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love-killed-the-superstar · 4 years

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heres day 5!! more cassunzel angst! and now... i sleep

CASSUNZEL WEEK DAY 5 - HEARTBREAK

Cass can’t sleep.

It’s not like she isn’t used to sleeping in unfamiliar places. These past three years she’s slept in barn lofts, under bridges, in caves and up trees and even in shitty, overpriced taverns with bedbugs. She’s slept through rain and snow and even a sandstorm, once; so why is it that she’s been unable to sleep since arriving in Corona, as she lies in what could only be described as the world’s comfiest bed?

Well, sharing it with Rapunzel and Eugene could be the reason. And not so much because either of them snore, or toss and turn, or murmur in their sleep; that much she can handle, after the year they spent on the road, with little to no privacy between them all. She’s shared a bed with Rapunzel a few times now and slept soundly, although the first time it happened her heart thudded away rapidly the entire night, being so close in proximity.

Maybe it’s because the sheets are too silky, the mattress too soft? Maybe it’s the quiet of the room, where every rustle of sheets feels like a roar in her ears? She’s so used to the sounds of nature, after all, or the drunken cheer of fellow travellers, or the gentle breathing of Fidella and the scratching of Owl’s talons as he watches over her dutifully. She’s a drifter now, and maybe palace life and the luxuries it brings just… doesn’t suit her anymore. It never did feel right, but now it’s more alien than ever.

Fuck, who is she trying to kid? This isn’t about the bed, or the company she keeps. It’s everything else around her that’s keeping her awake; things she can’t escape from whenever she returns.

As quietly as she can, she rises from the bed and creeps over to the large window leading out to Rapunzel’s balcony. She slips through easily enough, though not without a loud creak that causes Eugene to stir; he blinks blearily, yawns, and rolls over, his back to the window. Thankfully.

The change in temperature is stark, and she allows the cold night air to wash over her with a sigh of relief. Out of that room, back into nature again, she’s finally able to just breathe. Corona is mostly dark; a few stray lamps send the courtyard awash with a dim russet glow, but otherwise she is pleasantly plunged into darkness. Across the water, there are flickering lights from Old Corona. The sight, while a little comforting in its familiarity, brings no real catharsis to her. Instead, it just makes her think.

She shouldn’t have come back.

It’s her own fault, of course, for not writing ahead of time to let them know of her imminent return. It’s so stupid, to think that Rapunzel and Eugene will always be able to drop everything when she swings by, and she’s taken it for granted. Usually when she comes back Rapunzel will take the whole day off to catch up, hear out her latest stories, fill her head up with all that has been going on in Corona without her. They’ll spend a few days riding the horses out, swimming in the lagoon if the weather permits it, having private candlelit dinners and stargazing each night. Now that she’s more involved in royal duties, Cass visiting gives her an excuse to take a few days off and recover from the stresses of everyday life too.

This visit has been different. For a start, Cass somehow forgot that coming back this time of year meant her visit would coincide with the goodwill festival. Idiot. Rapunzel has been rushing around constantly since her arrival yesterday, just trying to keep everything ticking along smoothly in the lead up to the event. Cassandra offered to help pretty much the moment she’d left Fidella in the palace stables, but Rapunzel assured her everything was handled, leaving her to catch some down time on her own.

They’ve only managed to catch up twice since then, each day over dinner, and one of those was accompanied by the king and queen. She certainly isn’t… opposed to dining with them, as awkward as the conversation may be given they have very little common ground to talk about. But when that eats into precious little time she has to spend with the woman she loves, it pisses her off.

Eugene is busy too. Cassandra never thought she’d see the day where she grew frustrated by his improved work ethic, but he’s been so busy organising security, as well as some ridiculous new flag-wielding march for the soldiers that he’s introduced to the festivities in the last year or so, there’s been no room to tag along after him either. She watched today, for an hour or two, as they fruitlessly waved those dumb fucking flags around, but where’s the fun if she doesn’t even get to poke fun at them with Eugene’s rapport? Even Lance has been busy, preparing to run some sort of food stall with the help of Kiera and Catalina. In the end she spent the day with her father, catching up on life and riding out to a local fishing spot to drink ale and pass the time together. It’s by no means a disaster of a day, but… damn, it felt empty.

She feels empty.

It’s not like Cass didn’t notice the stares as she moved from place to place, or the whispers, just quiet enough that it’s left to her own imagination to work out the things that the people of Corona still whisper about her. Didn’t Rapunzel tell her once that things would get better over time, if she just left room for everyone to forgive and forget? And if active atonement is the way forward, how can she offer that if there’s no breathing room in Rapunzel’s rigid festival agenda for her?

Her eyes sting, and she reaches to clutch a fistful of her night shirt. The lights across the water begin to blur together, her breath comes shorter, and her throat… it aches, a cry just on the tip of her tongue.

For all that she’s convinced herself that she doesn’t need Corona anymore, that it only serves as an anchor she’s pulled back to from time to time, and solely for the purpose of visiting Rapunzel… maybe it’s Corona that’s run out of use for her. It’s… not the kindest thought she’s had today.

There’s a loud creak as the window behind her opens out. Cass can’t bring herself to turn around, even as she hears a voice call her name gently. If she tries to respond, she knows her voice will be thick with grief, so she doesn’t make a sound.

“It’s pretty cold out here,” Rapunzel continues quietly. There’s a click as the window shuts, and Rapunzel pads over to join her at the edge of the balcony. “Have you been out here long?”

Cass shakes her head and takes a few deep breaths, trying to steady her voice as best she can. “Only for a few minutes.”

“Liar. Your hands are freezing.” Rapunzel reaches for one, holding it to her mouth and breathing to warm it up. The sudden rush of heat sends a violent tremble through Cassandra’s body and she pulls her hand away quickly, gripping the flat surface of the rail as her vision swims. “Hey, Cass. Talk to me? I… I know things have been busy around here and we haven’t really spoken much. But I can lend an ear now.”

“Raps, no. You’re exhausted from organising the festival, you – y-you should-”

Damn it, her words are starting to crack. She squeezes her eyes shut and takes another deep breath. The ache in her throat is back again; it’s a dam holding back her cries, and it’s frustrating as fuck. Would it kill her not to agonise over things that don’t matter? It’s like every time she comes back her brain is scrambling to find some new reason to sabotage her visit, a new thing to fixate on that eventually leads back to this tired thought pattern – that she’s a horrible person and everyone has finally given up waiting for her to get better.

Cassandra reaches to touch the base of her throat, where it hurts the most, and whispers, “You should go back to bed.”

She’s met with silence for a few moments, as Rapunzel carefully chooses her next words.

“You know, Cass, it's almost been a year already.”

“What? A year since what?”

Rapunzel leans forward, her face swimming into view, before saying gently, “Since the last time you cried with me.”

A hot blush bleeds through to her cheeks, and Cass stares hard at the floor. “I'm – I don't...”

“You don't have to justify or explain it. But I'm glad you let me near you when you're feeling like this, Cass. Instead of keeping it to yourself, I mean.”

“Raps...” Cassandra lowers her head. The tears keep coming, and she tries in vain just to plug them completely. She takes a few steps away from the edge, staring hard at the floor, and clutches at her throat a little harder. The pinching of her flesh is a welcome distraction from the pain inside. “I just – I just wonder if me coming back here was a big mistake? Maybe I should have stayed away.”

“What?” In a flash Rapunzel is on her knees before her, looking up at her with big, confused eyes. “Why? Why would you think that?”

“I... I messed up so bad, Raps. I know it's in the past, but people still talk about it. People still see me as the girl who's one meltdown away from destroying the kingdom. And they're right to, aren't they? They know the only person that can rein me in is you and – and you have more responsibilities these days, so of course you can't just drop everything for me, I would never ask you to do that. But Rapunzel, it's so much harder than I thought it would be just to exist in Corona by myself.”

The crying is starting to ebb back into her voice again and she squeezes her eyes shut tight so she won't have to see the way Rapunzel's own face crumples, as it always does when Cass finally bears the full brunt of her ugly emotions out in the open.

“Oh, Cassandra...” The softness, the care Rapunzel handles her with is beyond what Cass deserves after all this time. The road was supposed to have hardened her, but Corona unravels that process so easily it just makes her want to scream. Still, when she feels Rapunzel stand upright, scooping Cass into a hug that is steady and grounding, she gives into the grief and finally lets herself cry on Rapunzel's shoulder again, just like every other time she comes home.

…

Soon enough the crying has come and gone, as quickly as a flash flood, leaving the two of them sore-eyed and fatigued. At some point they gravitated back to the edge of the balcony, hoisting themselves to sit with their feet dangling. The night goes on, unwavering, and they talk things out as they always do when things get too heavy for them to ignore.

“I don’t know what I’m doing anymore, Raps,” Cass confesses, staring up at the moon. “I mean, it’s been years. I enjoy life on the road, but… I still don’t understand destiny, or what it feels like or how to find it. Everything I ever knew about it turned out to be wrong, and now – well. I’m back here with nothing to show.”

“Well, that’s not quite true, is it?” Rapunzel reaches over to trace a finger over a long cut that extends from the base of her wrist til midway up her arm. “You have some new scars. Each with their own terrifying story, I’m sure.”

“I slipped and cut it on a rock while I was climbing down by a waterfall,” Cass deadpans. “This is exactly what I’m talking about, Raps. There’s no big picture here. No overarching point to anything I’m doing, it’s all just… stupid, small, unrelated incidents. That’s my life.”

Rapunzel huffs, offended on her behalf. “Well, I think it’s wrong to consider yourself a failure just because there’s no linear path to your life right now! Maybe there never will be, I don’t know, but thinking this way only seems to be hurting you. Not all destinies are clear-cut.”

“I just… I want you to be able to look at me and be proud of the things I’ve done,” Cassandra murmurs, shivering in the cold night air. She hugs herself for warmth, and Rapunzel scoots in a little closer and drapes an arm around her to share that precious bit of body heat. “And right now, I just feel a bit aimless and like my life is going nowhere and now I don’t feel needed here, either.”

“Cass, if you really want me to keep you busy for the next few days, I can find some odd jobs for you,” Rapunzel says, shaking her head in exasperation. “But please, don’t ever think that I don’t need you. Do you think I would worry over you like this if I didn’t?”

“Maybe not.” Cass sighs heavily and leans into Rapunzel. “...Can I be really insecure for a moment?”

Rapunzel nods.

“I know I went out into the world with so much confidence, but it’s going on three years now and lately I just – I mean. Damn it. D’you think… maybe, do you think that you can still be proud of me, even though I keep losing my direction?”

“Oh, Cass.” Rapunzel leans over and presses a kiss to Cassandra’s hair, pulling her tight against her for warmth. They rock a little in the awkward embrace. “I will always, always be proud of you, no matter what you do, just by being here and being yourself. All right? But – but I’m not the one you should be asking this question to, you know. You’re more incredible than I can even put into words, but do you recognise that in yourself?”

“I do,” Cassandra promises, shutting her eyes and allowing herself to slacken in Rapunzel’s arms. “Of course I do. I just… need an off day every once in a while where I can pawn my self-worth onto you.”

Rapunzel laughs softly. “Good. Then, listen to me. For as long as the world keeps turning, I will never give up on you. I’ll never stop believing in you, or loving you. And if you want my expert advice, being as well-versed in destiny as I am, it seems to sneak up on you when you aren’t looking for it. Maybe let it sweep you up, instead of getting so stuck in your own head.”

“You make an excellent point. Or maybe I’m just getting tired, it’s hard to tell.” Cass pulls back a little and kisses Rapunzel slowly, her fingers getting a little tangled in her hair as she deepens the kiss. A few minutes pass where nothing needs saying at all; but an icy wind blows through, breaking them apart as they both shudder from the cold.

“Think maybe it’s time to go back inside?” Rapunzel asks, red-faced and starry-eyed. Cass nods breathlessly, scooping Rapunzel in her arms and setting her safely down on the other side of the balcony.

“I do. Hey, uh… Raps?”

Rapunzel, hand outstretched to pull Cass to her feet, tilts her head. “Yeah?”

“...I love you.”

A warm smile melting onto her face, Rapunzel tugs her back towards the window. “I love you too. Enough that I’ll let you be the little spoon tonight.”

“Oh, score. Hope this doesn’t make Fitzherbert too jealous.”

“He can have me any other time of year,” Rapunzel says cheerfully, leaning in to peck Cass lightly on the lips before ushering her through the window. “Now, get comfy.”

Cass drags her tired bones to the bed, sinking into the mattress like a stone through still water as Rapunzel latches the windows shut. Her eyes grow heavy, and as cold, comforting arms wrap securely around her, she drops out like a light.

#cassunzel week #cassunzel week 2020 #cassunzel #tangled the series #tts #writing

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tzdkh · 3 years

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For my next party trick, @immolatic has asked once more for two hacker idiots: “ he doesn't deserve you. and i’m not— i’m not trying to be that asshole that says i do. but I sure as hell would never hurt you like that. ”

There are things about London Reggie enjoys immensely - the way the air tastes like blood and revolution, the freedom he feels despite the oppression, the threat of violence that’s always right there, just out of his grip. But there are things about London that Reggie does does not enjoy, and the rapidly lowering temperatures is one of them. The fact that his usual attire - hoodies and jeans - does next to nothing to combat the bite of the cold and promise of snow is frustrating, and the fact that he’d not thought ahead before taking his definitely-not-running-away trip to London is something he’s mildly ashamed of.

Fact of the matter is, Reggie is broke, flat broke. Everything he steals goes into plans, everything he scams out of companies goes into supplies and rent. And anything that doesn’t, he spends on things he shouldn’t. Takeout and beer. Imported cigarettes and drugs he’d made a promise never to get back on.

But promises are easily broken, and like the promise of ‘Until Death do us part’ , his promise of going clean goes right out the window, shatters against a nearby wall, it’s pieces left to rot in his past in San Francisco.

So Reggie spends more than he has, makes due with both petty crime and grand theft. Everything is fine. Until winter comes, and he finds himself with numb fingers and no gloves to solve the problem and no sheets on the bed to warm him at night.

Predictably, however, Jay is fine. Jay plans ahead, much to Reggie’s utter dismay at times. The Fixer had grown in their time apart, from someone selfish and angry and bitter at the world, to someone who was still all the aforementioned, but a touch more aware of his surroundings. He’d planned ahead, of course, for cold days and colder nights, and it takes all of Reggie’s willpower not to complain about it.

He doesn’t complain - because he’s a grown ass man - but things show up in his half of the apartment anyway. A black beanie that he takes to wearing all the time. Gloves with fingerpads that register on touch technology. Thick hooded pullovers (some that have Defalt screen printed on them, which he does not laugh about) that he changes out his thinner sweater for. Flannel sheets for the mattress they share, a duvet that looks too nice and out of place in his messy apartment. Simple things. Expensive things. Things they don’t speak of because both of them are too wrapped up in their own shit to question what the hell is going on in the other’s head.

So. Reggie wears clothes Jay buys him. Jay looks indifferent. Winter creeps in and settles over London, and the resistance slows for a time, people focused on helping each other survive and not murdering each other in (literal now) cold blood. It’s almost peaceful. Almost.

And then Reggie drinks himself drunk and Jackson calls Jay to pick him up.

(’S’fine, m’fine.’ ‘You ate shit walking on even floor. I’m not letting you walk home like this. You’ll fall somewhere and freeze to death.’ ‘Fine. Call Jay.’ ‘Are you... sure about that?’ ‘Yes.’)

Jay, predictable, looks unimpressed with the entire affair, but he doesn’t baby Reggie, which is nice. He doesn’t scold him either - which is more nice. He just hefts an arm over his shoulders, slides an arm around Reggie’s waist and starts the walk home. A walk because Reggie insisted, between sighs and pouts, that it would be better, nicer, to walk home.

(‘It’s the first snow. C’mon, Jay, it’s almost romantic.’ ‘Fine. Fine. Shut up.’)

Which left them there. Two dangerous men, shuffling home in the dead of night through London as snow gently fell around them. Quiet as mice (rats) as each thought about whatever bullshit it was, as long as it wasn’t the other.

Reggie doesn’t last long in the silence. He’s warm, and drunk, and thinking of his last Christmas, which leads him down a road he shouldn’t follow, stumbling through memories more painful now to process than they would be were he sober.

“I think... I should've tried harder.” Jay doesn’t respond, but Reginald doesn’t need to. He could monologue like a villain when he needed to, and in the moment, he thinks he needs to. “Was so wrapped up in work shit. Robots. Designs. Bullshit.” He rolls his head to look at the sky, blinking just once as tears well up but quickly subside. “Zane wa’ right. M’kindof a jackass.” Gloved fingers squeeze at wrist and hip, but Reg doesn’t register the touch for what it is - a warning. Instead, he smiles ruefully and sniffles. “Shouldn’t have signed m’ fucking business...” He drifts, dropping his head. “D’you think m’fuck up?”

“Wrench.” Even drunk, Reg recognizes that tone for what it is. He groans and slumps into the body next to his, whines so he doesn’t have to listen to what comes next. Only nothing is said next. Instead, he finds himself dropped onto the stairs of the apartment block, wetness quickly seeping through denim and a chill running up his spine.

The noise he lets out is undignified, but there’s no fight to him anymore. Instead, the drunk man slumps into the halfwall nearest and blinks tiredly up at Jay. “ C’mon Jay.” He grumbles when nothing is said, after a solid minute of them staring at each other. “S’cold.”

“Shut up.” Jay squints at him, then looks away, mouth pursed in an annoyed line. When he looks back, the line softens, and Reggie watches in fascination as the other man ruffles his own hair irritably, musing dyed locks up, before huffing an irritated, smoky breath. “Stop talking about him.”

“I’m not - I’m -” Lamenting.

“Reg. Shut up and listen to me, I’m only going to say this fucking once,” Jay drops down to eye level, crouching in slush and wetness. His fingers touch the designer’s leg, palms curling over cold knees with tenderness, spreading warmth with a simple touch. “He doesn't deserve you.” Reggie’s mouth falls open, ready to protest but Jay gives him a look and he snaps it closed, listening now. “And I’m not — I’m not trying to be that asshole that says I do. But I sure as hell would never hurt you like that.”

Reggie blinks. Opens his mouth. Closes it. Blinks again as sobriety hits him like a fucking bus, the rush of feelings hitting him like a fucking train. It’s too much said - not enough but too much - and he doesn’t know what to say. Tentatively, he touches one of Jay’s hands with his own, blinking back what he thinks are tears.

“Okay?” Jay’s expression softens, not just his mouth, but everything.

“Okay.”

It’s not quite a start, or a middle. But it’s something.

#immolatic #✦ anarchist → fuck shit up 「 gen. 」#✦ anarchist → fuck shit up 「 fills 」#:) i'm furious #i'm smiling but i'm angry

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nearlynorth · 4 years

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Day Two: Role Swap

Baz Pitch was thirsty. He hungered for blood, let his fangs slide out of his gums. He reluctantly drained rat after rat until he finally wasn't thirsty anymore. Until one day he wasn't.

——— Simon I'm cold. Why am I cold? This is the first time this has happened since my magic erupted, even after I lost it. I normally wake up twisted in my sheets, sweat soaking my pajamas while Baz sleeps beside me shivering. Something feels wrong.

I do a mental check of my body.

Feet. Check. Stomach. Check. Face. Check. Wings. Not there. Tail. Not there.

I sit up suddenly. My wings and my tail are gone. My last connections to magic, gone. Tears begin to leak out of my eyes as I cry silently. I don't want to wake Baz. He sleeps like the dead, which I guess is fitting, even though he's not dead. It's the point of one of our only arguments, the fact that I think that he's not dead. He insists that he is, the self-deprecating twat.

I look over at Baz, my panic momentarily forgotten. He's sleeping in an odd position under the blankets, it looks like he has a pillow underneath him.

I feel my stomach rumble, and I pray that it doesn't wake Baz. I watch him open his eyes, and just stare at me.

Baz I hear Simon's stomach rumble and I laugh quietly to myself. He must want scones. Simon is a bottomless pit, no matter how much he eats he could still keep going.

I shift uncomfortably. There is something poking at me, making it hard to lie flat. It's pushing me up from the mattress.

I turn to smile at Simon and I have to stop and stare.

He looks different. He's still beautiful but in a different way. He's still covered by those freckles and moles that I love, but his normally tawny skin is paler. And his wings, his wings, and tail are gone.

I sit up to get a closer look at him, and he gasps.

"Baz, why do you have my wings?" Simon says to me. His voice is awash with disbelief, and Crowley, that's how I feel.

"I don't have wings!" I say indignantly, even as I get up out of bed to look in the mirror. "Crowley, I do have your wings."

Deep, blood-red wings are sprouting out of my shoulder blades, ripping twin tears into my shirt. A barbed tail in the same shade is flicking in between my legs. I'm not as pale as I normally am, and when I flick my tongue to where my fangs normally would be, I feel nothing.

I'm still staring at the mirror when he says, "Baz, I'm hungry."

I roll my eyes at him. "Simon, you're always hungry." In the mirror I see his face begin to show signs of stress, and I turn around to face him. "Simon, what's wrong?" Worry begins to creep into my voice.

"It's like I'm hungry and I'm thirsty at the same time." He whispers. Strain is evident on his face.

Is it possible that since I have his wings and tail, he got my vampirism? That doesn't seem possible, but you never know with Simon. The holes have been being filled, and Bunce's father says that Simon could get his back too. His magic always was explosive. Could this be a sign?

I walk over to him and I lay a gentle hand on his shoulder. Simon's cheeks are puffy with fangs, and he's paler than usual. "Simon, let's get you some blood, and then call Bunce."

"Penny," he mumbled around the fangs. "She'll know what to do."

I nod and lead him into the kitchen that was attached to our small flat. We had made the decision to move in with each other three years into our relationship. Crowley, if Dev or Niall could see me now. They'd say that I've gone soft. But that's true. I've gone soft for Simon Snow, and I'm finally not afraid to admit it. I was so scared for so many years.

"Snow, sit." I point at the mismatched chair that resides at our round wooden table. As he sits down, I go to the fridge and pull out a cup of blood. We had managed to find a sustainable blood source for me, with blood coming from a magical butcher in London that caters specifically to vampires. "Do you want a straw?"

"Yes," Simon's words are muffled by the fangs that are filling up his mouth. He grimaces and shivers.

I push a straw through the plastic film on top of the blood cup and hand it to him slowly. His vision must be heightened, and his hearing should be amplified as well. I'll have to be careful not to frighten him.

"I'm going to go call Bunce. Is it okay if I leave you here for a few minutes?" I ask quietly. I don't want to overload his senses. One of the few memories that I have from when I was younger is just the feeling of being completely overwhelmed.

Simon I shake my head at Baz when he asks if it's alright if he leaves. I don't want to be here alone. Everything feels so different. My balance is off because I don't have my wings and tail, and I'm cold. When these stupid fangs go away I'll have to tell Baz that I'm sorry for leaving the window open on all those nights at Watford. No wonder he was always so insistent that it was closed, I'm freezing.

And I'm thirsty. These dumb fangs are filling my mouth and making it even harder to speak. My words are being caught physically too instead of just mentally.

I take the cup of blood as Baz pulls out his phone to call Penny. We moved into separate flats recently as Micha moved to London. She moved in with him and I moved in with Baz.

The blood is weird. It has a metallic sort of taste and it feels weird to be drinking blood through a straw, but it makes the fangs slide back into my gums.

I can hear Baz talking quietly with Penny as I drink the blood. Penny was hesitant about Baz at first, but she has warmed up to him. Baz helped me a lot in those first days after I lost my magic. He helped me understand that my magic wasn't what made me me. It was only a part of me.

"Bunce," Baz says simply on the phone.

I'm surprised when I am able to hear Penny's response, a single word. "Hello." Baz is always talking about how he can hear me even when I'm in a different room.

"We need you to come over immediately." Baz is looking at me. I used to hate when he got that look in his eyes, the one that fills his eyes with concern. But now I know that it means that he cares about me. I used to feel like I was useless when he looked at me like that. It wasn't his fault, it was a product of my own mind. Now I just feel loved.

I smile at him to show that the fangs are gone. He smiled weakly back at me, filling in Penny on what happened.

"I'll be right over. Let me just check in with my dad." Penny always wants to do research.

I suppose that I can wait a few minutes for her to come. I don't feel as uncomfortable now that my fangs are gone and I've finished the blood. I just feel cold.

"Baz," He whips his head around to look at me. It's interesting to be able to see my wings without looking in a mirror. Baz looks gorgeous with them, like an avenging angel. "I'm sorry for arguing with you about the window being open."

Baz I feel my face break out into a smile when he apologizes. The idiot's finally realized that I was actually cold for all those years and not just opposing him. "I'll get you a blanket." Walking with the wings is cumbersome, but if Simon can do it, I can.

As I'm coming back with a blanket, Bunce arrives. She walks right into the flat, letting herself in with her key. A map is cradled gently in her arms.

"Oh, wow." She breaths out, taking in Simon before turning to me. "This really is a powerful spell."

"Really? This could be a spell?" Simon asks. He's gotten better at not flinching when magic is talked about. He used to hate any mention of magic at all. "Who could've cast it?"

"That's what we are trying to figure out." I bring the blanket over to him and drape it around his shoulders. "I didn't cast it, so the only reasonable solution for who cast it could be..." I trail off, letting Bunce finish my sentence.

"You, Simon. It could be you." Bunce finishes.

Simon looks stunned. He never was good at hiding what he felt. "What... how... how is that possible?"

Bunce lays the map out on the table carefully, revealing London and its surrounding areas. Large circles are filled in on various spots on the map. "This is a map of where all the holes, dead spots, places without magic, that used to exist."

"Used to exist?" Simon's eyes are blown up wide.

Bunce nods. "Can you see where they are filled in? That's because the dead spots no longer exist. The magic has returned to these places, and we think that it could have returned to you."

"We?" Simon manages to tear his gaze away from Bunce to stare at me.

"I've been talking with Professor Bunce. I think that your magic could have returned to you, and that's what prompted the switch." I place a hand on his shoulder to comfort him. Simon looks like his whole world just blew up. He's slumped against the back of the chair and his eyes are half closed.

"Try casting a spell." Bunce encourages. "I recommend Flick of the Switch." She said the words without magic purpose behind them, so that she wasn't casting a spell.

"What's that from?" Simon asks, astonishment turning into curiosity.

"It's from a popular song. Trixie used to use it all the time when she wanted to switch the properties of two things, so it should work for you." Bunce tells Snow, smiling at the memory of Trixie.

"Flick of the Switch." Simon says forcefully. There is magic behind the words, and my body begins to tingle.

I can feel Simon's magic encasing my body. It feels different than how it did at Watford, with no smoke smell coming off of him. When I make eye contact with him, he's giddy.

Simon I'm magic. I'm a mage again. I can do magic. I cast the spell and it works, it actually works!

My magic feels controllable now, not like how it felt when I was the Chosen One. I feel like how I did when I was sharing my magic with Baz, except I'm doing this by myself.

I connect my eyes with Baz. When I open my mouth to speak, my vision goes black for a few moments.

When my vision comes back, I see Baz standing close to me. He no longer has wings.

I smile at him and reach back to feel if I have my wings back. They are there, like they always are.

"Baz, I can do magic." I say to him, my smile huge.

"I know, Simon, you can." Baz pulls my face to his, and gives me my first kiss with controllable magic.

#COC 2019 #Carry On Coundown #Carry On Countdown 2019 #Snowbaz #Simon Snow #Baz Pitch #I know that it’s a day late #I didn’t know how to end Ghost-o-Matic

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lallemcnt · 5 years

Text

go ahead and watch my heart burn (part two)

“If that blue could stay for ever…if this moment could stay for ever–“

— Virginia Woolf

“Fuck, I’m freezing.”

Teeth chattering, limbs shaking and cold drops of ice water dripping down their necks, Lucas and Eliott hobble towards Eliott’s apartment door. Lucas’ teeth are chattering as he watches Eliott, painstakingly, trying to fit the key in the lock with shaking hands.

As soon as they’re inside, they’re both stripping off their jackets, shoes and socks. Eliott disappears and returns with a towel for Lucas whose clothes have become a second skin. Eliott’s shirt is halfway off his shoulders revealing a smooth chest and a small tattoo indiscernible in the dark.

“Why are you standing in the dark?” Eliott is laughing.

“Uh.” Lucas is laughing too. It’s infectious, Eliott’s laughter. All airy and earnest, like a fresh drop of winter snow on a blank canvas. It creates and funnels light, emboldening Lucas.

All Lucas can think about is Eliott’s chest and...the skin of his legs being rubbed raw by the wet of his rain-soaked jeans. So when Eliott offers him a pair of sweatpants Lucas is desperately relieved, made all the more sweeter by imagining the next few hours sitting down in squeaky denim. The sweatpants are a little long so he rolls the bottoms up a few times, drying his hair with a towel before drifting towards what he assumes to be the living room.

Homes are interesting places. They can be safe havens for some and dreaded sites of loneliness and fear for others. Lucas has had it both ways. Eliott’s is all wooden floors, white curtains and bookshelves filled with vinyl, non-fiction books, graphic novels and candles. The light grey-blue walls are relatively sparse, interrupted by a painting, a black and white photograph of the moon and an A4 piece of paper stuck to the wall with cello tape, depicting a...raccoon. The same one, Lucas deducts, as the one on the napkin. The napkin.

Dashing back to their pile of clothes on the kitchen floor, he digs through his pockets for the drawing, heart dropping in his stomach, colouring him wholly disheartened when he feels it’s threadbare material. He lets out a curse, catching the attention of Eliott.

“Everything okay?”

“Yeah,” Lucas responds quickly, shoving the napkin back into his pocket. “It’s nothing. Should we watch this film you’ve been raving about?” He tiptoes towards the other boy, trying to miss the little drops of water decorating the tiles.

He’s embarrassed at how upset he feels about the ruined drawing. In theory, he could ask Eliott for another, from what he can gage from Eliott’s behaviour and attitude towards him, he’s sure he would do it, be happy too even, but Lucas doesn’t want to test that just yet.

They end up on the sofa, wrapped up in a stripy, wool blanket that feels like paradise, a shelter against goose bumps and chilly toes. A barrier between cold skin, and hopeful touches.

He feels shitty about it, he really does, he knows under different circumstances he would be enraptured by this film. Thirty minutes in and the colours alone are breath-taking. He wants to hug Little, the main character, up in the warmest hug. But Lucas is completely enthralled by Eliott, and he can’t be consumed by two things at once. It’s all or nothing for him. He doesn’t know whether it’s exhaustion finally setting into his bones and slowing his thoughts down, but with every shift on the sofa beside him, every out breath, he’s glancing over and gazing for seconds on end, before he realises he should be watching the film. This is what he came here to see after all: not him watching Eliott watching the tv.

“Shirley Jackson. Toni Morrison. Hannah Arendt. Shakespeare. Angela Davis. Oscar Wilde.” Lucas reads the names off the spines one by one, some he recognises from school, others from evenings on buses with his mother: she always sat there, an arm slung around his shoulder and a paperback folded in half in the other.

A push of a button. Silence. Light foot-steps, hands shoved into pockets. “A penny for your thoughts?”

Lucas shrugs his shoulders. “You read. A lot.”

“Yeah. And you?”

A shake of his head, he looks at Eliott briefly before returning to inspect the rows of vinyl. “No, but my mother did. Does. She loves Shirley Jackson. I can remember coming home from school and seeing her tucked up in her a chair by the window, dressed in an oversized jumper and joggers, reading away.” He smiles a little at the memory, consumed by his love for his mother for a split second. It’s all a bit much, too private, sharing this with someone he’s only known a few hours. Someone he wants to know.

“Weren’t enjoying the film?”

“Sorry, I’m just-” Lucas sighs and rubs a hand over his face. “I don’t know. I was enjoying it, but, I guess I’m not in the mood.”

Lucas drifts to the opposite wall. The raccoon sketch. He’s beyond curious so he asks. It’s that simple really. “What does the raccoon mean?”

“It’s me.”

Lucas frowns for a second, Eliott is still standing in front of his bookshelves, hands in pockets, a rueful smile on his face. It’s safe to say Lucas is thoroughly confused.

“You? As in the raccoon?”

“Yes.”

“So, the drawing you did for me. On the napkin. The raccoon was you? And the hedgehog was?”

“You.” A sheepish smile, and rounded shoulders, a light colouring of red on his smooth cheeks.

“Huh. I’m a hedgehog,” Lucas walks towards Eliott, slowly, with a shy smile on his face. “How do you figure that?”

“Well,” he gives Lucas a considering look, sweeping his body from head to toe with his eyes, and Lucas feels it all over like lava in veins, music in his eyes and a shiver down his spine.

“Well...?” He’s a foot away now.

Not looking too keen to spill the beans, Eliott intones, “Come here, you have something in your hair.” Lucas is willing to let it go, Eliott doesn’t owe him anything, but he promises himself he’ll find out, one day.

Lucas is practically in Eliott’s space already, so he leans forward slightly, curious and nervous and heart pounding, excited. A soft brush of fingers in his hair, a slight pull and Eliott holds a piece of fluff in front of Lucas.

“There.” His gaze shifts down to Lucas’ face. Eye contact held on bated breath.

The midnight-blue sky weakens in colour, letting in dregs of light as the sun prepares to rise once more. Wisps of pink stain the sky, and the dead silence of the night is replaced by a slow trickle of noise that grows rapidly into the sound of wheels against concrete and beeping horns of hurried commuters.

Sitting there, listening to the city waken and begin a new day, with legs thrown over legs, dark circles glistening under blue eyes that yearn to shut, to sleep, to rest. Lucas has become quite familiar and fond of the stripy woollen blanket, wrapping it around his feet and pulling it up to his shoulders, he leans against the side of the sofa listening to Eliott��s voice, hoarse from talking for hours on end, about everything and nothing: the life-cycle of a star, how he broke his ankle when he was eight falling off a skateboard, about an exhibition launching in a couple months that his work is in. Lucas has learned many things about Eliott, that the intensity of his eyes holds no matter the conversation topic, that Lucas feels them most acutely when he’s answering questions about himself: his friends, his mother, his degree and his love for the piano. He learns that Eliott hates anything with mint in, his favourite ice cream flavour is pistachio and that he pours the milk in his bowl before the cereal — Lucas mocks him to no end.

“Stay here,” Eliott whispers, “don’t go yet.” Lucas traces his hand, the tendons and the knuckles and the smooth skin between each bump of bone. He lightly taps against green and blue veins, aligning his own hand flat against Eliott’s, his fingers a cm or so smaller, Eliott curls the tips of his over Lucas’ and then they slip together, intertwine, Lucas rests his cheek against them. “Ok,” he whispers.

The intimacy of being in someone else’s bed, the bed of someone you like, the intimacy of sharing yourself with someone: your aches, pains and hopes. Every few minutes they’re laughing and Lucas feels the breathy air of Eliott’s laugh on his face that has gradually lost its sound throughout the early morning. He’s taken in this room and cannot help but compare it to his own. No cracked ceiling or second hand furniture in sight. Where Lucas’ room is minimalist, the only indication that it belongs to him being the photos of him and his friends taped up above the headboard of his bed, Eliott’s is a manifestation of his passion: a mural covers the walls, his collection of shirts hangs on a rail by the door, photos from magazines, ticket stubs and photographs decorate the area around his mirror in a collage of his greatest hits.

Sprawled on blue sheets, lying on their sides, faces close and resting on palms, whispered breaths and uncontrollable laughs. Quiet smiles, lingering touches, and sighs of contentment. A new world has been created, here in these cerulean sheets. A world forged of a compulsion to know the other, inside and outside.

The desire to kiss Eliott has grown like daisies in summer since he saw him standing in the door of that bathroom at McDonald’s, and now that they are positioned in such a way that if Lucas were to just tilt his head forward slightly, their lips would brush. He’s drunk on the tantalising idea.

That’s how they get there. Eliott, is running long fingers through Lucas’ hair, even more wild and unkempt than it was at one a.m. His hand stops, reaching around to grip the back of Lucas’ head, and Lucas takes the moment because he’s desperate, he’s buzzing with nerves, but, oh, he wants to. He closes that space between them, it’s nothing really, a whispered breath of air, and a press of his lips against Eliott’s for a few seconds, and just as he begins to retreat, Eliott reciprocates, his grip on Lucas’ head holding him in place. There’s a candle burning in Lucas’ gut, it was shimmering early and now it’s positively burning. As their lips move against each other, Lucas open his mouth and Eliott deeps the kiss. It’s slow and sensual, a new dance, bursting into existence.

Brushing his thumb against Lucas’ lower lip, pressing one, two, three quick kisses to his mouth, Eliott pulls back, and smiles, and Lucas’ heart is afire. He whispers, “Whoa.”

Lucas is hit by a tide of overwhelming need, he can’t look at Eliott for a second. He drags his eyes away and turning over, reaches for his phone on the nightstand to distract himself.

(57) new messages from Le Gang

(2) new messages from Manon

“In trouble?” Eliott asks.

“Oh, just my friends wondering why I went home with a weirdo.”

Lucas feels fingers pinching his sides and he’s gasping for breath, gasping into a kiss.

Feet brush and tangle. Sleep comes for them both, the white curtains trying in vein to block out the sunlight, though their job is easy made easy by these two boys high on desire for each other and utterly exhausted. Eyelids shut, breaths even out, tucked in a pocket of their own making, the boys sleep.

And sleep.

And,

Sleep.

It’s as though the body refuses to reenergise unless you sleep at night, making it so that when Lucas wakes he wishes he could be asleep once more. He closes his eyes against the afternoon sun but a nagging pain tugs at his consciousness, he rolls onto his side, relieving his dead arm, the tinkling of blood filling his limb. Huffing out a breath, rubbing his eyes, and yawning, Lucas flops onto his back and stairs at a smooth white ceiling, no cracks or brown stain. He’s not home. He reaches under the duvet wrapped around his body, and he’s also dressed.

There’s a faint sound filtering through the closed door, and like a bee to honey, he trails its path to a sleepy boy, coffee in hand, listening to the radio. A window is latched open, letting in humid air, a rigorous contrast to the icy rain of the night before. Looking at Eliott, remembering last night, his heart falls to his stomach. Should be stay? Or should he leave? How do you navigate this kind of situation? They talked for hours, kissed, but only met fifteen hours ago...does he sit down at the table, smile and hold Eliott’s hand? Or does he sneak out, as quiet as a mouse, and never speak to him again? It would be so easy, they don’t have each other’s numbers, after all.

Lucas takes a step forward, hesitates and turns away, betrayed by a creaky wooden floor board he steps on. Because of course he does.

“Sorry, I was-“

“Hey!” Eliott’s chair scraps against the floor as he stands up, winding around the table to meet Lucas, giving him a quick peck and a winning smile. Lucas is stunned, he thought...he imagined that maybe it was all in his head. That he was clouded by desire, by his own feelings. “I have cereal and yeah, that’s about it. Sorry.”

“I should go.”

“You can stay for breakfast.”

He’s feeling awkward, like he doesn’t belong. He just wants out of the situation as quickly as possible. “No, I should really get back. Check in with my mum...”

“Alright.”

Not knowing what else to say, a sharp contrast to their late night/early morning ramblings, Lucas disappears into Eliott’s bedroom — meticulously clean and tidy — to get dressed. Pulling on his jacket, he checks to make sure he has everything and heads towards the door.

“Can I have your number?” Eliott just in boxers leans against the kitchen door frame, arms folded across his chest like barriers to potential rejection. Lucas’ rejection. He doesn’t like that power. He would be lying if he said he didn’t want to see him see again. But he’s unsure if he’ll ever use the number because, firstly, look at Eliott. He’s been carved by Aphrodite herself; beautiful, sleepy, green-grey eyes like water mottled green by the harbour, deep brown hair that defies gravity, and a keen interest in people: their likes and dislikes, their passions. Lucas cannot compare in any sense of the word. He’s just...lesser. But he’s weak and he caves because he can still feel Eliott’s lips on his.

Eliott slips Lucas’ phone back into his jacket pocket, squeezes his hand and steps back. “Until next time.”

“See you.” The words taste like bile in his throat. He wonders if Eliott can sense the deceit.

And Lucas is out the door, stumbling down the stairs and onto the early evening streets of rush hour. He’s pulled along by streams of work-weary people desperate to get home, to have dinner, to see their children and lovers. In this sea of anonymity, Lucas lets his mind float, float towards that circus of dreams he was lucky enough to experience, letting himself be consumed by that feeling of being cared for in a way entirely different from familial love, love from a stranger, someone who doesn’t know the flaws of his person, the openness of being touched with care, his thorns soothed down for the night, no shields in place, because while he pretends to be sharp, he’s a fool for kindness, for love.

Not that he believes it’s love with him and Eliott, yet. It’s definitely too soon, he thinks. Though it would be the biggest lie he ever did tell if he didn’t acknowledge that there was something there. He can’t describe it, he can’t explain it, because the words haven’t been invented in his language yet. It is more than lust, a string below love, and this is what is on his mind when he finally reaches home.

The Lallemant’s may not be wealthy, not have the income to be able to kill the environment with their private jets, but they get by and they are strong, because you have to be in a world that does not care about you. Since his father left, there have been times when it has been a struggle to put food on the table, but his world has been a world peace since that man left. Since he was forced to leave. The strain in his mother’s shoulder is no longer there, and her step is lighter, her smile is a constant ray of light, and seeing this eases some of the anxiety in his stomach.

Slipping off his shoes, Lucas practically bolts to the bathroom, hopping into the warm spray of the shower. As he washes his body, he can’t help but think he’s washing away Eliott’s touch and he stops for a second to process this.

When the water turns off he hears the unmistakeable sound of pots and Celine Dion coming from the kitchen and the smile that overtakes his face cannot be stopped. He rushes to dress, combing hands through his hair as he strolls towards the kitchen, resting his elbows on the work surface as he grins at his mother. Her blonde hair wrapped up in a scarf with her fringe peering out of the fabric and a spatula in one hand, Ms Lallemant exclaims: “Honey! How is my little boy doing?”

Lucas rolls his eyes as she leans forward to kiss his cheeks, though he’s secretly loving it, and his mother knows this. “I’m good, maman. And you? How was work?”

She sighs, “The usual. You okay to have spaghetti, tonight?”

“Spaghetti is good.”

“How is our little Manon doing? Did you have a good time at hers?”

Manon. Thinking back on the texts he received but hasn’t replied to. She must have covered for him and thank the heavens for this intelligent girl, Lucas thinks, always saving him, since before he can remember. Manon has always had her head screwed on straight, logical to Lucas’ chaos. They balance each other out.

“She’s doing good, her brother has a new boyfriend, and her dad just retired,” Lucas replies, feeling shitty for lying about his whereabouts, but also not wanting to share Eliott with his mum because that would make it a thing, which it isn’t. “We didn’t do much though, maxed out from the party.” He concludes.

“Are you feeling okay?”

“Yeah.”

They eat their spaghetti at their two-seater table, sharing anecdotes from their restrictive days, made-up in areas on Lucas’ part, teasing and mocking each other, because that’s how they work. Their dynamic established even while living with their father became more pronounced and carefree when he was gone. Freeing them up to be as loud and ridiculous as they can.

In the confines of his room, Lucas opens up his group chat with le gang and rolls his eyes, it is now sixty-three messages of asking for details, cheering him on for “finally getting some action” and asking where he is. Lucas clicks off that chat and onto Manon’s.

Today 14:25

Manon: Told your mum you’re at mine

Manon: Assumed you would forget

Today 18:45

lucas: you are an absolute Blessing

lucas: thank you ❤️

Manon: ❤️

He slumps onto his bed, starfish-ed across the sheets and stares at the ceiling. The brown stain. The cracked paint. His phone beeps. He sighs. He picks it up.

(1) new message from eliott

Today 20:41

eliott: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0jmgLaNL-Y/

“Lips meet teeth and tongue, my heart skips eight beats at once If we were meant to be, we would have been by now See what you wanna see, but all I see is him right now”

But all I see is him

Right

Now.

The song is bittersweet, but the melody hypnotises Lucas until it worms its way into his head and he’s humming along.

Today 20:41

eliott: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0jmgLaNL-Y/

lucas: cute

lucas: you're cute

The feeling that comes with those words. Is there really anything better than that? Being thought of in connection with something random. Being thought of period.

eliott: Can I call you?

lucas: if it so pleases you

Incoming call: eliott

There’s rustling on Eliott’s end and then his voice, a bit hoarse, saying: “Hey, Lucas.”

The sound of his name in Eliott’s voice sends a buzz through him. “Hey, you. Missing me already?”

“Like you don’t wanna know,” a chuckle, a breath. “Is that weird?”

Lucas shakes his head, feeling weirdly emotional, like he could cry. “No…” He coughs to clear his throat.

Putting his phone on loud-speaker, Lucas places it beside his head and closes his eyes, counting the staggered beats between his out breath and Eliott’s until they’re almost sinked up. A faint trickle of music filters through the phone, a bass and an acoustic guitar echoes in the periphery.

“Would it be weird if I asked to see you again?”

“We did eat each other’s faces off this morning.”

“You really have a way with words,” a few seconds silence. “but you didn’t answer my question.”

“No.”

“No?”

“I’ll see you. Under one condition. Wear one of your lesbian shirts.”

A snort, followed by hysterical laughing. Lucas can picture Eliott’s face at this: crinkle-eyed, full-toothed smile, a hand reaching up to cover his face, to shut off his happiness from the world.

“What?” Lucas is laughing too.

They stay on the phone for a while, Eliott playing songs to Lucas, and Lucas voicing whether he likes them or not. He’s almost shocked out how open Eliott is with sharing his music, Lucas thinks it would take a few months to crack that from him.

“I asked Imane about you.”

“Oh no.”

“You’re on the same course, right? Biology, right? So you’re really fucking smart.”

“Um. It depends who you ask, some would tell you I’m an impulsive idiot who may be book smart, but I’m lacking in other areas. Anyway, Imane is ten times smarter than me. Let’s just say I get by…with her help. How did you meet Idriss?”

“Same high school. We joined the same film club and that’s where we met Sof. Kinda been attached to each other ever since.”

“How have I never met you till…this morning, then?”

“The universe works in mysterious ways. And, you know, Imane said you were smarter than her.”

Huh. “Really?”

“Really. So, when can I see you again?”

“Tuesday?”

“Could I kiss you again?”

#i gave eliott my reading taste lol #elu fic #elu #skam france #eliott demaury #lucas lallemant #mine #go ahead and watch my heart burn

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bazypitchandsimonsnow · 5 years

Text

Hold Me Close and Love Me True

Rating: T

Genre: Fluff

Word count: 3750

Summary: Simon asks Baz to sleep over for the first time. Baz is his anxious self and overcomplicates it. Based on spooning request.

Read on AO3

AN: Shoutout to @carryonmylovelies for helping with the title. She is literally the best, love you dude <3 Also I've just realised this is the third fic in a row in Baz's POV and about his fears. Sorry if it feels repitive, I didn't mean for it to happen. The boy just has a lot of different fears to explore and I like to write about it lol. I promise the next fic will be different. For now, enjoy this one :)

———————————————

Baz

I don’t know how Snow does it, but he’s gorgeous even when he’s disgusting. He’s dozing on the couch, arm hanging off the edge, snoring loudly, drool dripping from the corner of his lip (mouth breather), and he’s still the most beautiful thing in the entire world. I’m sitting on the floor next to him, playing with his hanging fingers. I’m technically watching the end of “UP” but I’m more focused on him. Simon Snow, a snoring, drooling, handsome Disney prince.

I shouldn’t be surprised he passed out so easily. Greek takeaway always makes him slip into a food coma. But I know he can’t sleep on this couch. It’ll hurt his neck and give him a headache. Then he’ll be all mopey tomorrow, calling me to ask if I can come over after school to comfort him. Of course I would come over, but I’d rather him not be in pain.

Carefully, I shake his shoulder. “Snow,” I whisper. “Snow, wake up.”

His face scrunches up and he grunts with annoyance. “No.”

“You need to go to bed, Snow.”

He groans low and deep. “Don’t wanna move.”

I sigh. “You have to get up, or you’re going to have a crick in your neck again.”

“That happened once.”

“And it will happen again if you sleep here. Get up.”

He groans again even louder. With dramatic effort, he rolls onto his side, slightly crushing his wing. I expect him to swing his legs off the couch and slouch his way to his bedroom. But instead, he lifts his arms up, flexing his hands.

“Carry me?” he asks sleepily.

I cross my arms. “Seriously? Are you five?”

He whines in that utterly pathetic, utterly adorable way and keeps grabbing at empty air. I sigh very dramatically, so he knows this is under reluctance. “You’re so lucky I love you,” I grumble.

Carefully, I put one arm under his knees and the other around his back. He’s easy to lift up (hooray vampire strength), but the wings are a bit more of an issue. They smack me in the face at first. I grumble and try to push them out of the way. I usually quite like the wings (not that I’ll admit it out loud), but right now I have to strain up to see what’s in front of me. Aleister Crowley, this is a bad idea.

Snow’s arms wind around my neck. Suddenly, I feel his nose nestle under my jaw, sending a shiver down my spine. He curls into me like an affectionate cat. His warmth overwhelms my hypersensitive body. Okay, maybe this is somewhat alright idea.

Very slowly, I make my way down the narrow hallway. I do my best to keep Snow’s limbs and dragon appendages from hitting anything but it’s difficult with my lack of vision. His foot bangs sourly on his bedroom door frame, and he hisses into my skin.

“Sorry, love,” I say.

“S’fine,” he replies. Lucky for me he’s more forgiving when he’s tired, and he’s more forgiving of me now that we’re dating.

We reach Simon’s very messy bed. I lower him down on the rumpled sheet, careful to not crush his wings and tail. I don’t bother with the blanket. Snow, despite his name, runs incredibly hot. After getting both his legs on the mattress, I lean down and press my lips to his forehead. He’s so warm, like the soft glow from a fireplace.

“Goodnight, Simon,” I whisper against his skin.

I start to stand, but Snow’s arms suddenly tighten around my neck, keeping me kneeling and choking me. “No,” he whines quietly, “stay.”

My blood suddenly goes even colder than it already is. That word sends me into an odd sort of panic. What does he mean by that? Stay here uncomfortably kneeling? Kiss his forehead again? Or, stay the night, in his bed...

Fuck. That’s not something we’ve done before, not really. I slept in his arms at Christmas, but I don’t really count it. I was restless for an hour then panicked and went to my bed. And in the month Simon and Penelope have had this flat, he’s never asked for me to stay. I may have shared a room with Simon Snow for years, but I’ve never slept in his bed, and the idea of doing so is both exhilarating and terrifying.

“What do you mean?” I ask with only a little quiver in my voice.

“Stay,” he says again.

I sigh heavily. He’s even more inarticulate when he’s sleepy. “Please elaborate, Snow. Do you want me to stay kneeling on this cold floor? Because it’s very uncomfortable.”

“No.” He pulls me closer, forcing me to nearly bend in half. “Sleep here. With me.” His eyes slide half open, nervously biting his lip. “I-If you want, that is...”

Bloody hell, what do I want? Obviously I want to stay. I always want to stay with Simon. But I’ve never really shared a bed with someone in a romantic context, except that one time where I freaked out. What if I do it wrong? Is there a way to do it wrong? There has to be, and I’ll probably do it. I’ve done quite a lot wrong in regards to Snow, romantically and otherwise. But I want to. If he wants to.

“If you really want me to,” I ask quietly.

He presses my nose into my cheek, sighing against my skin. “I really do.”

Fuck, guess he does want to. That’s not scary. Not at all. “Okay.” I start to stand up, but Snow keeps his arms tight. “Snow,” I chuckle, “I have to get up to change. I’m not sleeping in jeans.”

“Mm, fine.” He lets his arms fall like limp noodles.

“May I borrow some of your pyjamas? They are mostly clean right?”

“Yes,” he grumbles. “Tosser.”

I chuckle as I walk to his dresser. It looks like a tornado hit it, sleeves and pant legs spilling out the sides, but that’s normal. Luckily they do smell clean. I pick out a long sleeve shirt and some trackies. I look over my shoulder, just to check that Snow still has his eyes closed. Good. We may be dating, but he still hasn’t seen me in my pants. I’m already sleeping over and that’s enough for me tonight. Baby steps are necessary so I don’t completely panic.

I quickly take off my clothes and replace them with Simon’s. They’re soft, and warm, and they smell like him. I press the shirt collar to my nose and quietly sniff. Fresh baked cinnamon rolls, pulled straight from the oven. Yes, that’s definitely Simon. Not sure I’m going to give this shirt back. I walk to the bed, where Snow is all spread out like a starfish. I sigh heavily.

“If you want me to sleep here, Snow, you have to make room,” I say. Snow makes an annoyed noise then rolls on his side, leaving a space for me. Problem is he’s still on top of the blankets my much colder body needs. I sigh, then try to pull the quilt down. Snow, tired as he is, offers minimal help, lifting his legs and hips slightly. I eventually do get under the covers, laying my head on the pillow. And I freeze.

Fuck, this is actually happening. I’m in Snow’s bed, under Snow’s too thin blanket, head resting on Snow’s lumpy pillow. This is incredible and absolutely paralyzing. Literally. I’m completely still, like a statue. Body straight, hands over my stomach, staring up at the patchy ceiling. I can feel Simon’s heat radiating off him right next to me. I want to reach out and touch him, but I don’t know if I’m allowed. I’m not even sure how to ask.

“What’s wrong?” Simon whispers. I turn my head, and he’s looking at me. His eyes are only half open but his brows are pulled together.

“Nothing’s wrong,” I reply.

“Bollocks. You look more high strung than your violin.”

I don't know how he’s this articulate when he’s tired, but it doesn’t seem like he’s going to let this go. His furrowed brow isn’t settling. “It’s not that bad,” I say quietly. “I’ve just, never slept over with someone I was dating, obviously. I’m not sure what to do.”

He frowns slightly. “You slept in my arms at Hampshire.”

I chuckle quietly. “Yes, for an hour before I got uncomfortable and scared and went to my own bed.”

He frowns even more. “Are you scared now?”

“No, love, no. Just, nervous. You’re my first boyfriend, all of this is new for me.”

Simon’s eyes open wider. He still looks concerned. He shuffles a bit forward, then reaches out and taps hand against mine, something we do to reassure each other. It started when Simon was first recovering from the Mage debacle. He would lay in bed for days not speaking, and I was unsure what I could do to help. So I started just brushing my hand against his, silently letting him know that he wasn’t alone. Eventually, he started brushing my hand back. Now it’s our nonverbal way of saying, “I’m here for you.” I smile softly at him, and tap his hand back.

“Thank you, love,” I reply.

He smiles back, the worry finally melting from his face. “I do get it,” he says, so quiet the words only fill the space between us, “it was freaky for me too. But I promise you sleeping next to someone isn’t that freaky. It’s nice, really.”

I have to suppress the sting of jealousy in my gut. Yes, he would know, because of Wellbelove. Who he slept next to and fawned over while my heart broke. I can’t really blame him, he didn’t know how I felt. In fact, I did everything in my power to make sure he didn’t know. But he knows now, and he’s good to me. So the sting fades quickly.

I firmly grab his hand, his heat spreading over my palm. “I’ll take your word for it, Snow.”

His lips twist in thought. I can see him trying to sort through the beautiful tornado that is his brain. “You can, uh,” he starts, “we could, try stuff.”

I inhale sharply. Oh fuck. We just started snogging on the couch occasionally. Anything more definitely requires more time and discussion. Simon must see my panic because he immediately moves closer and starts shaking his head.

“No! Not like that, definitely not like that.”

“Okay, good,” I sigh. “Even if we were ready for anything like that, I think the Greek food wouldn’t be happy.”

He giggles. It’s such a beautiful sound. “Yeah, you’re definitely right.”

“So what in Merlin’s name are you talking about, Snow?”

“I mean, mostly what I like about sleeping next to someone is like...touching and stuff. So we can try that, if you want.”

That makes my heart pick up in a completely different way. “So, essentially, you want to cuddle.”

He smiles and squeezes my hand. “Yeah, pretty much. I’d like that a lot. Would you?”

I chew on my bottom lip, running my thumb over the back of his hand. Why is this so frightening? Why do I make things so hard for myself? I can do this. I won’t mess it up. “Yes, I do.” He grins. “I just don’t know how it’s going to work.”

“It’s just cuddling, Baz, not rocket science.”

I give him a pointed look, then reach up to flick the corner of his wing. He hisses slightly. “I mean your extra appendages, Snow. You’ve said they make sleeping alone hard, so I can’t imagine adding me into the mix will help.”

“Hm, yeah, I guess.” I watch him think about it. Well, I assume he’s thinking about it. I’ve always assumed his thoughts resemble his disjointed rambling, if he thinks it over at all. Usually he just does the first thing that pops into his big beautiful head. But right now he’s taking awhile. I lose some interest and look back up at the ceiling.

“Oh,” he says, and before I can ask what “oh” means, I have an entire teenage boy on my chest.

“Oof!” All the air is suddenly forced out of my lungs. Snow has decided to sprawl himself on top of me. His head is on my shoulder, our chests are half pressed together, and the rest of his body is just straight up crushing mine. I flinch when his wing joint gets nearly hits my face. I can’t even revel in the fact that Simon Snow is on top of me because I’m just struggling to breathe.

“Snow,” I say, voice strained, “I can’t breathe.”

“Oh, sorry!” He rolls back onto his side., and I take a deep breath. “Sorry, I thought, you know, vampire strength and all.”

“Vampire strength doesn’t negate the need for oxygen. What even was that?”

He shrugs, obviously embarrassed. “I don’t know. I usually sleep on my front, and I wanted to be near you, so I thought maybe...sorry...” He shrugs again and I sigh. Typical Simon. Nice thought, poor execution.

“It’s alright. Let’s just find a way that’s not going to crush me.”

“Yeah,” he chuckles, “that sounds like a good idea. How do you want to?”

It’s my turn to shrug. The habits you pick up from your partner are astounding. “I don’t know. You’re the expert.”

He scoffs. “I’m hardly an expert, love. Me and Agatha didn’t get much alone time with the Humdrum and all that.” He looks me over again, then just throws his arm over my side. It’s a nice sort of comfortable weight. But that’s all he does. “How’s this?”

“It’s...alright. But, I wouldn’t mind if you were closer.” Fuck, I had enough blood earlier to let me blush, and that was a mistake. I’m more red than a tomato. Snow, the bastard, is grinning at me with utter amusement. He shuffles closer so our bodies are lined up, throws a leg over mine, and tucks his head under my chin. It’s kind of like he’s climbing me. He moves my arm so it’s over his side. Our other arms are somewhat uncomfortably tucked between us.

“How’s that?” he asks.

Well, it’s nice having him this close, of course. His warmth wraps around me like a cocoon. I can feel him playing with my t-shirt. I like the way his hair smells, all fruity because of his shampoo. This is similar to how we slept at Hampshire. But, it’s still paralyzing in a way. We’re so intertwined, no space between us, no room. I’m scared to move a muscle in fear of breaking the moment. I don’t think I can sleep like this.

“It’s nice,” I whisper, “but it’s not ideal for sleeping, sorry.”

Simon shakes his head. “It’s alright. How about, uh, you hold me from behind?”

“You mean spooning?”

“Is that the word for it?”

I roll my eyes. “Yes, Snow. That’s the word according to the dictionary.”

“Then yeah, that.” He lightly flicks my side. “Also, you’re a dickhead.”

I snort. “Yes, we’re both very aware of that.” My fingers run up his back, and I brush the base of his wings. Snow jolts slightly. Hm, okay, that’s something to investigate at another time. “Though spooning you sounds nice, these might get in the way.”

Snow flapped the wings slightly in annoyance. I will say, inconvenient as they are, they do look quite majestic. “Hm, yeah, I guess. What if I, uh, held you from behind?”

“So, you want me to be little spoon.” I can’t help my blush spreading at that thought. There are so many things I assumed I’d never get to do with anyone, let alone Simon. It’s incredible. Nerve wracking, but incredible.

“Yeah, I guess,” he says. “Spooning is a weird word...”

I scoff though it’s halfway to a chuckle. “It’s just a word, Snow.”

“Yeah, I know, but I don’t get it. Like why do you need a weird word for cuddling? It’s like- I don’t-”

“Simon,” I sigh, cutting off his rambling, then turn in his arms, “shut up and spoon me.”

I hear him laugh, then feel his arm flop down over my side. Slowly, Snow shuffles closer, figuring out how to arrange himself around me. His chest presses against my back and fits one leg between mine. It’s nice, though I have to actively not think about how close his crotch is to my arse. There’s an inch or so but still, we’re quite close. His arm tightens around my stomach. He’s a long line of heat on my usually cold back, and I like it quite a bit.

“This good?” he asks.

I reach down and fit my fingers in the spaces between his. “Yeah, this is good.”

I inhale sharply when I feel his nose press against my neck. He rubs it against my skin, small exhales tickling me. “Good. Let’s finally sleep.”

“Agreed.”

I let my eyes slide shut, sinking into Snow’s heat and soft skin. The nervousness fades away with every breath I feel against my neck. This is still a lot for me, but I don’t feel as overwhelmed. I have room to breathe and adjust while Simon is surrounding to me. Maybe we could sleep like this again sometime.

Just as I’m just about to drift off, something brushes against my shoulder. I crack open my tired eye. Simon’s wing is draped across me, covering a good portion of my torso. Luckily his wing joint is on my shoulder with little risk of it reaching my face. It’s more like an extra blanket than anything. Right, Snow’s wings relax more when he sleeps. But that doesn’t seem to apply to his tail. I almost yelp when I feel it slither between our legs and wrap around my ankle. It’s sort of adorable, both are. And I’m smiling as I drift off to sleep.

———————————————

I wake up feeling warm. That’s unusual. I tend to wake up being a bit chilly. As I return to the world of consciousness, I feel something on my side. My eyes slowly open. There’s an arm draped over me, a leg on top of mine, and a leathery tail loosely holding my ankle. It appears Snow has rolled onto his front in his sleep. I’m on my side, hand on Snow's upper back. I've got a lovely view of his beautiful visage, smushed into the pillow and drooling. Crowley, I love him.

I don’t move for a little while, just watching him. Fucking sappy, I know. But I've spent years watching Snow sleep, and I've come to enjoy it. It’s so much better now that I’m allowed to. Eventually I can’t help but reach out and run my fingers through his bedhead. He stirs slightly, tilting up towards my hand, and I can feel his arm tightening.

“Mm,” he says into the pillow, the corner of his lip pulling up. “Morning.”

“Morning,” I whisper. It’s so bloody soft I should be disgusted with myself. But it’s Simon. I can let myself be soft with him.

He slowly runs his hand up and down my back. Even through the shirt it feels like sparks on my skin. “I like this.”

“What, the shirt? It’s your’s, Snow, I hope you like it.”

“No, arsehole.” He moves closer, our noses are nearly touching. “I like you sleeping here, and waking up next to you. In a good way, not like back at Watford. Do you? Like it?”

I reach out and trace a single finger on the base of his wings. Snow inhales sharply. I feel the deep shiver that reverberates down his spine. “Yes, I certainly like it too.”

“Bastard.”

“Yes,” I move even closer while rubbing his back, “but you like me.”

“Yeah,” he sighs. He rolls fully onto his side, wing stretched out and covering us both, “I do.” He pulls us so we’re pressed together, legs tangled, his tail firmly holding my calf. “I love you, Baz.”

Those words don’t shock me like they used to. It’s not a secret or a surprise, just wonderful. He loves me. Simon Snow, the chosen one, the centre of my universe, loves me. I cup his pretty face, covered in beautiful moles and awash in sunlight bleeding in through his wing. “I love you too, Simon,”

I’m not sure who kisses whom, but it really doesn’t matter. We both want to. How could we not? There’s absolutely no urgency to it, our lips lazily sliding together. I twist a few of his soft curls. I revel in every time Simon sighs between our mouths. He rubs my back and stomach. His fingertips dance just under the hem of my shirt (his shirt). I think it’s his silent way of asking permission. I’m seriously considering pushing his hand fully under it, when there’s a loud knock at the door.

“Simon?” Bunce asks. “Are you up? I’m making tea.”

I sigh as I reluctantly pull away from Simon’s mouth. “Yes, Bunce, we’re awake.”

“Oh. You’re here, Baz?”

“Obviously.”

Snow pokes my stomach. I hope he doesn’t notice the way it makes me shudder. (My stomach is so bloody sensitive, and if Simon knows just how much he will exploit it ruthlessly.) “Ignore him, Pen,” he calls out. “Earl grey tea would be lovely, thanks. We’ll be out in a bit.”

“Alright, will do.”

I crane my neck “Aren’t you going to ask what kind of tea I like, Bunce?”

“You’re assuming I care.”

Her footsteps fade away. I huff and flop down again. Snow’s arm is still draped across my side. I expect him to smiling smugly, making fun of me. But he isn’t. He still looks all soft. My heart melts in my chest.

“I liked you staying,” he whispers.

I sweep my thumb over his rosy cheek. “Me too.”

His smile somehow gets even brighter. It’s a miracle I don’t go blind. “So, could we make it a more regular thing? And maybe I could stay at your place too?”

This man is so adorable it’s criminal. Any fear or nerves are gone now, part of me wondering why I even had them in the first place. I lean forward and kiss my favourite mole on his neck. “Absolutely.”

He tilts his head, pulling me into another soft kiss, and the world fades away, completely condensing down to our bed.

———————————————

AN: This is so sweet my teeth are rotting. I wanted to show just how awkward firsts in a relationship can be, especially with two people so unused to intimacy. But they're good now, they're figuring it out, and they're super cute. Hope you all liked this! Next chapter of Black Swan should be up soon, and I'm already onto the next request :)

#carry on #snowbaz #baz pitch #simon snow #penelope bunce #fluff #cuddling #post canon #spooning #mysnowbazfic

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paullicino · 5 years

Text

On America(na)

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“The trouble with America,” my father says, “is that it’s too big.”

As he speaks, a morsel of food misses his mouth and begins to fall down his body. Like a climber who has lost their grip, it tumbles down the terrain and bounces off his belly, coming to rest in a crevasse somewhere in his trousers. My father has opinions about America. He has never been there and he doesn’t know any Americans. He never will and he never will.

The time is spring and I am in a small car, winding up around some sort of hillside that overlooks part of Seattle. I don’t know what Seattle really is, nor where it begins and ends, only that the city is spread thin like butter across so many square miles of suburban sprawl, a grey smear that stretches to the horizon and which is marbled with the wet and warm greens of whatever trees have been spared its splay.

The sky is the colour of hope and the thinnest haze falls over everything toward the horizon, turning all that is distant into a ghost of an idea. Somehow, impossibly, someone has painted a grand white spirit above it all, a glowing pyramid grander than any pharaoh's tomb. My mind insists that there is no way that there could ever be any mountain this big, yet it stands there both so large and also so far that my imagination tells me it could never create anything nearly so grand.

I look at the peak and the slopes and the rocks and the snow that trace and shape its features and I recognise them all at once. Their aspect is immutable eternity and their countenance is the unforgiving divine.

The face of the mountain is the face of God.

I first flew to America in the summer of 2002. Flights and accommodation were almost absurdly cheap. Less than a year before, I had taken a day off work to travel into London and meet friends. My workplace was a secure facility where my colleagues would get locked in a windowless room, without access to media or the outside world, and so they began to call me from the office phone to see if it was really true that aeroplanes were being deliberately flown into famous American landmarks. Another friend of mine told me how he had kept trying to change the channel on his television, trying to get away from the same disaster movie and simply find out what was on the news.

I was an idealistic young man and my response was to write a letter of sympathy to the President of the United States. My response to a lot of things is to write about them and I write to politicians and to friends and to authorities and to whoever is waiting outside the window after I fold up the paper and launch the plane out into the world. You never know where a paper plane is going to go.

My father had said that we’d plan a visit to America someday and perhaps rent a car and drive across it, going from state to state, seeing sights like the Grand Canyon or Mount Rushmore or The Empire State Building. All of those are near each other, particularly when their pictures are printed on the same page of a holiday brochure.

It seemed eminently possible. It was the 1980s and it was Morning Again in America. Nothing wasn’t possible. I was watching Knight Rider and Columbo and The Dukes of Hazzard and The A-Team. Mr. T was the coolest person I’d ever seen and I’m not sure if my parents were annoyed that he seemed such an aggressive role model or that their son liked a black man.

My father had lots of plans. Others included building an elaborate model train set and converting the loft. He never did any of these things and after he left my mother, I travelled to America by myself, with my own money, under my own steam, at a time when so many other people were still scared to fly there, even scared to fly anywhere at all.

I ran down the stretched spine of an airport in Detroit, thinking I had only five minutes to catch a connecting flight, because I didn’t realise I’d changed time zone and had an entire hour to find my plane. I landed in Chicago so tired and so sleep-deprived and with arms so ruined from dragging luggage that my hands shook when I tried to lift a glass of water. Nothing out the window of my motel room looked real. From the accents to the asphalt to the traffic to the telegraph poles, it was all sights and scenes stolen from film and television. All these disparate pieces were America, sure, but seeing them all together at once and assembled in front of me felt artificial and alienating.

I burned myself lying in the sun by lake Michigan, reading a physical copy of The Onion, rattled around The Loop on trains that told you which side their doors were going to open and hurtled up to the top of a skyscraper to stare out out so far that I could see Indiana and Wisconsin and the speckled imperfections that flit across my weak and broken eyes. The sky was the colour of hope and the thinnest haze fell over everything toward the horizon, turning all that is distant into a ghost of an idea.

I tried to do everything I could, but the trouble with Chicago was that it was too big. I came back with sheets of notes about my trip and I wrote all about it. I hadn’t flown in eight years and what I most remember writing about is the strange sense of suspension I felt as I crossed the Atlantic. Here’s what I said:

“Blue above and blue below. Right now we've just passed by Iceland and we're going to have a brush with Greenland soon. I feel a little more stable now, which is good, as I previously had a sensation whereby I felt the plane was suspended by a single piece of string that could be cut at any time. Takeoff was not much fun either (it was a lot less fun than I'm having now, which is very little), as I was convinced we were climbing too steeply, banking too quickly and likely to stall at any time. We didn't, which was nice. The engine I can see out of my starboard window has also stopped wobbling about, so that’s good.

The only in-flight entertainment with which I can distract myself has so far consisted of a Cybill Shepherd documentary. As you can imagine, this hasn't helped anything.”

I think now that no small part of that sensation was caused by my repeatedly drinking wine before and during the flight, something that I thought would make me feel more relaxed. It did not. Instead, I constantly worried that the plane would crash and/or explode. I also wrote this:

“I've just been to the toilet, which was fun. Thankfully, no hideous explosions occurred and, as a result, I was not thrown out of the plane into a -31C low pressure environment squirting a stream of piss as I went.”

I was getting into folk music and one song I was listening to was called America. It told the story of two people travelling across the country and trying to understand both it and themselves. There are two things about this song that are very realistic. The first is that they fail. The second is that they get stuck in traffic.

The time is winter and I am in Texas. The world is broad and warm and bright and easy. The roads are impossibly large, huge and hulking raised highways that wind like petrified snakes across the landscape. Infrastructure itself is a monument, a colonnade of concrete that conquers the landscape and rivals any classical architecture, every other onramp or highway a temple to the motor car and its pantheon of petroleum-powered processions. I am a passenger, passive in all of the endlessly ongoing ritual that is traffic.

A freight train slices across the perfectly flat skyline. It is so long that I never see its start or its end, only an infinite horizon of boxcars and hoppers. Every other thing in Texas feels like a stereotype I should roll my eyes at, but I’m instead filled with fascination and delight, even at everything that’s imperfect or ridiculous and, as ever, I can’t stop making friends who are American, some who will become very close and vitally important to me. I can’t stop enjoying myself. The trouble with my enthusiasm is that it’s too big.

I’m not supposed to like America. I grew up British, English, and all the playground talk was about how silly America was and is. The people aren’t as smart. They don’t have a good sense of humour. They have everything easier and still don’t do as well or work as hard in the same circumstances. I don’t now know what this mentality was, but it seemed some sort of contempt or resentment.

My father served with Americans in NATO in the 1960s, just as Kennedy and Khrushchev began to stand nose to nose. They were boisterous and bad at being soldiers, he said. The British were better and, in particular, more sensible. All these conversations, playground or personal, were also always about who was better. There was never the idea of being equal.

Other friends with parents who are more motivated or more middle class will go to America and come back with stories of things we don’t have. Those things are mostly different food or different cars or so many different sights to see. Or more television. They have things like Star Trek and The Simpsons, as well as a life full of tiny and so distinctly different details. I am an idealistic young boy and I can’t help but think about things that are somewhere else and different.

The time is spring and the wind is freezing. I am in a bar in New York with a group of actors who have just performed a superb evening of improv comedy. Paired off, each performed an exercise where one must adhere to a script and only recite lines they’ve learned, while the other has no knowledge of this script and can only react, with no idea what lines might be coming next. The results are a combination of hilarious, ridiculous and ingenious, in spite of all these Americans having such a terrible sense of humour.

We’re served food in small plastic baskets, a detail that strikes me as the most New York thing possible, and the actors talk about the lines they had to learn or the responses they had to invent. The actor sat beside me asks me who I am, where I’m from and how it is that I’m friends with another member of the group, a series of unpretentious questions that suit this very unpretentious group of talented people. We comment that we have the same first name and only later do I discover that he is Paul Rudd and that my friend is a little intimidated by him. A few days later, Ed Harris shakes my hand and fixes me with eyes the colour of an iceberg, but I’m not intimidated by anyone. It’s only Ed Harris.

The time is last week and the weather is Los Angeles. An eighty foot tall palm tree lords over the parking lot I am stood in, its shadow a sundial for an already setting afternoon sun. While my friend takes a ticket out of a parking meter, a man takes the trash out of a nearby bin and selects the most recyclable items, methodically emptying all the bottles he finds. These contrasts are so humdrum that nobody comments on them, though I still see fewer homeless people here than I do in San Francisco or Seattle. Block after block of those cities are packed with so many people who have nowhere to sleep that it’s an exercise in hiding humans in plain sight. Here, across LA, they are still more subtle, camped under bridges or living in every concrete nook the infrastructure affords.

All these cities are about some intersection of media and technology and convenience and big business, so being in them or near them is itself so prestigious and important that it teleports increasingly large amounts of money out of people’s pockets every month. Still, none of the geniuses and products and companies that make so much money in these places can dispel the displaced and disaffected because there is no profit to be made in helping the helpless. Instead, the richest and poorest people in the nation exist right on top of each other, never making eye contact.

It helps to have a motor car. An automobile. Millions of people lock themselves in boxes to travel from convenience to convenience, driving through banks and post offices and diners and cafés, These petroleum-powered chairs play their music and offer holders to place their drinks and demand huge roads and parking lots just so that each person can have their own private and portable room to journey inside. These are supposed to be convenient, but every time I’m inside one, the person in control becomes confused or angry with all the other people in their portable rooms and there is swerving or swearing or long periods of grinding gridlock.

Still, they help because they keep you apart from the disillusioned and the disenfranchised by shutting out the outside world. My problem is that I can’t legally operate an automobile and I like to walk or share my transport with other people. Walking can be particularly odd, even dangerous, as more than a few roads are not built for walking along and, in many places, it’s only the most disadvantaged people who you’ll share the pavement with. It’s a weird way to meet everyone who has been forgotten.

I miss trains.

The time is winter and I am supposed to be rolling through southern Oregon, but there has been some kind of mistake and our locomotive has taken a detour through a fantasy land torn straight from an Ivan Shishkin painting. I am trying to use two cameras at once to capture everything I see, because otherwise nobody will ever believe that I have been here or that any of this could possibly exist.

Every single tree is lathered with snow and a deep gorge runs parallel to the tracks, traced out by the jagged and reckless route of a ragged river. Above it there is a colossal hump of sleeping rock, shrouded in fog, and every curve of our route reveals some new variation of this scene, endless rearrangements of majestic mountains, rippling rivers and frozen forests. Everything everywhere is beautiful all the time and can’t afford to miss any of it in case I might never see it again.

The United States doesn’t have enough trains and it doesn’t spend enough time using them to show people how beautiful its landscapes are, whether those are forests or deserts or peaceful pacific coastlines. Instead, it shuttles everyone through airports with security that will look inside your shoes and airlines who will try to charge you for your seats and your bags. Flying has become a minor melodrama, but if you don’t want to ride your portable chair for forty hours, it’s the only way to put the Grand Canyon or Mount Rushmore or The Empire State Building on the same page.

The airports are ugly and the views are as likely to be of clouds or darkness or the seatback in front of you. Not enough people realise that, down there, everything everywhere could be beautiful all the time.

The time is autumn and the air is thick like soup, wet and warm and wrapped around me everywhere I go. I am in Florida and I will drink an awful lot of scotch that will all be paid for by a man who is impossibly rich. The man will never know or notice, because he is also paying for so many other people, plus an extremely famous DJ and to rent an entire theme park. Meanwhile, drunk, I will accidentally damage a toilet stall and a bouncer will mention who I am a guest of and suddenly there was never any problem.

A milkshake will save me from a hangover that makes the inside of my skull feel like cheap carpet charged with static. Someone will joke that, like Las Vegas, what happens in Florida stays in Florida, but I will meet a person who will begin to change my life and the what happens in Florida will follow me to England and then back again to the United States. One night, I will break into a state park and climb to the top of a ridge and see an entire city and coast blinking below, laid out like Christmas lights, while the din of a thousand spawning frogs fills the night behind me. Another night, I will lock myself in a tiny and windowless room, curl up on the floor in the dark and simply cry.

There will be a single ship bobbing in a bay beside a seaside restaurant, a sky-high hotel bar with the best view in the city, the steel outline of a old bridge hulking beside me in the darkness like the skeleton of a long-dead dragon. There will be so many experiences and I will pull all these disparate pieces apart to keep the good ones and learn from the bad.

The time is a year of incredible emotional upheaval. I will stand on a hill and look at city shining in the sunlight, asking myself why I can’t and why I shouldn’t try to live somewhere different. I will stand in front of hundreds of people applauding things I have done, the artificial barriers of the internet finally stripped away. I will stand by the Pacific as I begin a romance of the sort I thought I could never enjoy. I will even visit Florida again to enjoy a kind of demented excess that involves cocktails in bowls, or take a tour of an island chain populated by some of the most expensive properties in the world, all ready to lose every cent of their value as the sea rises around them. I will stand tall across America and, while my life will take me elsewhere, it will be America that gives me the confidence and the love and the inspiration to be more than I already am.

On one trip I take a bus, because that is normal to me in Europe, and the only other person riding with me is a frustrated woman whose ride abandoned her and who needs to get to work. She has her shoes in her bag and she tells me she is a dancer. The shoes are enormous and so I naively ask how anyone could possibly dance in those.

There is a moment where she is deciding if she can trust me or if judgement will follow what she says next. She makes a choice and tells me she is a stripper. I don’t know if she expected shock or disgust, but all I have for her is a whole barrage of questions about what that is like. She talks about the money she is saving and the plans she has to move away from her small town and all the men who can’t understand that they aren’t allowed to touch.

She leaves me her number and says I should call sometime. I try once but the number is engaged and I am not brave enough to try again. I am nowhere near as brave as her.

The time is night and I am waiting for my ride. I am lost and so are they, so I stand on a street corner by the emptying train station and a tall, slim African American man approaches me. He is asking only for spare change, and only for the change I can truly spare, and it’s really no problem if I have none and he really is sorry to disturb me. The man has just come from a place nearby that offers support to veterans and is concerned I may not believe that he is one, so he produces a card to prove his service.

The man is impossibly polite and sincere in a way that I will never be able to be and when I ask him about his service he names places in Vietnam I have either never heard of or would struggle to find on a map. He has no job and no home and no family and still stands straighter and more stately than perhaps any other person I have ever seen. He is a marine and he has more dignity and decency in one toe than I have in my entire body and I feel pitiful giving him the dollars in my wallet. I am not intimidated by anyone, but I am humbled forever by this man.

The time is now and I am in Seattle again, the place I have visited more than any other and where all my memories are the colour of wet sidewalks. I am staying with a non-binary friend who is showing me their huge stockpiles of food and telling me I’m welcome to eat all I like, a statement that makes me uncomfortable as it has just followed a description of all their cost-saving measures and how poor they are. I feel like the majority of my queer friends are poor. For some reason, they all want to help look after me.

This friend, maybe one of the most important people in my life, has just collected me from the airport and has a habit of treating me to road trips I wonder if they can really afford. I don’t think they have the money to try to travel across the country and understand both it and themselves, but they still try to help me do this.

I try to convince them to let me buy them food.

My alarm goes off. It is morning again in America, but I am no longer a child and, in the country of impossible vistas and eminently possible dreams, I wonder what is realistic. I look at the television shows I watched thirty years ago and they’re full of white dudes. I find an old episode of The A-Team where they beat up a bunch of Mexican men and I feel disappointed. I look at my friends here and feel I haven’t listened enough to the experiences of those who are black, asian, hispanic or queer. I listen to my folk song and it’s two white men singing about a nice ride on transport that had often been segregated just a decade before.

It’s morning again in America and more children than ever will be homeless. More than one in ten homeless adults will be a veteran. Forest fires are more persistent and deadly than ever and last week I saw California hills covered in charcoal, as well as damage caused by indiscriminate blazes that burned right to the sea. Violence against LGBT people is on the rise and the number of those being murdered has nearly doubled from 2016 to 2017. There is a new song about America and it feels far more realistic and referential, more candid and circumspect, as well as more appropriate for those who who don’t have the opportunity to travel across the country and understand both it and themselves, who can’t fit the Grand Canyon or Mount Rushmore or The Empire State Building into the same life, who struggle to enjoy all the splendour of the country they were nevertheless born in and are citizens of.

The time is jumbled and I am a paper plane and I never know where I’m going to go. I am in Portland, Maine, nestled into one of the oldest corners of the country, and I am peering through the fishy fog at a town like no other in America, but then I am in Minnesota, nervously watching news of a nearby tornado, but then I am in Indiana and sat at Kurt Vonnegut’s typewriter, or looking at Kurt Vonnegut’s Purple Heart, or reading each early draft of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, every one of them abandoned in favour of a fresh start that hoped for something better.

There are so many fresh starts and so many beginnings, each one the same but different, as the author tries again and again. One line in his finished novel will read “Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.”

But then I am in Arizona and the desert is purple, or I am in Virginia, or I am in Utah or New Hampshire or Massachusetts or Colorado, where the rocks are red and I see a saddlemaker for the first time. A saddlemaker.

But then I am in a university and Ursula Le Guin steps in through the door. Every single person in the room begins to behave differently and this tiny woman walks through an atmosphere thick with reverence and respect so rightly earned. Later I will stand up to speak to her and think about how so many important choices I made in my life, choices that seemed terrifying at the time, lead me to that moment, a moment that shows me how they were right and true and that I was so impossibly good to myself in making them. I will ask a question and I will remind myself that I am not intimidated by anyone.

She will speak back to me and the voice of Ursula is the voice of God.

But then I am in Maryland in a rainstorm, the thunder rippling around me and the lightning tearing open a sky too large to exist on this planet. I am in San Diego and there are Bible passages and references on a plumber’s van. I am in Pennsylvania, looking at the Liberty Bell. I am in Los Angeles and it is Christmas and the tree is eighty foot tall. I am trying to be in all the museums in Washington DC and I zigzag across the town like the lines on a Pollock, but the trouble with American history and culture is that it’s too big.

But then I am in love, more than once, and I will give my heart to people who come from this country at which I am supposed to glower or frown. I will want to give them my all.

The time is summer and the Illinois night is flush with chirping cicadas. The kitchen light is too bright and I eat dessert with the grandmother of a young woman I like and she warns me not to go too far south on the Chicago metro.

“When the people turn the colour of the chocolate on your eclair,” she says, “go the other way.”

I have never heard someone say something so brazenly racist in such an everyday setting.

The time is winter and my partner tells me that so much of America hates people like her. I had never considered this before because America is full of people like her, but she tells me stories of violence and assault and racism and being scared. No matter how precious or important I think she is, there are so many people who will never see that.

My father sees America as three hundred and thirty million people who are all the same. I see it as the same number of people who are all wonderfully different. Some of those people are remarkably similar to my father and sure would like everyone to be the same.

What an impossibly stupid idea. How can you even try that in the country where the deserts are purple and the rocks are red and the air is thick like soup and the forests are frozen and the palm trees are eighty foot tall and the old bridge is the skeleton of a dragon and the horizon is a train. Why would you even want to, when there is so much excitement in what is somewhere else and different. There is no way to pull all these disparate pieces apart any more than there is any way to mash them all together or make the Grand Canyon or Mount Rushmore or The Empire State Building fit on the same page. There is no America waiting for you to understand both it and yourself, just like there is no life that makes sense from the things you find in gift shops. Both are tasks that are too big.

Trust me, you will never fully know America and you will never fully know yourself. That doesn’t mean, however, that you can’t love both.

The time is this evening and I edit all I have written here and wonder if I will be called a cynic or a patriot or an idealist or an idiot. I am all of these things and also none, as I pull these disparate pieces of myself apart and mash them back together again. People tell me everything here is going wrong and there is so much to be unhappy about, but my affection for America won’t go away and if I ever think it might, I want you to help me reach for it and pull it back. I will never desert my American friends and nobody can ever erase the joy I’ve felt any more than they can turn back the tears that run down my cheeks as I write this.

I cannot edit this any more, much as I cannot edit America. There is no grand theme I can find, no story I can invent by reshaping and realigning pieces that never joined together in the first place. There is only a messy and imperfect whole, across which I have zigzagged like the lines on a Pollock. I doubt me or my journeys make sense to anyone.

I have spent a small though significant fraction of my life in this country, but I have invested a disproportionate amount of my love, energy and enthusiasm here. I regret none of that and I have received rewards and restitution tenfold. My only problem now is that my experiences have left me with a condition both chronic and terminal: The trouble with my heart is that it’s too big.

(The pictures featured are, in order: The America Map in Denver Airport, Gas Works Park in Seattle, Chicago downtown viewed from somewhere like Roosevelt Road, a still from It's Morning Again, Manhattan, Austin, Dealey Plaza, Times Square, Los Angeles, Hollywood, somewhere perhaps in the Willamette National Forest, somewhere in Northeastern Washington, Orlando, Sausalito, Indianapolis, the WTC Memorial, San Francisco's Bay Bridge, Estes Park, The White House, the Kurt Vonnegut Museum, Ursula Le Guin speaking at Seattle University, the Portland Head Lighthouse, Washington DC, Philadelphia and the Golden Gate Bridge.)

#America #travel #travelogue #writing #Patreon

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nerdyqueerandfulloffear · 5 years

Text

Crimson: Chapter One

Warnings: Blood, abuse, unusual punishment

I hate how Jared has broken me. If the situation had happened before, I wouldn’t freeze like this. Like a coward. Footsteps break the thick silence. The light from the living room becomes blocked and I see the silhouette of a man with a knife, dripping blood. Jared’s blood. I whimper as the man gets closer. He sits on the edge of the bed and reaches out to grab me, but he doesn’t. No, he grabs the blankets, slowly dragging them down, exposing my bare chest.

“Poor puppy,” a deep voice says causing me to shudder, “are all these bruises from him?” He gently touched a purple bruise on my side, “He never treated you right now did he?” I started to cry. I don’t know if it’s because this man just killed the only person who would talk to me, cared about me, on campus. Or because everything he is saying is right.

“He treated you as something lesser, like some sort of toy he could play with? Then he hurt you when you refused didn’t he?” I hate it. I hate that he’s right. I denied it for so long but he’s right.

“There there puppy,” he wiped the tears from my check, “no need to cry. He can’t hurt you anymore.” The sentence ends with a jester to his knife. My tears slow down but don’t stop. I stare at the man as he wipes the blood off one side of the knife. He licks the blood of the finger before basically shoving it down his throat.

The finger was removed with a sickening pop. He turns his attention back to the knife. He wipes the other side of the knife with the same finger before placing it against my lips. I don’t move to do anything but instead, look at the man with wide pleading eyes. He removes the finger from my lips before licking it clean. I feel Jared’s blood against my lips. I hated the way Jared had started to treat over months, but I never realized how much I relied on him for protection.

“Come on puppy, it’s time for us to leave.” He gently pulls me out of bed. My body still hasn’t had time to unfreeze, I fall into the strange man’s chest. He wraps an arm around my waist, keeping me upright. I turn my head away from his stare to see my glasses Jared had put on his side of the bed. I reach my arm towards them, expecting to have it get smacked away like normal, but it doesn’t. Instead, the man grabs my glasses before gently putting them on me.

“There, all set puppy. Now we really need to get going. Can you walk pup?” Without thinking, I nod my head.

“Good, now be careful where you step, don’t want to cut your feet now do we?”

We slowly make our way into the living room. If his arm wasn’t holding me up, I would be flat on my face. I keep my gaze on the floor, avoiding the glass from the shattered coffee table. My attention is soon brought to the blood cover feet. I stop walking. Jared. My stomach turns.

“Look away pup, you don’t want to see. Look away.” He tries to pull me along but I can’t. My eyes travel up his body. His skin was a sickening pale. Much worse than the time he was in the hospital. Blood slowly oozes its way out of the cuts were pieces of glass shards stook out. Before I can make my way to his chest, my head is quickly buried into the crook of the man’s neck.

“You don’t have to look pup. You don’t want to look. You just can’t look away. I know.” We continue to walk through the living room. I whimper each time I feel myself step on a shard. When we get to the doorway, his hand leave the back of my head and I quickly look back into the apartment. I bite my lip, trying not to let the vomit escape my mouth.

I’m looking into Jared's eyes. When we first met, when we were in love, his eyes reminded me of grass peeking its way through the snow at the beginning of spring. I used to love his eyes. As time went on, and our relationship broke. His eyes slowly became poison. A deep sort of toxic that was controlling him, breaking what we had. But now they were different. They were empty and cold.

Only one though. The other had a glass shards in it, causing blood to trickle down his pale face. I wish I had control of my body. I would break free of this grip, run to Jared and see if there was a chance to save him. I would definitely be in for a beating, but at this point, I don't care. I just want to be in his arms, his hands going through my hair instead of being pressed against this stranger. I want my Jared back.

“I told you not to look pup,” the man says while his grip tightens. I whimper in pain and he gives a small chuckle.

“Sweet little puppy. Couldn’t help yourself now, could you? Now that you got that out of your system, we need to leave.” I don’t respond as he slowly walks me away from the apartment, closing the door in the process, leaving Jared behind us as we walk out of the complex.

———————————————————————————————————

I didn’t realize I fell asleep until I woke up in silk sheets. As I look down I see that my chest is no longer bare. No, instead it’s covered by a red and black ombré sweatshirt. My eyes go up and I look at my surroundings.

The walls were a cool gray on the top half and black on the bottom with a line of deep red separating them. The bed was a queen size with black sheets and red bedding. The bed post was simple with cedar wood. Next to the bed was a small side table that looks like a slice out of a wood trunk that had a plain lamp with a white shade on it contrasting to the dark color scheme of the wood.

I pulled my feet out of the sheets to see my feet were bandaged. The bottom of my feet had brown spots of dried blood from the glass cuts. I hiss as I put my weight on them when I stand up. My legs are slightly shaky, but my full control of them is mostly back.

I walk towards one of the two doors and slowly push it open. It was a bathroom. There are black tile floors which contrast with the white appliances. There was a decent size bathtub without a shower head above it. The toilet was bright white and looked like was cleaned quite often. The countertop for the sink was white marble with a simple, small mirror above it.

My appearance wasn’t the best. Red tear streaks went down my face. My eyes were still red from crying. My hair was thrown all over the place, which was typical bed head. It was much worse when my hair was longer. I had my down past my shoulders a long time ago. I would always through it into a messy bun before first period.

I also lost my long hair though. It was around the time I lost my Jared. He had started taking medication after he got out of the hospital and the withdrawal symptoms on the day he ran out were really bad. I still have a scar on my leg from it. But he cut my hair off that day. Once we got a refill and he calmed down, I was swarmed with apologies. And I forgave him. I always forgave him. Even when he didn’t deserve it. But I thought if I did, I might get the man I was in love with back. But I was stuck with the man that had possessed him.

My lips were another thing I noticed. Jared’s blood, now dried, was still on my lips. I grab the white hand towel and quickly wet it. I bend over the sink and start scrubbing my lips, trying to get the image of Jared’s dead body out of my head.

As I go to put the towel back, something catches my eye. A drawer under the sink is slightly open allowing the light through the tiny window to hit something metal, give the shine that hit my eye. I open the draw wider to find a pair of scissors, the type you would find in a barber shop or hair salon. I pick them up and examine them. There was little rust indication that they weren’t new, but other than that they looked in good condition.

An idea came to my head, causing me to quickly pocket the scissors. I walk out of the bathroom and open the second door. A hallway is what I was greeted with. With a had in my pocket, death gripping the scissors, I walk outside the room.

I make my way into the kitchen to see my kidnapper in front of a stove, stirring something in a pot. My eyes wander to the front door.

“Shit,” I mumble under my breath realizing that I had forgotten my glasses in the room. My vision wasn’t too bad, but the door was too far away to see how it was locked.

My mumble was apparently loud enough to gain his attention. The man turns around and smiles at me. The light may have been on in the apartment last night, but this was the first time I got a good look at him.

He had black hair that was long enough that some fell in front of his eyes with a deep, almost unnoticeable red tips. His eyes were a deep brown like a natural soil, not the ones you buy at the store. His nose was slightly skewed as if it had been broken before. He was not pale like Jared or me, but not tan either. He stood tall, maybe six foot or more. He had a smile that gave off fake sweetness.

“Puppy, it’s about time your up. I was just making something for us to eat. Come, sit.” The way he said the last words made it sound like he was talking to an actual dog. I warfully walk towards the kitchen island, which also was white marble, and sat down in one of the barstools.

“Do you like the sweatshirt pup? I wanted to make sure I had something that fit you.” I don’t respond, he sighs.

“Pup, I know you’re not mute, I heard you last night and just now. I want a verbal response when I ask you a question. I do understand why you didn’t speak last night and I’ll let it slide. Okay?” Remembering when Jared went through this phase I quickly respond with a quiet,

“Yes, sir.” His eyes widen at my response.

“Pup, please don’t call me sir. I’m not that old. My name’s Damien.” I grip the scissors tighter in my pocket as he moves closer until he’s next to me. He, unlike Jared yesterday, gently grabs my chin so our eyes meet.

“What about you pup? What’s your name?” My eyes dart to the door behind him, then back to his stare.

“Alex,” is all I say before removing the scissors from my pocket and stabbing him in his shoulder, causing his grip on me to loosen and a hiss to escape his lips. I escape his arms and run for the door. But I quickly come to a stop was the door become clear. Around ten different locks were on it, he would be able to get me before I had a chance to get the first five unlocked.

I turn back to see him staring at me with wide, almost black, eyes. He takes a step towards me. I bolt past him and into the room I woke up in, slamming the door behind me. I quickly grab the side table, the lamp falling off and bulb shattering in the process and put it in front of the door.

I push against the table attempt to make some sort of barricade with my limited supplies until I can think of a way out of here. My attempt fails and the door is pushed open, causing the table and me to fall down. More specifically, the table fell on top of me.

I look up in terror to see the ma- Damien looking down at me. Blood is falling out of the wound and some fall on to my face as he bends down and removes the table. I can feel myself start to freeze again, but I won’t let it happen. I scoot backward as he continues to walk towards me until I’m pushed into a corner.

He bends down and I quickly make an ‘x’ over my face with my arms in preparation of being hit. Instead, he moves my hands from my face but doesn’t release them.

“ I’m not going to hit you pup. I won’t ever hit you. I go by a simple rule. An eye for an eye. If you hurt me, you get punished,” I flinch at his words, “But if I hurt you, I get punished. Now does that sound fair?” I stare at him for a long time before nodding.

“Verbal responses pup.”

“Yes, Damien.” He sighs.

“We’ll work on that later. Now though, you need to listen to me.”

“Okay,” I whisper. He lets go of my hands.

“Now, remove the scissors.” I look at him before carefully wrapping my hand around them. He nods his head and I slowly start to pull the scissors out. He hisses in pain until they are completely removed. The blood flow speeds up and in the light, it has an almost white shine to it.

“Remember how I cleaned my knife yesterday? Well, I want you to copy that.” I whimper at the idea of having the terrible copper taste in my mouth.

“Come on pup, it's only fair. You did stab me.” I sigh in defeat before repeating what I saw last night. My finger slowly glides up the scissors until I reach the tip. I look to see my finger covered in the same shining liquid before giving it a small lick.

It tastes different than I expected. The copper taste isn't the first thing that hits me. Instead, I'm hit with a salty, bitter taste with the copper following after it. What's worse than the taste is the texture. It wasn't liquidly like it looked, no. It was warm and silky. I fight my stomach, trying to keep yesterday’s breakfast down.

“Licking it off wasn’t the only thing I did last night.” I grimace before slowly putting my finger in my mouth. He smiles and threads a hand through my hair, causing me to shudder as I start to suck the disgusting fluid off my finger.

Unlike Damien yesterday, when I removed the finger from my mouth it didn’t make the sickening pop, but instead, a trail of saliva connects my finger to my lips. He breaks the trail, wrapping my saliva around his finger, before licking his finger clean.

“There’s another side pup.” He says while wiping his finger clean on his pants. Using the same finger that was just in my mouth, I wipe the other side of the scissors until my fingers are covered in the same red. I bring my finger to his lips as he did to me yesterday. He smirks before putting my finger in his mouth.

If sucking on my own finger wasn’t weird enough, this was a different experience. I feel every vile movement he makes. Whether his tongue trailed its way over my finger, or when his cheeks hollowed, I felt every violating movement.

He removes my finger from his mouth and I’m quick to wipe it on my pajama bottoms.

“You did so good pup. You ready for the next part?” I whimper at the idea of this continuing on. But I nod my head.

“I’ll accept the non-verbal response for now pup, but next time no exceptions. Now, sit your finger in the wound.” I look at him with wide eyes.

“Are are you su sure?” I ask. He nods his head and smiles.

“I’m sure pup. Now go on, be a good puppy.” I sigh and gently put my finger on the blood gushing wound. With a shaky breath, I push my finger into the wound up to my distal interplanage joint. There’s probably a simpler name for it, but I can’t remember at the moment. He hisses in pain but doesn’t tell me to stop. When he stops hissing, I hear how shaky his breathing is.

“Good pup,” It’s almost like a whisper when he says it, “Now move your finger around a bit, but don’t go any deeper.” I can feel my heartbeat rise as do what I’m told. I start off slowly pushing my finger back and forth, the motion causing the wound to bleed fast, covering my hand in it.

“You’re a good pup. So good for me.” I shudder at the praise as the image of the worst night of my life comes into my head.

‘ “You’re so good at that princess. So good for me. Such a good little pet.” ‘ I start to cry from the memory. I had almost forgotten about it until now. Jared had been there to save me before things get worse and I just want that to happen again.

“It’s okay pup no need to cry, it’s almost over.” He says while wiping the tears off my cheeks.

‘ “Don’t cry princess, it’s almost over. Then we can get onto the fun part.” He licks the tears off my cheeks.’ I wanted Jared to burst through the door and pull me away from him. I want Jared to kiss my forehead and tell me that I’m safe. I want Jared.

“Can you hear me pup? I need you to breathe.” I didn’t realize I was having an attack until now. I start trying to steady my breathing as he treads a hand through my hair. When he did it before it felt wrong, but now it was almost comforting.

My breathing patterns slowly became normal as his hand left my hair.

“It’s okay, Alex.” It’s the first time he has used my real name, “Can we continue? I know you want this over with as soon a possible and I’m fine with that.”

“I I think I think so.” I stutter out. He smiles with that fake sweetness again.

“Good. Now remove your hand,” I do so to see that it’s almost fully covered in his blood, “and replace it with your tongue.” My eyes widen with shock.

“Wh what?” I ask in disbelief. He moves his shirt down so the wound was easy to get to, also exposing blood stained skin in the process.

“I want you to clean the wound the same way you cleaned your finger. Do that and we can be done with this.” Is this man insane?

“What, what if I refuse to?” His expression goes dark.

“You don’t want to find out. Now go on.” I can feel my whole body shake, but I do as he says.

I gently start by placing my lips on the wound. I open my mouth to do the first lick but was met with the wound gushing blood at the same time. I’m quick to close my lips after that, swallowing fast so I don’t have to deal with the texture or too much of the taste.

“Try starting lower pup, so you don’t get a mouthful again.” He says. I move lower so I’m near his collarbone to start. I grudgingly start to lap at the blood, slowly making my way back up to the open wound itself. My face feels covered in blood but is washed away with my tears. As my tongue glides over the wound itself, I hear him hiss in pain.

I pull away from his body and look him with pleading eyes. He leans towards me and runs his tongue over my blood stained lips, not trying to force his way inside my mouth, but more as a cleaning manner.

He pulls away and stands up, taking a few steps back. I didn’t realize I was leaning against him until I collapse to the ground, covered in blood, tears, and a mix of both mine and his saliva. I wrap an arm around myself and start to sob. I shouldn’t have said anything yesterday. Maybe Jared would still be alive, holding me as he starts to wake up. Or maybe we both be dead. Either option would be better than this.

He walks out of the room as I turn so my face is to the wall as if it was my protection. I hear his footsteps as he enters the kitchen, then the sound of water running. He’s probably cleaning the wound, leaving me here covered in his blood. I should go clean up myself, but I don’t have the strength to get up. I’m drained emotionally.

The water stops and I hear cabinets open before closing. He's probably looking for a first aid kit. The sound of a fridge opening confuses me. What does he need in a fridge? Silence takes over as my sobs dies down.

I hear footsteps come become louder before there’s a shadow above me. I turn my head to see him place a tray on the ground. On the tray is a bowl, a facecloth, and a water bottle.

“Wash up pup, then we can have lunch,” Damien said. I turn completely around and scoot towards the tray. I reach towards the face cloth to find it’s already wet. I quickly wipe my hand before going to wipe the blood and tears off my face.

I put the face cloth down once I found my face clean enough for now. I grab the water bottle and start to clean out my mouth. I spit the water in the bowl, feeling the awful taste slowly leave my mouth with each mouthful of water.

Once the water bottle is empty, the taste is still there, but mostly gone. The salty and bitter taste is gone, but the copper is still there. I look up to see Damien looking down at me.

“You all set pup?” I sigh and nod. I still feel absolutely disgusting, but I'm clean enough for now. He reaches a hand out to me and I hesitate for a moment before taking it. He walks me into the kitchen by the hand and leads me to the same seat I was at before I stabbed him. He squeezes my hand before releasing it as I sit down. I’m quick to wrap my arms around myself, using them as some sort of fake protection.

“I hope spaghetti is fine. If not I can make you something else.” I stare at the floor and hug myself tighter.

“It’s fine,” I mumble into the sweatshirt. He sighs and I hear what I believe to be the stove turning off.

“Look,” I tear my eyes away from the floor to see him draining the steaming water from the pot, “I know we got off to a bad start-” I roll my eyes “-but I want you to know I have no intention of hurting you, in any way.” I sigh before making direct contact with his eyes for the first time.

They way he’s looking at me wasn’t like when Jared would lie to me. It’s a strange mixture of searching and, fear. His eyes show old age that contrast with his young form. His eyes are heavy and sunken. The bags underneath were quite clear, as if he hadn’t gotten a decent night sleep in months.

I’m the one to break the eye contact and the heavy silence.

“Would,” I sigh and hug myself tighter, “Would you be mad if I said I don’t believe you?” I meet his eyes again, but only for a moment as he turns back to the spaghetti. His eyes showed something close to disappointment.

“It’s okay.” He puts a plate of spaghetti in front of me before going to a small pot on the stove. “I gave you a bad impression of me, I understand why you’re wary of me.” He turns around with the small pot in his hands, turning it slightly to expose the red inside.

“Sauce?” I nod. He opens a drawer and grabs a fork and a spoon before walking so he stood next to me. I move over ever so slightly. He puts the fork by the plate before moving the pot so it’s above my plate. The sauce seems thinner than usual, covering the pasta more like a salad dressing than anything. I shake any speculation away, it could just be the brand.

He moves back towards the stove and I release the breath I didn’t realize I was holding. He reaches above the stove and opens the cupboard to grab two wine glasses. He places one in front of me and one on the other side.

“I-I do-don’t drink,” I say as he grabs a wine bottle out of the fridge. He ignores my comment and starts pouring me a glass.

“It’s not that strong. Come on now, eat.” He starts to pour himself a glass. I sigh in defeat before picking up my fork. He put his plate next to me before sitting down and eating himself. The copper taste is still in my mouth as I eat, but I try to ignore it.

I give a sigh once my plate is half empty. The copper taste just won’t go away. I pick up the wine glass and swirl it around a bit. If it gets rid of the copper taste in my mouth so be it.

...

It did not work

Tags: @punttonsanders @tributes-vamps-and-ginnyweasley @chrystalyasama

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dukeofriven · 5 years

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‘The AfD declares autistic climate activist to be “mentally challenged” and firms-up its campaign platform around the idea of publicly ridiculing a teenager.’ Throw their pathetic fear of a teen back in their faces. Mock them at every opportunity. Smear their faces in their own shit until they can’t breathe without opening their mouths to swallow it. Remind them always that they are small and weak and frightened by a 15 year old - jeer them, giggle in their presence them, howl with laughter every time they try and pass their crayon scrawl as policy. Make their every waking second a taunting Mean Girls hell in which they can never be free of the knowledge that everyone knows they’re nothing but a pathetic joke. And every time they try and draw strength from that, to try and don the mantle of the oppressed underdog, punch them in the nose and remind them that their bodies are as fragile as their egos and their ideas. Push them down again and again and again. Whisper in their ear that their Nazis forebears used to get treated like this - until one day they found the courage to stand up for themselves and their beliefs and fight. And then they lost. And then we killed them. And then we displayed their bloated corpses for all the world to jeer. And then we destroyed everything they had built and they were powerless to stop us because these failed, pathetic losers put their faith in beliefs that were wrong. Demonstrably false. Literally untrue. The Reich to last a thousand years never grew old enough to get a driver’s license. The Nazis who were humiliated in the Beer Hall Putsch vowed that from that day forward no one would ever treat them like that again. But we did. Because they’re losers who fail. These are people whose ideology gives them cover for advocating some of the most heinous acts this earth has ever seen. The alt-right, whether they openly identify as Nazis or not, are Nazis, and are in accord with the exact same belief system that advocated for genocide, racial supremacy, patriarchy, antiquated conservatism, and other such debunked delusions even if they distance themselves from the Nazi label. When someone’s ideology gives them cover for being a piece of shit like that then you should oblige and treat them as such. Drag them into the nearest restroom and give them a couple swirlies -shit belongs in the toilet, after all. Alright. Despite my bellicose rhetoric above I am a pacifist at heart - violence ultimately begets more violence. So don’t let them drown. Don’t break any bones. Don’t go pulling off fingers the way you might the wings of a tiny, helpless, pathetic, utterly incapable-of-fighting-back mosquito before carelessly squashing it with the tip of the nail on your pinkie finger. Even though you could. Easily. It would not be hard.

But there’s a difference between perpetuating a cycle of violence by starting a blood feud or spending decades abusing someone emotionally and physically and dragging someone who said “you’re a weak effeminate pansy degenerate who wouldn't exist in our pure society and its not hate speech to want a country for white straight men and women with shared moral values” into a park bathroom and demonstrating certain inaccuracies of that argument by clamming their heads into the urinal and forcing them to eat a urinal cake. It’s not the most intellectually robust rebuttal, but you could rephrase “you’re a weak effeminate pansy degenerate who wouldn't exist in our pure society” as “you’re a stinky doo doo head who sucks and when I grow up I’m gonna be strong enough to throw you into space.” They’re functionally identical in terms of tone, content, self-aggrandizement, and mental acuity. There is no intellectually appropriate response to that kind of infantile argument - these are not intelligent people. I don’t mean ‘lacking in formal education.’ I mean they’re stupid. ‘Burn the blankets to warm the bed’ stupid. Leibowitzian ‘Proud To Be A Cretin’ stupid. ‘Smart Men Stay Ignorant; Leaning’s For Libs’ stupid. Their positions should not be treated as intellectually valid out of a misguided belief that a good intellectual should be open-minded to every idea every time it’s proposed. Sure, absolute-free-speech defenders always willing to normalize Nazi “discourse”, I’ll concede that the world-is-flat guy might have had a right to explain what his beliefs were. In 5000 BC, When nobody had heard them before and we didn’t know what he was going to say. Eight thousand years later, though, indulging his ancestor who’s just going to repeat the same points that were wrong eight millennia ago is lunacy.

A good intellectual knowns when something isn’t worth their time and acts accordingly. Sometimes this means not letting someone fill the air with hate speech out of slavish obligation to letter of freedom of expression instead of its spirit (when someone is granted the freedom to debate the idea that everyone who disagrees with them should be purged, you only harm freedom, not celebrate it.) Sometimes this means force-feeding an advocate of genocide a tasty lunchtime treat of urine and quaternary ammonium compounds while cheerfully wondering aloud what might happen if there’s still unswallowed cake in their mouth and you need to resolve certain biological necessities.

The first mistake we ever made with the alt-right was to leave the whoopee cushion at home, when we should have attended their every rally with an armful and play them constantly every time they tried to speak. “There’s nothing wrong with saying I’m pr-THPPTPHTPHPHHPH proud to be THPPTPHTPHPHHPH be white and to stand up for THPPTPHTPHPHHPH the achieveTHPPTPHTPHPHHPHments of the whitTHPPTPHTPHPHHPH of the whTHPPTPHTPHPHHPH white THPPTPHTPHPHHPH white raTPHRRURURURPHH-P-P-P- whiP-P-P-P whP-P-P whiteP-P-P-P WHITE RACTRRHPRPRP-P-P ... ... ... *cough* ... ... WHITE POWFFFFWWWPWPPRPRPRPRPRPRSQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAKTRRRHHPPPP-PPP-RPPP-PPP-P-P-P-PLIPPPP-THRP plip! We should attend their rallies and events with boxes of red noses, rainbow wigs, and buckets of greasepaint and throw ourselves upon them until we’ve forced them into wearing their true colours. Remember: every SS officer who looked so forbidding in their tailored uniform stank of their own disgusting sweat because all that blackened leather couldn’t breathe and every SS trooper standing in that imposing formation was broiling in their own filth. Nothing but bozos in fetish gear. The vaunted Wehrmacht had their uniforms rot off their bodies in the snows of Stalingrad as they had to strip the dead for scraps and rags, freezing to death, starving to death, because Hitler - the great genius who personally involved himself with the running of his forces almost to a tactical level - he didn’t think they needed to be resupplied. The Nazis lost. The Nazis lost so badly their monuments were ground into dust, their leaders bodies destroyed or abandoned in the mud, the dreams of Germania proven nothing but a dusty model in a museum devoted to cursing the Nazi’s memory. Nothing but a shrine to hubris and grossly over-estimating your own abilities. The legacy of the Nazis is humiliation, shame, and utter fucking failure. Neo-Nazis, this ‘new’ alt-right whose philosophies are all old, have as their heroes men who did nothing but fail, who achieved nothing but to have their life’s work expunged, debased, destroyed, and condemned by the world not just in their time but for generations after. Not misunderstood geniuses but understood buffoons. Never, ever, let them forget this - and never, ever let them try to turn it into a virtue. No ‘we shall rise again’ narratives. No abyss-to-transformation in some bullshit Cambellian hero’s journey. Their past was not a defeat to inspire them to future victory. They are not the underprivileged hurdle jumper who against all odds and obstacles wins gold at the Olympics, they’re the guy on your track team who once pushed so hard on a door marked pull that he fell through the glass and had to get ten stitches, the guy who got so drunk at an out-of-town meet that he shat his bed at the hotel and tried to hide the dirty sheets in his bags and stunk-up the bus ride home until Coach found out and chewed him out in front of the entire team for being the biggest fucking tool in the whole wide world. Not the guy who was a loner in high school but who found like-minded friends in college, started a cool band where they sang about their sucky pasts, and wound-up a rich and famous with legions of adoring fans. Nah, they’re the guy who was a loner in high school, and in college, and in the job at the napkin distribution company, the guy who retired without a party, spent weeks at a time with no one to talk to, and ultimately died alone - not because he was socially awkward or shy or struggled to communicate, but because he was really unpleasant to be around and even those virtuous folk who try and make sure that nobody is lonely gave up on him because he was such a nasty, loathsome, turd of a human being whose only impact on the world was that he improved it by leaving it. That’s the past of the Nazis. That, too, is their future. Never let them forget this. Their past should embarrass them. Mortify them. There’s is the ideology of pathetic losers. When you march against them, raise high above your heads images of Nazi Germany - not rigid columns of well-armed soldiers or shining tanks rolling off the lines, but the images of their ineptitude. The shuffling columns of defeated, broken men. Their burnt tanks, their downed planes, their sunken ships, their pulverized cities, and all the equipment abandoned in panicked withdrawals or through sheer bureaucratic incompetence. Show images of Jews defiant, the simple act of their still drawing breath spit in the eye of those who thought to see them erased. Humiliate the Nazis again and again and again. They. Failed. The Jews endured, survived, flourished - won. The conquered nations of Europe rebuilt their cultural wonders and their ruined homes and brought back their stolen treasures. They won. The disposed Roma preserved their ways of life despite the will of an entire conquering empire set against them. They won too. The queer communities persecuted for their ‘deviancy’ not only survived they reshaped the post-war world into a place that could no longer sideline them in history. Another victory. The Nazis lost. The Nazi’s failed so completely that they lost not only the territory they had tried to gain but their own nation lay shattered at their feet - politically, socially, economically, spiritually. The Great and Powerful Nazi Party so failed its own people that Germany was sundered into West Germany, East Germany, and Eastern Prussia, promptly swallowed whole by the Societs - the trauma from that lingers generations on. The Nazis not only failed to achieve any of their goals - they failed in the promise made by any such ideology: in joining us we will protect you. They did not just fail to make Germany greater, they literally destroyed it, and left it in pieces. So when you march against the alt-right, these neo-Nazis, Hoist photos of the bloated corpses of the hanged at Nuremberg - their swollen faces distorted in death. Chant the cry “Morons, Not Martyrs!” Remind every alt-right shit-eating soul that they were nothing, are nothing, will always be nothing but failures, losers, and followers of stupid, incompetent, incapable fools. They were, are, shall always, can only ever be wrong. “These are your role models? This is your dream? Failures! Failures! Failures!” “Be A Nazi To Lose It All” Do not, for a single solitary second, treat their ideas as grown-up. Do not, for a moment, give them the cover of adulthood, maturity, or sober discourse. Do not, for one second of time, treat them with respect so long as they seek to hold power over you, to be feared by you, to be thought of as an enemy and not something foul but forgettable to be scrapped off your shoe. Never give them an inch of fear to feed their starving egos. The man who said that rocks were soft as butter and as edible as custard would be given no weight as a person of substantive ideas - Nazis deserve the same derision. And do not allow them a moment of privacy to brood on the indignities you heap upon them, to be like a teen sulking in their bedroom crafting fantasies about how one day they’ll be proven right and everyone will be sorry. Drag them out into the light again and again and again, give them no moment of peace, allow no instant of time to pass when you are not holding images of their ideology’s worthlessness and failure above their heads. No hiding. No sulking. No second to plot or brood or dream. Stake them to the earth, keep them forever in the light, and pummel them with pie until even they can not deny that they are nothing but clowns worthy only of mockery, ridicule, and endless savage laughter.

#climate change #germany #afd #alternative für deutschland (afd)#greenpeace #environment #nazis #alt-right #greta thunberg #neo-nazis #Hitler #Mean Girls #fart sounds #eat shit and die #long post #autism #tw anti-autism

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seokmins-thighs · 6 years

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[scenario] all of the while, i never knew (coffee shop!au pt. v)

Pairing: reader x Mingyu; wonwoo and jihoon are still here! :D

Genre: coffee shop!au, garbage fluff

Word Count: 3090w

Warning(s): germy mingyu

pt. i | pt. ii | pt. iii | pt. iv | masterlist

desc: continuation of coffee shop!au; it all started with you giving mingyu different names for your orders.

a/n: something keeps popping up for me to revive this scenario. a title to this part because why not

____

Slushes of snow, rain, and wind aren't so friendly to your immune system and more times than not, you open textbooks at your bedside and turn on the lamplight once moon greets you. It's better than heading off to the coffee shop and coughing into fists and at eraser shavings, plucking more tissues from the center of the table than actually picking up your mug of coffee. It's probably the safest way to make sure no one else get sick.

When you tell this to Mingyu over the phone, that you'll stay home to study instead of driving down to the coffee shop, you hear the bitter smile in his voice when he assures you that, "It's okay, but hopefully you'll get better soon, so I can see you at the shop."

When you try to sleep that night, a kick in your heart does nothing to fan off the burn in your cheeks.

----

The next morning, minutes into walking out of class, another set of steps start to sync up with your own. You glance up after the cloudy glare of sunlight and catch a hand grab for your textbook. Mingyu plops your book over the stack of his, flattening the apron folded at the top, and the lift of weight eases your arms.

"Feeling a bit better?" he asks as he opens up the cover of your textbook to lines of sticky notes, flashes of tabs, strikethroughs and underlines at every other date and term.

You shake your head just as an itch rises in your throat, forces out a cough to answer him. "Not really." With your nose clogged, you mumble about wanting to stay in bed today, but missing a lecture would step your grade down a letter. And when you say that out loud, Mingyu shakes his head, "That's a little extreme." You sigh about heading to the coffee shop to see him, your friends, his friends, but then dismissing it right away because you're the only one among your classes and friends who coughs through lectures and steps outside to blow into tissues.

"You're not the only one," Mingyu confesses, and it almost convinces you to go today. "Customers come in and cough into their hand before taking the drink I made. He sticks his tongue out in disgust, a scowl taking place of the faint smile that was there a second ago. You can't help but laugh--albeit, with a rough spell of coughs in between--at his misery. "I know it was unintentional, but it was just nasty."

At your car, you still urge him that it's better minimize the spread of germs, and the chatter punctuated with coffee machines, clinks of glass, bells of the door won't help your ears, anyway. He nods, understands. "Just text me when you need anything, okay?"

A few hours later, into your second nap between homework, your phone vibrates across the table.

Mingyu: Remember to take your medicine and drink lots of water

You tell him that you will, but it doesn't seem to convince him.

Mingyu: You better. But really if you do need anything, tell me

A string of knocks makes its way across the room and through your layers of blankets. After pulling the sheets away to see the door, your roommate swings the door open with a glass of water and an orange pill bottle in hand. Something in your face might have registered the words "How did you read my messages without looking at my phone?" better than out of your mouth.

"Your boyfriend texted me and wanted to be sure, so here."

----

A week later, coughs never make their way to your fist and you resort only to silent sniffs between a few sentences. Your naps between homework hours and textbook pages are cut in half to maybe only once a day when you feel a little burned out after lectures.

Today, you step into your car with the destination finally not being the university or home. Instead, you drive through rain and sleet to warmth and strings of mocha, green tea, sometimes caramel if customers are feeling a pinch sweeter today. The pale blue box in the passenger's seat ties off with a white ribbon, and inside holds a jacket you hope warms Mingyu up better than that thin beanie he deems an acceptable form of a head heater.

Guilt takes over through the single jacket because you know that it isn't enough to repay for all Mingyu has done for you, but it's a start. It's a warm start to the cold corner of winter before a leap into spring.

The bell's first ring above the door is cut off at Wonwoo's voice announcing louder than he would for calling out finished drinks Mingyu brewed, "Mingyu, y/n is here."

You look around for any scarred customers and only find a few of them dashing for that calm of post-morning rush. Ten in the morning seems like an ideal time to visit. Some clangs of metal and a hard cough later, the back door opens slightly. You catch Mingyu's eye through the small slit and you wave. His eyes widens, almost like his eyelashes throw the door open.

A couple of stumbles from behind the counter and to you is all it takes for him to regain his balance and stand up straight. If there are more customers here, if you actually decided to drop by a couple of hours ago, Mingyu would definitely have ran over a customer or two. Maybe three if there is a child.

"What are you doing here, y/n?" he asks, flattening his apron with the palms of his hands. Occasional white streaks absorb into his fingertips and he smears an entire blob of syrup off the torso of the fabric.

Without a word, you hand him the box and you know he's trying to control the smile from his face the second the cardboard is in his palms. From the flatline of his smile jumping back to life, lips parting and closing, flustered and hesitating. His eyes blink quickly as he glances from you to the box to his hands to his apron.

"Thank you," is a whisper before commenting that you look so much better, healthier, mumbles a third word indecipherable to your ears, before asking you what you would like to drink to start your day.

----

Study sessions and cupcake taste-testing with your friends resume under low lights of the shop. Sometimes, Mingyu drops a couple of extra drinks to try and Wonwoo elbows him when he returns behind the front counter.

One of your friend begs Mingyu to tell him the recipe for this one drink he tried, "I never had something like it before, just tell me what it is before I commit murder."

Mingyu smiles, doesn't say a word besides "Tell me what else you think of it," and leaves your friend plotting death with an old Minnie Mouse pencil he found in a lab.

----

The irony of the universe is that when someone tells you to do something, you do the exact opposite. The irony of Mingyu is that he messages you to not wait for him after class and assures you to not worry about him. You ask him Why? What's wrong? because he never tells you to not wait for him, never tells you to not worry about him.

But the irony you is that you are sure that worrying about him means you tuck your feelings for Mingyu somewhere and you convince yourself that don't have feelings for him. So you follow the irony of the universe, of Mingyu, despite what your brain tells you to do.

When you discover Wonwoo and Jihoon manning the front with two other strangers, you ask them what happened to Mingyu. Wonwoo shrugs as he fixes someone's drink, pumps so much syrup into the cup that you feel the energy draining from his eyes watching the glass bottle empty before him. "Mingyu's just sick. It's better if he doesn't cough into drinks, right?"

"Yeah, I guess so," is another irony of you when you still hoped he would still be here, even when weeks ago you wouldn't even step inside when you coughed, blew your nose, and sneezed around the clock.

----

Communication doesn't reach both ends; it leaves messages asking how Mingyu is doing and throwing his own words back at him: if he needs something, don't hesitate to ask you.

But after a few days without a reply, besides one that you believe should say I'll be fine if it isn’t for bashes of typos, worry freezes you anxious. It smothers you when Wonwoo says that he hasn't let Mingyu into the shop for a week.

Y/n: Can i come over?

Mingyu: WAIT NO

Mingyu: Give me like...20 minutes pls

Y/n: Why?

Mingyu: I need to throw away the trash

Y/n: ???? because why does it take twenty minutes?

And as if he read your mind, Mingyu: I also need to clean my room

Y/n: STAY IN BED MINGYU

You head back after visiting the coffee shop, wave goodbye to Jihoon and Wonwoo. On the way to the grocery store, you call your father to ask him about that one thing that he always made whenever fevers, coughs, runny noses downs you.

"You don't sound sick," he scoffs.

"It's for a friend," you tiptoe your way with the word "friend" and around the usual question of Are you dating this friend?

But the question that crosses miles away has your foot nearly slamming the breaks in the middle of the intersection. "Is it that one guy?" rips a pounding right at your heart and you ask how does he know about this one guy. "Your friends are great at tagging you in pictures you don't take.

He lists off ingredients as you walk around the store, basket bouncing from your leg. When you head home and roll your sleeves up, wash your hands and pull out a pot and ladle, cutting board and knives, he reads off directions like a manual, yet punches in some modifications. You hope that beef and vegetable porridge will help Mingyu and spoon it out into a couple of thermos, one for Mingyu and one for Wonwoo. After brewing some green tea--because your dad says it will help a lot and you should be drinking some, too--you put everything into a bag.

Mingyu greets you with flat hair at the back of his head and a blanket draped around his shoulders. His eyes drown in light pink, but the tip of his nose drowns in a deeper shade. From the ten seconds after opening the door, he sniffs at least twice and coughed once.

"You should have told me you were sick," you tell him as you walk in and toe off your shoes.

"I was going to," is deep and troubled from the pit of his throat.

You can't be mad at him, so you plant the palms of your hands on his back and push him to the general direction of his room, promise him that you'll bring him food that you made before coming here. You shuffle to the table and set the bag down, pull everything out and ask yourself where the bowls and mugs are. After a quiet reply of "the cabinet behind you," you thank him before shooing him off to bed. But he doesn't budge a step; he lingers in the hallway and keeps his eyes on you, languid grin teetering on his face.

Your eyes glance up to him again as you start to pour some porridge into the bowls. "What?" before letting another drop fall onto porcelain.

The shake of his head is barely a tilt and he blinks slowly, softly. "Nothing," before waddling back to his room with a couple of stumbles at his steps.

After he downs the porridge and you wash the dishes, he lies back down in bed and asks if you can stay, "at least until I fall asleep."

You sit at the edge of his bed when you tell him, "Of course I will." Conversations jump from classes, the shop, to your friends, and it takes more than a thousand words for you to notice your hip pressing into his. When he tries to sit up in a snap to grab something, you slip a palm on his chest, pat the spot right over his heartbeat, and assure him to not strain himself. You don't realize the gesture until he places his hand over yours and on his chest.

"What were you getting, anyway?" after a loose squeeze of his hand.

"I took your pad of sticky notes once and I just remembered," is quieter against a breathy chuckle.

You shake your head, admit that he should keep it because you have stacks of them at home. Mingyu's eyes don't reflect glints at the corners and you start to miss them, until your mind treads around the topic of your friends. "You know, our friends think we're dating."

His eyes flutter shut and he grins. You wonder what that grin is supposed to mean, but you don't push him because it's the best thing he can muster while he's sick, while he's under medication.

It doesn't take long after to send him to sleep. The reply of snores after asking about his engineering professor doesn't indicate a whole lot. You pull his blanket up to his shoulders and when you try to get up, you forget about his hand still in yours.

You uncurl his fingers from yours one by one as the squeak of the front door damages the silence. When you step out and close the door, you tell Wonwoo that you'll be heading home and that the thermos in the fridge is for him.

A sigh of relief passes between the two of you and he smiles, offers a calming thank you before telling you to drive safely.

----

You resort to studying at your apartment nowadays, especially after your friends bug you that "You're so sad at the coffee shop now that Mingyu isn't there. Plus it's raining hard."

Wonwoo's number flashes on your phone hours after the third time you hear those words, and tells you that he'll be taking Mingyu to the doctor after finding him "wheezing since the morning, and he doesn't seem to get any better."

As much as you want to accompany them to the appointment, you don't know if you can handle Mingyu looking worse. You hear Mingyu at the other side of the bed asking if Wonwoo is talking to you, voice raspy and needing to take a breath in between every few words.

"Yeah, I told y/n that you'll get checked by the doctor."

Just a weak "Oh" from him hurts you a little. But little words can hurt a lot. Especially if that's all you hear and you expected him to ask you to come along. But Wonwoo assures you that he'll tell you what the doctor says when they come back.

"Hopefully it's nothing too bad," barely makes it to the receiver.

Focusing on studying finishes too quickly and it ends up as dragging to the kitchen and searching through every cabinet, though your stomach isn't even asking for it.

Wonwoo calls you again an hour later and says that Mingyu has some kind of inflammation, and after shuffling of papers, "But it should be gone in around two weeks." You thank him for informing you, but he adds on, "If he doesn't get better by then, you're taking him to the doctor."

----

The next couple of weeks, you and Mingyu resort to short messages because you're not sure how much he can do, besides stressing himself out with studying he stays up for and catches up to. You don't visit him after he emphasizes the possibility of scarring you to see him in this state and "so that's what Wonwoo is here for." You respect his decision, but you really do miss him.

Coffee shop study sessions are less frequent as your friends decided one day to come over to study at your apartment. Your roommate doesn't mind one bit, just spits hushed concerns about all the studying you do. But you justify it, explain that you think Mingyu would feel bad knowing if you weren't studying for or passing your classes because of him.

----

Snow simmers down to sprinkles of precipitation and during that time, Wonwoo messages you to come over to their apartment. In the middle of revising some lecture notes in the weekend, you reply to him that you'll be there in a bit. You're not sure what to expect or what to bring, so you hold another thermos of green tea before making your drive to his apartment.

You knock on the door and Mingyu's hair fixes its bangs over his eyes and his face brightens in its usual welcoming tan, with no pink at his nose or ears. He beams at you and takes your hand in his, pulls you inside and tells you that he feel so much better.

"Yeah, it looks like it," you agree and nothing can slap the smile off your face. He takes the thermos from the crook of your elbow and cups it in his, bending down to fix your shoes on the rack once he secures a hold.

"Where's Wonwoo?" you ask when you both reach the kitchen. "He was the one who texted me to come."

"He's in the shop, covering for Jihoon." He waves his hands at your furrowed eyebrows. "Jihoon isn't sick; he just has an essay he didn't start on." But the topic brushes past both of you like dust as he places the tea down and smiles, jumps a bit on his bare feet since "the last time you saw me, I was so sick and gross, but you still stayed when I asked and-"

The words bubble up too much and tip too far that he pulls your face in his hands and it takes a long moment to register the warm of his palms and his lips on yours.

You question yourself if it really happened, if the pounding at your chest isn't for no reason, if Mingyu's face is really just mere centimeters from yours this time. His hands linger solid and heating on your cheeks as he whispers a, "Thank you" that ghosts over your lips.

____

a/n 2: i guess...this is really the end to this +1 year long scenario? bc 1) it's not even a coffee shop!au anymore, 2) i haven't been writing scenarios lately and 3) gOSH MInGYu ISN'T MY BIAS. looking back, i think my writing really developed outside of scenarios.

anyway, i hope you all enjoyed this and to those who read from beginning to end (especially when i started this scenario), like mingyu, thank you for staying.

renaming it now that i finished it bc the title has been bothering me for months

#a post-thanksgiving gift from me to you <3 #mingyu #seventeen scenarios #seventeen #tabi writing

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chainsawbettyloo · 7 years

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Title: Snow Laden Confessions

Pairing: Sidlink

Rating: Explicit

Summary: Sidon and Link confess their love for each other after being stranded during a bad snowstorm, then proceed to find a unique way to keep themselves warm -wink, wink, nudge, nudge-

A/N: i hate thinking up titles : D

This has also been posted on my AO3 so if you’d prefer to read it there! Comments, reblogs and kudos are very much appreciated! Thanks!

Don’t make this weird, he thought fervently. Whatever you do, do not make this weird.

Lying curled up next to the small, currently dead fire that he knew he should give one more go at getting started again but just couldn’t work up the motivation to do so, Link hugged his legs to his chest and tried valiantly to ignore two things: the bitter cold cutting through his light, flimsy clothing to assault the vulnerable flesh underneath - why on earth had he chosen a regular old tunic over the much warmer, much sturdier Rito clothing was beyond him - a serious slip in judgement as far as he was concerned. Why did people allow him to be the Champion again? He couldn’t even competently dress himself, despite knowing the weather was going to be freezing! The cold, however, was something he was used to ignoring. It was a relatively easy thing to ignore, despite the immense discomfort it wreathed him in.

That other thing was Prince Sidon, who was sitting quietly only a couple inches away, close enough that if Link were to roll over, he would get a faceful of knee. So close, in fact, that he was completely surrounded by the Zora’s unique, pleasant scent. Every time he breathed in, his throat, lungs and mind were saturated by it. He had been surprised, at first, to discover that despite Sidon’s people having some kind of connection to fish, they didn’t at all smell like fish. Instead, Sidon, at least, gave off a salty, grassy scent - something similar to what a sunny, clear day in Lurelin village smelt like; when you got past the overwhelming odor of dead fish, that is. He’d define it as a peaceful, welcoming aroma, as well as one that was very, very distracting.

If his concentration on not thinking about it slipped for even a moment, Link found the same lines of dialogue zipping through his mind, chanting over and over again that Sidon smelled so good, so unbelievably good, how could he smell so good, how was that even possible, no one should be able to smell that good, especially not someone who spent the majority of his time in water. For a few moments, his brain would be completely overrun by the loud, incessant cacophony before he jerked back to reality, harshly chastising himself as his cheeks burned hotly with embarrassment. He knew there was so way Sidon could hear his thoughts but still, that didn’t change the fact that he was thinking them.

Don’t be weird, don’t make this weird, he told himself for what felt like the tenth millionth time since he and Sidon had coincidentally met at the edge of the river that ran through the split of the Dual Mountain just as a nasty snowstorm was picking up. It had caught them both by surprise, leaving them practically stranded as hefty snowflakes pelted down from the stone grey sky to quickly cover the world in a thick sheet of pristine white. His heart fluttered happily as he remembered the huge, relieved smile that had spread across Sidon’s handsome face when they had spotted one another. After all, it’s better to be out in dangerous weather with someone you can trust and rely on, rather than be stranded all alone. He wasn’t sure who was more thankful for their impromptu meeting, himself or Sidon but one thing for certain was that they were both very happy to be in each other’s company.

Though, it would probably be more accurate to say he was both very happy and extremely worried. The cold was easy to ignore, he had spent more than enough of his time convincing himself that he wasn’t freezing or that he wasn’t overheating that he knew how to handle being out, exposed, in bad weather. Sidon, on the other hand, was very difficult to ignore - mostly because he didn’t want to. At that moment, he wanted nothing more than to roll over, prop himself up on his elbow and look up into those gorgeous, warm, golden eyes but he could recognize that would be putting himself in a dangerous situation. The mental filter he usually kept strongly in place tended to get a bit weaker whenever he was exhausted; given that he had spent the entire day climbing up the sides of both sides of the Dual Mountain just so he could get to the shrines that, for whatever horrendous reason, were at the top, it was easy to say that he, before Sidon had appeared and even more so now, was about ready to drop where he stood.

Now that Sidon was beside him, the exhaustion was still there but it was accompanied by a familiar jitteriness - the sensation he associated with his flight response, the basic and instinctual need to flee from a situation he knew posed a danger to him. Not a physical danger in this scenario as he knew that if Sidon ever were to attack him, he had probably been asking for and deserved it, but rather a sense that something that was both intangible and precious was currently in peril. All because he might not be able to keep his dumb, big mouth shut.

Don’t make this weird. Do not make this weird, he repeated over and over again as Sidon’s heavenly scent wafted around him, cocooning him in pleasantness that easily pulled his mind away from the fact that he was currently so cold that his fingers were numb. He needed to rebuild the fire, to get it going once more or he was risking hypothermia. However, that would entail rolling over, getting himself up and collecting the materials needed to make a fire, which would mean some kind of interaction between him and Sidon would most likely take place. And in his current exhausted but somehow hyped up state, he was scared of what might happen. He didn’t even really need to blurt anything out - Sidon could just smile and he knew he’d probably fall flat on his face, the tips of his ears turning the same color as the rivers of lava that ran from Death Mountains.

In other words, he’d make an ass of himself and Sidon wouldn’t just turn a blind eye to that. He would know something was going on, would probably also demand that Link tell him what it was (most likely out of fear that the cold was getting to his head - which wasn’t wrong as he was sure the cold wasn’t helping his current state), and that was something that he just couldn’t risk because the answer was one he didn’t ever plan on sharing with Sidon. And given that he didn’t want to lie to Sidon - mostly because he knew he was a terrible liar, and the Zora Prince knew the same - he just found it easier to lie on the cold ground, his limbs shivering, his teeth clenched so they wouldn’t chatter and try his best to ignore the someone who, in any other circumstance, he wouldn’t even consider snubbing.

He just needed to hold on for a little while longer. Eventually, exhaustion would overwhelm everything, as it always did, and he’d slip into a restless sleep where his dreams would be filled with Sidon’s scent, possibly even more than just his scent, then he’d awake in the morning to find the world blanketed in white, Sidon asleep by his side and probably take a few moments to gaze longingly down at the Zora Prince’s handsome face before guiltily jerking away and putting his refreshed mind on maintaining a non-weird demeanor. Then, they would continue on, same as before, nothing having changed and awkwardness avoided. He just needed to get to that point - after that, everything would be fine. He would be fine, Sidon would be fine. Their friendship would be fine.

“Link,” Sidon abruptly spoke up, his voice hesitant and soft, “are you awake?”

Suddenly, he was very grateful for his lack in motivation in getting the fire going again because if he had, Sidon would have definitely been able to see his jolt of surprise but due to the darkness brought on by the heavy, overcast sky, he was relatively sure that the Zora Prince could probably only see his general shape and nothing else. Biting back the automatic response that had arose in his throat, Link tiredly sighed inwardly at the wave of guilt that washed over him at having ignored Sidon calling out to him, and told himself that it was just for tonight, he just needed to hang on for the night and tomorrow, he would be okay. Tomorrow, he would make it up to the Zora Prince by listening attentively to every single thing he said, never letting his focus slip once.

But for now, he needed to play it safe and remain quiet.

“Are you asleep?” Sidon whispered, followed by the telltale noises of him shifting closer to where Link lay.

Again, he bit back a response, mentally apologizing Sidon for being dishonest. Struggling against the urge to hold his breath as he felt the Zora Prince lean over him, obviously inspecting his face in the dark. There were a few moments of tense silence, during which he was certain that the Zora Prince knew he was fibbing, before Sidon shifted back, let out a soft, long sigh, whispered something to himself that Link couldn’t quite make out then fell quiet once more. The guilt was in full force now, almost to the point that he couldn’t bear being quiet for a moment more.

Don’t make this weird, he chanted, over and over again, inside of his head. He knew if he were to speak up now, if he were to roll over and engage Sidon in some kind of dialogue, something would slip out that would make things weird between them. There were a lot of things he didn’t want and one of the things at the very top of the list was their relationship becoming awkward. His friendship with Sidon was very precious to him, he considered the Prince to be his closest, dearest, most beloved friend whom he could lean on, rely on, talk to about anything and he would rather march into Hyrule Castle, completely naked, armed only with a tree branch to face Calamity Ganon over doing anything that would mess up their relationship.

And if that meant swallowing down everything, clamping his mouth shut to keep words that desperately wanted to be said from falling out, then was absolutely what he was going to do.

Warmth suddenly brushed along the curve of his cheek, causing him to nearly jump out of his skin. He managed to not actually do that and remain still as he tried to figure out what just touched him. It took him less than a second to realize that what was currently lightly stroking the cold skin of his cheek was none other than the backs of Sidon’s fingers. The only reason he could tell that was what it was was because he could feel the Zora Prince leaning over him, his other hand planted firmly on the ground directly in front of Link’s stomach, close enough that he could feel it pressing against him. Not to mention, just from the sensation alone, he could tell that it was somebody’s hand and given that no one was there besides him and Sidon, and since he wasn’t touching his own face, that only left the Zora Prince.

Okay, that explained the what but not exactly the why. While the Prince wasn’t at all the distant sort, he was actually quite affectionate but it was never to this extent. Hair ruffling, bear hugs (which he was sure were just normal hugs for Sidon but were more of the bear variety for him given their size differences), as well as the common Zora sign of friendly affection that Link referred to as the forehead bump because it was just Sidon lightly bumping the rounded curve of his head fin against his forehead or temple were what he was used to - simple, easy going signs of platonic love, some of them a bit rough, others a little more sweet but nothing ever this tender. The gesture was almost intimate in nature, though he was certain that that was probably just reading too much into it.

A soft pang of guilt made itself known in his heart. Maybe Sidon wanted to talk about something that was bothering him, perhaps that was why he had been inquiring as to whether he was asleep or not, and Link had ignored him. However, the guilt was quickly batted down by confusion: if Sidon wished to speak about such a something, why was he touching him in such a way? Link wracked his brain for any line of thinking or sort of problem that could lead up to him having his cheek gently, almost loving stroked while the person doing the motion was certain that the one whom the motion was being enacted on was asleep. The answer was none, he could not come up with a single, defined reason as to why the Zora Prince was touching him in such a way.

A thought sudden sprang up in his mind. Perhaps Sidon was just feeling lonely but didn’t want to be rude and wake Link up so he was just touching him in that very soft, very gentle way so he’d feel less lonely, but also wouldn’t disturb him. Yes, that had to be it! The Zora Prince wasn’t sleepy just yet so the intense quiet of their current situation was making him feel a little uncomfortable - therefore, he was initiating some kind of physical contact with Link to alleviate that but was doing so in such a way that he was certain that he wouldn’t wake him. Link mentally nodded, a little proud of his deduction skills, though the guilt sullenly crept back as he realized he had pushed Sidon into feeling such a way by ignoring him. He would definitely have to make it up to the Prince someway, somehow in the following days but for now, he would just stay still, enjoy the feeling of those long, calloused, warm fingers grazing his skin and try not to think too terribly hard about the whole thing.

He had just made up his mind to do that when he suddenly felt Sidon lean further down. For a split second, he was scared he had been caught in the act, that the Zora Prince had figured out that he was just fibbing. Hundreds of excuses screamed through his mind, each one more ludicrous and outlandish than the last but they all came to a screeching halt when he felt Sidon’s warm, firm lips press a light, fluttery kiss against the same cheek his fingers had just been caressing. Warm air slid along his skin as the Zora Prince breathed out slowly, sending a wave of tingling goosebumps across the surface of his flesh. Before his sputtering mind, which was just repeating ‘WHAT! WHAT! WHAT!’ over and over again in an annoying, maddening loop, could react to what Sidon had just done, the Zora Prince leaned down once more, nuzzling his lips against the curve of Link’s cheeks, lightly pressing kisses that became increasingly firmer and more pronounced as they move along the line of his face. Not with enough pressure that if he were truly asleep, he’d be woken up but still with what he was only a little bit hesitating to say was enthusiasm. Short, harsh breaths puffed against his skin, chasing away any trace of cold.

Meanwhile, his own breath had frozen inside of his throat, surprise at the sudden actions causing his lungs to seize. He had thought up an explanation about why Sidon had been stroking his cheek - it had been far fetched now that he actually thought about it but it had still been a reason as to why. Even with his brain currently in the state of constant, startled screaming, he knew there was no explanation as to why Sidon was kissing him to be found inside his mind. How did he explain this? This went beyond just feeling lonely, beyond needing some kind of physical connect in order to chase away the discomfort of stillness and silence.

This...this was intimate, this was beyond friendly affection. And it felt so supremely good. His exhausted, seizing mind quickly got away from ‘what’ and ‘why’, deciding instead to focus on the immensely pleasant sensation of Sidon’s lips brushing softly along his skin. Heat began to bloom in his cheeks, spreading across his face to his ears, surely turning them a bright shade of pink. Inside his chest, his heart was hammering wildly, slamming hard against his ribcage, sending reverberations of the beat throughout his entire body. Struggling to keep the pace of his breath even so Sidon wouldn’t catch on to the fact that he was awake, Link distantly wondered what he should do. He wasn’t exactly anywhere upset that Sidon was kissing him out nowhere, he was just extremely confused as to why.

A sudden disturbing thought dawned on him: what if this wasn’t really happening? What if he was halfway asleep and this was just a dream? As soon as the thought appeared in his mind, he just as quickly shoved it away. The sensations, the warmth, his own sense of perception alone was enough to tell him that this was not in any way a dream. Though, that had been the only why he had been able to think of and now, he was left again with no explanation. Maybe he should speak up? Just like the thought about how this could be a dream, that suggestion was quickly shoved away. Don’t make this weird, the mantra chanted once more inside his mind. Pretending to wake up now would most definitely make things weird.

Before he could make up his mind as to what to do, Sidon abruptly jerked away, letting out a harsh, hard exhale of breath. Link felt him lean back, away from him, and cold quickly refilled the space he had once occupied. An intensely mournful feeling suddenly filled his chest as Sidon’s scent, Sidon’s warmth slipped away from him. Swallowing hard, struggling against the impulse to turn over, grab the Zora Prince’s arm and yank him back, Link let his breath slow down, his ears trained for any noise. There was a deep sigh from Sidon followed by him softly saying, “What are you doing? Are you an idiot?”

Another sigh followed then there was nothing but silence for a very long while. It felt like a different silence than before - this one was heavier, more tense, as though there were an ominous cloud hanging directly overtop of them. Link swallowed hard again, a hint of anxiety nervously murmuring in his chest. He desperately wanted to ask what was going on with the Zora Prince but was far too scared to reveal he was awake. Pulling in a deep breath to calm his still pounding heart, Link had a short lived internal struggle of what to do that was brought to an abrupt end when Sidon suddenly reached over, gripped his shoulder and began to firmly shake him.

“Wake up, Link.” Sidon commanded in a calm but forceful voice.

He couldn’t ignore that. Pretending to be asleep now would definitely just bring to light that he had been fibbing. After letting Sidon shake him a couple of times, Link slowly opened his eyes, then out a quietly irritated noise before rolling over to face the Zora Prince. Just as he previously thought, it was so dark that he could barely make out any of Sidon’s features. Rather, all he could really see was Sidon’s outline. The Zora Prince had moved close once again and was leaning over him, his head bent down so Link guessed he was looking down at him.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, a little proud of how perfectly he got the ‘I’m tired, why did you wake me up’ voice.

Sidon was silent for a few moments. Link could practically feel his gaze boring into him. Fighting against the urge to fidget under such a scrutinizing stare, Link tried to meet his eyes but since he couldn’t figure out exactly where his face was, that proved to be a bit difficult. All he could do was look back in around the place he estimated Sidon’s head to be.

“If I were to kiss you right now, what would your reaction be?” Sidon suddenly asked.

“Eh?” Was the only sound he managed to get out.

“Please just answer the question, Link.” Sidon responded firmly, though his tone sounded like false bravado.

Staring blankly up at the Zora Prince, Link slowly digested what he had just been asked. What would he do if Sidon were to kiss him right now, in this very moment? Link stared blankly up at the Zora Prince as the question flashed vibrantly in his mind’s eye. Did he mean kissing him as he had just previously done or a full blown kiss on the lips? No, now that he was thinking about it, that might be a stupid inquiry. This atmosphere, the way he could feel Sidon's gaze boring into him, he could only mean an actual kiss kiss. Still, maybe it was best to ask for some clarification so he didn't misunderstand.

“What do you mean?”

More silence from Sidon, though thankfully, it didn’t go for too long, “Here,” he said, lifting one large hand to point at Link’s mouth, “if I were to kiss you here, right now, what would your reaction be?”

“Why would you do that?” Link finally managed to ask after several moments of stunned silence. It felt like a dumb question to ask. A large part of his brain already knew the answer. Despite not being the most versed on the subject, he could, at least, put two and two together to come up with a valid reason. Not to mention, looking back to only seconds before, that just hammered home that this was what he thought it was. Wasn’t the answer obvious? But still….he needed to hear Sidon say it. Before he could answer, before he could officially shove away the mantra of ‘don’t make this weird’, he needed Sidon to say it.

For a very long, very tense moment, he thought Sidon wasn’t going to say anything. He thought for certain that the Zora Prince was going to move away, tell him to forget it before lying down on his side, facing away from Link. Anxiety fluttered inside his chest. He didn’t want that. Yes, he had just been running away and pretty much doing the exact same thing, which he now felt profoundly embarrassed at having done so - he was the Champion, and yet, he couldn’t handle something like this?! - but at the same time, he realized that, rather abruptly, he and Sidon were in a scenario he had envisioned many times, and what they both said in this moment was going to be very important to the future of their relationship.

“Sidon?” He spoke up, his voice cracking slightly, “Why?”

The Zora Prince was quiet for a moment longer before he let out a long, hard breath, his head bowing. His hand dropped away, somewhere down where Link couldn’t really see. A lump rose in his throat, his stomach muscles tightening as he anxiously watched the shape of Sidon’s broad shoulders rise then slowly fall back down. He wanted to reach out, to reach down to wherever the Zora Prince’s hands had gone so he could take one into his own, squeeze it tightly, comfortingly, in hopes that would give Sidon the courage to speak but his body refused to listen to his wants. Instead, all he could do was stare up at the Zora Prince, his heart thundering in his chest, his skin cold for another reason beside the frigidness, and a dizzying mixture of hope and anxiety whirling around inside his mind.

“I love you.” Sidon suddenly said, his voice soft and barely audible, “I’ve loved you for a very long time now. Ever since you first arrived in the Domain, I think there’s been a part of me that loved you. As time passed and we spent more and more time together, that small part grew and grew and grew until it filled my entire being with adoration, adulation for you. I thought I could hide it, that I could swallow it down and we could just be friends. I wanted to be friends with you, to be close to you, to be your confidant, someone you could turn to but I wanted so much more.”

Sidon paused, taking in another deep breath before softly continuing, “I wanted you. Not as just a friend, but as something so much more. I wanted to deeply to tell you but I was frightened. I didn’t know what would become of our friendship if I did. I-I didn’t want to lose you. I don’t want to lose you but this silence...it's suffocating. I can’t keep quiet any longer, I know that now. So please,” Sidon’s head abruptly lifted and Link felt, rather than saw, the full weight of his intense glare fall upon him, “answer me. Deny me so I can put these feelings behind me and be your true and honest friend. Please, before I do something shameful.”

“No.” Link replied after several moments of silence.

He heard Sidon gasp quietly in surprise but he paid no mind to it. Pushing himself up onto his knees, he scooted forward until he was directly in front of the Zora Prince. Also ignoring the breathless question of what he was doing that came from Sidon, Link reached up, having to stretch his arms out to full length, and cupped the Zora Prince’s cold cheeks in the palm of his hands.

“You asked me what I would do.” He said softly, his voice trembling, excitement thundering through his veins, an intensely dizzying feeling bombarding his head, “Is this good enough of an answer?”

With that, he pulled the Zora Prince down while pushing himself up as far as he could go and clumsily placed his cold lips against Sidon’s, using the tips of his thumbs to guide him to where his mouth was. A startled, hard breath brushed against his nose, followed quickly by Sidon’s muscular arms wrapped around him and squeezing firmly. Pulling away from the light kiss, Link stared up into what he hoped was the Zora Prince’s eyes, took a deep breath and said, “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” Sidon asked hazily, his voice laced with barely disguised want.

“I’ve feel the same way. I’ve loved you for so long but I’ve always been so scared to tell you. You are my most precious friend, someone who I want to remain by, to stick by your side through everything and just be with you. And I was so scared of making our relationship awkward, to ruining it and losing my closest, dearest friend that I would just tell myself to not make this weird, to not doing anything that could destroy this,” He slid down into a sitting position, his hands falling away from Sidon’s face to rest limply in his lap, “Everything is in turmoil right now, there’s tragedy and violence everywhere I turn but you are the one who makes me feel safe. No matter where we are, if I’m with you, I feel at peace, like the whole world had just vanished and everything was okay. I can talk to you about anything, turn to you about everything and loved being someone you felt the same about - that we were on the same level, we could talk openly and honestly with each other. I was so fucking scared of losing that. I couldn’t even stand the thought of it. But that didn’t change the fact that what I felt for you went beyond just friendship.” He laughed quietly, “We’ve both felt the exact same way. How did it take us this long to realize that?”

“Say it again.” Sidon whispered.

“What?” Link asked, brushing hair out of his eyes.

“How you feel about me. Please, say it again.”

Sniffing hard, his cheeks heating up again, Link let his gaze drop down to his laps, took a deep breath and said, “I love you.”

“Again...please.” Sidon whispered urgently, reaching forward to brush the backs of his fingers along Link’s flaming hot cheek.

“You say it back first.” Link said in a tone that was a little pouty. “It's not fair if it's just me.”

“I love you.” The Zora Prince said firmly without any hesitation. Stroking the pad of his thumb against Link’s lips, he whispered, “I love you so much. I want to make you mine. I want to keep you by my side always. I love you, Link.”

Leaning down abruptly, he began to pepper kisses all over Link’s warm face, whispering soft confessions of love in-between each smooch placement. Basking in the blissful attention, Link slowly turned his head every which way to give the Zora Prince access to every inch of his skin. However, a dinging thought suddenly popped up in his mind. He wasn’t bothered by the abruptness of their situation - if anything, he was glad that, if anything, despite their confessions coming out of nowhere, the entire thing had been handled far smoother than he ever would have thought and resolved so easily that it almost made him nervous. There just was something he was immensely curious about - to the point that he couldn’t really concentrate on anything other than the question flashing inside his mind. Setting his hands on Sidon’s broad shoulders, he gently pushed him away and asked, “Why now? What made you speak up now?”

He felt the Zora Prince jolt underneath his palms, accompanied with a sharp grunt of surprise. In the darkness, he saw Sidon bow his head slightly, though couldn’t tell at all what kind of expression he was wearing. Now the darkness was really starting to get annoying. He should really get that fire going again. Opening his mouth with the intent to tell Sidon he was going to do just that, he was cut off by the Zora Prince suddenly speaking up.

“I lost control of myself just now, when you were asleep. I wanted so badly to touch you, to kiss you that my restraint simply caved, and for a short moment, I allowed myself to indulge in you, all the while knowing that I had not been given permission. When I managed to regain control of myself, I realized that this was something I could not remain silent about anymore. No matter the result, I understood that it was unfair to both you and I to keep my silence. So, I chose to speak.” Sidon chuckled softly, reaching forward to lightly stroke Link’s hair, “Praise to the Goddess, you feel the same as I.”

“I do,” Link said warmly, covering the back of Sidon’s hand with his own. After hesitating for a moment, he cautiously said, “I have a confession, though.”

“Oh? What is that?”

Heat rose to his cheeks as he meekly lowered his head and said, “I was awake.”

“Huh?”

Flinching slightly in embarrassment, Link took a deep breath before continuing, his words coming out quickly, flowing free from his mouth like a strong moving current, “Just now, I was awake. Having you so close was incredibly distracting because you smell really good and I couldn’t help but to think of you but at the same time, I didn’t want to make anything weird. If things became weird, our relationship might become awkward so I was pretending to be asleep with the intent on making it to you tomorrow for ignoring you and then you started touching my cheek and then kissing me and I didn’t know what to do so I just kept quiet.” He stopped, took another deep breath and whispered, “I’m sorry.”

There was a tense moment of silence, during which he was certain Sidon was mad at him for tricking him but, to his relief, the Zora Prince abruptly burst into laughter. Cupping Link’s burning cheeks in the palms of his large hands, he gently pulled him forward into a sweet, smiling kiss, “Well, I suppose this makes us even, doesn’t it?”

Smiling back, leaning into Sidon’s touch, Link nodded, pressing his lips against the Zora Prince’s, loving the expected firmness but also the unexpected smoothness, “It does.”

Chuckling gleefully, Sidon yanked him close, muscular arms snugly closing around him. Pressing kisses all along the top of his head, the Zora Prince whispered in-between smooches, “This doesn’t feel real. I’ve dreamed of this for so long and now that I have you in my arms, it feels like a dream. It isn’t, is it, Link? Tell me this isn’t a dream, please.”

Link was about to respond when an idea suddenly popped up in his mind. Squirming lightly against Sidon’s embrace, he said, “Give me a moment. Let me do something real quick.”

Very hesitantly, as though he didn’t want to let go, Sidon moved his arms away, his hands slowly training down Link's arms. The cold immediately assaulted Link’s flushed skin, quickly driving away all memory of heat. Not bothering to put the effort to keep his teeth from chattering, Link fumbled his way over to where his pack sat. Beside it was a the last bundle of wood he had. Picking it up, he retrieved a piece of flint as well as a small dagger from inside his pack then made his way back over to the designated fire pit. After instructing Sidon to scoot a bit away, he dumped the wood onto the remains of the previous fire and, with trembling hands, took a few tries to get it going but managed to get a loud spark on the fourth try. It took a little persuasion to get the sparks into a roaring fire; however, his talents with flames was something he was bit proud of so soon enough, there was soon a splendid source of heat and light flickering away in front of him.

Smiling triumphantly to himself, he turned back to Sidon, stood up and walked over to him. Sitting down in the gap between his legs, he scooted closer, sighing happily when Sidon’s arms embraced him once more. Wiggling around until he was in a more comfortable position, he leaned his head back so he could peer up into the Zora Prince’s face, he smiled sweetly and said, “This isn’t a dream. See? I’m right here.”

“You are.” Sidon softly, his expression so warm and intensely loving that Link felt his heart skip a beat. Heat rushed to his cheeks, surely turning them a deep shade of red. He wanted to look away, but at the same, he never wanted to stop looking into Sidon’s golden eyes. Never would he have thought that he’d ever see the day that the Zora Prince would look at him in such a way. Now that it was here, now that that gaze was right in front of him, he dearly hoped that nothing would ever take it away from him.

“Are you warm enough?” Sidon asked worryingly, brushing his fingers through Link’s hair.

“I’m warming up nicely.” Link replied.

They both fell silent, simply enjoying the closeness of the other, breathing in each other’s scent. Sleepiness almost immediately swamped him as he sunk into the blissful feeling of Sidon’s warmth, skin and embrace. Yawning, he snuggled closer, ready to let himself slip into a peaceful slumber, knowing that tomorrow, he would start the day not with the suffocating, painful thought that he needed to continue hiding, to continue ensuring Sidon never knew but instead open and honest, with Sidon by his side, their fingers intertwined. That was about the most comforting promise tomorrow brought with it in a long time.

“Link?” Sidon suddenly spoke up, pulling him from his almost slumber.

“Yes?” He replied sleepily.

“Can I touch you?” The Zora Prince asked after a moment of hesitation.

“You already are.” Link said, confused.

“No-” Sidon stopped, his voice catching before quietly continuing, “I mean, down there.”

His sleepy mind couldn’t figure out what the Zora Prince was talking about for several moments. Leaning back, he stared, perplexed, up at Sidon, trying to put the pieces together. Seeming to understand that he needed some time, Sidon quietly gazed back, though Link noticed, even in the low light level, that there was a distinct blue tone to the Zora Prince’s pale cheeks. He understood that to be the Zora equivalent of blushing. As his eyes focused on that blue hint, all the pieces fell together inside of his mind and he finally understood just what Sidon was asking.

Now, it was his turn to blush. Though, instead of blue, he knew his cheeks had to be as red as rubies. Sputtering slightly, he blushed even more deeply when Sidon abruptly smiled, obviously catching on that Link had figured it out. Down there, there was nowhere else he could be talking about other than privates area. That was definitely taking a giant step forward but was he bothered by that? Tearing his gaze away from Sidon’s tantalizing golden eyes, Link stared down at his lap and was startled to find, despite being exhausted, he still had enough energy to react to that request.

Inside his loose pants, he was already semi-hard. Not yet standing to full attention but he was quickly getting there. As Sidon’s voice, asking if he could touch him down there, echoed inside his mind, his cock responded, eagerly hardening and growing. He could even feel a little patch of wetness around the head. Physically, it seemed he wasn’t bothered at all and was even ready for such a big step forward. Was there actually any complaint or doubt inside of him? He quickly searched around inside his head but came up empty in that department. There was only a soft, meek question of why so suddenly but he couldn’t find the energy to devote to that inquiry. He couldn’t bring himself to care about the abruptness - after all, this was something that both of them had been unconsciously hoping for for a long time. Sidon didn’t even have to affirm that, he could see it in his eyes. Instead, he found his heart racing, heat coursing through his veins, causing a tidal wave of goosebumps along his skin. As he registered all that, he realized that he was excited, all traces of sleep had once again been driven away in favor of thundering exhilaration at the thought that if he said yes, Sidon would happily touch him. His big hand would slip down between them until it got to his crotch and then-

“You can.” Link said in a warbling voice, not wanting to just imagine what would happen. He wanted to experience it. Not for it to just be a sweet, lovely dream as he slept underneath the wide open sky. Not for it to just be a hazy daydream as he jacked himself off, after which the shame and guilt over doing such a thing threatened to make him vomit. He was being willing, hopefully, eagerly, happily offered the real fucking thing.

And he wanted it so unbelievably bad.

“You sure?” Sidon cautiously asked, reaching down to cup Link’s chin, raising his head up so their eyes met.

His heart pounded hard against the confines of his ribs as he looked up into Sidon’s eyes. Despite the calmness of the Zora Prince’s voice, his gaze told a different story. Inside that golden sea was an intense heat, a hungry, almost desperate want that stared down at Link as though he wanted to devour him. He hadn’t been fully hard before but now, his cock was standing directly upright, pulsing and hollering that it was ready to go. Swallowing hard against the dryness in his throat, Link could only manage a short nod.

“I need you to tell me, Link.” Sidon softly urged him, leaning down, bringing that hungry gaze even closer, “Tell me that it's okay. I have already shamed myself by kissing you without permission and I swear to do that never again so tell me, speak clearly and tell me that it's okay.”

“It’s okay.” Link coughed out, his voice embarrassingly eager, his breathing uneven and patchy.

The Zora Prince stared at him for a moment longer before a small smile replaced the stern, serious expression on his face. Leaning down further, he pressed a soft kiss on the tip of Link’s nose and whispered, “You are so unbelievably cute.”

Before Link could respond, Sidon’s large hand was sliding down his back, downwards towards his hip. Holding his breath in excitement and anticipation, he tried to turn his head away out of embarrassment at just how much he wanted this but Sidon kept his head in place with the hand on his chin and began to place light, fluttery kisses along the bridge of his nose, the curves of his cheek and the line of his brow. Pulling back slightly, his hand pausing at the hem of his pants, Sidon smiled warmly down at him and whispered, “So cute.”

With that statement said, the Zora Prince, without a speck of hesitation, pushed his long, calloused fingers underneath the hem of his trousers. A hard jolt raced throughout his entire body, startling the air out of his lungs. Given the length of Sidon’s fingers, as well as his own smallness in comparison to everything that was the Zora Prince, he didn’t have to move his hand much further before he was weaving through the wild, wiry pubic hair that grew in abundance around the base of his cock, sending shudders up Link spine at the sensation of his smooth fingertips rubbing softly against his sensitive skin. He expected Sidon to take it slowly, to gradually move further down until contact with his dick was made but it seemed the Zora Prince’s patience had run out. Letting out a short, hard, excited pant, Sidon plunged his hand down even further and wrapped his fingers firmly around his twitching, precum dripping member.

Letting out a loud, choking, startled cry, Link’s hips uncontrollably pistoned forward into the ring of Sidon’s fingers and immediately, as the last note of his yelp was coming out of his mouth, he was coming into his pants. Scalding hot, thick jizz spurted all inside his underwear and all over the Zora Prince’s hand. It was so abrupt that there was only a short lived, flimsy flash of pleasure that faded just as quickly as his orgasm had come. Shuddering, his cheeks burning with mortification, he tugged his chin away from Sidon’s grip, bowed his head and mumbled, “I’m so sorry.”

Instead of responding, Sidon carefully pulled his hand from Link’s pants. Frowning deeply at the removal but knowing he had no place to voice a complaint, he was about to apologize again, to explain that it's been a long time since he had gotten some relief so that’s why he had been so quick - not to mention, it was Sidon, someone he had been dreaming about touching him like that for so long so it was kind of understandable but still, didn’t change the fact that that had been embarrassingly quick, when a wet sucking sound reached his ears. Jerking his head up, his eyes widened, even more heat pouring into his cheeks. Half-lidded, hazy golden eyes gazed unabashedly down at him as Sidon slowly licked off all traces of his semen from his hand and fingers. Hard pants fell free from the Zora Prince’s open mouth. His cheeks were stained with vibrant splotches of blue. Link watched, mesmerized, as his long blue tongue slipped in-between and around his digits, loudly slurping up his jizz.

His dick, which had been softening, immediately reacted. Twitching slightly, it decided that playtime was nowhere near over yet. When Sidon pulled his now clean, but glistening with saliva, hand away, it was already semi-hard again. Smiling widely, the Zora Prince softly said, his voice a husky purr, “That was the intended end result, so why apologize?”

“It happened so quickly, though.” Link mumbled, his gaze still on those sharp, white teeth. In the back of his mind, he wondered if Sidon would bite him. He didn’t know what it would be like to be bitten but, for some reason, he really wanted to find out.

Sidon shrugged slightly, still smiling, “That doesn’t bother me. After all, this isn’t going to be the only time, correct? So why worry?”

His heart jumped excitedly inside his chest. It was obvious, of course it was but still, the promise of more, the sudden impactful knowledge that this wasn’t going to just be over once the moon had set. There was going to be more, so much more! A big smile spread across his face. Thrusting himself forward, he threw his arms around Sidon’s broad shoulders and nodded happily, “You’re right. I promise it’ll last longer next time.”

Sidon laughed heartily, wrapping his arms around him tightly, “That’s not something you have to promise. I’ll be happy no matter what, as long as I’m with you.”

Stupidly happy - that was how he felt. Happy to the point that he felt he was going stupid. Snuggling close to Sidon, he sighed contentedly, ready to just spend the rest of his night in his arms, utterly uncaring of the fact that the situation in his trousers was very soggy, but a thought suddenly occurred to him. Leaning back, he placed his hands on Sidon’s shoulders, looked up at him and said, “Not just me. Lemme do you, too.”

The Zora Prince’s eyes widened in surprise before, to Link’s distress, visibly hesitating, his golden eyes shifted away. A little worried but not wanting to jump to conclusions, he leaned to the side so he could peer into Sidon’s face, “What’s the matter?”

He remained quiet for a moment more before moving his gaze back to Link. After taking a deep breath, he slowly said, “My gential...situation is a lot different than yours.”

“I figured as much, we’re different races, after all.”

“It might be a little...overwhelming for you.” Sidon said haltingly.

Link blinked, tilted his head and said, “I’ll have to see eventually, Sidon. Unless you really don’t want me to.”

“It isn’t that! It’s not that. I just don’t want to scare you.”

Scare him? That was not remotely possible. Sidon would have a gaping mouth in place of a penis and he wouldn’t even blink. He’d find a way around it, find a way to make it work. There wasn’t much of anything that he felt could deter him away from any of this. Not to mention, now, more than ever, he really wanted to see. He actually knew nothing of Zora genitalia or reproductive activity. It wasn’t exactly something he could just ask so he had been curious before but now, it was officially piqued. He didn’t want to do anything that would make Sidon uncomfortable but he felt this was probably something they needed to go ahead and get out of the way before it became awkward.

Placing his hands on Sidon’s warm cheeks, he peered into his eyes and said, “If I’m ever scared, I’ll tell you and we’ll stop. I expect the same from you, understood? If you’re ever nervous or uncomfortable, you just need to tell me, okay?”

Sidon hesitated once more, clearly having an a short but intense internal battle before letting out a soft sigh and nodding, “Okay, understood. Sit back for a moment, I’ll need to guide you a little.”

“Nothing like a Zora biology lesson to get you in the mood.” Link replied teasingly, scooting back a few inches to give Sidon some room. There was just enough light coming from the fire that he could clearly see the entirety of the Zora Prince’s front. His eyes unconsciously traveled down to Sidon’s crotch region, which was still as smooth and unbearing of anything resembling a penis as it ever was. If he were being completely honest, he’d have to admit that curiosity was overrunning excitement. Due to Sidon’s reaction to having to show off whatever it was that was Zora genitalia, he was more eager than ever to see it.

Chuckling, Sidon spread his legs open a little bit more, fully exposing his crotch region, “Do you see it?” he asked quietly.

“See what?”

“Give me your hand.”

Link obediently offered his hand to Sidon, who gently took it into his own. Bringing his hand down to his crotch region, he gingerly pressed the palm against the dip in-between his legs. Immediately, Link caught on to what the Zora Prince had been talking about. It was a little hard to detect but there was definitely something underneath his hand. A line? No, a slit, currently closed, which means, it could most likely open, probably with a bit of stimulation. Without waiting for a verbal prompt from Sidon, Link began to gently rub the heel of his palm against the quickly becoming pronounced edges of the slit. To his delight, Sidon immediately began to react, shuddering lightly and panting softly as he gently encouraged the slit to open up, excited to see what was hidden underneath.

Suddenly, an idea popped up in his head, a way to speed along this process just a little bit. Moving his hand away, he ignored the confused look that Sidon gave him, and scooted back further back, just enough that he could lie down on his stomach with his face directly in front of Sidon’s crotch. He felt the Zora Prince start slightly but, again, paid no mind to it. Now that he was closer, he could more clearly see the slit. The edges had become much more pronounced, no longer a stark white color but instead tinged with an adorable shade of pink. He still hadn’t gotten it to open up but he could tell that he was close. It just needed a little more encourage. With his pulse pounding in his temple, his breath falling hard and fast out of his mouth, and his dick rock hard once more in his trousers, he leaned forward, stuck his tongue out and pushed it gently but firmly against the bottom of the slit. As the loud, startled moan that Sidon let out rained down onto his head, an intensely weird but somehow immensely delicious taste flooded his mouth. It was sweet and bitter at the same time, a bizarre combination that immediately made him feel dizzy.

Drawing in a deep breath through his nose, the scent of Sidon’s musk driving the dizziness a notch further, he ran his tongue up the length of the slit, pausing at the top to suck lightly. He actually had no clue what he was doing or what he should do to make it feel good but he supposed the best way to find out was to try what seemed right. At least, he could tell that trying to force open the slit was a bad idea - he could imagine that probably was not a pleasant experience and it needed to happen naturally. Not that that bothered him, he was already enjoying himself. Sidon’s slit was tantalizing soft, tasted unbelievably amazing and it was clear his ministrations were well appreciated, if Sidon’s gasps and moans were any indication.

“Link,” he suddenly coughed out, “back up, back up!”

He didn’t want to move away but he could tell by the tone of Sidon’s voice that he should do what he says. Pulling his head back, he leaned up with the intention to ask the Zora Prince what was wrong, a little afraid he had done something to hurt him, when the slit abruptly opened up in a smooth, easy movement. A shudder passed through Sidon’s legs as two very large, pink lengths of flesh pushed themselves out to stand proudly in front of Link’s face. His mouth hung open in shock, his gaze filled with the startling sight of Sidon’s penises. The base shape, at least, looked similar to a Hylian penis but there was the similarities ended. For one, the head was shaped like an arrowhead with instead of a rounded tip, it was more angular and pointed. The texture of the penises almost, from look alone, seemed to be rubbery almost, as though they were flexible. And, of course, they were big - very, very big. This came of no surprise as he couldn’t imagine someone as big as Sidon having a tiny dick, that just didn’t correlate but he never expected his member to be that big.

There was also two of them. Tilting his head slightly, his eyes glued to the throbbing, twitching dicks in front of him, he quickly decided that was probably the most important detail. In the back of his head, he vaguely wondered why he had two, what purpose did that serve but quickly decided that was a question that could be asked later. Right now, rather than being nervous or uncomfortable by the strange dicks, he was actually even more excited. This was something entirely new and he was ready, willing and eager to explore it. Swallowing down the excess saliva in his mouth, he scooted back to his original position and softly asked, “Can I touch?”

“Yes, please.” Sidon breathed.

Quickly realizing that there really was no point in lying down anymore, Link shuffled into a sitting position, got himself comfortable, ignoring the throbbing erection begging for attention inside of his pants and cautiously reached out to wrap his hand around one of Sidon’s cocks. The Zora Prince let out a sharp, short breath, his large body shivering. Now that the dick was in his hand, he found it no more strange than holding his own. It was a bit slimy but also soft, hot and throbbing. He didn’t even get closer to getting his fingers all the way around it, though. His fingers weren’t even close to touching. Slowly, he slid his hand up to the head, paying close attention to Sidon’s reactions to make sure that what he was doing was appreciated. Again, it seemed as though his actions were much appreciated since the Zora Prince was making the cutest noises and after a quick glance up, he found that his eyes were closed, his mouth was halfway parted, soft, hard pants dripping out from between his lips, and his cheeks were a brilliant shade of blue.

The head was oddly firm and spongy underneath his palm. Immediately, he could tell that, just like a Hylian penis, the head of Zora penis was a highly sensitive area. Mostly because the moment his hand wrapped around it, the reactions from Sidon intensified. What had been a minute shudder running occasionally through the Zora Prince’s large body magnified into a constant shiver. Those adorable little noises he was letting out became more frequent, as well as a bit louder. Well, seeing how that was the case, there was only one course of action he could think of to do.

Tucking a length of hair behind his head, he slipped his hand to just below the head, leaned down, opened his mouth as far as it could go, straining his jaw a little in the process and pushed the head inside. It was so big that it could barely fit but his brain barely registered that. Instead, all he could really think about was that amazing taste, how soft the skin of his dick was and just how much he wanted to sink his mouth all the way down to the base, despite that meaning it going down his throat. In that moment, he wanted nothing more than to stuff his entire throat with Sidon’s cock.

He wanted Sidon to fuck his throat until it was raw.

The intense desire didn’t last for long as reason slowly bled back into his mind as the pain of his jaw being so strained brought him back to reality. Largely ignoring it but knowing he probably couldn’t keep this up for long, Link paid special attention to where his teeth were in relation to the head as he brushed his tongue against the spongy head. It was largely flat but intensely powerful tasting precum was leaking out of a small split that ran down the middle. He sucked the best he could but it proved to be a little difficult. Not that that mattered to him because Sidon...just listening to him alone was enough to nearly make him come. The normally composed, in control Zora Prince was currently gasping, mewing and melting underneath his ministrations. At some point, he had put one of his large hands on the back of Link’s head, fingers weaving through the silky strands.

He was feeling it. He was enjoying it. He was liking it. That meant more to him than any discomfort. He wanted to give him so much more, but could already tell that, just like him, Sidon was not going to last long. Quickly realizing that he was only paying attention to one of the dicks and let the other one out, Link reached around, wrapped his small hand around the large head and began to earnestly rub his palm against the flat edge.

“Link!” Sidon cried loudly.

Wishing he could smile but his mouth was just too full, he intensified his ministrations, wanting to drive Sidon to edge, wanting him to flood his mouth, to send scalding hot, copious amounts of his cum down his throat. He wanted to swallow every last drop of it. Craning his neck so he could look up at Sidon, he took great pleasure in seeing just how much he had unraveled. Mouth wide open, head thrown back, chest heaving, eyes squeezed closed, and, to his delight, a thin stream of saliva was slowly rolling down his chin - if that wasn’t the face of pleasure, he didn’t know what was. Abruptly, Sidon clenched his teeth shut, his head wrenching forward as he looked down at him with an intense, glowing gaze.

“Off!” He grounded out from behind his teeth, “Off, now!”

Not happening, Link thought distantly, hopefully conveying the same with his eyes. Though, neither of them were given the time as the moment after the words were out of Sidon’s mouth, his entire body spasmed, a loud, keening cry erupting from his mouth, his head jerking back as, inside of Link’s mouth, a different kind of eruption was happening. Link felt both of the cocks momentarily swell up before fluid was gushing in copious amounts into his mouth, He attempted to swallow it down but it soon proved to be too much. Regretfully, he pulled off, swallowing down a mouthful. However, he refused to move away so he caught the last few spurts on his face, chest and arms. Probably not the best idea, though he really didn’t care.

By the time Sidon was spent, there was a large amount of Zora jizz on him. He wasn’t covered but, understandably, it was a bit messy. Sitting back, taking the time to look down at the liquid on him, he licked away the cum from his lips. Swirling it around inside his mouth, coating every inch with the bitter taste of Sidon’s jizz, he decided that it tasted alright, not as good as what he supposed had been a natural lubrication to keep everything smooth and soft but still not nearly as bad as what he’s heard Hylian jizz could taste like. Glancing over at the Zora Prince, he was surprised to discover that, in opposition to how long it took to get the penises out, it hadn’t taken any time at all for them to go back in. There was only a slight hint of the slit remaining now. Blinking hard, he tilted his head and wondered if that was a conscious or unconscious thing - did Sidon control when they come out and go back in? Another question he would need to ask later.

“Was I even any good?” Link asked curiously, as Sidon slowly slumped forward tiredly, his head bowing down towards his chest. “I’ve never done that before so I can’t imagine I was any good at it.”

“Doing something like that is unheard of among the Zora.” Sidon said softly.

“Like what?” Link asked confusedly, wiping away the jizz from his face best he could.

“What you just did with your mouth. That isn’t something Zora do, I didn’t even know that was something that could be done.”

“Because of your teeth?” Link guessed, flicking the cum from his fingers.

“Precisely. Sharp teeth and genitals don’t exactly match.” Sidon replied, slowly raising his head.

His eyes immediately widened in alarm when he saw the state Link was in. Reaching forward, he yelped out an apology and became to fervently wipe away the mess on his face. Giggling mischievously, Link took hold of Sidon’s jizz covered hand, tugged it over to his mouth and, without breaking eye contact, playfully licked away a swatch from his skin. Sidon’s eyes widened, his shoulders tensing up. Then, they abruptly slumped as his head fell forward.

“Don’t rile me up anymore, please.”

“Oh? And what will happen if I do?” Link replied teasingly, licking off another patch.

In one quick, fluid motion, Sidon suddenly reached forward, grabbed his arm, yanked him forward until their chests bumped together. For a moment, he was worried he had made him mad but that was quickly disproven when the Zora Prince’s hand landed on his backside, and firmly squeezed one of the rounded, plump globes. A powerful jolt of tingling pleasure ran up his spine, causing his penis to twitch powerfully in response. Gasping into Sidon’s shoulder, he shamelessly rubbed his butt against Sidon’s hand.

“I may not have known that the mouth could be used for such pleasure but I do know that this can be used for intercourse.” Sidon purred into his ear, “I wanted to know how to make it work with you, even though I thought it would never happen. I explored the options, learned what to do and how the two of us could do such a thing, but it only heightened my lust. And now, with you right in front of me, I want nothing more than to claim you, to mate with you but we cannot do it here. At least, that is what the rational, in-control part of me is saying but the primal part, the one driven by instincts wants to push you down, spread you open and shove myself inside.”

Part of him wanted to tell Sidon to just do it, fuck the consequences and fuck him until he couldn’t stand in the morning, to shove both of his dicks so deeply inside of him that he could feel them bumping against the bottom of his stomach but he knew that was a stupid request. Even if they did decide to do it, there was no way that even a finger was going to get inside of him, let alone even one of those massive dicks. Despite never having actually done it with a someone else, his own fingers had been inside him often enough to know that even with his small fingers, a significant amount of lube and preparation was needed. Right now, they neither had the lube nor the patience to get through the preparation process. Though he did like it when it hurt a bit, he didn’t much like the idea of a very large dick suddenly being shoved up inside him. That was a little bit too much pain for his liking.

Just going for it was tempting because he wanted to but he needed to be realistic, “Promise me that’ll be one of the first things we do when we get out of here?”

Sidon chuckled, “I promise. One of? What would be the first thing?”

Link thought for a moment before easily replying, “I really want to sleep in a bed together with you. No playing around, just wrapped up in your arms and sleeping by your side. That would be my first thing.”

“I can arrange that.” Sidon replied, lightly nuzzling his neck, “I can give you half of the request right now, however. Not a bed in sight but I would delighted to have you sleep in my arms.”

There was nothing else, at that moment, that sounded more wonderful than being wrapped up in Sidon’s arms, surrounded by his scent. Now that all the excitement was winding down, he quickly realized he was exhausted. His limbs were getting heavy, his mind was becoming sluggish and he knew that in no time at all, he would barely be able to keep his eyes open. Nodding happily, he snuggled closer to the Zora Prince, unintentionally rubbing his still hard dick against his stomach. It twitched angrily in response, almost as though it was chastising him for forgetting about it.

“Do you want me to take care of that first?” Sidon asked, a hint of eagerness in his voice.

Okay, strike that. There was one other thing, at that moment, that sounded more wonderful than just falling asleep. Despite being very tired, he figured he could keep himself awake for one more orgasm. Slipping his arms off Sidon’s shoulders, he slid back, pushed himself a few inches away with the heels of his feet then, while coyly smiling up at the Zora Prince, he spread open his legs, revealing the very obvious bulge in the crotch area. Waggling his hips invitingly, he said, “You’re welcome to it.”

“Then, allow me to indulge myself just a little.” Sidon said, his voice dropping once again to a low, husky purr.

Reaching forward in a startlingly smooth motion, he gripped both of his legs, yanked him back but instead of sitting in down right in front of him, he kept pulling until Link was on his back then on his shoulders then not on the ground at all but instead, held upside down, one of Sidon’s arm tightly holding him around his midsection, his back against the Zora Prince’s chest and his legs dangling uselessly above him. He was so startled by the abrupt chain of events that he barely registered the fact that somewhere along the way, Sidon had shoved his pants down, exposing his bare buttocks to the cold, night air. Once he had managed to realize that, he was given no time at all to figure out just what Sidon was planning before the Zora Prince was spreading him apart with one hand and in the next moment, something wet and incredibly hot was pressed against his opening.

Tongue, he thought distantly, his mind already going funny. Tongue, tongue, tongue, that’s his tongue, he was licking an area that Link would have never thought to put a mouth anywhere near but now that there was a tongue there, he couldn’t bring himself to think about it. All he could really focus on was that Sidon’s long, limber, talented tongue was swirling teasingly around the puckered opening, occasionally pushing against it and spreading him open just a little bit. It was a strange, foreign feeling but one that he quickly got used to, and thus, one that almost immediately had him on the brink of orgasm. He really needed to work on his endurance but for now, he allowed himself to bask in the shudders of electric pleasure flashing throughout his body, making his toes curl and his heart pound. Arching his back, grinding his butt against Sidon’s tongue, Link, needing something to hang onto, set his hands on the Zora Prince’s thighs, curling his fingers so that his fingers were digging into his scaly skin.

He was coming close, the tingling at the base of his cock growing into a steady, loud, thrumming hum. Rivers of precum were currently flooding out of the tip, flowing down to create a large puddle on his chest. Seeming to sense that his orgams was quickly coming, Sidon picked up the pace and intensity, but didn’t go quite far enough for Link. He knew he needed a little bit more. Sure, he could reach up and jerk himself off until he came but he wanted something else to make him come. Reaching forward, he gripped hold of Sidon’s wrist and said through clenched teeth, “Inside! Fuck me with your tongue!”

A mighty jolt raced through Sidon’s body but he made no complaint or argument. Instead, he pushed the tip of his scalding hot tongue directly against his opening and with absolute ease, pushed inside. Now, it was Link’s time to jolt, his eyes going wide as the distinctively odd but immensely pleasurable feeling of a wet, wiggling, talented tentacle of a tongue pushed deep into him. Crying out loudly, he held on as best he could, forcing off his orgasm through sheer power of will - not yet, don’t end just yet, just a little while longer. Somehow, he managed to keep himself from coming but Sidon seemed determined to force him to him. With a soft chuffing sound, he began to swirl his tongue around inside, pushing up against the sensitive walls in a constant assault. Cries, mews and sobs of Sidon’s name fell free from his wide open mouth, along with lines of saliva as his inside were mercilessly invaded by the Zora Prince’s tongue. His mind was completely blank, filled with nothing but a loud buzzing noise as his orgasm coiled like a spring, tighter and tighter, inside the base of his groin.

He didn’t last much longer than that. When Sidon pulled his tongue almost all the way out, only to forcefully shove it back in, his self-restraint snapped. He came quietly, only letting out a choking sob as his orgasm tore through him, his eyes and mouth clenched shut, his fingernails digging into the Zora Prince’s skin. The world behind his eyelids went momentarily white. His body shuddered pleasantly, pleasure zipping through the network of his veins. As it faded away into a golden glow, he let out a long, gasping breath, slowly opening his eyes as Sidon carefully righted him. Dizziness immediately swamped him as all the blood rushed away from his head.

“Are you alright?” Sidon asked, stroking Link’s cheek with the pad of his thumb.

“That felt amazing.” Link reverently breathed, smiling tiredly.

Sidon smiled in response, tugging Link close, pulling up his pants as he did so, “I’m glad, that was a fine experience for me as well. One I’d like to do again sometime but for now, I think it's time we actually try to get some sleep.”

Yawning widely, pretty much on the verge of passing out, Link nodded. Lying limply in the Zora Prince’s arms, he let him move him around until they were lying beside the fire with Link being the closest to it, and the Sidon behind him. Snuggled up close to his chest, safely tucked into the natural curve of his body, covered by his arms and their legs intertwined, As they relaxed into one another, Link mumbled, “I’m going to need a bath so badly tomorrow.”

“A bath and a change of clothes.” Sidon agreed.

Link fell silent, feeling himself slipping away into slumber but before he was completely gone, there was one more thing he wanted to say. Pressing a warm kiss against Sidon’s chest, he said, “I love you, Sidon.”

A kiss was pressed against the crown of his head, followed by warm breath ruffling his hair. Curling his arms tighter around him, Sidon whispered, “And I love you, my little one.”

With those simple, profound, warm words echoing inside of his mind, sending waves of comfort washing over him, Link sighed happily, buried his face into the Zora Prince's chest and finally allowed sleep to claim him.

#loz #breath of the wild #prince sidon #sidlink

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aelin-and-feyre · 7 years

Text

Preference: Proposals

Rowan:

It’s during a sparring match, and you, for once, successfully pin him to the ground. You smirk as he stares up in awe. ‘Marry me’ he suddenly blurts out, and you can’t help but laugh. ‘Did I suddenly pass your test? I get to marry you because I was able to beat you?’ Quickly, Rowan switches your positions so now he is on top. ‘No, of course not, but it does help.’ He winks as you scowl up at him. ‘But really, I want you to marry me.’ ‘Okay, but only if you beat me in the first thirty seconds of the next round.’ He grins at the challenge and stands, offering a hand to help you up. Of course, incredibly easily, Rowan once again pins your to the ground and smirks. ‘Well, guess you’re gonna have to marry me now.’ You grin, ‘A deal’s a deal, I suppose.’

Rhysand:

Always the hopeless romantic, Rhysand proposes to you with rose petals. He makes a trail of them from the front door to your bedroom, where ‘Marry me’ is written out on the floor in front of your bed in even more petals. You gasp, tingles spreading down your spine as he comes up behind you, his arms circling your waist and pressing the ring into your palm. “Will you, darling?” He murmurs into your ear, sending even more shivers through your very bones. You turn around in his arms, pretending to think about it as you slip the ring onto your finger. After playful deliberation, you sigh, ‘I suppose,’ you finally answer, his arms tightening around you. His head tilts forwards and you smile against his lips. ‘You wicked thing.’ He accuses, then scoops you up and carries you to the bed, which is also covered in rose petals.

Dorian:

Walking along a beach, a perfect date with Dorian is coming to a close. Suddenly, he gets down on one knee and you gasp, covering your mouth with one hand as he takes the other in his own, looking up at you with his big, sapphire eyes full of hope. Out of his pocket, Dorian pulls a small red and gold box, presenting it to you and showing a beautiful piece of jewelry inside. ‘I don’t want to rule without you. Please, marry me. Bare my children. Be my queen.’ When you scream yes, he slips the ring on your finger and stands, picking you up around the waist and twirling you around.

Cassian:

You are both flying over Velaris, enjoying the feeling of freedom and the taste of the sky, but you can tell Cassian is nervous. You look over to him to see he’s already staring at you, an incredibly thoughtful expression on his face. 'What is it?’ You ask. 'I want to marry you.’ He answers simply, and you almost fall out of the sky. Your wings fail for a few moments but then Cassian is there, supporting your weight and allowing you to regain your flight. He chuckles, not letting go of your waist as you stare at him in shock. 'Really?’ 'Yes, really, we should get married.’ Cassian moves a couple fly-aways out of your face and gazes at you with surety and confidence, no sign of joking or foul play. So you say yes, and the smile from Cassian in response is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen.

Lorcan:

He practices what he wants to say for weeks. He plans everything out and knows exactly how it’s gonna go. Shockingly, though, when it finally comes time to pop to question, Lorcan is speechless. He stumbles over his words and tries to get back on track but he ends up getting so frustrated that it all just comes out in one big jumble. Nonetheless, you say yes - after you stop laughing - and Lorcan lets out a huge sigh on relief, a genuinely happy and rare smile gracing his face.

Helion:

After a long day dealing with High Lord duties and a problem in the Day Court, you and Helion take for a tumble in the sheets. It’s not until both of you are breathless, flopping back into the bed in companionable silence, does Helion say what’s been on his mind for weeks. 'Be my High Lady’ he murmurs as he brushes a stray strand of hair out of your face. You don’t believe him at first and think perhaps he has lost his mind but he says it again with more conviction, sounding completely sane and sure. You can’t find your voice enough to speak so you simply nod and an ethereal glow envelopes Helion as he literally shines with happiness, reigniting your previous passions for many more hours.

Chaol:

He whispers it every night when you’re asleep. 'Marry me.’ He murmurs before drifting off. One night, however, he miscalculates and says those two words while you are still awake. You look at him, suddenly not tired anymore, questions swimming in your eyes. Chaol chuckles nervously. 'You weren’t supposed to hear that’ he mutters, and then shrugs. He turns slightly and pulls a small box from the bedside table. 'I’ve had this for months but couldn’t find a good time to ask you. Will you marry me?’ You knew this was coming, as you’ve both talked about it plenty, and so you simply smile, grabbing his hand and pulling it up to your lips. 'Okay.’ You whisper, but Chaol keeps whispering it every night until the wedding day, and every night you say yes again.

Lucien:

He spends months planning the scavenger hunt, deciding each place to perfectly represent what he writes in the notes. Each piece of paper tells you another reason he loves you, and recounts his favorite thing that happened in the next place you’re supposed to go. You finally find him in the place where you first met, and he is waiting there with his arms open. He envelops you in a strong, tight hug because you’re crying at how sweet he is. When you part from him, he gets down on one knee and shows you the ring. ‘I have loved you ever since I first saw you at this exact spot. I don’t want to ever part from you. Please be my wife.’ And there is nothing else to say but yes.

Fenrys:

It’s a huge spectacle. He plans an event, inviting everyone both of you have ever known. There’s karaoke and late in the night, Fenrys serenades you in a horrible rendition of ‘Marry You’. At the end of the song, amidst the laughing, Fenrys jumps down from the stage right in front of you, and stares deeply into your eyes. 'Yeah, I think I wanna marry you’ he says. Unable to speak, you simply nod and Fenrys smiles grandly, scooping you into his arms and bounding back on the stage lifting you proudly for everyone to see. 'She said yes!’ He proclaims proudly and everyone rejoices for he rest of the night, even though you and your now fiancé leave for other activities…..

Azriel:

His hands shake so badly right before it happens because he still doesn’t believe that he is worthy of holding your own in his scarred ones. You know it’s happening, because you’ve talked about it before and so you grab his hands without hesitation, holding firmly to show him that you love everything about him, even the scars. He takes a deep breath when your eyes meet his, and nods slightly to himself before bending one knee and looking at you with endless hope filling his eyes. When you say yes, Azriel’s siphons flare in his inability to hold back the emotion coursing through him. He brings his hands up to your face, still a little bit hesitant, and you grab them again, placing them on your cheeks and then grasping his own face to bring him to kiss you.

Gavriel:

He desperately wants to be discrete about his intention to marry you, but sometimes Gavriel just gets too excited to keep it to himself. Everyone knows that he bought the ring, even you, although you would never tell him that. That is, until one night, he just can’t help himself. Fishing the delicate piece out of the frequently opened box he keeps next to him at all times, Gavriel carefully slips it onto your left ring finger while you sleep. You wake up when you hear your mate crying softly, and immediately feel the new weight on your hand. Gavriel panics, and tries to pretend like the ring has always been there, like it’s nothing new, but you look from your finger to his face, your eyes full of questions. ‘I just wanted to see what it would look like.’ he finally confesses, tears still glistening in his eyes when he glances down at the hand you are now admiring. ‘And what’s your verdict?’ you question, feeling Gavriel slip his arms around your waist and hold you tightly against his chest. He kisses your shoulder. ‘It looks like it belongs there. Would you do me the honor of keeping it where it belongs forever?’

Kallias:

Of course, he writes it in the snow. It’s a nice change from skywriting, and is actually rather comical when he drags up all the way up a huge snow covered mountain until you are soaked and freezing and swearing. Then when he turns you around to look back on the flat expanse before the hill, you see the words written in enormous swirling letters. You forget all about your shivering body and fling yourself at him. You both fall to the ground, his arms wrapped securely around you as he smiles. ‘I’ll take that as yes?’ You sniffle and he quickly kisses the tip of your red nose. ‘Of course, you idiot, now take me somewhere warm so when I rip your clothes off you, you’ll be able to do the same for me.’

Aedion:

He’s jokingly asked you for years. He’ll ask you after you make him dinner, or after the two of you have sex. He’ll ask when you wake up in the morning and when you’re cuddling at night. it takes a while for him to realize he’s being serious. It takes you even longer to realize it as well. The first time you even consider that he might actually mean the question, you shrug it off, but as it keeps happening, you can’t help but wonder. So finally, one night after the two of you had returned from training, and Aedion again pops the question, you respond. ‘Okay.’ He stops short and looks at you, his eyes widening. ‘If you mean it, than yes, I’ll marry you.’ The smile that lights up Aedion’s face is breathtaking. Immediately he lowers himself to one knee. ‘I have to do this properly at least once.’ He realizes, taking your hand in his own and kissing it lightly. ‘Will you marry me?’

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wintermell · 7 years

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gotta gotta be down

[ here’s chapter three of coming out of my cage! enjoy, everyone! ]

part i | part ii

(ao3)

“I’m heading home for today. See you tomorrow, Margie.”

Sansa gathers her supplies into her sewing basket. Her latest project, a wedding dress, has taken all her time and energy for the day. The lace overlay will have to be hand sewn at home if she has any hopes of finishing it on time.

“Oh! Actually, I wanted to talk to you about that,” says Margaery, setting down her scissors. Sansa’s heart sinks.

“Are you… are you firing me?”

“What? Fuck, no. I wanted to offer you some vacation time. Do you really think I’d fire you? You’re the only one who actually does any sort of work here.”

She breathes a sigh of relief. “Thank you, but I can’t really afford to take off. With the holidays coming up and everything-”

“Sansa, you’re forgetting an important fact. My family is rich. Now, I want you to take these next four weeks off and relax. Help yourself to a chunk of that man meat you’re living with. Whatever floats your boat, girlfriend. As long as you get that dress finished by the time you get back, you’ll be fine. Alright?”

“Alright,” says Sansa, grinning. “And Jon is not man meat.”

“Oh, honey, are you kidding me? If I weren’t dating Robb, I’d climb that boy like a tree. You better board the ship before it sails, so to speak,” Margaery says, digging through her wallet. “Is two hundred good for now? I can always send you more.” Sansa nods and tucks the bills in her purse.

“I feel like this isn’t how money works.”

“Whatever. I’m lazy and tired. Let me know everything that happens between you and the sexy lumberjack.”

Sansa pulls on her coat and leaves the boutique. A thin layer of snowflakes coats the streets and sidewalks. There have been flurries all week, but no big snow storms yet.

There’s a bookstore at the corner of the street, which she passes every day on her way to and from work. Sansa pulls the door open and steps inside. It smells like coffee and paper. The White Christmas soundtrack is playing softly from the radio.

She finds the aisle labelled ‘science and space’. There are hundreds of titles to choose from. Sansa runs her fingers across the spines of the books before she comes to one that catches her eye. Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. She picks it off of the shelf, reads a few pages, and closes it in satisfaction.

She’s about to go to checkout when she sees a poster hanging on the side of a shelf. It’s a black and white picture of an astronaut, with the caption ‘I need some space’. It’s possibly the most Jon Snow thing she’s ever seen, and it’s only ten dollars. She buys it without a second thought.

When she opens the door to the apartment, she’s greeted with a strange scene.

“Hey, how was work?” asks Jon. He’s in the process of hanging silver baubles on a large Christmas tree. A science documentary is playing on the TV, and a delicious smell is coming from the oven. Ghost barks and rushes to nuzzle Sansa’s legs.

“It was fine. Jon, how did you get that tree in here?” She shuts the door and kneels down to rub Ghost’s belly.

“Tormund helped. He also took a look at the heaters. Apparently, they need to be replaced. I’ll probably go out to the hardware store tomorrow.”

Sansa remembers the book and poster, and tries to move to her room inconspicuously. She hides the gifts under her bed. Her feet and back are aching from a long day, so she changes into her pajamas and takes her sewing kit out to the couch.

“Margaery gave me the next few weeks off,” she says, threading a needle with white string. “I’m free for anything, I guess.”

“Really?” Jon’s face lights up with a smile. “I mean, I’ve got some ideas. There’s a Christmas market down the street. Sam told me that there’s a stand that sells little lemon pastries.”

“That sounds wonderful,” she says. For some reason, the fact that Jon knows she likes lemons means a great deal to her.

But it isn’t just lemons. He’s memorized her favorite recipes so he can cook supper every night. He’s learned sewing terminology so he can ask about her work. He knows which channels her favorite shows are on, he knows what movies make her cry, and he knows that she likes her tea with half a spoonful of sugar.

And Sansa… she knows that Jon takes Ghost on a walk every morning at seven and every evening at six. She knows that he reads for an hour before going to bed, she knows that he always watches Nightly News, she knows that he listens to Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture when he needs to think, and he has a notebook full of the names of stars and constellations that he likes.

Sansa isn’t sure if she’s ready to be loved, but Jon makes her feel like she deserves more from life, and that isn’t so terrible.

They have lemon chicken piccata for dinner and cookies for dessert, while watching more documentaries on Netflix. Sansa works on the lace and Jon talks about whatever kind of science the TV is illustrating.

“See, the thing about black holes is that we automatically assume that we’ll never be able to understand them, or that we’ll never possess the technology to prove or disprove any theories- and there are plenty of theories,” he says, biting into a cookie. “But a hundred years ago, nobody would’ve thought that we’d be able to reach the moon. The sky was literally the limit. So if we can put people on the moon and send machines to planets that are millions of miles away, who’s to say that we won’t understand black holes someday?”

“This is terrifying,” says Sansa. A German professor in the documentary is describing how a human would be squashed into different dimensions if they entered a black hole. She’s always been afraid of the apocalyptic sci-fi movies that Robb, Arya, and Jon wanted to watch all the time when they were growing up.

“Most of this is probably speculative,” says Jon, trying his best to comfort her. “No one actually knows what a black hole is like because they’re so far away.”

“Don’t you want to know?” she asks.

“Sometimes, I guess. But there are some things that just aren’t meant to be known, and I’m okay with that. Everything we know and love is right here on earth,” he says, reaching over to join their fingers.

Sansa must have a look of wonder on her face, because Jon frowns and asks, “What is it?”

“Nothing. You just… that was kind of beautiful,” she says.

“Thank you.” Jon is blushing faintly. Unable to think of something else to say that wouldn’t completely embarrass her, Sansa packs up her sewing.

“I’m going to get some sleep. Good night.”

“Good night, Sansa.”

Once she’s in the safety of her room, she buries her face in a pillow and groans. Stupid, stupid, stupid. She’s been living with Jon for almost two weeks, and she’s already infatuated with him. When she finally falls asleep, her dreams are dark and hazy.

Sansa wakes in the middle of the night. The room is freezing cold, even with five layers of blankets on top of her. Ghost is nowhere to be found.

“Shit,” she mutters, sliding out of bed. The familiar hum of the heater is gone. She kicks it once, then again, before giving up. It’s far too cold for her to go back to sleep. Sansa leaves her room and knocks on Jon’s door.

“Come in?”

She enters the room slowly. Jon is sitting in his bed with an array of papers scattered around him. There’s an old astronomy textbook in his hands, and his phone is playing Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.

“The heater broke. My room’s a freezer right now,” she says. “I don’t want to bother you, but could I stay here for tonight?”

“Yeah, of course. I’ll take the couch.”

“No, that’s okay. I don’t mind sharing.” Well, that was forward.

Jon gulps and quickly clears away his papers. Sansa slides under his soft sheets and curls up. He turns off his music and his lamp. The string of LED lights that hangs above the window provides a dim, warm glow.

She’s still shivering after a few minutes, and Jon notices. She feels him press the back of his hand against her arm.

“Sansa, you’re fucking freezing,” he mutters.

“I’m just a little cold,” she says, which is a straight up lie. If she were an ocean, she could kill Leonardo DiCaprio in two minutes flat.

“Okay, c’mere.”

He wraps an arm around her waist, pulling her against his chest. Sansa can smell pine and smoke on him. The coarse hair of his beard tickles her forehead, sending electricity through her veins. She prays that he can’t feel her heart beating like a drum in her ribcage.

“Is this okay?” he asks.

“Yeah,” she whispers. Very okay.

They fall asleep like that, and Sansa can’t remember ever getting such a good night’s sleep. She wants to spend forever in his arms.

When she wakes up in the morning, she’s facing away from him but still wrapped in his embrace. His leg is awkwardly pressed against her back. She tries to turn away, but he just shifts back against her.

“Jon, can you move your knee?”

“Hmm… what?”

“Your knee. It’s right against my back.”

“I- oh. Um… I’m gonna go make breakfast.”

Sansa frowns and sits up, but he’s already left the room. For a minute, she’s convinced that she’s overstepped a line, and this is the end of everything between her and Jon. However, the awkward realization soon sets in.

Fuck. That definitely wasn’t his knee.

#coming out of my cage #jonsa #jonsa fic

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primasveraas-writing · 7 years

Text

Coming Home: A Steggy AU

Please send requests my way! My ask box is always open.

1945

"Peg." Even over the phone, Howard Stark's voice teemed with excitement and urgency, slight desperation and much hope. "Peg, we're so close. We may be able to actually do it!"

Peggy Carter leaned against the counter of her cramped apartment, pressing the phone closer to her cheek. It was the unusual seriousness of her friend that kept annoyance from creeping into her tone. "Do what, Howard?" She tried to elicit more details from him. "What's going on?"

"...I can find him. I might be able to finally do it, Peg!"

"Find Steve?" Her words caught in her throat. She fiddled with the wire of the phone, her typical calm and confident attitude evaporating instantly, the old wound so easily reopened.

"Yeah, Peg, listen. I've been building a plane. It's small, but it's equipped with scopes, radar, all the works. I've done the math, and I think I know where his plane is."

"But- he's gone." Tears creeped into her eyes, as she spoke, hating her own words, hating her sudden lack of composure.. "Steve is dead."

"I- I know, Peg. But we can bring him home. Give him a funeral in Brooklyn. That's what he would have wanted." Howard sounded desperate and rueful, not at all like his normal boisterous self. "I owe him that. Let me give him that."

"It was never your fault, Howard. He wouldn't want you to feel guilty."

"I need closure, Peg. Don't you too?" He baited her.

The woman stood alone in her kitchen, her back against the counter. Peggy closed her eyes, thinking of the skinny boy from Brooklyn who would die fighting in the name of his home, knowing he would perish a world away from the place and people he had loved most.

And she knew her answer.

***

Soon enough, she found herself packed in flight tower with an flight crew, navigators, military officials. The air was tense accompanied only by silence, but occasionally, a few bursts of static would interrupt the stillness.

In all, the environment was unbearable. Peggy thought it odd that all the high ranking officials, who had previously faced a war, couldn't even sum up the courage to make small talk with one another.

She despised the similarities between this place and the last flight tower she had been in, the one where she had listened to Steve talk as he steered the plane into the water. His voice had been calm enough, though she couldn't deny the underlying tones of panic beneath the facade. He had talked until he died, the static replacing his sudden goodbye.

But now, the bursts of static meant something new. They gave a quiet sense of hope to the room full of the people closest to Captain America, reassuring them that their friend and comrade received a proper goodbye.

Finally, Howard's voice emitted from the radio, interrupting the static. "I see something... it's definitely not snow or ice... for a change..."

The tension in the room spiked, reaching a breaking point like a wire snapping. Excited whispers broke out, sending the room into a flurry. A group of military men congregated around the radio, but Peggy somehow found herself front and center, surrounded by everyone else. She deliberately ignored the awful parallels between her experience just over a month ago and this one as Howard talked.

"I'm landing now. There's a flat enough sheet of ice in front of me. Everything is frozen for miles and miles, so it should hold." His words reflected the mood of the flight tower's; eager, yet still a little sad. Nobody spoke.

"The ice is holding. I'm pretty close, and it does look vaguely like a plane. I'm going to check it out."

"Affirmative, Howard. Be careful." The brunette managed, the emotion rising in her chest and making it hard to breathe.

"Wouldn't have it any other way, Peg. You know me." Howard promised, and Peggy relaxed ever so slightly, trying not to imagine what he was about to discover.

The next ten minutes were agony. Her mind was overworking, thinking of every horrible possibility, worrying about Howard and unable to let any of it show, not in front of her superiors.

"Peggy, I need you to trust me, and I need you to listen to me, okay?" Howard returned abruptly, sounding desperate. Peggy's heart pounded in her chest as she responded.

"Yes, Howard, I- what is it? What did you find?"

"I need you to leave. Go home, and I'll call you after I get back."

"No, absolutely not-"

"Peg, I wouldn't ask-"

"I have every right to be here!" She half-shouted. The woman's voice quieted after she took a deep breath, but she still spoke firmly. "I was closer to Steve than anyone else here, and I have every right to stay."

"Just trust me on this. Peggy, please."

"I can handle whatever it is you have to say!"

"Agent Carter," Colonel Philips interrupted, "perhaps Mr. Stark is right."

The veteran glared at the Colonel, a flush creeping into her cheeks, her outrage showing and betraying her. "I don't believe this."

"I'll explain soon." Howard tried to assure her, and Peggy was despicably satisfied to hear regret in his voice. She huffed, giving everyone in the room a murderous look before storming out.

They forced her to leave the tower, but Peggy refused to go home while the men were discussing Steve, or whatever it was Howard had to share. She sat on the ground outside, staring at the cement in front her, drawing her coat closer to her in an effort against the cold.

***

Fantasises, the good and the bad alike, had seized Peggy's mind and dominated all of her thoughts, as her brain computed, with an uncontrollable frenzy, all the possible outcomes of the day and what Howard was hiding from her. Her paranoia was only fueled further when an ambulance drove up the side of the long runway, parking just a hundred feet away from where the plane would later land. The two doctors pulled a gurney out of their long car and stood by it, waiting for their patient to arrive. Peggy watched with a furrowed brow, wondering if something could possibly be wrong with Howard. There was no pain in his voice when they had talked (or argued, rather). And Steve shouldn't need doctors, as Peggy had to painfully remind herself.

Another hour and a half passed slowly. Each minute brought a new wave of worry for Peggy. Her foot tapped impatiently, showing both her nerves and her meager attempt at resistance against the extreme cold. Eventually though, a rumble in the sky announced the arrival of Howard, his despicable secret, and, hopefully, the last of Captain America.

As the plane landed, Peggy rose to her feet, and the men from the tower began to spill out around her. She kept her eyes forward, defiantly ignoring her male counterparts. The eyes of Colonel Phillips were on her, she could feel it, but that made a negligible difference on her cold demeanor.

Howard exited the small plane without his usual grand entrance, foregoing that and rushing to the doctors, exchanging a few, hurried words with them before coming over to her. She watched the two men dash over to the plane, craning her neck around Howard's approaching figure.

Forcing her features to correctly reflect her icy disposition as Peggy wrestled with sympathy for her friend, who looked freezing with his hands stuffed deep into his pockets and his head burrowed deep in his coat, and the anger at him, which had only grown in her hours of waiting. She gave her best glare, and Howard shrunk back, looking appropriately guilty.

"Peg-" He began apologetically.

"I don't want to hear that you're sorry, Howard, I want to know what's going on." She cut him off, drawing herself up to her full height.

"I can't do that just yet." The billionaire stole a quick glance back at the plane, where the doctors were moving a large covered object onto the gurney. Peggy too stared at the strange and questionable scene, her mind still racing.

"I'm not some lovesick bimbo, Howard, I can handle it."

His face softened ever so slightly, and Peggy saw his usually unbreakable and ego-driven attitude begin to fail. "Please, Peg, just trust me..."

Her nostrils flared. "Do you trust me, then? Because you seem to think that I'll turn into a whimpering child at the first mention of bad news, that I haven't already fought in a war, that I haven't already lost Steve, that I didn't talk to him while he died-" she stopped herself abruptly, blinking tears out of her eyes, "You have no right to withhold any information from me, Howard. None at all."

His shoulders sagged. "I have to stand by it, Peg."

She could only stare at him for a moment more before turning away wordlessly, stalking towards the car, her heel clicking on the pavement. Howard watched her for a moment before something dawned on him.

"Hey-" he started after her, "I'm your ride home!"

She didn't bother turning around, but called back to him; "I suppose it'll be a long ride back, then."

***

"You're not trying to make a profit off of this, are you?" demanded Peggy suddenly, "using his blood to make money?"

Howard barely spared her a glance before turning his focus back to the road. "No. I would never."

"Well, you never involve reasonable people in your mindless money-making schemes, so I had to be sure." She replied scathingly.

"Peg, if I were making money off of Steve's blood, you'd kill me when you found out. And there's no point in makin' money if you're not alive to enjoy it."

She still fumed silently. The man sighed loudly, speeding down the lonely road and desperately thinking of a way to bridge the gap between him and his companion. After a few minutes, he seemed to come to a decision. "I am going to fill you in now, Peg. I was always going to."

Peggy waited for him to continue, still aloof enough that she remained turned away, but her posture straightened slightly, listening attentively.

"I did find him. I found Steve. But between the ice and the serum... he looked exactly the same." Peggy was looking directly at him now, transfixed on his face.

An involuntary shudder rippled through her. "He still looks like...?"

"Looked like he was sleeping." Howard confirmed, and for once, his words came with a gentle delivery. Their eyes met for only a second, Peggy's shining with tears. "But here's the real kicker- I found a pulse. Peg, he's alive."

A shaking hand covered her mouth, the tears now streaming down her face. "Steve..."

"I could feel his heart beating. The serum did a better job than we ever thought it would.

"I didn't want to tell you until he was stable," Howard continued, "you know, no giving you false hope. I wasn't sure- I could barely believe it."

"You should have told me."

"Look at you," Howard denounced, "I just didn't want you to lose Steve twice."

She glared at him through her tears, though her happiness remained clearly splayed across her face. "But he's stable?"

Her dear friend nodded eagerly. "Yeah, and the doctors even say that he's woken up a few times this morning."

More tears of joy slipped down Peggy's cheek, as she sighed contentedly, the weight of grief disappearing from her shoulders. Such good news felt surreal to her, like it was too good to be true. But there was Howard, smiling at her lightly, and telling her they were on the way to the hospital to see Steve, and they were so close, oh so close.

She sniffed, wiping the wetness from her cheeks. "Thank you, Howard."

***

Holding the large, callused, yet limp hand in her own felt so strange to Peggy. She couldn't help but think how lucky she was that they were both here, the war over and the two of them safe and alive, together. But it still didn't feel quite real. How could the man she had spent 6 weeks mourning be right there in front of her?

When they had arrived at the hospital, Peggy had been prepared to argue and fight with every nurse that came her way to gain access to Steve, but Howard had just announced their names, grinned impishly at the right women, and then they were right outside his room. "I'll wait," Howard had told her, "he's all yours." Briefly, Peggy wondered if she could handle this alone, but then she had turned the knob, given Howard and anxious smile and ended up in the same room as Steve Rogers once again in her life.

Now, looking at his face was practically unbearable, despite this being a moment she had spent many nights dreaming about. He hadn't said anything yet, as Howard had informed her, and Peggy remained unable to believe the miracle in front of her just yet. For now, it was only if a ghost were present, a prominent memory accompanied by the vague sense of hope.

Peggy jumped when Steve gave a long sigh in his sleep, turning his head ever-so-slightly towards her. This small movement distracted her from her focus on his hands, her gaze now shifting to his face. A surge of emotion was created within her, the most dangerous of feelings exploding in her chest. All of the pain, anger and sorrow she had carried with her resurfaced. The frustration at losing Steve extruded inside her, her grievance at how her was so stupidly brave, brave enough to sacrifice his life, how ridiculous it was that they never acted upon their feelings for each other, how she waited, and waited, and never said anything or did anything until it became too late, and he was gone, flying away in that godforsaken plane, until he was crashing into the ice, far, far away. There was the pain of losing him, of saying goodbye, of sitting in that awful tower, listening to his last words, then just radio static, the pain of going to his funeral, watching as they lowed the empty coffin into the ground, walking along the streets accompanied by his thousands of fans and mourners, and finally, the confusion and joy, the whiplash of finding out that he could be a hero again, not just a martyr.

Staring at his face and his peacefully closed eyelids, she waited, suddenly unwilling and unable to look away, her breathing slowing to match his as a sense of calm and acceptance slowly settled over her,

Time faded away, minutes passing rapidly as she watched him, patiently now, anticipating it, but not rushing it.

Then, her prayers were answered, her dreams and hopes becoming a reality as his eyes fluttered open, staring at the ceiling blankly, then, as if sensing her presence, turning his head to see her face. Peggy sat still, not daring to move, focusing on his eyes, which, in turn, gazed at her, filled with amazement.

Her breath let out in a deep sigh, a long-withheld smile spreading across her face, an action that the breathing, alive, awake, present boy from Brooklyn imitated with ease.

"Hello, Darling." She whispered quietly yet proudly, eyes shining with rapture and love for the young man who had saved the world countless times with his heroics and leadership, who now saved her once more from any possible grief in that moment, who filled her with hope, and inspired her, and kept her going on every bad day, who clearly loved her so much, and who, finally, could squeeze her hand back while the two people grinned ecstatically at each other, filled with an indescribable and endless happiness.

***

"I'd hate to step on your toes." Steve recalled suddenly, speaking the thought as it came to him.

"What?" Peggy demanded sharply, jolted from her reverie back to the present. Their eyes met, hers startled and wide, his soft and calm. There was a pause as they stared at each other, caught up in the moment.

"That's the last thing I remember," Steve explained, shifting from his position on the hospital bed and gazing at Peggy intently, "telling you that."

She blinked, taken aback. "Yes- yes, I know. I remember too."

"That was six weeks ago." He sounded sure of himself, but nonetheless, he looked to her for confirmation.

Peggy nodded helpfully. "That's right." She said, swallowing the sting that came with the memory, and smiling at Steve gently.

"What did I miss? Full story." He prompted, sitting up a little straighter, desperate to learn anything about the world. Most of what he knew now was warped and blended together in the flurry of chatter and the blabbering of the doctors and nurses attending to Steve. Between the several check-ups he had endured, the hour of questioning, and the large meal that had been forced down his throat, he had been able to gleam any real information.

"The war is over," she told him , looking down at her hands, "we won. And I've attended more funerals than I care to count," her voice caught, "including Bucky's. Including yours."

"I'm sorry." He uttered instantly, the helplessness written across his face.

"Don't be," She said, her voice firm again, "both of you saved so many innocent lives. The funerals were a way for us to honor your sacrifices. We are forever indebted to you."

"I wish I coulda' been there for Buck's..." Steve shook his head, grief palpable on his face.

"You were a bit preoccupied, Steve," Peggy said gently, resting her hand on his knee, "he would have understood."

"I know. I know," he sighed, "I just wish..." He trailed off, putting his face in his hands.

A few minutes passed in silence, Peggy still next to him with her hand on his leg, a small and comforting gesture that left him enough space to grieve for a moment. Then his entire body tensed, and he looked up. "What happened to the Tesseract?" He demanded, his voice incisive, with urgent undertones replacing any previous sorrow.

"Howard amused himself by throwing it around until he was lost, then spent a large amount of time cutting through ice to drop it to the bottom of the ocean. It's far away enough from the plane, which Howard left buried in eight feet of snow and ice. It's gone."

Steve slumped back onto his heap of pillows. "Thank God," he breathed.

"Howard took your death quite hard. It was crucial to him that you didn't die in vain."

"I'll have to thank him for that, won't it?"

"He's right outside, I believe, if he hasn't been sidetracked by one of those nurses," she informed him, smiling faintly.

"I owe him my life," Steve said, "and he protected my sacrifice." He laughed. "What a man."

"Never underestimate Howard Stark," Peggy agreed quietly.

***

"Visiting hours are now over," the female nurse chirped, sticking her head through the doorway, blushing when Howard devilishly winked at her.

"Don't worry, Steve," Howard said offhandedly, standing up. "We'll be back first thing tomorrow to pick you up. I was chatting with your doctors outside. You're pretty healthy for a guy who's been dead for a month and a half. They just want to keep you for a night then you're free to go in the morning."

"First thing?" Steve repeated, his eyes on Peggy.

"First thing," Peggy nodded.

"Don't you dare be late." He said seriously, despite his eyes were alight with humor.

Peggy rolled her eyes, bending down to kiss Steve passionately on the lips, giving in to the long-withstanding urge and making her feelings clearly known to them all. "You really shouldn't doubt me, Steve." She murmured, still close to his face. Then, while Steve sat there, stunned, she turned in her heel and stalked out of the room, her chin held high.

***TEN MONTHS, TWO WEEKS LATER***

"I hope I'm not too late," Steve muttered to Peggy, his lips almost brushing against her forehead, as they swayed together to the soft tunes of music. The atmosphere in the room was slow and lethargic so late at night, even at the usually bouncing and upbeat Stork Club. The two remained some of the last on the dance floor in the gradually emptying club. They stood out, the tall, extremely muscled man in a nice-looking tux, with his arms around the striking English woman, adorned in a stunning red gown that swept the floor as she moved.

"Only by a year," she whispered back, but with no malice in her words, "but better now than any later."

"Good," Steve smiled, bending down ever-so-slightly to kiss his partner. "Keep your eyes closed," he instructed her gently when their lips had parted.

"Why?" She breathed, suspicion shooting through her instantly, although she obeyed his wish, feeling him step away from her. Her breathing accelerating as suspense consumed her, her lips twitching up into an inpatient smirk when he simply answered;

"Because." Then, a moment later: "Open."

"Please?" She teased.

"Please." He replied, and Peggy could hear the amusement in his tone.

So she opened her eyes, and saw the one and only Steve Rogers kneeled on the floor in front of her, holding a beautiful silver ring in his hands.

"Peggy," he began, love in his eyes, and his voice absolutely teeming with it, "my best girl." Emotion made his voice crack. "You are my right partner." Nervously, he smiled. "Marry me?"

An helpless, stupidly lovesick grin answered him first. She extended her hand, pulling him up and drawing him close, so that their noses almost touched. "Yes, darling. Of course I will." She breathed, staring deep into his eyes just a moment before kissing him deeply, the two intertwined on the center of the dance floor, the heroes forgetting all the troubles in the world, and everything else in it, their moment forever cherished in their time.

***

Building their lives together proved no easy task, two independent people suddenly learning the meaning of codependence, something only made harder by Peggy's demanding and dangerous job with the SSR, and Steve's equally trying work and fame as a resurrected war hero.

But still, as the years passed, the two changed and grew together, their bond strengthening with the challenges of the various missions and adventures that came their way. Domestic life and quiet moments were treasured, but the days filled with excitement and adrenaline were always looked forward to. But whatever came their way could be dealt with, so long as the two had each other by their side.

Friends followed a similar path, bringing the couple great joy when Howard announced his engagement (they couldn't help but to be smug about that), and under a year later, was married.

All seemed well until an innocent-seeming thank-you card arrived in the mail, a lovely thing handwritten by Maria herself (Howard had only cared enough to sign it, Peggy reasonably supposed). Inside the envelope, however, was a picture of Steve and Peggy, taken at the wedding. Steve's arms were wrapped around her, and he gazed down at her lovingly, though her own focus was caught by something off to the side.

A soft smile graced Peggy's face as she stared at the photo, studying it and recalling the night. Then, rather abruptly, a realization hit her, and she strode out of the hall and into their living room, snatching a framed photo off the mantle and holding the two side by side, as to compare them.

Peggy stood next to Steve, smiling widely and adorned in a beautiful lace dress, Steve in his military uniform. The day they got married, years ago.

The time showed on her face, now. She could see it in the new photo, a smile line here and there, even how she carried herself, weighed down by so many troubles of the world. She had changed.

But not Steve.

No aging showed on his face, his eyes remained untouched by time, his features preserved perfectly. He wouldn't change, medically couldn't grow older, even while she would, while their potential children would. He'd be frozen in time, and she would be lost to it.

"Peg?" A voice behind her asked gently.

"You haven't changed. At all." She said strangely, turning to face him. This bothered her, clearly, but she couldn't pinpoint exactly why. Did she mind getting older? Well, perhaps a little bit, but it certainly wasn't something to make a fuss over. "Not since the serum, I don't think."

"Peggy- I-" He made his way across the room to her, setting down the photos and taking her hands in his. He took a deep breath, playing with her fingers for a moment as he thought, running a finger over her wedding band. "I don't care how you look, or even how I look." A small smile crossed his face, tinged with sadness. "So long as we're together." Leaning down, he kissed the side of her face. "Is that okay with you?"

Absentmindedly, she nodded, still disturbed but willing to wait for whatever the future held.

***

"She was shot six times," the doctor explained patiently, "twice in her right arm, once by her sternum, above her heart, and twice again in her stomach. She's lost a lot of blood, and we believe there may be damage to her heart and arteries."

The middle-aged man delivered this news simply, calmly, as if he were sharing the day's weather or a boring bit of news. As if it didn't matter. As if it weren't a potential death sentence for Steve's wife.

"So what do we do next?" Steve asked, his arms crossed and disposition strong even while his voice was meek, made timid by the destroying news. Next to him, Howard rubbed his forehead, making a small noise, perhaps one of grief.

Now, the doctor hesitated. "Surgery is a very risky option. Her heart is weak, it would very likely give out during any operation. There's not much we can do."

"And without surgery?"

"Her chances aren't good either way. I'm sorry, Mr. Rogers. We can make her comfortable, but her heart will likely fail in a couple of days." The man ran his fingers through greying hair. "If there's anything I can do for you, please, let me know." With that, he exited the room, leaving the two men to face the horrible reality.

"Damn it!" Howard burst, springing up from the worn hospital chair. "This isn't right," he seethed, beginning to pace, "I'm sorry, Steve." He said to his friend, who had buried his face into his hands. "I'm sorry, it was supposed to be a simple job, just a coupla' thugs with some bad ideas." He closed his eyes, running his fingers through his hair. "'cept there were more than a couple... she shouldna' been alone."

Steve too, closed his eyes, bowing his head, searching for something to say, anything to reassure Howard, or maybe himself.

But nothing could do that.

He stood up, and walked out.

"Peggy."

Her eyes opened slowly, meeting his. "Steve," she murmured, just barely managing a smile. He reached out, taking her hand and grasping it firmly. "What's happened?" She asked, wincing as she did so, for even the smallest movement pained her. Moving his chair closer, Steve prepared himself to deliver the awful news.

Pain showed clearly in both of their eyes, physical agony in Peggy's and an emotional hell erupting in Steve's, but still he carefully chose his words and began to speak.

"Too many thugs," he said, trying for a smile, but any expression of joy on his face felt entirely too foreign, and any cheer quickly slid from his face, "or at least that's what Howard said."

"So I recall. Those bastards," she mused, "there are five wounds, I believe?"

"Six," Steve corrected her gently, and on that word, his voice broke, turning away from his wife, unable to meet her eyes, to face Peggy and her suddenly inevitable fate.

"Steve?" She asked, concern immediately lacing both her tone and features. "What is it?"

"There's nothing they can do," he delivered the news bluntly, hating his words but unable to sugarcoat them, "your heart is too weak."

"I'm going to die?" She inhaled sharply, looking away from Steve. He nodded, squeezing her hand, Peggy's presence the only thing that could possibly comfort him. The despair and heavy weight began to set in as they sat in silence for several long, torturous moments.

Finally, she turned to him, a smile cracking through her tears. "I do love you."

"Love you too." He whispered back.

***

"Hey!" Howard's loud voice disturbed the quiet peace of the room, "Uh- sorry," he focused on something out the window, incapable of eye contact with either of his friends, standing in the doorway awkwardly as he talked. "Steve, listen, I have an idea I need to discuss with you-"

"I'm a little busy right now if you don't mind." The captain cut in coolly, not even moving from his chair next to Peggy, or bothering to spare him a glance. Howard shrunk back slightly, but yet he persisted.

"I know, but I wouldn't ask if it wasn't important, would I?"

Steve glowered, his brow pinching together, until Peggy squeezed his hand. "You can leave my side, Steve. I'll be quite alright."

He looked between her and Howard before making his decision and standing, joining the genius outside, closing the door with a click.

"So I've been thinking- you've been shot, right?"

***

"I've got it!" Howard half shouted, sprinting into the room.

Lying helplessly in bed, the dying woman stirred feebly. Sitting in a chair next to her was Steve, who eyed Howard with something like hope beginning to shimmer in his eyes, wondering if their plan had worked.

"An injection," he continued, "this could save you, Peg!" he told her as she woke fully, gazing dimly at Howard in her dying haze, still clutching Steve's hand, though her grip was now weak and failing.

"What have you done now?" she uttered faintly.

"A serum replication." The inventor and scientist said excitedly, bouncing on the balls of his feet as he entered the room, striding in and standing at the foot of her bed. "I'm going to save your life."

"And you're sure this'll work?" Her husband asked, the sanguine energy spreading to him too, though he didn't dare to attach fully to this hope.

"95% sure. And the doctors are on board too, so we can start as soon as they all arrive."

"What the bloody hell is going on?" Even in her deteriorating state, the agent commanded their respect and attention in an instant, the two boys twisting around to look at her, suddenly like children caught by their mother doing something naughty.

"Howard used my blood to recreate the serum-" Steve explained calmly, as if this weren't an illegal crime.

"An improved one, mind you- suited to your femaleness-"

"Project Insight is closed." Peggy's voice was disapproving, even with the weakness behind it.

"Well, they can arrest me once it works." Howard moved closer to her, "Are you ready?"

"We are." Peggy's doctor said, leading a group of doctors into the room.

"Is this really rational?" The patient demanded, angrily looking at the men congregated around her.

"Peggy, you're dying," Steve said determinedly, "this is the only way."

"This my life!" She protested, "and none of you even told me-"

"We didn't want to get your hopes up-"

"You're going to die without it, Peggy." Howard reminded her, frowning down at her. "Are you going to die fighting, or just give up?"

Raising her chin, she noticed Steve beside her, his eyes glistening with tears, desperation still clear on his face, though he seemed to be trying to hide it. "Well, if that's a challenge- to die fighting, that is- then I accept. But if I die-" she spoke to Steve now, "then you move on." He shook his head, against her words already, "if," she pressed on, "you get back up, and you keep fighting, you understand? Will you do?"

Tears sliding down his face, Steve leaned over her and kissed her, lingering and soft. "Don't just mope around," she instructed him when their lips parted, "you're more than that."

"I love you."

She smiled at him, one last time. Then to Howard, she said:

"Do it."

So he injected the serum.

Immediately, the effects of the inoculation took place. Her body twitched and seized. A horrible, moaning scream penetrated the room. Steve watched, horrified but unable to look away as his wife convulsed on the bed.

Almost a full minute passed before the fit ended, leaving her body with a sigh of air. Peggy Carter slumped back against the pillows, completely limp as all fight left her.

***

"We are gathered here today to celebrate the life and accomplishments of Peggy Carter, a remarkable woman who dedicated her life to justice and fighting for what's right, even when that fight proved not to be easy.

"Even before she became the first female super soldier, Peggy proved she could hold her own, both in the war and after it. It is because of her perseverance and bravery, no matter the circumstances, that we honor her tonight."

Grinning ear to ear, Steve looked at Peggy sitting next to him. She smiled back, leaning into his shoulder.

"At what point tonight do we dance?" She whispered in his ear.

"Anytime you like," He promised, and this date, he would keep.

#steggy #steggy fanfiction #steggy au #love #fanfic #marvel #marvel au #peggy carter #steve rogers #tfa #captain america #au #the first avenger #captain america au #mcu #agent carter

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that-one-awkward-anon · 4 years

Text

The Cursed Scribe

[if i have to repost thing one more time i might just kill tumblr with my bare hands]

Steven Scriptor probably had this coming.

With how little he knew about his powers, he should have been extra careful when writing about himself. But of course, he just had to be dramatic and write about how much he wanted to die. It wasn’t how he was expecting to go out, that was for sure. As he fell from the balcony in what seemed like slow motion, his life did indeed flash before his eyes. Well, the important parts did. His first job as a news reporter, watching Morris live for the first time, discovering his powers, how jealous he was of Otis, getting fired… it all spun by in a blur. Maybe if he hadn’t written that stupid story, he would have never discovered this power, and he could have continued living a normal life. ~ Steven adored Morris. Of course, he had never actually talked to him, but he could still admire him from afar. He visited that club almost every day, just for the chance to see the white-clad singer perform. He would just stare, lost in his songs until the next act came on and he’d head back to his crummy apartment. Perhaps he should have just left it at staring. But he was just too moved, and fantasized too much. He needed to get his feelings out somehow! So late one night, he scribbled out a poem. It was teenage level stuff, honestly, nowhere near his best work. But hey, he didn’t have anyone to impress but himself. “One True Love The singer in white had a new song One directed right at him And it was beautiful. The song was about a one true love About how everything about them was perfect And how they were beautiful. Then the singer in white looked at him And he knew the song was made for him And that feeling was beautiful.” Steven forgot all about that poem by the next morning, the embarrassing paper having been crumpled up and thrown across his room after he had gotten it out of his system. And as always, right after work, he went straight from the headquarters to that little club to watch his hero. He hadn’t really connected the dots until halfway into the performance. Morris stopped for a moment to talk about how he had a new song, and how he hoped they’d like it. Then, he started singing about a “one true love”, and how “beautiful” that person was. It took a few seconds, but Steven suddenly realized what was happening, and straightened up significantly. No way. There was no way a sappy poem he had written at midnight was actually being sung about in front of him. This had to be more than a coincidence. He was barely paying attention to the song anymore, and instead left the club and made his way back home the second it was over. Perhaps it really was just a coincidence… but he couldn’t just leave it at that. As soon as he got home, he tore out a sheet of paper from his work notebook and scribbled something down. “We’re very sorry, but Mr. Annus won’t be performing today. Unfortunately, he’s completely lost his voice, and is unable to sing.” There. That was the most specific thing Steven could think of at that point. This time he didn’t just toss the paper away- he folded it up tight and shoved it in his jacket’s pocket. Only then did he go to bed. The next day, Steven couldn’t wait to just leave work. He actually ran out and back to the club the moment he was off the clock, now fidgeting in his seat waiting for Morris to come on. But when the hour struck, instead of the singer, there was a bit of a commotion, and a server nervous came onto the stage. “U-Uh… We’re v-very sorry, but Mr. Annus won’t be performing today. Unfortunately, he’s c-completely lost his voice, and is unable to s-sing,” the man mumbled into the mic. There were groans and mutters throughout the club, but Steven was silent and white as a sheet. He shakily pulled out the sheet of paper and read it over. Save for the stuttering, it was exactly as he had written it down. Once again, he didn’t stick around for much longer, and instead headed back to his apartment. He sat in silence, his mind racing with fast enough to make him dizzy. Whatever he wrote came true. He had no idea where this power had come from, but he had it now. Of course, when he was able to start making coherent thoughts again, he decided to test his limits. “Best Day, Worst Day For Steven Scriptor, this Day was made of pure bliss At the end of the day His boss gave him a raise Just because he could exist For our lovely mayor, though His car got stuck in the snow And there he would freeze In the minus degrees And end his run of the show” There. It was awfully written, but the point came across. If whatever this power was could effect the mayor, he could keep upping the ante to federal stuff. But for now, he simply folded the limerick up and put it in his pocket like before, then once again headed to bed. The next day, Steven’s little experiment had interesting results. There was a massive snowstorm seemingly out of nowhere, which came and went by sunrise. He walked to work anyways, so he wasn’t that affected by it. Halfway into his workday, he got a new job- the mayor had been in a limo that got stuck in the snow, and only now had he been freed. Alright, half of what he had written had come true- the mayor had been stuck, but he didn’t freeze to death. It was a pretty easy story, all things considered, which made the fact that he got a bonus from it all the more ridiculous. It was a good thing to note, however. Everything he had written about himself had come true, but only the nondeadly parts of the mayor’s verse had happened. Which meant that whatever power this was seemed to have a moral code of sorts. Fine by him. He never had any real urge to kill people, it was just a test. He didn’t think he had the balls to try and kill someone anyways. ~ The next couple of months were like a dream. Anytime someone was out of place in his life, Steven could just write a quick poem and fix it. Promotions at his job, a better apartment, a new car- you name it, Steven had given it to himself. There was only one thing he couldn’t fix. The person that had started going up on stage with Morris- Otis Unus. He had heard the other performer once or twice on his way to work, but had never stopped and listened. And all of a sudden, this random guy was up on stage with his hero, instead of him. Perhaps things would change if he could gather the confidence to just go up and talk to the pair. Maybe it could be a threesome? He could write lyrics for them! But no, he was stuck watching from the crowd, jealously slowly but surely building. Jealously was a truly awful thing. It came to him while he was still sitting in that club. If he could affect Morris, could he do the same to Otis? He quickly pulled out his notebook and scribbled something down. “On their way backstage, Otis tripped. He landed right on his face, and with a grunt of pain. Nobody laughed out loud, of course- they loved him. But the chuckles were there, and he knew it. He got up and made his way off the stage, a bit quicker than necessary.” There. Nothing that could cause lasting damage, but the embarrassment would be there for sure. He folded the comment away and turned his attention back to the stage. The next day, just as he had written, Otis tripped on a wire and fell flat on his face at the end of the pair’s show. There were gasps at first, then muted giggling. The man in black quickly gathered himself and ran backstage as the giggles grew louder, but the moment quickly passed. Steven slipped out of the club after that. A tiny part of him felt guilty- he was being petty, and he knew it. But the majority of him was giddy. Sure, he could never be on stage with Morris… but he’d make life hell for the person that could be. And so it went for the next couple of months. It was never anything too damaging- the logical part of Steven knew that Otis had done nothing wrong and that he didn’t deserve any of this. But the dramatic, emotional side? The side that had taken this power and ran with it? That side didn’t care. That black-clad idiot had taken Morris for himself, and he was going to pay, one way or another. Then, all of a sudden, it stopped. Morris was going on stage alone again, and Otis was nowhere to be found. Steven worried for a moment, but he managed to talk himself out of any paranoia. He had never done anything to actually hurt Otis, so whatever had happened wasn’t his fault. Besides, he had eased up on pestering the black-suited man and hadn’t written anything damaging about him in a while. So it couldn’t have been anything he wrote! A month later, news broke that Otis Unus had died. Food poisoning, the doctors said. Every newspaper in the city was reporting the story, and Steven’s place was no different. But, unfortunately, he just couldn’t put his jealously aside for long enough. “FAMOUS SINGER, OTIS UNUS, FOUND DEAD IN HOUSE: POISONING? OR SOMETHING MORE?” Yeah, looking back at it, maybe that assignment should have been given to someone else. Not once in that whole article did Steven write anything positive about the dead man. It boiled down to “he grew up alone, and he died alone, and nobody cares”. Unsurprisingly, that had led to a wave of backlash towards his company, and less than a week later, he was let go. Not that it mattered all too much, as he had spent a year giving himself anything and everything he would ever need. To say he was well off was an understatement. Still, it stung. His job had been the only place where he had friends of any sort, and now that it was gone, he realized how empty his life actually was. It only took two days of unemployment for Steven to be moping in his room all day. That sadness, however, soon turned into anger. How dare he get fired for speaking his mind?! And of course, he was never going to get another job in the journalism world with that article floating around. Without his job, he really was alone. Dammit, life wasn’t fair! About then was when he picked up a pencil and pulled out a notebook for the last time. “The End He fell from the balcony And he was scared Not that he was dying But that nobody cared” After taking a few more seconds to calm down, he crumpled up the middle poem and threw it away. He wasn’t thinking about the consequences at that point, instead storming back to his luxurious bed and falling into a fitful sleep. The next day, the poem had completely left his mind. Instead, he was feeling more refreshed than usual. Maybe writing his feelings had actually helped! He made his way out of his bedroom and to his balcony to get some fresh air, his mind no longer a storm of negativity. He leaned against the bars, taking in the chilly morning air… And then the railing snapped. ~ His death had been pretty pathetic, now that he thought about it. He didn’t have any friends or family outside of his old job, so it took a whole day for someone to even recognize who the corpse with a broken neck and bashed open skull was. But now, Steven was properly alone, and he was genuinely scared. He was stuck in a completely white field, with miles of nothing in all directions. Inside of pajamas, he was wearing what he had usually worn to work, jacket with pens in it and all. That wasn’t the strangest part of his situation, however. Time seemed to not flow the same way here, now did space feel the same. He would be walking in one direction for what felt like days, but never get tired, and never find any kind of marker. After going through the five stages of grief three times in a row, he finally accepted that he was probably in hell. He must have used his powers in a way that was considered evil, and was now cursed to be truly alone forever. That is, until he found a piece of paper. His reaction to seeing a random sheet of scrap paper was probably embarrassing, but he didn’t care. He searched through his pockets for a working pen, then quickly wrote the first thing that came to mind. “Steven asked if he could go home, and the world listened.” Suddenly, he was back in his apartment, laying in his bed. Had that actually worked?! He sat up straight, looked around his room… and felt defeated all over again. He was still wearing his usual clothes instead of pajamas, and a quick glance out of his window led to white nothingness. He was still in this hellish realm. Either way, he had some sort of comfort, even if he knew it was fake. But where to go from here? Well, he could ask about his job, but he doubted anything would actually come from that. But maybe… “Steven asked the world to tell him what he missed, and the world listened.” Suddenly, there was a strange device sitting on his lap. There was a split second of panic- it looked like a typewriter, and those things were heavy. But when his legs decidedly weren’t snapped in half, he could take a few moments to examine it closer. It took a while for him to figure out how to turn it on, but when he did, he was even more confused. It was like one of the huge machines he had seen- the ones that could figure out arithmetic and things like that in an instant- except ten times as small, and much more complex. Well, at least the bottom half still resembled a typewriter. It didn’t take him all that long to figure out what to do, all things considered. Or maybe it did, and he just didn’t feel the time passing. Either way, he figured out how to use this new device, and was understandably amazed. It was the most technologically advanced thing he could have ever dreamed of- something out of science fiction, really. But apparently, this was what he had missed while dead. After a bit more discovery, Steven managed to find his way onto something called “YouTube”. It seemed to be an infinite amount of television shows in one place! It ranged from present-day to videos from before his time, and he watched what felt like every single one, until something hit him. Perhaps someone had recorded Morris singing all those years ago! He quickly went down a rabbit hole of every old recording uploaded that he could find. Unfortunately, there was no mention of the white-clad singer in any of them, and Steven was slowly starting to grow discouraged. All of these videos, and not one mention of his hero? He was about to give up before he noticed a video on the “trending” page. Two men standing in front of a black and white background. One dressed in a black suit, and one in a white suit. They were advertising a new channel: Unus Annus. Steven was torn. He had found Morris again… and Otis was next to him. Sure, they were calling themselves “Mark” and “Ethan”, but he knew it was them. It wasn’t fair! Why had they been brought together again, but he was still alone?! Steven sat in angry silence for a while, before realizing something. Wherever he was now, his powers were still working. And if they had worked on the pair before… A much-too-evil grin started to grow on his face as he thought more. If he still couldn’t have Morris, then Otis couldn’t have Morris! And there was one sure-fire way he knew of to mess with that idiot’s life. He picked up his pen.

#oc writing #really hesitant to add to the unus annus tag #so just that tag

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