no warning XP

All mistakes are mine, as always.

<<READ IT ON AO3>>

If the other him in the other universe had taken the time to imagine their human life together in a parallel universe, the Doctor doubted he would have pictured this. His imagination, when it came to Rose Tyler, was always quite whimsical. Happiness had made him impractical, really. Because despite all of the drawbacks, all of the reasons he currently loathed himself, the Doctor knew every single reason why the other truly felt like this was the best possible option.

But maybe it wasn’t.

Sometimes, despite it not occurring too often, he was wrong.

They had spent five and a half hours on the beach at Bad Wolf Bay.

(I create myself.)

She had been so upset; said that after everything they’d went through, everything she did to get back, the other him owed her a proper goodbye. She had stopped speaking to him when he told her that, actually, he would never give her a proper goodbye.

And she didn’t let him explain why. Now that he finally could.

Now it had been 57 days since she’d last spoken to him. Since he’d gotten more than a brief glimpse of her with his own eyes. That he’d spent piecing together a picture of what her life had been like here, without him. Such a short time, really, now that it was over (almost over), but yet also some of the worst moments of his entire existence.

It seemed fair that the multiverse would demand just that extra sequence of pain, considering everything he could potentially get in return. What another version of himself could only hope for, bitterly gambling eternities, following their timeline through all of it’s complicated swirls and turns, names weaving around each other, stamping themselves on the structure of creation.

Forever isn’t something that ends.

(How long are you going to stay with me?)

Quite the opposite, actually. And he knew, eventually, she would remember that. Knew it, but didn’t feel it.

The Doctor finally understood what all of the human writers meant about falling in love. Not just the terrifying sensation of the unstoppable freefall, but also the immense pain of crashing into the immovable object at the end of the journey.

They had sat on opposite ends of a Zeppelin. He had gone back to the Tyler Manor with Jackie, and Rose had gone back to her flat. Hoping to see her, talk to her, he had immediately joined Torchwood (once they agreed to his very detailed, highly specific, entirely ironclad contract). Their paths rarely crossed, and when they did it was just tiny, insubstantial moments.

A flash of her at the far end of a hall. Her name in a report (a lot of reports). Snatches of her voice, there one moment and gone the next.

It all made everything hurt so much more, somehow, having her so close but yet further than he could have possibly imagined.

But yet …

His imagination, when it came to Rose Tyler, was still quite whimsical. So when he tried to think of the bigger picture, waxing poetic, alone on his office couch, the Doctor tried to look at the last few years as the impact, and this as the aftershock. Still, philosophical jaunts weren’t exactly a solution to his problem. A temporary solution was moving his office even further away, so that’s what he did.

Plus, he found it kind of fitting, commandeering the inside of Big Ben. UNIT may have it in the prime universe, but in this universe he had the fancy landmark office. Well, office-slash-home (without Rose Tyler, a proper house with doors and things was absolutely unthinkable). Not that it was just about having a private laugh. The gears soothed him, the sound of ticking helped the gnawing emptiness that had filled his mind ever since the TARDIS dematerialized without him in it. The Doctor had thought it was kind of fitting - the closest he could possibly be right now to time.

Not that he wasn’t spending every possible spare moment working on the baby TARDIS, just a tiny piece of coral still, currently sitting in the extended electro-percussive environment chamber. He wondered if, in three years (his best-possible projected timetable), when the new TARDIS would be ready for flight, she would still not be speaking to him.

Incidentally, the emergence of that thought and the start of his supposed ‘self-isolation’ coincided to an alarming degree for how coincidental the two really were. The fact of the matter was, he was busy. Tons of experiments to run, alien equipment to identify, classify (and more often than not remove from Torchwood entirely), a baby TARDIS to tend to, and a backlog of Rose’s mission reports to hack into made spending slightly over three weeks in his tower easy.

The problem was the fact that during that time the Doctor avoided sleeping, barely remembered to eat, and existed on overly sugared tea alone. Not sleeping didn’t put the demons at bay, but at least when he was awake he wasn’t forced to confront the man he never wanted to remember being.

It had been 57 days since Rose Tyler had last spoken to him, and the Doctor detonated a bomb in the abandoned annex Torchwood had scheduled to be demolished and rebuilt.

Then the counter reset to zero.

“What do you think you’re doing?!” she yelled, barging into the top floor lab where he had been checking the readings on the EEPEC.

Everything that he wanted to say to her, and the Doctor was struck mute.

“Whatever plans you think you have, however good of an idea it is, for the good of the planet or, or the galaxy or what, you don’t just go blowing up buildings without a word to anyone! Do you know that everyone else was too scared to come up here and have a word with you, because that highly confidential ridiculous contract you drew up made its way through the gossips and isn’t so classified anymore. Now no one wants to go toe to toe with the man who ‘speaks for the planet’,” Rose growled through the air quotes. “So tell me, Doctor, what genius reason you’ve got for blowing up the Records Annex?”

A slow smile spread across his face.

“It worked.”

“What?”

“Remember ‘run’?” he asked, bouncing away from the baby TARDIS and circling her, picking up his new sonic screwdriver as he did and deadlock sealing the only door off the floor.

“Run?” she frowned as he circled back.

“Run,” he whispered in her ear as he passed, running up a small set of stairs to flip a giant switch that activated the clock-lights outside of their automated timer. Likely no one noticed outside with the sun still out, but it lit up the lab. “Henrik’s basement, Nestene Consciousness, shop window dummies, you and me. How did that night end?” he asked, with a manic grin as he skidded to a stop in front of her.

“Oh, that ‘run’,” Rose breathed, trying to fight back a smile. “You blew up my job.”

“I blew up your job.”

She huffed, blowing her bangs out of her eyes, and crossed her arms. His shoulders fell, exhaustion pressing down onto each and every bone of his new, much more fragile body.

“I just want to talk,” he told her, only a moment away from begging.

“Alright then. Talk.”

Everything he wanted to say to her, and all of it felt disjointed in his overtired mind. Yet she was here now, and if she left he didn’t have a new idea for getting her back again. So he talked.

“I’m sorry. That I made this choice for you, even if it was technically a different me who did it. I’m sorry that this is the best option, the safest option. I’m sorry I never got the chance to explain everything to you before. But I am never going to say goodbye to you, Rose. Never. And I know that the power of words doesn’t translate as well for you, the science of psycho-kinetic-telepathic influence on the elements of creation. But there are some things I can never risk saying aloud. There are some beings that exist, at least in our original universe, that could easily- … still, no matter what universe we’re in, I’m never going to say it. Forever, Rose Tyler. It’s longer than you can comprehend. An eternal silence stretching infinitely ahead, timelines swirling in every direction. This one is ours, if you’ll- if you could just- if you could see in twenty-odd dimensions and focused on individual temporal waveforms, the quantum reality of specific-”

“Doctor!” she shouted when his legs gave out, immediately grabbing hold of him, joining him on the floor.

“I’m fine,” he insisted, but when he moved to get back up she easily held him down. Rose gently manipulated his face, giving him a basic medical check. He couldn’t help but smile a little at how much she had learned while they were away, only to then frown at how hard he imagined it all must have been for her. Floundering, he tried to make a joke. “So, I’m still the Doctor?”

Which went ignored.

“You look like a wreck,” she told him, and it wasn’t new information. The Doctor now made much more frequent trips to the restroom and was well aware of how pale he was, of the dark circles under his bloodshot eyes. He had at least been making a disjointed effort to shave, which was another activity that had increased with his meta crisis, and admittedly it had slipped his mind for a couple days.

“It’s not easy, doing this without you,” he admitted. “But if you need more time, I want you to take it. I really am alright. There’s just so much I need to tell you, now that I can.”

“What do you mean, ‘now that you can’?”

“Different universe, firm walls in between. I don’t have to worry about using the wrong words at the wrong time and having cosmic consequences … for a lot of things, not all things. With our timeline in a different dimension and reality back as it should be, at least for the moment, I can tell you all sorts of things. Though the most important one, the one I’m never going to miss an opportunity to say, is that I love you, Rose Tyler. Forever.”

“I love you, too,” she sighed, caressing his cheek for a moment before helping him up. “But I’m still mad at you. Now you need sleep.”

“But I’m not done talking,” the Doctor complained, dragging his feet as she led him over to the sofa in the corner.

“We’ll talk more after you’ve gotten some rest, okay? I promise.”

“Thank you,” he sighed, more horizontal than he remembered being just a moment ago. Something soft and warm ensconced his body. He hadn’t realized how cold he had been until just then.

Another breath and black oblivion overtook him. Peaceful until it suddenly very much wasn’t.

A shockwave. A rift in time and space. A breached void. A crack in reality. A big red button. No more. Howling, howling, howling.

“Wake up!”

His eyes snapped open.

He didn’t know where he was. Nothing felt right; not the air, not time, not even his own body. The Doctor tried to do a quick systems check, and the results were all wrong. His hand flew to his chest, where only one heart was beating.

A choking scream echoed through the space, which seemed to be tick tick ticking, and he didn’t realize that it was him who shouted until soothing hands were brushing through his hair. Vision focusing, he saw Rose Tyler kneeling next to him, or at least it was something that looked like Rose Tyler. She felt too cool. Or maybe he was too warm.

“Are you real?” he asked, hoping that she wouldn’t lie to him.

Just one heart working, and it was beating too fast, refusing to slow down. The air was too thick, he couldn’t breathe.

“Yeah.” A sad smile. “I’m real.”

The Doctor didn’t know if he believed her, closing his eyes so that he wouldn’t have to see the moment she inevitably vanished. “I’m dying,” he told the being-who-might-be-Rose as he shuddered and collapsed back onto some sort of sofa.

“You’re fine,” she lied, but it was a lie she seemed to believe.

“Only got one heart beating,” he admitted, trying to get his breathing under control as his malfunctioning body began to sweat. The room ticked away, and he wondered if all of this was about to explode, if he should be running, if he even could run. His legs felt like lead. So did his arms. The air was too thick, dragging him down.

“That’s-”

The Doctor shut his eyes tighter, tears escaping that he hadn’t even realized were there. She must have vanished, just like he knew she would. And if she was never real to begin with, why did it have to hurt so much for her to go?

A weight rested on top of him, and he would never forget the feel of her. He vaguely wondered what it meant for him, to be having tactile hallucinations. Olfactory hallucinations. Even the buzz of time that had never left her skin after she took in the vortex was present.

“You’ve still got two beating,” Rose whispered as his arms wrapped around her in a tight hold that didn’t feel nearly strong enough to keep her. He wasn’t strong enough to keep her.

Her heart beat steadily over where his right heart had failed.

“I’m scared,” the Doctor admitted, eyes still closed though it was oddly easier to breathe.

“I’ve got you.”

“Please be real,” he whimpered, even as his mind grew foggier.

She said something, but he didn’t know what. Everything was fading away, darkness becoming darker, becoming void.

Nothing.

The Doctor awoke alone on the couch in his office. According to his time sense, he had slept for eighteen hours and twenty-one minutes. He felt better than he had in weeks, but also so much worse. He grabbed his pillow and screamed into it.

“What’s wrong now?”

The pillow dropped from his hands and his eyes locked with Rose’s as she raced up the slight stair onto the platform that separated his primary workspace from the rest of the top floor.

“What?” His voice cracked.

Rose Tyler sat next to him on the couch, hand immediately resting on his forehead, primitively gauging his temperature. The Doctor cleared his throat before trying again.

“Rose, what are you doing here? Not that I’m not glad, I’m so very, very glad you’ve come.” Her hand dropped away and he was able to get a good look at her, dressed in a pair of his boxers and one of his shirts (Jackie had bought him a ridiculous amount of clothes before he left the manor, all of which he sent out to be cleaned). He swallowed audibly. “W-why are you wearing my clothes?”

“‘M locked in here. Door’s deadlock sealed.”

Flashes of memories began to speed through him. Attaching a re-calibrated Tziklian implosion grenade to a newly-repaired retroreflective Clishtahrr drone. Obsessively trying to circumvent his vision in order to peer at his own timeline, making himself sick. A contained rift event in the lower levels of the tower that made him feel like he had looked into the untempered schism again.

(Run, run, run!)

“I’m sorry. I don’t … I’ll just …”

He pushed himself up onto unsteady legs, found his sonic screwdriver and unsealed the door. And he wished he hadn’t trapped her with him, even if he was starting to remember why (inky black terror crawling up his spine, wrong universe, wrong universe, wrong universe).

“Do you remember what happened yesterday?” she asked, following him as he went to check the TARDIS on autopilot, looking as if she was worried he would collapse (again).

“It’s coming back to me,” the Doctor admitted. Still had a good four hours to go before the shatterfry process would be complete. He straightened his shoulders, trying to stand tall as he turned to face her. “Things got a little, uhm, unpleasant. I’ll do better.”

“Unpleasant,” Rose scoffed. “I’m pretty sure you had a bleedin’ breakdown!”

“It’s been a difficult regeneration,” he deflected, turning away, leaving the platform and making a beeline to the tiny kitchenette tucked off to the side. Tea. He just needed more tea.

“So, this how it’s gonna be, then? All that stuff about wanting to talk, but now you’re just done?”

He nearly spilled the kettle with the speed of his turn, brows furrowed and mouth falling open. “What? Of course I want to talk!” the Doctor exclaimed. “Just, er, what did I say? Before?”

Memory was still a bit of a blur. Successful energy funnel for the TARDIS’ growth tank. Vodka tasting different in a universe without potatoes. Reports saying: Correct universe. Wrong time - past. No contact.

“You don’t remember?”

“I said it was coming back to me, it’s just not coming in the right order.” he sighed, refocusing on the tea.

“Well, what’s the last thing that you vividly remember?” Rose asked, moving around him, easily finding mugs and sugar and milk.

“Thirteen days ago, creating a temporal disruption chrono-field manipulator. Needed to siphon rift energy for our TARDIS. She needs a very specific growth environment.”

“Thirteen days?! Wait, siphoning the-” She leaned against the tiny countertop and covered her face with her hands. The only sound for a few moments was of the electric kettle quickly boiling the water. “Our TARDIS?”

“If you want,” the Doctor muttered, lifting a hand, wanting to touch her, but then thinking better of it. He clenched his fist as it dropped to his side.

Rose groaned as she turned back to him. “Of course I want that, you daft alien git! But you don’t exactly make things easy, do ya? I spent years getting back to you, and then suddenly there’s two of you and one of you abandons me just like I was always afraid of, but one of you stays and I’m expected to be able to process any of it? And then for weeks it’s an effort just to give myself space, knowing that wherever I go you’re so close, part of me wondering why I’m even trying to stay away when all I wanted for ages was to be back with you. Then suddenly you’re gone! I still know where you are, but there isn’t a chance that I’d actually run into you. And I still don’t know what to feel, but coming here yesterday, seeing you … I don’t think I’ve ever seen you look so broken.” There were tears in her eyes. His nails dug into his palms with the effort it took not to wrap his arms around her, to wipe them away. “I can’t help but feel like it’s my fault.”

“It’s not. It’s my own fault. You haven’t done a single thing wrong,” he assured her.

“That’s not true and you know it,” she tried to laugh, but it came out watery. “I’ve been an absolute cow. And I still haven’t answered your question. You’d said some things about words being a type of science, and that you could say things here that you couldn’t in the other universe. Like you were paranoid, under surveillance or something? I think you tried to describe how your time sense stuff works, but you almost fainted.”

“Fifty-seven days without you and that’s what I was talking about?” The Doctor grimaced.

The kettle clicked off.

“If it makes you feel better, it was kinda romantic. The stuff about not saying goodbye and forever and blowing up my job.”

“Blowing up your what?!”

“That’s why I had to come here. You blew up the old Records Annex.”

“Riiiiight. That explains the drone bomb. It’s not like they weren’t going to blow it up anyway. Didn’t I help?”

Rose rolled her eyes before moving to fix both their teas. “We’ll get into that later. Right now I don’t even want to talk about us. I wanna know about you, what you’ve been doing these past two months. Because I didn’t even stop to think what this all must be like for you.”

Cuppa in hand, the Doctor led her back to the couch as he tried to think of how best to explain something that he barely understood himself.

“I was created in a two-way human-Time Lord instant biological meta crisis. Hundreds of years as one being, then suddenly two. Exact same mind, almost the exact same body, but different enough that I can barely comprehend existing in it. If you remember, the first forty-eight hours of the regeneration cycle are complicated and dangerous. Barely a few hours into mine I was dropped outside of the prime universe that all Gallifreyans are meant to exist in, cut off from all telepathic contact as the walls of reality continued to sway, slowly falling back into place. It’s been … an adjustment. Sometimes things don’t feel real, even when they are. Sometimes things feel incredibly real, even when they aren’t.”

“You had a nightmare,” Rose told him, placing a hand on his shoulder, thumb rubbing soothing circles through his layers. “I woke you up, tried to help. You didn’t think I was real. You thought you were dying, because you only had one heart.”

He tried to smile, and the action felt painful. “Sounds about right.”

“I’m sorry. If I hadn’t been so selfish-”

“There’s nothing for you to apologize for. I want you to put yourself first.”

“But I can’t stand seeing you in pain like this. What can I do to help?” she asked, a desperation in her eyes that he couldn’t bear.

“You’re already helping,” the Doctor sighed, finally giving in and leaning into her touch, lying his head on her shoulder. It was the closest he’d felt to time since they’d been left on that bloody beach.

Memories were still racing through his head. Energy coils radiating artron energy into a centrifuge. The smell of burnt flesh against the remains of a Bverni navigational system. Reports saying: Correct universe. Wrong time - future. No contact.

“The other Doctor said that you needed me.”

He laughed, but there was no humor in it.

“Yes, because he needs you. He also said that I was dangerous. I am. He is. We are. But you already knew that. It’s easy, you know, to yell at yourself. Not often that there’s actually a separate you there to yell at. I destroyed the Daleks, but we’d already done that before we met. In fact, so did you. The other me was lashing out, knowing what he would have to do but not wanting to do it.”

“That’s another thing,” Rose said, moving to face him, dislodging his head, “you said that us being here, in this universe, was the best, safest option. What was that about?”

“Something’s coming. Has come. Ended and began. There’s a massive paradox surrounding me in the other universe. Incredibly dangerous, potentially catastrophic. All I know is that it has something to do with a woman named River Song who claims to be my wife.”

“Your wife?!”

“I said claims. And she did seem to be telling the truth, besides the fact that what she was saying was entirely preposterous. My soul is entirely bound to yours.” The Doctor took her hand and squeezed it. “So I think I have an idea of the kind of man I’ll have to become in order to keep the universe intact.”

“What’s that?”

“A liar. If she is going to believe that I could possibly join myself to someone else, someone who isn’t you, I’m going to have to lie. I’m going to have to forget. I’m going to have to lie so well and for so long that even I believe the fiction I’ve created for myself.”

He wondered what the other him in the other universe would think, then, whenever he caught a rare glimpse at their timeline surrounded in gold, bound with Rose’s for all eternity. What kind of explanation he would craft. The Doctor shuddered.

“But that sounds horrible!” she cried.

“It’s the sacrifice he’s making for the sake of the universe. My timeline is dangerous and someone, something is tampering with it. You and I made one tiny little paradox and it almost destroyed everything. This one is circular, might be able to be maintained, but the scale of it, Rose. And who knows if it will even work. River seems great and all, at least I hope so, but I don’t think she has much of a handle on time travel. That, or she’s a manipulative psychopath. Suppose that’s a surprise for the other me to find out.”

Rose sniffled and he pulled her into a hug.

“He’s going to be all alone.” The words were muffled into his shoulder, his shirt growing damp with her tears. He cringed and tried to think rationally, that of course she would feel this way, that it had nothing to do with how she felt about him him. But then again, maybe it did.

“He won’t be alone. He’ll find someone. I always do, eventually.”

“B-but I-”

“We’ll figure it out. How to get you back there, once it’s safe,” he whispered into the top of her head. Maybe that would be it- what she needed this him for. And if so, it would be enough. It would have to be enough.

“Really?”

The Doctor nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

“So it’s not- you really weren’t abandoning me here?” Rose lifted her head, eyes brimming with a hope that had been missing before.

“Never.” The word felt as if it was torn out of his very being.

She cupped his cheek, stubble beginning to smooth out into the beginnings of a beard. He really needed to shave.

“I thought you said to never say never ever?”

“That was before.”

It occurred to him that he had tea, so he took a sip - it had gone cold.

“Oh, right, all the, uhm, psychic-kinetic-telepathy science stuff.”

He opened his mouth to correct her - she was very close, though - but was interrupted by the ringing of the giant clock. It was heavily muffled by the sound proofing adjustments he had made while setting up the office, but still audible enough.

“It’s eight now, yeah?” Rose asked, even as she moved away.

“Yes.”

She walked over to his desk, where the Doctor now noticed a pile of her folded clothes sat. He frowned when she brought them over to him.

“Do you think you could sonic these clean for me? I’m gonna quick hop into your decontamination shower.”

“Th- there’s a proper shower, it’s two floors down. First left, third right, door marked ‘Security Level Alpha’.”

“What, really?”

“Didn’t want random lab techs using it. Has a retina scan. It’ll let you in.”

Rose laughed, ruffled his hair, and gave him a kiss on the cheek before disappearing to get ready for work. The whole thing left him confused. He went through his list again, checking and double checking to make sure that this all was real . It was, just as it had been all morning.

More memories. Recalibrating the tower’s new sub-basement weapon’s vault. Burnt toast and no more jam left. Reports saying: Correct universe. Wrong time - future. Contact made.

It wasn’t fair that she had spent almost an entire day with him yet he had missed most of it. Still, he sonicked her clothes, as well as his tea. Finished his cuppa, and then had a second before Rose came back from her shower.

“Why’s there no one around?”

“Dangerous radiation leak,” the Doctor shrugged. “I fixed it almost as soon as it happened, but apparently there’s ‘procedures’. How’d you get in?”

She bit her lip, fighting a smile. “Mighta shot a few of your doors,” Rose admitted, picking up an electro-pulse blaster off of a nearby cart. Non-lethal on organic matter. Very effective on fancy doors. “Nobody told me anything about a radiation leak, though.”

“Classified radiation leak.”

“And why’s that?” she scowled, hands on her hips.

“Everything to do with time travel is classified to this office. Bethany is not being very cooperative about putting you down as a liaison-whatever. Please believe me, I wasn’t trying to keep anything a secret.”

“Oh.” Rose glanced over at the EEPEC, absently biting her thumbnail.

The Doctor didn’t know what she was thinking, didn’t know if he should ask. After a moment she disappeared into the loo to change, promising to be back in a tick.

It was a funny multiverse, really, that his reunion with Rose Tyler would be such a stilted thing. That it would be about him and her, but not this him. Acknowledged with a few questions after his health, sure, but that was just polite. She’d always been compassionate, caring for others. Rose didn’t see him as the Doctor. Not the proper one. Sure, she used his name, but it would be easier for her to do that this time around.

He looked just like him.

He was him.

But he wasn’t.

Memories were still coming. Adjustments to Torchwood’s alien tech retrieval protocols. Nutrition shots. Reports reading: Correct universe. Wrong time - past. Contact made.

He went through the list again. Still real.

Unless it wasn’t.

Unless he wasn’t.

What would have stopped the other Doctor from knocking him out and uploading him into a matrix? Giving him a half-life with a programmed Rose Tyler?

The air here felt wrong.

(Wrong universe. Wrong universe. Wrong universe.)

“Doctor!”

(Daleks exploding. “What have you done?!”)

Pressure against his hands. Why was it so dark?

The Doctor opened his eyes to see Rose in front of him, pulling his fingers away from his palms. Oh. He was bleeding. Hadn’t even noticed.

“Sorry, sorry.” He spun away from her in order to grab the first aid kit from his desk.

“What happened?” she asked, vibrating with barely contained panic.

“Nothing, nothing. Things just got jumbled for a second,” he assured her, efficiently cleaning his palms and wrapping them in gauze in a practiced motion.

“How often do you-”

“Hard to say. I’ve been graphing them. Seems to be stress contingent, but generally decreasing. My senses are gradually acclimating to this universe, so I have to hope that once they do, I’ll be fine. Perfect. Molto bene. No inconvenient lapses.”

“Stress? What h- oh.”

He didn’t like the sound of that ‘oh’. The Doctor clenched his jaw before facing her.

“We still haven’t talked about us,” Rose pointed out, approaching him slowly. Like he was a wild animal. Like he would hurt her. “And you … you don’t really remember yesterday still, do you?”

“Not really.”

His hands hurt. His body ached. One heart, and it was beating so quickly that he was sure it would give out.

Rose wrapped her arms around him and he automatically returned the embrace.

“Maybe I should just call in,” she suggested as she pulled away. “We can just take the day?”

“Or don’t and stay anyway,” the Doctor couldn’t help pointing out. “Some bits have come back, and didn’t they send you here?”

She burst into laughter. “Oh my god, they did!”

And it was beyond words, how great it was to hear her laughing again. To see her smiling.

But …

That was wrong.

Rose was upset with him.

Time didn’t feel right.

The air tasted off.

Wrong Universe. Wrong Universe. Wrong Universe.

The Doctor staggered backwards.

His respiratory bypass was malfunctioning. It was like it wasn’t even there. He couldn’t get air into his lungs.

Everything went black.

There was a shot of gold, and then a different kind of black.

“Doctor,” said a whisper in the dark. “The timer went off for the TARDIS. ‘M I supposed to take her out of that thing?”

A TARDIS timer?

TARDIS … timer …

The timer for the extended electro-percussive environment chamber!!!

The Doctor shot up from where he had apparently been lying on the couch and ran over to the EEPEC, swiftly shut it off, removed the tank housing their baby TARDIS, and then poured in the pre-prepared aqueous nutrient solution before inserting the tank into the quasi-dimensional artron chamber (currently set to it’s highest opacity setting).

“Hah!” he exclaimed, punching his fist in the air and itching to switch the chamber’s outside view settings to transparent. He turned to Rose, opened his mouth to ask her, and then paused.

It all came back to him, all of it, not just the jumbled recollections he had been getting earlier. Apparently he had fallen into a healing coma, and it seems to have been just what he needed … but it all truly hadn’t been fair to Rose. Though, to be fair, she was currently smiling like it was Christmas, so-

Christmas. Healing comas.

Huh.

“Shall we switch it to transparent?” the Doctor asked, unable to reign himself in any longer. “It was clear when Benny - quite the coincidence, right? - helped me set it up. This is a quasi-dimensional artron chamber. It’s funnelling in rift energy and centrifuging artron particles, and the end result in that chamber is the specific environment needed to properly grow a TARDIS. Well, along with the chrono-nutritio aqueous habitat. Benny describes looking into it as being similar to taking DMT, which, by the way, is completely inaccurate. It’s exactly like looking into an Eye of Harmony. If it’s malfunctioning, it’s like looking into the untempered schism, which I don’t recommend. But everything’s stable now, we could-”

“I thought I wasn’t supposed to look into the vortex?” Rose interrupted, and …

“Right … erm, well ,” he hedged, scratching the back of his neck, “I mean, it isn’t actually the vortex, but you’re probably not completely wrong. Best not risk it.”

Excitement abating, the Doctor slumped against the chamber and at that moment realized that he had been changed into jim jams.

Jim jams. Healing comas.

Huh.

At least these were his own pajamas, and not some ‘friend’ of Jackie’s, though how strange was it that he owned his own pajamas in the first place?

“C’mere,” Rose said, beckoning him back toward the couch, which she was sitting next to, but not on. Not your typical decision, but he had likely taken up all of the space earlier. “I made you some tea.”

It really wasn’t worth it, cataloguing the similarities between this and when he had first regenerated into this body … even though the list did seem to be growing.

“Perfect! Just what I need!” the Doctor smiled as he walked over, taking a seat next to Rose on the floor.

Silence fell as he sipped his tea, and he found himself unsure of what to do or say next. There was too much to say, and he’d certainly done a piss poor job of organizing his thoughts earlier.

“Feeling better?” she asked, after another moment.

Small talk. He could definitely do small talk.

“Mmm yes, very much so.”

“Better enough to talk?”

The Doctor coughed, having swallowed his tea incorrectly (bloody hybrid body, still acting up), before nodding. Rose moved onto the couch and he scrambled to join her.

“So,” she began and paused, face scrunching up in concentration (it was nice to know that he wasn’t the only one who found this whole business incredibly awkward), “I guess … what is it that you actually want? Aside from a working TARDIS, that is.”

His brows furrowed.

Sure, there were plenty of ways he could answer that question and have all of them be true, but he had a feeling that she was looking for a specific type of ‘want’.

Problem was, the Doctor wasn’t quite sure what that was .

“What?” he asked, in lieu of any better things to say (as the runner up response was to ask for some jam, or maybe a banana, or some of the takeaway from the shop down the corner and blimey, he was hungry).

“This whole time, all of it, since you c- since you were- since you stopped just bein’ a hand- ” the Doctor had a list of complaints and corrections that he barely held in “- nobody’s asked what you wanted. The D- the other Doctor chose for both of us, really, and I hadn’t really looked at it that way before. An’ I wanna know. What do you want?��

Removed from the actual experience itself (and therefore not feeling incredibly, deathly ill), visions of the slight peek he’d gotten four days ago of his own timeline played in his head.

The Doctor grabbed Rose’s hand, weaving their fingers together.

“I want this.”

She smiled and gave his hand a squeeze.

“Care to elaborate?” she asked with a slight laugh.

“Nope,” he replied, popping the ‘p’. “Because as long as you’re happy, everything else is just- just semantics. I mean, obviously it’s going to be a bit dull until the TARDIS has grown enough for proper travel, but I think we can make do?” At least, he really hoped so. It hadn’t been going swimmingly so far, but the Doctor sincerely hoped that he could chalk all that up to the initial side effects of the meta crisis, compounded by all of the, er … technical difficulties he had run into while constructing the TARDIS’ growth tank. Also, his new hybrid body needed much more maintenance than he was used to, including sleep. Really was rubbish without regular sleep. Such a waste of time.

“So, if I were to suggest you moving into the flat?”

He opened his mouth, intending to immediately agree, but then frowned. The TARDIS was here, after all. And he absolutely could not move her. Not at this stage. Not until she could connect to other dimensions on her own. The Doctor looked over at the quasi-dimensional artron chamber, once again wishing that he could switch it to transparent and watch the process unfold.

“How moved in is moved in?” he asked once he forced himself to turn back toward Rose.

“You’d sleep there, shower there, eat some of your meals. Most of your clothes an’ stuff would be there. Y’know. It’d be where you live. With me. If you want.”

“And that’s what you want?” he double checked, trying not to telegraph his surprise - he must have missed a lot while in a coma, as last he knew they were teetering on the edge of a row.

Rose rolled her eyes, and that was much more in line with where he thought they were at, er, relationship-wise.

“Well, I don’t fancy living in a clocktower office. When I’m done working, I’d like to not still be at work, ta.”

She did make some excellent points … but still, it all implied that they would be staying together. And that was what he wanted, of course it was, but the Doctor still couldn’t help but feel he had missed something crucial despite the fact that he could now remember everything clearly.

“You blew up my job. ”

“I love you, too. But I’m still mad at you.”

“You’ve still got two beating.”

Maybe there wasn’t something to have missed. Human emotions were relatively complex, after all, and there was no rule requiring them to happen in isolation.

“Are you still mad at me?” he asked, realizing as he did that to Rose it was coming from seemingly out of nowhere.

This was confirmed as she blinked, brows furrowing.

“I don’t know. Maybe a little, but …”

“But?” the Doctor repeated, unable to stand the suspense.

“It’s hardly the first time we’ve had a fight, yeah?”

He nodded, unsure of where she was planning on going with this and hoping that he wouldn’t need to begin apologizing for every insensitive thing he’d said or done since they first met. It would take ages.

“Well, we always end up workin’ it out. And we did live together, travelin’ on the TARDIS, whether we had a row or not, so …” Rose shrugged, now examining her fingernails.

Speaking of the TARDIS, though …

“First things first,” the Doctor began, rubbing the back of his neck as he stood up and began pacing, “I want it on record that I would absolutely love to live in a flat with you, with carpets and doors and things. Assuming we’d spend much of our time traveling about, that is.” He turned back toward her, having paced his way back over to the TARDIS’ QDA chamber. “The thing is, it’s … I don’t want you to think that- the TARDIS. She needs me here. This is a critical development period. For the next three to six months, the TARDIS will be growing in the chamber, learning how to connect to and create dimensions. Until she can manage it, I can’t move her and she requires near-constant monitoring. Every hour or two.”

“She’s like a newborn baby,” Rose commented, getting up and joining him at the chamber, where she stroked the side.

“Exactly.”

“Well, I suppose this’ll have to do then,” she reluctantly … agreed? “As long as we’re living in the flat as soon as she’s moveable, mind. The bathroom here is two floors away.”

“It’s a clocktower, Rose! There’s only so much space.” The Doctor scrunched up his face as he said the word.

“Then why’d you pick this place? I know because of the Rift, but doesn’t it stretch further than just the tower?”

“Nope,” he shrugged.

It’s not as though he hadn’t checked.

“Really?”

“Small rift.”

“Yeah,” Rose laughed, “a small rift right under Big Ben.”

The Doctor laughed with her, amazed that he finally could.

Then he frowned.

It was all a little too good to be true.

Was this real?

“Hey.”

He refocused. Rose was right in front of him, their eyes locked.

“You were getting that look in your eyes,” she informed him.

“Look? What look?” the Doctor asked, though he was pretty sure he already knew. Some sort of dazed tell, some sort of glaringly obvious indicator that his grasp on reality was failing him.

“This look you get when you start thinkin’ you’re in the wrong universe.”

Wrong universe, wrong universe, wrong universe.

“Well, I am in the wrong universe,” he couldn’t help but point out.

“Yeah, I know. Me too. But y’know what?”

Rose wrapped her arms around him, and it was almost as if she were his tether, grounding him to this new reality they’d found themselves in.

“It’s better with two.”

#TenToo x Rose #doctor x rose #pairing: rose x doctor #timepetals #fic: improbable multiversal transcending spacetime event #fandom: doctor who #my fic

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