#iron galaxy click

[yeyinde]

the soft blue of a pale moon | Yautja x f!Reader

He keeps his claws fixed against the scruff of your neck. Forcing you down, bowed on your knees with your face tucked tight against his massive thigh, breathing in the stale scent of him. Even through the foreignness of it—the sharp burn of oxidising iron, rusted metal, and old, rotting blood—he smells good. Intoxicating. It makes you dizzy. Makes you greedy. For something. Survival, maybe. That instinctual drive, self-preservation, needling in your hindbrain to keep you alive.  Despite your reticence, you angle your chin up, glaring at this creature, this beast. This Cimmerian god of old. Stygian king in his throne of bones, his pretty pet, his plaything, supplicant by his side. You won't ever submit. Ever. 

warnings: noncon/dubcon. captive reader. predator/prey. forced submission. noncon D/s dynamics. forced mating. rough sex/violent sex. broken bones. belly bulge. biting. size difference. mentions of violence. scent kink (slight). marking/scarring (territorially, possessively). alien biology. alien genitalia. female presenting reader (female anatomy).

Yautja terms:Kainde Amedha — hard meat (refers primarily to xenomorphs)

Ooman — human

this is basically a Dark (from the 2010 avp video game lmao) x Reader fic. Yautja is not an OC. but you don't need to know anything at all from the game to read this.

lore:

comics, novels. divine wisdom.

The bed of furs is soft beneath you.

It's an odd juxtaposition compared to the uncanny harshness of the room you've been left in (held captive for days, weeks, months—) with its severe lines and its stark, unfamiliar geometry. The walls stained a strange, unearthly colour of brownish-gold, towering high into a domed ceiling etched with symbols and runes you've yet to decode. Ones you know you never will.

This whole place is otherworldly. Seemingly beyond the scope of science fiction, or what your meagre imagination can dream up. Reality. Fantasy. The two blend together to form this archaic, rustic interior that's somehow far too futuristic for your mind to understand, and yet shaded in use, in age. Space dust. Caught between old and new—new: unknown, unknowable—and utterly mesmerising despite the garishness of what lies outside beyond the edge of the pelts you rest on. 

Adorning the walls are an uncountable number of skulls and bleached white bones. Weaving spines strung up. Spindly, alien vertebrae. Fantastical creatures. Mythological beasts. It's something only the most inspired minds can conjure—

And yet, it all sits within reach. 

(The human skull on the wall, still attached to its spine, is perched over your head like an omen—)

You tear your gaze away from it, sliding over the trophies immortalised in a shrine dedicated to the prowess of the being who took you. An alien. Yautja, you’ve come to learn. Predatory hunters who roam the galaxies in search of the best prey. A race made of warriors with a strict honour code. 

Though—

You don’t know how honourable keeping captives are to their society, but none of the other massive beings had tried to intervene when he had taken you on the ship, hauled over his shoulder like a conquest, beating furious fists into his broad back. They stood back, chittering to themselves in what you know is laughter. Mocking clicks. Low trills. They thought it all so funny, outlandishly so, to see him stalk through the thick haze of fog that blanketed the ground with a yowling ooman clawing futilely at his back. 

(As if your weak, feeble fists could ever hope to maim, to hurt—)

You don't know why he decided to take you. Even now, aeons later as you pass by an unfathomable number of solar systems, all glimmering like crushed gems just beyond the domed window above your bed, you have no idea what brought this on. What made him look at you, and think—

Pet (mine). 

And it's not for a lack of trying, either. But trying to prise anything out of him is near impossible. Chiselling for gold with a plastic spoon. 

It leaves you with only one other villain in this story, and you very readily blame Weyland-Yutani for this mess—dig deeper, explore faster, mine harder—but yourself, more so, for signing your name on the dotted line in the first place. You knew it was a terrible idea from the beginning. Not too many planets are truly desolate these days. Not with those things, xenomorphs, roaming the solar system unhindered. 

Nothing good ever comes from meeting them. Death, inevitably, follows. 

Though, comparatively, you'd rather be sprawled out—naked, collared—on a bed of strange, soft fur than being used as a breeding sow for a race of parasitic monsters hellbent on devouring the galaxy. 

Panic is white hot, electric. The thought alone makes you lash out, a paroxysm of pure adrenaline, fear. Your hand flies to your chest instantly. Fingers knotting between your heaving breasts, feeling around for any movement under your skin. A beat. Several. All erratic. Thumping harshly against your ribcage. And—

Nothing. Just the erratic flutter of your heart, bragging senselessly in your chest. 

(stupid thing—)

Of course. Of course. 

Out of everyone on the ill-fated expedition, somehow only you survived. Holed up in the armoury, listening to those serpentine creatures tear into the flimsy metal of your ship. Taking out the ones who managed to sneak in with a well-placed shot to their domed heads. Hiding in a corner waiting for them to find you, wondering if the last few bullets should be used on them or yourself. 

It was days of that. Of piling these awful monsters high, and hoping the corrosive blood didn't ruin the hull to make an opening wide enough for them all to pour in, overwhelming you with your dwindling ammo. 

Breathing in ragged breaths, all the while listening to the hisses skirting across metal, grazing talons down your skull. They liked to taunt you, a fact that nearly drove you to the brink when all the meandering words uttered around about their hive-like simplicity, their insectoid stupidity, fell apart. These creatures are deadly, cunning. 

And smart.

They adapted easily to your patterns, overcoming your bullets and your patchwork ingenuity with ease. The only thing that kept them at bay was the metal being too thick to penetrate with their claws. 

(And you watched, helplessly, as they realised this after the second week, and sacrificed the smaller drones to splash their corrosive blood across the thickened alloy, melting it slowly down to nothing—)

They would have gotten you soon enough. 

Had to, really. Because the Queen was waiting. You heard her hisses in your head. Felt her in the air, disturbed and agitated, around you. Pulsing like a heartbeat. Hammering against your resolve with each nightmare she pressed into the folds of your subconsciousness. Luring you to her. Showing you the wonders of giving in, granting her access. 

Coming home—

You don’t know how anyone could withstand her influence. The siren’s call from down the hall, showing you image after image of her children curling protectively over you. Nestled in a tight embrace. Safe and sound from the howling winds and the scorching sun, from the awful hisses outside, and the horrific sound of metal giving way, melting into a puddle on the floor. 

It was madness. One you wanted nothing more than to give into—

And then they came. 

Appearing out of thin air just as your bullet pierced her jaw when she finally came for you, her child—

She fell, taking out several of the others with her—ones not on your list of alien species to look out for—and left behind nothing but a passel of intimidating creatures and you. 

He, their leader, was the first to find you. Grabbing you by the scruff of your neck like a misbehaving kitten, and pulling you close. Taking stock, you think, of the bodies behind you and the holes in the Queen made from your gun. 

An uneasy, stifling silence fell, broken by a series of drawn-out, low clicks. 

You realised then, right as he bent down and tore the claw off of a dead xenomorph, what these beings were. Hunters. Predators. It was rare to see them on earth, but you’d heard of several run-ins with these creatures whenever humans decided to mettle with their preferred prey. 

It was even rarer that any human survived the encounter. 

He cocked his head to the side before pressing the bloody tip to your cheek, branding you with the mark of the blooded. One that matched his own. Purposefully done, of course. 

His crest on your skin, unique as a thumbprint, is the loudest proclamation of his claim. Anyone from any number of clans that roam the heavens in search of prey, of hard meat, know, immediately, that you belong to him. That you bear his mark, branded with the scar of his respect. 

(Respect—such a weighty thing to carry across your shoulders, too. Something you'd been eager to obtain, hungering for it all your life. And now—

The blunt, almost suffocating heft of it feels permanent in a way you can't even begin to unravel.)

He'd taken you, then. Despite thinking of humans as soft meat, cattle, he'd thrown you over his shoulder and marched you to his quarters where he stripped the xenomorphs of their skin, and hung their bones on the wall—your trophies. Sat next to his own. A bold display. A show of respect, however rare—and unwanted. 

And then he'd stared at you through the black slits in his horned mask. Just watching. Studying. It took a great deal of composure not to weep. To beg for—

For something. 

Leniency, maybe. For whatever crimes you inadvertently perpetrated against them. For being here, of all places, because of the insatiable greed of Weyland-Yutani. 

For believing in them in the first place, maybe. Following, desperately, in the footsteps of your fallen idol. 

It never mattered much in the end, though. After a careful, blank scrutinisation, he'd simply reached down, talons digging painfully into your skin, and tossed you into the softest bed of furs—of pure, hedonistic luxury you'd ever felt—and followed you down with an inhuman growl that rattled through your bones. That seemed to echo throughout the ship, shaking the walls, and trembling through the floors.

The kicking and screaming never happened. Futility paints a desperate picture, doesn't it? And in those moments, now lost to time, you knew, somehow, that it was useless. Is useless. 

He wanted you. Him, the captain of this ship you've been left to rot inside of. The one who knows your language, but refuses to speak it. Preferring, instead, to let the guttural clicks and the chirring of his foreign, unspeakable mother tongue take precedence. 

The one who hunts, viciously, and wears his trophies around his neck. Strung up for all to see as they dangle across his broad, mottled chest. Black. Endlessly so. His colouring is shades darker than your own galactic canvas where midnight itself spills across satin, but the comparison itches in your chest, rotting along with your sickening heartbeat. 

And you think he knows this. Because despite his fury as he slashes his way through the oddest assortment of extraterrestrial creatures you've ever laid eyes upon, he's cunning. Smart. Adaptable. 

It's this, the strange, almost preternatural patience he exudes which keeps you where you lay now. The innate knowledge that he's a primal hunter, one who uses both instinct and a keen, calculative sense of awareness to ensnare his victims wholly, unquestionably. One who'd undoubtedly hunt you down to the very edges of the star system you escape into until you're bent down on both knees, supplicant to his prowess.

His little pet. 

And oh, how he luxuriates in it. This little moniker given to you by his clanmates seems to make him preen each time you hear the familiar, rasping click of their scornful mockery. 

Soft ooman. His ugly little trophy. 

He snaps his mandibles at them in response, but keeps his claws fixed against the scruff of your neck. Forcing you down, bowed on your knees with your face tucked tight against his massive thigh, breathing in the stale scent of him—ozone, leather, spice, and a potent musk of mildew and loam, humus; the stagnant waters of a swamp teeming with algae blooms. Even through the foreignness of it—the sharp burn of oxidising iron, rusted metal, and old, rotting blood—he smells good. Intoxicating. It makes you dizzy. Makes you greedy. For something. Survival, maybe. That instinctual drive, self-preservation, needling in your hindbrain to keep you alive. 

Despite your reticence, you angle your chin up, glaring at the creature, the beast. This Cimmerian god of old. Stygian king in his throne of bones. 

You won't ever submit. Ever.

But you can play the part—if only until he eases his grip, allowing you to slip away again. 

With a glower, you lay open kisses along the hard, leathery ridges of his black scute, chasing the oily tang of his musk on your tongue. 

The feel of your soft mouth makes his thighs tense—all firm, corded muscle; raw, primal power sheathed in a thick, aggregate pelt of marbled colours. It feels like warm stone under your fingers. Oiled leather. Crocodilian. 

His maw opens, and the sound that tumbles out is full of fractured syllables and inhuman chirrs, gutteral crepitate. It's not something your human tongue could ever expect to replicate, and your lips tug downward in a sharp frown, your displeasure at this game of his growing by the minute. His staunch refusal to speak your language despite clearly knowing it—and knowing it well—is aggrevating, if only for the sole reason that he kidnapped you. That you being here, listening to him, is not of your own free will. 

The scorn is thick on your tongue, the vitriolic rebuttal taking shape already, but he silences you when his thumb grazes your jaw. The air in your lungs tumbles out in a shudder when you feel the unnaturally soft, yet firm, skin of his palm slide around the back of your nape. 

The fight in you is numbed by the realisation that his hand alone spans the entire length of your shoulders, now curled possessively around your neck. Fingers overlapping, folding over each other easily into a perfect collar. 

His hand closing over your throat draws your eye to the ringed gorget he wears around his neck. 

The comparison makes you sick. 

The talons on his fingers are warm, powder-soft like the beak of a bird, when they tap against your throat as you swallow, thumb still stroking along the ridge of your jaw. It's shockingly intimate, and the humanness of it settles in your stomach like a sinking stone. Granite needling against soft tissue. Mercury bleeding into your guts. You hate it. 

Hate how much you don't hate it. 

The juxtaposition fills you with a fit of vicious anger. You don't want to seek comfort from this beast. 

Your gaze drops, resting churlishly on the thick skin of his belly. Despite the raw, indomitable strength that coils through his muscles, malleable obsidian, when he sits, the softness of his belly pudges out, jutting over the brass-coloured belt of his loincloth. 

It's—

Another marker of his uncanny likeness to the human form. 

But where you might have expected to see coarse hair, his lower belly is sparsely covered by a dense, thick cropping of quills trailing along his abdomen. They feel like softened polymer under your fingertips, but catch on your skin if you're not careful, the sharpened edge digging in. It's not as painful as the press of his nails, but itches like a thorn. Needles of a cactus. 

They stretch upward. Arching along in a perfect mockery of a happy trail that stretches to form a heavy bushel on his chest, small whiskers on his chin, his brow, dotted along the crest of his crown where his tresses fall. 

Dragging your gaze up this path leads you back to piercing amber set deep inside the bracket of his skull. They seem to glow, an unnatural light spilling out of their sockets, highlighting the rigid lines of his bones. 

He's watching you. Always. 

(You blame the rapid thud of your heart on fear.)

Knowing he has your attention now, he makes the noise again. Lower this time. A snarling rasp breaking apart between his flexing mandibles. The sound akin to the rumble of an avalanche; the roaring screams of a forest on fire. 

You have no hope of ever mimicking it—not without drinking down acid to corrode your vocal cords first. The anger that lashes through you is a whipcord cutting its tip against your resolve. 

“What are you saying? I don’t understand—”

His massive crown dips, mandibles clicking. His thumb presses into your skin. Intentional. Pointed. 

It's then you piece together that what he's saying isn't a command or a taunt, but rather his name. One you have no hope of ever repeating unless you want to turn your vocal cords into tatters, strips of unusable tissue. Wasting your words on his name is not something you think you would ever want to do. 

And so, you don't. 

Maybe it's to spite him. Or to put some semblance of distance between yourself and the alien holding you hostage, touching the skin of your neck with a soft sort of reverence you hadn't known he was capable of. Whatever the reason, you twist the ugliness inside of your chest, the rage and sorrow, into a brutal knife, wedging it into the scant space between your bodies, prying them apart in a shallow victory. 

He's a hideous thing, isn't he? This brute. 

Raw power. Untameable malice. All hidden under this pantomime of honour. How laughable, really, to think these beings know anything of the sort. Or maybe it's just him in particular. The outlier of the lot. One with a confounding obsession with ooman pets. 

Ugly, you think, staring up at him. With his sunken eyes, and his mane-like crown. His tusks clicking together in quiet pleasure, smug in his throne of metal and bone. 

Ugly, like the mossy green surface of a still swamp. Stagnant waters. A black lake. Shrouded by a dense, impenetrable cropping of weeping willows and mangroves. Shading the water so much that the algae blooms turn black like tar. 

Dark, like him. 

And so, you whisper it. Not his name, but this vindictive moniker you pieced together thinking of the lingering swamplands covered in moss and peat.

“Dark.”

In response, his nails rake over the back of your neck in both a warning, a reprimand; the same harsh touch used on an unruly cub by its mother. The comparison makes you bristle, hissing out a series of cruel jeers at him, but he barely pays it any mind, too busy chittering to himself now, humoured instead of insulted by this tangentially human name you've bestowed upon him. 

The juxtaposition, the humanness of it all, is almost too much. 

How can a creature that ripped a xenomorph’s jaw apart with his bare hands have these soft rolls along his midsection. Feel humour the same way your friends back home might have at your taunting barbs? 

The contrast is nearly comical. Sour. 

You don't like it when he's too human. When he scratches his warm talons along your nape absently. Thoughtless. A little twitch of his hand offering threadbare comfort in an unconscious whim. When he's tactile with you. Tensile. Gentle. Touching your skin with an exploratory sense of curiosity, of fondness. Laying you down on the furs with a tenderness that is at complete odds to the rough, demanding way he'll inevitably mate with you. 

Mate. Because your coupling is always animalistic. Brutal. There's no tenderness to be found when he presses you into the furs, rutting into you like a beast. Growling, snarling. Making you take, and take, and take until he's satiated—

But you think you like it that way. 

Especially when he's fresh off of a hunt. 

When he fucks you into the mattress with nothing but harrowing, inhuman roars spilling from deep within his heaving, blood-drenched chest. Guttural snarls. Harsh, demanding. Moulding your body to his liking. Grasping you in a crushing clutch, and drawing your aching hips back to swallow down the intense thickness of his cock as it buries deep—impossibly so—inside of you. 

You like him angry. Like him rough. It rents the moments when he's docile with you; bifurcating the peculiar sheen in his beady eyes when he lifts his mask off, placing it on the metal mantle with all the others, content to just stare at you. Looking, watching. Assessing. 

It's the unnatural stillness of his gaze that sets you on edge. The heavy, unerring way he takes you apart with nothing but deep amber drilling through your skin. 

Through because you've pieced enough together to know he can't see you the same way you can see him. That all the sharp angles of your features are hidden. The infinitesimal detailing lost to some wavelength your human eyes can't begin to take apart. 

He hides this weakness by touching you endlessly. Long, sharp talons dragging over the bridge of your nose. The dip in your chin, the angles of your jaw. The plumpness of your cheeks. 

He buries himself inside of you, and plays an exploratory game of committing your topography to memory with the soft, thick palms of his hands. Lets his long, rubbery tresses brush across your face as he sets a maddening pace that promises to one day snap your pelvis in half again, eyes glued to the centre of you where you burn the hottest. 

Between these moments is where you linger the longest. Oscillating between a pet or a mockery of a queen; supplicant to its owner, it's King. Head resting on a terribly massive thigh as he commandeers a ship that makes all the technological advancements of your home world seem rudimentary and crude. A child's rendition of a spaceship brought to life with broken crayons. Left there to bask in his prowess, his glory. Surrounded by artefacts and trophies of all his kills—but considerably lesser than the vastness of his quarters where he keeps his most prized possessions. 

Yourself included. Polished diamond perched on a satin pillow. 

One he keeps dressed up in armour, in plating; decorated in the traditional fabrics of his own kind—mesh netting that keeps you perfectly comfortable, acclimated to the unbearable swelter of their ship, the temperature almost too much for your fragile skin to handle; breastplates over your chest; a bronze loincloth with intricate webbing and a heavy belt to keep it in place. 

Adorned with pretty gems and metal bands around your neck, your arms. His mark on your skin. 

Belly bare, and offered no shoes. But this fact is not a pointed statement about your imprisonment or your status amongst them—it's just for the simple fact that he doesn't wear them, and so: neither should you. The axiom is so irrefutable, that the bare, gnomic revelation is almost obvious in hindsight. 

Obvious. In the same way a lightning strike is. Being torn to pieces for getting between a mother bear and her cubs. Falling off a cliff after dancing too close to the edge. Trying to swim in aerated water. 

Obvious. It's all so obvious, isn't it? 

You spend most of your days in this liminal labyrinth. Lost in your own mind as space flickers past the large window in front of you. Pinpricks of light in the distance of an endless, unfathomable black nothingness. Perched on the precipice of complacency and dread. Never knowing when he'll grow bored of this game, and turn you from a living emblem to a skull on his mantle like all the rest. 

If, of course, you're even worthy enough of a place there.

You just don't know. And that's the crux of it all. Not knowing. Kept on the brink. Shrouded in uncertainty. 

You'd think it intentional if you hadn't seen the way he preens under your stare sometimes. Flexing in his metal throne, showing off his array of scars; the trinkets he picked up on worlds unknown. The open, wanting way he regards you—this little human, barely a scrap of thing compared to him, to the sheer vastitude of his bulk. Hungry. Possessive. Always snapping his mandibles at the other Yautja who get too close, claws raking down flesh, spilling luminescent green blood across the floor. Injuring his own kind for attempting to touch you—

The King’s conquest. 

But his ire doesn't abate for you, either. You've learned the hard way what it means to try and flee from his grasp, and while it wasn't nearly as bloodied, as brutal, as it was for his kin, it was terrifying. 

You thought you were toeing the line before when you'd dig your human deep into his thickened hide as he kept you tucked to his side, on your knees for him; or when you tug so harshly at his tresses that green blood leaks from his skull and he howls in pain, but you realised then that you were wrong. That those little moments of mutiny were akin to foreplay to him. Small, inconsequential. Spilling his blood earned you marginal amounts of his respect, and he showed it by dumping you on his bed, and burying himself inside of you until you'd passed out into the furs. Overwhelmed. Punished. But it wasn't. You weren't being taught obedience by his hand, but rather getting a playful slap for your antics. 

He'd snatched you by your throat in an instant. His warm, soft palm enclosing over the fragile length of your neck with too much to spare for you to ever be comfortable. Long fingers overlapped across your nape, and he'd heaved you forward, slamming you into the hard plains of his body with a growl. Talons prickling into your skin, spilling blood down your back. He'd snarled so loud that the ship seemed to quiver, quaking under the sheer weight of his anger. 

Amber eyes drilled into you, widened with the fever of his fury, burying deep into your being. Your head wrenched side to side in a slow, agonising jolt as he assessed you. Taking stock of the silly pest that tried to run from him. That had the gall to slink off like an insect scurrying over his feet. Dishonourable.

This, though. 

Running from him—

Well.

In that moment, the air wrought with the metallic tang of his indomitable rage, you had thought: this was it. He was going to kill you. Flay your skin from muscle, and hang you in the rafters for the rest to gawk at. Easy prey. A fickle kill. 

And with everything you'd gleaned about this strange tribe and their odd customs, it would have been a mercy. 

But he didn't. 

Doesn't. 

His mandibles flare open, stretching out wide across his boxy jaw. The pinpricks of his teeth gleam in the hazy, saturated light of the ship; white, jagged peaks against fluttering, angry red. It shudders as he growls. The decibels pitched low, unfathomably so. You catch the spear of it rattling through his body, the rasping snark bellowing from the depths of his chest, and shaking the air around you. You can feel it reverberate from his flesh, the tight grip he has on you a conduit funnelling his anger straight into the middle of your throat. 

It reminds you of a territorial crocodile bellowing in the shallow water, making it vibrate and splash around him as the shattering frequency ripples outward. 

It's terrifying. Electric.

You feel it rattle through your bones. Feel the ripples trembling through your flesh. 

It's primal, this fear. Animal. 

But in the end, he doesn't kill you. 

You're simply tossed over his shoulder like a rowdy, misbehaving pest, and taken back to his room, much to the amusement of his gathering tribemates peeking out of their room to see their leader tend to his wilful, misbehaving pet. He strips you of your armour with a careless, almost cruel disregard before pushing you back on the bed. There's a rigid line to his shoulders you'd never seen before; a damning flex to his jaws that make you shake, quivering in fear. 

You know better than to speak, to beg. All it gets you in the end is a mocking series of clicks that you know enough to recognise as laughter. Instead, you take your punishment with your chin in the air, unwilling to submit the way he so clearly wants you to. 

Your supercilious scorn has his mandibles widening in anger once again, and he exercises his control by shoving you face-first into the bed, and burying his tusks into the meat of your shoulder, keeping you still under him. 

It's a clear warning. Move, it says, and his tusks will catch on your spine and rip it clean from your back. You still. Quiet. A prey animal lying prone, unmoving, at the feet of a chuffing predator as he mounts you from behind, rutting into you with a savagery that renders you into nothing more than a ruined heap under his bulk. 

For your attempted escape, you end up with more of his scars on your body, indents in the shape of his flared mandibles on your shoulders, and a fractured pelvis. It could be worse. You could've died. 

Should have, maybe. 

(is that a plea? an orison? 

and if so, why is it drenched in misery?)

And there is something vicious about the way he tends to your broken bones after, plunging the needle into your skin despite your howling, or the way you thrash. It's pure agony. The sensation how you imagine it must feel to be burned alive from the inside out. 

That, you think, is why he has no qualms about leaving you alone now. Wandering off, chasing trophies and honour on a planet just outside of the domed window above your bed. A vicious, red world tidally locked around a small dwarf. One half shrouded endlessly in black while the other burns, charred from the intensity of its star. In the middle, you know, is a small strip. A habitable zone, if only just. 

It's a place where a large, lumbering predator roams. One with towering antlers akin to the moose on earth, and jagged, spiked teeth protruding from its maw. The length is too much like a Sabre-toothed tiger for you to ever want to meet it face-to-face in the dark. 

Proper prey. A worthy trophy, they consider it. 

And, from the chittering you picked up, it seems that xenomorphs—kainde amedha—have found this place as well. 

The thought of them down there—spreading, growing, infecting—fills you with a potent sense of dread, one that gnaws on your insides with serrated teeth. Vicious and ugly, it lingers in crevasses where it pokes and prods at your fear, and your worries, until they split open, leaking putrid rot all over. 

It’s not that you’re worried about him. Not at all. 

(despite the nagging in your chest that whispers you’re a liar when you press your face into his side of the lavish bed of furs, greedily inhaling as much of his lingering musk as you can—)

He's gone off on hunts many times since you've been taken, and most of them end up on worlds already broken apart, infested, by those parasites. 

The notable difference is that brushes with them in the past never incurred much worry from you. If anything, you think you rather preferred it. Enjoyed the respite that came when he was gone, giving you a meagre ounce of freedom to think about all the (futile) ways you could escape. 

And mostly waiting. Waiting for someone at Weyland-Yutani to notice the glaring absence of one of their engineers. 

How laughable, really. Its echo is a false prophet whispering poison into your head, telling you that things will be over soon, that the higher-ups care less about profit margins than a whole fleet that went missing under garish circumstances on a planet you're soon beginning to think you never should have been sent to at all. 

Saves money on wages, you suppose. And the expense of sending a rescue fleet in to investigate costs more than your yearly salary. 

The bold, unignorable truth in that is a cruel, twisting knife to your agency. To the lingering remnants of your humanity, and worst of all, your hope. 

No one is coming. You've known this for a while now. The toxic hisses are part of the reason why you decided to try your luck on a massive, earth-like planet the first (and only) time you've tried to run. Because without that, without this fraudulent hope, what else are you left with if not him?

And now—

It's been an uncountable number of days. Weeks. 

Time in interstellar orbit is inconsequential. The beings themselves—yautja, you remember him hissing; garbled words mangled in his throat, and feel the burn in yours when you try to echo it in his tongue—have no reason to keep time, it seems. And even if they did, it's doubtful you would be able to interpret its abstract meaning. 

But even without traditional clocks or human measures and scales of time, you know that he's been gone much longer than before. Agitation seems to simmer in the air. The yautja—unblooded younglings; juveniles in their comparably archaic youth—that come to deliver your food seem—

Restless. 

Their maskless faces whisked in agitation. Shoulders set in a tense line. Eyes skewed toward the vast windows of the mothership, fraught with an eager sort of intensity. 

You know, first-hand, how brutal their hierarchy tends to be, and have seen Dark use a brute, savage dominance over the younger, disrespectful, ones who ignored his warning in the past. The amalgamation, then, of their excitement and their uncertainty screams one thing: 

he should have been back by now. 

And it—

It does something to you. 

Changes things, maybe. Skews your perspective. 

Because the reality is this: 

As much as you hate your circumstances, you're under no compunction that Dark isn't the sole reason you've been left, untouched, for so long. Why you're allowed to stay alive; to linger in his shadow, trailing after him like a lost dog. And you're barely certain that Dark won't turn around and kill you when the whim strikes him, much less his compatriots. His clanmates. 

It leaves two brutal truisms for you to contend with: that you need him; and that without him, you're dead. 

In that, you find there's almost too much to think about. 

So—

You lean back, staring up at the pale blue moons outside of your prison, and think of nothing because if you can't see the pendulum, if you don't stare down into the maw of the pit, then you can pretend neither are really there at all. 

You wake from a restless slumber to the door opening with a mechanised whirr, the rasp of heavy metals sliding against each other filling the air. A plume of thick fog billows up in response, shrouding the entrance in dense white. 

The cloud conceals their identity, but it doesn't matter much. No one has access to these chambers. No one but him. 

The long, sharpened talons on his toes clink against the floor as he approaches. Each footfall makes your heart jump, scattering in a strange, off-kilter rhythm. 

Through the fog, he appears. Battleworn, and filthy. Splotches of dulled green blood cover his body from head (where you note a few tresses have been ripped off, some at the crown where a pock gapes open, deep forest green, and others at the ends) to toe. The majority of it is covered in the low, angry light of the glowing metal, the colour of molten rock. It's shielded from your prying eyes as he moves forward, strides purposeful as he lugs his wares over the threshold. 

He comes to a stop at the foot of the bed, broad chest heaving with each breath he takes through the mask still on his face. You take stock of him as he stills, cataloguing each change to his appearance now—a new scar down the length of his chest, blistered and scabbed over from the healing salve they carry on their hunts. Part of it is hidden under a thick patch of burnt skin. The splatter whipping over his lower belly, and raising the toughened skin up half an inch. 

The infliction of both are immediately recognizable in their unmistakable pattern. 

The slash of a xenomorph’s claw ripping through skin, shredding through it like paper; and the jagged, rough burn of their blood as it rained down, unhinged, on bare flesh. 

He fought quite the battle, you note, and pretend the rapidness of your breath doesn't reek of relief. 

His hard-earned victory sits in his hands. 

The skull of a queen. 

The sickly white already polished and primed, ready for its place on his mantle. It should be there already. Should have been his first stop. Per tradition. 

But he breaks it by standing before you now, covered in grime and dried blood. Reeking of stale sweat. Of rot. And holding his wares in his hand for you to see. To take note of. He waits even though you know it costs him a great deal of effort to stand here, beaten, bruised, scarred, burnt as he is. Half of it is the same, undeniable stubbornness that they all seem to inherit; a weaponised sense of pride. The other—

Well.

The significance of this moment, of this break in a sacred routine, isn't lost on you, despite your best efforts to pretend otherwise. As much as you want to ignore it, it itches behind your ribs, pulsing like an infectious wound. 

It's only when he sways slightly in exhaustion, the movement almost indiscernible if you hadn't been watching him so intently, do you release him from this strange moment. Bowing your head down in quiet, muted submission; a reverent surrender to his indomitable prowess. 

This gentle, almost desultory yielding doesn't seem to click at first. He tilts his head down slightly, gazing at you through the black slits in his mask, seemingly uncomprehending as he takes in the sight of you—this errant little human who caused him nothing but trouble, offered nothing but mocking respect—bowing down to him after an indefinite time fighting to free yourself from under his thumb. 

Until—

It does. 

The massive, bleached skull of the queen is shoved in the air in a sudden chirr, pitched to the ceiling as he stomps his feet on the ground in an effort to widen his stance. Knees bent, he throws his head back, and lets out a ravenous, blood-curdling roar of victory. 

It bludgeons into you. The force of it winding when it hits, bruising along your skin in a throbbing ache. 

This doesn't so much as feel like toppling over the precipice, but already being caught in an unstoppable freefall. 

(one you're not sure will be an indefinite fall to the stagnation, stasis; or will send you crashing down to the jagged rock at the bottom of this vertiginous drop. 

the one thing you are certain of is this:

it's much too late to go back when you've already lept off the edge.)

—and so, the pit it is.

His thumbs pitch under the board curve of his mask, grazing the soft underside of his boxed chin. Carefully, he lays down a single finger at a time, resting it against the smooth surface before slowly lifting it off his face. 

When the humid air hits his flesh, his mandibles flare out. Flexing. An unconscious response, you now know, after being folded against his mouth to fit inside the helmet for so long. Joints aching. Muscles hinged with disuse. 

It's with this motion that you notice the absence of his left, lower mandible. The stump a mangled mess of cauterised flesh. It's ugly. Atrocious, even. The scars crisscrossing against moulted skin of pale amber and black are a harrowing emerald smear, an awful amalgamation of dried blood and gnarled tissue. 

The shock of it is dulled under the weight of his success, and it's then that you know you're too far gone to ever go back. Where there should be pity, and—shamefully—disgust, all you feel is an overwhelming sense of borrowed pride. Chiselled from the staunch set of his shoulders, the flex of his muscles, as he openly preens under your stare. Angling his chin downward, giving you a better glimpse of his battle scars. A hard-earned victory. 

A queen is no easy feat, after all. 

His eyes find yours in blood-red gloom. Burning amber, chiselled into the canyons of his unique, unmistakable topography, seems to drill, intensely, into you. They stray, travelling down the length of your nude body, barely covered by the pelts of his conquests. 

You spare a thought to the idea that seeing you this way, wearing nothing at all but his kills, is what makes his broad chest expand suddenly, shoulders pulling back as he preens. Puffing his plumage in a heady pride, a deep satisfaction that runs bone deep. 

Waiting for him, you think. Dressed only in the hide he skinned with his bare hands. 

He rumbles suddenly. Bellowing out a low, steady growl between his sharpened teeth. This noise is unlike anything you'd ever heard before—deep, unfathomably so; but hollow. It echoes, reverberating from his chest in a timorous pitch. 

You could almost mistake it for a leonine pur. 

He stalks towards you, and each step ignites a war within you. The urge to flee from this predator is fierce. Instinctual. It burns through you with a vicious force, but in that rippling intensity, kindling burns in the scorch marks left behind. 

Just as potent as the urge to run is, the want, the desire, to roll over and submit to this massive, powerful creature rages, blistering through you. 

But you force yourself to stay still. To wait as he moves, seamlessly, to you. Lighter now that he's stripped himself of the wrist gauntlets, the cannon mounted to his shoulder, his trophies, his kills—the dangling skulls from around his neck, and waist. The belt and loincloth were the first to go, freeing himself to display his immodesty, completely at ease in his own nudity. The thermal netting peeled off next, and dropped into a pile by his mantle. The chill—if a near-constant swelter could ever be considered such a thing—made his jaws flare out in the only sign of discomfort he would ever give, flexing under the slow acclimation to this balmy heat that clings to air. 

The heat, though—

Such a relentless thing. 

You feel the humidity burn through you as he walks, unashamedly bare, to you. An incredible length of skin unveiled for your prying eyes, glinting a devastating obsidian in the pale luminescence of the locked moons just outside the window. 

In this sparse light that trickles in, you let yourself grow bold, greedy, for the fill of him, and let your gaze trail down the pockets of quills dropping down his chest, his belly, until you meet the thick thatch on his groin. It's here where your breath catches. Hitching loudly in your throat as he comes to a standstill within your reach. 

As human as he sometimes appears—usually in the most inopportune times—you can't deny the obviousness in his extraterrestrial anatomy compared to yours, to human morphology. Birdbeak warm claws, tusk tips on mandibles, leathery skin connected through a series of irregular polygonal shapes in mossy black and blazing amber, baleen teeth sharpened to needlepoints—you would be remiss to think him human in anything other than silhouette. 

But arguably, the biggest shock (outside of his maw) is, of course, his cock. 

Softened, it's kept tucked away inside of a slightly bulging cloaca shaded in the same dark green hue as his outer arms, back, and legs. A dense cluster of quills sit in a thatch around it, protruding near his black, pebbled scute. It's firmer than you'd expected it to be, but softens near the opening where his cock emerges, intimidatingly long, thick. The fattened length of him, too, is foreign. 

The end tapers into a fleshy point. Along his shaft are barbs, small ridges that resemble the scute covering his body, if only softer. The reminder of them makes you tremble, skin heating. Feverish. It's indescribable, really. The way they drag along your sensitive flesh on the outstroke, the sensation dizzying. 

Covering his flesh is an oily, slick substance, and it's really only this natural lubricant that even allows taking the full length of him inside of you possible. The sheen of it glints in the light when he flexes his muscles, and steps closer to the bed, smearing slick against his thighs. Your mouth waters, flooding with the veracity of your insatiable want.  

(You hate him. Hate him. Want so him so badly that it feels like you're burning from the inside out—)

The push-pull of your submission, still at war with your innate sense of self, dims, quieting when he reaches the edge of the bed, cock in full view. The jut of it, now fully extended from his sheath, hangs, heavy and thick, between his legs, bobbing with his movements, twitching in his growing excitement. Prespend, slightly more watery in texture compared to a human man, gathers at the opening, dripping down to the floor beneath his feet. A long, pearlescent strand clings from his weeping slit, dropping to land on the flesh near his knee. 

The sight of it shouldn't be as sinful as it is—you’ve yet to find god amongst the stars and you doubt, very much, you ever will—but seeing the thick glob of his desire spill, leaking steadily from his twitching cock, fills you with a heady sense of want. Desire. 

He hasn't touched himself at all. Content, almost, to stare at you, head cocking to the side as his beady amber eyes drill into your lower belly, fixed on the spot where you burn the hottest. The heat signature you give off, blistering; red-hot, is probably the biggest appeal to a creature like him who sees in shades of yellows and reds. The mismatch of your complexion, the nude state of your body, is inconsequential to him when at your core, you're molten. And all for him. 

He knows this, too. Knows your body well enough to see the unmistakable burn of your desire. Your desperation. The slick growing between your parted thighs turns into a heavy, hot flood; pulsing full of electricity. The depth of your need grows increasingly uncomfortable the longer he waits, watching. You want him. Want this massive beast who stole you away, who held you down and made you take him, made you submit. 

And he wants you back. This Stygian king cut from ashlar, limned in shadows, wants you just as much—if not more. Went out of his way to burrow past your pitiful defences to bury himself as deeply as he could, rearranging your humanity into a likeness of his image; branding you with his mark, dressing you in clothes tailor-made to fit. Giving you the gift of his prowess—bones, skulls: trophies from the most fearsome predators in the galaxy left at your altar—in this mating dance, this outré ritual. 

His desire for you is overwhelming. Dangerous. Your hips twinge at the reminder of when he exercised his punishment, exiguous as it was compared to his sheer strength, smarting with the phantom burn of fractured bones as he gave in, infinitesimally, to this voracious yearning that smoulders, a constant ember, in the sunken depths of his eyes. 

Something surges through you at the thought of him holding back as much as he has, at the way he thickens just at the sight of your blood red need. It's a strange amalgamating of animalism (pure, unquantifiable primalism, bestial in its savagery; feral), and a heightened degree of pride—the sort that leaves you feeling godlike, peerless: transcendent, in the very essence of the word. 

He wants you. You. 

And in that, the vestiges of your control cessate. 

Submission, you find, feels too much like finding sanctuary amidst a raging wildfire.

In response, he trills. The thundering bellow vibrates through the air. An unmistakable pur of a beast successfully conquering its mate. 

He moves—soundless and surprisingly agile for such a mountainous creature; prodigious down to his every atom—and makes a slow, aching crawl to meet you on the bed. His knees, the size of your skull, press down first, making the basin of fur dip under the enormity of his heft. Encompassed in his shadow even with him kneeling before you, it makes the absurdity in your sizes more pronounced. Thighs thicker than the trunks of fir trees. Arms the width of your legs. His chest is the span of your own, just duplicated thrice. 

Dark is a beastly thing up close. 

There's a thrum in your throat; a heady pulse, throbbing with adrenaline cut by dormant fear. As if sensing death so close by, an atavistic caterwaul begins in your hindbrain, screaming at you to run, roll over, submit, play dead—the flickering of these prey responses an instinctual deluge that you quell, half-heartedly, with the knowledge that there's nowhere to go. Nowhere to run. 

He'll find you. Even if he has to hear the star system apart to do it. 

As if omnipotent to these weeping tendrils of animal fear, his broad chest trembles as he lets out a shallow pur. A softened bellow. The growl of a prowling cat on the Savannah. 

You shiver, fisting the fur in your slick palms until it bulges up between whitening knuckles. 

“Please,” is all you say, and you don't even know if this particular word registers to him at all. He never responded in the past to it (or stop, don't, no) outside of the rare occasion when he kept his helmet on, and mocked you with the garbled mimicry as he buried himself as deep inside of you as he could go. 

This time, though, his mandibles twitch. His maw gapes open, displaying an egregious set of terrifying teeth, and the flutter of his throat grows, undulating in jerking pulses of flesh, sliding over each other until—

Puh–le’e–suh—

It's butchered beyond recognition. Maimed in the flex of his corded, baleen throat. But the intention is there, and the implication more so. 

He spoke. 

And it's a broken, devastating mockery of your mother tongue, but the force of it all is a blow, a bludgeon unlike anything you'd ever felt. 

A whirlwind of emotions rage through you, all congealing into a muddled, indiscernible mess. It slips through your fingers, featherlight, but he doesn’t give you a moment to gather them together between your fists. 

His tresses fall over his broad shoulders as he prowls forward, tiring of this epoch already. The long, tubular strands frame you in a serried curtain of black as he looms—gargantuan, mythical—above you, head dipped down. The massive crown lists to the side when you lean back, instinctively, spine meeting the furs in tandem with his slow advance. 

The absence of his lower mandible when he flexes the others is novice in the liminal light that spills through the bulk of his body. You're not used to seeing him hurt like this. Ragged scars. Scorch marks tearing across his flesh. 

Reflexively, you reach up. The tips of your fingers are feather-soft against the dry tresses just behind the missing cluster. The ends of them are cauterised—a thick, metallic clump glued to the bottoms to keep him from bleeding. Another anatomical anomaly. 

Filled with veins and nerve endings, his tresses are far more sensitive to touch than the coarse hair of primates—the integument is different, too; rubbery to the touch, reminding you of polymer pipes or rubber bands, almost. 

At your gentle touch, he makes a noise, a shallow churr in the back of his throat; mandibles soon folding over his mouth after. Reactive, you find, and endlessly endearing for such a monstrous creature. Cute. 

A smile blooms at the notion of his sudden shyness. Such an outlandish thing for someone whose entire existence is narrowed down to honour and death. The pinch of his tusks elapsing over his maw fills you with a misplaced affection, a foreign growth metastasizing between your ribs. 

You're not sure what it is—survival instinct, maybe. The urge, the drive, to keep living despite yourself; a blot against the harsh reality of your predicament. It feels like the most likely one considering the other is genuine adoration. Unthinkable even now in spite of your willing submission. 

But thinking about this is a jagged dagger cutting through your insides. You shove it aside, hide it away. 

The soft touch—a mere whisper of your fingertips gliding along the surface of his tresses—takes on a more intentional drag, purposeful. You curl your index finger around a corded forelock, giving a small, impish tug just to make him jutter above you. 

His jaws flex, mandibles spreading slowly apart with a quiet, humid hiss. The heat brimming up once more as he curves his long mane over you, chin dipping down to encompass the entirety of your body under his. 

You can't help wondering if this is what it feels like to be devoured. 

And when he reaches the apex, eclipsing everything in your sight with the full, dark heft of him, hands fixed against the soft furs above your head, you think of a sanctum instead of a cage. 

(a swinging pendulum—)

The heat is unbearable with him over you like this. Made worse, somehow, when his hand lifts, falls to your waist. The width of it covers you entirely. Swallowed whole by palm. You tremble, and he eats your anticipation with a distinctive, preening click, turning you on your belly with an ease that knocks the air from your lungs. Barely a featherweight to him. The notion is scorching. 

The name he's given you is full rasping, mangled syllables your fleshy tongue could never begin to wrap around. In the absence of knowing how to speak it, you've begun to call him by your own human version of his namesake. It's this, the shortened, paltry whisper that rolls off your tongue when he presses the tapered tip of his cock against you. 

“Please, Dark—”

At the soft utterance of it, he snaps his hips harshly in retaliation, burrowing his cock inside of you in a quick, jarring thrust. 

It rents you in two, splits you down the middle. Your breaking point is surpassed in an instant; mettle fracturing, shattering on impact. It takes every ounce of willpower to cling to cognisance when he snarls through the last few inches of impaling you entirely. 

In the static tatters of your consciousness, the realisation—a startling polyphony of fear, trepidation, and awe—that this is him holding back lingers on the periphery. That, in itself, is the rekindling of your appetite; hunger gnaws on shallow need, unsatiated by the threadbare scraps it's been given to chew on. 

You say his name again. The whisper of it raw, wounded; scraping against your lacerated vocal cords, torn by the vicious howl, the shriek, that ripped through your chest when he seated himself deep inside of you. 

He responds by snapping his hips into yours, the barbed ridges on his cock licking across your nerve endings in the almost perfect zenith of pleasure and pain. It's nirvana, you think. With hell nipping sharply at its heels. 

The stretch—unlike anything you've ever felt before; incomparable outside of too much—burns furiously. The only thing keeping it from being impossible is the thick oil coating the length of him. The makeup of it must have analgesic properties, or some paralytic agent mixed in, because with each stroke, it soothes your raw flesh, erasing the pain of him inside of you, and leaving nothing but pure, unfettered sensation behind. It's just the thick, unrelenting press of him. The heaviness. The girth. 

It's good. Too good. Overwhelmingly so. 

A series of low clicks spilling out from his broad chest, the chirr of a rattlesnake. He must see it, the way your body floods with endorphins, with heat. The room, kept at an uncomfortable swelter, glues to your skin. Balmy, and achingly hot. The blister of it burrows deep, massing together into a molten core at the very apex of where he's buried inside of you. 

Drawn there, moth to a flame, your hand slides between the damp fur, now drenched in your sweat, and comes to rest on the prominent bulge shifting through your abdomen. His cock. 

Behind you, Dark lets out a susurrus hiss, and pauses the ruinous cants of his hips just long enough to let you feel for yourself how perfectly he changes your shape to fit himself inside. It's unmistakable, of course; but everything outside of raw feeling is liquified. Rendered numb. You know, somewhere, distantly, that this—feeling him through your muscle, your skin so distinctly that you can touch each ridge on his cock—is something that ought to break you, shatter you into pieces. The anatomical anomaly of having him stretch you like this, to this extent, is unfathomable. 

And yet—

He drags his cock out, and you whimper, mindless, stupid, at the sudden loss of him. 

You don't feel complete unless he's buried within you. 

And despite yourself, the somnolence lapping at you, a part of you wonders if this is a symptom of that paralytic agent—musk, pheromones, miasma, poison—blotting out all logic, and inducing a soporific desperation, a vacuous need for him and him alone. One that makes wholeness out of the heavy press of his cock. 

If it is, it doesn't matter much anymore. 

You're too far gone, lost to the throes of it, to care about anything else. 

A good thing, perhaps, because with Dark, it's always a selfish coupling. He pays no real heed to your pleasure, fully under the belief that his cock splitting you apart is enough. 

And damn you—damn your treacherous body—it is. 

Each brutal cant of his powerful hips slamming into you sends waves of pleasure roaring down your spine. To be pried apart, stuffed full of the overwhelming surplus of his girth notches against something inside of you that makes your bones liquid, your marrow running molten. Burning you up from the inside out. 

You clench around him desperately, fingers knotting into the furs below, squeezing it tight in a vice. Trying, futilely, to cling to some sense of cognisance despite the vicious way he takes you apart. Atom by atom. Synapses bloating, crackling under the strain. 

He fucks you like beast. All vicious snarls, guttural rasps; blood is drawn when his claws catch your skin, tearing it open like tissue paper. The sting is buried under the layers of sensation tunnelling through your body. 

Pleasure, pain: equilibrium met on the cusp. Aided, in large part, by the frenzied way he ruts you; fractured, careless. Bullying himself into you until the tapered tip of his cock bruises your cervix—more battering ram than flesh; eager to wrench you open, spill himself inside of your womb. 

You can't imagine what this must be like when he isn't holding back. Horrific, maybe. Blood, bruises. Torn skin. No wonder their hide is so thick. 

But even this—tamed, as it might be—feels like a battle. A war. He spears you open, chirring the whole time as he curls over you, protective and awful, the motion forcing the last few inches of him into you. Bruised, aching, you whimper at the feeling of his sheath, white-hot and soaked with your slick, cupping your drenched cunt. He holds himself there, as deep as he can possibly go—tip a bludgeon against your cervix, stretched wide around the thick of him—and lets out another long, low pur that rumbles through you. Teeth chatter from the vibrations, delirious and bordering on the equinox of absolute damnation, your pussy clenches around his cock, each ridge and divot more pronounced than before. 

Overwrought with bliss, with a nauseating pain, you keen in response to his deep bellow, feeling more animal than ever before. 

Driven purely by instinct, you push back into him, thighs slapping against his own. The power in his muscles, the contrast between your supple, soft body and his, iron wrapped in thick, crocodilian skin, is flint striking steel. 

A mere tinderbox, your body erupts in a devastating heat. 

The burst of molten red makes him reel back, barbs catching on your sensitive skin. It's too much, too much—

He thrusts back into your spasming cunt with a shuddering roar, the sound alone—the lewd, drenched squelch of him splitting you apart—tugs the knot inside of you past its breaking point. As his claws rip through the pretty fawn fur, shredding them to pieces as he grips tight in an effort to piston his cock as fast as he can into your aching pussy, you find yourself tipping over the precipice in a stumbling fall. The force of it, the suddenness, is agonising, edging immediately into overstimulation when the deep, heavy jut of his cock head burrowing into your fluttering walls doesn't cease. It's—

White noise. Static. Your head is galvanised into slush, slurried into liquid pleasure that thrashes and writhes in your core, nerve endings set aflame in a wet, hot inferno under his bulk. 

You puddle under him, burning with the aftershocks. Body melting, useless and spent, into the sheets as he drives into you with the single-minded purpose of reaching his own cataclysmic end. Numbed now, all you feel is an intense, dizzying pressure pulsing molten inside of you. 

Dark braces himself over you, content to just rut deep into you, barely pulling the full, heavy length of himself out of your aching sex. With anyone else, it might be considered sloppy—a messy, desperate coupling, but even this much with him is devastating. Ruinous. 

It's a maelstrom. A bleak, calamitous fall to the bottom of a blackened pit. 

And with a savage, brutal plunge, he buries himself inside of you again, prising the soft plug of your womb open with a brutish roar—deep, broken; bellowed at the heavens—and you feel the steady pulse of him inside of you, filling you. It's too much—his fat, heavy girth, and the copious amounts of his spent stretch you past your limit, teeth raking across your mettle, and the bulge in your lower abdomen grows taut as he floods you with his release. 

The end of the pit looms, and from the chasm, a jagged maw gapes open, gnashing its teeth at you in rapacious anticipation as you careen toward its empty gullet. Falling, falling, falling—

And in the midst of it all, you think this might be what dying feels like.

Your cognisance is drawn together in pieces, inchmeal. 

A slow, gradual crawl out of slumber, the tugging threads of hypnagogia clinging to your rheum-heavy eyes. 

Furs stick to your damp body, some pulling loose when you shift away from the uncomfortable, sweat-soaked puddle of heat beneath you. 

Nausea roils through your belly, pulsing with dreadful synchronicity to the throbbing ache in your pelvis. In an effort to quell the feeling of your insides folding over themselves in a damning knot, you gingerly press the tips of your fingers to the spot that aches the most, feeling the raised indent of a contusion under your pads. 

It makes you blink up at the domed ceiling, head lifting to catch a glimpse of soft flesh near your hip. 

Through the midnight spill of your skin, you can see the tumid ridge bubbling up slightly higher than the rest of your flesh. In the middle is a small dot. An injection sight. 

You realise, with a huff, that he must have broken your pelvis again. Unintentionally, this time. Caught up in your feverish coupling. 

It makes sense. Your bones feel shattered beyond repair, but you know that they're knitted back together, suffused with the medicinal magic their healing injections have. 

The thought should scare you. Be it the ease in which he can break your bones, snapping them into pieces; or whatever it is he's pumping into your body to heal it, but it slips, diaphanous and ephemeral, from your tangled thoughts. Untouchable now, slowly fading into the background. 

The marbled quiet of your mind is broken when you feel him move beside you. His massive paw falls on your crown, covering the entirety of your head with an ease that you can't imagine ever not leaving you a little breathless at the scale, the vastness in your differing sizes. It rests there for a moment, leaching the warmth from your cap like a satiated, languorous reptile. A sluggish snake still digesting its oversized meat. 

A series of clicks spill when you lull your head over to meet the burning yellow of his gaze, everything awash under the heavy scent of sex and loam. Stale sweat, iron. You breathe it in, blinking in the soft blue light of the pale moons spilling in from the window of the ship. 

He lounges like a satiated cat. His legs spread akimbo; his other hand resting on his chest. The narrowing of his eyes, too, reminds you of a well-fed feline, squinting into a dewy oblivion. 

With a deftness you can't keep up with, his hands shift, reaching out to take hold of you when the sleep drips from your eyes. It takes no real effort at all for him to drag you to rest between his spread thighs, head pillowed on the tuffs of quills covering his lower belly. 

There's a twinge in your hips, but it's numbed by the palliative magic of the injection, pulsing like the soft beat of a headache through your bones. It'll hurt something awful later on when it begins to wear off, leaving you feeling more like a massive contusion than a person. But that's later. Much later. And as he rests his palm, warmed by your heat, against your nape, you find you don't mind the tenderness much at all, content to bask in the evidence of your coupling simmering, electric, between you, distinct in the air. An ozoneous tang. Heady. A sour, earthy miasma. 

You breathe it in. Breathe him in. 

And in the slow, soporific spool of your weaving thoughts, you can't help but wonder what he thinks of this, of you, as he reclines in the fur. Nothing at all, perhaps. 

Or maybe something. Something you can't even begin to unravel. An archaic, primordial sort of want—animalistic, alien. The kind that would make him scar his own kind for gnashing their claws at you in anger, indignant over your mere presence in their leader's nest. Who would take a creature not of the same species, and parade them around as they bared his mark for all to see. A mate. A conquest. A queen. A pet. The fickleness of it is not lost on you, but there's something about the knowledge that this is as taboo, as unprecedented for him, for his kind, as it is for you. 

And yet. 

He still picked you. Of all the humans in the galaxy, crawling around like lost, queenless ants, he decided to shun the staples of his culture and take you with him. 

That alone, you think, is enough. 

And so—

You relax. Melting into the wrought iron strength of his frame, liquifying under the raze of his nails grazing your skin, pulling you deeper into this sense of complacency. Where else do you belong, after all? 

You turn your head, nuzzling your nose into his quills. Into his skin. The potency of his smell is stronger here, so close to his groin, and you groan a little at the twinge in your cunt at the heady, briny weight of it settling on the back of your tongue when you breathe in deep. 

He chuffs a bit, quietly pleased by your obvious scenting. The way you bury your nose into the crease where his inner thighs bend, drawing in the pungence of his unwashed flesh. It drags your attention away from his heavy musk, head lifting to catch his blistering, intent gaze. It darkens slightly at the sheen smearing across your chin and nose, covered in the natural oils of his pelt. 

It's unlike yourself, but you find the depth of his intrigue deeply arousing, and slowly lick your stained lips, chasing the taste of him with your tongue. 

A rumble reverberates from his broad chest, shaking the bed with his quiet growl. It's the only warning you get, the only one he'll give, before the other hand folds over your lower back, pushing your belly into his sheath where he swells, hot and thick, between you. 

His eyes glow in the absence of light. Pale amber flickers when you arch into his chest, needy for him, and it unveils a catacomb desire much too primordial for you to ever dream of mapping. The deep pool of it unspools you, and you fall, weightless, to the bottom. 

Ensnared. 

#for someone who's entire identity is “i wanna fuck an alien/monster/yautja so bad it makes me look stupid” #i have a surprising lack of smut in my repertoire #yautja x reader #yautja x human #dark (avp) x reader #predator x reader #avp #predator #yautja smut #yautja

[jymwahuwu]

Summary: You have been kidnapped and sold as a pet. Blade wants a pet. Content Warning: kidnapping, non-con, dehumanization, body modification (just nipples ><), lactation, humiliation, yandere

dark content, minors DNI

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For details, please visit the official website and social media news. The precious opportunity to meet with pets is right in front of you!

＊(According to the newly revised "Interstellar Pet Act", the company can make a little body modification without compromising the life rights and health of pets.)

-

Last week a man who lived down the street was taken and disappeared. People are talking about it. It was the employees of the Space Pet Home Company who caught him. Those disrespectful aliens roam the galaxies, capturing random species to sell. This is contemptible. Still, there's nothing anyone can do about it. Under the gaze of a powerful space civilization, the planet you live in is trampled like ants.

On the way home, you browsed the news with your mobile phone, and found that some people searched for the man's photo and selling price on the official website, and posted it on the discussion forum. They offer to raise funds to buy him back to the planet. This is already the most likely way to redeem them to their original planet. You clicked on a link to the pet company's website. Ironically, that's a cute design with clouds and a rainbow, and a little animation that brings the pet home. The website loaded for a while, and a picture of the man was displayed. He looked at the camera with a calm expression on his face. You have no idea what they did to him.

Name: ▄▆▄▂▅▅▄▃

Price: 200000

Below is a description of the pet. You read a few words and feel so sick and horrified. There is also "More Recommendations", which introduces pets of different species, from cats, tentacles, humans to supernatural creatures.

You close the page and want to donate some money. However, you feel a cold, prickly sensation in the back of your neck.

Half a second later, as if stepping on air in the sky, you plummet.

-

Blade was more irritable than ever. This time, the target of the mission made a provocation, leaving some traces, deliberately mocking them. He then "solved" them, a little rougher than usual. The problem is, for the next three days, he was just as "rough". He even declined Silver Wolf's invitation to play a racing game together. Silver Wolf remained expressionless, indicating that she didn't care, but the atmosphere became a little depressed.

"Bladie, did you know? Elio said you're getting a pet this month."

"I don't need a pet." No doubt, that's stupid.

Kafka's eyes narrow, and smiles. She said in a certain, seductive tone. "Are you sure? Imagine getting that little kiss after a mission…kneeling down to relieve you…"

"No," he snapped, getting up and walking into the darkness.

-

"Currently scanning for physical condition-"

"Number E92730012 is in good condition. Everything is fine."

"Suggestion: Transform the nipples into a breast-feeding state, and add drugs to enhance sensitivity."

You are in a coma, two robotic arms grab your hand and stretch out, and two needles are aimed at your nipples on both sides to inject medicine. Some subtle changes are transforming your boobs.

"Hmm…" Your head shook slightly, but your eyelids were so heavy that you couldn't open them, and you could only bear the sensitivity and a little pain on your chest. The machine continued to inject the medicine without mercy, and gradually, some white milk flowed out from the flower buds, dripping on the ground, exuding a sweet smell.

-

Not this… and not this.

None of them fit.

If the other Stellaron Hunters saw Blade now, they'd think he was nostalgic about something and wouldn't bother. No one knew he was looking at the official website of Space Pet House. He has searched with keywords, but the results are still not what he wants.

He decided to go to the store in person.

-

It's been three days, maybe… five days?

You can't believe that you've been captured and sold as a pet. The store was decorated like some kind of spider web, some kind of hideous lair. Placed across from you are about thirty transparent cages of various species, including six humans. Some people try to resist like you, slapping the cage and cursing at the clerk, only to get some accusing looks from them, like they are really looking at a naughty pet. Some had given up and stayed quietly in the cage, looking at the guests curiously.

Your neck is covered with a black lace choker and a heart bell. Clean water, food and toys are placed in the cage. You can't believe it and don't want to play with those toys for cats.

When those guests visit, they always whisper which pet is better and more suitable. Among all the customers, you are impressed by a certain man. His dark blue fringe draped over his forehead, and his waist was covered with long hair. His hair dangles along with certain bandages as he walks around the store. He's… charming, in every sense of the word, but creepy, with those red eyes that wander from cage to cage and finally stare at the cage you're in. This situation lasts for tens of minutes, scanning your information and prices.

You don't know if he wants to buy you, because when the clerk asks if he needs to go further and allow him to play with you for a while, he just walks away.

-

"It's been seven days… still no one wants to buy this pet. Why…"

"Maybe we can help."

-

"No…don't! Please! Please, I'll be good!"

You plead as you struggle. The clerk still pulls down your sheer clothes, exposing your breasts and locking your hands above your head. The tears in your eyes are swirling, whimpering, thick milk flowing down the swollen breasts.

The door bell rang and two guests came in. They looked around the store. When they caught a glimpse of you, their eyes visibly lit up and they walked in your direction.

"Today's special offer, milk production anytime...?" One of the guests read out the information under your cage in a low voice - that's the first time you know what's written there. The way they look at your naked breasts seems to be on fire in you. "sounds good."

"Didn't know you were interested in that." Another guest snickered.

"Such a beautiful little thing can change my mind. I hope this time the pet will not be destroyed so quickly…"

You shudder at the implications of his words - this is a lunatic who isn't taking care of pets. what should you do? What if you were bought by this person? You may be facing a more dire situation than you are now…

There is a raging and dangerous atmosphere wandering in the store. You see that familiar face from behind the two customers. He stood behind them, but didn't seem to see them at all. He feels his crotch tighten when he notices your breasts dripping with milk.

-

He licks away any sweet milk that pervades your swollen buds, sweet, rich, and creamy. His hand is rubbing your other breast and pinching your nipple. It doesn't take much force, the milk is already squirting. Your bewildered moan turns into a scream as your lower body bounces, the fluid squirting against his cock.

In the orgasm, you stick out your tongue, address him unconsciously, and touch his palm. It's cold.

"Blade." He said his name.

“…?”

You touch his chest, where the heart is beating and echoing. A warm feeling sinks in.

#blade x female redaer #blade x reader #yandere honkai star rail #hsr x reader #honkai star rail x reader #hsr blade x reader #blade x you #hsr x you #honkai star rail x you #yandere blade x reader

[whisperingdoves]

astronomical phenomenons as types of people

[galaxies]: long flapping coats; heels clicking on marble floors; radiant energy; insomnia; perfectionism; unhealthy habits to seem like they have their shit together; sighs made visible by cold night air under a street lamp; plenty of acquaintances with friends few and far between; chai lattes in the morning and red wine in the evenings; the eerie silence of libraries at 2 am; winning at all costs; can and will destroy you and themselves if you get to close

[voids]: ironic smirks; cigarette hanging from the corner of their mouth; bitten nails painted black; washed out jeans; notebooks dipped into water one too many times refusing to stay shut; black coffee; sleepless nights contemplating; the spots on the ceiling childhood rooms removed glow in the dark stars leave; desiring a little bit of everything and at the same time nothing at all; listening over talking; being the odd one in the friend group; being appreciated for that exact oddness and the contrast it offers

[nebulas]: fleeting smiles; rhinestones on the inner corners of their eyes; cherry chapstick; tiny backpacks that don’t fit anything but look cute; checkerboard patterns everywhere; nostalgia for times before they were born, chasing the spark of those times in arcades, old music and thrift stores; floral teas with neon popping boba; getting lost in the flashing lights of a club; their first love being their forever love; being the center of attention for better or worse

[rogue stars]: cold hands and sweater paws; light eyes rimmed with dark circles; glasses sliding from their nose; bitten lips; bruised knees; fingers wrapped in band aids; perfectionist mindset with zero follow through; late night drives; always in a hurry and always late; living alone; plushies to keep them company; plays the guitar mindlessly laying on their back on their bed; dog-eared library books; people watching; if drawn in by someone they’ll never let go again

#i don’t know where this came from other than a random late night thought #types of people #aesthetics #astronomy #space aesthetic #people aesthetics #tag yourself

[mthofferings]

Marvel Art Party

See Marvel Art Party’s existing works here.

Preferred contact methods: Email: [email protected] Discord: Rufferto Tumblr: marvelartparty

Preferred organizations: - Anything from the list of approved organizations

Will create works that contain: Marvel heroes, especially from the MCU. If you are interested in a “villain” or comic-based character, just message us to double check that it’s ok.

Will not create works that contain: Any ships (Not that we don’t love ships! But this auction is for a single character per artwork) Any AO3 warnings (I.e., violence, death, rape/non-con, underage, etc.) Kink (i.e., bondage, infantilization, etc.) Hydra Mpreg

  -- Art --

Auction ID: 1069

Will create works for the following relationships: Avengers fandom any gen - MCU Captain America fandom any gen - MCU Iron Man fandom any gen - MCU Thor fandom any gen - MCU Black Panther fandom any gen - MCU Guardians of the Galaxy fandom any gen - MCU Captain Marvel fandom any gen - MCU Ant-Man fandom any gen - MCU Moon Knight fandom any gen - MCU

Work Description: Marvel Art Party (Group Offering from 8 Artists + bonus) We are offering art from eight individual artists, all members of the Marvel Art Party Discord server: - amberdreams - rufferto - magpiemurder - sweatypeaches - heyboy - maichan - helene - amadness2method - call_me_kayyyyy (Bonus artist offering) You get to choose 1-3 characters, 1-3 prompts, and the highest rating level you are comfortable with. Each artist will then work independently and interpret one character and one prompt in their own style (this will be a discussion- we won’t just choose a character and prompt without talking with you about what you want). Over the next year, you will receive eight unique pieces of art and a bonus pet offering (delivered digitally). Call_me_kayyyy will only be drawing a Marvel pet as a bonus offering. Example: If you pick Bucky as the character, you can also pick an animal character such as Jeff the Land Shark as the pet. Note that this auction is for art of a single character per artwork, not a ship. Examples of prompts you might choose include: A pinup style pose, an illustration of a character from a fic, a movie scene, an AU, a specific setting, a specific activity, a specific emotion, etc. If you are interested in a character or prompt that might be seen as problematic, please send us an email to double check that we can draw it. The diversity of artists means you will receive art in a wide variety of styles and ratings (up to the highest rating you request).

Ratings: Gen, Teen, Mature, Explicit

Can pods bid on this auction? Yes - Podbids welcome!

CLICK HERE TO BID ON THIS WORK

The auction runs from October 22 (12 AM ET) to October 28 (11:59:59 PM ET). Visit marveltrumpshate.com during Auction Week to view all of our auctions and to place your bids!

#Marvel-Art-Party #auction: art #mth 2023

[psychedelic-ink]

kinktober '22 ║ XXII

pairing: william tell x f!reader

genre: smut, minors dni

word count: 538

summary: William Tell is a dangerous man. You should’ve known better than to piss him off. 

warnings: pussy slapping, dom!william, dirty talking, the use of slut, oral (receiving)

MLISTS .  LIBRARY. TAGLIST . KINKTOBER '22

William Tell is a dangerous man. You should’ve known better than to piss him off. 

You’re completely bare from the waist down, your baggy shirt is rolled all the way up to your neck, exposing the rest of your body. Your one leg is thrown over his shoulder, fingers biting into the back of your thigh. When he meets your gaze, a shudder claws up your spine and settles at the back of your neck, the tips of your fingers tingling with fear and anticipation. You can feel yourself clenching around nothing, wetness grows between your legs, slick glistening between your folds. 

“Is this what you fucking want?” he asks eerily calm. “Me, exposing the filthy whore that you are?” 

You moan at his words, head falling back, your chest heaves. Heat blossoms across your skin when you imagine all the things he was capable of. The pain. The pleasure. You want it all. His fingers delve in between your folds, he feels how wet you are and clicks his tongue with annoyance. 

“No shame,” he groans. “I’m not even doing anything and you’re ready for my cock,” 

“P-Please,” 

His hand slices through the air, pain spreading across your throbbing cunt. You scream at the ache, tears quickly building in your eyes. Another slap follows and you cry out his name, he’s not holding back, you can feel the sizzling hurt slithering up your body, taking refuge in your stomach. But despite the pain you feel between your legs, you feel yourself soaking the sheets underneath. The palm of his hand smooths over your cunt, tutting as if you were a helpless little girl. 

“Look at you, two slaps and you’re a mess already. You know this is punishment right? You’re not supposed to enjoy it,” 

“I’m not–” 

Another slap follows, you cry out, a hoarse moan following soon after. He doesn’t stop, each hit harder than the other, quicker– The wet sound your cunt provides becomes louder and louder. You writhe in his grip, his grip on your thigh like iron. Your sharp cries shift into gasp and strangled moans. You’ve lost count of how many slaps, but he finally allows you a moment of relief when he slowly caresses your abused cunt. 

“Seems to me that you do enjoy it, sweetheart,” he says, voice dropping after each word. “Now I want you to count,” 

“W-What?” 

“Count them. We’ll start with ten,” 

“I-I can’t take it,” 

He stills for a moment, then continues when you don’t utter the safeword. 

“You should’ve thought about that before being a brat,” his hand deserts you, leaving you cold and lonely. “Now, count with me: one…” 

“O-One,” 

Your voice is shaky, your throat becoming more sore after every smack. When you finally reach ten, you’re shaking, tears rolling down your cheeks as you whimper his name, begging him to smooth the pain. Much to your surprise he does. You shudder at the way his tongue ghosts above the hurt, numbing the ache between your legs. It doesn’t take him long to rip your orgasm out of you, leaving you breathless and worn out. 

“So good to me,” he mutters into the inside of your thigh. “Let’s get you all cleaned up.” 

kinktober tags: @tusk89 , @amneris21 , @witchisenpai , @pedrito-friskito , @tom-whore-dleston , @lola766 , @batdarkladyvampir , @dindjarinswhore , @dnxgma , @eyelessfaces , @queenofthefaceless , @softtdaisy , @saintlike78 , @timpletance , @xdaddysprincessxx , @stardust-galaxies , @spacecowboyhotch, @queenofthecloudss , @prettyouttherethoughts , @reaperofmen , @partr1dge , @bbyanarchist , @alwaysdjarin , @thevoiceinyourheadx , @absurdthirst , @levi-llama , @damnyoupedro , @stardust-galaxies , @all-the-way-down-here , @welcometostayingawake, @bullet-prooflove , @rainbowcreepie

#william tell x y/n #william tell x reader #william tell x you #william tell fanfiction #the card counter fic #the card counter fanfiction #oscar isaac characters masterlist #oscar isaac characters x reader #oscar isaac characters

[honestlywtfisgoingon]

Caf — Obi-Wan Kenobi

AN OBI-WAN KENOBI x READER DRABBLE

description: it’s the little things for obi, including waking up just to get his favorite drink

warnings: none, just fluff and soft obi

a/n: this is so sickenly sweet i hate it and love it at the same time. but yeah, this is another little fall fic for obi bc im tryna churn some of those out and i thought this was a funny and cute lil idea (yes it’s basically a pumpkin spice latte lol) also, fun fact, ironically i hate pumpkin spice lattes

words: 310

“Hey,”

You groaned as Obi-Wan tried to gently coax you awake with his whispers. At least he was trying to be considerate, but groggy you was still pissed at being awoken from your slumber.

“Hey, y/n, my love, let’s get something to eat,”

“Obi, how do I put this…” you rolled over and pressed your head into his chest for warmth, “It’s too fucking early,” You felt the little rumble in his chest as he laughed at your snarky response. This wasn’t new though, his waking up early, but he usually let you stay asleep, only accidentally stirring you with a kiss to your forehead, the rest of your face usually buried in blankets. He just ran his hands through your hair, then along your forearms to warm you up from the first cold night of Coruscanti fall.

“I want to go to the diner,” he told you. Then it clicked.

“Oh my stars, are you waking me up just so you can get caf?” You would’ve been irritated at his excuse for waking you if you didnt find it adorable. Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi, accomplished warrior and revered around the galaxy, was trying to get you up because he was excited over a seasonal drink.

Autumn Spice Caf only came around this time of year, and Obi-Wan made sure to get his fill before it was gone. Cup after cup…after cup, he downed the kaf. You didn’t understand why he loved them, especially considering he was typically more of a tea fan. You thought it was way too sweet, but he was addicted.

You sighed, “Ten more minutes and then we’ll go get you an Autumn Spice Caf,”

“Thank you, love,”

You didnt have to look it know that he was smiling. It was the cute little things about him that would usually surprise people, like his childish excitement for a sweet treat, that made you feel lucky that he was your Obi-Wan.

#star wars #obi wan #obi wan kenobi #obi wan kenobi x y/n #obi wan x reader #obi wan kenobi x reader #obi wan smut #obi wan fluff #star wars fall fic #obi wan drabble #star wars drabble #fall #autumn

[platonic-tony-stark]

Hey 👋 I know it’s rough right now, I really do understand it. Life is tough but you shouldn’t shame yourself for having these feelings ! What you feel right now is completely valid and you deserve to acknowledge those feelings and not feel a guilt about them. I don’t know you but I can assure you that you are wanted in this life and you are needed in this life. We all have different ways of coping and just because yours is a fictional universe billions of galaxies away doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong. BELIEVE ME WHEN I SAY this feeling of suffocation and darkness that you probably feel carries itself on your shoulders everyday WILL PASS and that little voice inside your head that says “that’s bullshit, you’re wrong it won’t go away” is very very wrong. No matter how hard it gets never let that voice win. You are worthy of happiness and it will come your way. That voice is a liar and in a few years time you will be glad you didn’t listen to it. Everyone yearns for the past and for childhood to come back and embrace them like a warm blanket but if you get so caught up in the past you are going to forget to look ahead and around at the current moment. You might think it’s the end and that isn’t true, it’s the beginning. I know that sound cliche but you need to remember it has been proven that multiple realities exist so somewhere in those realities your comfort characters are reading your story and watching you right now and I can tell you with full confidence they are screaming “DONKT GIVE UP JUST YET, I DONT WANT THIS STROY TO END”. We all as readers of your blog no matter if they like, comment or just appreciate from afar are also begging you to carry on. You are so strong to have come this far, carry on. YOU HAVE GOT THIS! Drink some water and eat something small. You deserve that much at least. Now start the next chapter in your life, your comfort characters can’t wait to see what’s next xx 💚💖💚 (anytime you see this at the end of an anon that’s me and I appreciate you being here)

Wow wow wow. First of all, damn tumblr looks hella different now. Secondly, I can't believe, my posts are still around and still getting LIKES amd Follows. Like my guy- I've been gone for almost 2 years now I think. I was on some times but not active active yk. I truly believe nobody missed me EXCEPT this person.

SO UPDATE. I ain't dead. And got professional help. Brain chemicals balanced and stable environment. I moved and sorted things out at work.

I joined loads of communities and wrote some fics on AO3. I still love tony and the OG Marvel Stuff but clicked out after endgame and the spiderman movie after.

Just wanted yall to know i never deinstalled the app and never ever thought to delete all this. I kind want to continue but want to kept the atmosphere of the first avenger movie and around iron man 1 & 2 i just love the nostalgia. In my humble opinion the best era.

Thanks for read and I might beginning to post again. Maybe. Let's see what the morning brings

Cheers yall!

[angevinyaoiz]

burger king

Junior: watches lesbian porn bc he's uncomfortable seeing a guy in a sexual situation bc it makes him feel insecure about his own performance with. And also bc in his galaxy brain it doesn't feel like "cheating"

Geoffrey: watches conventional porn as well as "weird" (read: not hetnormative) stuff to make fun of it. Kind of into the femdoms and some gay stuff but is embarrassed so he says he's only into it Ironically

Richard: Has all Internet security on lockdown. Caches cleared, browsers and files secured. Eclectic mix of violent gay porn and embarrassing cheesy stuff. Periodically will delete everything and go on abstinence purges before returning.

John: has disabled his parental blocks on his devices but Dad hasn't noticed or doesn't care. Clicks on the spam ads in his games

#Burger King AU #Meanwhile for Philip idk a mix of prudish household yet he's allowed to watch grown up movies and adult comics bc it's 'classy' I guess

[autumnwoodsdreamer]

There’s the link but ao3 seemed to be going a tad slow so I’ll post you guys the chapter here too

Enjoy! ;D

27

The Damned, The Lost, The Forgotten

. . . . .

For one moment, everything was as still as nothing, like a plunge straight to the heart of a black hole.

Din activated his visor’s newly furnished night vision, adjusting it to automatic.

Gradually, the now inert security control room visualized in a ghostly outline with the colours all wrong and muted but the image clear. The enhancement would self-regulate, balancing its strength to supplement the surrounding light and provide a seamless visual (or, at least, that’s how Sabine described it working—Din hadn’t yet had a chance to test it).

The reserve power kicked in sluggishly, like a tired old thing that hadn’t been checked on or called upon in so long, no one could vouch for its state and all they could do was guess at its lifespan.

Dim lights awakened, the Empire’s preferred stark white traded for an easier to maintain soft flame.

A few screens tried to come back online but Chopper shut them off and then disconnected from the panel.

Without a word, they left the room and split up: the droid still had a batch of Sabine’s explosives to distribute throughout the base before they left and Din had to get to the brig before Zeb and Ahsoka.

Blaster out, finger on the trigger, he covered the distance to the nearest lift with a sharp sprint.

Reserve power usually prioritized lights, doors, essential environment-control functions, and lifts. Din could only vouch for the lights and doors until he pressed the button and the row of lights above the lift doors began blinking, assuring him the lift was coming and relieving him of the highly unappealing prospect of running down multiple flights of stairs.

The lights inside the lift were completely out. Din stepped in, selected the ground level (the main lift didn’t go all the way to the sub-levels; he would have to run straight across the hangar to reach the lift that would) and then the doors closed. It didn’t matter that his visor enabled him to see: he could feel the claustrophobic dive into absolute darkness, like the doors of a cellar—

He focussed on the mildly disconcerting weightless sensation of the lift descending, its efficiency ironically increased with the main generators offline.

And he got ready.

Level 2.

He rolled his shoulders.

Level 1.

He breathed in, he breathed out.

Ground level.

He clicked the blaster’s safety off and stilled his heart.

The doors opened.

A trooper whirled around but Din stunned him, shooting through the crack of the lift doors, immediately shutting the trooper’s window to do anything before it even truly opened.

He stepped over the gracelessly dropped body and took up a run again, referencing the base layout on the small screen of his vambrace to make sure he was headed in the right direction.

Across the hangar was no short distance.

But, thankfully, there weren’t even half as many troopers milling about now.

Through the gaping hangar doors, he glimpsed a slash of emerald light as he ran past. Secretly, he smiled at the crisp sound of Sabine’s lightsaber and the beskar spear deflecting blasterfire. Out of the corner of his visor, he caught the streaking trail of either the Light Thrower or the Nightingale—he couldn’t tell exactly which—as it swooped down low, adding to the fray.

They were a ragtag mob comprised of the galaxy’s damned, lost, and forgotten, but they worked with the kind of harmony the grand armies of legend could only dream of.

The troopers yelled to one another, trying to coordinate a response to this surprise attack; clearly, they hadn’t had a chance to get their bearings before their defences and the base’s power had all gone out, compounding their problems.

Din ran.

He stepped fast, he stepped light as he wove around the vehicles sheltering in the hangar, using them as cover.

He reached the lift without interference.

Ducking in before he could be seen and stopped, he hit the button to shut the doors with the side of his fist and then selected the first sub-level.

Again: the sharp claustrophobic sensation coiling around him like a vice, the unnatural weightlessness, a heartbeat to get ready, a breath in, a breath out.

Gravity reclaimed him.

The doors opened.

Two troopers, two stun bolts through the crack of the doors—it was all done before Din could hear the thought of it in his own mind.

He barely got a pace away from them before he heard more coming.

A blaster bolt sliced through the air—shot by a twitchy finger, it went hopelessly wide. Before the trooper could loose another, Din whirled around and stunned him and his partner, the blue rings hitting them both square in the chest and arching through their whole bodies, disrupting their consciousness.

Another three followed: a pair and, in the opposite direction, the trooper from earlier, the one who wore a poncho over dirty armour; the one who had asked if Din ever took his helmet off for “some things.”

Din lifted his blaster as if to shoot but then ducked down as flat as he could.

As expected, the poncho trooper fired, hitting one of the troopers opposite. In the split second of confusion, Din stunned the unaffected trooper.

Poncho trooper—the last standing—spat a curse and a blaster bolt glanced off Din’s helmet.

It didn’t touch him, of course, he didn’t feel its heat or suffer the damage it intended, but the force of it knocked him off balance.

He stumbled back, ears ringing, sight confused.

It was just a split second but the trooper had bought himself a perfect advantage.

Din braced and fought to right himself and bring his blaster to bear.

But another shot didn’t come.

The trooper jolted forward, like something had barrelled into him from behind; not expecting it, he dropped his blaster.

Din took the chance opened for him and stunned the trooper.

He collapsed with a bodily thump and a clatter of plastoid, revealing Jacen behind him, hands still cuffed in front of him.

“Gutsy move, kid,” Din praised, nodding in genuine admiration—he had bowled into that trooper with the kind of mettle the instructors at the Fighting Corps. would have applauded.

“Thanks!” Jacen beamed as he opened his hands and the binders fell off.

Din tossed his head to look up and down the hallway. “Are there any more?”

“No. There were six already down here and then him,” Jacen answered, nudging the poncho trooper with the toe of his boot, his young voice holding a quickly grown but understanable grudge against the soldier.

“Alright.” Din holstered his blaster and picked up the binders, closing them and clipping them back on his belt. “I have to check something down that hallway,” he explained, jerking his head in the direction of the lone prisoner. “The kids are down that way,” he pointed down the hall the trooper had been leading Jacen down before the ruckus erupted. “Can I ask you to go on ahead and get them out so long?”

“Okay,” Jacen said, uncertainly but not like he was opposed or reluctant.

“They’re in the last two cells at the very end.” Din pointed to the unconscious heap of the trooper. “Take his code cylinder. Slot it into the port and then just open the doors. Should be straight forward. Any problems, shout for me. Zeb and Ahsoka should be here soon and they’ll get you all out.”

“Wait! What about you?” Jacen asked, a sudden franticness flashing in his bright eyes, enhanced by the dim lighting.

“Me?”

“You’ll get out, too, right?”

Too late, Din realized the mistake in his phrasing.

“Of course,” he assured, warming his voice for the boy’s sake. “I’ll be right behind you, I promise. I just have to check that—that no one gets left behind.”

Jacen didn’t quite hesitate but there was a glimmer of disbelief in his expression as he nodded, accepting his assignment and Din’s answer. His doubt and worry paled as the same look of determination Din had seen in both Hera and Kanan’s eyes shone in his own. “Okay. I’m on it.”

Din returned the nod. “Thank you,” he said and waited to see that the boy got the code cylinder alright before continuing on.

A long, sterile corridor rolled out before him, closed doors spaced intermittently, interrupting the sheer grey walls at precise intervals.

He ran with his heart pounding and his lungs straining, screaming for air yet only taking in short bursts.

There was no sound: no alarms, no pursuing troopers; just the sounds of his own steps and his own mind.

He didn’t know who he would find in the cell.

He tried to picture everything Ezra was not, just to give himself a cushion, something to break the fall when it turned out not to be him at all.

But it didn’t work.

Din ran, the image of his brother fixed, frozen, stained in his mind’s eye.

It was not an absolute image as he had no perfect picture to reference, but, rather, it was a cluttered collage pulled together from paintings, murals, holopics, and descriptions.

He couldn’t hear the cynic in him right then—that necessary part he had built and maintained and relied on for decades, the part that told him nowhere was ever safe, nothing was ever permanent, and no one could ever be trusted all the way, the part that didn’t believe fairytales and myths, the part that wouldn’t reach for anything it didn’t believe he could touch and hold.

All he could hear in the time it took him to cover the distance to the final cell was a child’s voice.

A voice that echoed in a cellar just too small for anyone but him.

A voice corroded over time, scarred and small; lost for so long but never discarded.

A voice still innocent, still reaching, still hoping.

It will be him, it said.

He didn’t know.

But the voice in his head was so clear and so sure, it made his heart believe.

He reached a dead end.

There was a door either side. He had to slow down and check the registry on his vambrace.

It was the one on his right.

He fished out the code cylinder and inserted it into the port beside the control panel. The panel unlocked, turning from red to blue, and he pressed the button to open the doors with a hand he could no longer feel.

The doors opened.

Just like that, they opened even though he thought it should take pleading, it should take time.

It shouldn’t be so easy.

For one awful moment, he saw only an empty cell and he supposed that was it, that was why it had been so easy—because there wasn’t meant to be victory. Then his gaze adjusted and he made out a form laid out on the bench.

A human.

A man with a mop of dark hair and an unkempt beard, his thin frame dressed in dark, simple clothes without shoes or even socks.

He laid stretched out and still, one leg hanging off the bench, an arm slung across his middle. Everything about him looked limp and lifeless—he didn’t even look to be breathing.

Din switched his visor from night vision to heat vision, relief flooding through his veins as the form in front of him registered as a shapeless blotch of pink.

It faded too soon into the blue, his extremities almost as cold as the room.

But there was warmth there, ever emanating from his core.

He was still alive.

Din switched functions on his visor and then stepped down into the cell and approached, his steps intentionally soft as if he were afraid of disturbing him. A dreadful smell permeated the small room; it crept into Din’s notice and then hung there, heavy and despairing: the foul stench of sweat, fever, malnutrition, and a sore lack of bathing.

It turned his stomach, not just because of the olfactory affront, but for the fact it was a state that could not be achieved overnight.

He had been here a good while already.

Din wanted to deny the possibility it could be Ezra then, more so than ever. He didn’t want his brother to be here, to be going through this; he could not ever have deserved it.

But the last dregs of his doubt evaporated as he came closer and peered down at a pale face with two faded but distinct scars cutting across a bruised check.

Though pale and scarred and beaten, it was a face Din recognized instantly.

It was the last face he saw before the cellar doors closed.

Ezra looked just like their father.

#din djarin #chopper #ezra bridger #jacen syndulla #the mandalorian #star wars rebels #my writing #lift a sail

[multi-fan-dom-madness]

Chapter 13: Chaab (Second Chances - Hunter x reader)

Chaab. n. fear.

Chapter Summary: Your rescue from Coruscant goes better than you anticipate, but the squad is still fractured.

Chapter Warnings: self-starvation as a form of resistance; mentions or possibilities of torture; Tarkin is mentioned; canon-typical violence; angst; if I missed any please let me know!

Word Count: 4,171

A/N: ask zero questions about the timeline of this story because i genuinely don't know. this is purely vibes. enjoy!

Read it here on AO3!

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A guard brings you a meal again. This is the third, maybe fourth one, your only real way to measure time here. You leave it untouched. Partly, you’re unwilling to move from the corner of the duracrete cell, your body warmth having long since leached into the cold, unyielding surface. To move would mean to lose what little comfort you’ve scrabbled out of nothing. Partly, you’re not entirely trustful of the prison system food. 

Mostly, though, you’re trying to figure out if it’s even worth sustaining yourself when you know there’s a very high chance you’re going to be dead soon. 

Crosshair had said your punishment was capital. There are few greater measures of capital than a being’s life in this galaxy, particularly under the Empire. Even if you ate, even if you tried to keep your strength up, how long before they sent in an interrogator droid? How long before your trial? How long before the seemingly endless reserves of power and people overwhelmed your singular attempt at resistance? 

Punching out a sigh, you shift on the uncomfortable stone platform. Your entire right leg has gone numb sitting here. The jumpsuit they forced you into when you arrived is stiff and itchy; every nerve in your body screams for you to scratch, to soothe, to relieve. Ignoring the impulse is becoming a losing battle. 

When the guard returns to collect the food tray, still full, he says nothing, and you don’t, either. Try as you might, you can’t figure out how long you’ve been here. How much time has passed between finding Crosshair on Iridonia and now? Chewing at the inside of your mouth, you taste blood. Karking hells. You spit the blood onto the floor. 

Your world consists of dark-wash gray walls, staticky red electrobarrier, and gleaming white plastoid as guards march past on regular surveillance patrols. You can’t see any of the other cells on this block, even if you crane your head from where you sit. Probably by design. Can’t plot an escape without backup. Gray, red white. 

Jerking awake, heart pounding, you scan the small cell you’ve been confined to. Kriff, you hadn’t even realized you’d fallen asleep. As you look around, trying to determine exactly what woke you, you rub your palms on the coarse fabric of the jumpsuit. Maybe a bad dream.

“616F, 616G, 616H, 616...ah, 616I, here we are,” comes a muffled voice. 

You draw yourself deeper into the corner, eyeing the glowing red barrier. On the other side, you catch a glimpse of white armor and a light gray uniform, and then the barrier flickers before powering down fully. Your eyes narrow, heart jumping into your throat and making it hard to breathe properly. 

Polished shoes clicking on the duracrete steps, an Imperial officer descends into the cell. Uniform pressed and ironed to perfection, rank insignias aligned in neat rows, hair swept back underneath an officer’s cap, a dark-skinned woman faces you, her face twisted into something like disgust, like you’re a piece of trash stuck to the bottom of her otherwise impeccable shoe. You breathe through your nose, trying not to betray any emotions on your face. You studied intimidation tactics at the academy; you have an inkling of what this woman is here for. 

The red electrobarrier snaps to life behind the woman as she appraises you with dark, glittering eyes. You meet her gaze, lifting your chin just a hair, wanting so desperately to curl your lip in a sneer.

She mirrors the expression you’re failing to hide. In a clipped Coruscanti accent as polished as the rest of her, she says, “(full name), chain code 06Z25T891, parents unknown. Raised here on Coruscant. Admitted to the Academy under the previous regime, graduated with honors, and assigned as a supply officer to the Outer Rim. How...wasteful.” She clasps her hands behind her back, disgust growing more evident with every word. 

You remain silent. A part of you, the part that wants to claw your way out of this suffocating detention center, hopes. You hope beyond hope that the squad will just forget you, live full lives, safe and hidden. 

“Nothing to say for yourself?” the woman asks. “No matter. I believe you’ve said enough, as it is.” 

She produces a holographic puck from her pocket and holds it flat in her palm. In spectral blue light, a recording of you and Arien—your heart clenches—flares to life. 

“—out of here,” your past self says in an undertone. “I don’t like this, Arien. Come with me.”

Swallowing against the lump in your throat, your brain conjures the memory of this conversation as it plays out in real-time. In your memory, Arien is not a translucent being, but flesh and blood, purple eyes shadowed with worry and doubt. 

“It’s not safe,” she says. She places a hand on the shoulder of past-you. “Stick it out until your contract is out, and don’t re-enlist.”

The small, flickering version of you shakes their head. “That’s five years away. I won’t be complicit in this bantha—”

The Imp officer clenches her fist around the holo puck. Your and Arien’s likenesses vanish, leaving an afterimage burned into your retinas. Your eyes find the woman’s again, and you drop the neutral facade. 

“What do you want,” you ask, voice as flat as you can manage. 

With a twitch of an eyebrow, the woman sweeps an arm out as if to encompass the entire cell. “You’re smart; I’m sure you can figure that much out.” 

“Humor me.” 

“I am not in the business of humoring criminals,” she says imperiously, drawing herself to her full height.

You glower up at her through your eyelashes, not deigning to give her the satisfaction of making you move your entire head. “No, it seems you’re in the business of being an insufferable di’kut with an overinflated ego.” 

For a beat, neither you nor she moves. Then her face splits into a wide, beaming smile, one that is so saccharinely false that your blood freezes in your veins. “Admiral Tarkin will be pleased to know that you are in custody, (full name). Consider yourself lucky that you are still, as yet, of use to the Empire.”

The name is unfamiliar to you, but if you’ve caught the attention of an admiral, you can only imagine what kind of hell your life is about to become. The woman turns on her heel.

When her foot touches the bottom step, you shake your head. “You don’t know who you’re dealing with.” 

Her smile grows as she slowly faces you once again, but her eyes remain cold, menacing, uncaring. “No,” she says, softly, “you are about to find out exactly with whom it is you are dealing.” 

With a hum, the electrobarrier powers down, letting the Imp out, and immediately flickers back to life behind her. She throws you one last baleful glance before striding out of view, two troopers flanking her. After her footsteps fade, you count to ten. 

And then you sob. Pressing the back of your hand against your mouth, you screw your eyes shut. Your chest tightens. The room tilts off its axis. Heat and ice fuse into your spine, melding you in place, locking your limbs where they’re wrapped around each other. Thoughts spin wildly in your mind. Disjointed. Frantic. Panicked. 

Omega—is she safe? Will she stay that way? Will Hunter forgive you? Will you see Echo again? Are you still going to die? Are they going to interrogate you? Your brain conjures up an image of Tarkin—you’ve never seen him before, but in your mind, the unknown figure takes on a looming, oppressive presence, larger than life. You blink: in the flash of darkness, there’s Hunter, his kind, tired eyes vacant and glossy. There’s Echo, blood leaking out of his mouth. There’s Omega, screaming for you. 

Another sob rips itself from your lungs. You heave, stomach emptying onto the dark flooring.

Time passes strangely here. You’re unable to account for how much of it passes around you, whether the officer visited you seconds, hours, days, eons ago. It could be any of them. It could be none of them. You sit in the corner, eyes unfocused. When you blink, returning to the present moment, you glance around. A new tray of food rests near the barrier. All the same food sits there—mush, a dry biscuit, and a dented cup—just in different order. Or maybe it’s the same. You’re not sure. 

The sight of food makes your stomach twist. Breathing through your nose, you turn away, angling your body so that the tray is out of your periphery. If you’re lucky, you’ll starve to death before this Tarkin person arrives. The realization that you’re willing to die for your squad, even knowing that they may never forgive you, is as natural as the breath you draw into your lungs. Of course you’d die to protect them. They’d do the same. 

Wouldn’t they? 

You’re glad you won’t have to find that out. Eyes sliding shut, a tear glides down your cheek and drops onto the coarse jumpsuit. 

Apparently, you’re not the first prisoner of the Empire to attempt this tactic. You have no way of knowing how long it’s been since the officer came to you, but the dryness of your mouth, the fatigue weighing your head down, the trembling weakness in your hands when you raise them all speak to the toll your self-imposed fast is wreaking on your body. When the electrobarrier power whirs down to nothing, you blink against the bleariness clouding your eyes and raise your head. A soft groan escapes you at the effort. 

In the doorway, another uniformed Imperial hovers, with a trooper and a floating droid behind them. Panic seizes your heart, arresting its beating for a moment, before exhaustion floods through you again and you find you don’t have the energy to be afraid. Have they finally come to interrogate you? 

The Imp tsks as he descends the steps into the cell. Both the trooper and the droid follow; the barrier shimmers back to life. 

“You really are lucky you are needed,” the Imp says. His voice is scratchy, rough, grating. You grimace. “Elsewise, we might actually let you starve to death. As it is, the Admiral has requested you be in good condition for him.” 

The Imp snaps his fingers and the droid bobs in the air toward you. 

“Don’t,” you mumble, eyeing the needles on the droid. Now that it’s this close, you can do nothing but gape at the array of needles, buzzers, prods, and other instruments on its black domed surface. 

“Don’t be silly, now,” the Imp says. At a wave of his hand, the droid hovers closer and jabs a needle into your arm. You flinch, the pain intense—but brief. It is immediately replaced by a familiar cool sense of relief that emanates through your entire body. Bacta. 

Sighing, you relax. Stars, that feels damn near heavenly. When the needle retracts, you don’t even feel it. Nor do you feel the second jab, and your exhausted mind succumbs to the pleasant, airy sensation of the bacta, dragging you into a light slumber. 

When you wake next, you feel stronger, more alert. Rubbing your eyes, you push into a sitting position, groaning at the ache in your muscles. You’ve been here too long. With a glance at your arm, you find a transparent catheter taped below the crease of your elbow. Ah. That explains the reason your hands no longer shake as you hold them up for closer inspection. Karking Imperials.

You’re unsure if something woke you, or if your body finally seems to have rested enough. Standing, you shuffle across the bare floor and scale the steps to peer through the red barrier of your cell. Nothing seems to move beyond it, the lights in the hallway no brighter or dimmer than they usually are. Something is going on out there, though. In the distance, so faint you think it must be a figment of your imagination, blaster fire repeats. Shouts, incomprehensible, echo off the hallway walls. 

Even from this vantage point, you can’t see the entrances of the cells across the hall from yours. The barriers are set too far back into the wall, blocking your view. Even so, something quiets your tongue, stalling the impulse to call out and ask if anyone knows what’s going on. 

You’re glad you stay quiet. A few more long, tense moments pass; the blaster fire and shouting gets louder with each breath, until you catch the sound of footsteps approaching your direction. You scurry back down the duracrete steps and resume your position on the bench. If the footsteps coming this way are Imperial, you don’t want to be caught with your nose in their business. 

A hulking figure sprints past your cell, then seems to skid to a halt, if the clatter of armor is any indication. The figure reappears in the doorframe, walking backwards. Gray armor with white and yellow accents. 

The gasp that escapes you is nearly a squeal. “Wrecker?”

“Nav!” 

You gape, open-mouthed, at the man before you. He pushes his helmet up onto his forehead, his face creased in a massive grin.

“S’good to see ya, Nav! C’mon, we gotta go!” Wrecker raises his blaster and shoots out the door’s control panel. The humming red barrier flickers before winking out of existence for good. He  beckons you, glancing up and down the hallway.

Without a second more of hesitation, you scramble up the stairs. Heart thumping wildly in your chest, the familiar, fuzzy warmth of happiness radiating into your very toes and fingers, you tackle Wrecker in a hug. 

“What are you doing here?” you ask, face buried into his chestplate.

He awkwardly pats your back with his free hand. “Well, we—”

“We could ask you the same thing,” comes Tech’s voice from behind Wrecker. 

You step away from Wrecker. Panting, Tech stumbles to a halt, and though his helmet obscures most of his expression, his eyes meet yours briefly behind the yellow tint of his goggles. He inclines his head in greeting. 

“We received a coded transmission that you were at these coordinates,” Tech continues. 

“What?” You frown. “I didn’t— my belongings were taken from me.” 

“So who sent the message?” Wrecker asks, voice hushed. 

You worry your bottom lip between your teeth. The answer springs immediately to mind: Crosshair. You can’t make yourself say it aloud, not here, fearing that speaking his name into existence will shatter this reunion. With a sigh, you decide to tell them on the ship, when you’re all safely back in hyperspace. 

Before your silence can become something awkward, another set of footsteps rush up behind you. Your lungs feel like someone’s squeezed all the air out of them and swapped your heart for a rock. Everything seems to slow, your focus drawn in on the skull-like helmet and your warped reflection in the visor. 

“Hunter,” you breathe. 

Wordlessly, he draws you into a crushing embrace. You gasp in surprise. Of all the possibilities you ran through when imagining reuniting, this one never occurred to you, not with the way things were left on Iridonia. The hard plates of his armor digging into your skin, but you don’t care about that. All you care about are his arms around you, the tremble you can feel in his hands where they grasp at your jumpsuit, the breath he exhales that crackles through the vocabulator. Your hands find purchase around his waist. His warmth smothers all of the fear and confusion of the past two weeks. 

“Thank you for coming,” you say, loud enough for the others to hear, but you intend it only for Hunter. 

He tightens his arms around you for a moment before releasing you. You step back, a bit dazed, nose full of the acrid scent of carbon scoring mixed with gunmetal oil and musk. Looking up at him, you hope your gaze meets his behind the visor. He nods once. 

“Tech,” he says, “get us out of here.” 

“Already done,” Tech says. “Our primary route will take us back parallel the way we came in, and I have several backup routes identified should we need them.” 

“Let’s go,” Hunter says. He gently nudges you to follow Tech.

Wrecker plasters himself to the wall to let you and Hunter pass by first before taking up the rear. He taps his helmet and it slides back into place over his face. 

“Omega is at the ship,” Hunter says behind you. His voice is close—closer than he’s ever been to you before. “We’ll be lucky to get back without much resistance.” 

“Hey, at least we haven’t tripped the alarm,” Wrecker says. “Gotta be a record— oh, for kriff’s sake.”

At his words, a klaxon alarm blares to life. You wince, covering your ears as the ascending note pierces through the hallway. “You just had to say something, Wreck.” 

“Sorry,” he says, and he sounds genuinely sheepish. 

Breaking into a jog behind Tech, you refrain from peeking into any of the cells you pass. You doubt you’ll recognize anyone here—but you also fear you’ll recognize all of them for the same hopelessness you wallowed in not that long ago. The same pervasive, heavy dread that weighed on your lungs, slowly crushing them. 

You stumble, jarring out of your reverie. Hunter catches your arm and steadies you. 

“Where’s your gear?” he asks, like he’s just now realizing what you’re wearing. 

“I don’t know,” you say. “I didn’t see where it got taken.” 

“Kriff.” Hunter sighs. “Tech, detour us to—”

“The processing office,” Tech interrupts. “Done.” 

Tech leads you all down a dizzying number of turns, hallways, service tunnels, and yet more turns. It’s not until the processing office is in sight that you encounter resistance. Ducking into an alcove, you cringe as blaster bolts scream past you. Hunter and Wrecker respond in kind, the rings of blue stun blasts expanding as they travel the length of the hall. One of the men at the other end grunts in pain and the telltale sound of plastoid against durasteel echoes around you. 

“I have eyes on the intruders,” says a familiar voice—a clone voice—at the end of the hall. “They’re in Detention Block 68—hrgh.” 

“Nice shot, Tech,” Hunter says. “Nav, we’re clear.” 

Nodding, you peek around the corner of the alcove. Two clone troopers lay sprawled, unconscious, in awkward positions on the floor in front of a square room. Through the transparisteel walls, you catch sight of neat rows of cubbies, most of them empty, but in one of them you spot your faded and worn pack. 

You rush forward, stepping gingerly over the downed troopers. Your pack, blasters, and clothing are all here. On top of your pack rests a single toothpick. Eyes widening, you brush the tiny piece of wood away, then grab your belongings. The familiar, comforting weight of your pack on your back and your DC-17s in both hands settles the spike of adrenaline. Crosshair again. 

“Time to move,” Tech calls.

You glance up; more troopers rush down the hall you just left. “Coming.” 

Behind Tech once more, with Wrecker taking up the tail again, the four of you dash in what feels like an endless circle. You lose count of the turns, the backtracking, the levels you scale down. Only your absolute trust in these men, in Tech, keeps your hands steady as you fire over Tech’s shoulder, his own hands occupied with the detention center schematics on his datapad. 

“The hangar is just ahead,” he says. 

“Thank the stars.” You’re panting, a burning stitch in the side of your neck, but as the hallway doors whisk open, you nearly sob at the sight of the Marauder. 

“Intruders!” The shout echoes around the massive hangar bay, several troopers taking up the call and radioing for reinforcements. 

Putting on a burst of speed despite the way your legs feel like molten lava, you duck under the lip of a stack of crates just as blaster fire screeches toward you. The bolts impact the crates, but you don’t stop moving. The Marauder ramp begins to lower. 

“Go, go go!” Hunter urges. “Wrecker, get on board and get on the guns!” 

Tech, Wrecker, and you practically sprint for the ramp, Hunter providing covering fire behind you. You fire blindly to either side, hoping that at least one stun blast catches a trooper, or at the very least deters them from shooting at you. Tech reaches the ramp first, leaping the few feet off the ground and clambering up the rest of the way. By the time you and Wrecker reach it, the ramp is finally on the ground. Wrecker disappears to the right, but you hesitate. 

“Hunter!” you call. 

“I’m coming,” he says. 

Still a few dozen feet behind, he’s crouched behind a long rectangular supply crate, head ducked low to avoid being shot at. A quick glance shows a number of troops advancing on his position—and another squadron falling into place in the rafters at his back. Under your feet, the ship lurches. 

“No, wait, Hunter!” Your voice cracks. “Now!” 

He follows the line of your outstretched pointer finger. Stumbling, he rushes toward the ship just as the firing line opens, raining blue blaster bolts onto the crate he was just behind. You raise, aim, and fire your DCs without a second thought, nearly every shot connecting with a trooper. One, two, four go down, unconscious, and the rest scatter. 

Twenty feet, ten feet to go—the ship rises several feet into the air. You toss your blasters behind you into the ship. Like you’ve rehearsed this a thousand times, Hunter jumps and you catch his forearm, fingers digging into him as his dig into you, and you pull for all you’re worth. The ship pitches to the side; blaster fire narrowly misses the both of you as Hunter’s feet find purchase—

With another jolt to the side, you lose your footing and stumble back into the ship cabin, yanking Hunter with you. You collapse onto the durasteel floor, Hunter landing on top of you. The air whooshes out of your lungs; for a moment, you panic as the cabin grows darker. Only the pneumatic hiss of the ramp sealing calms you, though not by much. Your chest is tight where you imagine your diaphragm is, the muscle not working properly. Dimly, you’re aware of shouts being thrown back and forth over your head, Tech and Wrecker trying to get the squad to safety. 

Hunter removes his helmet; it bounces and rolls across the floor. “Nav?” 

You nod weakly, lungs still refusing to work. Pushing at his chest, you try to get him off of you, to get the extra weight off of your chest. Thankfully, he understands and lifts himself onto his palms, but he doesn’t go farther than that. Worry lines crease his forehead, his gray eyes searching your face, his lips turned down in a frown. 

Finally you heave a lungful of cold, recycled air into your aching lungs. Coughing, you gulp down a few more breaths before you become aware of the relief spreading over Hunter’s face. This close, you could count his eyelashes. Heat blooms in your chest. 

“Hi,” you whisper. 

“Hi,” he says. 

Two feet appear in your periphery, and you crane your head around. Omega’s features are upside down from your perspective, but the puffy, reddened eyes and tear tracks clench your heart. Scooting out from underneath Hunter, you rise to your knees, arms open. 

Omega throws herself into your embrace, wrapping her arms around your neck and her legs coming up around your waist, fully latching onto you. Hunter’s hand steadies you as Omega’s added weight tips you off-balance. The girl sniffles, her hair obscuring your vision, the red dye faded to pink. The ship jolts as it makes the jump to hyperspace. 

“I missed you so much,” she says, her voice thick. She hiccups. “Please don’t leave us ever again.” 

Rubbing her back, you squeeze her tightly. “So long as you all want me here, I’m not going anywhere again, kid.” 

“Promise?” she says. 

“I promise.” 

With a sniffle, she slowly lowers her feet back to the floor. When she pulls back and you look at her face, you offer her a smile. She doesn’t return it. Instead, fresh tears well in her eyes. 

“What’s the matter, bug?” you ask. “I’m here. I’m okay. We’re safe.” 

She shakes her head. “E-Echo—”

Your eyes widen. Heart thudding in your ears, you look up at Hunter, the worn, tired light in his eyes only serving to deepen the sudden dread in your veins. Echo can’t be gone. He can’t be—no. You refuse to even entertain that thought. Pushing up to your feet, you take quick stock of the ship, like he’s going to jump out at you, that they’re just playing a joke for your return. But he’s not here.

“Where is Echo?”

Taglist: @the-hexfiles @fjordg @idoubleswearimawriter @skellymom

#hunter x reader #hunter x gn!reader #tbb hunter x reader #second chances #rhiwrites #tbb x reader #the bad batch x reader

[theenpcbracket]

Seeding Round: Poll 4

Image ID included, click to see the full image please!

(The images submitted are of option 1, Duurhnaviig, and option 3, Khorush the Destroyer)

More about each NPC below the cut!

Character Descriptions are in the order of their appearance in the poll!

Character 1

Name: Duurhnaviig Party: Face Smasherz Relationship to party: Party member's family member/king of realm that party member works in (Homebrew)

What makes them the best NPC: Duurhnaviig is a loud, raucous, strong, passionate character, who takes his job as a king very seriously. He honors his people and makes sure that the needs of his kingdom are met before anything else. Though Duurhnaviig is not opposed to war, coming from lands torn by war, he moved to peaceful lands to get his people out of war, so he tries and avoids it as much as possible.

Though he is not always the most intelligent character, often times mistaking social cues, he's got a heart of gold and wants the best for his people and anyone in his lands. At least those that don't intend to cause harm to the former. Duurhnaviig is happy to assist where he can, so long as it doesn't take away from his kingdom and rewards help generously.

Duurhnaviig can be known to be overzealous sometimes, and will make decisions that could be disagreeable to others if he believes it to benefit his people.

Quote: "Should the path to my people's salvation make me hell bound, then I will gladly descend."

"I am the Red Tide, Tagavor of these realms, and dealer of your judgement. You may pray to your god, but in these lands, only I will hear you."

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Character 2

Name: The Bread Guy Party: The guys Relationship to party: Shop keep in Everwinter

What makes them the best NPC: The sell the best bread in town. Pumpernickle, white, pumpkin, raisin, all the bread. Best bread in town.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Character 3

Name: Khorush the Destroyer, Speaker-to-Animals Party: Jax's Rovers (Rovers system) Relationship to party: Hired mercenary & ship's chef

What makes them the best NPC: Khorush is a massive 8-legged, 4-eyed alien creature with thick fur known as a "spider-bear". Can stand from all eight legs to just the two hind ones, measuring ~12ft tall when stood on four. Feet not being used for standing are prehensile and can pick up objects, etc. He also wears a minimal amount of Iron Age style armor, and travels with a 7ft greatsword and an iron frying pan. Human is a favored delicacy among his species. Our space rovers originally encountered him while visiting cold, snow-covered planet. After our alien member convinced him not to eat the rest of our crew, ze ended up hiring him as part the group. In addition to being a formidable warrior and a cultural ambassador he also prides himself on being an excellent cook, and is knowledgeable of many cuisines across the galaxy. When our rovers team was stationed at the imperial base Khorush spent the entire time impressing the kitchen chefs with his culinary talents.

_______

(Mod note: please reach out if anyone would like this post to be tagged for arachnophobia. I have severe arachnophobia which wasn't triggered, but I would be happy to do so if someone else would like or need!)

#seeding round #dungeons and dragons #dnd #d&d #dnd oc #dnd npc #ttrpg #pathfinder #powered by the apocalypse #indie ttrpg #dnd stuff #dnd character #character tournament #oc tournament #homebrew #dnd homebrew #d&d 5e #d&d 5e homebrew #polls

[my-head-is-an-animal]

Opinions on how plo would turn to the darkside? Is it like slowly breaking his character and creating someone new? Or was it simmering under the surface the entire time? OR does he just embrace it all at once, like "IM DOING THIS AND NOTHING IS STOPPING ME". bonus points on if it's for a secret s/o. This is not a request btw

Okay, I know it says not a request, but I could not resist doing some headcanons for this!

So, we know that Plo is the BEST Jedi ever, so surely it wouldn't be a sudden change of heart that would lure him to the dark side, right?

He's a creature of exploration and discovery, so his desire for knowledge would lead him on a journey, one that would take him to you.

At first, he would be confused, but put his faith in the Force, there must be a reason that he found you.

He'd leave it for a while, weeks, months, possibly even years.

It would be like an earworm, silently making it's home in the back of his mind, slowly leeching out into his thoughts.

You.

Why were you suddenly so crucial to his journey?

When he finds he's unable to locate the answer alone, he goes to you, he talks with you and comes to understand you.

You are the purest thing he has ever come across, everything about you ignites in him a need to protect you.

At all costs.

Plo soon understands. His role as a Jedi led him to the answer to all his questions.

His inner brutality, his swiftness, his mercy exists for you. To do the things that you cannot.

Plo has the strength to fight for you, instead of you.

The Jedi Council disapprove, of course, but Plo sees the sense in his actions.

The galaxy is not ready to see you for what you really are.

Pure love and compassion.

Plo protects you, even against his own. His skill with a saber, his wisdom and tactical prowess is second to none, and worthy of being your protector.

The one thing he could never account for though: your reaction.

In all his efforts, his force of will, his iron judgment, he becomes rigid and immoveable. Unwise.

Plo sees you through tired eyes, realisation that tension and fear had taken over.

He lets his thoughts of your loss consume him until he is unable to live without your existence.

He never even notice the destruction he left in his path. How could he ever have strayed so far from the Jedi way?

He kneels before you, begging your forgiveness, begging for relief from the madness of the Dark Side.

He hands his saber to you, begging more violently than before for you to help him.

Your fear of him this way is what opens the darkness up for just a moment so that light may enter and clarity take over.

Plo places his saber to his heart and knows that he cannot continue like this. He prays you find faith in the Jedi once again, for he is not an accurate representation of what they are.

He clicks the small button on his saber and allows the burning blade to pierce through his heart.

The nightmare is over. Plo finds peace. You are released from the prison he created for you both. The Jedi come to your aid and ask that they forgive his actions.

The Dark Side works in many ways and this is only evidence that even the best of the Jedi can succumb if they are not careful.

Plo's death only serves to teach others of the whims of the Dark Side.

He helps to guide you through the Force, his new mission is to rectify any damage he has done.

He vows to keep himself out of reach of you and any others that may become slaves to the very same evil that took him.

Hope you enjoyed that, it was a lovely little mental exercise for me!

If you liked this, please consider supporting me ☕ thanks for reading!

#plo koon fanfiction #plo koon x reader #plo koon headcanon #head canon #plo koon #sith plo koon

[mthofferings]

Juiche

See Juiche’s existing works here and here.

Preferred contact methods: Tumblr: juiche

Preferred organizations: - Anything from the list of approved organizations

Will create works that contain: N/A

Will not create works that contain: N/A

  -- Art --

Auction ID: 1156

Will create works for the following relationships: Captain America fandom any gen - AA, MCU Daredevil fandom any gen - MCU Guardians of the Galaxy fandom any gen - MCU Deadpool fandom any gen - X-Men movieverse Spider-Man fandom any gen - MCU, Spider-Man (Raimi trilogy), Spider-Verse (animated films), TASM Iron Man fandom any gen - MCU Venom fandom any gen - Venom movieverse WandaVision fandom any gen - MCU

Work Description: I will do a flat coloured bust sketch limited to one character of your choosing :) Here is an example.

Ratings: Gen

Can pods bid on this auction? Yes - Podbids welcome!

CLICK HERE TO BID ON THIS WORK

The auction runs from October 22 (12 AM ET) to October 28 (11:59:59 PM ET). Visit marveltrumpshate.com during Auction Week to view all of our auctions and to place your bids!

#Juiche #auction: art #mth 2023

[two-reflections]

Iron Will, Crimson Whispers

Warsmith Kirakos Neman of the Iron Warriors prepares to meet with Captain Roscius Sedulius of the Red Corsairs to discuss a trade agreement. [Part 1/4.]

This is the start of a oneshot that I'll be posting in parts on Marine Meat Monday for the rest of February. Today and next week should be fairly in line with MMM, but the two weeks after that will focus on the characters' meeting and its aftermath.

Tumblr version below, but please read on Ao3 if you can.

The halls of the Iron Warriors’ fortress echoed with the rhythmic hiss of steam that marked Warsmith Kirakos Neman's ablutions. Steam swirled around his imposing figure, sculpted first by the arts of the Corpse God, followed by years of war and the attention of the Dark Mechanicus. Time was anathema to Neman, yet his pre-meeting ritual was as precise and unwavering as a laser lance. Every facet of his being, from the ceramite plates meticulously polished to the Aquila gleaming on his chest plate, had to be an instrument of perfect order.

The ancient rituals of his Legion, passed down through generations of warriors, flowed through him like scripture. The industrial-grade cleanser was measured to the exact micron for optimal exfoliation and applied with surgical precision. His serfs scrubbed him, dissolving all impurities in the foamy lather. Each stroke was measured, calculated and practised; any deviation would have spelt a promotion for the hapless mortal from bath attendant to the newest member of the Astartes’ growing swarm of servo skulls. Neman’s armour lay disassembled in the next room, being attended to by agents of the Dark Mechanicus. Now, he was naked, the statuesque beauty of his body on display for his own judgment. 

His gaze, sharp as a power sword, scanned his reflection in the mirrored wall. He was seven and a half feet of scarred skin and heavy muscles. Once, that skin had been the rich colour of fertile earth. Now, it had taken on a dull, steely aspect more reminiscent of basalt. This change pleased Neman; his augmetic leg and semi-extruded spine matched his new colour better. His face’s resting expression was imperious, calculating, yet stoic, hinting at a soul with the patience to conquer a thousand worlds. His scars, each a testament to his unwavering loyalty to his Primarch Perturabo, were arranged in a grim symmetry. 

Some of his brothers would have called Kirakos Neman vain, but those who knew him understood: he was a demanding master, expecting nothing short of perfection from all who served him. This demand extended to his own body. His gaze held little self-admiration. It was laser-focused on the task, dissecting minute imperfections with the same intensity he brought to dissecting his foes.

As his cleansing ended, Neman passed on to the next room. He moved with the practised grace of a predator preparing for the hunt. Each layer of armour was donned reverently, the ceramite plates clicking into place like a prayer. The Iron Warriors’ sigil on his shoulder, a testament to his lineage, was buffed to a mirror shine. These efforts were not just about presentation; they were about embodying his legion’s ideals – strength, discipline, and an iron will that could shatter that of lesser beings.

As the final power coupling hummed to life in harmony with the hereteks’ binharic chants, Neman felt the familiar surge of power course through him. In his armour, he was no longer just Kirakos Neman, Iron Warrior; he was an instrument of the Legion's will, a cog in the war machine that would first reshape The Cicatrix Maledictum and later the galaxy.

His gaze settled on a data-slate clutched in his hazard-striped gauntlet. The details of his upcoming meeting with Captain Roscius Sedulius, envoy of the Red Corsairs, were etched in his mind. This meeting was of paramount importance. Perturabo's grand design, whispered only amongst the Iron Warriors' elite, demanded absolute precision in material acquisition and transport. The Red Corsair’s reputation preceded him – concerningly, Sedulius was said to be flamboyant, duplicitous, a viper in the ranks of traitors. Though he possessed a keen sense of beauty, Neman cared little for theatrics. He craved efficiency, precision, and the cold satisfaction of a completed task. The Iron Warrior would tolerate no sloppiness, no hint of weakness. This envoy of Huron Blackheart’s would be managed with the same ruthless precision he brought to his ablutions. He would be his Primarch's hand, the unwavering instrument of the Lord of Iron, and this Sedulius would bend to his will as surely as heated steel yielded to the touch of the hammer.

Nevertheless, one concession could be made. Neman rejected his helmet with a glance and a flick of his fingers. The priests who carried the two halves of it bowed and retreated from the room, singing the end of his armouring. 

Neman strode out of his quarters, the rhythmic clang of his boots on the metal walkway a counterpoint to the whirring machinery that hummed the lifeblood of the Iron Warriors' fortress. The meeting with Roscius Sedulius was not a social call, but a surgical strike, a test of wills veiled in civility. Neman would navigate the treacherous shoals of diplomacy with the same ruthless efficiency he brought to the battlefield, his every word a weapon honed to a razor's edge. For in the grand calculus of the Legion, there was no room for imperfection, no margin for error. There was only duty, and Neman, the ironclad instrument of its execution. 

#iron warriors #40k fanfic #Warhammer 40000 #chaos space marines #marine meat monday #It was written while I had a fever #I apologise if it's hard to read or massively canon divergent

[abyssalzones]

hey, i really enjoy your escape velocity stuff! were there any sci-fi stories that served as inspiration for it?

I'm so glad to hear you like my guys!! EV has had many, many inspirations over the years that range from "I'd like to isolate this one element from this work that inspires or speaks to me and see what I can do similarly" to "This is the foundational source of inspiration for the entire comic", all of which get muddled together and altered until its fully its own thing- but I'll name the most important ones here.

As far as the single most important inspiration for EV goes (in terms of sci-fi), it's gotta be starbound. Ironically I don't actually play that game anymore but in no uncertain terms it was the launching pad for escape velocity to be a story at all- and I feel like you can definitely see it here and there, down to the array of sapient species or even Gills' iconic adaptable crossbow being a concept partially lifted from the game. Before any other member of the crew existed, Gills was my hylotl player character, although he was pretty drastically different to the guy you see now!! Maybe I'll talk more on that at some point. At the end of the day though, Starbound was less story inspiration and more world inspiration for me.

There have been a number of different sci-fi works serving as inspiration since then: the Southern Reach book trilogy, the half life series (!!), IDW transformers comics have always been a major inspiration for the comic's tone, outer wilds, the Akira movie and manga... Even more recently Everything Everywhere All At Once has helped things click into place for me. Also worth noting that as a huge biology/ecology nerd I'm very inspired by real life experiences and the natural world, from what I learn in class settings to personal experience to nonfiction works like The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy. Sometimes the best source of inspiration for your sci-fi really is the weirdness of the world we live in.

Anyway, I hope that helps! Thank you for the ask!

#lately i've also been looking into cowboy bebop but it struggles to keep my attention lol #but there are lots of things like that where i've been inspired by visual assets and ideas rather than seeing the full work itself #i'll get around to it though #lab notes #escape velocity

[radioactive-earthshine]

You have infected me. Timbo for the prompt with either "wait, you think I'm cute?" Or "I don't think I've ever seen you smile" please. It's all I've been able to think about for a good few days.

I decided to do both, thank you for the fun prompts!

. . .

“New Genesian tech fixes i’self, Bird Boy.” Tim rolled out from under the Super-Cycle. Wrapped around his forehead was a bright headlamp; he turned it off so he didn’t blind his guest, the voice alone was unmistakable. 

“Not trying to fix her, she’s making this… noise. I think something is stuck in her,” Tim explained and he swiftly got back to his feet. 

Slo-Bo grinned. “That’s wut she said.” 

“In this case, I think that’s exactly what she said,” Tim said, a bit smug that he derailed Slo-Bo’s attempt to be irritating and juvenile. Tim hopped up in the driver’s seat and Slo-Bo swaggered over and put a pale hand on the Super-Cycle’s front, where the hood would have been on a normal car. 

“Ya not feelin’ well, huh?” Slo-Bo asked her and Super-Cycle made the unfamiliar noise Tim had brought up. It was mechanical and gravelly, like a rock tumbler grinding coarse stone, but laced throughout there was a low whine that sounded organic. He narrowed his eyebrows at it as his face pulled down in empathy. “Never heard that before, Bird Boy, hand me the light.” Tim held it out for him and Slo-Bo quickly strapped it around his head and got on the mechanic board, pushing himself under. “Now, what the frag’s makin’ ya feel like shit, where’s the bastich?” 

“I looked everywhere under there, I couldn’t see anything,” Tim sat there as he watched Slo-Bo, occasionally he would shift under there, swearing in languages he knew came from the other side of the galaxy, and yet even frustrated there was a lazy drawl to it. 

“Yeah well, ya don’t know New Genesian tech, humans are ‘bout 5000 year behind em.” There was a sudden thunk and a pop and the Super-Cycle suddenly lurched three inches forward. Tim gripped the handlebars and pulled back on them like reins in a panic. “Woah girl! Stop!” 

“Calm down Bird Boy! I jus’ startled her! But I found it! There ya are ya little fragger!” There was silence and a soft click, then Slo-Bo wheeled out holding up the assailant in his left hand; a wound up string of fishing line. 

“That’s it? That’s all it was?” The Super-Cycle rocked back and forth, as if testing if the discomfort was gone, and then a low thrumming purr emitted from her. “We must have picked that up when we went to the lake. Thanks ‘Bo. How did you know where to look?” 

Slo-Bo took the headlamp off and put it down on the workbench, then discarded the fishing line in the trash with a scowl. He looked at Tim with his bright yellow eyes and explained lazily. “Lobo’s memories,” he tapped his temple. “Fer a time he smuggled New Genesian tech, outfitted it, altered it, sold it to the right bastich fer the right creds. When ya live t’be as old as he is, ya learn quick bein’ a little nerdy can save yer life and be pretty profitable. I wuzzn’t jus’ pushin’ buttons fixin’ yer ship on fraggin’ Apokolips, ya know.” 

Tim couldn’t decide if Slo-Bo’s accent was Southern, New Jerseyian, Brooklyn or some weird Cajun hybrid of all of them. “Well, thank you. I’m sure she appreciated it too.” Super-Cycle trilled and Tim smiled at her. 

“I don’t ever think I’ve seen ya smile, Bird Boy,” Slo-Bo suddenly announced as he leaned back against the workbench, he was grinning, large canines visible set below deep purple gums. 

“Huh?” 

“Smilin’, don’t think I ever saw ya doin’ it.” 

Tim scrunched his eyebrows together. “I smile all the time! Don’t I?” 

Slo-Bo shook his head and huffed a low giggle. “Nope. First time fer me.” 

“No way, I smiled in front of Lobo. I remember he told a joke that was actually ironically funny and not crude or gross!” Tim refuted, he refused to be known as the funless one without humor or joy. That was Batman. He was NOT Batman.

“That doesn’t count, yer dealin’ with me now. Not him. This is the first time ya smiled in front of me,” he said and pointed his thumb at his chest for emphasis.

Try as he might, Tim could not debunk Slo-Bo’s claim. Losing Lobo and gaining his clone Slo-Bo was an adjustment for everyone. Tim liked Slo-Bo and thought he was far better company than his progenitor. At least he didn’t have to constantly be looking over his shoulder with him. 

“Wow. You’re right. I guess have been lacking in the smiles lately. Lots on my mind.” Tim dismounted the Super-Cycle and she drove off to the other side of the workshop, she had a “spot” she favored over everywhere else. 

“Like wut?” Slo-Bo asked lazily and Tim debated with himself on how much to reveal to him. With Lobo he kept conversations at a minimum, but friendly. Slo-Bo was an entirely different person. 

Tim quickly made a decision. “School stuff, dad stuff.” It wasn’t a lie. 

Slo-Bo’s lips curled upwards into a sly smile. “Girl stuff n’ boy stuff n’ other stuff?” 

Tim smiled again. “Yeah, something like that.” 

“Sounds like normal teen stuff t’me. Already went through it once, guess I’m havin’ go number two.” 

“I don’t even want to know what Lobo was like the first time,” Tim said and he leaned back against the same workbench next to Slo-Bo. 

“Not much diff’rent from wut ya saw here, only on Czarnia he brought upon a genocide. He wuz the weird one. One in a trillion.” 

“Oh.” Tim always thought that was a grave exaggeration, Bruce even had the claim on Lobo’s file as ‘claim not confirmed, suspected exaggeration.’ 

“Don’t go worryin’ yer head Bird Boy. I happen to like Earth. And yer good company. Ya don’t yap incessantly and ya got balls. I can respect that,” he said easily. “I like yer energy, Bird Boy. Imp’s like one of those Japanese cartoons; too high energy. Superboy is just a lost dweeb that thinks he’s cool. Wondy is wound up tighter than that fishin’ line. Secret still needs to figure ‘erself out and I dunno what t’do with Ray. Ya got yer own big time issues, like a mix of all of em, but yer alright.” 

Tim didn’t know what to do with that but his cheeks were hot. “Thanks, I guess,” Tim responded as he considered Slo-Bo’s observations. “You’re good company too. And you’re not him either.” Slo-Bo flashed him another grin. “I’m cuter too.”

Tim nodded absently. “Yeah, and I can actually talk to you.” 

“Wait, ya think I’m cute?” Slo-Bo actually looked surprised, but the expression was brief as it fell back into a smug teasing grin. “Ya think I’m cute!”

Tim looked horrified and his cheeks flushed, even his forehead burned. “I-I do not!” 

“Ya do!” Slo-Bo was unrelenting. 

“I do not. That was me misspeaking. I take back everything I said!” Tim pushed himself off the workbench and went to leave the workshop, face red. Maybe there was a good healthy drop of Lobo that still beat in Slo-Bo’s heart. Tim hoped it was the best parts of him. Stopping at the doorway he turned back to Slo-Bo. “Thank you for helping with Super-Cycle. I mean it. I’ll talk to you later.” Then he was gone.

Slo-Bo chuckled as he watched him leave, glad that he managed to see him smile at least once before his vision got too blurry and  he missed his chance forever. 

It was a good day. 

#tim drake #slo-bo #slobo #timbo #mine #dc comics #young justice 1998 #yj98 #thank you #this was such fun to write #driver's seat