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scoonsalicious · 2 months

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Unwanted, Chapter 1: Unarmed, Pt. 1

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x Avenger!Fem!Reader

Summary: (For this part only) Following the events of CA:CW, Tony Stark has offered Steve Rogers an olive branch of sorts to bring The Avengers back together. You, CTO of Stark Industries and head of Innovation & Technology for the Avengers' Initiative, have your doubts, as you're not quite ready to forgive Captain America for ripping your family apart just yet. Steve had one condition, however, when agreeing to return to the team, one that's going to turn your life upside down and inside out: If he's coming back to join The Avengers, he's bringing his best friend, Bucky Barnes, with him.

Warnings: (For this part only) Language (obviously), minor mention of alcohol, I'm obviously on Team Tony during the CW; don't come for me, awful jokes, minor use of (Y/N). As always, if I missed any, please let me know.

Word Count: 3.2k

A/N: Here's a little preview of Unwanted. In it's current form, it's standing at about 50k words, with about 25k still in editing, and I'm maybe about half done with writing the entire thing? I'm not going to lie, it starts out cute and fluffy, but it's gonna get real angsty and painful. Dear Reader has unresolved emotional trauma and Bucky doesn't understand the importance of boundaries in 21st century relationships. This piece has been my baby for several months now; I really hope ya'll enjoy reading it as much as I've enjoyed writing it! Banner By: The absolutely amazing @mrsbuckybarnes1917

Taglist: (Please let me know if you'd like to be added!) @blackhawkfanatic

"You're sure you're cool with this, Boss?" you asked Tony Stark, for what was probably the ten thousandth time in the last hour. The two of you were sitting by yourselves off in a corner of the common area of the Avengers Tower while the rest of your team congregated around the bar, eagerly anticipating the official return of Captain America to the Avengers. That, by itself, would be enough to warrant a gathering of Earth's mightiest heroes, but what had everyone in attendance talking was the fact that Steve Rogers wouldn't be returning alone.

Your billionaire employer sighed and swirled his glass of Laphroaig, the amber liquid sloshing along the sides of the tumbler. "I don't love it, Pocket, but it was Cap's only condition for coming back into the fold, and since Barton, Wilson, and Maximoff all went off the reservation with him, it seemed a small price to pay to get everyone back under one roof." He took a swig of his whiskey and smacked his lips.

You couldn't help but smile at his use of your nickname. Thor had inadvertently given it to you when you first met the God of Thunder years ago, remarking for everyone to hear that you were so small and tiny, he could tuck you into his pocket and abscond away with you to Asgard. Somehow, it stuck. You'd hated it at first; it had felt dismissive and condescending, which of course meant that it soon became the only thing the members of your team called you, but the more they used in their daily lives, the more you actually came to love it. It was a brand new, unique identity that came to embody the person you’d become, and the past you’d worked so hard to put behind you. You were more likely to answer to 'Pocket,' now, than you were your legal name, and you were grateful for it.

"Besides," Tony continued with a shrug, "if letting the Barnes thing go means we get the band back together, I'm willing to be the bigger person about it."

You stared at him, impressed. "Well look at you. When did you get so emotionally evolved?"

"Since Pepper told me I needed to start seeing a therapist or she’d leave me once and for all," he admitted to you with a cheeky wink; you both knew that, though Tony drove his partner, Pepper Potts, absolutely insane sometimes, she loved him far too much to ever walk away from him for good. That didn’t stop the threats, though. Lord knows he tried her patience. In your opinion, the woman was a saint.

Your eyes widened at the revelation and you let out a low whistle of appreciation. "You're going to therapy? Wow. Tony, That's amazing. I'm proud of you."

"Oh please," Tony scoffed, "I have much more important things to do than sit on a couch and spill my feelings. Besides, my secrets are too valuable to divulge to an actual human being. I just trained FRIDAY on therapeutic conversational datasets so she can handle all that psychological mumbo jumbo and then I paired that with BARF's augmented reality-- it's seriously the platinum standard in mental healthcare. No awkward silences or judgmental stares, just pure efficiency. You should try it; it’d do you wonders. And the best part? No copays."

You chuckled as you took a sip of your pineapple and Malibu. "Yeah, okay. That completely tracks for you," you told him with a smile. "So, what did Dr. FRIDAY tell you that got you to change your mind about the Barnes situation?"

Furrows appeared between Tony's eyebrows as he took another sip of whiskey to buy time for collecting his thoughts. There was still so much pain in him where Bucky Barnes was concerned. You'd worked for him in some capacity for nearly fifteen years and you'd never seen him as defeated as he'd been when he got off that Quinjet from Siberia. He'd been bloodied, battered and utterly broken, body and soul. Seeing him like that had shattered you, and you never wanted to live through something like that again.

Tony ran you through his experience with his therapeutic innovation, and you had to admit, it was impressive. The system had helped him realize that Bucky Barnes wasn't responsible for the heinous crimes Hydra had brainwashed him into completing, and so his anger over the death of his parents, while justified, had been misdirected.

"Once I processed that, it was a quick jump to realizing we can't be the best version of the Avengers if we only have half the team at home, and it's innocent people who would pay the price for it. So, when I reached out to Cap and he agreed to come back if I agreed to let him bring Barnes with him, well..." Tony trailed off, gesturing vaguely with his hand toward the where the rest of the team was waiting.

"So, you and Rogers are just, what? Good then? All water under the bridge?" you asked him, mild irritation clouding your voice.

"Oh, absolutely not." Tony took another sip of whiskey. "I can work with him again, and I'm glad to, but we're not going to be braiding each other's hair anytime soon."

"Good," you said, raising your glass in a mock toast to Tony. "I'm not quite ready to forgive him on your behalf just yet." Tony had essentially saved your life when you first met him, and he’d continued to support and guide your career to heights you could have never imagined. You'd started as a systems analyst and mechanical engineer at Stark Industries fresh out of college, and under Tony’s mentorship, it wasn’t long before you found yourself rising to the position of the company’s Chief Technical Officer, second in command only to Pepper, now that Tony had passed on the reins to her. All this happened long before he'd ever brought you in to work with him on the Avengers Initiative, and now you spent the majority of your time heading up their Technology and Innovation Department, as well.

Any kind of healthy respect you might have had for your boss had died out a long, long time ago, because Tony Stark was Tony Stark, but now he was just Tony-- more like an annoying older brother you loved dearly, whose name just happened to be on your paychecks. You owed him everything and that had earned him your unwavering loyalty. You'd follow him to hell and back again if he asked it of you, though he knew he’d never have to; you’d be paving the path there right alongside him.

The sound of laughter made its way across to you from the other side of the room and you felt warmth at the sound-- everyone, together again and happy. Just a few short months ago, you never would have been able to imagine the scene before you, not after the fight in Berlin and its brutal aftermath. You had thought for sure that this little family you'd found yourself in the middle of had been destroyed beyond repair.

So, you might have had your own reasons to be pissed at Steve Rogers.

"What's Barnes like?" you asked Tony. Having only ever glimpsed him from a distance, or from behind a computer monitor, you'd utilized all the resources at your disposal to dig up as much information on the Winter Soldier as possible, but even your skills hadn't been able to get you what simply didn't exist. "You know I don't like unknown quantities."

Tony seemed to think for a moment. "You mean, aside from being a brainwashed, murderous assassin?"

"Tony," you chastised. You knew that Barnes had spent a good deal of time in Wakanda before coming home to New York, working on having the words that triggered his homicidal alter-ego neutralized. Rogers may not always acted rationally when it came to making decisions about his oldest friend, but you were sure he wouldn’t be bringing Barnes back to the Tower if he posed a serious danger to the rest of you. Right?

"Fine," Tony said, with a typical exaggerated sigh. "Aside from being a former brainwashed, murderous assassin; better?" You rolled your eyes but nodded. "Don't really know, didn't care enough to ask. I'll be happy as long as he doesn't start murdering us all in our sleep. Cap vouches for him, so that counts for something. Maybe not as much as it did once upon a time, but something. But T’Challa seems to think he’s harmless enough now, so that’s good enough for me."

You nodded, taking another sip of your pineapple and Malibu, then leaned back, pensive. "Oh, God," you said after a moment of thought, sitting up in alarm. "You don't think it’s going to be like having an entire extra Rogers around, do you? All '40s morality and emotional repression? Because I am so over having him police my language." It wasn't that you had anything against Captain America as an Avenger, but there was only so much of the Boy Scout act you could take before you started getting nauseous. And okay, fine, you weren't too proud to admit it-- there was a not-so-small part of you that still hadn't forgiven him for what you saw as his blatant betrayal of Tony when he refused to sign the Accords. You'd promised to play nice, though, for the sake of your family, but your personal relationship with The Star-Spangled Man had taken heavy damage since Berlin.

Tony chuckled. "As if you'd ever let Cap's presence keep you from a good profanity. I should put out a swear jar. We could fund that crisis algorithm project of yours off your mouth alone."

"Fuck you, Tony," you uttered with a chuckle, fully aware that he had your number. You never met a four-letter word you didn’t fall immediately in love with.

"And look at that," Tony said with a smirk, "I just made another dollar. Hey FRIDAY, open up a new savings account and deposit a dollar into every time Pocket has a potty mouth."

"On it, Boss," the AI replied cheerfully.

You swore at Tony a few more times for good measure. "I fully intend to financially bleed you dry now, asshole."

"Oh no, I'm shaking in my custom Tom Ford's," Tony mockingly bemoaned, putting his feet, enclosed in the aforementioned ridiculously expensive loafers, up on the coffee table.

Raised voices from the other side of the room caught your attention. You stood up and craned your neck, trying to see what had caused the commotion. "I think they're here, Boss," you said.

"Alright," Tony said, standing up and putting an arm around your shoulder, "big smiles, kiddo. Remember, we're supposed to be happy about this." You suppressed a chuckle as you watched Rogers present Bucky Barnes to the rest of the team. Everyone was welcoming; you wouldn’t have expected any less, but as you watched their body language, the only word that came to mind was guarded. And you completely understood; The Winter Soldier’s reputation had preceded him, after all. There were hugs for Rogers, of course, but no one made any attempt to reach out to his friend.

Despite your overall annoyance with Rogers, you couldn't help but feel some degree of happiness for the giant oaf. When you'd been assigned on a mission with him (which happened fairly frequently, as he was so pathetically abysmal with anything having to do with technology) and ended up having to hole up in a safehouse for an extra couple of days while waiting for extraction, he'd started opening up to you about James Buchanan Barnes, and the reminiscing had made him so happy, you encouraged Steve to tell you everything about this Bucky. After that, the trouble was getting Rogers to stop telling his Bucky stories. If he wasn't sharing tales about growing up with his best friend during the Great Depression and all the absolute mischief they got into, he was sharing war stories of their time together with the Howling Commandos. He'd even shared his grief with you– how painful it had been to watch Barnes fall from that train and the guilt he carried for not being able to save him. He’d confessed to you once that, when he went into the ice, fully prepared to die, there was a part of him that was relieved to be reunited with Barnes in the next life, and waking up some 70 years later to a world where he was still alive but Bucky was still gone had broken his heart all over again. And yet, here they were– together in the next life, after all. If you were a different kind of person, you’d say it was a goddamn miracle.

Because of the way Rogers described his best friend in those old stories, you were expecting Bucky Barnes to come swaggering along next to him, with a cocksure tilt to his head and a panty-dropping smirk playing along his lips, but the man who accompanied Steve was the furthest thing from that.

He shuffled behind Rogers slowly, looking at the floor and avoiding making eye contact with anyone else from the team. His hair hung long and limp, curtaining off his face as though it were a protective barrier. Though, if it was keeping him away from everyone else, or everyone else away from him, you couldn't be sure. He was much thinner than you'd anticipated, especially for a super soldier– though still extremely muscular, giving you the impression that it had been a long time since he'd let himself indulge in anything more than the bare minimum amount of calories he needed for survival. Tilting your head, you tried to steal a glance at his infamous metal arm, the thing of legends that had turned him from a run-of-the-mill assassin into the stuff of waking nightmares.

But the sleeve of his jacket hung limp, only empty space where the appendage should have been.

Curious. He'd come to Tony Stark's home unarmed. Your hand flew to your mouth to try and stop the uncontrollable snicker that broke loose at your own stupid joke. Tony elbowed you gently in the ribs to shut you up, and you hoped you were too far away and the others too distracted by Steve's introductions to notice you, but that thought flew right out the window when Bucky Barnes' head snapped up at the sound, his eyes locking onto yours from across the room.

"Holy shit," you breathed, knowing another dollar would go into Tony's digital swear jar, but damn if the man didn't have the most striking blue eyes you had ever seen. There were dark circles under them, and he looked incredibly tired, yeah, but they were beautiful. You didn't mean to stare, but you found you couldn't look away, either, and so the two of you were locked into some sort of impromptu staring contest. The longer you looked at him, the more you could sense an overwhelming sadness coming from him, as well as a level of wariness at being in a room full of strangers. It was almost overwhelming.

But then, just as suddenly as it began, the spell was broken. Blinking once, Bucky looked away and you felt the tension vanish from between you.

"What was that about?" Tony asked you in a low singsong voice.

"I have no idea," you answered, honestly. There had been so much pain and loneliness in his eyes. You'd seen eyes like that before, when you were younger and looked at your own reflection in the mirror following a scalding shower with your skin scrubbed raw and bloody. You suppressed a shiver.

Finally, Steve managed to disengage himself and Bucky from the other Avengers and began making his way toward you and Tony. Up close, you were struck by how tall Bucky was. He had to be at least a foot taller than you, if not more. And God, he was handsome. Granted, in a kind of heroin-chic sort of way, but still. A couple of good nights' sleep, a few good meals, some light personal grooming, and... well, there was a very good chance you were going to be in trouble once he got his shit together, that was for sure.

"And Buck," Steve was saying, drawing you out of your ogling, "This is our resident computer genius, Pocket (Y/L/N). You ever need help with anything technology-related, she's your girl."

"A bit of an over-simplified version, Rogers," you said, sticking your hand out to shake Bucky’s, "but yeah, that about covers it."

Bucky looked at you, then down at your hand, making no move to take it.

"What the hell kind of name is Pocket?" he asked, voice rough as though he hadn’t been using it a lot. Pulling your hand back, you shot him an annoyed glare.

"I don't know," you oozed back sarcastically. "What the hell kind of name is Bucky?"

"It's his nickname, Pocket," Steve supplied helpfully, though not without a trace of confusion. You gave him an annoyed, pointed look.

"No shit, Rogers." You turned back to Bucky and spoke slowly, as if to a child. "So, what do you think Pocket is, then?"

"Oh," said Bucky, catching on. The corners of his mouth turned up ever so slightly. "Gotcha; m'sorry about that. My manners are rusty from a severe lack of use."

You didn't mean it, but your mouth curved up into a hint of a smile, too. And then, almost as if you couldn't stop yourself from doing it, you found yourself saying "I see you've arrived unarmed."

There was a long, heavy beat of silence as Steve and Tony stared at you, mouths slightly agape, and you wondered if you'd made a critical error. You were just about to punch yourself in the face and claim you had a concussion and therefore couldn't be held responsible for what you said when Bucky burst into laughter.

It was the most beautiful sound you'd ever heard, and it was contagious. Through your own laughter, you risked a glance up at Steve. He was looking back and forth between you and Bucky, an indiscernible look in his eyes, and you couldn't help but wonder how long it had been since he'd heard his best friend laugh. Hell, you wondered how long it had been since Bucky Barnes had laughed at all.

"Pocket," Tony groaned, palming his face, "that was truly terrible, even for you."

"I'm sorry," you said, trying to catch your breath through your burst of giggles. "It just slipped out-- I couldn’t help it. You know once these things come into my head, they just bounce around in there until they fall out. I didn't mean it."

Steve smiled at you. "So that's what you were snickering at," he said, amused. Damn that enhanced super soldier hearing. Rogers didn't need to be so nosy with it.

You shrugged. "What can I say? Bad jokes are my superpower. Don't be jealous that all you got was super strength and a six pack, Rogers."

Bucky laughed again, then nudged Steve playfully with his elbow. "I like this one, Stevie," he said. "She's funny."

You weren't sure why, exactly, but something in Bucky's words turned your insides into a warm puddle of goo.

Oh, you were going to be in trouble, indeed.

Next Part ->

#bucky x reader #bucky barnes #bucky fanfic #bucky barnes fanfiction #bucky barnes x reader #james bucky buchanan barnes #bucky x you #mcu bucky barnes #james buchanan barnes #james barnes #bucky barnes x you #bucky barnes x female reader #bucky barnes x y/n

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intheorangebedroom · 3 months

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Tonight you belong to me, chapter 2

Summary: He comes to you every Friday, in a shady motel on the outskirts of town.

Two months have passed since your first time at the motel with Frankie. What has changed, what hasn't. Who are you now?

Pairing: Frankie Morales x fem!Reader (OFC)

Rating: Explicit 🔞 PLEASE, see series masterlist for extensive trigger warnings.

A/N: Happy Frankie Friday, Orange besties 🧡 How are you all? Gentle reminder that our Reader is an OFC. In this chapter, we get to know her better, and there are indirect physical descriptions of her. Sincerest apologies to anyone who knows Tampa. I did a lot of research, but I'm afraid my ignorance will still show… I swear I did my best. Raul is real, though. He's a friend of a very dear friend and he lives in Paris.

@frannyzooey my love, as always, I am in your debt. Thank you for your help. I love you more than words 🧡

I hope you enjoy this one, Orange besties, it made me sweat blood, @dreamymyrrh and @pedrit0-pascalit0 had to listen to my constant whining to put me on life support. Ily 🧡

Word count: 8.6k

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Chapter 2: Closer

The traffic is dense, but you spot Ava’s red Toyota as soon as it turns into E 7th avenue.

On any given Saturday, the upbeat neighborhood is bustling with cheerful crowds of leisured weekenders and hip thirty-something. On this particular Saturday, the first after Thanksgiving, the streets are a vision from hell.

There’s a constant ballet of cars pulling in and out along the curbs. On each side of the avenue, the sidewalks are swarming with jittery shoppers, frenetically prospecting for good deals on potential Christmas gifts. You’re willing to bet that most of them will stretch their budget thin on useless, meaningless knickknacks. Generic trinkets without soul nor purpose but that will, for the first half hour of ownership at least, fill the void in their consumers’ existence.

The traditional Christmas tree of unholy proportions is up and sparkling. Wrapped around the iron porch columns, electrical garlands blink in rapid sequences like luminescent spasmodic snakes. Storefronts are decorated with more or less taste. The temperature has dropped twice below 70. It’s that time of the year.

The merry season usually finds you adding a generous helping of anxiolytics to your daily cocktail of little helpers. This year, however, you haven’t popped a pill in days, and everything feels… more. Louder, too vivid, more oppressive. Sensations magnified and emotions amplified. Which is, after all, what you were aiming at when you unilaterally decided to taper off your intake.

Ava miraculously secures a free spot on the other side of the avenue, about a hundred yards in front of yours. You watch her parallel park, the maneuver surprisingly sloppy, given the parking assist technology the brand-new hybrid car is equipped with, and you wonder if you really needed to spend that much money on it.

In front of your own parked car, pedestrians agglutinate at the crosswalk. When the light turns green, they move as one, like flocks of extras on a movie set, coming to life on cue when the director yells “action!”

They’re not extras, however, each one of them is the main character in the movie of their life. Together they form a constellation of individual and interconnected stories, while you stand at the margin, forever exhausted, willfully forlorn. At best, a supporting part in Ava’s fantastic tale of eccentric adventures, but more likely a backdrop in your father’s gripping success story.

Although, your narrative has changed drastically over the past two months. You now got a part in your own right, unfolding in between takes.

You wait until Ava gets out of her vehicle before you exit yours, reluctant to leave the hushed safety of your old sedan’s cab, even for the few minutes it’ll take you to meet with her and step into the coffee place.

You wave at her from across the busy street until she sees you, but when she proceeds to jaywalk over to you, reckless and entirely indifferent to your pleading expression, you have to avert your eyes. There’s a crosswalk right in front of you, god dammit.

She levels up with you and pecks a kiss on your cheek, hitting your cheekbone with force, more headbutt than demonstration of affection.

“Hey,” she says, barely stopping in her tracks before she pushes open the glass door to the coffee shop.

“Hello, pup,” you answer fondly, your words lost to the street’s bustle.

Inside, the artificial air instantly pulls at your skin. The atmosphere is cool but dry, saturated with the smell of freshly grounded coffee beans and greasy-sweet pastries. The high-ceiling, cement floor, wide open-space is packed. The brick walls reverberate the ambient noises, and the late morning sun beams brightly through the large floor-to-ceiling windows, evenly spaced along the lateral walls. People sit in small parties around the white designer tables, sipping iced coffees from tall red paper cups with white snowflakes, large shopping bags at their feet.

Trying your best not to shrink and shrivel from the multiple overwhelming stimuli, you focus on Ava’s back, walking behind her as she leads the way to a free table at the rear of the coffee shop, between the counter and one of the windows. There’s a regal quality to her gait and the way she carries herself, not unlike your father, the resemblance enhanced by her preference for masculine clothing, and you have to love the irony, given how much she hates the man. She has your mother’s beauty, though. The same luxurious dark hair, fair, flawless skin, and wide green eyes, her frame tall, her figure athletic. She’s the masterpiece. Next to her, you look like a clumsy first draft, with blurry edges and hesitant features.

She throws her jean jacket on the back of her chair and collapses on her seat with a theatrical sigh.

Across from her, you sit down gingerly on the edge of the hard wooden chair, balancing your weight around the sore and delicious ghost sensation of Frankie between your hips.

“You look good,” you start.

“Yeah, you too!” she exclaims, like it’s unexpected, “tired but like, good. Are you getting any sleep?”

You smile, waving your hand dismissively.

“Don’t we have to go to the counter to order?”

“No, it’s fine,” she answers, “they serve at the table. I’m having an oat milk matte, what do you want?”

“An espresso, I think.”

Right on cue, a young woman dressed in a black cropped top and black skinny jeans presents herself at your table and proceeds to tap in your order on a rectangular electronic device. Her long acrylic nails hit the screen with a rapid succession of click-click-click. The sound brings you back to your parents' dining-room, the large table standing like an angular island on the shiny square of reflective tiles, in the middle of a shag carpet ocean. Your mother’s nails, painted in Revlon Desirable #150, rattling impatiently over the lacquered surface of the dining table near her untouched plate and a glass of G&T sweating with condensation. She never ate her food. She drank even when she was pregnant.

Your fingers find the back of your knee and pinch the thin skin there, so hard you flinch.

The waitress waltzes off, and Ava returns her full attention to you.

“I’m happy to see you,” she offers, and you smile softly at her uncustomary expression of affection. Your chest expends. “It’s been a while.”

There’s no reproach in her tone, but you are usually the one expressing ill-concealed concern over her long silences, and the reversal in your dynamic throws you off. Guilts gnaws at you. You choose defense.

“You were away.”

“Yeah, but like, I came back three weeks ago.”

Three weeks. Your smile fades and you slump in your chair, running a quick mental calculation.

Time has never been an easy concept for you to grasp, but until recently, you’ve managed to remain afloat and functioning, on a practical level at least, amidst a society that revolves around schedules and timetables. The watch on your wrist, yearly organizers, recently and reluctantly replaced by the iCal app on your phone, sticky notes, tin boxes filled with tickets stubs… All clutches to your failing memory, anything to keep you tethered against an overpowering and primal instinct to escape, let go, drift away. And perhaps, most of your exhaustion stems from this endless swimming-race against the current.

Lately, your inability to remember appointments, to navigate time and hold an effective grasp on reality has reached a new high. For the past two months, your life has revolved around Friday nights and the sound of a red pickup truck pulling in and out of a decrepit motel’s parking, tires screeching on the gravel. Inside this timeframe, your entire life is contained. Around it, the days stretch, spiral, and blend. And you’ve lost all motivation and interest in any counter-current swimming.

You frown slightly, scanning her face, but she doesn’t let on anything out of the ordinary. After all, if she genuinely worried, if she so badly needed to see you, she could have given you a call. You were the one to reach out and ask to see her this morning.

Something’s different about her, in the way she holds herself straighter on her seat, with her legs crossed and her head tilted to the side, exposing the undercut she got before the summer. You’re still not entirely sure if this was the bold fashion statement she claimed it to be, rather than a dramatic reaction to her girlfriend moving back to New York. With Ava, it could be both. She’s not wearing any makeup today, her face looks disarmingly young, and the concern she’s expressed, however subtle, churns your insides with guilt and affection.

You plaster a polite smile on your face.

“Well, I’m here now. It’s good to see you, too. Tell me, how was New York? How’s Polly?”

The waitress returns with the pastries and beverages you ordered, and Ava begins to narrate her two-week trip to the big city. She speaks fast, punctuating her words with large gestures to describe the cultural buoyancy, the hip neighborhoods and her thrifts finds, the street food and the refined, cutting-edge restaurants, how everything is bigger there, faster and better, how she fell safe walking hand in hand with Polly, the clubs, the galleries, the weather, crisp air and chilly winds from the north, a refreshing, comforting seasonality to pace the existence.

“I was fucking crying when I boarded the plane back, you have no idea.”

“Oh, I can imagine,” you sigh, shaking your head. “You don’t miss her too much?”

She doesn’t answer, and something in the way she avoids your gaze makes you frown again.

Polly and you have always gotten along well. You genuinely appreciate her solar personality and her worldly conversation. Their encounter four years ago had been the silver-lining in an otherwise horrendous year. The happy, coincidental consequence of a chain of events that had been years in the making.

When Ava dropped out of college halfway through her freshman year, it provided your father with the excuse he had been waiting for to kick his own child out of his house. You had seen it coming. In fact, you had spent your entire adult life shielding Ava from the paternal discontent, investing all your strength into becoming the son and successor he had wished for, and that neither of you could ever be.

Ava, however, had never put in the effort. She didn’t fit into the family portrait. She never had. You didn’t want her to, and she simply couldn’t. Too rebellious, decidedly unconventional, and, well, queer, to boot. Your father had spent years formatting you and there she was, standing proud, strengthened by your unconditional support, a glaring highlight of your diverging values, a breathing reminder of his failure with you both.

In the aftermath of the fall-out, Adrian had refused to take her in, and she had spent days out of your sight, sleeping god knows where. Eventually, you’d dug your heels in, as you only ever did when Ava was concerned and her wellbeing on the line, and obtained that she move in with you. The cohabitation hadn’t gone smoothly in the least. As usual, Adrian was more concerned about potentially upsetting your father than making you happy. You were once again caught between crossed fires.

The strained situation with your fiancé notwithstanding, Ava couldn't spend her time sitting idly at home. You had pleaded with her for weeks before she agreed to resume her studies. Only this time, it had to be with your funding. The realization that you didn’t have any consequential money of your own had been brutal, even though it shouldn’t have been a surprise: you lived in Adrian’s apartment, and were employed by your father, who refused point-blank to let you sell some of your company shares, knowing the money would go to his estranged daughter.

All you could afford was Hillsborough Community College, but things had eventually taken a turn for the better when Ava and Polly had met. Polly was teaching psychology, waiting for a tenure that she would never be granted. Because of the 20-year age gap between them, she insisted Ava graduate with her BA before they started properly dating. And when they did, the improvement in your sister’s mental state and overall balance was immediately noticeable.

Calm and collected, affectionate and thoughtful, Polly grounds your young sibling. She eases her anger and channels her energy into creative and fruitful endeavors, without snuffing her rebellious temper.

And now, despite Ava being almost fully independent, with a job and a place of her own, you don’t know what you’d do if they were to break up. If one of them were to decide that a long-distance relationship is not what she wants.

You lean forward, your hand coming to rest over hers, warm and smooth. “Hey pup, what’s up? Is everything ok between you two?”

“Oh yes,” she quickly assures you, withdrawing her hand, “and by the way, she sends you her best.”

Understanding downs on you like a bucket of ice. You suddenly feel stupid, pathetically naive, forever one step behind. Leaning back in your chair, you let out a short, soundless huff. What you’re facing is not a breakup, but the likely possibility that Ava will soon move out of town to follow Polly to New York.

Ava is talking again, about New York you’re guessing, but you can’t focus on her words. Behind your impassive eyes and your attentive smile, your mind reels and wrestles with a downpour of conflicting thoughts and emotions. Pride flares in your chest at the prospect of your baby sister setting roots in a city as intimidating as New York, but it tugs at something else, something you’re too scared to consider, and an ugly feeling you’re reluctant to acknowledge.

Would she hesitate before leaving you behind, after you’ve prioritized her freedom over yours? After you stayed so she could fly away? And wouldn’t it be the point?

Your eyes travel up along the trail of small tattoos adorning her forearms. Dominos, tea cups, a white rabbit with round glasses, a flamingo, several thin arrows, a broken heart in flames.

What’s your purpose, if she’s not here anymore? If someone else is looking after her? If your sacrifice is no longer necessary nor justified?

“How was Thanksgiving dinner? Did you have fun talking about politics with Richard?”

You wince involuntarily at your father’s name. She never refers to them as “mom” and “dad.” She hasn’t for a long while. But today the sarcasm doesn’t fool you, no more than her feigned indifference.

She’s not truly asking if you had to bite your tongue and smile through conversations that make you nauseous. She knows well enough you’ve got just enough political convictions to carry you to the voting poll, but hardly a step further. Listening to him is painful, but you get by, and your shameful silence buys you necessary peace.

No, what she wants to know is if your family inquired about her. And you don’t have it in you to answer that no, no one has, not last Thursday, not for the past four years, not ever. Not your indifferent father, nor your inebriated mother. Not your bigot grandparents, not your egotistic aunt and her gold-digging husband, not even the housekeeping staff.

You shrug noncommittally.

“Who were the guests of honor, this year?”

The question makes you groan and briefly close your eyes at the memory.

“Adrian’s parents.”

“No?! Fuck! They really want this marriage to happen, don’t they? Looks like you’re not gonna be able to dodge much longer.”

She smacks her hand over her thigh, letting out a short staccato of a chuckle, as if the subject of your confinement through marriage was a laughing matter. You glare at her, crossing your legs and folding your arms over your chest, but the shifting in your demeanor goes unnoticed.

Suddenly, her levity riles you up. She got away. You didn’t. And the only thing that carried you through this year’s Thanksgiving dinner is the perspective of being fucked senseless by a stranger on a dirty motel floor the following night.

For a brief moment, you’re tempted to bite, and retort that, contrary to her, you didn't spend the holiday on your own. But the truth is that you envy her the privilege, and she knows it.

Taking a deep breath that does absolutely nothing to calm your growing nerves, you stir the conversation towards another topic, finding neutral ground with her job. You’re stalling, and you’re not even good at it. You sit restless on that damn hard chair, squirming uncomfortably, sweat prickling under your armpits in the chill artificial air, eyes flicking down to your watch every other second.

“Do you have to be somewhere, or something?”

Your head shoots up. Again, you have no idea what she’s talking about, or how long she’s been rambling for. This is ridiculous. You are being ridiculous.

“Listen, Ava, I have to ask you something. A favor. I have to ask you a favor.”

Her eyes widen at your sudden change of tone but she nods. “Hit me.”

“I need you to… I need to be able to tell Adrian that I spend… that I spend Friday nights at your place. Actually, I’ve already been doing it for a while. He thinks we see each other on Friday evenings. I just… I need more time. I need the night.” You grip your shin with both hands and dig your nails in. “It really doesn’t matter anyway, he’s not home on Fridays, he plays poker and he never comes back until like, 3 or 4am, and I just need— I need to be able to come home after him. Not, like, every week. Or yes, maybe every week. Just in case. If ever. You know?”

She remains completely still and silent as you wrestle your words out of your throat. Her face hardens, her wide, green eyes strained on you. She gauges you in silence for another moment, while you rub your clammy palms on your jeans under the table. Above the table, you do your very best to maintain a casual air.

“And what exactly is it that you do, on Friday nights?”

You anticipated the question, of course you did. You swallow around the sharp stone stuck in your throat. Your eyes dart down to your espresso cup. It’s empty.

“I’m just taking a bit of time off for myself.”

More time, to commit his body and his face to your long-term memory after he’s left you, depriving you of his heat. The tiny bits of him that add up to form the formidable sum of the man he is. The locks that curl around his ears. The dip in his collarbone. The little target tattooed on his hand. You’re never sure which hand it’s on, you need more time, that’s all. And you won’t lie to her, not exactly. You set your mind on that early on. But you will not tell her the whole story.

A large shit-eating grin slowly parts her plump lips.

“Are you telling me that Richard’s favorite daughter is getting some side dick on a weekly fucking basis?”

“Jesus, Ava, why do you always have to be so crude?”

“But you are? Right? You are getting dicked down, every fucking Friday night? Right? Are you on Tinder, or something?”

“I’m not—” you start, but her excitement is louder than your exasperation. She uncrosses her legs to lean toward you, propping her elbows on the table and threading her fingers together, talking over you.

“Why didn’t you tell me? For once that something cool–”

“Because there’s nothing to tell,” you retort through clenched teeth, raising your voice. Her mouth hangs open in shock. You don’t give her time to recover. “And look, if you don’t want to do that for me, it’s fine, it’s not like anyone is going to call you to ask if I’m with you.”

She takes the blow, leaning back in her chair. “Wow. You really thought this through, didn’t you?”

You don’t answer, shame and anger burning your cheeks.

“Why you’re telling me now, then?”

“Like I said. In case.”

“I case what? In case I find myself on a Friday evening in the same place Adrian takes his cuntsluts?”

You steel yourself and stare at her.

“Something like that, yes.”

—

Two months.

Two months of lies and deception, shoving your bright secret deep down inside you, shrouded under a veil of routine and normalcy.

Nine weeks, split into six days of stretched out hours, swirling languid and excruciating, like smoke from a cigarette stub in a room without air, and one day of counting. The minutes, your steps, your breaths, your heartbeats.

Saturdays, worn-out, appeased, pleasantly aching. Sundays rising slow like a lurking threat. Mondays-Tuesdays-Wednesdays merging, dragging and useless. People talking to you, expecting words, when your mind is filled with two glistening bodies entwined in golden hues. A tremor on Thursdays, the nearing promise, and by Friday morning you’re all frayed nerves and aching want, tapping into your pent-up emptiness for focus and patience.

Friday evenings sliced up into a ritualized sequence of actions.

At 6pm, you leave your office and head toward the employees' underground parking. There are 37 steps from your desk to the two silver-doors elevators on the landing. Seventeen stories down, including 2 underground levels, and 58 steps from the elevators to your designated parking place. It is crucial that you don’t allow the pace of your steps to catch up with the racing thumps of your heart.

From downtown Tampa, it’s an hour and thirty-six minutes drive north on the 589, before you reach the motel. An hour and fifty minutes, two hours top, if the traffic’s bad. There might be faster alternative routes, but you don’t use the GPS, so you don’t know about them.

Once you’re there, you park in front of room number 7, the one with the missing brass number. You stuff your phone into your purse, which you slide under your seat.

You exit your car and walk towards the reception in short, hurried strides, cursing the tight skirt that hinders your steps and gives your posture a subdued aspect, which is probably why your father imposes the garment on his female employees.

The reception is a square room with an old humming AC unit, dark-brown fabric wallpaper, yellowing popcorn ceiling and a counter behind which sits Raul, the night clerk. Raul is a short man in his mid-60s. His dark eyes are reshaped into tiny concentric boot buttons by the thick lenses of his small, round glasses. His light brown, straight hair is styled in a bowl cut. He only wears beige Henley’s with rolled-up sleeves and indigo painter overalls. You’ve never seen his shoes.

Every week, Raul hands you the key to room number 2 without lifting his boot-button eyes from the charcoal drawing he busies himself over behind the counter, and tells you in a thick accent that “everything has already been taken care of.”

Every week, you thank Raul, grab the key from his stretched out left hand, and chance a glance over the counter to see what he’s drawing. Mountains, infallibly, week after week, the scenery only varying in shape and shades of anthracite.

And every week, as you exit the reception, you feel Raul’s boot-button eyes strained on your back through his round glasses.

When you step inside room number 2, you flick up the two toggle switches by the door, turning on the lights and the overhead fan, and you go to the bathroom to wash your hands and check your reflection in the antique black-edged mirror.

Then, you return to the room and you sit on the bed. That’s where you wait for him.

You don’t undress, you don’t lie down, you don’t undo the bed.

You know what he’ll do to your clothes. Anticipation trickles down along your spine all the way to the ripe heat between your thighs, and it travels right back up to tug up at the corners of your lips, but you press them together, lips and thighs, as you wait.

He comes in after dark, preceded by the sound of tires on gravel and that of his boots stomping on the porch and he’s here, Frankie’s here, the rush of night air from outside when he storms into the room wafting over your face.

He greets you with a hoarse voice, like he hasn’t used it all week, and he takes a couple of long strides towards the desk, where he sets down his cap. You peer at his reflection in the framed mirror when he combs his fingers through his dark curls, tense jaw, creased brow. You study his broad shoulders, the rippling muscles of his strong back, when he takes off his jacket and drapes it on the back of the chair, swift, precise gestures. It’s his own ceremonial, you let him have it, his transition into this world that you share. The confine of this room. Brown carpet, yellow curtains.

When he turns to face you, at last, it’s always with a heavy, grating sigh, a sound so rough and primitive to express his relief, his hunger, the limit of his patience. You stand up slowly, unfurling in slow motion from your sitting position on the edge of the bed, eyes on him, forever and always. His want radiates from him in colorful angry waves, like a tangible, virulent aura, black eyes boring into your skin and you welcome it as it pours out of him and creeps up to you like thick fumes.

You stand tall in the charged stillness of the motel room, offered, but not quite yet within reach, waiting for him to come and seize you.

“Take off your clothes,” he says as he comes closer, tilting up his chin. The command rumbles low and guttural from his throat, and those words are your cue. You clamber out of your statuesque stillness, twisting your ankles out of your pumps while he tugs at your blouse, as he crashes his lips onto yours.

His first kiss is voracious, unescapable, your face trapped between his cupped hands, and you’re engulfed in the taste of him, drowning in the scent of him, leather and soap and musk. And something metallic you have no name for. It’s intoxicating, you’re floating, losing both bearings and balance, like when you were thirteen, and you’d sneak to the downstairs pantry to drink your mother’s gin before dinner.

On some Friday nights, you’ve already made it back to your glass prison when you notice a tear in the seam of your shirt, or a missing button. “Take off those fucking clothes, I wanna feel your skin.”

“Yes,” you answer with parted lips, parted heart, parted life, jaunty fingers working your skirt open.

Beyond that point, neither of you talks much.

It’s his name –Frankie– falling from your lips, a long but quiet whimper when you come, a whine of pleasure-plain when he inches into you, a moan when you plead for more, a whisper when you promise you can take it all.

It’s his clipped orders, sharp and short.

Open up

Push back into it

Let me hear you

I want you to come on it

And two words, always the same since that first time in the parking lot.

Stop me.

Stop me when he pins your hands above your head or folds your arms in the small of your back, his fingers like shackles around your wrists, and he lines himself up. Stop me before his saliva drips down his tongue in fat drops between your breasts, and he straddles your chest. Stop me, when he closes a fist in your hair and slides you down along his hard length, your chest caving in under your gag reflex, beads of tears like precious shiny diamonds clinging to your lashes. Stop me when he angles your spine backwards with a sudden tug on your hair, when he bands an arm across your belly and ragdolls you to the floor to fuck you harder and deeper. Stop me when he ties your wrists to your ankles with the black zip ties that bite into your flesh.

Stop me with the flat of his hand pressing down between your shoulder blades, Stop me with his thumb teasing your tight ring, Stop me with your legs around his neck.

Those two words, a beacon guiding you through the week that precedes.

Sometimes, when you’re alone, you repeat them to yourself.

“Stop me,” you say, low and quiet, facing the mirror when you're applying makeup, staring straight into your eyes, so intently it twists your reflection.

“Stop me.” A whisper, and a slow-spreading, carnivorous smile that splits your face in two because someone, at last, wants you beyond reason.

Stop me. You will never stop him.

He fucks you twice, three times a night, before he leaves you covered in him, sated and sprawled on the rumpled bed around 2am, with a nod and a husked, “I’ll see you next Friday.” He sounds calm at last. Drained.

Once he’s gone, in the rumbling of the pickup’s engine and the screeching of the tires, your mental countdown to the next Friday is reset. You crouch into the narrow bathtub of dubious cleanliness, and ruefully wash him away in the trickle of hot water. You try to hold on to the thought of him, even more so than to the feeling of his touch. That’s what the soreness is for. It will stay with you until Monday at least.

But in your memory, his face is blurred. Only his sad angry eyes stand out, dreamlike, entrancing.

There's a conflicting distance beyond his hunger. An underlying restraint beyond his roughness. Withheld intimacy. A reluctance to give into your softest touches, when his forehead briefly rests on the plane of your chest, and you circle his neck, or carefully run your fingers through his sweat-soaked curls.

It doesn’t take a PhD in psychology to understand that if he wasn’t in here with you, he’d be somewhere else, doing something worse.

Some weeks, you go through strings of sleepless nights and restless days of anguish, your mind spiraling to the agonizing thought that you are nothing more to him than an empty and interchangeable vessel into which he can fuck his rage.

With masochistic thoroughness, you pull taut a red woolen thread to connect the clues of your insignificance.

He doesn’t name you. There are no sweet names, no terms of endearment, and he certainly never calls you Marion. The sounds he produces when he’s inside you, that’s your reward. Deep guttural grunts, and if you’re lucky enough, they resonate through your whole body when he holds you tight and close.

He never comes inside you. Where do you want it? he pants, when his hips start to fall out of pace. “Mouth,” you quickly answer, always, a greedy match for his gritty ways. And most times, he obliges. Flips you around or scoot over you and shoves his pulsating cock into your warm, wanton mouth.

But sometimes, he doesn’t. The thick pearly white ropes of his spend spurt over your back, your belly, your chest. That’s when he’s got a mind to rub it into your skin. That’s when you want to believe he might have chosen you to be here with him.

In those scarce instances, you are tempted to rely on your instinctual understanding of your relationship. Far from the toxic codependency that, according to Ava, you feed into with Adrian, what you share with Frankie is elsewhere entirely. Week after week, he presents himself before you, visibly wounded, willing to offer exactly as much as he needs to receive. The balance is perfect. No travesty, complete equality. The purest form of interaction. The most honest transaction you’ve ever taken part in.

And thus, no matter how remote he may seem on some nights, no matter how dark his eyes, how clouded his gaze, or how brutal his hold, you can’t help but feel safe.

The feeling thrums underneath your skin and finds an echo in his bloodstream. You hear it in your shared silence, when you lie side by side on the bed and stare emptily at the ceiling, chests heaving, bodies cooling off. When a shiver rakes through you, he gets up and turns off the overhead fan. Walks over to the bathroom to bring you a glass of water.

He’s given you everything you wanted and didn’t know how to ask for.

And when he looks you in the eyes, he doesn’t blink.

Stop me, he says, and what you hear is, Trust me.

He’s been quick to learn your body, and he’s greedy with your highs. He keeps you pinned down onto the threadbare linen with his mouth fastened around your cunt until your legs tremble and your throat is hoarse with your repeated high-pitched moans, the stubble on his cheeks scraping the sensitive skin of your inner thighs. Bestowing pleasure, drinking it right back.

Your body expands into new sensations, after years of a dormant existence, curled up within your outer shell into the tightest ball, the smallest possible shape. You’re spreading, stretching into your limbs, filling them in. Growing nerve endings that shoot farther along your extremities with each fiery kiss, each starving touch, each orgasm, like trees rooting in beautiful, intricate ramifications.

The wild creature nestled between your lungs has a mind of its own. You’re developing emotions unknown to you until now.

The tranquil contentment he leaves you with when he steps back into the night and closes the door behind him rapidly fades over the following days. By Sunday evening, there’s nothing left of it, and you find yourself shivering, deprived of his heat, unsettled, agitated.

Your mind wanders to her. The faceless, nameless woman he drives back to after you’ve fucked each other free of your pain.

Envy, tinged with hatred, pours ugly inside your chest, pressing against your rib cage, hindering your breathing, its heavy particles tainting your oxygen.

Does he handle her with reverence? Does he use sweet names to beckon her into his embrace? Does he spit in her mouth, does she beg him to? Does he rub his spend into her skin, or does he stuff her pussy full of his seed?

Whenever you loosen the grip on your thoughts, you’re brought back to a large reception room on the last floor of another glass prison, stilettos wounding your feet, strangers with empty smiles and cruel eyes drinking from crystal champagne glasses. The excruciating misery of having to interact with Adrian’s colleagues, laughing at golf jokes you did not understand, desperate to fit in. Fighting your survival instinct, to tether yourself and not present a blank stare to those people you were supposed to impress. As Adrian’s fiancée. As your father’s daughter.

The effort seemed worth it, then. You were in love. Or so you thought. In hindsight, you’re not certain anymore. Reinterpreting your past is a temptation you try not to succumb to. In more then one way, you still love him.

There was a hushed tremor in the faceless assembly of tuxedos and cocktail dresses, and you saw her entering the room, parting the crowd. Slender, swaying, lush honey blonde locks and incandescent hazel eyes. Junior partner at Adrian’s firm, quickly climbing the ranks, flawless makeup and oozing self-confidence, she smoked Vogue cigarettes and when your gaze returned to Adrian, everything fell into place. You knew with a chilling certainty that this formidable young woman was fucking your boyfriend.

Adrian had had a couple of flings in the past, but this one was different. He fell for her hard, a grown man in a teenage-like trance. Your blood left your face when you realized everyone else in the penthouse, and most likely in the firm, could see what you were seeing.

You decided then and there that you were never going to marry him, regardless of what he or your father would threaten you with.

But even then, what you had experienced wasn’t jealousy. You’d felt trapped, and yes, betrayed. Wounded, in what little self-esteem you possessed. Thoroughly defeated. But you did not feel jealous.

You understand it now, and every time you think of Frankie’s touch grazing the faceless woman. Every time you torture yourself into considering the nature of their bond and the depth of their attachment.

Would Frankie look at you the way Adrian looked at her? With blunt desire, unabashed, irrepressible thirst? With belonging? Would people around you know? Would they identify you as lovers?

After all, a single glance had been enough for him to take you from a bar, to a parking lot, to a motel. To make you desperate to mean something to him.

Does he miss you outside your shared time? Does he think of you? Does his mind wander to your skin in the blue morning hours, does he try to name your scent?

Deep down, you are no fool. If there’s one thing you’ve always known in this life, it’s your place.

But some Friday nights are more dangerous. They give you too much hope. Prompting you to call your sister, for instance, and risk your little secret so you can spend more time in the small room with the yellow curtains. Wrap yourself in the dirty sheets that bear his musky scent, instead of jumping into the shower. Linger into that breach of your life’s continuum. Extend the delusion.

Last Friday, he buried his face into your core and drew violent waves of release that he kissed back into you, swirling his tongue into your mouth to coat it with your taste.

His face was shiny with your slick and his body glistening with sweat in the soft yellow hues from the bedside lamps, when he got up to the desk and slid his belt out of the loops of his pants.

Your eyes grew wide, but not with fear.

He placed you face down on the bed, with your arms along your chest, and he trapped your body with the belt. You accompanied his movements, docile, curious, without apprehension. The metal buckle was cool on your feverish skin, and the leather smelled like him.

Stop me. He was hard and thick, and he fucked into you in long, thorough strokes, dragging the round tip of his cock along your clenching walls, slamming his hips into the swell of your ass. With his thumb pushing into your asshole and his hand around the belt to keep you where he needed you to lie still.

You came in seismic tides that quaked along your body in concentric ripples, from your wrung out core to the extremities of your fingers and toes. The sound that came out of your throat was unrecognizable, and perhaps it was his. Your mind tipped over into unconsciousness. When you resurfaced, his cock was rubbing in the cleft of your cheeks, his come leaking down the curve of your back, mixing in with your combined sweat, his chest pressing down onto your shoulder blades.

You felt his lips brushing against the shell of your ear, hot breath searing his choked up words into your soul.

“You’re a good girl. Say it. Say you’re a good girl.”

“I’m— I’m—“

“That’s it, say it for me.”

He was lying heavy on top of you, sinking you into the mattress, his belt buckle digging into your side. This was going to leave a mark.

“I’m a good girl.”

“You’re my good girl.”

You will never stop him.

—

Sitting on the edge of the bed, with your back straight and your ankles crossed, you wait. Eyes on the yellow curtains, darting beyond the dusty fabric into the warm December night. It’s yours. All of it. Yours until morning.

There’s the faintest hint of a bad taste sitting on the back of your tongue. Coppery, bloodlike. It comes in waves every time you remember how you twisted your baby sister’s arm into covering for you. But the night is yours. You swallow hard, force a smile. You want to be guiltless, for once.

“Polly says you’re overly secretive. That you like to live ‘hidden between the folds of life’, as she puts it. Something about culpability being a coping mechanism…”

The words, delivered flatly after you’d stubbornly diverted and defused all her questions, had cut through the most tender parts of your flesh.

“Is that her professional opinion?” you had retorted, your chin tilted up as if you were not bleeding inside.

You swallow hard again. If you close your eyes, if you concentrate, you can almost hear it. The pickup’s engine, bolting down the asphalt, bringing him into your needy arms. You can feel the heat radiating from his solid chest and seeping into your body through your palms, resting empty and upwards on your lap. Your tongue tingles with his tangy taste, a trail of goosebumps breaks across your skin, anticipating his caress.

Frankie.

The daydream that carries you through the week, carries you through that very last stretch.

Until the man himself storms into the room like bad weather. Dark, electric, a standing threat.

One look at his face and you know. It’s going to be one of these nights that make you doubt everything.

At first, the change in the script is barely perceptible. There is no gentle acclimatization, no ceremonial, no tacitly shared ritual. He doesn’t face away to let you observe his reflection in the mirror. But he looks like he hasn’t slept since last Friday. The crease in his brow is forbidding, his eyes are too bright, too clouded, circled in black and you’re dizzy with the distance you find there. Tension rolls out from his taut muscles underneath his clothes and you stand up, alert, if not entirely ready.

“Get naked,” he growls, tugging his gray t-shirt over his head, his trucker hat falling to the floor and tonight, you miss your cue.

Instead, you come closer, extending your hands towards him. You call him in a murmur, Frankie, but the wild thumping of his heart under your trembling palms cuts you short.

The light flickers in his eyes, so you hang in brave, hang onto the thread of your touch, sliding your hands up his burning chest. He stills. His gaze focuses on you for the first time since he came in. Your fingertips brush lightly along his collarbone, to the dip at the base of his neck, where they linger, underlining the hollow shape of it, skating around his neck to his nape. His brow shifts, his jaw ticks, and you draw him in for a kiss.

He jolts when your lips meet his. His hands grip your hips, rough and desperate. This is the part where you melt into him, surrender to his touch, but tonight the balance is tipped off. He licks into your mouth with a pained, muffled whimper, and your eyes remain open.

You’re powerless, powerless to get to him and bring him back to you from wherever the hell he may be. And his distance settles between your two bodies, an invisible partition. It stands erect and opaque, projecting its shadow over you when he lies you down on the synthetic quilt and dives between your hips. His ministrations are detached, performative, mechanical. There’s no contained urgency in his handling of you. Empty touches, empty silence, and you orgasm weakly, the sensation floating on the surface of you.

You can sense him, trapped behind his black eyes and this damn crease that splits his face above them, only you can’t reach him. He won’t let you. For every one of your attempts at a caress, at tenderness, is rejected by a shrug, a push of his hand, a shake of his head.

Sweat breaks on his forehead and dampens his curls as he becomes restless, showing none of the familiar signs of the relief he finds in your release, when he hums softly into you, lapping at your entrance to capture what you offer him, what he drew from you. Impatience and desperation roughen his grip on you. He shoves you to the head of the bed and you scramble, sliding on the slippery quilt, curled on your side, until you’re caged between his rigid body and the headboard.

There’s no warning, no Stop me, when he lines himself up with a stifled groan. You bury your face into the pillow and bite down on it to muffle the pain when he splits you open. He starts rutting into you with unrestrained strength, forcing through the vice grip of your tight cunt around his hard length. You try to relax into it. That’s all you ever want, for him to fill you up, to be inside you and around you, but that’s the thing: he’s not touching you. Not really.

Instead of gripping the curve of your hips, or kneading your breast, or lying between your shoulder blades, his hands are clenched on the headboard, white knuckled. His bent knee doesn’t quite touch your folded legs, his hips don’t even slap against the swell of your cheeks.

“Frankie,” you try, but your voice comes out thin as a ripping thread. It’s immediately drowned under the sounds filling the room, the creaking of the bed, his strained breathing.

“Frankie,” you call again, louder this time, reaching to the side to grab his thigh.

He jerks at the contact, sliding out of you with a hiss like you just burned him with a red-hot iron. You grab the side of the headboard to haul yourself up. Behind you, you feel him falling back on his knees. For a few seconds, you can’t bring yourself to move. You remain hunched over, fingers wrapped so tightly on the hardboard, your nails digging into the cheap, tender wood.

“Fuck,” he breathes out, and you turn around to face him.

Your heart sinks and chatters at the sight of him, of his glassy, pleading eyes that won’t meet yours. His chest heaves with exertion, and the weight of something else. He grazes a palm over his face, tilting his head down.

“I hurt you. I fucking hurt you, I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry.”

Tonight, this is it. These words are your cue.

“No,” you start, scooting closer to him as he shakes his head, exhausted, isolated. The gesture no longer carries the warning it did as he was about to succumb. It’s a measure of his failure, of the depth of his defeat, and it chills you to the bones.

“No,” you repeat, stronger, and you offer him the only lifeline you know.

Closing the physical distance, you straddle his lap and wrap your arms around his shoulders. When his body stiffens, you harden your hold.

“Frankie… Frankie…” you coo, again and again, like his name holds the solution, and all of your devotion. You say it as you press your forehead to his, as you rub your cheek against his stubble, as you nuzzle the sharp edge of his nose, and trace his plush lips with yours.

Until his shoulders sag under your embrace, until you feel the choked up breath that quakes his chest, you keep repeating his name. A few minutes, or an infinity of seconds, time doesn’t matter anymore. The night is yours, your skins are glued together in the soft yellow light.

His arms circle your waist, hesitant at first, but you encourage him, raking your fingers through his hair, twining them into his soft curls. He lets you, he gives in, tucking his face in the crook of your neck. He inhales you there, raising the soft hair on your nape. His voice is broken when he speaks.

“I’m not–”

“Frankie don’t, please don’t,” you cut in.

You know the words that are piling bitter and desperate on his tongue, know them on an instinctual level. You feel them swirling, black and hopeless inside his head, you’ve known them from the very beginning, recognized them in the sadness of his angry stare. And you won’t let him pronounce them inside this room you share, you won’t let him give them any kind of substantiality. Not between your arms, not against your skin.

“I’m not hurt,” you begin, pulling back to see his face, to look into his eyes and sink your words of hope and faith into him, past the barrier of remorse and regret, “I want everything you–” but his brow furrows deeper as he clenches his eyes shut, and you trail off.

Panic briefly floods your brain. You’re acutely aware of your shortcomings and limitations, of all the things you’ve never been taught growing up. How to translate feelings into words, how to express compassion, how to care for others. How to be heard.

You take a deep, shaky breath, your breasts pushing into his chest.

“Look at me, Frankie baby. Look at me. Let me–”

Let me in. Let me be yours. Let me mean something.

Your plea dies on your tongue when his eyes shoot open. They shine with unshed tears, pierced by a ray of light from the bedside table, and for the first time, you see that they’re not black. They were never black. His eyes are brown, a deep, rich, precious mahogany brown. The color paints your vision, it flows into your bloodstream and courses along your veins. It spreads into your heart, gets tangled in your soul. Around you, the whole world disappears, along with everyone in it. There is only him, his mahogany eyes brimming with tears, and the feeling of his hot, damp skin against yours.

His arms wrap tighter around your back, his warmth seeps into your bones. His hands find purchase on your curves, drawing you closer.

“I want you so badly to be real,” he whispers, quiet and pained, like he can’t ask you this much, but you know that, for him, you’re willing to be.

“I’m so sorry,” he says again.

Swallowing down the tremor in your throat, you give him a tender smile, tinted with gratitude, colored with praise. You cup his face, fingernails scratching at the heart-shaped patch on his jawline. His eyes flicker down to your lips, and you give him what he needs, leaning in to press them to his.

Underneath you, his length throbs with unreleased hunger, and you sway your hips over it. He moans against your lips, the vibration trails down to your core like hot, liquid amber. His tongue peaks out, and you open up for him, like you always have, like you always will. A grating sound comes out of his throat, an echo of your gratitude, a mirror of your pain, a reflection of your loneliness.

He breaks the kiss to lift you up gently, helping you find friction with his cock sliding between your folds, where it pulsates hard and thick against your clit. Your limbs turn to molasses, toffee soft and sticky, but your hips lock into a slow, languid rhythm, slick pooling down on him as you stroke him between your two bodies. His right hand skates up flat along your spine, to settle on your nape.

He draws you in closer, closer than you’ve ever been. His heart beats inside your chest, enveloping the purring wild creature you still can’t name or tame.

“Make us come, baby.”

A dry sob undulates up to your throat. Your eyes fill with hot tears, they spill against his temple. Mahogany explodes inside your brain. The night is yours.

“Yes, Frankie.”

“Make us come together.”

****

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joelswritingmistress · 4 months

Text

You Scare Me, Professor: Chapter 29

Summary: The reader is taking graduate classes at a local university in the wooded upstate New York. She is drawn to her professor, Dr. Joel Miller, though she is also inherently aware that he has something dark about him that she can't quite put her finger on. As the reader's attraction grows deeper, she has to decide whether to endure the danger or run away as fast as possible.

Pairing: Professor Joel Miller x f!reader

Tori and I met up on my lunch break the following afternoon. I filled her in about the mishap with James the night before and she visibly cringed.

“Ouch.” She made a face. “That was a bold way to shoot his shot.”

“I felt so bad,” I admitted, “I still feel bad.” I twirled a French fry in ketchup and popped it into my mouth.

“Did you tell Joel?”

I nodded. “The night before I had gotten a card that was left on my car with no name. I thought it was this creepy guy Trevor from class.”

“Who’s creepy Trevor?”

“He's just this brown noser type of guy. I saw him lurking behind the building one night when I left and then he, like, popped out of the library stacks at me out of the blue.”

“Red flag, red flag.” Tori made invisible check marks in the air with her finger. “What if he's the lady killer?” That's what the papers and news outlets had branded the person responsible for the two dead women.

“Lately, I think everyone is the lady killer.” I huffed a laugh and shook my head. I changed the subject. “Are you and Derek doing anything for Valentine's Day tonight?”

“We’re going to see an early movie and then going out for cocktails and some apps.”

“Sounds fun.”

“Where’s Mr. Gold Coins taking you?” She asked with a laugh as she forked a bite of chicken from her salad, “Paris?”

I laughed. “We’re going to a place called Lake Kora.”

“Where's that?”

I shrugged and reached for the second half of my turkey wrap and took a hearty bite.

“You didn't Google it?”

I shook my head and continued to chew.

“Do I have to teach you everything?” Tori eyed me and began typing away on her phone. “How do you spell it?”

“L-a-k-e,” I began, smirking at her as she flicked my hand.

“Smartass, I know how to spell ‘lake'. What about the second part?”

“K-o-r-a.”

Tori eyed her tiny screen and began flicking her finger until she seemed satisfied. “Hmm..”

“What?” I arched my neck and she turned her phone part way.

“Looks nice.” She scrolled through photos. “Is he going to put, like, rose petals all over the bed? Feed you chocolate covered strawberries?”

I nearly spit the bite of my sandwich out and the two of us began laughing, drawing looks from other customers in the little sandwich shop.

“Sorry,” Tori whispered with a hand up, still chuckling as she took a sip of her iced tea to compose herself.

“Maybe we can double date some time soon,” I suggested.

“I gotta get a feel for this guy,” she nodded in agreement and poked around through her lettuce in search of a crouton. “What's going on next weekend?”

“His sister is getting married. We’re going to Vermont for the long weekend.”

Tori raised her eyebrows. “Wow.”

I nodded. “I was nervous to go but I met her recently and we hit it off, so..” I shrugged.

My friend pointed her fork in my direction. “If this guy ends up breaking your heart, I'll break his neck.” Tori paused, “Well, I’ll get someone to do it because I probably wouldn't be able to.”

I have a closed-mouth smile. “I hope this is all what it seems; because I'm totally caught up.”

“I know you are.” She nodded, “I've never seen you like this.”

“I know.” I ate another French fry and sipped on my Diet Dr. Pepper. “It's a little scary.”

Tori gave a genuine smile. “I guess life should be about taking chances.. and following your heart.” She raised her styrofoam cup, “To the next step?”

I tapped my cup against hers. “To the next step.”

The ride to ‘up-upstate’ with Dr. Miller late that afternoon had me excited for the weekend ahead. We took the truck, loaded up with snacks and even stopped at a little hockey store to purchase two pairs of ice skates. I couldn’t wait to go ice skating. It had been so long since I’d been but I was sure I’d pick it up again - like second nature.

“Want a coffee?” Dr. Miller motioned to a little shop beside the hockey store, “Or hot chocolate?” He grinned and took my hand when I nodded. We wandered into the shop and the aroma of freshly ground coffee beans hit me like a wave.

My eyes scanned a chalkboard with an endless array of choices. There were your typical French Vanilla flavors and Hazelnuts. And then the list trickled down to pistachio, white chocolate almond, blueberry and peppermint mocha.

“I’ll do a medium black coffee with a shot of espresso,” Dr. Miller ordered. “And a package of the chocolate covered espresso beans.”

When I spotted a banana mocha chocolate espresso, I was sold. Half hot chocolate, half coffee with the sweetness of the banana. Sign me up.

Dr. Miller smiled at me and gently squeezed the back of my neck as I ordered. I leaned into him and our hands found one another’s again after getting our orders and walking out.

“I can’t wait to get up there,” I told him when we got back in the car. I sipped my drink after giving the entrance to the cup a gentle blow and then set it in the cup holder. When Dr. Miller reached for my hand again, I squeezed his. I loved how he had to touch me at all times - whether holding my hand, squeezing my neck, or resting a hand on my knee as he drove.

He popped open the little bag of espresso beans and then reached over, prepared to place one in mouth.

I accepted, purposely sucking the pad of thumb for an extra second and Dr. Miller smiled at me. I almost giggled, thinking about Tori’s comment about the chocolate covered strawberries but I just grinned and looked out the window, relinking my hand with his.

Honestly, I didn't want the car ride to end. Until it did, and the A-frame lake house we would be staying in came into view.

Okay, I'm ready for the car ride to end.

The frozen lake stretched out, what looked like, for miles as he pulled down the long, rocky driveway.

Dr. Miller pulled the truck up beside the house and I got a glimpse of a hot tub on the front deck. He turned to glance at me and I couldn't help but smile.

“Come on.” He nodded his head toward the cabin and opened his door.

I eagerly trailed him up to the rental property. Neither of us bothered to grab our belongings yet. The sting of the cold weather felt refreshing on my cheeks on the short walk to the front door.

Dr. Miller punched a code into a little black box beside the door and a silver key popped out as the front of it opened.

“Do you own this house, too?” I had to ask, but he smiled and shook his head.

“I know as much about it as you do.” He slipped the key into the lock and opened the door, pulling me inside by the hand as he flipped on the main lights. It was like something from Pinterest or “hashtag cabin” on any number of social media outlets.

An oversized television sat above a stone fireplace to the right. A small collection of couches and chairs faced it, only split up by a shag throw rug. Above it hung a giant rustic chandelier. Overlooking the living room area was a loft that was accessible by a winding staircase and beneath the loft, straight ahead, was a cozy, modern kitchen with low ceilings.

“What do you think?” Dr. Miller put his hands on my shoulders from behind, and I reached up and placed one hand over his.

“I think we should stay here for a week.”

“Or two,” he added.

“Or two.” I nodded in agreement and looked over my shoulder at him. “Thank you. This is amazing.. again.”

“Let's get our bags.”

I followed him back to the car and he carried as much as he could, leaving me with just the ice skates that I set down on the couch in the living room area. We unloaded the little bit of food we’d brought up for the short stay and then towed the suitcases up the windy stairs to the lofty bedroom.

“Feel like some dusk ice skating?” Dr. Miller asked, sitting down on the edge of the bed.

“Is it safe?”

“I've been checking the weather all week,” he explained, “It's been in the teens and twenties.” Dr. Miller nodded, “There were some people out there when we drove up. Should be frozen solid.”

“Well, then, I can't wait.” My hands fell down into his and I bent at the hip to kiss him firmly on the lips. When I slowly dropped to my knees in front of him, working at the buckle of his belt, Dr. Miller looked down at me with a half, closed-mouth grin.

He sighed and arched his hips so I could shove his pants down to his ankles before closing his eyes as he stood back up. “Alright,” he agreed with a second deep breath.

“Unless you want to get right out onto the ice..” I teased.

Dr. Miller opened his eyes again and looked down at me. “It'll still be there in five minutes.”

“Five?” My hand wrapped around him now and I took him partway into my mouth. I guessed longer.

He groaned and smiled with his eyes closed. “Maybe three.”

CLICK HERE FOR THE NEXT CHAPTER

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cuttergauthier · 9 months

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Neighbours

Quinn Hughes x Female reader

Warning: against, fluff, cussing, alcohol

word count: 3.7k

let me know what you guys think🤍

April 2022

I moved to Vancouver 2 weeks ago for work even though I can work from home. I wanted a change so I decided to move. I'm a clothing designer. I started the summer before I started going to university. It was hard trying to juggle a clothing brand and university at the same time especially since i was doing extra classes during summer since i wanted to be able to finish a semester earlier so i could go back home for summer & be settled in Vancouver for when i come back in September, but i was able to make it work.

When I first started I would only make 1 shirt in all sizes and sell them, it took a while to be able to make money off it, but now the clothing company is doing really well, It’s an online clothing store. I sell both Women & Men clothes from comfy to fancy.

I’ve always wanted to open my own store and I thought Vancouver would be perfect for that, most of my buyers are from canada.

I was born in Plymouth Michigan, i grew up in a lake house, my parent’s love it here, so do i, during winter my dad, my older brother and i would go skating on the lake, it’s one of my favorite things to do during the winter, during summertime we would go on boat rides almost every day.

I went to the University of Michigan, I graduated in June, it was the best 3 and a half years, now I'm on a new chapter of my life. I

I am still getting used to Vancouver. I don’t really know where everything is yet, it’s only been 5 days and i can work on my own time as long as i meet my deadlines, so i’ve been walking around Vancouver. It was a pretty chilly day but it wasn’t too bad. We are now at the end of April.

It took a while before moving here to look for an apartment, And to get everything settled since I’m American i needed to apply for a work visa, it took a while before i was accepted.

I finally found a cute coffee shop so I made my way inside and in line to order. I looked at the menu to see what I should order. Once I decided to go with (favorite coffee order) the line was shorter and it was only a cute guy in front of me and I.

When I finally ordered, I made my way to the pick up station. The cute guy got his drink before me and walked out. I got my drink a second later and left the coffee shot. I started walking back to my apartment since I still have some unpacking to do.

I’m walking and looking around me, Vancouver is truly a beautiful city. I looked in front of me and saw the cute guy was going in the same direction. He looks familiar but I can't figure out why.

I saw him getting in the same apartment building I live in, maybe he lives there too. I made my way inside to see the elevator doors about to close. The guy looked up from his phone and saw I was walking that way, so he put his hand to stop the doors from closing.

I smiled as I walked in and stood next to him, to see he selected the same floor as I live on.

“Thanks for holding the door,” I said thankfully.

“No problem,” he said. He looked so serious like he didn’t have any emotion in the fact that i said thank you.

“I’m yn” i said

“Quinn” he replied before looking down at his phone.

He looked pretty tired, maybe that’s why he doesn’t seem to want to talk. But so am I, so I can't judge.

The doors opened on our floor and we both started walking to our apartments. We are both going the same direction.

Once he stopped at his place, I stopped at mine which was the one next to him.

How have i not noticed him till today, since i’ve been here, it looked like no one lived there.

I saw him look at me before he opened the door. I looked at him as we made eye contact for a second.

“See you around neighbor” i told him smiling before walking in my Apartment and closing the door behind me.

I really hope I see him again. I smiled before continuing to unpack my stuff.

1 week later, May 2022

I finished packing my suitcase to bring back home with me. I was finally able to finish unpacking the furniture and everything else in this apartment so I thought I would finally go back home, since it’s warmer there right now then it is in Vancouver.

I made sure everything was turned off and made my way out of the apartment with my suitcase. As soon as I locked my door, Quinn opened his and got out with his suitcase. Looks like I'm not the only one who seems to be leaving Vancouver.

I made my way to the elevator and I saw him do the same. I made sure to wait before pressing the lobby button.

“Thanks” he mumbled

“ no problem… Are you going to Vancouver?” I ask him, trying to make conversation.

He looked at me confused for a minute, before he shook his head.

“Going to see friends and family” he replied

“That’s always nice,” I say. All he did was nod, I guess he’s not one for conversation.

We both got out of the elevator and made our way outside, i had ordered an uber so that I wouldn't have to wait. It looks like Quinn did the same thing. Once my suitcase was in the trunk the driver started making his way to the airport.

I texted my parents to let them know I was on my way to the airport.

I got my bags checked in and made my way to my area. I found a spot where no one was sitting and sat down. My flight is only boarding in an hour but I like coming here earlier in case it’s ever busy.

I saw that my brother had texted me, he’s only 1 year older than me, he's 23 but he’s my best friend.

Big bro

Yo, are you on your way yet?

I chuckled, of course he’s impatient

Just got my bags checked in, we are only boarding the plane in an hour

Big bro

Please hurry, I miss you!

Big bro

Also before i forget, apparently the hughes brothers bought the lake house next to us that was for sale, i met one of them yesterday and some of his friends they all play pro hockey, one of the brothers plays for Vancouver, Jack said he should be getting in today & the ones i met are really cool, they’re around are age, so looks like we’ll have a fun summer🤪

Oh good, at least it’s not another older couple who would complain every time we try to throw a party when mom and dad go away for the 4th of July😂 & wtf obviously i heard about then you idiot, kinda hard not to when we both went to a school where a bunch of hockey players went to. Also I met the youngest Luke at university, Nick introduced me to the freshman at the beginning of the year.

Big bro

I know right😂 oh cool then i guess you’ll know one of them! Anyways see you soon kid!

See ya!

I smiled, hopefully I won't be stuck hanging out with a bunch of idiots the whole summer, but at least we aren’t the only ones our age.

I was scrolling through instagram. In the corner of my eye I saw someone sitting in one of the seats in front of me.

I looked up and saw Quinn, looking like he’s going to Michigan.

He looked up at me so I smiled.

When it was finally time to board the plane, I went and sat in my seat. I'm thankful that i got the window seat, a few seconds later Quinn sat down in the seat next to me.

“Looks like we’re both going to the same place” I said.

He just nodded.

I looked back at him with a small smirk, I have a feeling that I’ll probably annoy him on the flight.

“You’re not much of a talker, are you?” I said teasing him, every time i try and talk to him, he looks like he ins’t interested in talking to me.

“Not really, do you need something from me? i’m not interested, okay, i get enough people trying to get with me just because of who i am i don’t need to have one who’s going to try the whole plane ride back to michigan” he said a little annoyed.

That was rude, why would he think I wanted anything from him… then it struck me that’s why he looked so familiar when i first met him. He’s the guy my brother told me about the brother who plays for Vancouver. He’s Quinn Hughes. He’s also Luke's older brother. How the hell did I not figure this out earlier? Luke told me that his oldest brother played for Vancouver, I just didn’t think he would be my neighbor and having him hate me.

Once I made the connection my eyes widened.

Quinn rolled his eyes.

“See you clearly know who i am, so just leave me alone” he said annoyed.

I scoffed.

“Don’t be so full of yourself, Luke’s my favorite anyways. I also didn’t recognize you until now, not everyone is going to recognize who you are. I’m also guessing you’re going to the lake house you and Jack just bought right?” I said. He’s pissing me off, and since he doesn’t know we are going to be neighbors or that I know Luke, I thought I would creep him out a little bit.

His eyes widened when I said that.

“Omg are you some kind of stalker?” He said in disgust.

I chuckled at his expression, he looks really creeped out right now.

“Not a stalker but according to my brother who met Jack yesterday we are about to be neighbor’s… again.” I said

“I’m sorry… what?”

“Oh My brother texted me earlier turns out you and jack bought the lake house right next to my parents house, looks like we’ll see each other a lot this summer” i said smirk

I heard him curse under his breath.

“You better not go anywhere near our house,” he said.

“that’s funny because i can promise the second Luke sees me, he’s going to invite me over”

“Like hell he is” he said laughing like there was no way that would ever happen.

“I don’t care if you guys play hockey, i’m going to go after you just because of fame or money. And Just so you know, I already know luke. I met him in September when he started at Michigan since I'm friends with Blanks. He's a good kid, i would help tutor him with calculus, i think of him as a little brother, same with the other younger guys. I even met your mom for fuck sakes and she was nicer than you are right now” i said,

I could see a look of regret on his face. He sighed.

“Look i’m sorry okay, a lot of people try to get along just because of who I am , same with my brothers. Can we start over?” He asked.

He looked sincere, and I nodded, i know my brother will most likely hang out with them a lot this summer, so we should probably get along.

“I’d like that” i said

He smiled

“I’m quinn hughes, it’s nice to meet you” he said

“I’m Y/n Y/L/N, it’s nice to meet you too” i said.

We ended up getting to know each other for the rest of the flight. I told him about what I studied at university and what I do, along with a few funny stories about Luke and some of the other freshmen. He told me about hockey and his family. It was nice actually talking to him, and I really hope we can be friends since we are neighbors in Vancouver and now in Michigan.

Michigan

When our flight landed we made our way out, and went to baggage claim.

I texted my brother to let him know, he said he was waiting with Jack and Luke since both Quinn and I were on the same flight.

“Looks like my brother is waiting with yours” I told Quinn as we started looking for them.

“I see Jack, come on,” he said. I followed him to our brothers

When my brother saw me, he pulled me in a hug, making me laugh.

“I miss you too Y/B/N” i said

“Y/N” Luke said when he saw me and pulled me in a hug.

“Hey Luke” I chuckle.

“You guys already know each other?” Jack asked, confused.

Luke let go of me and looked at jack.

“Yeah, she’s friends with blanks, he introduced us in the beginning of the year, she’s also the reason why i passed calculus, thanks for tutoring me by the way” he said

“How did she tutor you if she lives in Vancouver?” Jack asked again, you could tell he was so lost, it was funny.

“I’ve only been living in Vancouver for 2 weeks now, i graduated from university of Michigan after Christmas” I said and he nodded.

“Oh make sense, and you’ve met quinn?”

“Turns out we’re neighbors in Vancouver” quinn answered, i smiled at him.

Our brothers started laughing.

“What are the fucking chances” luke said

“Yeah seriously, now you’re also neighbors here” my brother said

“I know right,” I said.

“Let’s get going” quinn said impatient

“Yeah, yeah let’s get grumpy,” Jack said.

Quinn rolled his eyes at him which made me laugh.

We made our way to the car and Jack drove us to the lake house.

Jack parked in his driveway and we all made our way to the trunk.

My brother took my suitcase before Jack turned to look at us.

“I don’t know what your plans are today, but we are having a bonfire tonight, you two are both welcome to join us” he said smiling.

“Thanks jack, that sounds fun” i said

My brother nodded.

“Yeah man we’ll be there” my brother said

“Great, then we’ll see you guys tonight”

“Blanks and a few other wolverines are here by the way, I won’t tell them, you’ll be able to surprise them” luke told me. I smiled and nodded before my brother and i made our way to our house.

As soon as we got in the house my parents hugged me.

I talked to them about Vancouver and how Quinn was my neighbor there and now here which made them laugh.

Then I went up to my room to unpack. By the time I was done it was 6:30 p.m. so I went to take a shower since I was all sweaty. Once I was done I got dressed in some Black Lululemon gym shorts and my blue Michigan hoodie.

My dad made food on the grill for dinner so I made my way down to eat since it’s already 7:30 and I am starting.

I sat down at the island counter on the chair and my mom gave me a plate.

“Thanks mom,” I said smiling.

“No problem honey” she said, placing a kiss on my cheek.

“When you’re done eating we’ll go next door. Jack said they started the fire even though it’s still light out, and you can bring alcohol if you want or he said they have a lot so we should be good.” My brother told me.

“I think you still have some (favorite alcoholic drink) in the fridge from before you left for Vancouver, bring it with you if you go” my mom said before making her way to the living room with my dad.

I finished eating so I put my plate in the dishwasher and looked in the fridge for the drinks my mom was talking about and there were still 6 of them so I put them in a bag. My brother and I made our way next door.

I saw Blanks was standing with his back to me talking with Luke. Luke saw me but I told him not to say anything. I gave my bag to my brother and ran up and jumped on his back.

“What the hell!” blanks screeched.

I laughed.

“Surprise!” I said before getting down.

“Yn?” He was surprised to see me. I nodded before he gave me a hug.

“I live next door '' I said happily, a big smile made its way on his face.

“This is about to be the best summer ever” he replied, making me laugh.

“Want to know what funny blanks she’s our neighbor here, and she’s quinn’s neighbor in Vancouver” Luke told him and i rolled my eyes, with a smile.

Nick let out a gasp.

“For real? Oh that’s awesome, like seriously what are the chances” he said

“I know right, also Luke, are you going to tell everyone?” I ask, chuckling.

Luke nodded, smiling.

“Everyone has to know” he said, like it’s the most obvious thing ever. He walked away leaving me alone with blanks.

“So, how is it like living next to Quinn?” He asked, smirking.

I rolled my eyes.

“Oh shut up” I replied, he laughed.

“No but seriously, how is it?”

“Fine i guess, he’s pretty quiet, but he kinda hated me until we got on the flight and sat next to each other, he thought i was some crazy fan” i said and nick burst out laughing i didn’t even know if he could breathe.

“What’s so funny?”

“Let me guess, you were nice and always tried to make conversation with him?”

“Yeah…” I said and he shocked his head.

“That’s what a hockey player with think most of the time when a beautiful girl tries to talk to him and especially if you see him everywhere and end up on the same plane as him, he’s gonna think you’re following him, it’s just an instinct” nick said

“Yeah i know, but i really didn’t recognize him until after my brother told me about them buying the house next door to me and then accusing me of wanting something from him, then i saw the resemblance to Luke, so i kinda creeped him out a bit about telling him i knew exactly where he was going “ i said and nick chuckled.

“Of course you did… Quinn is a good guy though so i don’t doubt you guys won’t become friends… or maybe even more than friends” he said smirking.

I pushed him back.

“Oh shut up, let’s go see everyone else” I said, laughing.

We made our way to everyone else. Blanks introduced me to the guys. They all sound really nice.

We sat around the fire and drank, the guys were sharing funny stories. Nick told the story about how Quinn and I met. I put my hands on my face to hide the embarrassment. The guys laughed

“Seriously Quinn?” Luke asked

“Look sorry but you never told me about her” Quinn replied.

We continued talking and sharing stories for the rest of the night. Some of the guys had already made their way inside to go to bed since it was late. My brother had gone back home, now it was only Quinn, blanks and i.

“I’m going to head up to bed before I pass out here” Blanks told us, making me chuckle.

“Good night blanks,” I said.

“Good night you two,” he said, smirking. I’ve known him for 4 years, he’s totally up to something.

“I should probably head to bed too, I don't want to be too tired tomorrow” I said, yawning.

Quinn turned to me and smiled.

“What?” I ask giggling.

“If I ask you on a date, would you say yes?” He asked, making me smile.

“I would,” I said blushing.

“Well, yn would you like to go on a date with me tomorrow night?”

“ i would love to” i said smiling

“Perfect, I'll pick you up at 6:30 p.m.” he said and I smiled.

We said goodbyes and I made my way home.

Once I got into bed, I fell asleep with the biggest smile on my face.

September 2022

Going on that date with Quinn was the best decision I could have made. It went really well that we went on 3 more dates until he finally asked me to be his girlfriend.

We spent as much time as we could together this summer. When the guys found out we were dating they laughed since Luke had told everyone what happened when Quinn and I first met.

We have been in Vancouver for a little bit now, Quinn came back in August for training camp, i got back last week. I know how hockey season can be, but I also know Quinn and I will make it work. We’ll be seeing each other a lot since we are neighbors.

Quinn had practice this morning but he told me last night that he would come by after lunch.

He’s been stressed lately, he hopes he can have a better season than last year, i don’t blame him.

It’s now 12 p.m. when I heard the door open.

“Babe, I'm here and I brought food,” I heard quinn.

“I’m in the kitchen,” I replied.

He made his way around the corner and smiled when he saw me.

“Hey beautiful” he said, making me blush.

He chuckled, he put the food on the counter and came over to me and kissed me. When we pulled away our forehead touched each other. I looked at his eyes to see he was doing the same.

“I love you” I said happily.

“I love you more” he replied before leaning in and kissing me again.

Being with him, nothing could make me happier.

153 notes · View notes

kthyg · 11 months

Text

ghoul. — (consign)

[SIXTH INSTALMENT OF GHOUL SERIES : CONSIGN]

"Kiss your clean record goodbye." Provocation or prediction.

S2 squad went to the 13th ward for a Wipe Out Operation but didn't expect to encounter an Owl in the midst of the operation.

pairing. jungkook x reader, hoseok x reader, jin x reader (ft. myg & pjm)

rating. M

genre. tokyo ghoul au, soulmate au, gore, violence, mass attack

disclaimer. this story is a work of fiction. descriptions of the BTS members in this story does not reflect nor portray them in real life. everything in this story only fits in imagination and does not apply outside of imagination.

warning. lots of bloodshed (mostly spilled from the ghouls :/), depiction of people (doves) getting killed ruthlessly by the Owl and killing methodology was described.

word count. 5k+

lexicon & profiles . masterpost . masterlist . navigation

note from winter 💌

sorry for the long disappearance </3 but er hey, a brand new banner for ghoul!! beta read by loyal beta reader @zyphqr <3 this is just a short one maybe can be counted as a filler chapter too, but it will make do. hope you guys enjoy this <33 and u lots might not notice, but i kind of changed my writing style a bit? I think consign has got to be the most elaborated fic I've ever written cause those detailed words? idk how my brain came up with that but I'm proud of this one

💌 what is winter listening to? in sequence; D-DAY, Interlude: Dawn, HUH?!, AMYGDALA. (All by Agust-D)

📑 if you want to know more about this au, you can refer to lexicon & profiles. any other questions you can refer to me !!

dedication. a gift to all of my readers.

The urban avenue of Seoul tonight was oddly still, with only sporadic leaf rustling in the soft breeze breaking the silence. The streetlights emitted a pale light illuminating the desolate pathway and generating a creepy ambience that felt unsettling. The towering edifices on both sides of the street looked imposing and austere, with dark windows and walls stained by the wear of time. In Seoul, quiet streets like this one often serve as a warning sign, hinting at the stillness that precedes a night of horror and violence.

This only served as a warning that hazards could present in any situation, even in the calmest and most tranquil circumstances.

The only sounds that interrupted the quietness were the faraway noise of cars and the faint footsteps’ echoes. A stray feline would occasionally scuttle across the street, eyes gleaming, barely visible in the low light. Despite the peacefulness of the evening, the street’s stillness felt unusual and peculiar. A strong odour of rot and other, more ominous scents, detectable only by those with heightened senses, hung heavily in the air. An enduring sensation of peril seemed to permeate the surroundings, giving the impression of being under surveillance by something lurking in the shadows. The silence was broken by the occasional sound of shattering glass or the screech of metal against metal. A car alarm would blare for a few moments before falling silent once more.

These sounds, too, added to the unease that hung in the air, hinting at the possibility of danger lurking in the darkness.

For those who knew of the existence of ghouls, quiet streets would be even more unsettling. People would be acutely aware that a ghoul could lurk somewhere in the shadows, watching, waiting for its next victim. The silence of the street, combined with the faint scent of blood in the air, would make them feel like they were walking on thin ice, with danger lurking around every corner.

The 13th ward, Seochu-gu.

The pale moonlight bathed the ward where ghouls were recently reported to be lurking in the shadows. The usually bustling streets were now empty, only to be filled in by a large group of doves - some dressed in formal KCCG attire while others were heavily armed. Operating vehicles and drones were also present, adding to the sense of preparation and anticipation in the air. As Jung Hoseok, the Chief Director of Division II, approached, the sound of footsteps echoed through the night, accompanied by the presence of bureaus.

“Alright, good evening, doves,” Hoseok spoke, his voice firm and commanding. “I, Jung Hoseok, Chief Director of Division II, will be leading today’s Wipe Out Operation that is to be conducted here in the 13th ward.”

You and another four supreme investigators stood at attention, listening to Hoseok’s every word. “Operating squad involved in this operation will only be the Supreme Squad S2 and 75 Bureaus. Other than S2 and Bureau Investigators are required to leave the scene. Failed to do so and get caught by S2 squad members, the bureaus, or me, will receive disciplinary action.” Everyone present at the scene nodded, understanding the gravity of the situation. Hoseok continued, “Commencing roll call on S2 squad. Please present your weapon.”

Each member stood tall and proud, eyes scanning the surrounding area for any signs of danger. The atmosphere was tense, and they knew they were about to embark on a dangerous mission. Finally, Hoseok began calling out names; each member stepped forward to present their weapon.

“Present as always.” A soulful voice spoke with confidence.

The roll call started with Jeon Jungkook, the Branch Director of 2nd Ward, as he confidently presented his weapon, the Angel Beat, an SS-rated Ukaku type known for its incredible speed and accuracy. Min Yoongi stepped forward with a bored, unbothered expression and presented his weapon, the 13’s Jason, a Rinkaku type rated S+. 13’s Jason was one of the most potent weapons in their arsenal, and Min Yoongi knew how to use it to devastating effect.

As the roll call continued, Park Jimin, another Special Class member, stepped forward proudly with his charming smile, “Never not present,” and presented his weapon, the IXA, a Koukaku type that was rated S+.

Kim Seokjin, your fellow Associate Special Class, followed suit, responded upon his name being called and presented his weapon, the Narukami, an S+-rated Ukaku type known for its incredible range and power.

Finally, your name was called out. Your grip tightened on your quinque as you presented your weapon, the Aus, a Rinkaku-type rated S+. The Aus was a fearsome weapon known for its speed and agility, and you had spent countless hours training with it to hone your skills. As the roll call came to a close, you stood steady, weapon at the ready.

Hoseok looked around at his team, impressed by their impressive arsenal. “Total of five members. Weapon rating from SS to S+.”

He then briefed the investigators on the operation. “This operation aims to cleanse the 13th ward off ghouls. It was brought to our attention that quite a number of ghouls have been roaming in this ward. Expect every worst possibility as the data collected by the bureaus have shown that several S+ rated ghouls are hiding in this ward.”

“Movement will be in personal formation with 15 Bureaus as back-ups. I will be assisting each one of you through the earpiece and monitoring through the drones.”

The investigators nodded, preparing themselves for the dangerous mission ahead. Hoseok gave them a nod of approval. “Doves, fight with your all. Best of luck,” he said before giving the signal.

“Operation commences.”

With a nod from your leader, the five of you set out into the dark night, ready to fight for justice and protect the citizens of the 13th ward from the threat of ghouls. You moved out, determined to eliminate the ghouls that lurked in the darkness. As all of you moved through the eerie streets of the 13th ward, the tension in the air was felt by everyone. The sound of footsteps echoed loudly as if warning any lurking ghouls of the doves’ presence. Jungkook took point, his Angel Beat quinque ready in his grip. He scanned the area, searching for any signs of movement.

“Clear,” he informed Hoseok, his voice crackling through your earpiece too.

As Jungkook ventured to his chosen route, the rest of the team moved forward, staying in formation before breaking into personal formation. Your squad moved deeper into the ward, searching every nook and cranny for any sign of ghoul activity. The tension was palpable, as all of you knew that any misstep could mean certain death or injury.

To describe Wipe-Out Operation with one word would be unpredictable. This operation was assigned to the Supreme Squad for a reason. Given the unpredictability, KCCG only sent out Associates Special Class and above to prevent any unwarranted damages, and it was usually conducted and supervised by Division Chief Director, Hoseok or Namjoon, according to the wards involved. KCCG strictly prohibited any ranks lower than Associate Special and Special from participating in the operation, no matter how great and exceptional one’s skills were.

It was the experience that counted, at least according to the KCCG’s higher-ups.

“Remaining doves, split into pairs,” Hoseok commanded. “The headquarters sent a newly found vision radar of the 13th ward, and the Rc levels are increasing. Jungkook, be informed. I will send out more bureaus to your side.”

“Very well.” His voice echoed in your earpiece following Hoseok.

“Bureaus, load your Q-bullets,” he ordered, stern and commanding.

The bureaus sprang into action, their movements quick and efficient. They reached for their bullet cases, deftly loading their Q-bullets into their quinques. The sound of the bullets clicking into place was the only noise in the silent night as they prepared themselves for the upcoming operation. They stood in line as they finished loading, waiting for the following order. Each one was ready for whatever lay ahead, their minds focused and their hearts beating with anticipation.

“Weapons are to be fired upon the orders of your respective formation leaders,” Hoseok instructed one last time before going off the communication system.

Suddenly, Yoongi urged you to follow him, “Let’s go (Y/N).”

Noticing the confusion on Jimin’s face, he clarified the situation by pointing out that it wouldn’t be a good idea to form a team with two associates and two special classes.

“In that case, you can take Jin,” Jimin countered, crossing his arms.

Yoongi scoffed, “Damn. Did I miss a notice stating that (Y/N) is your partner again?” He then grabbed your wrist and pulled you towards the other side of the ward, leaving Jimin fuming with anger and Jin puzzled.

As you and Yoongi turned to a corner, a loud noise erupted. The two of you stopped any movements, weapons raised as a reflex. You knew better than to speak out loud, so you waited with bated breath. Suddenly, a figure leapt out from the shadows.

It was a ghoul.

Its Kagune gleamed in the dim light and moved at a thunder-like speed, but before the ghoul could even reach the two of you, Yoongi had already unsheathed his jagged quinque. His quinque sliced through the air with deadly accuracy as he pivoted on his heel and swung, slicing through its kagune. The ghoul stumbled backwards, blood gushing from the wound on its side. Yoongi didn’t give it a chance to recover, though. He pressed forward, striking blow after blow with his quinque.

The ghoul crumpled to the ground with a loud thud, lifeless.

You stood back, watching as Yoongi wrenched the blood off his weapon and rested it on his shoulder. You weren’t oblivious to the fact that Yoongi was the most ruthless, quick-witted investigator ever to be born in KCCG. But at that moment, you wished he was anything but those. The ghoul you and Yoongi had encountered was a lone male ghoul. But it wasn’t that fact that made you hesitant.

He looked terrified. Eyes wide with fear.

It wasn’t the fear of being found by doves.

The fear in his eyes was present even before the pair of you arrived. He was about to say something before Yoongi killed him. You didn’t miss the tremble of his lips. “He was trying to tell something.” You approached the dead body.

Yoongi crouched down beside you and examined the ghoul’s face. “It doesn’t matter now.”

You frowned; you couldn’t shake the feeling that you might have missed something important. You scanned the area to see if there were other ghouls nearby, but there weren’t any. You and Yoongi moved forward cautiously. The streets of the 13th ward were silent. The moon shone down the deserted road, casting an eerie glow on the surroundings. As you and your partner walked further into the area, Yoongi suddenly stopped in his tracks, causing you to do the same.

The sound of footsteps echoed in the distance, approaching you rapidly.

Yoongi swung his quinque, ready for use, a menacing look on his face. You followed suit, grip on your weapon tightening. The footsteps grew closer, and you could see the silhouette of three figures approaching your direction with crazed expressions on their faces, ready to attack.

Without hesitation, Yoongi charged forward, striking one of the ghouls with a swift blow from his quinque. They clashed back and forth, Yoongi using his agility to dodge the ghoul’s attacks and strike back with his 13’s Jason. Each time he landed a hit, the ghoul would let out a pained growl, but it only seemed to make it more aggressive.

But it made Yoongi scoff.

He found it funny how the ghoul tried to act mighty and strong when he could easily detach the head from the neck with bare hands. Yoongi fought the creature with a clear stance and graceful movements as if he was performing a dance.

A deadly dance.

He was, after all, a killing machine masking as a delicate doll.

The remaining two turned their attention to you. The male ghoul was massive, towering over you with impressive height and a menacing expression. His kagune, a long tentacle-like appendage, whipped through the air as it prepared to attack. He lunged forward, forming his kagune into a claw; he aimed at your chest. But you quickly dodged the attack, stepping to the side and bringing your Aus up in a defensive stance. He snarled and attacked again.

Yoongi launched a powerful attack with his kagune, slicing through the ghoul’s torso and causing him to fall to the ground with a thud. He dragged his quinque painfully slow through the ghoul’s body as more blood flowed out. He lazily turned his head toward your direction. You were fighting two ghouls, but he didn’t have any intention of helping you, so he continued playing with the dead body.

You can handle them…

Probably, he shrugged.

With a swift movement of your wrist, you sliced through the ghoul’s arm, causing him to screech in pain and recoil. The second one finally jumped into the fight. She was relentless, her kagune striking out again and again, but you were unyielding, dodging, blocking, and attacking with unflinching determination. She charged at you upon seeing her friend being taken down, but again, you instinctively dodged to the side, swinging your quinque in a wide arc. She was fast, but you were quicker as you blocked and deflected her attacks while landing blows of your own. Your weapon finally made heavy contact with the ghoul’s flesh, spraying a shower of blood into the air. She howled in pain, but you couldn’t feel any sympathy; instead, you could feel a rush of adrenaline.

Suddenly, the injured male lunged forward with lightning speed, his kagune striking at you with deadly force. You looked at him with a condescending smirk, “A strong one, aren’t you?”

It was almost psychotic how your tone sounded because nothing could’ve prepared your opponents for your sudden move. Your quinque pierced through the ghoul’s flesh in a blink of an eye, and he let out a final howl before collapsing to the ground, dead.

It took the female one off guard, but you didn’t give her time to recover as you jumped over her head and delivered a powerful kick to its back. She was sent flying with great force; probably broke a few bones and damaged some areas of skin. You looked down at her spasming figure with malice and plunged your Aus into her back, ending her life immediately.

The bureaus under your command had shocking looks on their faces. They exchanged glances with each other as if realising that you were not to be underestimated. Of course, they had always heard the praises that fell from the lips of the higher-ups that you were a skilled investigator, but seeing you in action was entirely another thing.

“New recruits?” Yoongi’s voice was calm and collected, betraying no hint of emotion as he finished off the ghoul he was handling just now.

He did detach the head from the neck.

The bureaus’ complexion paled, every colour drained at the horrendous sight before them.

“Right, I forgot bureaus don’t kill all the time,” because it was clear that killing ghouls was just another day in the life of a KCCG investigator.

Suddenly, a shiver ran down your spine as you caught a glimpse of a figure moving in the corner of your eye. It has to be a mistake. A low growl echoed through the hallway, causing the team to freeze. They knew that sound all too well - it was the sound of a ghoul.

Not just an ordinary ghoul.

“It’s the Owl.”

Yoongi’s voice was the last thing you heard before the explosive sound of the Owl crashing on the ground, announcing its presence and causing debris to rain down on everyone. The heavy feelings that have been crawling on your back. The first ghoul you had encountered, the terror and fear in his eyes.

The three ghouls that were killed.

They died in the hands of doves instead of the Owl.

It was unintentional that they encountered us.

They were running away from the grim reaper but still stumbled on death’s door.

“Take cover!” You commanded the bureaus, grabbing the nearest to you by the arm and pulling them towards the most immediate cover. You and Yoongi were split as he jumped toward the right side. You positioned yourself in front of the female bureau you had pulled with you, shielding her from any potential danger.

The Owl planned all of this. None of these were coincidences.

Reaching for your ear device, you contacted Hoseok, “Emergency code red-O, triple S; Yong. Location, North–”

“Bureaus, fire!”

Upon Yoongi’s command, the bureaus opened fire on the Owl. The air was filled with the sound of gunfire and the whistling of projectiles. But the bullets seemed to have no effect on it. The Owl grew even more enraged and began to thrash about wildly. Its tentacles flailed out in every direction, knocking over walls and sending debris flying through the air.

What the fuck?

Why is he provoking Yong?!

Owls were immune to Q-bullets; sometimes, even quinque does no damage. He should know that.

“Fall back!” You shouted through the chaos, but your command fell on deaf ears. The sound of the continuous firing prevented your voice from reaching your comrades. You scrambled to dodge the tentacles and find another safe cover. You could feel the ground shaking beneath you as Owl continued to wreak havoc on the ward. The dangerous creature let out a deafening screech. Its eyes glowed red as it turned its attention toward the bureaus. It flapped its kagune and leapt into the air, swooping down towards them with incredible speed. The armed investigators scattered desperately, trying to avoid the creature’s deadly tentacles.

“Investigator Min, we need to–”

Yong pounced on a group of bureaus, slashing and tearing with its razor-sharp appendages. They screamed in terror as the beast’s relentless assault tore them apart. Some were still shooting and firing in hopes of distracting or even injuring – just a minor wound on the Owl, but despite their best efforts, the attacks seemed only to enrage the Owl further. It seemed almost invincible, unstoppable in its rage. Its attacks became increasingly ferocious, and the investigators found themselves quickly losing ground.

You turned to your partner in terror, hoping he would just look you in the eyes and bellow a command. “Min Yoongi – !” Except he was not in his spot.

The Owl turned around just in time to block your superior’s attack with its own kagune. It countered with a devastating strike that nearly took Yoongi off his feet.

“Yoongi, Hoseok is on the way. We need to retreat first!” You tried to reach him again while trying to gather the bureaus. The situation was already chaos at its finest; Yoongi definitely didn’t need to add up to it.

With a violent swing of his 13’s Jason, Yoongi charged forward once more, his quinque gleaming in the dim light of the ward. The two engaged in an intense battle, their weapons clashing with each other in a violent symphony. He lunged at the Owl, his quinque slashing through the air toward the ghoul’s head. But no matter how skilled Yoongi was, Owl was no easy opponent, and it had yet to unleash its full power.

Yoongi was not Namjoon.

Not even Hoseok.

Skills unmatched.

Yong’s eyes glowed with malice. Sidestepping the attack, it launched itself towards Yoongi; massive kagune extended, robust scale-red slashed through the air and to his abdomen. Yoongi stumbled back as blood seeped through his shirt.

He cursed under his breath, looking down at his open wound. His stamina was decreasing significantly from all those attacks and defences. But his body had long entered survival mode; he was far from exhausted. The Owl that stood in front of him, he knew very well.

The same Owl that caused a riot and havoc back in his hometown.

The very same Owl that became the reason why he was in KCCG instead of living happily with his family.

The one and only Owl that was responsible for his first ever traumatic event.

The fucking Owl that–

“Yoongi, dodge!” You slammed your body toward Yoongi without thinking twice the moment you saw his eyes go blank. You’ve seen that Yoongi way too many times. The Yoongi that would be deep in thought and stare into nothingness when you passed by his office. The only moment where he would show vulnerability unconsciously, and you knew how much he hated it– because you hated it too– but that always happened in the KCCG building and never, ever during a mission.

The collision between your body and Yoongi’s was extremely powerful that it sent him flying to the other side, to a safer side. His eyes finally met yours as his train of thought was interrupted. The worried expression on his face was the first you ever saw in your time working with him as he screamed your name with great desperation. You could swear you saw his eyes turn glossy before you were sent flying.

You pushed him just in time but were a second late to dodge the Owl’s full-force attack. Your Aus managed only to cover your torso as the Owl’s movement was too quick for your reflex. Your whole body met with the Owl’s heavy blow.

Since when does getting hit by your own quinque hurt like bitch? “S-shit…”

Your body was numb.

Hey, at least you’re not feeling pain.

Better than feeling the pain like someone was taking away your soul.

“Oh, my lady,” A voice reached your ears, although it was very faint due to the impact your body had experienced. You knew whose voice it was. “Do you recognise me?”

It was Hoseok.

You blinked twice as a yes.

“Good girl.” Weirdly you could feel his gentle stroke on your hair. His warmth reached your cold, numbing body. You wanted to close your eyes. “I need you to stay with us until you reach the hospital. Can you do that for me?”

You were tired. You didn’t think you could comply with this order.

“I know you’re tired and hurt, (Y/N), but I need you to just stay conscious. Jin will keep you company. I will take over everything from here. Take a rest, but please stay alive.”

The next thing you know, Jin was already on your side with a worried expression. “(Y/N), hang on there. The ambulance is on the way.” He stroked your hair with his rough, calloused hand – probably due to handling those heavy killing weapons. Your hands were no different. In fact, all ghoul investigators were bound to roughen their hands.

With the quinques.

And with blood.

Oh, are you regretting your decision, (Y/N)?

Never.

“Stay with us, (Y/N),” you heard Jungkook’s voice. Quinque was thrown to the side as he kneeled next to you. You swore his force could’ve injured his knees, but he didn’t seem to care at all by the looks of it. His eyes were only on you. Pupils dilated in fear. Hands and lips trembled as he spoke. “It must’ve hurt a lot, Sakura.”

Sakura.

“Yeah,” you said with minimal energy. “It hurts a lot, Koo.”

Jimin arrived last at the scene. He was out of breath from the sprinting he did when he received Hoseok’s assembly order. His eyes first landed on your half-alive body before the sight of the hideous monster caught his eyes.

Yoongi and (Y/N) couldn’t be that stupid to try and take the Owl down.

One was a half-ghoul, and another one was pure human.

“Oh, Yong Owl,” Hoseok had left your side, hands stuffed in his pockets and walked towards Yoongi, ordering the other fellow Supreme Squad members to follow him with bureaus at the ready. “It’s been a while, don’t you think?”

Yong Owl.

That name caught Jimin’s attention. When Hoseok commanded him to come here, he wasn’t informed which Owl was at the scene; only his rate was told. Jimin pushed back his hair from his forehead. He so badly wanted to burst into a loud laugh. He let his hand stay on his face longer but couldn’t contain the vicious smirk tugging on his lips at the realisation. Of course, it wasn’t you that could be so stupid in this situation.

You were the result of Yoongi’s stupidity.

Yong wasn’t some random Owl. Of course, he wasn’t, even for KCCG. But Yong was especially not some random Owl for Yoongi.

Jungkook hesitated to walk away from you but got on his feet and stood next to Jin with a concerned face for a few seconds. You were, after all, a Jeon. He couldn’t bear to see his family in pain and let the assaulter run away. He was torn between staying by your side or taking down Yong Owl. Jimin slung his hand on Jungkook’s shoulder, pulling the younger with him heading towards the Owl.

Yong was the murderer of Yoongi’s family.

“We’ll be right back, (Y/N),” Jimin sent you a wink. A smirk followed shortly after as he continued. “After this, no more danger you can’t take on will come your way.”

Silly Yoongi, but thank you for the opportunity, soulmate.

“Didn’t expect to see me?” Hoseok smiled. “I know you wish to have encountered Namjoon instead because he always lets you go unscathed, worried for his teammates.”

Yong took a step back as the Chief Director took a step forward. Hoseok was known for his ruthlessness, and that fact was well-learned even for ghouls, even for Owls. While he seemed like the most gentle and caring person, the fact was that he was still a ghoul investigator. His motto in KCCG was to kill with passion. He has worked for KCCG for the longest among everyone. His entire bloodline was born only to serve KCCG for the betterment of the world.

Most Owls have their own hideouts that were undetectable by KCCG; hence it was unlikely for Owls to bump into the doves. Moreover, Owls always stayed lowkey.

“But things work differently for me. You bark, I bite.”

A bureau walked towards Hoseok to hand him a quinque suitcase. Jimin whistled at the sight. He knew what was in that. Heck, it even looked different than any other quinque suitcase.

It was the legendary quinque.

It was the quinque imported from CCG, Japan. Previously wielded by Kishou Arima, the legendary ghoul investigator before he died, since then, the quinque has been stored in CCG’s top secret room. It was only recently an evaluation was done to hand over the quinque to worthy hands and make use of it. Hoseok was invited to take part in the evaluation and easily scored the highest. The quinque was named Owl, created from a kakuhou torn out of the Non-Killing Owl during the battle against Arima. Crafted with precision and designed for devastating efficiency, it possessed an air of elegance despite its deadly purpose. It was the only known SSS-rated quinque and the only one known to be created from a living ghoul.

“Unlucky for you; you hurt my favourite person.” Hoseok shook his head in disappointment as he was just scolding a child for his wrongdoing. He activated the suitcase, and immediately, it transformed into the Owl.

The Owl quinque was a masterpiece of engineering, combining intricate craftsmanship with advanced technology. Its appearance was both captivating and haunting, resembling a pair of oversized metallic wings. The wings were adorned with intricate patterns and etchings, reflecting the meticulous attention to detail put into its creation. The surface of the quinque gleamed with a metallic sheen, hinting at its superior strength and durability. The blade of the quinque was razor-sharp, capable of easily slicing through flesh and exoskeleton. Its edges were finely honed and meticulously maintained, ensuring maximum combat-cutting efficiency.

But it was not just its physical attributes that made the Owl quinque so formidable. Within its core lay a unique and deadly mechanism. With a simple flick of a switch, the quinque would unleash its true power. The wings would unfold, revealing hidden compartments and mechanisms, each serving a specific purpose in enhancing combat capabilities. The Owl quinque was known for its incredible speed and agility. It allowed its wielder to move with astonishing swiftness, striking down enemies in a flurry of precise and lethal attacks. Its versatility was unmatched, enabling the wielder to seamlessly transition between offensive and defensive maneuvers, easily adapting to any situation.

Moreover, the quinque possessed a unique ability to absorb and manipulate the kagune, the potent weapon of the ghouls. It could absorb the kagune’s energy and redirect it with devastating force, turning the enemy’s own power against them. This ability allowed the wielder to effectively counter even the most formidable opponents, turning their strength into their downfall.

The sheer power and elegance of the Owl quinque made it a symbol of Arima’s skill and prowess as a CCG investigator. Its reputation preceded it, striking fear into the hearts of ghouls and admiration in the minds of fellow investigators.

It was a weapon of legend, capable of rewriting the course of battles and leaving a trail of destruction in its wake.

Weapon at ready, Hoseok began again, “I don’t want your death.”

In the hands of Arima, the Owl quinque became an extension of his own being. It embodied his relentless determination and unwavering resolve in the face of darkness. With each swing and strike, he delivered justice with chilling precision, carving a path through the ghouls that dared to challenge him, and it was about to be the same for Hoseok.

The legend of the Owl quinque would be relived in his hands.

“Your scream when I extract fragments of you in Cochlea sounds more satisfying.”

And he would start by painting the blood of Yong on the quinque.

178 notes · View notes

oc-challenges · 5 months

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WELCOME TO THE OC NEW YEARS CHALLENGE!

Since the winter challenges struck out, we're crawling home. Luckily, the new years oc event is here and hopefully it will be the toast of the town. So before we all have to clean the glitter off the floor after the party, we're going to hold onto the memories of 2023 and looking forward to 2024. This event comes from @aliverse (me) and @elmunson with suggestions and feedback from the OC Challenges & Potluck discord, and it spans from the 26th of December 2023 to the 1st of January 2024. With the hope that you may never become a stranger to the oc community, let's go over the rules and then get to the challenges!

Rules

DO NOT copy others edits, if you feel someone has stolen your edits, follow these guidelines!

If you are doing crossovers, PLEASE make sure that the creator of the other oc is okay with crossovers.

If you want your post to be reblogged onto this blog, it must contain the hashtag onyc23.

Feel free to ask any questions, I promise I'll stay even when your scared, and I'm lost, and you're running away.

Everything is up to the creators interpretation, although I have tried to include some examples for help!

Have fun!

Day One: What A Tangled Web We Weave

On the first day, let's take part in one of my favorite trends this year—web weaving! Weave a captivating web incorporating quotes, images, screencaps, and more for your OC. If you're not familiar with the concept of web weaving, here's an account with a lot of examples.

Day Two: I Polish Up Real Nice

Sometimes we get tired or bored of an oc or an edit, but there still things we love about them. To reignite our love for these things, we're going to revise and revamp. Choose an oc, a story, or an edit to to refine and enhance to its fullest potential.

Day Three: In My ＿ Era

On the third day, let's reflect on the defining periods that have shaped either us or our original characters. Despite the initial impression, and my well known obsession, this is inspired by The Eras Tour but doesn't have anything to do with her.. We delve into the various eras within our OCs' lives, whether categorized by tv show season, movie, age, or any other criteria you can think of. Alternatively, share insights about the current era your in as a creator, like "in my hunger games oc era" or "in my gifset era".

Day Four: Everything New

Now that the studios have stopped being bitches, we can acknowledge all the remarkable releases of 2023 (a special shoutout to the talented individuals who contributed to their excellence). On day four, craft something inspired by a creation that emerged this year, whether it's an entirely new series or just a fresh installment in an existing one.

Day Five: Don't You Forget About Me

Though 365 days sounds like a long time, it doesn't always feel that way. In the midst of our activities this year, some things may have been unintentionally overlooked. Fortunately, there's still time to make up for it. Take this opportunity to craft something for an OC that took a backseat this year, bring to life that edit you've been yearning to create all along, or share that chapter you've been gradually working on throughout the year.

Day Six: In With The New

Let's not do out with the old, but we could certainly do in with the new. For day six, introduce a brand new oc or story you hope to be your newest muse for 2024.

Day Seven: Exchange The Experience

Tidings, tinsel, and a year of beginnings. It's start of a new chapter of our lives, especially for our original characters. Be sure to celebrate this new chapter by signing up for the OC Potluck New Years exchange and spreading joy.

#ocappreciation #allaboutocs #queerocs #onyc2023 #n: 2023 #origin post #new years challenge

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pessimisticoptimistsblog · 2 months

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A/N: Two chapters in two days, I'm on a roll! I hope you all like this, finally getting some of the show in this.

Prologue Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8

Chapter 4

What the fuck

Grabbing another book off the dwindling pile in front of them, Caelwen’s shoulders slumped. This was the 4th day that she and Lucifer had been in the library. As much as she was enjoying the fallen angel’s presence, every book that wasn’t what they were looking for made her want to cry.

The news of the extermination moving up had come as a surprise and shock, Heaven truly was heartless. But it also moved Caelwen’s deadline up, she was too close to making Adam pay to wait until the following extermination – it had to be this one.

Lucifer tossed another book on the pile of useless ones, having given up on putting them away for now. Looking over to see his companion also growing weary, he checked his watch to see it was almost lunch time. Lucifer tapped Caelwen on the shoulder to pull her away from her current book. “Let’s pause and get lunch, we could both use a break.”

In the kitchen, Lucifer summoned ingredients for some sandwiches to the island, arranging them so they could both make their own. As Caelwen was going to sit, she felt her phone buzz in the pocket of her dress. Pulling it out, she noticed a message from Nia.

Nia: hope it’s going okay boss lady. We’re all good here, Velvette was a bitch but I handled it. Don’t forget about overlord meeting tomorrow. I know you don’t normally go but with everything happening…

Caelwen: Thank you. Yes, I was thinking this might be the time to go. I’ll go alone though, I’m more interested in seeing who still stands and assuring them I’m still capable.

Nia: let me know if you change your mind, okay? I’m here if needed.

Caelwen finally sat down, rubbing the bridge of her nose; she hated those meetings but with all the chaos of the extermination being moved up, she knew being present could make or break her company and position.

“Is everything okay? Your assistant hasn’t let your business burn to the ground, hopefully?” Lucifer asked with a chuckle.

Caelwen gave him a small smile *Yes, she was telling me that all is well. She also reminded me that there is an overlord meeting tomorrow. Despite not owning any souls, I rank rather high amongst the demons apparently. I’ve been considered an overlord for almost 300 years now, but it’s been a few decades since I last attended a meeting. With the extermination moving up, this is one I don’t think I should miss.*

Lucifer’s was slightly taken aback, he had always thought the sinners were only led by fear and power. This woman in front of him seemed so gentle, how could she have gained respect amongst heartless demons? Caelwen could see his confusion and chuckled silently.

*I can be quite scary when I need to be. Plus, I do have support from Beelzebub with my business. And that’s been a helpful bonus* Caelwen finished with a smirk.

Chuckling, Lucifer agreed with the Nephilim – not too many sinners would willingly try to piss of one of the sins. Though he wasn’t sure he could ever see Caelwen as scary.

Back down in the library, the two continued the cycle they had established on the first day. The 14th and 13th centuries had been a bust, nothing had come close to the symbol Caelwen had been branded with. Despite their lack of success, though, they were both smiling and laughing. Between sharing stories from their lives and making small jokes there were secretive glances, light touches that lingered on hands or shoulders, and faint blushes that they each did their best to conceal.

Caelwen had never felt so light in her life. In spite of how long she had lived in Hell, the Nephilim had always been more concerned with staying alive and hidden then with maintaining her company and image. She had never bothered with romance; she’d read about it, sure, but never looked for it. Still, here she sat, next to the strongest being in all of Hell, blushing and feeling as though her heart might beat out of her chest every time his hand brushed hers. And, fuck, if he kept brushing the feathers of her wings she might combust – she’d never realized how sensitive they were!

When night rolled around and they retired to their separate rooms, Caelwen lay awake, trying to sort through her feelings. Having been unable to speak for so long, she’d become well-attuned to her surroundings and reading people. She knew Lucifer was reciprocating her actions, truthfully he’d been the first one to start lingering when handing her books or moving her wings to a better position. The problem was that she didn’t know how to proceed or if she even should.

~ The Next Day ~

Caelwen was gone after breakfast, expressing her desire to check on the office and Nia as well as grab some clean clothes before the Overlord meeting. She hated taking a break from their search, but Lucifer assured her he’d keep looking while she was out.

After changing into a clean, sleek black dress and assuring she was consumed in shadows, Caelwen headed into her office. There, she saw Nia sitting in her chair with her legs propped on the desk with a phone to her ear. Plopping down into a chair across from the hell hound, Caelwen waited for the call to wrap up. From the eye rolls and the hand yanking at her hair, it was obviously not a fun conversation.

Finally slamming the phone down after a gruff ‘fuck off’, Nia turned to her boss with a grin. “How’s it goin’ boss lady? Any luck with the books?”

*Unfortunately, not yet. We’ve worked through quite a lot though and Lucifer is going to keep going while I’m out today.* Caelwen leaned forward then, peering at the spread of papers on her desk before looking back to Nia. *I assume everything here is still okay? No one has died or tried to get one over on us?*

Nia smirked, “Duh! I’m pretty good at this shit. You know, if you ever wanted to take some time off, I’d be more than happy to run this place for awhile!”

*Good. I may take you up on that; once this seal is broken, I’ll probably need some extra time to adjust and get myself in order before the extermination.* The two women smiled at each other then Nia began to catch her boss up on everything that had happened over the last few days.

An hour later, Caelwen was standing in an elevator of the tall building, and the overlord meeting would be held in. Consumed in shadows, she took a deep breath to center herself and mentally assume her alter ego. The elevator door opened, and Madame C exited and turned to walk towards the meeting room. Entering the room, she noticed Carmilla walking to the head of the table. Madame C looked around, taking note of each Overlord in front of her, a couple she didn’t fully recall, but most were the same. When her eyes landed on Alastor and his unnerving grin, a shiver rolled down her spine – she’d thought for sure he had died, wished for it honestly.

“Welcome Hell’s sovereign Overlords. I’ve invited you all here because you represent the controlling powers of our city. Together you own millions of souls, souls at risk with the new extermination schedule. We need to discuss what can be done to minimize the impact to our interests.”

As the tall woman was talking, Madame C made her way around the table towards her chair. Despite not being present for a few decades, the chair next to Carmilla and opposite to Zestial had always been hers, and no one had bothered to try and occupy it.

“Zestial, so good to see you my friend”

“Enchanted as always Carmilla” the spider demon said, summoning a cup of tea.

The arms dealer then turned towards the radio demon in surprise, calling his name. It seemed Madame C wasn’t the only one who had thought him dead.

“Oh, yes, I know I’ve been absent some time. I’m sure you’ve all been wandering!” How she hated the sound of his staticky voice, like nails on a chalk board.

“Not really,” Carmilla shrugged. “But welcome back in any case.” She turned to the shadow-encased woman beside her next. “I’m glad to see you as well, Madame C. It’s been some time since you’ve graced these halls.”

Madame C gave a short wave and nod of her head, eager to be done with the niceties and this meeting.

Carmilla snapped her fingers and was handed a clipboard. “This years extermination was brutal, far more even than years past. We have assessed that about 16% of the population was lost. With the Angelic legions returning twice as quickly, I think it prudent we-“

The door was kicked open by Velvette, entering the meeting late and on her phone. ‘Children’ Madame C had never liked the Vees much either, to brash for her taste. She propped her elbow on the table and placed her head in her hand, doing her best to tune out the youngest Overlord.

Madame C jolted back as a head rolled towards her before stopping. It was the head of an exorcist, golden blood leaking from where it had been severed from its body. Bringing a hand to her mouth, the shadowed woman looked away to re-center herself.

“Where did you get this” Carmilla asked Velvette.

“We found it during extermination day. If these Holy Rollers can be killed, the game has changed!” She hopped up on the table walking towards the center, “We can take the fight to them. The boys and I have come up with a full assault plan –“

Loud slurping interrupted Velvette’s tirade, thankfully. Everyone turned to Zestial.

“If it be true thee and thy colleagues desire to war with such meager proof, thou art far more foolish than I be thought.”

Madame C gave a subtle nod agreeing with the spider, one exorcist meant nothing in the grand scheme, no matter how wonderful the thought of eliminating the holy army was.

Velvette snorted, “’Meager proof’? It’s a dead fucking exorcist. I’d say that pretty fucking definitive. You goin’ blind, old man?”

“We know not how this perished. Mayhaps t’was not by a demon’s hand at all. If we rush to war without knowing, mightn’t they purge all of Hell for daring an uprising?” A round of agreements was heard from every overlord around the table, angering Velvette.

“Oh I get it. So, grandpa is too pussy to fight so I guess there’s no point. Right?” She got into Zestial’s face. “Oh what’s the matter, fossil? Too senile to make a real power grab?” Madame C clenched her fists to keep from throttling the girl, letting Carmilla stand up for Zestial.

The two women began to battle it out over showing respect. Madame C felt a headache forming behind her eyes, doing her best to not lose her mind over the shit show this meeting had become. She could have been with Lucifer - looking through the library, getting closer to actually flying, sharing more stories. Testing the boundaries of their growing friendship. Instead, she was stuck here watching a child argue for all out war with angels trained to kill sinners.

Madame C tuned back into the conversation when she heard Velvette accuse Carmilla of knowing why the angel was headless. If it was true that Carmilla had killed or at least knew how to kill the exorcist, she’d need that information for later.

Carmilla called for the end of the meeting abruptly as Velvette tried to get a confession, leaving the other Overlords confused and upset. They had all taken the time to gather, and the meeting had barely begun before it was over. Madame C had not missed the chaos these meetings could be.

Rising from her seat with the other Overlords, Madame C made her way to the elevators, avoiding any questions thrown her way. It wasn’t like she could answer, so why did they try?

Once out of the building, shadows consumed her and transported her to Lucifer’s front door; she didn’t want to bother with being interrogated by Nia after the disastrous meeting. Greeting the imp that opened the door, Caelwen dropped her shadows as she waited in the entryway for Lucifer. Less than two minutes passed before a portal opened in front of the green-eyed woman, a black gloved hand hastily pulled her through.

Stumbling, Caelwen was caught at her shoulders by a grinning Lucifer, his smile so wide it nearly split his face.

“I found it! It’s not the exact symbol, but that’s because he changed it to make it what he needed. I’ve spent the last hour triple-checking and I can’t believe I forgot about bindrunes! They’re very old, but powerful and it makes perfect sense for the timing and-“ he cut himself off, running a hand through his hair. “We can break this seal within the next couple of days, just need to get a couple things first!”

Caelwen’s jaw had gone slack, her brain silent, eyes wide in disbelief. When Lucifer said she’d be whole in just a few days, she couldn’t contain her body and threw herself at the blonde man, wrapping him in a tight hug. She felt his arms slowly encircle her waist, returning the hug slowly as his mind processed the action.

Pulling her head back to look Lucifer in the eyes, it took everything she had to not kiss him. Instead, she grinned at his shocked face before squeezing him tighter and then pulling away slowly. Caelwen grabbed Lucifer’s hand and gestured for him to show her the book, her headache completely forgotten as the two lost themselves in reading through the book together and making a list of everything they might need.

Whether they realized it or not, neither one made any attempt to pull their hand from the other’s, content with the connection as they basked in their victory.

A/N – Ahhh!! I’ve done a quick proofread of this, so hopefully, I didn’t miss anything. We got a little peak into Caelwen’s mind this chapter which was fun. I’ve been developing her since the season premiered on prime, and it’s so nice to get her written down. Hope you all enjoy; likes, reblogs, and comments are so appreciated. They’ve literally kept me out of a depressed funk this past week, so thank you all!

Tag List:

@leximus98

#hazbin hotel #hazbin hotel x reader #hazbin x reader #helluva boss #lucifer morningstar x reader

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stillness-in-green · 7 months

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On Heteromorphs and Heteromorphobia (Arc XV - My Villain Academia)

(Skewing away from the wiki arc titles here, because come the eff on; everyone on god's green earth calls this My Villain Academia, not "The Meta Liberation Army Arc.")

At the request of a kind asker, I'm trying something different with footnotes this time; you'll find them at the end of the relevant bullet point, rather than at the bottom of the post. I've also flagged the numbers in purple, though I left the text itself the default color. I hope people find that a little easier to handle than having to scroll all the way to the bottom, have two tabs open, or wait until the end when they've forgotten the context.

Content Warning: Mentions of the KKK, as well as anti-Korean hate crimes/speech in Japan.

The My Villain Academia Arc (Chapters 218-240)

Chapter 218:

Tsuyu’s weakness to cold is noted in-canon, rather than in a volume extra profile.

All of the people featured specifically in the Detnerat commercial are heteromorphs—a four-armed woman, a walrus gent, and a little gelatinous boy. Re-Destro pontificates about how people with these “newer types of bodies” struggled in the new era because they couldn’t find products that would meet their daily needs; mass production was not equipped—could never really be equipped—to handle the endless variety of body shapes and sizes that came about due to the Advent of the Extraordinary. It recollects the mall scene back in Chapter 68—or, even further back, Ojiro’s character sheet and UA’s lack of varied desks—and calls the reader to consider, once again, the sorts of special needs that those with heteromorphic bodies might have, and how difficult it can be to meet those needs. RD says that his company’s ability to rapidly customize and produce unique goods for every customer has made them #1 in their industry (lifestyle goods). Assuming there’s at least some truth to the commercial shpiel—and the newscaster does at least call Detnerat “a big player”—it suggests that plenty of other companies are not so good at the rapid+customizable combination. Of course, not all companies are trying to be all things to all people, but specialization costs money—as do speed and customization, really, and note that nowhere in the commercial is there a talking point about affordability! So mainly what the commercial leaves me wondering is what degree of inconvenience is still felt by heteromorphs, especially those who are somewhat cash-strapped. That strikes me as a particular hazard when it comes to child bullying. Of course, Japanese schools have uniforms, but I wonder how available tailoring and alterations are for students with particular needs? Is there a provided budget for that sort of thing? Financial aid? How much did Ojiro’s parents have to pay for him to have a full set of uniform pants with a hole for his tail in them? How about Shouji getting all his uniform tops made sleeveless? What arrangements had to be made for Shouto’s gym uniform to be fire retardant? Even setting uniforms aside, there are also their social lives outside of school to consider. Kids will absolutely notice when one of their number wears the same clothes all the time, or home-made clothes instead of name brand, or with obvious patchwork and repair. As in real life, it’s at the intersections of more than one type of disadvantage—in this case, a heteromorphic body combined with a low-income family—that problems become more likely.

Here in 218, almost fifty chapters after the first mention of them, we finally get the proper introduction and explanation of the Meta Liberation Army. Of course, they aren’t heteromorph-specific—the closest any of the named commander-types in RD’s inner circle get is Curious, with her bright blue skin and black sclera,[1] though certainly Re-Destro himself has drifted somewhat away from baseline compared to his ancestor. Regardless, their foundational belief is the deregulation of quirks, stemming from a time when any deviation from the norm made meta-humans targets. The compromise society reached—that quirks require a license to use—is restricting enough on those whose abilities are found with a baseline body, but, as I’ve brought up before, it makes life even more potentially fraught for heteromorphs. That kind of thing is basically a pre-written excuse for heroes or police to stop and harass a heteromorph they don’t like the look of! And while the evidence of that kind of bias has been pretty circumstantial thus far, it’s about to get way, way less so. [1] Wacky hair colors being somewhat de rigueur in anime, we’ll give her a pass on the purple hair.

Chapter 220:

Here we finally hit the major leagues: the Creature Rejection Clan, or CRC. The Japanese is igyou haiseki shugi shuudan, with igyou and shuudan being pretty straightforward—igyou is, of course, “heteromorph,” and shuudan is any sort of organized or self-identifying group of people, anything from a family unit to a business organization, even all the way up to a nation. Haiseki shugi is the important bit, with shugi meaning “doctrine; principle” and haiseki meaning “rejection; expulsion; boycott; ostracism.” Thus, “group whose doctrine is the rejection of heteromorphs.”[2] Note that, in the Japanese, the word in the group’s name is heteromorph; they didn’t pick something more insulting or derogatory. They didn’t really need to, since igyou is, as discussed back in the introduction to this piece, plenty derogatory all on its own. So Caleb Cook went with a translation of igyou that would better get that derisiveness-in-the-context-of-a-hate-group across than his choice way back in Chapter 14. Creature Rejection Clan is a fairly localized translation, but Cook was pretty frank in his Twitter thread on the chapter that he was thinking about the KKK when he made the decision. And it’s not an unwarranted comparison! Of course, I wouldn’t think to presume Horikoshi’s that up on the history of racism in the U.S., but combine the cod-religious trappings and the full robes and hoods with an explicit textual description of hate crimes, and it’s an extremely easy parallel to draw. [2] The Japanese also gives the abbreviation of CRC, with the databook eventually coming out and revealing that it really stands for the name they’ve chosen for themselves in English, the Curious Rejection Committee.

That established, it’s notable that Spinner, in describing them, says that they commit hate crimes against “people with heteromorphic quirks”—a nearly word-for-word translation of the Japanese igyou-gata no ningen. This leaves aside the idea I’ve spent so much time talking about, that heteromorph discrimination is aimed broadly at those with heteromorphic bodies, and not only those with the more narrowly defined heteromorphic quirks. Shortly, however, I’ll cover some evidence that Spinner is over-generalizing, or just misinformed.

In the meantime, take note of a few things the CRC guys[3] actually say here, starting with the fact that they call Spinner a lizard. Instantly, a word that was previously a snippy and dismissive little shrug in Dabi’s mouth takes on the weight and ugliness of a slur. Further, they call the League of Villains “sins against nature”—or, in a more literal translation, “impure criminals.” I provide the more literal translation there because it’s more specific. My immediate question of the English translation would be whether the CRC judge the League as being sins against nature simply because of their criminality, or because of their association with Spinner, but the Japanese makes clear that there are two separate labels being flung there: the League are both criminals and impure. This idea of impurity brings in a religious dimension to heteromorphobia, a dimension heightened by the line (dropped by the English translation) in which the CRC accuses the League of invading a sanctuary—in Shinto, shrines have to be kept pure. The CRC calling their hideout a sanctuary, with the added context of, “They have a lizard with them. How disgusting,” thus makes it pretty clear that the impurity is about Spinner’s presence, not just the League’s assorted crimes. This spiritualistic justification for bigotry will later be made even more explicit in Shouji’s flashbacks. [3] With skull masks right there on their hoods! A real, “Are we the baddies?” moment, but given some of the other things we get on them later, it's possible the skulls are meant to contrast what e.g. Spinner or Koda’s skulls might look like: baseline human versus animalistic or “misshapen.” Credit to @codenamesazanka for connecting the dots on that!

Spinner also gives us here the line that I covered back in the terminology section at the beginning:

We’ll go with the official version this time.

So here we have the observation that the word absolutely everyone uses, the word that, as far as we know, academically defines an entire category of quirks, is an unpleasant, even rude word. But what is the alternative? We’re never given one. Indeed, Spinner doesn’t suggest one; he says that the nice thing to do is “avoid” the word instead. In other words, talk around it. See again what I said at the start about all the difficulties baked into that prospect.

Later, we get the first drops of Spinner’s backstory, and hit again on the “lizard” thing, with the note that Spinner’s backwater, stuck-in-the-last-century hometown called him “the lizard freak.” He grew up with it, grew accustomed to it, thought there was nothing he could do to change it—he might even have internalized it somewhat, though clearly by the time Chapter 160 rolled around he was ornery enough about it to complain. It's perhaps also notable that Spinner knows who the CRC are. Though we’ll later find out that their numbers have hugely diminished, he not only recognizes them, he’s not even surprised to see them—unlike many, Spinner knows the CRC never truly went away. (Compare his lack of reaction to, for example, Shouji's unsuspecting classmates, who will later be shocked, just shocked, that this kind of ugliness still exists in their country.) So just to state the obvious here, yes, the presence of active hate groups does irrevocably shift the lens on everything we’ve seen up to this point. You can’t say calling a heteromorph an animal is harmless, a little insensitive at worst, maybe even meant as a cute nickname, when that same language is used by openly violent bigots.

The volume version gives us, at the end of the chapter, further notes on the CRC. It’s full of relevant tidbits, so I’ll provide the text in its entirety:

Once superpowered society grew more stable and less chaotic, this group emerged, based around a lack of acceptance for those with body-altering quirks. They started out with demonstrations and protests but eventually started committing violent hate crimes. Most felt this was taking things too far, so the group saw a sharp decline in membership and a scattering of factions. These days, one faction might only reject people with animal properties, while another focuses its hate on people with irregular heads. These two, among others, have very few members left. The faction that Tomura and the villains attacked was one that stood by the original group's fundamental tenets.

So what is there to gather from this? Let’s break it down a point at a time.

“Once superpowered society grew more stable (...)” If you’ve ever lived through a time of increasing acceptance for a marginalized group, particularly if that acceptance involves measures for legal protections being passed, you’ll recognize what this is. Just to pick a few U.S. examples, the KKK didn’t exist until after the Civil War;[4] proactive federal bans on same-sex marriages didn’t start getting passed/proposed until individual U.S. states started legalizing them and civil unions. When opposition to something is the norm, said opposition often doesn’t start organizing until they see that status quo being threatened; they weren’t organized before because they never imagined they’d need to be! That’s what we see with the CRC: they didn’t formally declare themselves until it started looking like quirks—and especially non-baseline quirks—were going to find legal acceptance. [4] Literally. The last day of the war was May 26, 1865; the date the first Klan was founded was December 24 of the same year. Easily the most vile thing I learned in the process of writing this piece.

“(…) based around a lack of acceptance for those with body-altering quirks.” This is what I was referring to when I said Spinner's characterization of the CRC might be a little bit off: the CRC wasn’t founded because of a hatred for specifically heteromorphic quirks; they were founded because of a hatred for different bodies, a descriptor that could also apply to those with transformation-style quirks! Those, too, are quirks that alter bodies, after all; it’s just possible for people to turn them off, which is not the case for those with heteromorphic quirks. So Spinner was not quite on the mark before. Further, note that the phrase “body-altering quirks” is used here—a phrase that’s similar in meaning and much less othering than igyou. It doesn’t fully cover everything I use “heteromorphic” and “non-baseline” to cover, in that it’s still murky in situations like e.g. Cementoss’s, where his emitter quirk is entirely independent of his oddly shaped head, but it’s still a useful term! Except for the small complication of where it isn’t found: anywhere in the actual story. The fact that Horikoshi uses it in an author’s note, but it comes up nowhere in BNHA proper, puts it in an unclear place as far as in-universe alternatives go. Has it just not come up because Horikoshi hasn’t thought to include it? Or has it not come up because it’s not a phrase people in-universe use?

“They started out with demonstrations and protests but eventually started committing violent hate crimes. Most felt this was taking things too far, so the group saw a sharp decline in membership and a scattering of factions.” Confirmation here of what Spinner said about the CRC and hate crimes, but note what this doesn’t say: that the CRC was outlawed. There are, I suspect, a couple of factors influencing that. o Firstly, while Japan has legal methods to restrict undesirable organizations,[5] making it difficult for them to raise funds or engage in publicity, the country doesn’t actually de facto criminalize membership in such organizations. That distinction is part of the legacy of violent crackdowns on labor groups and protest movements in the first half of the 20th century; people tend to get very loud about anything that whiffs of the government trying to give itself the power to get that heavy-handed again. Assuming that the laws haven’t changed overmuch in HeroAca!Japan, then, I wouldn’t expect membership in the CRC to have been criminalized outright, but the volume extra doesn’t mention any kind of legal repercussions at all. That, I think, may go more to my next point. [5] The relevant laws are aimed mostly at terroristic groups or organized crime. o Secondly, another thing Japan has very, very little of is hate crime legislation. From my research, there are only two laws of any note: a federal law passed in 2016 and widely regarded as toothless thanks to it lacking any criminal provisions targeting offenders,[6] as well as a local ordinance passed in Kawasaki in 2019 that went as far as mandating fines against repeat offenders, among other measures.[7] [6] It required the government to start “implementing measures” to eliminate such speech/behaviors, as well as to “respond to requests for consultation” from victims, but did not directly mandate consequences for offenders. [7] I suspect from some of what I read that Osaka has picked up a similar ordinance, but I didn’t find anything detailing it specifically. Osaka and Kawasaki are home to the largest and second-largest population of Koreans living in Japan. One major thing neither of these measures did, though—and something activists have been pressing for—is to establish standards for considering discriminatory motivations when issuing sentences against those who have committed violent crimes. To pick an example that made the news last year, a man committed arson out of openly admitted hatred for the Koreans he targeted, but nowhere in the trial or discussion of his sentence did the prosecution ever bring up discrimination.[8] [8] https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20220829/p2a/00m/0na/015000c Also, it’s worth noting that both of these measures were aimed at ethnic discrimination—speech and behavior targeting people living in Japan while being themselves, or being children of, people of non-Japanese ethnicities. They did not address discrimination based on e.g. religion or sexuality. Folding both of those points together, the image we have of the CRC is of a violent hate group whose existence is regarded as perhaps distasteful and extremist, but not actually illegal. Even what few laws Japan has now wouldn’t have applied to anti-heteromorph discrimination, because, while they may look wildly different from a prototypical Japanese person, heteromorphs still are Japanese, and therefore not protected by a law based solely around ethnic discrimination. Incidentally, the ordinance in Kawasaki laid out a number of specific examples of the kind of behavior it was looking to address, and one of those examples was likening victims to something other than human. I know why that was included in the context of anti-Korean sentiments,[9] but it certainly does shade e.g. Dabi calling Spinner a lizard more harshly to know that there’s legal precedent for categorizing such dehumanizing language as hate speech. [9] An extremely common form of anti-Korean hate speech in Japan is to refer/allude to Koreans as cockroaches.

“These days, one faction might only reject people with animal properties, while another focuses its hate on people with irregular heads.” This is a good echo of the sort of factionalization you see in organized religion, wherein the minutiae of tenets that seem similar to an outside eye are the topic of vicious, vehement inter-group debate. More to the point, however, it provides an excellent illustration of the senselessness of bigotry. They can’t even keep their own discriminatory dogma straight! Probably the second most common complaint about the story’s use of heteromorphobia—after calling it retconned-in bullshit that didn’t exist until Chapter 220—is that it’s illogical, that it makes no sense to judge people because they look a little different in a world where everyone is now a little different from the way we see the world. And I wonder if the people who say that are listening to what they’re saying. “Illogical bias that has no foundation in reality is unrealistic?” What do these people think bigotry is? Racism, sexism, xenophobia, ableism, religious discrimination, all the many different shades of queerphobia: all of these are built on foundations of fear and hate for people who are fundamentally still as human as anyone else, yet they all exist, and have existed, and will go on existing for quite some many years still. Because irrational hatreds are, by definition, irrational. Heteromorphic discrimination is the most realistic societal dynamic in the entire series! That little rant aside, I also want to highlight the first group in the excerpt above—people with animal properties. Check any talk on the theme of, “So you can believe dragons but not black people in fantasy?” and you’ll run into the ways people are much more ready to suspend their disbelief for full-on fantasy than for something that, rightly or wrongly, pings them as incorrect, and it’s easy to imagine animal-associated heteromorphs running into a similar issue: it’s fine for people to just look weird, but looking like an animal, that’s bad and unnatural. A heteromorph who just looks like nothing in particular other than “non-baseline” is not evoking the baggage of animal anthropomorphization and cultural animal symbolism that someone who looks like a bird, a lizard, a dog, an orca, etc. is.

Chapter 223:

Shigaraki refers to Gigantomachia as a gorilla. It’s debatable how much this is of a piece with Dabi calling Spinner “Lizard”—Machia’s only actual animal quirk is Mole, not anything simian, nor is Machia particularly ape-like in anything other than his large size—but it does stand out to me that Spinner, who we know to have strong opinions about animal epithets, just refers to Machia by name or as “the big guy.”

Chapter 224:

Mr. Compress calls Machia “our pet gorilla”; see note above.

Chapter 226:

Curious introduces the idea of quirk counselling, telling us that its goal is to align people to a unified understanding of how the world and society work, but that it’s flawed in that it winds up emphasizing peoples’ differences instead. The advisor at the hospital raid will include quirk counseling in his litany of grievances, so I’ll discuss its possible utilization against heteromorphs more there, but for now, recall that I talked previously about how quirk-based behavioral tics might vary from person to person by comparing Hound Dog with Sansa. With that in mind, it’s not a big reach that some heteromorphs might run into similar problems with quirk counselling.

There are a good number of what appear to be heteromorphs through the Curious fight; whatever the MLA’s core views on quirk supremacy, the organization self-evidently makes ample room for heteromorphs, even if, like e.g. the red panda guy in the crowd jumping Toga inside the noodle joint, they don’t seem to have any other stand-out powers beyond the fur and fangs.

Chapter 229:

Twice notes in his flashback that something about his eyes always rubbed people the wrong way, scared them. We’ll eventually see this same thing with Tenko on the street—a totally normal-looking child, but the look on his face scares people away even more than the blood. And I can’t help but think, “If even a totally baseline person’s eyes can creep people out, how much easier—and more extreme—is that reaction for the more out-there sort of heteromorph?”

Gori makes the tiniest of cameos in Twice’s flashback, playing backup off to the side when we will, in current times, find him having worked his way up to the interrogation chair himself.

Chapter 230:

Geten brings us quirk supremacy via his understanding of the MLA’s goals. It’s hard to say how accurate this is, since the MLA leadership is inconsistent on what exactly their vision of Liberation entails. Whatever it is, it certainly doesn’t seem to dissuade the MLA’s own heteromorphs, though of course there’s a big difference between how e.g. Spinner or Ojiro versus Gang Orca or Mirko would fare in a societal quirk free-for-all. Likewise, the MLA is a cult, so one can’t discount the likelihood of double-think in its members.

Chapter 232:

Re-Destro talks about the state of the country in Destro’s infancy, a period in which metahumans suffered “constant abuse—blatant discrimination.” Merely for speaking out that her child was just like everyone else—that his special power was just a quirk—Destro’s mother was killed by an anti-meta mob. This gives us further evidence of the violence metahumans faced. Of course, in that time, the hate wasn’t distinguishing between types of quirk, but with that being said, an emitter and a transformer can still hide the truth about themselves with far more ease than heteromorphs—recall All Might’s discussion about the early days of quirks back in Chapter 59, in which the panel showing four people with quirks contained only one baseline person. It would be entirely unsurprising for an outsized number of the metahumans killed in those days to be heteromorphs.

Chapter 233:

The confrontation between Trumpet and Spinner gives us Trumpet clucking about Spinner having a weak meta-ability—Gecko lets him cling to walls, and that’s about it. It’s a striking contrast to someone like Mirko or Gang Orca, or even Tsuyu, all of whom have some combination of big power moves and a veritable fleet of sub-abilities. We can see the way Hero Society prizes powerful, flexible quirks in this. Having a strong quirk can help overcome the societal bias about heteromorphs, but if you’re stuck with a weak quirk and a weird face, you lack that metaphorical ticket out.[10] [10] Incidentally, the fandom reflected some of that attitude as well. There was a widespread assumption that Spinner’s quirk would be really useful or situationally powerful, otherwise why would Horikoshi have hidden it for as long as he did? Then, after the reveal, there was a certain amount of complaining that Spinner was useless to the League, and why even bother with him? Sometimes, life imitates art in some very unflattering ways.

Trumpet brings up that Spinner was a recluse, “mocked and pilloried,” and we see Spinner in his hikikomori days. What we’ve gotten on Spinner up to this point suggests that the abuse he endured was mostly verbal, though one can imagine it was pretty rough when he was young enough to be the target of school bullies. There’s a certain amount of temptation to minimize that in comparison to his response: most people who are bullied or targeted by discrimination don’t grow up to become terrorists. But there was, we will eventually find, more visceral stuff going on—and parts of the country that were even worse than Spinner’s hometown.

Spinner spent most of his life trying to fit himself into the world around him; his strongest parallel in the League in this regard is Toga, as they were the two that held themselves back, let the world define what they were and how they should act, right up until they saw something that caused them to snap.[11] Trumpet tries to do much the same to Spinner here (albeit probably less as an intentional psychological attack than Skeptic’s attempts on Twice), but Spinner, like Toga, is long past the point where he would swallow that abuse without fighting back. When you tell someone they are something long enough, they eventually start to believe it—but if you aren’t careful, they’ll start to embrace it, at which point those weaponized words change hands. [11] Shigaraki and Dabi, by contrast, pushed back harder, trying to get the world to accept them and never accepting it when their families (and particularly their fathers) told them to stop. Twice was ejected without getting the chance to try to contort himself into a shape that fit the world, whereas Mr. Compress seems to have been raised to reject his society's accepted norms from the start.

Chapter 234:

We see an image excerpted from Quirks and Us, a children’s book published by Curious’s outfit, that exhorts the reader not to judge people by their quirks. It really, really begs the question, “If this is what’s being said in literature published to coax people towards anti-suppression radicalism, what on Earth is normal society saying?” Regardless of that absolutely wild disparity, though, the fact that there are children’s books being published about quirk bias being wrong suggests that the world very much does have a problem with quirk bias. Indeed, that much has been shown throughout the series, not merely in terms of anti-heteromorph bias, but also the bias against “villain quirks,” as well as the widespread idea that people with weak quirks—or no quirks at all—are weaker people overall, pitiable folk who lack the power to live their fullest lives or pursue their dreams unhindered.[12] People on more than one of these axes of discrimination will, as in real life, be more likely to experience discrimination and violence. [12] Villains like All For One and Geten may say it more loudly, but it’s not only villains who believe it—perfectly good-hearted people like All Might and Midoriya Inko fall into that trap as well.

Chapter 237:

Nothing much to say about Shigaraki’s flashbacks save to note that, if people won’t stop to help a lost and bloodied (and baseline) child, they sure as hell won’t intervene in anti-heteromorph bullying. Recall that Kirishima was accused of sticking his nose where it didn’t belong for trying!

-----

Thanks as ever for reading along, everyone! How was the new footnote format? Should I keep that up for lengthy meta going forward?

I was kind of expecting to be able to wrap this up (the main canon, at least) in one more post, but I underestimated the amount of writing I'd be doing for the first war arc. For next time, then, I'm looking to cover the Endeavor Agency, Paranormal Liberation War, and Dark Hero Villain Hunt arcs. See you all then!

#bnha #heteromorph discrimination plot #bnha worldbuilding #bnha meta #my writing #creature rejection clan #tw racism #tw hate crime #bnha spinner #iguchi shuuichi #meta liberation army

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peachymilkandcream · 4 months

Text

My Husband, My Monster|Part 9|William Afton x Wife!Reader

(A/N: We're getting closer and closer to the end of this series, I'm still not sure how many chapters it will end up being but for now we'll keep pressing forward! Hope you enjoy and comment to be added to the taglist!)

WARNINGS: noncon, dubcon, manipulation, domestic abuse, yandere themes, forced marriage, forced pregnancy, stockholm syndrome, violence, mind breaking, misogyny, etc.

============================================

Thankfully the next funeral William had to go to wasn't that of someone he cared for. Now it was Henry's turn to feel the pain and loss he had, poor little Charlie, dumped in the alley, strangled but with no suspects to be found. What a sob story. But when his child died the world didn't care for the innocent life snatched away too soon, no they cared about the chance to drag down his name and his life's work. My how different they were.

Granted it had been William's own fault, his drunk escapades rendered him useless to think. Therefore Henry found the body before he could bury in launch an investigation. So far he couldn't be linked to anything, the cameras outside of the building had always been sketchy at best. And it could have been any old tie that killed her, his was normal enough if they found any fibers it couldn't be linked to him. He was free. Although he couldn't shake the uneasy feeling that Henry suspected it was him. Their relationship was never good, but now it was on a new low. Glares and whispers replaced civil conversation, they were both biding their time.

============================================

Months passed, Charlie's death had been officially branded a tragic random act of violence and the case was closed. Law enforcement after some time give up when it's not an open and shut case. Millions of tax dollars for this kind of justice. William didn't mind, lazy cops meant more fun for him.

His home life had never been better. His beloved wife was developing nicely, and she seemed to have come around to his behavior. She let him control more and more aspects of her life, where she went, how she dressed. The list went on and on. Her showing pregnancy also helped to limit the amount of time outside the house she could spend. And since his true personality of absentee husband did nothing to control her moods his newest role as caring husband who dotes on his pregnant wife seemed to work wonders on her pliable mind.

His son was still a handful, haunted by what he had done to his brother. Michael had gotten into a habit of sneaking out to find distance from the space that once held his younger sibling, it was driving his mother sick with worry. With a child on the way the less stress the better, so William agreed he would talk to the boy and try to ease his guilt. Trips to the now closed diner that killed his brother had it's intended effect. Michael, seeing the dried bloodstains and rotting animatronics plagued his mind with nightmares. Nightmares that they were coming after him now, William could hear him crying in his room with terror, lights left on so they couldn't come to get him. He learned to stay indoors in the dark.

The Afton family was growing and thriving, William had intended for them to forget at least a little of their recent loss, he wanted to be the bearer of their sorrows, so they would love him as much as he loved himself. They were flying high and nothing could bring them down.

==============================================

"Scrapping Spring Bonnie?" The outrage was impossible to conceal in his voice. "That was my character, he's what started this whole business!"

"We already have another Bonnie, so your suit doesn't fit William." Henry didn't even give him the decency of eye contact.

"Then he can be a floor animatronic, you can't just get rid of the original mascot-"

"To tell you the truth William parents are afraid of it, since that suit and Fredbear had the same mechanical system parents are hesitant to bring their kids near so there's not a repeat of the accident."

"My son has a name, Henry. He's not just "the accident"."

Henry holds his hands up calmly and apologetically. "Alright, I'm sorry. What tragically happened to Evan makes parent's warry to trust our animatronics."

"The kids loved it!"

"True but they can't if they're not coming since parents are so concerned."

"So what, I'll just hide away in my office like you from now on?"

Henry scratches the back of his head. "About that-"

"You're joking-"

"Listen William, out on the floor your behavior is...eccentric. And I think it's too much for the kids."

"I'm a partner to this company shouldn't I have a say what I do?"

"Technically William I own most of it. I could buy out your shares in an instant."

"So you get to push me around."

"I hate that you word it like that but yes."

William scoffs. "I can't believe you."

"Believe what you want." He turns around in his chair. "I'll expect that suit to be in parts and repairs by the end of the day."

William storms out, fuming with rage. How dare he? He was just reacting to his dead brat. Children mean so much to him yeah? Well lets see what he'll do next. For weeks that insatiable thirst for blood plagued his every sense. No longer. He'd oblige that craving, indulge that urge. If William couldn't run the restaurant like he wanted, he'd burn it to the ground.

============================================

Choosing the victim wasn't hard. Birthday parties at the Pizzeria always meant a lot of commotion and confusion, the little blonde girl just happened to be all on her own. He recognized her, Henry had given the girl and her family permission to hang up missing dog posters in the door window since he cared so deeply about children's happiness. The stupid girl even gave him bait with which to lure her into the backrooms.

Henry wasn't here today, no one would notice the security cameras being tampered with. They wouldn't see him putting on his favorite suit since the parts and service camera busted months ago. It felt like home, smelled like home. He remembered the first time showing his wife his disguise and how she had laughed at "how adorable he was". Now she was at home caring for their newly born Vanessa, probably hoping he had a good day. Good, he had become very fond of the woman he vowed to spend eternity with. He'd hate to lose her over something like this.

================================================

His approach started subtly, just another mascot approaching a seemingly depressed child to cheer her up. He put on his best cartoon voice and offered her a balloon animal dog.

"Hey there miss, I couldn't help but notice your frown. What's wrong? Parties are no fun if you're sad." It was corny and made him cringe, but it always had a response with the kids.

"My dog, he's missing."

"Aw, well I am so sorry to hear that. But wait, is that your dog in that poster?" He points, a part of him wishing this was over so he could at least talk like an adult.

She nods, making him grin under the mask. "Good news! I think I saw that same dog in the back of the Pizzeria."

The way her eyes light up almost causes him to laugh, so gullible and naïve. Believing everything anyone says, she almost deserves it coming. "Really!?"

"Come with me!" He offers his large hand, having her take it as he slowly and surely leads her into the parts and service room, keeping his grin hidden and excitement in check.

Once there in the dark she looks around curiously, waiting for her dog to jump out of nowhere. When it didn't happen she looked up at him confused. "Mister, where is my dog?"

The knife plunging into her stomach severed all further questions. Her mouth hung agape in shock and horror as he repeated the action again and again. Not stopping until he was satisfied with his work.

When he was finished, a smile carved into her face, a wave of panic washed over him. What now? What about the body? Where wouldn't they look? He couldn't get lucky a second time.

His thoughts raced and raced until he spotted Chica, in for some routine maintenance with her chest cavity wide open. Perfect for a little girl.

With the body carefully hidden, William allowed himself a chance to enjoy his work and to revel in what he'd done. Nothing beat a high like this, he had to keep chasing it. But what could he do in this moment? Another kill would be too hasty.

His thoughts wandered until they finally came to his wife, knowing that she would be willing to feed until this high wasn't enough anymore and he needed his next rush. And then the one after this.

William stared at all of the parts and machines around him, Henry's pride and joy.

"Just think old friend." He said to the silence. "Now your precious machines are as corrupted and foul on the inside as you."

Tags:

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@fandomreader @n3r0-1417 @2pacl0ve

#my husband my monster #william afton x reader #william afton x you #william afton x oc #william afton smut #william afton #steve raglan x oc #steve raglan x you #steve raglan smut #steve raglan x reader #steve raglan #five nights at freddys #five nights at freddy's #fnaf movie #fnaf

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oleander-nin · 9 months

Text

The Weight of a Letter(10)

A/N: I'm so sorry this one's so short. I'll make the next chapter upwards of 3000 words as consolation. Thank you dearly to @faetaiity and @astral--horrorshow for beta reading. I'm brain dead and can't look at this any more or I'll explode. Any criticism is welcome, constructive or not. This is supposed to be a gender neutral reader, so if I screwed up somewhere, please tell me.

Taglist? If you want to be added or removed, just say so: @ssak-i @sinister-things @ancreativename @t0ta11y-n0t-cup1d @idiotreblogger @whygz @lexiechr@10yagurlchip01 @rex-ray @sunsersilversky @theavianlady

Part 1 - Previous - Next

Words: 900

Content warnings: not much, dark themes, yan themes

Chapter 10: A Hidden Fracture

I carefully close the door to the guest room, shuffling over to the bed. I glance at the door, biting my lip. I couldn’t imagine how Irma would react to my phone suddenly being back. As far as she knew, I gave it to a normal human kid who would drop it off in person, not toss it on the fire escape. I needed to make up an excuse.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll say they dropped it off at school? No, that wouldn’t work. Irma’s with me most of the day. Maybe I’ll just say I ran into them at some point. I didn’t need to worry about an excuse until tomorrow anyway. I have all night to come up with one. I lay on my stomach as I plop onto the bed, holding my phone in front of me. I power it on, watching the phone slowly come back to life. It was like brand new.

I couldn’t help but feel a surge of relief when the company screen passed and my familiar wallpaper shone bright in the dim light of the room. My phone was fixed. Donatello actually fixed my phone. I hold my hand over my mouth, biting back a squeal of delight. For once in the months of paranoia and torment, something was truly going right. Even the letters, which I admit I had gotten emotionally dependent on, weren’t as exciting as they used to be. Especially with everything happening. Irma’s theories were convincing, sure, but it still didn’t make sense. I shake the thoughts of the letters out of my head. Maybe Donatello and his brothers were the friends I needed. I hope I can introduce them to Irma soon.

My eyes drift over to the vase on the nightstand. I had moved it to stay here with me in the days I’ve spent with Irma. I tap the side of my still locked phone, contemplating. Technically, the police cleared my apartment and it was safe to move back in. But did I trust them? What if they missed something important? What if my apartment got broken into again?

What if they were already there, waiting for me to return?

I shudder, trying to shake off the thoughts that had dug their claws into my brain. I couldn’t go back. Not yet. I quickly reopen my phone, pulling up different articles on locks and security systems. If I was going to move back in anytime soon, I needed to be safe. They wouldn’t be getting away this easily. My eyes skim the words on the page as I read comparisons for different locks. I chew on my lip, barely noticing the sharp sting or the sudden taste of copper.

A sudden buzz from the device in my hands accompanied by a small pop up notification startles me out of my thoughts. I stare at the alert for a moment before pressing on the notification to view it in full. I just received a text from Donatello. The name stands proud at the top of the messaging screen, a bright purple and magenta D logo set as his profile. I’m a bit surprised to see it, but shrug. It makes sense he added his number, he was the one to fix my phone anyway. My eyes drop to read his message, wondering what it contains. I needed to thank him for my phone anyway, might as well do it now.

Donatello: Is your phone treating you well? I mean, of course it is, I fixed it.

I snicker at the text, rolling my eyes. Sure, the happenstance meeting on the fire escape was a bit weird, but Donatello and his brothers were endearing in an odd way. Especially Donatello’s small quips and ego. It was entertaining.

I send a quick confirmation of my happiness with the phone, as well as a thank you. I don’t want him to think I was rude. If all goes well, we can be good friends. I close the message thread before looking through my phone to see if he added or changed anything else. My settings are still the same, as are all my previous apps and conversations. The only thing he added was his and his brothers number, four small little contacts added to my already small list.

I open up Mikey’s contact, my thumbs hovering over the keys. He was the one who seemed most excited to see me, so he would be my best bet in making plans. Hopefully.

I send him a quick text, hoping he’d see it soon. A few moments pass and I grin as my phone lets off another quiet buzz. I watch Mikey’s ecstatic messages roll in, my mood improving even more. It was nice to talk to him, considering what seemed to be the oldest brother insisted they leave so soon yesterday.

I feel a warm buzz in my chest as he invites me to dinner the next day, each text of his more bold and ecstatic than the last. I chew on my lip, wondering how I’d tell Irma. She knew I didn’t have any other friends. Maybe I can tell her this was how I was picking up my phone. Yeah, that was a good idea.

I send back a short text, accepting his invitation to dinner. I couldn’t wait, he claimed to be quite the master chef after all.

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holylulusworld · 7 months

Note

Hey Lulu! Hope you’re having a nice October! Just wondering what Captain SassyPants and Goddess are up to for spooky season?!

Please feel free to ignore. Just wanted to let you know they still live rent free in my brain! I love their banter 😍

Hi lovely. October has been kind to me so far. I hope yours is great too.

Aw, I love them too. I try to get the next chapter out in November. After Kinktober vs Flufftober is over.

Here's a little blurb for their first Halloween. It's set right after his birthday. Goddess wants to play...

"Steve, please come and pick your girlfriend up," Tony groans. You are threatening to blow his head off if Steve doesn't come out. "I'm not in the mood to end up as a smashed pumpkin."

You cackle manically. *only for the drama of course* Carl, your favorite minion helped you build another weapon. You call it the pumpkin maker and now you threaten the mighty Iron Man once again.

"Steve, she threatened to use her weapon on me. She said it'll turn me into a pumpkin." Tony huffs as your nemesis finally steps out of the building. He's wearing a brand-new suit and his shield.

"Goddess," Steve sighs. "Again?"

Steve looks at the pumpkin-shaped weapon in your hand. It looks like a small bomb, and he worries that you'll wreak havoc today out of all days.

"Trick or treat Captain Sassypants," you grin at Steve. "I got a brand-new costume only for you. I call it the sassy cat. I got cat ears and a tail too."

You turn around and wiggle your ass in your black leather suit.

Steve's eyes darken for a moment, and he clears his throat. "We talked about your attacks on the headquarters and/or my friends."

"But it's fun," you pout. "If you come with me on free terms, I'll shelter your friend's life."

He dips his head to glance at the weapon in your hands again. "Fine."

"Great," you grin. "Carl, get the candy buckets. We are going on a candy raid with Captain America."

"YAY!" Carl cheers from the back. "Candy...candy..."

"Wait...What?" Steve furrows his brows as your minions run toward you, carrying candy buckets.

"Haha...Captain Sassypants. We are going to rob the neighborhood of their candy and bring it to the orphanage."

Steve smiles. He knows that behind your cocky façade, you're a good person. He only needs to make you see you're a hero, not a villain...

#lulu answers #lovely mutuals #captain sassypants and goddess #blurb #steve rogers #steve rogers x villain!reader #steve rogers x reader

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sigmoon · 18 days

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Wildflowers under the summer rain - Chapter Five: Bittersweet Nightshade

"Healing holy man, once upon a time / hunting high and low to seek revenge / brand new moral code / got made reluctant renegade / evil spirits flowed / he drank the blood like lemonade." (Morcheeba, Blood Like Lemonade)

"And how I tried so hard to hide the pain / what bad temper we're keeping / and so I followed a light into the night / and you kept me waiting in the dark with no place to hide / cause we are more than our disguises." (Weyes Blood, Twin Flame)

Pairing: Fyodor Dostoyevsky x reader

wc: 4.2k

cw: Dark content! Implied self harm (cuts). Implied sexual abuse. Implied depression and suicidal ideation. Implied murder. Religious themes. Implied manipulation/brainwashing. Vague hints about Fyodor’s past. Subtle flirting. Fyodor’s POV.

Author's note: It's been so long since the last chapter, and rereading the first four chapters made me cringe a lot. My writing has changed, and so have my original plans for this story, and the most recent revelations about Fyodor from the manga have interfered with them a bit… I don't want to make promises I might not keep, but I'm sure I won't take 4+ months again until the next update. That being said, enjoy reading part five!

“Man, there are many ability users out there.”

She knelt on the floor, surrounded by a sea of files she’d taken out of the shelf in the corner of Fyodor’s office, and browsed through them one after another.

Fyodor, who sat a few feet away from her at his desk, and was just as busy, had told her to read through the many files he had assembled about various ability users from all around the world. They included detailed descriptions of their supernatural abilities, and Fyodor hoped that at least one of them might be useful for the next missions he’d planned, and replace one of his current subordinates if necessary.

However, he felt no need to entertain her need for conversation, unbothered by the silence between them, unlike her, who tried to fill it by at any given chance.

Though inevitably, Fyodor had learned over time that she was sharper than he’d initially thought.

But he simply had very little interest in wasting his time with a sinner like her, let alone bond with one. She was a useful tool, but it was best to keep her an arm's length away from himself, emotionally.

“Oh hey, look!”

She held up a thin file, no more than a few pages with a small photo stapled on.

It was a bit blurry, but one could still recognize the face of a boy, presumably in his teenage years, with brown, messy hair. One of his dark eyes was covered by white bandages.

“What about him? His gift is… ’ability neutralization.’ That sounds pretty useful, right? I mean, sure, he’s a little young, but–”

“No, not him,” Fyodor said, clipped. He’d looked over his shoulder and recognized the file, or rather the person in the photo.

“Why not?”

“He already works for another organization. He can’t be trusted.”

“Are you sure?” she asked and skimmed through the file again. “Judging by what it says here, he'd make a pretty good hitman, at least."

“Not him,” Fyodor repeated. “Check the other files; and no members of other organizations.”

“So we’re only looking for people in vulnerable and unstable life situations?”

“Correct.”

“Exclusively employing easily manipulated people and desperate losers...good business model you got there. Religions take a similar approach,” she said, putting the file back. Her tone was provocative and her words were meant to be a jab at Fyodor.

“Shut your mouth and get back to work,” Fyodor said sternly. Who did this girl think she was…

“Sorry, I forgot that being reminded of what a terrible person you are is a sensitive topic…” she said and met Fyodor’s cold gaze with a contemptful glare of her own.

“You’ve got quite the nerve calling me a bad person. You’re no better than me,” replied Fyodor.

„Are you serious? I might not be a saint, but you’re a lot worse than I am. Yes, I’ve hurt people, but I didn’t kill any of them, and you’ve built an entire organization that does nothing but spill blood because their leader is some delusional fanatic who believes it’s for the greater good.“

Much as she was pushing her luck with him, and despite his anger, Fyodor grinned mockingly as she spat insults at him.

„You clearly do not understand my lifework one bit, but that was to be expected of someone like you. Impulsively going on a purging spree because someone took your dignity, only to get locked up and not change a single thing, not even for yourself. Pathetic,“ he hissed right back.

„Did it feel good, at least? Because I can assure you that your adorable little plan to rid the world of evil was entirely self-indulgent and did not help anyone in need, not even yourself. Why else would you see so little meaning in your life if not because getting revenge did not free you of the shackles that person apparently still has you in? You’re still as miserable as you were before, aren’t you?“

“You don’t know anything about me, you sick fuck!” she growled and trembled with fury. The way she eyed Fyodor betrayed her apparent desire to pounce him and tear him apart.

“I don’t have to; that deranged look on your face speaks volumes," Fyodor said coldly, but as soon as the words had gone past his lips, he realized that he’d gone too far. Her face was no longer twisted in outrage but in genuine hurt and humiliation.

Her efforts to hide it were unsuccessful– Fyodor saw her lower lip quivering, like that of a child about to burst into tears.

He wondered how she'd managed to agitate him like that once again. Insults were not usually his style, and neither was lashing out at people.

He cleared his throat and calmly, he added: "What I know for sure is that vengeance is never worth it. Not the effort, nor the blood that's being spilled...and especially not the remorse that comes after, either."

"It’s better than doing nothing about the things others have done to you," she whispered.

“And it’s ironic how you’re judging me for how strongly my past affects me when your entire life’s purpose depends on the words that someone else has put inside your head.”

“I never expected you to share my beliefs, or to understand them.”

“I wasn’t talking about your god, and I think you know it,” she said with the same penetrating expression that had made Fyodor so uneasy since the day they’d met.

“Sucks to hear it, huh?” She said, amused by the aghast look on Fyodor’s face. “You’re just as controlled by your past as I am, but I’m trying to escape that grip, while you succumb to it. You’re someone’s little puppet, and yet you believe that you’re acting on your own accord."

Fyodor swallowed hard and tried to make sense of his racing thoughts.

There was no way she could know...Fyodor had never spoken about his past in her presence. Not like he did around anyone else, ever. And how on earth could she possibly know about him?

No, she only enjoyed taunting him by making provocative assumptions. She was only playing a mind game, in hopes to rile him up.

Or was it her ability’s doing? Fyodor’s information about her ability was vague, but he knew that she could make people suffer a great deal by using it, so it wasn’t far-fetched that she was trying to do this to him as well.

After all, she was vicious, unstable, and, despite their teamwork, a dangerous individual.

“You’re being ridiculous…I’m ending this conversation now,” Fyodor murmured and turned away in his office chair, shaken up, and attempting to keep his composure.

His underling seemed just as fed up with their argument as he was. She pulled out another file from the shelf and browsed through it.

“What about him?” she sniffed. Her voice was shaky, her eyes glistening with tears that threatened to fall. “He can create portals.”

The file she was showing Fyodor now was significantly thicker than the previous one. Fyodor recognized it immediately; he’d been working on it for a fair amount of time now, as the ability user it was about had already piqued his interest a while ago.

He hadn’t been quite sure how to utilize him so far, but Fyodor was convinced that when the time was right, he would make for a valuable accomplice.

“We’ll keep an eye on him.”

━━━━━

Fyodor let his head fall back against the headrest of his office chair.

It was late, he’d been ignoring his body’s cries for rest for hours and was now nearing his mental and physical limits.

Working himself to the bone wasn’t rare, and though the price he paid was high, Fyodor deemed it necessary, willing to do everything in his might to get the job done.

His head was pounding, and he closed his eyes with a sigh of resignation, thinking about today’s incident.

His underling was not an easy person to have a conversation with, and maybe, under different circumstances, Fyodor would have appreciated someone to talk to who wasn’t as dull as the rest of the people he was surrounded by.

However, while he appreciated her desire for autonomy - a trait that his other subordinates lacked - broadening his horizon by constantly questioning his every sentence wasn’t what he’d hired her for.

She didn’t seem to have a shred of respect for him or what he stood for, and Fyodor was fed up with defending what was holy to him against a lowly sinner like her.

He stared at the ceiling above him and gnawed on his thumb as he reveled in his thoughts. While she wasn’t as degenerate as others he considered a pest in this world, her mind and hands were tainted with sin. And just like everyone else, she refused to see it.

She was not at fault for what had been done to her, Fyodor knew that, but he firmly believed that she was to blame for how she’d dealt with it.

Fyodor could even see why she’d decided to walk down the path of bloodthirsty revenge, an understandable desire, after being violated by another person, but still, it was not her rightful place to deliver punishment on those who deserve it, but his.

And always that damned expression on her face. Fyodor was unfazed by all kinds of horrors, having seen and done a lot, but the way her stare pierced through him as if she could see his soul creeped him out.

She knew things that she couldn’t possibly know, because Fyodor had never spoken about them with anyone, ever. But he had a feeling that she still knew, and he didn’t like it one bit.

Other than that, he had yet to figure out what exactly her ability enabled her to do. She hadn’t told him anything, and Fyodor wasn’t as almighty as people thought he was. Skilled at seeing through people by analyzing their speech and behavior, yes, or getting someone to reveal information about themselves without even realizing they’d been interrogated, but even Fyodor’s intelligence had its limits.

He assumed that her ability went beyond enabling her to inflict severe white torture upon people, which was the only proven knowledge he had about it. It would have been naive to believe that there wasn’t more to it than that.

Sometimes, when Fyodor felt his patience run out, he stooped to taking his irritation out on her by voicing how little value she had to him as a person and pointing out his superiority over her.

He wasn’t proud of participating in this infantile tug-on war between them, and it upset him that she had the power over him to get such petty reactions out of him.

Their discussions, no, her entire being only proved Fyodor’s point; most people failed to comprehend his mission– that they had to be saved from the misery that they were either put through by someone else or managed to maneuver themselves into.

Both were the case for her and - while it was uncomfortable to admit - it was for Fyodor, too.

In this world, nobody was free of sin forever. No matter how hard one tried, it would get to them at some point, and someone needed to put an end to this vicious cycle. Even if it required sacrifices.

Fyodor was more than willing to die on a cross and take those who stood in his way with him if it was for the sake of a better world.

A metallic taste spread on his tongue, and he retracted his hand to inspect it. A drop of blood oozed from his bitten nail bed, and Fyodor watched it trickle down the length of his thumb before bringing it back to his lips and licking it clean.

The sound of distant footsteps, slowly approaching, followed by the creaking of his door, pulled Fyodor out of his thoughts.

He knew that this late visitor could only be her, but her presence was not reason enough for him to drop everything and turn around.

„Aren’t you a bit too old to be suckling on your thumb?“

Fyodor didn’t reply to the voice coming from a few feet behind him. Even if he had felt like entertaining another argument, he would’ve been far too exhausted for that.

He felt miserable; his eyeballs were dry and stung, and his head still ached; telltale signs that he ought to abandon his screens and make up for the lack of sleep these days. Fyodor knew that he wasn’t doing his already strained body any favor, but there was work to do, too important to be postponed.

„No witty comeback?“ she asked when Fyodor stayed silent. „I’m just saying that you’ve got quite a bad habit with your nail biting.“

„That makes two of us,“ Fyodor said, looking at her over his shoulder, and he briefly nodded at her forearms.

Usually covered by her daytime attire, they were now exposed, the sleeves of her t-shirt barely reaching her elbows. The tender skin revealed was uneven, with multiple streaks of scar tissue betraying that she was no stranger to unhealthy coping, either.

Fyodor could tell that the cuts were not inflicted recently, but rather several months, if not years ago, as they looked mostly healed, as far as injuries like such could.

Still, he murmured: „You might want to give me that gun back I gave you some time ago.“

„Are you worried about me?“ she smirked, her tone surprisingly sober, considering the topic that hung in the air.

„No, but I don’t want to be the one scrubbing your brain off of the floor one day.“

„I‘m sure you wouldn’t have to,“ she replied and approached his desk. She took a seat on a chair next to Fyodor’s. „You’ve got plenty of lackeys who’d do anything for you, even that.“

„Still, I have no interest in losing my most valuable subordinate.“

“So you do care about me.” she grinned, but Fyodor wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of believing he liked her, which he didn’t. If he did, and he’d told her, she’d only be going to exploit it.

„I do not,“ Fyodor repeated. „But the others lack the competence that you have.“

„Is that a compliment? Are you promoting me?“

“It’s a matter of fact, not flattery. But I might think about assigning you with other tasks,“ Fyodor said, tilting his head and resting it in his palm. A small smile tugged on the corners of his mouth. „If I don’t keep you busy, you will just keep pestering me.”

„That’s great,“ she smiled back. „But if you make me babysit Ivan and Pushkin, I will use my gun.“

„To kill them or yourself?“

„All three of us, in that order,“ she said, and Fyodor finally chuckled, though he blamed the slip-up on his tiredness.

He was certain that his exhaustion was to blame for this conversation even happening, as he rarely had any interest in speaking with her, or so he thought, as he’d never given her a proper chance to prove herself worthy of sharing his few moments of spare time.

Neither of them said anything for a minute or two, the dim light coming from Fyodor’s computer screens painting the room, as well as their faces, in a soft purple, enhancing both of their weary expressions, and Fyodor could see that just like him, she had dark shadows beneath her eyes as she looked past him.

“Why are you awake at this hour?” Fyodor was the first to break the silence.

“I could ask you the same thing,” she said firmly, no trace of the lightness from just a moment ago left.

“I asked first,” Fyodor replied, but he didn’t expect her to open up. She’d never been eager to do so, and he doubted she would be now.

She scowled at him but sighed, and leaned back into her seat. “I had a bad dream.”

“About…?”

“Yes,” she said quickly, cutting him off.

Fyodor was on thin ice. He had to be careful, otherwise, this opportunity of taking advantage of her vulnerable state would pass, without having gotten any new information about her.

Fyodor was aware of this risk, and yet he asked: „Has hurting others made your suffering more bearable?“

She didn’t respond at first, and Fyodor already feared he’d lost his chance. But after pausing for a moment, she said: „Momentarily, yes. But the satisfaction, the relief– it didn’t last. What did last, was this rotten stuff inside of me. I’ve hoped that if I just kept doing it…then it might finally go away.“

„But it didn’t,” Fyodor said confidently, though he could only guess what she meant by the ‘rotten stuff’.

„No. The damage done stuck around, I guess.”

“I see. You never told me what your ability does, by the way.”

“Don’t you know?" she asked. “You’ve seen me use it.”

“But that is not all it does, am I right?” Fyodor insisted. As talkative as she was on occasion, she wasn’t easy to read.

“Why would you think that?”

“Because you know things you can’t possibly know,” said Fyodor.

“So I was right?”

“About what?”

“About you being someone’s puppet. Your actions are influenced, your entire plan is.”

Fyodor felt disrespected, even more than whenever she dragged his lifework through dirt, the very thing he’d gone through hell and back for.

What fueled the humiliation was that she wasn’t entirely wrong, but Fyodor didn’t want her to have the upper hand in this. However, the time spent trying to come up with a response only confirmed her accusation.

“I was only taking a guess, actually, I’m not a mindreader. But thanks for confirming my theory. I had a feeling that there’s more to this all than just your faith.”

Fyodor’s expression must've looked hilarious to her, as she giggled. “Don’t look so grim. It doesn’t take an ability to figure out that you have issues.”

There was a deep line between Fyodor’s furrowed brows, and he clenched his jaw.

Was she, perhaps, able to deduce someone’s feelings simply due to a high level of empathy and emotional intelligence, even without the help of a supernatural ability?

“Wanna tell me about it?” She asked, disturbing the silence, as well as Fyodor’s train of thought.

“Absolutely not.”

„Come on,“ she pleaded. „I don’t mean to make fun of you, I promise. I just think it would be helpful for us to understand each other better. I’m sure I wouldn’t despise you as much if I fully understood what all of this is really about.”

„And why do you care?”

Tight-lipped, she fidgeted with her hands as she struggled for words. “Well…Because you’re not boring, as much as I don't like you.“

"Oh?"

“Now, don’t mistake this as flattery, but you're really smart. You could be anything you wanted, and why would you make use of your potential the way you are right now,” she asked, “if not because someone convinced you that this is your sole purpose?”

“You’re both right and wrong,” Fyodor said solemnly. “It was someone else’s words, but the power of many that made me realize what my purpose is.”

“What, becoming a terrorist?”

He scowled. “No. That I must change the world, no matter the price. Sacrifices are inevitable, and no, I am not indifferent about that. I know that the measures I’m taking are drastic at times, but it all happens for a reason.”

“Ugh…” She grimaced and pretended to retch.

“I don’t care if you understand my reasoning here, but I know that those who end up being sacrificed for my plan will be rewarded when my work is done. Because then, all the lost souls will be granted salvation. God has mercy on those who deserve it, and I am creating a world with no room for those who don’t, which is why I assumed that you would gladly assist me when I had you brought here,” Fyodor said. "After all, what you did was similar to my plan. Bungling, lacking skill and precision, but of the same essence. That’s the whole reason I wanted you as my right hand.”

“First of all, rude, and secondly, I lost interest in cooperating with you when you started preaching about god and salivating as you did so.”

“Cut the blasphemy if you want this conversation to continue,” Fyodor hissed.

“Fine, fine. But a world devoid of evil and ability users? That goal is quite hypocritical, considering that you are an ability user yourself.”

“Abilities are part of the problem, which is the sin, infiltrating and corrupting people. They do more harm than good. I seek to free the world of this burden. Mankind is foolish and people need to be saved from themselves. Even you must agree, no?”

“Yes, though I wouldn’t have assigned you, of all people, with that task. You’re a menace.”

“Well, some people have thought differently in the past.”

“In other words, you’ve been manipulated. A person of your intellect would never come up with this crap all by themselves and let it dictate their life.”

“Call it what you want– I have lived a long life, long enough to know that I am the one destined to fulfill God's plan.”

“You can’t be that old,” she said, tilting her head and inspecting Fyodor’s face.

“Clearly, you don’t know as much as you think you do. Not about the world, and certainly not about me,” he said.

“Then enlighten me. Tell me about yourself.”

All of Fyodor’s resistance was futile. He felt weak and disgustingly vulnerable. The way she spoke, the way she looked at him; it all made him want to open up his heart, and spill everything he’d safely locked inside it over the years, just to get more of this new feeling– the sweet relief that he’d felt when she first made it clear that she wasn’t so easily fooled by his facade. The relief of having some weight lifted off of his shoulders.

“I feel with every person who's died at my hands, directly and indirectly. And I wish there was another way to change the world than wiping out the sinful parts of the population like they’re parasites and doing so at the cost of innocents. But I’ve been assigned this task, by God himself, and I must complete it, so no one else has to taint themself like I do. This means everything to me…all the lost souls, even the evil ones, will be forgiven for their sins and granted a second chance, but I…I’ve got blood on my hands that I cannot wash off, and I know that I won’t be granted a place in the new world I intend to create."

“That’s really fucking sad,” she said once Fyodor had finished.

“Hm.” He shrugged. “Anyway, there is a specific tool that will enable me to achieve all of this, a very powerful one. And I need to get it, at all costs.”

“What kind of tool?”

“A book. A novel, to be precise, with all blank pages, and whatever is written inside becomes reality. Getting my hands on it is difficult, and requires resorting to drastic measures, but once it’s in my possession, nobody will have to suffer anymore.”

“I understand,” she replied. “And do you think you’ll be able to find peace if your plan works out?”

“What? I’m not the one with issues, and I don't need your pity!” Fyodor said with a dark glare. He was angry, especially at himself, for blabbering with no restraint.

“Sure you don’t,” she said mockingly. “You might be fooling yourself, but not me. Look, I have no idea who made you carry the weight of the whole world all by yourself, but I can’t sit here, watching you approach this problem the way that you are. Surely, there must be a way to get that book with less mass destruction along the way.”

“Don't you think I'm already trying to avoid unnecessary suffering?”

“Yeah, no, I don’t believe you are. We might have a similar goal, but our approaches are worlds apart. And to be honest, I have little respect and understanding for your strategy.”

Fyodor rolled his eyes. “Yes, you’ve told me already. I lost count of how often.”

She smiled. “And you will hear it again. Just please, let me do more than interrogation, let me actually partake in this plan. I don’t care about hurting evil people if it’s necessary, but unlike you, I don’t believe in the afterlife, so I don’t want innocents to die because of us.” She then held out her hand, waiting for Fyodor to shake it. “Deal?”

“Fine, I can live with that. Yes, we have a deal,” Fyodor said, after a last moment of hesitation, and shook her hand; smaller, softer, but just as cold as his, causing chills to run down his spine. His gaze flicked down to look at the streaks on her forearms, and then up to her face, where a pair of eyes stared back at him, with an indefinable expression.

Fyodor had yet to realize that he knew far less about this sinner, as well as about himself, than he’d initially thought, and about how deeply her fate was to affect his own.

This handshake, their first touch, was only the beginning of a series of events that was going to turn Fyodor’s world upside down.

#bungou stray dogs #bsd #fyodor.bsd #dark content #fics #bsd fanfic #bungou stray dogs fyodor #fyodor dostoevsky #fyodor bsd #fyodor x reader #bsd x reader #wildflowers under the summer rain #factum est❁hio

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thicctails · 21 days

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><((((º>‿︵‿︵‿︵Undercurrent‿︵‿︵‿︵<º))))><

A Merformers x Reader Fanfiction

Chapter 2 ° Coastguard

Blessed be Randy the coffee machine, your holy god of caffeine. May His hazel liquid flow eternally into graceous Bartholomew, vessel of Randy's divine lifeblood; discount noname brand coffee that had expired last week.

Taking another sip of your beloved breakfast drink, you forced yourself to walk towards the greeting area of your clinic, praying to any deity that was listening that you looked at least passably presentable. You'd taken far longer to pull yourself away from the tender embrace of your nearly flat air mattress than you should have, and both your nerves and back were paying for it.

The head researcher of A.E.R.O. was meeting with you today to discuss your collaboration effort with them, and finally tell you exactly what species you'd be getting to work with. You hoped it would be something exciting, like sharks, dolphins, whales, or nudibranchs.

Taking a shaky breath, you shoved your anxiety down into the pit of your gut where it could, hopefully, only be noticed by you as your hand grasped the handle of the door. You pulled, ready to take the first proper step towards your new life.

Ka-thunk!

Ah. It was a push door.

Willing the colour that had suddenly flooded your cheeks to kindly fuck off, you meekly pushed the door open.

A man was standing in the main entrance room, leaning against Desk the desk and scrolling through something on his phone. He was dressed fairly casual for someone in his position, sporting tan cargo shorts, a forest green t-shirt, and a black lab coat, his company's acronym emblazoned in crisp vinyl across his breast pocket. He had tousled light brown hair and deep brown eyes that were framed by square glasses. At the sound of your approach, he lifted his gaze from his cellphone and gave you a warm smile, pocketing the device and turning his body towards you.

"Doctor L/N! It's nice to finally meet you!" he greeted, extending his hand to you. "My name is Dr. Burns, but please, just call me Graham."

Though it had been difficult to tell sometimes, you had not actually been raised by a pack of rabid wolves, so you returned the gesture, gripping the man's hand and giving it a shake.

"It's a pleasure to acquatence your make."

Oh, Jesus Christ.

Hey, God? Could you do a little smiting? Yeah, right here please.

"I- I'm so sorry, I swear I didn't mean to say that." You managed to get out, almost shocked that you hadn't fucked that sentence up as well.

Breaking News! Local PhD holder flubbs basic greeting! Becomes World Champion speedrunner for ruining first impressions and instantly loses any chance of being considered for further employment and any shred of respect this man had for them!

"It's fine. Honestly, I was just as nervous as you when I first started." Graham laughed, startling you out of your own mental spiral, "I was so preoccupied with my own worries that I tripped and fell face first into a pool on my first day."

You stared at Graham for a moment, stunned that he was still talking to by choice and not out of obligation, before a small, strangled chuckle left your throat, sounding more like the dying squak of a strangled seabird than a laugh.

"Come on, the rest of the team is waiting for us in town." the brunette said, gesturing for you to follow him.

You arched a brow but obediently followed after him, trailing after the researcher like a duckling waddling after a pair of boots.

"Oh? I was under the impression this meeting was to discuss my contract." you replied, trying to scrape together a professional-ish sentence while simultaneously praying that you weren't coming off as rude.

"It is, but once everyone got wind that we would be working with someone new, they got a little," he paused, hand waving about as he searched for the right word, "excited. It's been a while since anyone besides Marissa worked close enough for us to talk to them on a semi-regular basis."

"Can't wait to meet them!" you said cheerfully, lying through your teeth.

The idea of having to interact with another human being today had been draining enough, but to have to converse with several? When their opinions of you could impact your career?

Your hands twitched around Bartholomew's smooth, ceramic body, wishing you'd added a few ounces of pure caffeine to your coffee. Maybe you'd get lucky and get struck by a bus.

Unfortunately, God wasn't known for being kind to you, so you arrived at a small diner completely unharmed.

The worn bell above the door dinged as you and Graham stepped inside, the smell of greasy fries and cheap burgers wafting all around you as he led you over to one of the booths, the cracked red leather seats occupied by three other people in various states of dress.

There was a younger woman with russet skin and shockingly red hair that was pulled back in a loose ponytail, a few hairclips keeping her bangs out of her bright blue eyes. She was dressed in a cream and light orange dress, matching knee-high boots complementing her outfit. She was scrolling on her phone, but put the device down when she noticed your approach.

Ah, the mortifying feeling of being known. It never failed to make you uncomfortable.

The other two, who were seemingly in the middle of seeing who could chug a milkshake faster, were men, light skinned and with almost identically brown hair. It was easy to pick them apart, though, seeing as one was built like a brick shithouse and looked as though he was cosplaying some strange cross between a soldier and a Ghostbuster, and the other was a twink that also happened to be absolutely rocking some sun-bleached overalls and a set of the most obnoxiously yellow rubber boots you'd ever seen in your entire life.

"Hey, dingbats!" the woman hissed, nudging her closest colleague, who happened to be the rubber boots guy, "The new vet is here!"

While the two guys attempted to swallow their drinks without getting a brain freeze, Graham gave you a somewhat sheepish smile. "Dr. L/N, I'd like to introduce you to Doctor Sari Sumdac, Doctor Spike Witwicky, and Doctor Blaine L. Parker."

"Mainframe." Blaine said, slamming his cup down with a satisfied sigh, "Call me Mainframe. Only my Mama calls me Blaine."

"I'm still good with Spike." the other man chimed in, extending his hand to you as you and Graham slid into the opposite booth seat. You shook it, quickly repeating the action with Sari and Mainframe.

"So, you're the new guy, eh?" Mainframe asked, "We've been waitn' for Marissa to finally pick someone. She's too picky, if you ask me."

"Not picky enough if she hired you." Sari shot back, and for a moment you stiffened, afraid you were about to have front row seats for a fight, but Mainframe's laughter and Sari's teasing expression quickly calmed your nerves. She looked back at you, her face taking on a more genuine look, "He's not wrong about us waiting, though. A.E.R.O. has been around for a few years now, but you're the first vet we've gotten assigned to work with us."

Your eyebrows shot up, mouth opening slightly in surprise before you remembered to shut it, "Really? Why?"

The gathered marine biologists looked at each other for a moment, before Spike leaned in closer to you. You matched his action, wondering what exactly he had to say.

"Did Marissa fill you in on what exactly A.E.R.O. means?" he asked in a low whisper.

You thought for a moment, then shook your head. Actually, your employer had told you very little, just enough to get you to sign a contract with her. You didn't regret your decision; anything would be better than the place you'd come from, but this secrecy did make you wonder what exactly you'd gotten yourself into.

"A.E.R.O.," Spike continued, "stands for Aquatic Extraterrestrial Research Outpost."

You blinked, leaning back as you turned over what Spike had just told you. Had you heard him correctly? No, surely not. Clearly you hadn't had enough coffee yet.

"I'm sorry," you apologized, chuckling a little "I must still be a bit groggy, because I thought you said extraterrestrial for a moment there."

The four shared another look, then once again focused their attention back on you.

"You heard correctly, Dr. L/N." Graham said, producing an envelope from the interior of his jacket. He quickly glanced around the diner, before sliding the envelope over to you. He continued speaking as you picked it up, hands shaking slightly.

"Five years ago, several objects from deep space suddenly entered our atmosphere and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. It was presumed that they were abnormal meteors of some kind, but a government owned dive team discovered that they were actually pods of some kind, made of materials not found on Earth.

"They were empty by the time they were found, but not long after they were discovered and retrieved, strange signals began to be picked up by sonar sensors, and sailors around this area began to report seeing bizzare creatures swimming beneath their boats, some of them claiming that their vessels were attacked, which was corroborated by several documented cases of boats coming in with scratch marks on their hulls."

You opened the envelope and reached inside, withdrawing several polaroid photographs. Each one was of a different boat, ranging from dinky little sailboats to bulky fishing trawlers. However, they all shared one unique feature; a set of deep gouges that tore through wood and metal, left behind by something that had to be absolutely huge.

Well shit, slap a tinfoil hat on your head and call you a believer, because there wasn't much in the ocean that had claws to begin with, and certainly nothing with claws large enough to do that kind of damage.

As you began to tuck the photos back into the envelope, you noticed that one of them was drastically different. It was blurry, taken on the coast during what looked like a storm, but not even those hindrances could mask the appearance of the... thing that had been captured on camera.

It was big. Like, really big.

The closest thing you could compare it to would be some kind of whale, but it looked so wholly unlike any species you knew of that you immediately tossed that idea out the window. It had a long, silvery body, covered in large, armour-like scales that almost gave the appearance of it being segmented. Thick, spiny fins jutted out along most of its tail, purple webbing torn and ragged. It's upper half was obscured, as the creature was diving back down beneath the surface, but the very beginnings of its torso hadn't quite been submerged when the photo was taken, and you could see a long row of crimson gills that glowed in the moonless dark.

"What the fuck." you breathed out, shoving the photos back into the envelope before tossing it away from you like you were playing the world's strangest game of Hot Potato.

"Yeah, that was pretty much our reaction too." Sari said, picking up the envelope. "We've been calling that one 'The Meg', since you could almost mistake it for an overgrown shark, if you only caught a glimpse of it.

You pinched the bridge of your nose and groaned softly as you considered everything you'd just been told.

"Let me get this straight," you started slowly, dragging your hand down your face before resting it on your chin, "You and Marissa want me to find a way to study and treat a highly aggressive, barely studied, extremely dangerous alien, let me repeat that for you, alien species with no prior experience and, since you four work at a separate facility, no team?"

A pregnant silence met your question for a moment, before being broken by a very timid, very nervous "Yes?" from Graham, who was rubbing the back of his head.

You looked at him, looked at the rest of his team, looked at the exit of the diner, and considered your options; accept this batshit insane, borderline suicidal offer and risk getting torn limb from limb by sea monsters from beyond the stars, or move back in with your parents.

"Well Christ on a bike, sign me up." you replied, before snagging the nearby coffee pot and, after checking that it wouldn't give you third degree burns, chugged the whole damn thing, determined to get enough caffeine in your body to drown out that little voice in your head that alway nagged that you should have been a lawyer.

#transformers #merformers x reader #x reader #gender neutral reader #merformers #y/n #megatron #graham burns #sari sumdac #spike witwicky #mainframe GI Joe #Undercurrent | Merformers

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ro-aming · 16 days

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Confessions in The Valley Pt. 3 Sam!

Sam was my fav for a lonnngggg time. this is the last chapter pre written so after this they'll be brand new ! I'm not sure who's next but it might be Haley or Harvey since he's so popular rn. Anyway Enjoy :3

“Hey Farmer !!” Sam's cheery face called out to you, smiling from ear to ear. The blonde was waiting for you outside the bus stop in the early summer morning. Light beamed down on him through the leaves of the oak tree he sat beneath, tracing his face in a golden glow. He was sitting against the trunk, his board next to him and dirt on his blue jeans. He must've already been skating today. Sam invited you earlier this week, to spend the Saturday with him at the ZuZu city skatepark upon watching you fail miserably to ride his board. I mean like REALLY failed miserably, you didn't even make it an inch before the board slipped beneath your feet and you came clamoring down the cobble sidewalk. Lucky for you, Sam was seconds behind you catching you and keeping you from a gnarly concussion. You haven't stopped thinking about that moment all week. While doing farm work, mining, fishing, or chatting up your friends, he was all that was on your mind. His denim jacket was tied around his waist leaving his arms bare under his t-shirt. He wasn't buff by any means but he had a slim and toned physique that always managed to leave you staring anytime his skin was exposed. You Just hope he never noticed. Promptly after basically saving your life on that skateboard, he invited you to ZuZu City skatepark to teach you a thing or two.

You were on your way now, sat next to each other on the dingy bus seats as you stared out the window and the valley faded behind you. It was a beautiful day and you haven't been to the city in so long. To be honest, you were just really looking forward to spending such a large chunk of the day with Sam. The wheels of the bus clunked against the dirt then slowly turned to rolling smoothly as nearing the city led you to a much newer road.

“Sooo are you excited, Farmer?” His voice broke the silence previously sitting over you two as he turned to face you. “ I mean you used to live here didn't you? I bet it'll be cool to be back” He smiled softly, pink dusting his cheeks.

“Oh yea !” you returned excitedly. “ I'm stoked, as much as I hated living and working in the city, seeing all the places i love will be really nice.'' The light from the window cast a shadow against your face as you turned away from it, opting to look Sam in the eye instead. “I should go back some day when I have more time and explore”. You chuckled.

“ Hey, now that's a great idea! We can come back together another day, it'd be perfect. You get to explore the city and show me cool stuff, and I get to spend the whole day with you!” He chuckled, bumping you with his shoulder as he turned back to face the font of the bus. You couldn't help your face heating up at his words, though you tried to ignore it. The rest of the bus ride remained comfortably silent, only interrupted by the occasional squealing of birds in the sky. White seagulls flying in from the coast danced across the sky which was littered with fluffy clouds. Distantly you caught a peak at some thicker gray clouds and you wondered inwardly if it might rain today.

“This your stop kiddos!” Pam called out hoarsely to the back of the bus as you pulled up to the stop nearest to the park. You both excitedly clambered out of your seats and quickly exited the bus, giving your thanks to pam. You really couldn't believe how pretty the city still was. Without the stress of your previous draining life, you really had the chance to look back and appreciate the warmth and brightness of the city. A thousand sun beams reflecting off the glass of every tall building in the center of the city. The air smelled delicious as you and Sam headed to the park, passing every restaurant and market you remember loving.

“God it really is nice here” You smiled softly, speaking under your breath.

You are literally gonna die. “Sam WHY IS THIS SO SCARY '' you yelled out to the blonde who was behind you laughing uncontrollably at your misery. Upon reaching the empty, and frankly very rundown, part of the skate park, you had been placed firmly on the board as Sam tried his best explaining to you how to get started. He gave you several demonstrations (likely just an excuse to show off but you didn't mind). Right now you were only standing, but after your last time on the board you were seriously terrified you'd fall and knock your head. It didn't help your nerves that Sam doesn't exactly do helmets. After nearly an hour of demonstrations and practicing to get your stance right you were finally ready to try moving.

“You'll be fine, farmer i promise, just push off with your foot like i showed you.” Sam yelled back to you giggling. Your feet wobbled as you struggled to keep your balance. Drawing in a deep breath your foot came down to the pavement ready to push off and move you forward until…Sam's arms came around you, halting your movement. Your eyes widened and jaw fell open as his hands held tight against your hips. You completely froze, his grip was so tight.

“ Hold on there dude, if you push off with your foot like that you're totally gonna fall.” He was smiling brightly. He bent down, squatting on his knees and grabbed your leg, adjusting your stance. “There, keep your foot like that, higher up on the board, see?” He looked up at you confirming you knew what to do now, but you could only turn away sheepishly and nod your head. “S-sorry..” He stood up quickly giving you space. Was he blushing? “Ok you got it, c’mon you can do it just push off now.” He smiled at you, throwing up two cheery thumbs ups. The way his eyes closed and cheeks puffed up when he smiled at you like that was convincing enough for anyone, but especially you. Ok you can do this.

Without giving yourself any more time to panic, you pushed your foot hard into the ground and hurled your body, and likewise the board, forward and down the very subtle hill. Picking up your foot now you shimmied and settled yourself on the board as you gained some speed and rolled forward. You couldn't believe you were actually skating! The birds sang loudly in the sky above you feigning a congratulatory song for your achievement. You barreled down the stained and cracked pavement, probably not going very fast but still absolutely delighted in yourself. “SAMMY I'M DOING IT OMG!” You cheered out to him. Your wheels bumped against rocks as you neared steeper slope. You became increasingly aware of the fact you did not go over how to stop as you started barreling down a steeper hill and gaining a lot of speed. “UHH Sam I DON'T KNOW HOW TO STOP”. You started to panic, you probably weren't going as fast as it felt but you were terrified of losing balance.

“Oh shit.” Sam spoke aloud to himself before he grabbed his extra board and set off after you. Given his much higher skating ability it only took him seconds to speed up and pass you on the hill. “Don't worry, Farmer just slow down !!” He seemed way too happy given the obvious distress written all over your face

“ DON'T YOU THINK I'D STOP IF I KNEW HOW” You shouted at him, though he could hear you well at normal volume. Yours and Sam's wheels rolled on and on taking you down the hill faster and faster as adrenaline kicked into full drive. A turn was approaching and it was coming FAST . “ Sam, I can't turn or stop. What do I do?” The genuine fear in your voice seemed to flip a switch in Sam's mind as his laughter stopped and expression quickly shifted. He looked concerned but focused and he acted quickly to stop you from falling or getting hurt

“Alright just hold on, I got you.” he smiled softly hoping to assure you. In a flash, as the sky shifted to gray allowing more shade, he was slowing down and reaching out to you. His hands surged forward; one gripped your waist on the side farthest from him, and the other grabbed your arm. “Jump !” he shouted at you as he pulled you to him. You think normally you shout back at him that he's crazy, but the sloped pavement carrying you swiftly to a brick wall to the face, didn't really give you much room to argue. You jumped, leaning into him as you stumbled, trying and failing to stand on his board. You opted instead to cling onto him for dear life like a koala. The board you had been on sped up on its own and slid all the way down the hill, likely to crash into the wall. Above you, you could hear him giggling softly as he turned down the end of the slope, starting to slow down. When the decrease in speed allowed it, you shakily placed your feet on his board. His arms around you, holding you tightly. His chest moved up and down under your cheek as he continued laughing at your state of disarray. “You okay?” His voice was impossibly sweet as he looked down at you.

“Y-yeah I'm fine, thank you” you gingerly stepped off his board and released your grip for him, cringing as you regretted moving away from his warmth. “Sorry…” you muttered under your breath. As the sky darkened slightly again, he didn't let go. Why wasn't he letting go? His eyes met yours as a smile playfully curled on his face. A mischievous glint ran through his emerald eyes. Before your brain could catch up his sneakers landed right next to yours as he stepped off his board, tightening his grip on your waist and leaning in close, Breath ghosting over your face.

“Aren't you glad I caught you?” He was smirking. What a jerk teasing you like that. You smacked your hand against his chest pushing him away as you stumbled back and playfully scoffed at him. He doubled over in laughter still finding his act amusing. You couldn't help smiling back at him. “C'mon, I think that's enough for today,” he said, picking up his board and grabbing your hand while dragging you down the street. “Let's go get ice cream!” he really was like a giddy little kid as he rushed in the direction of the nearest vendor still holding your hand tightly.

Rain had started coming down in buckets. All those gray clouds you saw earlier? Yea well they moved over here on your walk to the ice cream stand. While finishing your ice cream on your walk back to the bus stop the clouds had come in, blanketing the sky in a chill overcast and drenching the city with rain. You held the boards as Sam held his jacket over your heads, shielding you from the downpour. You laughed and chattered back and forth while waiting for the last bus of the day to arrive and take you back to the valley. As you stood huddled together under the shield of a Sam’s jacket you watched the city light up as the earth darkened. Gloomy clouds and the slowly setting sun left everything dark, leaving room for all the lights of the city to shine together. You couldn't help the gleeful smile that spread over your face. You'd spent the whole day with Sam. looking at all the places you used to frequent made your heart yearn with nostalgia, and Sam's proximity made your heart flutter with…something else.

“I had a lot of fun today” you said, leaning into him slightly. “ Thank you for teaching me to skate even though I sucked.” You chuckled and placed your head against his shoulder. You really couldn't help wanting to be close to him and as you looked upwards you could swear his pupils dilated and a blush, much more intense then earlier, lay on his cheeks.

“Y-yea of course ! I'm glad you had a good time.” He was stuttering and turning away from you, seemingly just as affected by the closeness as you were. You just couldn't help it. Seeing the faint slivers of yellow light peeking through the heavy clouds down on his features. He cleared his throat trying to steel himself as if you being here made him nervous. You'd made his suddenly loud boisterous personality fall quiet and the fond look in his eyes paired with a gentle smile wasn't helping his case. Down the road Maybe a mile you could faintly see the bus coming and not really one for public affections you knew you had to hurry.

“Hey Sam?” You spoke. He all too quickly turned to you, humming in question and tilting his head like a lost puppy. His blonde damp hair fell into his face and as he went to fix it he felt your hand graze his cheek. He stilled, looking toward you. Your hand gripped his cheek and yanked him down, pulling his lips onto yours. He stood still in surprise but only took a few seconds to quickly kiss back. It was fast and fleeting but sweet nonetheless. The look on his face after was even better. He sputtered a bit trying to find words as his face bloomed beet red. "I like you a lot you know." You whispered to him still near his face staring at his lips. Wheels turning against the pavement came near leaving you to pull away from his face and grab his hand. The bus had arrived just in time as the harsh rain picked up even more. Giggling you dragged him towards the bus doors. Despite being entirely floored a bashful smile spread wide across his face following your lead out of the rain and onto the bus. The bus will Take you both home to the valley, to the peace and quiet of your homes. You definitely have a lot to talk about on the ride back but that didn't worry you even the slightest. No matter the circumstance Sam's presence would always put you at ease and despite you nervous nature you knew with certainty that he'd be there, to break your fall.

#stardew valley #stardew valley fluff #stardew valley fic #stardew farmer #sdv farmer #stardew valley sam #sam x farmer #gn!reader #gn!y/n

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boygiwrites · 9 months

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Harley D. Dixon 1

• Gen Tags. Found family, Daddy issues, Hurt and comfort, Gore.

• Summary. Harley D. Dixon is a tough yet sweet little girl who until the dead started eating the living, thought she had seen it all. Alongside a mismatched group of survivors in rural Georgia, Harley and her Dad are forced to leave their small life behind and learn how to survive all over again through the horrors of the apocalypse.

An amazing edit inspired by this story! (Cred to Cora_Line99) Harley D. Dixon's Pinterest Board! Harley D. Dixon's Playlist!

📖Chapter List.

❤️Cross-Posted from Ao3.

Author's Note. Here we gooo! Argh, I'm so excited.

I've been wanting to write something like this for a long, long time. I've read just about every 'Daryl has a daughter' story out there, and now I've finally got my own to share. I just love Daryl, and Daryl with a kid is a whole other thing. We all know he wouldn't be the perfect parent, so you bet I'm gonna play right into that. He's gonna swear, he's gonna be strict, and he's gonna mess up. As for Harley (Yes, as in the motorcycle brand), I love her too. So ready to write her.

This story will cover the general plot of the show. To keep things fresh, I've made sure that almost every canon scene has undergone at least one small change. Plus, of course, many new scenes. Occasionally, I'll make bigger changes just to keep you on your feet! Nobody's safe! I'm also gonna be expanding on all the characters. And lastly — FOUND FAMILY! Piles and piles and piles of found family, eventually. I live for found family.

Please enjoy reading! :)

My Uncle Merle died today.

I'm sitting in a crinkly green camping chair, watching embers die.

I don't wanna think about my Uncle right now, so I think about something else.

The fire was built last night by Glenn and Morales. Then Lori came along this morning very quietly and made it alive again with logs and wads of notebook paper. Thinking about facts is easy. It's like sucking on a plain candy that tastes like nothing. There's a navy-blue blanket across my lap with three holes in it, perfect for nibbling, poking, and ripping. Dale gave it to me when the cold settled in this afternoon. He told me he reckons it's around June, as he covered my shoulders, which used to be his niece's birthday.

He says she looked a little like me. That means she's dead. So many people are dead, now.

A thin log in the campfire cracks and tumbles over after trying to stay upright all morning. I hope I don't look like that log.

I can hear Officer Rick approaching. My stomach becomes a stone.

I can tell it's Rick because he's got one of them power walks that you can hear coming from a mile away, which I think makes him pretty stupid. He's loud, and loud is dangerous, and dangerous is stupid. My Dad's not like that. Unless he's angry or running, ain't nobody hearing my Dad coming; especially not no squirrels.

He's almost as big as my Grandpappy Dixon, who people used to say was as big as a house, and he wears super heavy boots from a hunting store near our house — but he's still not loud, or dangerous, or stupid. Not like Officer Rick.

"Hey, Harley."

I think I hate Officer Rick. I think I hate everyone.

And I think I might be crying now, too. I focus on twirling the blanket strings around my finger so I have something very simple to think about, which is that it hurts real bad when I twist it tight. I see Rick crouch down in front of me. He takes a while to say anything else, and it's prolly 'cause he's tryna be real careful, so he don't make me cry even more.

If my Dad weren't out hunting, he'd prolly slap Rick and everybody else that's tried badgering me today dead for tryna do his job for him. I feel like, just by sitting here, I'm disobeying him. Rick ain't my Daddy.

"We, uh..." He clears his throat. "Me and Lori, and some other folks are uh... Well, we're all a little worried about you, honey, okay?"

I imagine a small group of folks gathered by the RV right now, watching me and Rick; wondering if he's gonna be the one to get through to me.

I'm worried for when my Daddy comes back. When he finds out about Uncle Merle, he's gonna be fuming. He's gonna be like one of them cartoon characters with the bright red faces and the smoke comin' outta their ears, stomping all around, and he's prolly gonna kill somebody. It's prolly gonna be Rick. He always told me cops are bastard liars, and that they can't help us.

I look up at Rick. Yep, I've been crying.

Rick's all blurry, but I can still make out his ugly Sheriff's badge and his scary blue eyes and his frowning eyebrows that look like clenched fists, and I can tell he's been waiting to be the one to talk to me. I bet he thinks it makes him better than everyone else; better than my Uncle Merle, who he left to die just 'cause he ain't like him. I wanna kick Rick right in the face. I think he knows this, but he doesn't move.

"First off, I wanna say that I'm sorry about what happened to your Uncle Merle." Rick says all nice and gentle.

Nothin' happened to him.

It weren't no freak accident, which is what Uncle Merle used to say happened to my Momma.

Rick killed him.

"I know he meant a lot to you. And I'm sorry. If I had'a known he had a niece to come back to, maybe I woulda been a little wiser with my decision makin'. But Harley," He tilts his head and puts a hand on my knee for this part. "You gotta know, like I know, that your Uncle was a danger to us all."

There's a little angry parasite inside of me. It's been growing and growing ever since the group came back from Atlanta, and I couldn't find my Uncle Merle in the crowd. I've never noticed my Uncle Merle so much than when I realised he wasn't there. It was like there was the wrong amount of space left in the air and Rick was taking up the too much of it. Ever since the cars showed up, everything has been wrong, wrong, wrong.

Ever since Rick showed up.

"If I hadn't stepped in when and how I did," Rick says, "Your Uncle wouldda gotten us all in a lotta trouble."

Another log crumbles in the campfire. My finger aches and pulses around the string.

That hungry little parasite — hungry for Rick to hurt like I'm hurting, needing it more than anything — makes me tell him, "I wish he did." And again, because it feels good. Rick becomes even more blurry, as my voice makes an embarrassing hicking noise. "I wish you died."

I expect to be hit. That's what happens sometimes, when little girls don't know their place.

Tellin' adults I want them dead — That ain't my place. And I know it. I just don't care.

My Uncle Merle wasn't a danger, he was just Uncle Merle; Has been since I could talk. He used to feed me bits of his sandwich out on the deck back at home, like the tomato, 'cause he ain't like the taste. He used to fix my bike when it was broken. He used to make sure I was the first one to open presents at Christmas, and help me wrestle the wrapping when there was too much tape. He used to pull my wobbly baby teeth out for me and let me outside without shoes. He wasn't mean, or bad, or loud, or dangerous, or stupid; at least not always. He wasn't the one that got my Momma killed. He was good. And now he'd dead.

If someone had to die, I wish it had'a been Rick — Stupid, noisy, idiot Rick who ain't shed one single tear after what he done to my Uncle Merle.

I wanna get hit. I want him to hit me so bad that I'm allowed to hit him back.

"Okay." Rick says, and I can't breathe.

I feel like everything goes silent throughout camp, like the chairs and the cars and the people are all holding their breaths like I am. He actually looks a little sad, which feels really, really bad, because I wanna be angry.

"Okay. That's okay."

But as I think about my Uncle Merle, and the tomatoes, and my old bike, and what Christmas used to feel like, and my Daddy, and how he ain't even know about Merle yet, I realise I'm just really, really sad.

I can't even see Rick anymore, my eyes are so watery. My whole body hurts from being sad. I feel like I'm sick and I need to go to the doctor, but I don't even know what for. There aren't even any doctors here. Just two bastard liar cops, some campers, and a space where my Uncle Merle should be.

I think, after a while, Rick leaves.

My Dad still keeps his wallet.

It's in a backpack under his sleeping cot. He says that everything inside that bag will keep us alive some day, if we ever need to leave the quarry camp. He said I need to know exactly where it is so that I can grab it if he can't. He showed me everything the night we got here, because he forced me to, because it's important. The other kids don't learn stuff like this from their parents. It makes me feel smart. I'm in on a secret. He showed me the bug spray, which keeps our skin healthy from bug diseases, and he showed me the flashlight, which has two batteries and a big black button. He showed me the compass, the box of matches, the big knife, the little knife, the rope, and the map. It's like a Jenga tower. If we lose even one thing from the backpack; everything topples, and we die — I die. You gotta listen t'me, chicken. My Daddy's always been like this.

But the wallet made no sense.

We don't gotta pay taxes no more, like Merle said. I don't know what taxes are, except they're bad, and gone, and nobody liked them anyway. And I saw my Dad burn all his money in a campfire one night, so it can't be that.

It's the pictures, Dad told me. He flipped it open like a book, and we looked at 'em together on top of his sleeping bag. I felt like crying for a second because we forgot all my storybooks when we left our house, but Daddy hates it when I cry, so I dried up. Crying is for babies, and I'm a big girl. He showed me a photo of an actual baby, and after he touched the baby's face with his fingertip, he said the baby was me. I didn't think I could look like that. He stopped talking for a while. I listened to the cicadas in the trees to pass the time while he touched the photo. Then it was bedtime.

I'm looking at the photo now, waiting for him to get back.

I was a very pink baby. I was only the size of his forearm, which in the photo, hasn't been tattooed yet. The tattoo of my name is missing, which goes up his wrist in curly letters. Harley Davidson Dixon. It's the name of a motorcycle. The tattoo of the skull and the bleeding angel are missing, too. He's fixing my baby blanket around my chin. I guess he's been doing that since the day I was born. Every night, at least up until last week, my Dad tucks me into bed and sings me the same song. Hush little baby, don't say a word. Daddy's gonna buy you a mockingbird. I like his voice when he sings to me. Usually, he's yelling, or grumblin', but in those twenty seconds before I have to go to sleep, and nobody else is listening, he's softly whispering the lyrics to me, and touching on my ears and my cheeks. In the photo, he's crying down into his smiling mouth. That's something he doesn't do anymore.

The next photo is of us at the zoo. I know it was taken on one of the weekends I was at my Dad's house, because my Momma's not in this one. Just my Dad and two of his friends, I think, who are throwing rock star hands in the air. I'm wearing a black shirt with a videogame character on it that my Dad likes, and brown pants. I'm sitting on my Dad's hip as we pose in front of three giant elephants. My Dad's got a tiny purple backpack over his shoulder that makes him look sorta funny. It used to be mine. I'm looking at the elephant's long, silly-straw trunk as it tries to sniff us, but my Daddy's lookin' at me. I wish I remembered this day.

The third photo is a school photo with a swirly blue background. I remember this one. My Momma did my hair that day.

I know why he keeps his wallet, now. Just like how we need the bug spray, and the matches, and the rope, and the knives, and the map, and the flashlight to stay alive — I think my Dad needs these photos. They won't keep him warm or stop bugs from chewing on him, but he needs them.

I shove the wallet back where I found it, 'cause I'm not meant to be goin' through my Dad's things.

My Dad comes back while I'm vomiting under a tree.

At first, he doesn't see me. He calls for me to come get my little butt over there, so I can help him and Uncle Merle stew up some rabbits for dinner but when he hears me retch, he comes running over. I hear his crossbow drop and some more people call after him.

One minute, Lori and Amy are holding back my hair and patting my shoulders the best they can, and the next, my Daddy's forcing his way in. I'm rocking and I'm swaying like I'm on a life raft in the ocean, and I can hear Rick's voice and then Shane's and then Dale's. My Dad grabs the back of my neck and squeezes it, the way Lori and Amy would never know how to do, and tells me to lean forward some more. It works. I vomit up a chunky puddle of peaches and jerky into the dirt.

Then, I'm empty, and I'm crying — crying hard — into my Dad's lap.

"Someone wanna tell me what the Hell's goin' on here?" He snarls at whoever's around.

Feels like half the camp is here.

"How 'bout we all just try—" Shane's suggesting, but my Dad cuts him off.

"How 'bout ya'll just spit it out? And where the Hell's my brother?"

That makes me bury deeper into my Dad's legs, moaning and hiccupping. He puts a hand over my head. He's clocked the problem.

"Where the Hell's my damn brother?"

"Look, Daryl," Shane levels, "I'm just gonna come out and say it, alright? There was a problem in Atlanta."

My Dad's panting, now. "What fuckin' 'problem'?"

"Listen—"

"He dead?" Underneath me, my Dad's muscles are lurching and stopping, lurching and stopping, like he wants so much to just jump up and knock Shane to the ground, but he won't bring himself to leave me. The camp has gone completely silent.

Shane stammers. I've never heard Shane stammer. "We're— We're not sure."

The silence just keeps on goin' and goin' and goin', and somehow, it's even scarier than the yelling.

"There's no easy way to say this," Rick says, voice lowered. I wonder what my Dad looks like; if I was right about the cartoon thing.

Dad presses my head further into his stomach. "Who're you?"

"Rick Grimes."

"'Rick Grimes'." He spits, like it's an insult. It is. Bastard cop liar. "You got sum' you wanna tell me?"

"Your brother was a danger to us all." Lies Rick. "So I handcuffed him on a roof; Hooked him to a piece of metal. He's still there."

After he says this, something in the air must have changed; something must have snapped without even makin' a sound, because Lori's whispering to me that I should follow her back to camp, like we're running out of time. She tries to pull me away, but I kick her; kick her hard, in the shin. She tries again. I realise she's trying to separate me from my Dad. Then, I realise he's sorta shaking. Lurching, stopping, lurching stopping. Silence, silence.

"Lemme get this straight." Dad whispers, and it's not the nice kind, like when he sings. "You're tellin' me that you handcuffed my brother to a roof."

Glenn's pulling at me now, too. Nobody else moves a muscle.

"And you left him there?!"

This time, he lurches and he doesn't stop. Glenn catches me as I'm flung from my Daddy's hip, and he passes me off to Lori as Dad goes lunging at Rick. The brown pebbles go flying up into the air. My Dad tackles Rick at the waist, and they crash into the leaves and the twigs, and his fist — The one with my birth date tattooed on each knuckle — goes smack, smack, smack, into Rick's cheek. There's yelling; scrambling. Glenn and Shane pull my Dad off of Rick, and that smacking sound stops. Dad beats Shane offa him and then, —

"Watch the knife!" T-Dog yells. Now there's a swishing sound, and grunting sounds, and I was right — My Daddy's gonna kill Rick.

My Daddy's killed someone before. He did it on accident, 'cause he got so angry that he didn't stop until the guy was dead and gone, which means that it was aggravated manslaughter. It was in the afternoon, just like it is right now, and I was playin' in the front yard in the sprinklers. My Dad and Uncle Merle were in the open garage, smoking and poking at their bikes with tools. Ronnie lived two trailers down. I was small, and easy to pick up, so I don't remember much, but Ronnie snatched me up right there in the yard. My Daddy says he was gon' take me. But he didn't let him. Ronnie got chased into the woods, and for two days, my Daddy and Uncle Merle searched for him. Then they beat him so bad his Momma ain't recognise him when the ambulance people dragged him out in a big black bag, and the cops took my Daddy away while the sun rose. I wasn't allowed to see him for four and a half years.

I need my Dad. Suddenly, I'm shrieking at him to stop, even though I want Rick dead so bad. By now, Shane's got my Dad in a chokehold up against a tree. Are he and Rick allowed to take my Daddy away? Lori and — I think that's Amy — are shushin' me, but I just keep hittin' on them and shouting.

I writhe in the dirt. "Stop! Daddy!"

"Damn pigs!" Dad growls. "You're stressin' out my kid, now! Lemme the Hell go!"

Shane laughs. "Nah, I think it's better if I don't." Then he turns to Lori, because what my Dad said is true. "Get Harley out of here."

I don't let her move me when she tries.

Dad struggles. "Chokehold's illegal, bastard!"

"You can file a complaint later." Shane scoffs. "We got all day here."

Rick steals my Dad's knife off the ground and gets in his face. His cheek is all red and purple. The fight's over. "What I did was not on a whim," He tells my Dad straight. "Your brother does not work and play well with others. I did what had to be done in the moment, to keep us all alive."

He's lyin'. He's lyin' again. My Uncle Merle chopped these people's firewood and brought them meat. He worked well.

My Dad shoots out a foot to try hit Rick in the crotch. He misses. Shane pushes his face harder into the tree.

"It's not Rick's fault." T-Dog holds up his hands, coming close. "It's mine. I had the key. I dropped it."

"You couldn't pick it up?" Dad sasses.

"It fell in a drain." T-Dog serves up this answer like it means anything at all. I hate him.

"If that's 'posed to make me feel better, it don't."

"Well, maybe this will." T-Dog's lookin' at me, now, too. "The door to the roof — I locked it with a padlock so the geeks couldn't get to him. There's a good chance he's still alive."

I heard this all before, when all them people kept coming up to me at the campfire. Lori told me to get some food in my stomach; the peaches and jerky. Shane tried to make me go play with Carl. T-Dog said sorry over and over again. Dale gave me the blanket. Rick made me cry. I know how this goes, though. Gettin' someone killed and killin' them with your actual hands are the same thing. I know that.

"To Hell with all'a ya'll!"

He shakes Shane off and beelines for me. He takes me from Lori with bloodied hands — Rick's blood — and I let him yank me by the back of my shirt to my feet, and I fall into his chest when he crouches. His breath is heavy on my neck. Even his skin is hot.

Lori's pale as an egg. I think she's scared of my Dad.

He takes a big breath, stands up, and drags me by the hand back to our tent without sayin' another word.

#the walking dead #twd fanfiction #twd #daryl dixon #daryl dixon twd #daryl dixon fanfiction #daddy issues #rick grimes #fanfic #ao3 fanfic #daryl dixon daughter #parent daryl dixon

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