#ive lived like this for somewhere between two and four years | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

wavesmp3 · 3 years

Text

[ksw] clouds

sunwoo x reader

wc. 5k warnings: medical inaccuracies, death, illness, hospitals, overall just a pretty heavy piece genre can only be described as an absolute mess inspired mainly by san junipero but also slightly by charlie kaufman and wong kar wai

a/n: this is supposed to be told nonlinearly but like the creation of it was very messy so i have no clue if it actually worked, so good luck trying to make this piece make sense of this :)

act iii. scene iii.

Sunwoo sits and watches the sun shift from pink and blue to an impossible shade of green. And it’s then he knows that without a doubt Clara has ruined the color green for him. Because instead of marveling at the color of the sky, Sunwoo is reminded of the doors in her apartment building.

“Thought I might find you here.” The voice of a stranger who Sunwoo loved once upon a time says behind him. He tries like hell not to turn around. Not to lean back towards the voice and wait for your hand on his shoulder or your shin knocking familiarly against his back. He focuses on the waves crashing below instead. The roar of the water beneath him is deafening, but only if you let it be. He does, and he almost forgets that you’re behind him.

“Where’d you go?” You ask, now sitting next to him, tugging at the long grass.

“I’m right here.”

“And what about in there?” You bring a finger up and poke at the side of his forehead.

He turns to you, facing you in full. He takes in your features like it’s the first time all over again. And, oh, he wishes he knew before how many firsts you already had together. This is just another. This is just the first time he’s seen you in the past six months and remembered the thousands of times he’s seen your face before.

He studied your cheeks. The one he now recalls running the back of his palm over after you left for the Cloud.

He memorizes, for the millionth time, your eyes. He used to swear they were darker than they are, but then he saw them in the sun. He was dying back then; then he saw your eyes and you saved him. Just like that.

Mr. Choi was right of course. As he always must be. You and him are like an old married couple. Not like. You are. Almost were.

“I had lunch with Mr. Choi today.” He tells you.

You squint at him. “I know. It’s Thursday.” You pull out a piece of the grass. “What’d he make?”

“Ramen.”

“Was it good?”

“It was okay.”

“Too spicy?”

Suwnoo answers with a sigh, looking away from you and back towards the water. The deafening waves crash against the cliffside. “I know you looked at your file.” He finally says. You stop pulling at the grass. You still. “Mr. Choi told me.”

After he says it, there’s a silence that isn’t actually silent at all. The waves rage below his feet. The seagulls are there too, beneath, above, somewhere, everywhere. And then, of course, there’s you and Sunwoo, trying to be silent over the static in your heads and the machines you’re hooked up to in a universe far far away.

“Did he tell you about my file?”

He looks at you again. “No.”

“Oh.” You look away, brows furrowed, lick your lips, and then turn back to him. “So why are you upset?”

“After he told me, I went and I…”

“You didn’t.”

“I looked at mine.”

There’s another silence, except that this time it really is quiet. Sunwoo read once whilst in a rabbit hole of medical research that true silence only happens in a vacuum, where there is no medium for sound waves to travel through. This must be that. This place, the files, Mr. Choi and Mr. Chan, Clara and her apartment building full of green doors--it’s a vacuum. And they stick people in it then call it the Cloud. They call it extra time. But it isn’t. It’s nothing and he’s stuck in the middle of it. So Sunwo stares at you, straight through the vacuum of time and space you’re both lost in, waits for you to say something, and then waits for himself to hear it.

“You looked?” You finally say, voice folding in on itself.

“Yes.” Sunwoo’s own voice is barely there. You must be reading his lips which you’ve always been good at anyways.

“So you know now?”

“I always knew, and now, I remember.”

act i. scene iv.

There’s been an accident.

That’s what they say when the sun falls out of the sky and the world starts spinning in the wrong direction. It’s how they show up at Sunwoo’s door painted in shades of blue and red, with authority in their arms and hands on their hips. How they prepare him for the looming moment where they rip past his skin, blood, bone to shoot a gun straight at his heart. I’m so sorry for your loss, they say leaving him with a bullet lodged somewhere between his left and right atrium.

And those are the four words that play over and over and over in Sunwoo’s head as he gets to the hospital. Those are the words that crawl inside his open chest and turn him blue and black with infection. There’s been an accident, he remembers, staring at the extraordinary measures taken to keep your heart beating and lungs beating. This is it. Except that the accident isn’t that you’re dying, but that you’re dying. It’s always supposed to have been him. He’s supposed to be the one stuffed with tubes and hooked up to monitors, the one whose life is hanging on by a thread, and you’re supposed to be the one that saves him. It all feels like a play that’s gone horribly wrong because everyone switched parts after intermission without telling him. At what point did you steal the role of dying protagonist from him?

We did everything we could, a stranger in a white coat says. Except that it’s not some stranger, it’s your colleague and co-worker because this is the hospital you work at and the hospital Sunwoo met you in. There was too much damage to the brain, they explain as the image of their tear-stricken face goes from your friend during intern year to the doctor who operated on you as your brain went dead.

“We have two options, right?” Sunwoo is far too familiar with surgery and all this. He knows from his hospital days what’s supposed to happen next. But apparently, things have changed since then.

“Actually, there’s a third option.”

Sunwoo doesn’t waste a second. He jumps out of the chair stained red from his bleeding heart and asks: “What is it?”

“We can upload them.”

act iii. scene ii.

In fifty days of living in the cloud, Sunwoo has learned all about the people that he shares a building with. There’s Mr. Chan who lives behind a vomit green on the same floor as him and who hasn’t left his room since last January. There’s also Mr. Choi, who lives behind the emerald door and invites Suwoo over for lunch every Thursday. Clara lives upstairs, where the walls are painted in various shades of green--olive, seaweed, moss, hunter, shamrock, sage, and others that Sunwoo tries not to think too deeply about. He’s only met Clara once in the past fifty days and has no particular wish to see her again. He hadn’t expected her to be a kid. Cancer, you told him after their introduction in the lobby, poor girl was only seven. As said before, Sunwoo tries not to think about it.

And then of course there’s you behind the forest green door who has been slowly showing him all the good places. There’s the beach where you spent the day making seashell necklaces. The cafe which serves its tea too sweet for him, but sweet enough to be considered your favorite. Sunwoo just gets the chocolate bread. You took him downtown. To a club. The tallest building. And to midtown where the amusement park is.

But his favorite place you’ve taken him so far is the cliffside above the beach, where the waves crash against the rocks in a way that can only be described as violent. That day you and him laid in the grass and stared at the clouds with your heads dangling just over the edge and water spraying the backs of your necks. That day you turned to him and told him you’re sorry. For what, he asked. I’m so sorry you’re sick, you said, but it’s nice to have you around here. I think in a sense, we’ve both been waiting for this. Then, you smiled and stole all of the blood from his body. So yeah, that day, that place--it’s his favorite.

Today, you take him on a hike up a mountain.

“Do you believe in an afterlife?” You ask him after having spent thirty minutes silently staring at the view from the best peak.

“One after this?”

“Yeah. I guess. Although, I’m not so convinced this counts.”

“I don’t know.” Sunwoo shrugs. “Maybe.”

“Do you think we’d be able to be with our loved ones in it?”

His chest lurches. “If there is one, yes.”

“Do you think it’ll be different than this?”

Sunwoo turns to you finally. “Why are you asking about this?”

You shake your head. “Nevermind. It’s a stupid question.”

He turns back towards the view. From here, he can make out Clara’s building. He thinks about her, about Mr. Choi and Mr. Chan, who he recently found out were once married but who haven’t spoken since Mr. Chan read his file in January, and he thinks about you and about him.

“I think,” Sunwoo says, loud enough so that you can hear after wandering a little bit away from him, “that whatever the afterlife is, if it does exist, it’ll be worth it.”

You turn to him, but don’t make any move to come near him again. “And if it doesn’t exist?”

“Then life will have been worth it.”

The corner of your lip lifts. “I like that.”

Sunwoo only nods at the sentiment, and after a long while, he builds enough courage to ask, “you’ve been here a really long time, haven’t you?”

“Time doesn't work as linearly in the cloud as it does in the real world. Sometimes it feels like I got here and then you arrived the very next day.” You turn back towards the view and exhale heavily.

“But yes. I’ve been here for an eternity.”

act ii. scene i.

Before he actually sees you, Sunwoo feels you. Not you, in particular, but something in the distance, a presence in the corner of the room and a pair of eyes watching him from somewhere far away.

The scariest part is how much the feeling doesn’t actually scare him.

Two days after that, he starts to see you in the flesh. He tells himself that his mind is playing tricks on him, that the person he saw in the produce aisle wasn’t actually you at all and was just a stranger with the same hair.

He doesn’t go straight home from the store that day. Instead, he stops by the hospital and checks in on you, but even that doesn’t do anything about the fact that he sees a shadow of you behind the bed.

The day after that, you speak to him. Standing in the middle of his kitchen in broad daylight, you speak, you say hello, and the first thing Sunwoo thinks is that he’s dead.

You aren’t, you reply. You’re a zombie, he reasons, here for my brain. I’m not. A ghost. No. Are you, here Sunwoo falters, fear flooding out of his body to make room for the briefest blotch of hope that’s crushed almost immediately by you saying: I’m not alive, Sunwoo. You saw me in the hospital yesterday.

“So then,” he swallows, “what are you?”

I’m here. You look at him, stare at his face and without a sliver of doubt say, I’m here for you.

Sunwoo knows it’s impossible. You can’t be here. You can’t. And yet, you are.

Three years ago Sunwoo was told he had three months left to live, and he still remembers how impossibly you saved him from the brink of death. He remembers how impossible things happen all the time, and how impossibly possible it is that this is one of them. He steps towards you, touches your face, and feels the real, impossible thing against his hand.

“You’re here.”

On the fifth day of your haunting, Sunwoo finally has the sense to ask why.

Why what?

“Why are you here?”

I’m here for you.

“Stop saying that.”

But I am, you tell him. You asked, and that’s the answer. I’m a doctor, Sunwoo. I’m here for you.

Then, finally, he hears what you’ve been saying for the past five days. You’re here for him.

And the thing about doctors is that they’re there for you when you need them.

“I’m sick.”

Yes, you answer quietly, although it wasn’t a question.

“Again.”

I’m so sorry.

“You’re a hallucination, aren’t you?” Sunwoo’s shocked by how sad that makes him, how disappointing it is. “I’ve been hallucinating.”

Find me in the Cloud, Sunwoo. There’s something I want to say.

You’re gone by the time he gets to the hospital.

act iii. scene i.

Sunwoo stares at the hall of green doors, eyes darting from door to door in an attempt to stare down the shades until they confess which one of them is tea green.

“Clara, the landlord, likes colors.” A voice says from behind him. “Every couple of months she repaints all of the doors in different shades of the same one. Before the green, it was yellow.”

Sunwoo turns around to face you. When your eyes find him, they go blank for the smallest of moments. You give him a look that goes right through him, turning him inside out like you’ve seen the underside of his skin. It irks him.

“I’m Sunwoo. I’m new.”

You gulp. “You’re here.” He doesn’t know what to make of the statement. Do all people in the cloud act like this? “Why?”

Sunwoo nods, maybe you’re not so weird as much as you just have a weird way of posing questions. “I was told I’m sick.”

“I’m sorry.” You say, frowning like you actually might feel back for him.

“Have you been here a while then?” You nod. “Can I ask how long?” You shake your head. Sunwoo doesn’t think too much about it. Instead, he returns your earlier question “Why are you here?”

“Brain dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

You ignore it and point to a door down the hall. “I’m forest green. You?”

“Tea green. But I can’t find-”

You tap the door in front of him. “This one, genius.”

“Oh.” He laughs awkwardly. “Thanks.”

Your mouth parts as if to say something, and your face goes blank again. He feels his skin turning itself inside out because of it. “Have you read your file yet?”

He shakes his head. “I just got here.”

You inhale, softening, and mutter an ‘okay’. You continue down the hall towards your door. Sunwoo is stuck in place. “I can show you around here, if you like. Take you to all the cool places.”

Sunwoo takes you up on it.

A forest green door slams shut down the hallway.

act i. scene ii.

“Thank you for taking me out of the hospital.” Sunwoo says, exhaling. “I can’t remember the last time I’ve been to a park like this.”

And it’s true, he really can’t. He’s been sick for so long now, and has been through a multitude of treatment plans and too many surgeries. When you’re sick and have 9 surgeons turn you down after asking them to save your life, you forget the joy of being outside and feeling the sun on your skin. You were the first doctor to agree to the surgery. You’re the only doctor to have ever treated Sunwoo like he wasn’t dying, like he was actually going to live.

“You don’t have to thank me. This is good for me too.” You say, head resting against the park bench and eyes closed.

Sunwoo inhales, taking in the park with all his senses. A visceral sort of thing you learn to do as often as possible when you’ve been as close to death as frequently as he has. He feels the wood beneath his body and the grass beneath his feet. He feels the light on his skin and the wind pushing against his arms and nose. He listens to the kids screaming at the playground at the bottom of the hill and to the dogs barking within the dog park beside it. He takes all this in, relishes in it for the last time as a dying person.

You sigh. “One more surgery.”

“And then I’ll be done with this sickness.”

You smile. He pretends not to see. “And then you’ll be done.”

“Thank you for saving my life.”

“Don’t do that.”

“No. Seriously.”

You smile again, this time at him. Sunwoo doesn’t have to pretend not to see. “I haven’t finished saving it yet.”

He leans back against the bench and closes his eyes. “But you will.”

You tap on your coffee cup. “Honestly though, you did more work than me.” Sunwoo frowns while you take a sip. “The other nine doctors you called are good doctors, and they made the same judgement call I would have made for any other patient. No sane doctor would have agreed to treat you. But you were the reason I said yes. You had such faith that you were going to live and so much faith that I could do it that I believed you. I might be the one doing the technical saving, but you, Sunwoo, you’re the one who convinced me to do it. You saved yourself.”

He stares at you. The light hits your eyes like it’s finding a way to break through them. In truth, before Sunwoo got sick, he didn’t think he was scared of death, but he is. He’s terrified of it. Sunwoo realized it two weeks after his diagnosis and the day after he was wrongly told he only had three more months left to live. But now, for the first time since he was diagnosed, he doesn't feel so afraid of it. Despite how far he’s come and how close he is to beating this fucking illness, while staring at the light woven through your eyes, Sunwoo thinks he could live with himself if he dropped dead tonight.

That thought alone, is almost as terrifying as death used to be.

act iii. scene v.

“I saw your ghost, you know.” It’s the first thing Sunwoo has said to you in over two weeks. “It wasn’t actually you though, was it?” You don’t even bother looking up from your cup of tea. Through the silence, Sunwoo orders a coffee.

“I didn’t know that.” The coffee turns lukewarm. “It wasn’t me.” You push an uneaten half of chocolate bread towards him. “It’s in your brain this time. Symptoms can include hallucinations.”

“Think you can still save me?” You can’t. If you know that much, you know he’s out of medical miracles, and that this time, he really won’t survive it. But it’s a joke. And you laugh at it.

“Definitely not. I never really liked neurosurgery.”

And all at once, he’s painfully aware of your friend somewhere in the real world that does like it but watched anyways as your brain died before her, split wide open.

“Anyways, how do you know all of this?” But what Sunwoo really wants to say is brains are killer. Literally. Figuratively.

“I’ve known since we...“ you hesitate, mouth stuck halfway through a word he can’t place. “After last time, I read your chart and looked at your scans.” Sunwoo nods. He expected as much. He doesn’t ask how you got them. “I’m sorry you're sick again.” You say to him quietly. “I’m sorry you’re dying.”

“I’m sorry you’re dead.” As soon as the words have left his mouth, he regrets them. Because you aren’t. And he knows you too well to think you’d look past the technicality.

You scoff, shake your head slightly, and with a spiteful smile say, “Can I say it?”

Sunwoo only sighs. “Let’s start over instead.”

You nod. He pushes the chocolate bread back.

act iii. scene iv.

Mr. Choi was the one to recommend that Sunwoo give you and himself space. It’s been a month since you and him last spoke, since that moment hovering above the waves after he read his file and after he found out you read yours. He misses you, and has been for so long now. Mr. Choi was wrong. Sunwoo’s standing outside your forest green door to prove it.

You open the door before he can knock. There’s no shock in your voice when you say his name, like you’ve been waiting for this day, expecting it.

He looks behind you, at your apartment in Clara’s building that looks just like your apartment in the real world. The same one he cleaned out after you died, still filled with things he gave to your family or donated or took back to his place. He wants to crumble just looking at it again. “Can I come in?”

“It’s only been a month.”

And he knows what you mean by it. Three months is the recommended time off after reading one’s file. To reacclimate, they say, to process. But the insinuation that Sunwoo was supposed to go three months without seeing you makes him feel sick. The insinuation that after a year of being without you in the real world he was supposed to be without you here too, enrages him. Then he remembers how long you’ve been here, and how long you’ve been doing this and feels slightly murderous.

All he says is: “It’s been a lot longer than that for you.”

Your lip twitches. You lock and unlock the open forest green door five times before saying, “Are you sure?”

He nods. You let him in.

Sunwoo used to imagine what it would be like to meet you again in the Cloud one day. He imagined tears and hugs and kisses. He imagined i love you’s and i hate you’s and i miss you. He imagined the scenario more times than can possibly be considered healthy. But he imagined something. He was waiting for the day. Waiting for this day. But this moment, sitting at your round wood table while you boil water for tea, is nothing like the million different ways he imagined seeing you again.

And as you set down two mismatched mugs and take the seat across from him, he doesn’t even try to create one of them. “How long has it been since you read your file?”

You watch the steam rise from your tea for a long moment, then stand, grab the sugar and pour a spoonful of it into your tea. You take another spoonful and look at him expectantly. “Want some?” He nods, and you pour the sugar into his. You stir the tea then taste, then cringe, then add more sugar and then ask if he wants it. He refuses. You stir again. Sunwoo watches the whirlpool and waits the eternity it takes you to say: “I read it on my first day.”

You put the sugar away, satisfied with the tea’s sweetness while Sunwoo marvels at how long you’ve known and how silently you’ve been carrying the knowledge of you and him since he came. And that knowledge is what makes him finally remember one of the reasons he came. “Is there something you want to tell me?” You look up at him when he asks it, exhaling like you’ve been wanting to bring it up for so long now, which Sunwoo guesses isn’t as much of a simile as he thinks it is.

“Yes, actually. I…” you hesitate, flicking the mug as if the right words will come hopping out of the tea. Sunwoo watches for it. “I’ve just been here for a long time now, Sunwoo.”

“Two years isn’t that long.”

“Time doesn’t work the same here as it does down there.” You tell him tiredly. “It’s been decades.”

He doesn’t say anything.

“In the beginning, I didn’t mind the waiting. I knew you were on your way, but I just,” you hesitate, “I didn’t think it’d take so long for you to come back to me.”

Sunwoo covers your hand with his. “I’m sorry.” You twist your palm into it, squeeze, then pull your hand away. Sunwoo swallows. “I came as fast as I could.”

“I know. I waited.”

“Do you regret it?” Sunwoo’s terrified of what the answer might be.

You don’t give it. “That’s not what I meant.”

“Then?”

“I’ve been here for so long, and,” your head drops, voice breaking under the weight it carries, “it’s been so lonely.”

“But I’m here now.” Sunwoo says, leaning forward against the table. “You aren’t alone anymore.”

“I know you’re here. I know, and I thought that would fix it, but it didn’t. Seeing you in the hall that day was so bittersweet, because you were here but that also meant you were somewhere else dying. Because you were here and I still felt lonely.” You stop, chugg the remaining bits of your tea, and then wipe your cheeks. “Do you get what I’m saying?”

“No.” But it’s a lie. He does get it. He knows all about loneliness and the way it creeps inside, so slyly. The way it starts small and then grows, feeding on negligence, until it's too big for your body. He knows how it sits inside you, for all its enormity, and spills into everything. He knows how it lingers. How it has nothing to do with people or lack of them and everything to do with grief. Sunwoo knows all about loneliness. The day he read his file he felt a dam of it burst open within him.

“I’m saying that in the real world I saved you, and now it’s your turn to save me.” You gulp. “I’m saying that I want you to unplug me.”

It takes a moment for Sunwoo to even register what you’ve said, but when he does remember the life support that’s keeping your body alive somewhere in a universe far away, he doesn’t say anything. He just stands and walks out of your apartment.

act i. scene iii.

“Doctor, please present.” The attending announces, stepping into Sunwoo’s room for rounds.

“Mr. Kim,” a resident starts, flipping open his chart, “was diagnosed 14 months ago and has gone through several different treatment plans. When he came to us, the illness had spread and was deemed inoperable and untreatable by several other physicians. Our treatment plan was aggressive and grueling but ultimately, effective. Sunwoo is 20 days post op from his third and final surgery. The surgery went extremely well with no complications and his vitals were excellent. He has been a model patient all throughout recovery, and according to our latest scans, he is also now illness free…”

Sunwoo doesn’t even bother listening to the rest.

“So, now that I’m no longer a patient, if I ask you out on a date, will you actually say yes?”

“Well,” you say, signing his discharge papers, “only one way to know.”

“What is it?”

You look up at him, smiling. “Ask me again.”

He does.

You say yes.

act iii. scene v. take ii.

“I saw your ghost.” The first thing Sunwoo says after the last failed attempt.

You look up from your tea. “It wasn’t me.”

“I know.” Sunwoo orders another coffee. “But the hallucination was how I knew I was sick again. It made me feel like you were trying to warn me, like you were up here somewhere caring from a distance. Right after I pieced it all together you told me to find you here and that there was something you wanted to say.” The coffee turns lukewarm again. Sunwoo can’t bring himself to say it. You sigh and push the same piece of chocolate bread back towards him. This time, he takes a bite from it. And with a mouthful of chocolate bread, he cries, “I just got you back, and now you want to leave all over again.”

You frown. “I didn’t want to leave the first time, and it’s different now.”

“How?”

“I want to go. Isn’t that worth something?”

“And what about what I want?”

“Oh, Sunwoo,” you say, “I’m sorry you’re sick. The hallucination was you and your head, but for what it’s worth, I have been up here caring from a distance. I still…” you don’t need to say the words. He knows. He never had to doubt it. “I never stopped.”

“I’ve been thinking about what you asked of me.” Sunwoo tells you. He made the decision last week but today, right now, with your confession still falling through the air, is the first time he’s had the stomach to swallow it. “And I’ll do it. I will. I just need some time. You’ve had so long and in comparison I’ve had nothing.”

“Okay.” You say simply.

“How long can you give me?”

You smile. “You know I’d give you an eternity if you asked for it.”

“I’m scared.” Sunwoo confesses then. “I know it’s what you want, but selfishly, I don’t want to let you again. I don’t know if I’m a big enough person to do it.”

“I do.” You say to him, leaning forward against the table and looking straight through him. “I know because I was your doctor. I have cut inside your body, seen all your organs, and during surgery two, I held your heart in my hands. I felt it beating. So I know exactly how big it is, and I know it’s big enough for this”

Sunwoo feels the heart you worked so hard to repair bursting inside of him.

“God. Why’d you have to read your file so soon?”

You laugh. “I missed you. I couldn’t help it.”

And just like that, you’ve stolen the entire concept of fear from him.

“I’m ready.”

“What?”

He looks at you and feels the loneliness slither away.

“Ask me again.”

#sunwoo x reader #sunwoo scenarios #sunwoo imagines #sunwoo fanfic #the boyz scenarios #the boyz fanfic #sunwoo fluff #sunwoo angst #mine #*clouds

87 notes · View notes

troubatrain · 3 years

Text

four times you talked about having a baby + one time you did - k. hayes

a/n: here’s a very cute fluffy 4+1 from my old blog! :)

You watched Kevin on the floor, listening to the babbling toddler in front of him, laughing along with whatever his niece was trying to tell him. His sister had made the trip down to New York, and was out getting lunch with a friend while you and Kevin had offered to babysit. It was the first time you were meeting any members of his family, and you’d only been dating for a few months - but watching Kevin with his niece was doing something to you.

You pull your phone out of your pocket, snapping a photo of the two, “This is too cute.”

“You’re too cute,” Kevin says instantly, his niece walking over to you to be picked up, a grin finding its way to Kevin’s face.

You pick her up kissing the top of her forehead, “I think she’s cuter than both of us.”

You spend the rest of the afternoon in Kevin’s apartment, playing house with his niece. Watching Kevin run around his apartment with his niece was straight up endearing, and you were happy that she liked you too. She’d fallen asleep snuggled between you and Kevin, a couple of goldfish stuck to her Uncle’s shirt and she rested on your lap. By the time Kevin’s sister and her headed back to their hotel, you were absolutely exhausted - not even considering the idea of headed to your own place and opting to crash at Kevin’s.

“Do you think you want kids?” Kevin asks, plopping down next to you into bed, blue eyes looking at you full of hope.

You’d never really thought much about having kids, just thinking that at the time you were too young. It was something you wanted one day but you didn’t know when you wanted that. You’d just started your career and your relationship with Kevin was new but the way he took care of his niece and the way he always took care of you was starting to make you think a little differently.

“Yeah, one day. Don’t get any ideas though,” You scold, waving your finger at Kevin.

“I know, but one day sounds good,” Kevin says, pulling you into his chest.

Kevin lulls you to sleep that night, talking about the future he wants with you. You’d get married, Kevin would prefer in Boston but he’d let you pick regardless. Maybe you’d move to the suburbs, get a house outside of the city with a yard, so you could have some space for your future children. But he told you he’d be okay staying in the city if that’s what you wanted to do. It was romantic to hear him talk about your future like that, deciding that he would just come for the ride.

II.

Kevin’s large hands were tying your skates, while you looked down at him in his stall at MSG. It was Christmas and with Christmas came the family skate that you’d grown to love. The first year, you were terrified, considering you didn’t even know how to skate and you’d only met a handful of Kevin’s teammates.

“Do you think this will be our last one here?” You whisper, low enough so none of his teammates would hear you.

It was a thought that you’d tried to push out of your mind but there was no way you could at this point. The trade deadline was coming in a few months and Kevin was certain he’d be on the trading block. You’d pushed him to talk about it about tons of times but he kept putting it off, knowing he was nervous about a move out of New York.

“If it is, we’ll make it a memorable one,” Kevin places a kiss to your lips, pulling you up to step out onto the ice.

You watch as Kevin skates around the ice, Marc Staal’s kids chasing after him in the intense game of tag they’d been playing, while you smile at him from the bench.

“He’s so good with them,” Lindsay, Marc’s wife, says to you on the bench, “I think they’re going to miss him if you guys go.”

You nod, know how many dinners Kevin’s had at their place long before you’d even started dating, “I know it’s going to happen but, we haven’t even talked about it.”

“You’d go with him no?” Lindsay asks, trying to gauge how you actually felt about it.

“I mean, yes, he’s the one but-” You start to say only to be interrupted by the woman next to you.

“Just talk to him about it,” Lindsay says, “I’m sure you guys will be okay”

That night you’d been sitting in your shared apartment, a rerun of some terrible reality TV rerun playing in front of you. Kevin was out grabbing ice cream, insisting you spent the night off snuggled up with a movie. Your mind wanders to the conversation you’d had the family skate, and how you felt watching Kevin skate around with Marc’s kids. It was what you wanted and you knew you wanted it with Kevin but you were scared of the future. You’d been so lost in your thoughts you didn’t even hear Kevin walk back into the apartment. A pint of ice cream finding its way into your hands.

“Hey Kev?” You ask, your voice small, “What are we going to do if you get traded.”

Kevin looked confused, “What do you mean?”

“I mean, am I going to stay here or do you want me to go with you?” You ask bluntly, deciding to just get to the root of what’s bothering you.

Kevin takes a deep breath, walking out of the room and into your shared bedroom. You can hear him rummaging through a dresser, or it could have been a nightstand and step back into your living room with a velvet box in his hand.

“I was planning on doing a better job at his, you know, I was going to plan a nice dinner, make sure you’d just gotten your nails done, the whole thing but I think I need to do this now,” Kevin says, dropping down to one knee, “Baby I love you, and I want to be with you. I want to have a family with you, and spend the rest of my life with you by my side - wherever that may take me. Will you marry me?”

You nod, tears threatening to spill from your eyes, flinging yourself forward to kiss Kevin, over and over again, “Did you actually just do that?”

Kevin smiles against your lips, “I’ve been hiding that since the summer.”

You pull back smiling at the man in front of you, “I can’t wait to marry you.”

Kevin grins back at you, “I can’t wait to have a family, we could be like Marc and Lindsay with all those kids running around the ice.”

The idea seemed like a dream to you, but in reality you were getting to live that life with a man who loved and cared about you. Kevin spends the night talking about your future, the plans seeming more definite than the first time he’d done that. Settling on having three kids, and a summer wedding - even mentioning you could get a dog even though he was afraid of them.

III.

You’d ended up following Kevin to Winnipeg and then to Philly easily. You’d been making an adjustment, but Philadeliphia was starting to feel like home more and more everyday. Kevin was happy and he loved his new team - which made it easier for you to follow suit. You’d both started to become acquainted with the city and you knew this was going to be a good place for the two of you.

You bounce the baby on your lip, singing a nursery rhyme while moving around your kitchen, causing Gavin to laugh. You’d ended up babysitting, Claude’s wife, Ryanne, calling you last minute to complain about their sitter canceling their date night. You and Kevin had agreed on a night in, so you offered to take their son for a few hours. You loved Gavin, and quite honestly you spend more time at games playing with him than paying attention to your fiance on the ice.

“I think we should have a boy first,” Kevin says, sitting on the island watching you with the baby.

“I don’t think that’s for us to decide Kev,” You joke, blowing raspberries into Gavin’s cheek, causing the baby to giggle, “Right Gav, tell him, he’ll be happy with what he gets.”

“What do you want?” Kevin asks, holding his arms out for you to pass him the baby.

“A boy doesn’t sound too bad,” You admit, thinking about how many outfits you’d bought for Gavin that you’d love hanging up in a nursery of your own, “What brought this up?”

“You know, we’re getting married soon, and you just look really good singing nursery rhymes in our kitchen,” Kevin admits, “And c’mon you don’t want a little me running around?”

Kevin holds Gavin next to his face with a pout, rubbing his beard onto the baby’s cheeks causing him to giggle and wiggle in Kevin’s enormous hands. It was a sight for sure, and one that often made you think about just letting Kevin knock you up before the wedding.

“I’m not going to be pregnant at our wedding,” You scold, “I’ve spent too much time planning to not be able to drink.”

“You’ve got a good point, we’ll make a honeymoon baby,” Kevin assures you, as if you had a choice.

IV.

Newlywed life was coming to a halting stop the second you touched down in Philadelphia. The summer of bliss that you’d just experienced was about to be burst in with the reality of a new season starting. You’d bought a new place, the space in the city was far more family friendly than the apartment you’d been living in last season. There were plenty of bedrooms, and some outdoor space that still resided in the city. You’d finally finished unpacking, stepping back after hanging up the last of your wedding photos in the living room.

“They look good there,” Kevin says, wrapping his arms around your waist and lifting you off the couch, spinning you around, “You were right, I do like this place.”

Kevin wasn’t entirely on board with moving, but you knew he wanted to start a family and you wanted somewhere in Philly that you would come back to - a real permanent home. It took a little convincing but you managed to get him to crack while you were on your honeymoon.

You had one surprise that came with the house, and it sat in a box in your kitchen. Inside was a pregnancy test - that you’d taken a day before you moved down to Philly for the season. A very tiny jersey, with your now shared last name on the back, a bright number thirteen stitched onto the back. And to complete a very small stuffed Gritty that you had bought on impulse one day. You were excited to finally share the news with Kevin, keeping it a secret while you both handled all the craziness that came with moving and training camp coming up.

“I have something for you,” You say, slipping out of his arms and grabbing the box from the kitchen - dropping it into his lap, “Open it.”

You were on the edge of your seat watching him open the box and pulling the small jersey out, looking down at what was underneath it, “You’re pregnant?”

“I’m pregnant,” You confirm, placing your hand over your stomach.

“You, my wife, you’re pregnant, we’re having a baby,” Kevin blurted out, a goofy grin gracing his face, “Baby, we’re having a baby!”

You laugh, knowing this is the exact reaction you’d get out of your husband, “I take it you’re happy?”

“Easily the best thing that’s happened to me,” Kevin says, grabbing both sides of your face and kissing you over and over again. He spent the next week telling everybody he came in contact with that he was, in fact, having a baby.

Plus One

You hear a large crash, and a chorus of laughs coming from what was supposed to be your future son’s nursery. You sigh, curling your hands around the def-caf tea you’d been drinking, counting down the days until you actually start drinking coffee again, and you walk into the room, a piece of what was supposed to be a crib on the floor, and TK, Nolan and Kevin’s eyes staring at you.

“Sorry,” They all said in unison, guilt across their faces.

You give them a smile, “It’s fine guys, please be careful, and get this done.”

You decided to stay in Philly until you had the baby, the season ending when you’d hit around eight months and the stress of heading up back to Boston just seemed like too much at the time. Now, you were a week until your due date and you and Kevin had pushed everything till now in regards to setting up a place for your son. It was starting to stress you out, and honestly you were grateful for Travis and Nolan’s help, even if it was like having two kids in your house already.

You felt your stomach cramp up and a feeling in your stomach that this baby was coming, you gasp and look at Kevin, your eyes scared, “Kev - I think it’s happening.”

Nine hours of labor later, your son entered the world in a way somehow more chaotic than the way Kevin entered your life. Kevin did good, keeping his cool for most of your pregnancy and labor that you were honestly surprised. He finally cried, when he held your baby for the first time, calmly talking to the little boy who he loved probably more than he loved you. You got lucky, in all the craziness of what was going on, Travis and Nolan stayed back and somehow put together all of your furniture in the nursery, even leaving a few gifts behind for your baby boy.

“Thank you for this,” Kevin confesses, the two of you and your son being the only people left in the hospital room, exhausted from the day of visitors, “I mean I knew we’d get here, but I’m grateful we actually did.”

“I hope you’re still grateful when you have to change diapers at 3 am,” You say, knowing the hard part was definitely coming.

“I promised I’d do it, and I will,” Kevin assures you, intending on keeping the promise that you carried that baby for nine months and that he would take on the middle of the night diaper duties.

And you fell asleep that night like you did so many nights before, Kevin rambling about your future, all the things he wants to teach his son. How he can’t wait to teach him to skate, and how he can play whatever sport he wants - or it would be fine if he didn’t play sports at all. Kevin’s voice lulled you and your little family to sleep - and you knew he’d do that forever.

#kevin hayes #kevin hayes imagine #my writing #nhl imagine #nhl imagines

249 notes · View notes

viking-raider · 4 years

Text

The Immortal Sky - Part V *MATURE*

Summary: You’re more than half way to Bristol, when Henry finally chases up to you. The reunion doesn’t go how either of you had expected.

Pairing: Henry Cavill/You

Word Count: 10,705

Chapters: I II III IV

Warnings: Futuristic!AU, Dystopian!AU, Language, Angst, Fluff, Slapping, Name-Call, Arguing, Conflict, Hurt/Comfort, Dirty Talk, Loss of Virginity, Smut - Fingering, Penetration, Cowgirl, Cream pie, Praise Kink

Inspiration: I’ve always wanted to write a Futuristic!AU

Author’s Note: Thanks to @wondersofdreaming for being a fabulous Beta and Brainstorm buddy! Please, tell me what you think!

You had managed to reach, what had once been, the town of Cherhill, whilst still being utterly oblivious to the fact Henry was trailing after you. The two of you had been playing a complicated game of cat and mouse, since you snuck out of his flat in London.

Frustratingly for Henry, he struggled to keep up with you, almost always an hour or more behind you from the last stop over you had taken. At one point, he had even been a mere thirty minutes behind you, in Froxfield, and was sure he'd catch up to you at the next safe house, only to spend an hour checking the two safe houses there and asking people if they had seen you, only to learn you had stopped in the mini-town long enough to replenish your supplies and get a thicker coat, before moving onto the next place.

“At least, she's keeping warm.” Henry said to himself, as he stepped out of the supply store and headed on his way to the next town, two hours away, in Marlborough.

Making it to Marlborough, Henry went to the only safe house the town had, a residential home, that was also the supply location for the area. He walked down the cracked and uneven sidewalk of the neighborhood, most of the houses on the street were dilapidated, boarded up or charred remains. So, it made finding the house easy, it was the best kept house on the block, but still in a level of disrepair.

“What do you want?” Asked a man standing outside the rough picket fence that bordered the dirt lawn.

“I'm looking for someone, a girl.” Henry told him, pulling his mobile out and showed him. “Have you seen her?” He asked, looking up at the windows at the second floor of the house.

The man leaned forward, squinting at the screen of Henry's mobile. “No.” He shook his head and pulled back. “We haven't had any girls come here in about a week.”

Henry sighed and rubbed at his gritty face, his temples throbbing, then turned away from the man. “I swear, when I get my hands on that girl.” He grumbled the empty threat, for the millionth time.

Pulling up the map on his mobile, Henry calculated the distance and time to the next mini-town of Cherhill, and how much time he had in the day. It was an almost three and a half hour walk to Cherhill from Marlborough, with two hours of sunlight remaining. So, sucking it up, Henry decided to chance it and walk there through the night.

Getting into a room in Cherhill, you gingerly peeled your shoes and socks off your feet and rubbed at the raw skin and fat blisters that covered them. You weren't accustomed to walking for so long, for so far, and they felt like they had been worn down to your ankles.

Luckily, this pit stop was a little more accommodating, and you had a little bathroom in the room you were put up in, with the most absolute, teeniest tub you had ever seen in your life, and you lived near the bottom of London! But, you filled it with hot water and removed your clothing, sitting down on the dark stained toilet seat and soaked your feet into the water. Dipping a threadbare washcloth into the water, you used it to rub away some of the grit and dust that was caked into your skin. Once you soaked your feet for a little while, you rinsed your hair out in the sink, wishing you had some shampoo or soap, but settled for the plain water. Semi-refreshed, you redressed, nibbled on something for a late lunch and rested back against the bed, staring up at the water stained ceiling.

“Eric, how far is the next checkpoint?”

“Three hours, Ms.”

“When's sunrise?” You asked, rubbing at your eyes and pinching the bridge of your nose.

“Four hours, Ms.”

You laid there for a long moment, considering the sanity of walking yet another ten kilometers to Chippenham. “Oh, what's the worst that can happen?” You sighed, getting up and packing your things. “At least, I got to rest my feet.” You quipped to yourself, going out into the hall.

“Shit!” You snapped suddenly, looking down the long hallway and seeing the very last person you wanted to see, before dashing back into your room, in a complete panic. “How the fuck did he find me! How did the fucker even know I had come this far?!” You paced the room, shaking.

“Of course!” You berated yourself. “He's a goddamned High Marshal! It's all he does! All day, for years on end. But, why is he even bothering to come after me?” You shook your head, trying to clear the panic. “I'll worry about that later, I need to get the fuck out of here, before he sees me.”

You frantically looked around your room and spotted a godsend.

“Praise the gods.” You huffed, relieved for this room actually having a window.

You dropped the room key on the bed and rushed the window, pushing it open and looked out. You were on the third floor, so it was a fair drop to the ground outside. But, luckily there was a small metal balcony outside the second floor window of the room below yours. So, wiggling out your window backwards and hanging from the window frame, you dropped yourself the meter down to the balcony with loud clang and a shake of the rickety supports bolting the balcony into the red brick wall of the building.

Crouching there for a moment, to give the structure a moment to settle, you dropped the last meter to the ground at the first level of the building, then tucked tail and ran. Just as Henry's head popped through the open window of your abandoned room, he caught sight of you as you dashed around the side of the building.

“Fuck!” He barked, charging out of the room and down the hall, stomping down the six flights of stairs to the main lobby, then out the entrance door, calling your name as he chased after you through a cluster of trees.

Henry had made it to Cherhill an hour before sunrise and exhausted as all hell. He had already decided to get a room, whether or not you were there, to take a power nap, before he fell flat on his face. He was no good as spent as he was from looking for you, then to take you back to London, for the trials. He still didn't know how he was going to get his hands on Mikey, but part of him didn't give a fuck about your brother, it was you, he was worried about.

Entering the safe house, a rundown, three story hotel, Henry took a deep breath in and out as he approached the front desk and the male behind it, reading some cover-less and water damaged book, and readied himself to hear that he had never seen your face before. The guy looked over the top of his book as he heard Henry step up to his counter, slowly setting it down on the desk on the other side of the counter, and stood.

“Wanting a room?” He asked, looking Henry over.

“Yeah.” Henry nodded his head. “Can you tell me if you've seen this girl?” He asked, turning the screen of his mobile towards him.

“Oh yeah, I have.” The guy nodded at your photo. “She got a room here not that long ago, a couple hours maybe.”

Henry's hope went up a teeny bit. “Is she still here?” He asked, in suspense.

“Uh..” He turned his back to Henry and stepped into a little room for a moment, before returning. “Her key is still gone, so she must still be in her room. Unless, she forgot to return it, it happens more than you could realize. But, it's not a surprise, many people up and leaving out of the blue around here..”

“What room is she in?” Henry asked, interrupting him, even more antsy.

“Third floor, room six.”

“Do you have a master key to open the door?” He asked, chewing on his lip.

“Yeah, but I can't just go up there and open her door for you.” The guy protested. “It's against policy.”

Growling, Henry turned on his heels and headed for the stairwell leading up to your room. If he wasn't going to open your door, then Henry would just kick it in. He wasn't going to go up there and knock, so you would have the time to figure out how to slip by him again.

“Hey!” The hotel worker yelled, running around the counter and rushed after Henry.

Stomping up the stairs, the guy managed to get ahead of Henry and block the doorway that led down the hallway of your floor. Standing his ground as Henry stopped before him, huffing angrily, like a bull just entering the ring to fight the matador.

“Get the fuck out of my way.” Henry hissed, between clenched teeth. “Now.”

“It is against Hotel policy to disturb the guests. If you don't leave this instance, I will be forced to call security.”

“Oh really!” Henry snapped, brows lifting. “And who is the security in this shit hole?” He asked, folding his arms over his chest.

The guy gulped as he watched the biceps of Henry's arms bulge through his clothing. “I-I am.” He squeaked, like a frightened mouse, facing down a panther.

“That's what I thought.” Henry chuckled, as a door slammed somewhere in the building. “You'll be getting out of my way.” He said, grabbing the front of the guy's shirt and jerked him out of the way, before storming down to your room door.

Henry thrust his size eleven boot through the flimsy door of your room and stormed in, feeling the cool breeze bellowing in through the open window. “Goddamn it!” He hissed, stomping to the window and thrusting his head out and watched you dive around the corner of the building.

“Fuck!” He barked, charging out of the room, down the hall and down the six flights of stairs to the main lobby, then out the entrance door, calling out your name as he chased after you through a cluster of trees.

Whether or not you liked it, Henry was there chasing after you, no longer just missing you at every mini-town from London to Cherhill. He was in minutes of you, charging through the thicket of trees to the East of the hotel you both had bolted from. Henry could just see you ahead of him, maybe half a soccer field away from him, so he started pushing himself and closed the gap between you, within a few short minutes.

“Stop!” He yelled, reaching out and grabbed the back of your backpack, yanking and sending you backwards, before locking his arms around your upper body, trapping you against his chest; both of you gasping for air.

“Just stop.” He panted softly, dropping his forehead against the crown of your head. “Please, just stop.”

You growled, almost sounding like an angry cat, as you kicked your legs out and struggled in Henry's embrace. But Henry's thick arms only held onto you tighter, not picking up his head as you did, but grunted as you fruitlessly tried jabbing him in the side with your elbows and stomp on his foot.

“Stop it.” He barked into your ear.

“Let go of me!” You screamed, half hoping someone would hear and come help you, giving you the advantage to run again.

“I'm not.” Henry rumbled, spinning you around to face him and keeping a firm hold on you. “I tracked your butt for nearly a hundred and sixty kilometers, to take you back to London, and that's where we're going, as soon as we can.” He told you, with a heavy sigh.

“I'm not going back to London, so you can get fucked!” You barked at him.

“Ah!” He snapped and just managed to block your attempted knee shot. “Yes, you are.”

“Then, I'll run again!” You hissed, still struggling with him.

Henry sighed again, squeezing his eyes shut, taking a hold of your elbow and marched you back to the hotel. “Room.” He growled at the hotel guy, who looked like he wanted to protest, but gave Henry a key anyway.

“What are you doing with her?” He called after the two of you.

“Mind your own business, shithead.” Henry barked over his shoulder as he pulled you up the stairs to the second floor. “Sit down.” He ordered, carefully pushing you into the room and pointed to the chair.

You stood in the middle of the room, arms defiantly crossed over your chest. Henry stared back at you, a war of unsaid words flowing between the pair of you through looks alone.

“Why did you run?” Henry asked, finally breaking the tense silence.

“My business.”

“Your business is my business, since you want to act like a fucking brat and run off in the middle of the night, without word or reason. Especially, since you've gotten me in hot water with my boss. So, out with it.” He scolded you, his body tense.

“I know it's about your brother.” He said, when you remained silent. “I know that he's a Runner, working for Jaxon Quinn in Bristol. That he's going there to get training to be a big time Runner, and you're terrified that he's in some sort of trouble.”

“Congratulations.” You smirked at him, smugly. “Now, get the fuck out of my way!” You barked, starting for the door, but Henry blocked it. “Get out of the way!” You yelled, pushing at him, but he didn't move.

“I'm not.” He told you, softly, but firmly, shaking his head.

“You're going to get him killed!” You screamed, your voice breaking.

Henry blinked down at you, shaking his head again, and reached out to cup your face in his hands, tilting your head back to look up at him, seeing the furious and frightened tears in your eyes that you had been trying to keep at bay since having the nightmare. His thumbs smoothed over your cheeks, wiping away the dripping tears from your lashes, his face pinched with concern and confusion at how upset and desperate you were to reach not only Bristol, but your brother.

“You have brothers, Henry.” You sniffled softly, voice weak. “Wouldn't you do anything in the world, that you could, to save and protect them, if they were in danger?”

You tried to reason with him, pleading to his sense of family and the protective nature you knew Henry harbored in his soul, the reason you knew was why Henry wanted to be a Marshal; he couldn't protect people as a Cleric and Royal, the way he could as a Marshal. Henry's face softened, so did his heart, he would do everything he could, including giving his own life, to save one of his brothers, if they were in danger and trouble. He understood, mostly, what you were doing with running off and trekking through dangerous lands to reach Mikey.

“What trouble is he in?” He asked, blinking at you.

“I-” You frowned, you knew Mickey was in trouble, terrible trouble. But, you didn't know what that trouble actually was, and sighed. “I don't know exactly.” You admitted, gulping. “But, I know he is.”

“I just—I just feel it, Henry.” You told him, choked up.

Henry sighed, feeling the space between the rock and a hard place he was currently trapped in, get a whole lot tighter. He didn't know what to do with your brother, but he saw how deeply you felt about it and couldn't ignore that. So, he moved back a couple spaces and just focused on you, now that he had you.

“We'll figure it out.” He told you, softly. “But, for now, why don't we just rest. I'm sure we're both drained after all of this.”

“That's an understatement.” You laughed, nodding your head and letting your shoulders melt under the weight of exhaustion and stress.

“Give me your shoes.” Henry said, suddenly.

“What?” You snapped back, your nose wrinkling in confusion as you looked up at him.

“I said, give me your shoes.” Henry repeated himself, pointing down at your filthy trainers. “You can't run without them.”

“You wanna bet!”

“We both know you can't, love.” He chuckled, smirking at you, smugly. “So, take them off and give them to me”

You sighed. “Henry, I'm not going to run again, I promise.”

“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” Henry quoted, lifting a brow at you.

Rolling your eyes, you sat down on the edge of the bed and pulled your trainers off, tossing them to land at Henry's feet. Henry bent and picked up your shoes, shrugging his backpack off of his back and opened it, taking a couple of things, then shoved your shoes into his pack, zipping it up and connected the zipper to the hook below it, locking the backpack closed with a combination number; that wasn't his life pin.

“Why are you here, Henry?” You asked, narrowing your eyes at him as you flexed your sore toes.

“To get you.” He replied, uncapping his water bottle.

“Why?” You asked, drawing it out. “You wouldn't just chase me because you wanted to. What, you worried about losing out on your six thousand credits? Wanting them back.”

“No!” Henry barked, enraged at the thought that all he wanted out of you was money. “I was worried about your fucking safety.”

“I made it here in one piece.” You said, gesturing around.

“That's not what I meant.” He mumbled, moving across the room to the window. “Completely.”

You narrowed your eyes at his broad back. “What aren't you telling me?” You asked, feeling the vibe fill the room.

“What am I not telling you? What haven't you been telling me?” He hissed, turning back to you. “You ditch out in the middle of the night, without a word or note telling me to get fucked, to trek across this barren waste, risking your safety, for your drug dealing, crime running brother, because you feel he's in trouble.”

“Don't mock me.” You growled back at him, your own anger bubbling. “I knew you wouldn't believe me, if I woke you up to tell you that I had a dream about him being killed. I knew you'd fucking mock me about and tell me it was just a dream and to go back to bed. That you wouldn't understand the deep gut feeling I have that it isn't just some random dream I had.” You paused, trying to get a hold of yourself.

“It's a deep and hot feeling in my gut, like a sharp knife to my bowels; that hurt so much. That bond between him and I, vibrates with it. I couldn't just sit in your flat and ignore it, and I sure hell wasn't going to tell a High Marshal about my brother being an Adjutant Runner for Quinn. That would be a career maker for--”

You froze and stared at him, wide eyed, feeling the pieces fall into place. Henry knew about your brother, he knew everything about him and his activities, and knew that you were running straight for Mikey. It was perfect for Henry, follow you to Mikey, drag both of you back to London and turn Mikey into the Supreme Marshal and the Clerics. He'd be hailed a hero, given a promotion and a medal and who knows what else for it.

Oh, you felt like clawing his beautiful blue eyes out of his smug fucking skull.

“You fuck.” You said, your voice dripping with barely contained anger and slightly sibilant. “You're just using me to get to Mikey.”

Henry pressed his lips together and pushed his jaw forward, then nodded his head. He grabbed the back of the chair and set it down in front of you, plopping down on it. “I was going to come after you, before I knew anything specific about your brother. I figured, since you were heading for Bristol, that he was into some sort of crime, people don't tend to go there if they're not. I was afraid you would get hurt, and god knows what else.”

“I didn't give a fuck about the money I spent to get you out of Twist's hell hole, or the money you took for the mobile and backpack you have.” He said, eyeing them. “Just you. But, my boss, Supreme Marshall Dylon Reyes, called me, while I was out looking for you. To tell me that the Council of Clerics were starting the trails on Twist and his associates for their operations, you're a witness in that case.” He explained to you.

“A witness.” You echoed.

“Yes. You were there, one of the victims. So, the Council would want to talk to you, ask you questions and take your statement about anything you saw or heard there, the things you went through. My purchase of you, was done to verify that Twist was indeed selling people as Slaves and Servants. Keeping you, was, I don't fucking know. I was just told that it was final and I had too.”

“So, you did.”

“Obviously.” He snorted, lifting a brow at you. “But, it was also to keep an eye on you, to make sure you were kept safe from any of Twist's allies and higher up bosses.”

“Why would they care, I'm not the only one that was there.” You said, narrowing your eyes at him.

“Of the fourteen people we took out of that warehouse that had been kidnapped, just like you, under the same pretenses, you're the only one that had a buyer. So, you're considered more high profile.”

The muscles in your jaw twitched and your skin tingled with the hot heat of your fury, that unleashed with rock solid slap to Henry's tired and scruffy cheek, actually jerking his head to the side, from the force. Henry grunted and hissed at the searing pain of the slap, like lava had been splashed in his face. His hands gripped his knees and he shook his head against some of the pain, before looking back at you, his blue eyes darker than a stormy ocean and jaw tight.

“This is your fault.” You barked at him, trembling. “If it wasn't for you, if you had just purchased someone else in that line up, I would be home right now! I would have been able to convince Michail into not going to Bristol with that damn handler, months ago. Months ago, Henry!” You screamed, wanting to strike him again, but his hands shot out and gripped your wrists, pinning your hands to your thighs.

“I fucking hate you, dear god! I fucking hate you, so much.”

“I can live with that, if it means keeping you safe.” Henry growled through a tight jaw.

“I don't need you to protect me!” You snapped, jerking against him.

“Like fuck you don't!” He hissed, bringing his face closer to yours. “Your dear brother works for Jaxon Quinn, the second worse fucking Crime Boss this country has!”

“I know who the fuck he is!”

“Did you know he's the one that helped Twist fund that little warehouse you were imprisoned in?” He asked, lifting his brows at you. “Did you know that he's got people out here wanting to kill you? Because, if you can't make it to that interview with the Clerics, everything about Twist and that operation won't end well. They'll just get stuck with a few millions in fines, a couple of banishments, maybe someone getting sent to the Iron Tombs prison or executed. All of which people like Jaxon Quinn don't fucking feel, cause millions of credits is pocket money to him, just like the lives of the people that will be ruined and snuffed out, because there's thousands of people waiting in line to take their places.”

“Such as your brother.”

Your blazing anger turned to ice in your stomach and you nearly puked your guts out at the thought of a hit-man around some corner, waiting to kill you, or your brother taking the place of someone that had been killed by the justice system of London for their part in Quinn's business.

“That's why I came after you.” Henry said softly, easing the pressure he was putting on your wrists. “People are out here, wanting to kill you. You have a price on your head, and you're about to walk into the house, where every last one of those dirt-bags, live. Do you understand the danger you are in? Your feeling about Mike being in trouble could be true, but it also could just be the realistic feel of a nightmare.”

“But, the danger you are in is real.”

He tried to make you understand, he was desperate that you understood that your life was in danger and you being out here and heading for Bristol was only increasing that danger and making it easier for them to find and kill you.

“It won't stop me.” You said, softly. “I have to get to Mikey before something happens to him.”

“I'll tell you what happens to him.” Henry said, frustrated and tired. “You find him, his handler finds out that you're his sister and they kill you both.”

“No questions. No begging. Just both of you dying.”

A chill raced down your spine, the revelation spiraling around your brain. “That must be it.” You said, eyes flaring at Henry. “What if he does find out about Mikey being my brother, somehow?”

Henry let go of your wrists and rubbed at his face, hunching over his chair. “I don't know, maybe.” He huffed into his palms. “Is there a shower in this place?” He asked, looking up at you.

“I don't know if this room does, but I had a micro-bathtub in my room.” You retorted, looking towards the half open bathroom door.

Getting up with a tired and sore groan, Henry pushed open the bathroom door and found it did indeed have a shower and another micro-bathtub, so much to his relief. He turned back to you, studying you for a long moment, before taking off his jacket, shoes and socks, then pulled his sweater over his head, tossing them all onto the chair.

“I'm going to take a shower.” He told you, his voice measured with the still rocky trust the two of you had for each other.

“Okay.” You replied, staring back at him.

Henry slowly turned towards the bathroom, like he expected you to suddenly bolt for the door or window, but you stayed where you were on the edge of the bed. Sighing, Henry entered the bathroom, but didn't close the door all the way, in case you ran and he needed to go after you; possibly naked and wet. He spun the loose hot tap and the shower head sputtered to life, he stood there for a long time, waiting for the water to heat up, as he stared at his exhausted reflection through the spiderweb cracks running through the broken mirror, before removing his jeans and boxers, dropping them on the tank of the old toilet and stepped under the weak spray, with a loud groan.

You sighed, hearing the shower turn on and moved your backpack into your lap. Unzipping it, you removed your water bottle and a package of food you bought at the last supplier's. You sat there eating your food and drinking your water, trying to block out the thought of Henry naked just mere feet from you, and being able to catch a glimpse of his body through the fogged up mirror above the chipped sink and the open door.

“You know, Teddy Wang said you held him up at knife point.” Henry said, coming out of the shower in nothing but socks and his jeans, as he rubbed a hole strewn towel over his dripping head; still chuckling at the thought.

“Because, I did.” You retorted, glancing out the window and not his warm and pink torso.

Henry stopped and blinked down at you. “Really?” He laughed, a grin of amusement spreading across his lips.

“Yes.” You snapped, looking back at him. “He wouldn't tell me what I wanted to know, so I took out the knife my dad gave me and told him what I would do with it, if he didn't.” You informed him, angry at his amusement.

“Lord, I can only wonder what you told Fynn, to make him talk.” He roared with laughter.

“I told him, I would use his own door to bash his head in.” You replied, narrowing your eyes at him.

“I was sure you could take care of yourself, but I didn't take you as such a violent little thing.” Henry said, still unendingly tickled. “I mean, maybe I should be surprised. You did nearly take my head off with that slap of yours.” He chuckled, rubbing his cheek at the residual sting.

Letting out a frustrated growl, sick of people not taking you seriously, and the situation period, you launched off the bed and towards Henry, catching him off guard enough to send both of you into the wall. But, Henry recovered quickly, turning and pressing you up against the wall.

“Easy there, little nugget.” He grinned at you.

“Don't call me that!” You barked, struggling against him.

“Call you what?” He chuckled, enjoying your little rampage. “Nugget?”

“Yes!” You hissed, pressing your palms against his bare chest and tried pushing him off of you.

“Or what, Nugget?” He continued to chuckle, barely teetering as you pushed against him. “Hey now!” He snapped, squeezing his legs shut, planted his hands under your arms and pushed you up the wall, until your faces were level. “That's the second time you tried kneeing me there. That's not very nice, Nugget.”

“Oh my god, stop calling me that, you big brute!” You huffed. “Or else!”

Henry smirked at you, bringing his face close to yours. “Or else, what?” He said in a low and deep voice.

You knew you should just give up, he had you out matched in nearly everything, your feet were dangling above the dingy carpet, as he held you up against the wall, like you weighed less than the wallpaper peeling off of it.

So, you did something he wouldn't expect.

Licking your lips and taking advantage of how close his face was to yours, the tips of your noses lightly brushing, you tilted your head and kissed him on the lips. Henry nearly dropped you, in shock of feeling your warm lips against his, his mouth falling open and his pupils dilating. You didn't pull back, but you didn't deepen the kiss either. Henry slowly closed his mouth, his full lips cradled your bottom lip for a moment, before he pulled his head back and looked at you, licking his lips and tasting the sweetness of yours on his tongue.

He let out a shuddering breath, eyes darkening as he stared into yours. He saw a look eclipse your face and brought his lips back to yours, kissing them with a soft smack echoing in the room. You let out a soft breath through your nose and whimpered, eyes half falling shut. Henry smirked and chuckled softly against your mouth and kissed you deeper, his arms moving to wrap around you, pressing you closer against his body. You wrapped your arms around his neck and picked up your hanging legs to wrap them around his waist, nudging your mouth against his, feeling a growing bubble of desire and need for him.

One arm hugged around your waist, Henry planted a hand on the wall by your head, swirling his tongue against your mouth as his head tilted to the side, moaning deep in his throat and chest. His hand went to tangle in your hair, as the pair of you heatedly made out. The kiss was hungry and almost sloppy, you panted as Henry kissed down your mouth and chin to your neck, nibbling and biting at the pounding pulse under your jaw. You pushed your head back, letting your eyes finally fall closed as he sucked on your throat, whimpering softly as he sank his teeth into the bruised skin.

“Fuck.” He huffed and pressed his forehead against your temple. “I want you.” He moaned against your cheek, out of breath and gasping for air, as his blunt fingers and nails clawed and tugged at the waistband of your pants. “I've wanted you.” He admitted, eyes rolling shut as his clothed cock rubbed against your covered pussy, begging to be buried in the heat it knew was there, like it was sonar.

Chuckling, you nudge your cheek against his, amused by the turn of events. You had only kissed him to see if he would let you go and quit calling you, Nugget; not have the two of you melt into a heated and passionate lip battle, leaving both of you breathless and clearly wanting for the other. You would be lying, if you didn't admit that you had thought about Henry like this from time to time, wanting to see what he looked like naked, all in a hard pant, his skin damp with sweat and a pink glow from his spent effort; the feel of him inside of you. But, it also gave you qualms, deep in the pit of your stomach as well, a soft shyness washing over you for a moment, before you felt the nudge of Henry's hips against yours again, throwing it out the window and into the dying sunlight.

“Me too.” You admitted into the shell of his ear, nose brushing the still damp curls around it. “I want you too, Henry.” You whispered, breathless, and hugged your legs tighter around his hips.

Henry let out such a growl against your neck, that you let out a needy whimper, as he pushed you both off the wall, taking a step back and turning towards the bed, laying you down on it. He unhooked your legs from around his hips and fumbled with the button of your pants, before shoving them and your underwear down your hips and thighs; so you could kick out of them, while he removed his own jeans. Henry was attacking your mouth and throat again, his hands diving under the hem of your shirt and going straight for your breasts. You moaned at the feel of his lips against your skin, his hot hands squeezing and kneading your breasts in his palms, and the free feeling of his cock rubbing shamelessly against your bare folds, making the muscles of your thighs tremble from how good it felt.

“You like that, don't you?” He asked, in a husky voice, loving the sounds you were making as he humped against you.

“God, yes.” You mewled, dragging your nails down his broad back.

He chuckled, bracing his arms at either side of your head and looked down at you, watching you melt into the mattress beneath you. “You're still a virgin, aren't you?” He asked, his head tilting as he shifted his weight to one arm and glided his fingertips over your stomach.

You looked up at him and gave an audible gulp, nodding your head and looking up at him like a frightened rabbit. A smirk grew on his scruffy face, fingers circling your navel before dipping low, to rub the pads of two fingers against your sensitive clit. Henry wasn't put off by your virginity, but he didn't want to ruin it by succumbing to his animal desire to thrust his, well-endowed, cock into your tight, little hole and fuck you within an inch of your life, either. You whimpered and bucked up against his fingers, crazy for more friction. Henry clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, shaking his head at you and grinning like a hungry wolf.

“None of that, Nugget.” He cooed at you, removing his fingers from your wet folds and licked them clean; his eyes never leaving yours. “Have you ever touched yourself?” He asked, tilting his head at you.

You nodded your head, mutely.

He reached out and took your hand into his, pulling it down between your legs, and flattened two of your fingers down on your clit, and pressed them down with his own, gently guiding both of your hands in a slow and easy motion against it, watching your face for a few moments, before removing his hand, letting you continue touching yourself on your own, and looked down between your bodies. You had heard enough about sex from Mikey and your co-workers to know, this wasn't how you did it, but you did know about touching yourself, you had done on and off since you were a teen. But, you had never done it in front of anyone before, and doing it with Henry leaning over you, his eyes intent on your fingers, made you incredibly self-conscious.

“Henry..” You moaned out, trying to put the sound of a question in it, but your brain couldn't form it.

Henry's eyes flickered towards yours and smirk. “What, you just want me to shove my massive cock in that tight and little hole of yours?” He quipped, teasing you softly, his fingers brushing the skin between your breasts. “If I did that, you wouldn't be walking anywhere, for a very long time.” He chuckled, kissing the tip of your nose.

His fingers moved down your torso, skirting around your still working hand and teased a fingertip between your folds, ringing it around your entrance and coming back with a thick string of come. “Take that finger,” He tapped your middle finger. “and slip it in that sweet hole of yours for me.” He said, nodding his head at you, encouragingly.

“I--” You choked up, eyes wide, and gulped. “I've--” You gulped, flustered.

“Oh,” Henry chuckled, brushing your hair off your sweaty forehead. “You're a button rubber.”

“A what?” You squeaked, confused and caught off guard.

“You rub your little button.” He cooed, tapped your clit, with a smirk. “To get off. Without touching your core.” He gently pushed the very tip of his thick finger into your entrance. “A virgin, in almost every way.”

“That's okay, you can do it.” He encouraged you. “Nice and easy, Nugget.” He purred, moving his finger out of your way.

Gulping again, you slowly inched your hand away from your clit, fingers cupping your folds for a moment, as you hesitated, trying to muster the courage off of Henry's face and into yourself, before, very slowly, parting your folds with the tip of your middle finger and towards your entrance. It felt strange to push your finger into yourself. It was deep, wet, so much warmer than you thought, and soft. You touched something deep inside of your cunt and gasped, toes curling.

“Oh, someone found her sweet spot.” Henry chuckled, playfully tapping you on the nose.

“It feels so good.” You whimpered, rubbing at it a little bit more, biting your lip.

“That's good.” He smiled, watching you start to mindlessly thrust your finger in and out. “That's it.” He encouraged you, basking in the sight, rubbing his palm up and down your quivering thigh, before turning his hand to join yours. “No, no.” He murmured as you started to remove your finger. “Keep that finger right there.” He said, the tip of his finger brushing the underside of yours.

Henry tickled the edge of your folds for a moment, before slipping it under yours and gingerly pushed it in to join your own finger inside of you, stretching you wide open. He leaned down and pressed his lips to the corner of your mouth as you whimpered, uncomfortable at the almost painful stretch of your combined fingers. He shushed you and timed his thick digit with your smaller one, gently joining the tip of your finger at your sweet spot, and added even more pressure to it, making you cry out loud, throwing your head back.

“You're doing so well.” He praised you, nuzzling the side of your face with his. “I can't wait to have my cock inside of you.” He panted, eyes rolling shut at the idea. “Let's see if you can take one more.” He said, curiously. “Pull your finger halfway out.” He instructed you, rubbing his next finger in the juices dripping from you, then poising it at your hole.

“Just like that, good girl.”

Carefully shifting his first finger around yours, Henry pressed his new finger through the ring of muscle surrounding your entrance, taking it slow.

“Just relax.” He cooed at you, pressing his knees against the edge of the bed to shift his weight and used his now free hand to caress the side of your hot face and rubbed his palm over your chest, trying to help your relax. “Deep breaths. That's it. Very good.” He smiled at you, his finger halfway in.

“Henry, please.” You mewled, chewing your lip to bits.

“Hush.” He whispered, caressing the pad of his thumb down the bridge of your nose. “Gotta get you nice and open for my cock, love.” He told you, breathing heavy has the rest of his finger slide home with the first. “It'll hurt so much more, if I don't, and I don't want to hurt you, darling.” He said, a rush of icy goosebumps racing over his body at the sweet whimper that left your parted lips.

“Put your finger back in.”

“I can't.” You whimpered, shaking your head at him.

“Yes, you can.” He said softly, nodding his head and holding your eyes. “Come on, sweetheart.” He cooed at you, sweetly. “You can do it for me, can't you? Don't you want me to be inside of you?” He asked, coaxing you. “Keeping you nice and warm.” He added with a chuckle, feeling the creeping cold of the night outside coming through the thin walls and windowpane, chilling the sweaty skin of his naked body.

You gulped at the tone of his dirty talking, feeling it going straight to your pussy, making Henry chuckle as he felt the pooling wetness growing around your combine fingers. Whimpering softly, you pushed your finger back into the tight space above Henry's big ones.

“There, see.” Henry smiled, kissing your forehead. “Not so bad, is it, love?” He asked, crooking his, and your, fingers into your sweet spot and rubbed at it, with measured experience. “How's that feel, baby?” He asked, leaning in to kiss you, lazily.

“It feels so good, Henry.” You moaned against his mouth. “So fucking good.”

“Just wait til you have my cock in you, it'll feel a million times better.” He promised.

“I want it now.” You whined, nudging him.

“Just a little bit long, honey.” He cooed, kissing your hot cheek. “There's a little something I want you to give me first, just to make sure you're nice and relaxed, and comfy, for me to nestle inside this sweet little hole of yours.”

“Hen--”

“Ah-Ah, Sshhh.” He interrupted you, shaking his head and starting to work his fingers in and out, taking your finger with them. “Enjoy it, darling.”

You moaned aloud, licking your lips and pushing your head back, eyes rolling shut at the phenomenal feeling of the teamwork your joined fingers were pulling off inside you. You rocked your whole body down on your and his fingers, driving them deeper inside of you and stretching you wider with each motion. Henry smiled down at you, watching you lose yourself in the motion and moment; and he hadn't even given you the best part yet. He slowly slipped his fingers free of your core, you blissfully unaware of the change as you continued to fuck your own finger.

“I can't wait to have you squirt all over my cock.” He said aloud, his eyes glued to your finger, then watched the change slowly wash over you as your orgasm neared. “That's it, sweetheart. Fuck that finger good, come all over it.” He said in a husky and arousal dripping voice, feeling himself get even harder at the sight, and started rubbing your swollen clit.

“H-Hen-Henry.” You gasped, breathing hard, as your toes curled against the amazing hot flood rushing through your sweaty body; rubbing your clit alone had never felt this good.

“Come.” He hissed, eyes huge and focused on you. “Come for me. Soak the the bed, baby. You can do it, come on.” He encouraged you, a free hand moving to his hot and swollen cock, giving it a few pumps.

“Fuck! Oh, fuck!” You mewled, face contorting as your orgasm started to peak. “Henry!” You cried out, before finally falling into your orgasm and drenched your finger, leaving a damp spot on the duvet beneath you.

Henry licked his lips, the heavy and pleasing aroma of your arousal filling his nose; it made him hum. “See that? Told you, you could do.” He said, when you were halfway recovered. “And you didn't even need my fingers.” He added, with a sly grin.

“Huh?” You squeaked, looking down your heaving body to see his fingers still resting lightly on your clit, and your own finger still inside your core. “Oh fuck.” You chuckled shyly, your face heating up.

Henry chuckled and kissed you deeply. “Now, you can have my cock, sweetheart.” He smiled slyly at you.

“I don't know what—” You cut yourself off, feeling self-conscious again, and looked away from him.

You didn't know what to do once he was inside of you, you hadn't known what to do with your own finger inside of you, if it wasn't for Henry's fingers there as well, and him instructing you. But, Henry was very experienced in the art of lovemaking, and wasn't surprised or bothered by your inexperience in it; he had his own solutions to such things. So, he wrapped your heavy legs around his waist and your arms about his neck, before putting his arms around your waist. Henry lifted you up, so he could stand to his full height, slipping an arm beneath your bottom as he did, to keep you from slipping.

“It's all right, sweet girl.” He assured you, moving to the head of the bed and sat down. “Take your shirt off.” He told you, tugging on the garment.

Biting your lip shyly, you grabbed the hem of your shirt and pulled it off over your head, tossing it to the floor. Henry smiled and smoothed his palms up your back to the clasp of your bra and popped it free. Slipping the straps of your bra off your shoulders, Henry tossed the undergarment to the floor with your shirt and leaned forward to place open mouthed kisses to the supple skin of your breasts, nuzzling his face between them and leaving, almost painful, love bites in their wake. You whimpered, hugging your arms around his neck and hiding your face into his hair, feeling the solid and hot flesh of his cock press up against your thighs and ass.

Moaning against your skin, as your shifting rubbed your ass down against his cock, Henry turned and laid back on the bed, his head on the dingy and flat pillow, all the stuffing flattened from years of use. He held you in his lap, as you straddled him, and pulled up his knees to give you a little more stability. Henry gripped your hips to move you, so you knelt on your knees over him, then reached between your legs to take himself in hand, lining up with your sticky entrance, and pushed his hips up enough to press the fat and swollen tip of his cock just into you, then held his hips there.

“Very slowly, push yourself down.” He instructed you, nodding his head at you, as he broke out in a sweat, that plastered his curls to his forehead. “That's good. Keep it up, baby.” He said, breathing hard.

You pushed your hips down on Henry's cock, feeling how hot and hard it actually was as it filled you more and more. There was only a little bit of extra stretch as he entered you, but it wasn't uncomfortable and the slickness left over from your orgasm helped make it easier to do. It took some slow patience, but you finally had your fill of Henry inside of you, shifting in his lap.

“That feels so different.” You whimpered, feeling like he was deep inside of your stomach.

Henry smiled up at you, chuckling. “I'm sure.” He replied, nudging his hips upwards. “I'm nice and deep into your cervix.” He commented, feeling it wrapped around his cock. “Are you okay?” He asked, taking a few deep breaths, to keep a handle on himself.

“I'm-I'm fine.” You assured him, flustered at the feeling of him rubbing up against your cervix. “Wh-what do you wa-want me t-to do?” You asked, gulping thickly.

“So eager.” Henry teased, kneading your hips in his palms. “Just follow my motion.” He said, looking up at you.

Gripping your hips more securely, Henry started moving you back and forth on his cock, keeping himself firmly housed inside of you, while hitting all the right places, including rubbing your still sensitive and swollen clit against his belly. You gasped aloud, your hands gripping his wrists, and rocked faster, but Henry held you off, keeping your motion slow and steady, not wanting either of you to rush it.

“Easy, baby girl.” He cooed at you, letting go of your hips and rubbing his palms up and down your thighs. “We have all night, sweetheart. Take your time. I'm not going anywhere, I promise.” Henry shifted his hips as you continued to ride him in an easy pace, feeling the sticky smear of your juices all over his stomach and cock.

Henry had dreamt about this, in the lone times he didn't have crippling nightmares.

You would come into his bedroom, like you would when he was having a bad dream. Running your hand up and down his chest, touching his face and playing with his hair, before moving your hand down his taut stomach and into the elastic waistband of his pajama pants; rubbing his soft cock and fondling his balls, making him slowly grow against your warm palm. Wrapping your hand around the base of his then swollen cock, your hand would slide up and down the long length, swirling your thumb around his sensitive head; smiling so sweetly at him, when he moaned deep in his throat and thrust up into your grasp. Your pace was maddeningly slow compared to the hot need Henry had to be inside of you; spilling his load as deeply as he possibly could into you, and hear you call out his name as you orgasmed.

It didn't take long for that to happen as you lifted away the fabric of his pants, his eyes dropping to your still stroking hand. Smirking, you let his cock fall heavily to his abdomen and stomach. Henry gulped as you moved over him, straddling his waist and kneeling over him, hands braced against his broad chest for a moment. You reached back with one hand, taking up his cock again and bringing it to your weeping pussy, sliding him into the comforting, eye fluttering, warmth of your core, making Henry call out and grab your hips, planting his feet and thrust into you with one fluid motion, burying himself so completely inside of you.

“Oh!” You gasped suddenly, bringing Henry back from remembering the dream. “Henry.” You whimpered, as you felt the intoxicating build of a second orgasm.

Henry's hands moved from your thighs to the back of your arms, pulling you down on top of him. Wrapping his arms around you and kissing the top of your head, he kept his knees bent, using his planted feet on the squeaky mattress to push up into you. Keeping the same easy rocking, but driving himself so much deeper, that it sent spasms of pleasure throughout your whole body. You moaned into his neck, panting opening mouthed against the skin of his shoulder, sounding so soft and sweet in Henry's ear.

It wasn't long before Henry felt the unraveling snake of pleasure overcome him, his cock pulsed and throbbed inside of you, his natural instincts kicking in and made his movements involuntary as he continued to wildly thrust, his balls tightening in preparation. You could feel every muscle in Henry's body tense up, his loud, uncensored and lewd sounds grunting and moaning into your ear and hair, both of you could feel the rapid beating of your hearts pounding together with your chests pressed together; the feeling of his cock throbbing into you keeping in time with each heartbeat. He was at the point of no return now, with a few more thrusts, he push himself as deep into you as he could, scrunching you both up in the process, and came.

The strong and hot spurts of his come going off inside of you, drumming your cervix like a demolition hammer. You let out one sound, then came and squirted around Henry's still spewing cock, drenching his abdomen and balls with your release; leaving yet another puddle on the bed. Both of you became dead weight, spent from all the walking and stress, magnified by the mind-blowing orgasms you shared. Henry's hands slowly came to life, rubbing up and down your back and sides, head turning to kiss your temple as he did.

Neither of you said anything, neither of you needed to say anything. It had all been spoken in that intimate moment, saying what words could not. You sighed softly, the scent of his sweaty skin in your nose as you nuzzled his neck, feeling the deep tug of sleep take over you. Henry smiled softly, brushing his fingers through your hair, kissing your forehead as he felt you fall asleep, the soft change of your breathing, chilling his skin. He pushed his head back into the pillow and mattress, staring up at the stained drop ceiling with a huge grin crossing over his face, he hadn't felt this satisfied and relaxed in a very long time, he had never felt this complete either, as he fell asleep with you.

You woke a little while later, still laying on top of Henry, his soft cock still buried in your sore pussy. Biting your lip, you carefully sat up, freezing as Henry moaned and shifted in his sleep. You reached out and gently soothed his curls off his forehead, until he relaxed and dropped back off into a deep sleep, before carefully moving off him, biting back a moan as his cock slipped free and you could get off the bed.

Henry stirred again, and you again played with his hair.

“Ssshh.” You whispered to him softly, heart pounding. “Sleep sweet, Henry.” You cooed at him, using your other hand to rub his chest, knowing how well it calmed him. When he finally relaxed again, you tiptoed into the bathroom, carefully feeling for the toilet in the darkness, not wanting to turn the light on and wake Henry up. Finding it, you groaned as your butt touched the ice cold seat, and relieved yourself with a sigh. Stepping back out of the bathroom, you glanced around and spotted Henry's backpack. Every nerve and cell in your body told you to grab it and break into it, taking back your shoes and the rest of your stuff, and bolt out of the room; nighttime be damned, you needed to get to Mikey.

You almost did go for it, before you heard Henry softly mumble out your name in his sleep. He was dreaming about you. So, it wasn't only you that dreamed of him, that your mind-blowing and intense sex wasn't just because you had given him an opening to do so. Henry actually wanted to have sex with you, because he was in love with you.

“Goddamn it.” You huffed softly, your breath coming out in a light fog in the chill of the room, feeling the chemicals of your flight mode die away as you watched him sleep from the foot of the bed, and he mumbled out your name, yet again.

Shaking your head, you grabbed the first shirt like object off the floor and pulled it on, before stepping over to the curtain-less window. You were so conflicted, you wanted to leave and get to Bristol, it was only a ten hour walk from Cherhill, and according to the antique clock on the wall, it was only three in the morning. If you left now, you could power walk it to Bristol, gaining more time between you leaving and Henry potentially waking up. Then, by the time he reached you again, you would be in the heavily populated city, making it a million times easier for you to hide from him, as you searched for your brother.

You looked over your shoulder at Henry and sighed, but you couldn't just abandon him again either. Especially, after the night you both had. It would have been a kick to his trust if you had ran again, but an even bigger drop kick to his heart, ruining whatever was potentially happening between the pair of you. He would never trust you again, he would never love you again. He would either finally treat you like the Slummer Slave he had purchased, or he would just throw you to the Council of Clerics, letting them do with you as they pleased. Sighing again, you rubbed at your tired face, turning back towards the window, and looked out over the back of the hotel, the half moon resting on the tips of the trees beneath it, throwing a eerie silvery light through their branches.

“What am I going to do?” You asked yourself, breath fogging up the windowpane in front of you, oblivious of Henry starting to stir on the bed behind you.

The slow alarm sounded through Henry's skull as his body realized that your weight was no longer on top of him. His unconscious mind's first attempt to remedy this, was to roll over onto his side, figuring you had simply rolled off of him in the might. A hand sluggishly moving out over the mattress in search of you, but came up empty. He moaned in his sleep, brow furrowing, before his alert blue eyes popped open and panned around the room in front of him, the bathroom door was dark, but open, a quick glance to the room door showed it was still locked, but you could have taken the key and locked it behind you as you ran again.

His heart started to pound, with the anxiety of possibly losing you, and anger that you had broken your promise not to run again. He rolled onto his back, to get up out of bed, but paused, finding you standing at the window, wearing nothing, but his knit sweater, to keep the chill of the room at bay, to some extent. He was relieved to see you hadn't run after all, but he could tell by the way you stood and hugged your arms around yourself, that you were having a mental war with yourself. Frowning, he sat up, reaching out for his boxers and pulled them back on, before standing up to move behind you.

You gasped at the touch of Henry's hand on your hip. “Christ.” You let out in a frightened huff.

Henry smiled softly at you. “I'm sorry.” He chuckled softly. “I didn't mean to scare you.” He said, kissing the back of your hair and wrapping his arms around your shoulders, hugging you back against him, to share the extra warmth of his body, and rested his chin on the top of your head.

“Anything interesting?” He asked gently, looking out the window.

You knew what Henry meant, he wanted you to confide in him, tell him what you were thinking and what was clearly bothering you. You sighed and squeezed your eyes shut, your stomach was in knots, as you thought about him and your brother, torn between the two men. Did you tell Henry you weren't going back to London with him, no matter what, breaking his heart and incurring his wrath? Or, did you let your brother reap his choice to work for dangerous people, potentially getting himself kill? It had been Mikey's choice to work for Jaxon Quinn, he knew the risks and rewards of doing so.

Everyone did.

You sighed again, the weight of your conflict sounding with that outtake of air. Henry took a soft intake of air through his nose and let it out again, your body was tense against his. He really didn't need to ask what you were thinking, or really how you were feeling, he could sense it, and had known about it the moment he learned all the facts in the matter. He just figured it would help you relax and come to a conclusion on what to do, if you talked about it.

“He's my brother, Henry.” You whispered, leaning your head back against his chest, but kept your eyes out the window.

“I know.” He replied, gently.

“But,” You frowned at the faint reflection of you both in the window, a new knot twisting in your stomach.

“But?” Henry frowned back.

“But, I-” You chewed on your lip for a moment, mustering up some courage. “I also love you.”

Henry felt a tingling warmth in his chest, hearing your words, pressing his lips together as he tried controlling the smile on his face. “I love you too.” He confessed, feeling a weight lift off of him.

“I don't want to choose.” You added, almost soundlessly.

Henry sighed, the smile turning into a frown as he heard your words. “I know you don't.” He said, softly, and closed his eyes, feeling the swell of conflict fill him as well.

He honestly didn't want to make you choose between him and Mikey, knowing that whatever choice you did make, you would end up regretting it, because it wasn't the other option. He felt you get squeezed into the same rock and hard place he was currently trapped in.

“Come back to bed.” He said, finally. “It's cold.”

Neither of you moved for a moment, before you let Henry pull you back to bed, slipping under the thin duvet with you and curling his body around yours to keep you warm, letting you use his arm as a pillow. But, as you both, slowly, drifted back off to sleep, Henry had already made the choice of what the two of you were going to do next, when the sun finally rose again.

285 notes · View notes

mimik-u · 3 years

Text

Flower Child, Chapter 19 (Blue IV)

AO3 Link

Thursday, July 5th, 8:38AM:

Blue: Hello, Steven… how are you this morning?

Steven: tired.

Blue: I’m sorry.

Blue: Is there anything I can do?

Steven: no

Steven: I don’t think so

With one hand, Blue Diamond held her phone aloft and read Steven’s bare reply again and again. And with the other, she gently massaged her aching right hip, kneading her spiny knuckles gently over the bone beneath the thin layer of her nightgown.

She’d slept on it the wrong way.

Had tossed and turned all night, nightmaring.

And she didn’t need a psychoanalyst to tell her what it meant that her dead daughter erupted from a wilting hibiscus flower before transforming into Steven Universe, who dissolved into petals as she tried to cling onto them both—her smile, his laugh, her freckles, his hair, all crumbling beneath her fingertips into pollen and pieces. Pearl’s words echoed in the dark chapel of her own head as she gathered the petals in her palms: “Start with a flower and a smile, perhaps.”

Help him, Blue.

Don’t look away.

(You’ve always been so good at looking away.)

In the end, she laid her phone facedown on the bed and rubbed her sore hip in the curtained darkness of her room for a few minutes longer. It was unclear to herself whether she was trying to soothe the pain or grate it in just a mica deeper, one sensitive knuckle movement at a time.

Either way, she was only giving herself what she deserved.

Relief.

Injury.

And perhaps both at the exact same time.

A cocktail of them both—shaken, not stirred.

It was only when the alarm clock on the bedside table indicated that ten minutes had passed in silence and arthritic torture that she endeavored to apprehend her cane with both hands, violently wrenching herself into a standing position, briefly throwing her world into dizzying spirals. Blue closed her eyes against the initial nausea and told herself that she had to go on.

In so many more ways than just simply one.

She glanced fleetingly at the hibiscus that still remained on her nightstand, now withered around the edges, now graying, and thought to herself that perhaps she could save it if she acted fast, pressing it between the pages of a favorite book—an Austen, a Homer, a Kierkegaard.

Preserving it.

Start with a flower and a smile, perhaps.

Help him, Blue.

Don’t look away.

The sounds of her cane were muffled in the carpet as she made a detour to the bathroom to grab her robe, pulling on the worn garment like an old friend, the collar flush against her long neck. And then, her movements as stiff as they were laborious, she made her way from the bathroom back to the bedroom and then into the vast, empty hall—at the end of which the living room was framed in an arch of white, morning light.

Clank, she barely glanced at the door leading into the study because she knew Yellow wouldn’t be in there.

The door was completely closed, which was a telltale sign in and of itself.

Clank.

Assorted images from the previous evening sifted through her head like grains of falling sand, salting her unsettled thoughts as she moved forward, her bare feet tracing the smooth wooden planks.

Clank.

They had sat in the backseat together on the car ride home from the hospital yesterday and dared to hold hands, fingers intertwining, palms touching.

Lifelines.

Yellow was as warm as Blue was cold, the gathering of their skin simply electric.

Clank.

The sky outside the tinted glass windows had been the precise shade of a bruised peach—gold around the edges and a darker amber within. There were cream colored clouds that swirled and swirled through the ripening sky, becoming milky wisps in the places where they spread too thin.

Blue stared upwards into these vaulting heavens and thought fleetingly about beauty, how it could come from the most mundane of places.

In the continuous cycles of an ever-changing sky.

In children who gave flowers to random strangers at cemeteries.

In laughter.

In sadness.

Even in grief.

The fading light dusted the crown of her wife’s blonde head.

A slight frown pulled at her lips.

And there was great beauty and great sadness in this, too.

Paradoxes and contradictions.

“What are you thinking about?” Blue had asked, absently skimming her thumb along the side of Yellow’s hand, tracing every line, relearning every divot and groove.

“My luck,” Yellow returned in that familiar dry voice of hers. “That wreck could have been… disastrous.”

“Yes.” The word was hushed in her throat, cloistered, the possibilities that it engendered too much to bear: Yellow injured, Yellow dying, Yellow gone. The worst hypothetical had never felt more real to her than in the handful of hours that had elapsed between her doorbell ringing and rushing to the hospital in the dead of night.

With Pink, there had been no likewise chance.

No hospital to go to.

Only a morgue.

“Did… what’s her name… you know—the new valet—did she make it out alright? I forgot to ask.”

“She did,” Blue confirmed with a small nod. “Topaz—I mean. Only a few cuts on her face from what I understood. I gave her a temporary leave of absence.”

“Good,” Yellow sighed, relief palpable in her low voice. “Excellent.”

Her frown incrementally shifted, becoming the barest of smiles.

Subtle.

Almost easy to miss.

Clank.

They had ascended the elevator side by side, too, Yellow pulling her special keycard out from the pocket of her immaculately pressed shirt with fumbling fingers, and Blue could tell that she was tired by this uncharacteristic clumsiness alone.

“Let me,” she whispered before gently apprehending the card and slotting it into the reader that would grant them immediate access to their floor.

It was a tiny kindness.

Somehow, it was far more than that, too.

Yellow stared at her, eyes wide, and said, “Thank you.”

“It was nothing,” Blue murmured, a dull flush coloring her cheeks as she returned the card, slipping it back to where it belonged.

The doors opened slowly, welcoming the Diamonds home.

Clank.

Blue had insisted that Yellow sleep in the bed, that she needed a good night’s rest after all that she had been through, but Yellow was infuriatingly stubborn to the last—intransigent, inflexible, chivalrous—protesting that she didn’t want to aggravate Blue’s hip problem.

She’d be fine on the couch.

It only hit her later that night, as she laid in that bed that was much too big for her, that she could have invited her wife to come to bed with her.

But the thought scared her as much as it intrigued her.

She pushed it to the side, tabling it for a later date.

(Coward.)

Clank.

The living room was dressed in a pale sunshine coat when Blue finally arrived at the very edge of it, her oceanic eyes washing over the scene until they lit upon Yellow Diamond, stretched beneath a thin blanket on the white couch, fast asleep, soft snores emitting from her half-open mouth.

In the hours that had elapsed, her wounds didn’t appear as angry as they had done yesterday, and there was already a little discoloration around the edges of her stitches that suggested that they were already beginning to do the complicated work of healing—as transitory wounds tended to do.

Blue lifted the bottom of her cane now so it no longer thudded against the floor with each slow and deliberate footfall; she could retain her balance for that long, or, if she couldn’t, then she’d very well know it was likely time she had that hip replacement her physician kept threatening at each of her successive appointments.

But she didn’t waver.

Didn’t fall.

Miraculously refrained from breaking.

Long enough to reach the creamy ottoman in front of the couch, which Yellow had apparently used in lieu of a nightstand. Her reading glasses were folded neatly atop of yesterday’s copy of The Empire City Times, the crossword section right side up.

She’d almost finished it, lacking only two-across: ANTONYM OF CRUELTY.

And the answer, Blue Diamond could plainly see, was grace.

Fondness for her wife, exquisite and painful tenderness, unexpectedly erupted in the column of her throat—a rush of love, a flurrying sensation, spreading all over, both trickling water and raging fire, paradoxes and contradictions. And suddenly, all impulse, thought swept away by feeling, feeling unknotting her hesitant bones, Blue gingerly bent down and brushed the sharp line of Yellow’s jaw where sunlight had already scribbled itself in patches. She was a child running curious fingers along the edge of a forbidden shelf. She was a butterfly tentatively skimming a blade of grass. She was a broken mother trying to learn how to be unbroken again. She was a loving wife.

She hadn’t been intending to wake her—had only wanted to touch—but somewhere in the space of four awful years, Yellow had apparently learned to be a light sleeper. Her golden eyes flew open at the gesture, catching Blue in the act.

“Blue,” she murmured, shocked, disbelieving, as though she wasn’t entirely convinced that she wasn’t dreaming. “Good morning.”

“Good morning,” Blue returned softly and at least had enough decency to look ashamed. (For what exactly? She wasn’t necessarily sure. Somehow, she just knew that it was a very shameful thing to touch her wife. To caress her gently after so many days and months and years of having not done it.) “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“No, no,” Yellow protested, sitting up abruptly to make room for Blue on the half-rumpled couch. The movement must have been too sudden for her sore body because she briefly winced, glancing downwards at her leg. “I should be getting up anyway. What time is it anyway? Seven? Seven-thirty?”

Blue remembered the timestamp that had accompanied Steven’s last message, and a frown bruised her lips as she slowly lowered herself by her wife’s side, balancing herself on the head of her cane.

“Closer to nine, I believe.”

Yellow blinked once, disbelief turning to cross bemusement in the slightest shift of her brow as she searched for the truth in her wife’s long face.

“Seriously?”

“More or less.” Blue’s lips slightly rippled, and Yellow shook her head with disgust, the emotion snarling across her weathered face.

“I haven’t slept in past eight since I was in college,” she muttered, pushing a hand through her sleep-straggled hair. “Goodness, that’s unusual.”

“You were exhausted,” Blue proffered immediately, as though this was explanation and excuse enough, but Yellow only shook her head again, refusing her own defense just as quickly as Blue had risen to it.

“Not anymore than usual,” came the stubborn reply. There wasn’t argument in her voice, so much as there was an edge, inwardly pointed.

Because that was the thing about Yellow Diamond.

She saved her sharpest words for herself, lancing her own criticisms deep into her skin in order to forcibly teach herself how to do better the next day. Blue knew better than to challenge her when she did this, for Yellow did enough challenging to herself.

So she looked away and allowed Yellow to punish herself and lapsed into contemplative silence, thinking about Steven again, threading her fingers together on top of her robed lap: his sunken face, his lachrymose messages, his careworn caretakers, and all of their collectively haunted eyes. Even glancing out onto the sun-warmed balcony was enough to conjure the image of him sitting beside her in the chair that usually belonged to Yellow and eating one of Holly Agatha’s famous chocolate cakes.

The one he would later throw up.

Because he was sick.

Terribly so.

“Blue?” Yellow’s voice was soft, prodding, hesitant, awkward—full of all the dichotomies and contradictions that their relationship seemed to have been built on these last four years. They both loved each other.

Surely.

Deeply.

Beyond a shadow of a doubt.

They were equally afraid to say it aloud.

“Is something troubling you?”

Blue’s turned away from the balcony and faced her wife again—the stitches on her sharply hewn jaw, the complicated emotions in her golden eyes, the sharp set of her frown—and wondered what would happen if she simply told her the truth, if she laid it nakedly between them and simply waited for a response.

It was terrifying to be vulnerable with another.

Somehow, in the midst of everything, she remembered that it was necessary.

“Steven Universe,” she finally whispered, the name less like a name and more like a confession, gently handed over between the sliding partition in a wooden booth. “I’m worried about him. I talked to one of his guardians yesterday, and he isn’t… doing well.”

Yellow’s face grappled with the news, appearing far more stricken than Blue could have ever expected of her.

When she frowned, the lines beneath her eyes darkened and creased, making her appear ancient.

Haunted.

“I know,” she said unexpectedly.

“You do?” Blue couldn’t help herself—she arched an incredulous brow, and her wife’s cheeks promptly colored in response, the pink feathering the sickly purple of her bruises. It wasn’t a particularly handsome effect.

“I met him the other night,” she muttered, a little impish, a little stiff, glancing away. “I was curious. I wanted to know what he looked like.”

Blue didn’t know what was more astonishing—the fact that Yellow had visited Steven in the first place or the miraculousness of her actually admitting to it so plainly. Neither action seemed particularly characteristic to a woman who attempted to subjugate all of her emotions beneath the sleeves of her immaculately ironed shirt.

But she could see the truth of the words in the tense sobriety of her profile.

And she knew, from experience, that as astonishingly unlikely as it was for Yellow Diamond to visit a sickly child in the hospital, it was even less likely that she would lie about it in the first place.

And so Blue did what she could to collect her face, but she was fairly sure that trace remnants of her surprise still remained because her wife scoffed, the color of her cheekbones still a rosé red, sweet and mild.

“You don’t have to look so shocked.”

“I’m… I’m not shocked,” she protested immediately, her own features shading themselves in. “I’m just—”

But Blue Diamond, eloquent though she was, could not find another fitting word, and Yellow Diamond, seemingly despite her better judgment, laughed once, the sound harsh and warm in that airy, light-filled living room.

“Shocked,” she repeated emphatically, shaking her head.

“You’ve disarmed me before I’ve taken my morning tea,” Blue mumbled, a little petulance in her voice, a little play.

“Good,” Yellow sniffed, half-grimacing, half-smiling. “I’m glad to see I can still keep you on your toes.”

And then they both stared at each other—nakedly, unflinchingly—quite painfully aware that they were on the verge of making each other laugh for the first time in years, and the solemnity of the occasion brought them both back to themselves.

Blue frowned so easily that it was only muscle memory, primal reflex.

And Yellow followed suit, the sunlight raking itself across her wounded face.

“And what did you think of him?” Blue asked, both wanting the answer and dreading it. She slightly learned towards her wife; part of her wished to flee; and because she didn’t flee, because she stayed, the contradiction manifested as a twisting of her gut, a turning.

“A little impetuous…” Yellow said immediately, her voice low, distant with memory. “Annoyingly happy… but good, I think. Smart for his age. Kind. He almost reminded me of—”

But she caught herself just in time—stricken, terrified, revolted.

And Blue’s heart nearly failed with the simple proximity of her daughter’s ghost, of the closeness of her nearly evoked name.

But they danced through the horrible moment.

Silently.

Together.

Yellow swallowed thickly, and Blue Diamond was merciful; she gently took her wife’s splinted hand.

“Pink,” she murmured softly, the word, the name, the ghost reverent on her tongue.

Holy.

“Those eyes,” Yellow croaked painfully, folding her fingers into the gaps between Blue’s own. “That wide smile.”

“I know,” Blue whispered. “I know.”

“I can see why you like him, Blue,” she said seriously. “He hooks you in.”

Blue’s mind worked far ahead of her. Even though she didn’t explicitly articulate it, even though she likely never would, it was clear that Yellow was amongst this number.

She liked Steven Universe.

She cared.

“Before you even know it,” she agreed softly. “Before you’re even aware.”

“It’s all so very sudden,” Yellow muttered uncomfortably, frowning, a divot forming between her dark brow.

And Blue thought to herself, very quietly, that that was the nature of love, really.

It was all so very sudden.

And beautiful and extraordinary and rare.

And sad and horrible and tragic.

And lasting.

Even when it happened suddenly.

(Even when it was suddenly taken away.)

“What isn’t in this world?” Blue murmured, and she gently skimmed the side of her wife’s hand with her thumb, watching as this simple revelation played out across her powerful features.

Smoothing them.

Sanding and softening all those rough edges.

“Frankly,” she finally said, smiling a little sadly, “I have no damn clue.”

ii.

Once upon a time, there was a princess, a knight, and a little elven girl, all tucked up in bed together, side by side by side.

Blue ran her fingers through her daughter’s mass of curly hair as she snored lightly. Her tiny hand was curled into the front of Yellow’s pajama shirt, knobbly fingers twisted into the fabric, secure there. She’d fallen asleep protesting the need for sleep, trying to convince her mothers for one story more, and just as Blue had finally conceded—she rarely ever didn’t when it came to Pink—her hooded eyes drifted to a close beneath the gentle lamp-strewn haziness of the room, where she was warm.

Safe.

Loved.

For that was the crucial fact, the fundamental thing—Pink Diamond was loved most of all.

“We’re never going to have a sex life again, are we?” Yellow lamented, slanting a honey-eyed gaze at her wife over the top of Pink’s head.

Amusement in the expression.

Fondness.

Blue laughed lightly and could not help but play along, teasing her body upwards so that she was propped on her elbow, and she could look at her wife properly, drinking in the way she looked at ten o’clock at night, with her hair still a little wet from the shower. There was a certain gentleness in her hawklike face that she tended to eschew during the day around business colleagues, subordinates, and clients, but here, in the safety of their shared bedroom, it had always been implicitly understood that even birds of prey had to roost, too.

“It isn’t too late, you know,” Blue returned, her voice warm, low, suggestive . Yellow had started it after all; it was only fair that she finished. “We can simply move her to her own bed…”

“And chance waking her up again? Hell, no. It was an ordeal just getting her to sleep.”

“The couch is always an option.”

Yellow scoffed imperiously, poking her lips out in a magnificent imitation of her mother’s trademark pout.

“Every time we try that, one of us falls off the damn thing.”

“Hey,” Blue laughed again, causing a heavy strand of hair to fall from where it had been swept from behind her ear, “I wasn’t the one who vouched for hardwood floors.”

Yellow pulled on a faux-offended look like it was one of her favorite ties, dramatically starfishing one of her hands across her chest, exactly where her collared pajama shirt dipped into a vee.

“Well excuse me for thinking that carpet looks outdated.”

“You’re impossible,” Blue smiled gently, shaking her head.

“I believe the word you’re looking for is practical .”

And then, because it was late at night, and they were tired and being stupid, and there was a baby in the bed between them, the two of them caught each other’s eye and couldn’t help themselves, collapsing into laughter that was lovely and loud and ridiculous enough to make Pink briefly stir, her ears twitching irritably at the disturbance.

And then, because this was somehow incredibly funny even though it really, really wasn’t, they laughed some more—silently this time albeit—before eventually flicking off both of their lamps and wrapping their arms around their daughter in the cool darkness, fingers meeting precisely in the middle.

iii.

Friday, July 6th, 9:20AM:

Blue: Hello, Steven. Are you feeling better today?

Blue: If you are, I would love to come visit you again soon.

Steven: not really

Steven: sorry, Blue

Saturday, July 7th, 9:51AM:

Blue: Just checking in, sweet boy. Respond only when you feel up to it.

Blue: And if that’s not at all… that is perfectly okay, too.

They took their tea and coffee out on the balcony, Blue assuming the right armchair and Yellow the left, and somehow, there was both a rightness and a wrongness to these simple actions.

Because this was new.

And yet, achingly familiar.

One week ago today, they danced this same vicious dance, drinking coffee, drinking tea, sitting in these chairs, appropriating a sense of normality that they did not feel. And the memory of their failed ruse swallowed a lot of the precious oxygen in the air, making it hard for either of them to speak. Blue spidered her hand across her sternum, the tips of her long fingers touching spiny collarbone, and tried to remind herself how to breathe.

Yellow was more finicky in her discomfort, her careworn face drawn as she bobbed her left leg up and down, the heel of her slipper flicking arrhythmically against the smooth floor. And the sun that she stared at was the precise color of a healing bruise, pale ochre against a silver sky. And the bruises on her angularly hewn face were mottled in the strange light, pulsing like miniature supernovas, burning, gradually dulling.

“I heard it was going to rain tomorrow,” the businesswoman eventually said, and it was clear from the way that her voice was clipped that she didn’t really want to talk about the weather.

“I saw that, too,” Blue Diamond replied in a low voice. “On the news, I believe.” She had seen no such thing, in fact, but they were talking again, she and Yellow, and that was something that would occasionally take baby steps.

Weather talk.

Mere pleasantries.

Scratching the deep, dark surfaces with fingernails.

But then, because the weather could only take them so far, they lapsed into a silence that was its own person, sitting indelicately in the space between them.

Pink hair.

Constellation freckles.

A black hoodie.

A mischievous smile.

Once upon a time, there was a princess, a knight, and a little elven girl, who hadn’t been so little anymore—not really. She’d been tall and willowy and full of passion for a life she had yet to live. She’d been twenty-one, but both of her mothers had treated her like she was twelve.

And they loved her, but they suffocated her.

And they loved her, but they ignored her.

And they loved her, but the awful and unbearable truth of the matter was that love was not enough.

Love was the foundation, but it had to be built upon with care and attentiveness—with perceptive eyes and willing ears and flexible hearts. It required sacrifice. It demanded compromise. Mutability. Vulnerability. Change.

And so Blue and Yellow loved Pink Diamond, down to their marrow, down to all the atoms in their four hundred and twelve collective bones, but they failed her in so many of those other important respects.

And they paid the steep price.

Because once upon a time, the little elven girl who wasn’t so little anymore had had enough of her own fairytale and dreamed of carving out another.

She sought freedom and adventure.

She was daring; she wished to rebel.

But when she did for the first time (and the last), when she snuck out of her palace of a room, there were monsters out there, and nothing in the world had ever prepared her for monsters—not even her parents, who had slain their fair share of monsters: dragons and greedy businessmen and hardhearted mothers.

And so she died, and the princess and the knight were left alone in their high tower to lose their goddamn minds.

In separate rooms.

Away from each other.

They mourned and mourned and mourned.

And on that sun-paled balcony, before she knew it, before she could stop herself, Blue Diamond’s eyes were pooling with hot tears. She tried to swipe them away, so Yellow wouldn’t see, wouldn’t chide her, wouldn’t scold, but Yellow had already seen—of course she had already seen—and her golden eyes were wide.

Lined.

Horror-struck.

“I’m sorry,” Blue pleaded reflexively, covering her face with her tall hands. She was always so very sorry. “I was just... I was thinking of her and I couldn’t help it... and I’m—“

“Don’t apologize, Blue,” Yellow cut across her hoarsely, her voice a sharp knife on the edge of breaking. “Don’t ever feel like you have to apologize to me.”

But Blue didn’t think that this was a particularly healthy way of looking at things either. There were so many things she felt the need to apologize for.

(All of them had to do with looking away.)

“But—“

“Because I was thinking about her, too.”

The sentence was an admission, rushed, expulsive, thrown to the floor like it was a bomb ready to ignite.

Yellow abruptly flinched, and Blue did, too, waiting for the aftermath of the blow that didn’t quite come.

So now there was an invisible body in the space between them and a ticking time bomb on the floor.

Company was always diverse in the Diamonds’ penthouse suite.

Perpetually attuned to their self-made demons.

“You were?” Blue’s voice verged on the edge of offensively wondrous. She dared to look at her wife in the gaps between her fingers, slicing her statuesque profile into vees. Her stern jaw. Her world-weary eyes. The lines crisscrossing her face. The defeated hunch of her Atlantean shoulders.

Blue pulled her fingers downwards until they were tightly clenching the lapels of her robe, fingers sinking into the thin fabric, knuckles turning white at the grip.

“How could I not be?” Each word was acerbic, gritted through the teeth, self-loathing. “Just last week, we did this, too, and I hurt you then… I’ve hurt you so many times over Pink. I should be the one who is saying sorry.”

Yellow looked over then, her face desperately open, as though she was trying to convey the force of her raw penance by expression alone.

How tortured she was.

How craven.

Feral.

Agonized.

Undone.

“And I am sorry, Blue,” she continued, the lines beneath her eyes contracting harshly. “I am so sorry—for every wrong I’ve ever done to you. For every time I’ve made you feel wrong for grieving Pink. I… I have no excuse, no semblance of a justification… I just…” But she violently interrupted herself, her ferociousness seemingly drained from her body as she jerked forward, elbows on her knees, dragging a hand across the whole of her face, uncaring of her stitches.

And she remained like that for what felt like an eternity, a statue ruined, palm covering her mouth

Staring wide-eyed into space.

Into an awfully bruised sky.

Blue Diamond’s entire nervous system was in total disrepair as she looked at her wife.

And tried to comprehend the words she had just said, the very ones she had resigned herself to never hearing.

Because for all the four years that she had grieved and grieved, Yellow had been right there beside her, insisting that she should get a grip on herself, should get better, should move on.

And here was the apology for all those awful words.

Here was the proof that they had existed, and that they had injured, and that they had hurt.

The creased skin around Yellow’s eyes was damp.

Her robed shoulders trembled.

“Yellow Clytemnestra Diamond,” Blue finally whispered, the name less invocation than it was admonition, less admonition than it was cruelty, less cruelty than it was love, “you cannot honestly believe that it is that simple.”

That caught her attention.

Yellow jerked her head in Blue’s direction so quickly that it looked painful.

“What?”

“Can’t you see?” She asked, a pleading note in her voice as she leaned a little across the gap between their chairs, her silvery hair falling in loose gossamer curtains around her face. “It isn’t all just you, and it isn’t all just me either. It’s both of us. Together. My God and my goodness, it always has been.”

“Don’t be absurd,” Yellow snapped, her face leached of its color as she scrabbled for purchase, for a reasonable ledge upon which to mount her own cross. “You were grieving, and I kept pushing you. I couldn’t stand watching you fall apart.”

“But you were grieving, too, Yellow!” Blue all but shrieked, desperate to impress upon her wife how important it was to acknowledge the unplumbed depths of her pain.

To own it, by God.

To share it.

Because she didn’t want to be alone anymore.

She couldn’t bear to be.

“You were hurting, and you were sad,” she continued unrestrainedly, tears pricking the corners of her eyes again. She made no attempt to brush them away this time. “And I was so cruel, Yellow. I wanted you to acknowledge it for my own selfish reasons, and then, at the very same time, I was desperate to push you away. You hurt me, but fundamentally, I hurt you, too, and you can’t just… you can’t take away our history like that. You can’t shoulder all these four years on your own. It doesn’t work like that. Love doesn’t! Marriage doesn’t! We don’t!”

Blue Diamond’s chest heaved painfully at the end of all this, as though she had just run a marathon. She rubbed her sternum again, trying to excise the damage, but there was so much of it there—so many hundreds of days worth—and she was so tired.

Exhausted.

But still, there was more to be said; there were mountains between hers and Yellow Diamond’s chairs.

Insurmountable oceans.

And Yellow was frozen, a monument to her own colossal grief.

Stone.

Leaking stone.

She had fountains for eyes; they dripped and dripped.

“And we hurt Pink,” Blue whispered, closing her eyes against this final, horrible truth as the tears continued to lance down her long face, salting her cracked lips. “Oh, my God, how we hurt that poor child. She wanted so badly to grow up, and we wouldn’t let her. We looked away. And that’s what I think about every time I close my eyes, Yellow. Her last words to me echo perpetually in the dark of my head.”

You’ll never let me grow up, will you?

She couldn’t help herself then; she let out a bitter sob, wrenched to her very core.

Because their daughter was dead and never coming back, and the pain of that simple fact would haunt her until the day she died, the memories of her so many thousands of scattered ghosts.

Eternal.

Omnipresent.

Her own constructed gods to worship and to fear.

“I was grieving,” Yellow confessed hoarsely, and the naked baldness of it forced Blue to open her eyes again to take a look. Her wife was rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet, fingers dug into the thighs of her pajama pants. Without her trademark three piece suit, without her makeup, without her man-killing heels, she seemed so much smaller than usual—less adamantine, more human. “And I hurt you.”

“Yes,” Blue said simply.

It was a mere syllable; it cost everything in her to utter it.

“And you were grieving… and you didn’t mean to… but you… you hurt me, too.”

“But sometimes,” Blue reminded her gently, the words awful on her lilting tongue, “I absolutely did mean to. I wanted to hurt you, Yellow… I wanted you to feel the barest inch of pain that I felt and suffer with me. Us. Together.”

Yellow looked like she didn’t know what to say to that, so she ignored it, striking the heel of one of her hands across her running face, sniffing harshly.

“And we hurt Pink,” she carried on, this unforgivable truth the salt in the exposed wound. Yellow’s voice broke at the end as the pain of it simply burned. “We hurt her so many times over.”

There was only one possible answer to this leveled charge, too.

“Yes.”

Yellow closed her eyes against this final condemnation, wincing harshly, as though skewered through with a sword. Her jaw was red in the place where she’d tried to wipe away the tears that still continued to flow down her angular face.

“So what do we do now?” She asked, and the question was almost childish in her stringent voice. The desperation in her golden eyes pleaded for an answer, a foundation upon which to stand. “Where the hell do we even go from here?”

It was a simple question at the same time that it was a loaded one.

It engendered the possibilities of more pain, dissolution, and grief.

The startling potentiality that neither Blue nor Yellow Diamond would ever recover from the loss of their only child.

Their shared tomb of a bleak and horrible future.

But there was hope there, too.

The startling possibility of it.

The barest potentiality.

Small.

Slight.

Goddamn miraculous even.

But there.

Taught first to Blue Diamond by a boy in a cemetery, so many days upon long, aching days ago.

Thinking clearly for the first time in four years or perhaps not thinking straight at all, the fifty-five year old woman tenderly reached her shaking hand across the gap between their chairs and held her palm upwards as though it had a flower in it, inviting her wife’s fingers to fill in the empty spaces, to imagine a conceivable future where they could one day hold hands and be content.

“I don’t know,” she murmured, her voice also quite childish, the words so very small. “But wherever it is, Yellow, let’s go together.”

To heaven.

To hell.

To the grave.

To their golden years.

Yellow stared at her open hand for the longest fraction of an infinity, and there was exquisite agony in her eyes, painful tenderness, too.

Paradoxes and contradictions.

“Okay,” she finally whispered, taking Blue Diamond’s hand, interlinking their long fingers.

“Okay.”

iv.

Once upon a time, there was a princess, a knight, and a night that seemed to swallow them both entirely whole.

Because White Diamond wasn’t doing well.

Her live-in nurse had called Yellow just today and told her that some days were worse than others, and worse days were become less exception than the rule; she was often agitated, frustrated, terrified, confused; she thought that Yellow was still at boarding school; she saw shadows of strange men on the alabaster walls; she missed her own mother, who had been dead for some forty-odd years; she wanted to send her dearest Starlight a postcard from Paris.

As they laid in bed together in the darkness, Blue wrapped her arms around her wife’s tense body, pressing soft lips against her pillow-rumpled hair.

“Mother always said that she wanted a grand funeral when her time came,” Yellow said stiffly, each word yanked from behind gritted teeth. “If her casket cost less than a hundred grand, she’d haunt me from the aether for the rest of my life.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Blue sighed, a little sad, a little amused, a little fond. Her mother-in-law had always been quite the character, larger than life, always meticulously dressed in Gucci jumpsuits that were more expensive than most people’s home mortgages.

“She wants to be buried in the same crypt as my grandparents naturally,” Yellow continued in that same halting voice, “and I told her that she was being ridiculous. Someone would have to knock out a damn wall to fit another casket in there.”

But Blue knew her wife too well, perhaps better than she knew herself sometimes with her obstinate avoidance of all things introspective in nature.

“My colleague’s husband is a contractor,” she said gently, skimming her fingers up and down Yellow’s sleeved arm. “I can get a quote for you on Monday...?”

“Mm,” came a noncommittal grunt, which Blue correctly interpreted as reluctant assent.

The silence laid thickly upon the two women then.

Seconds passed.

Electric minutes.

Blue could almost feel the tension agitating Yellow’s bones.

And then—

“We should talk about our own burial plans one day in the near future,” she said brusquely. “At the very least, we need to have the Zircons codify our basic intentions into a will.”

Blue stared at the back of her wife’s head incredulously, eyes wide, her dark brow contracting somewhere in the middle. With some effort, she extricated her arms from around her, so that she could prop herself up on one elbow more easily.

“Yellow Clytemnestra Diamond,” she whispered, unable to quite keep the emotion from her voice, the rising pitch, “what on Earth do you mean? We’re not even fifty yet.”

Goodness, they were barely forty.

“Accidents happen all the time,” Yellow reasoned sagely, rolling around to face Blue properly, “and I want to leave Pink with a clear blueprint. Otherwise, you and I might end up in neon pink caskets as Weezer plays over our grave.”

“How serious of you,” Blue quipped, lowering herself down to the pillow again so that they were at eye level. In the barest light that seeped through the curtains, she saw that there were tired lines scoring Yellow’s face, straining shadows.

“I’m being completely serious,” she protested shortly. “Not about Weezer, perhaps, but the fact that we should have solidified plans.”

Abstractly, Blue knew she was correct—it was only common sense for them to put their affairs in order, even if they were young, and perhaps especially while they were. And yet, she had a feeling that this particular topic of conversation wasn’t strictly about the common sense of it, the practicality, the realism.

It was more so about the haunted look in Yellow’s eyes.

And the stiffness of her body.

And her sick mother.

Assuredly, it was about grief.

“Yellow,” Blue only whispered, reaching across the barest gap between them and placing the palm of her hand on the woman’s warm cheek. Her thumb cradled that imperial jaw, tracing its harsh geometry, loving it softly.

And Yellow Diamond immediately jerked, as though stung by such a gentle, careful touch, but ultimately, she didn’t move away from it.

She leaned into it, in fact.

And closed her dark-stricken eyes.

Sighing.

“Sorry,” she muttered thickly. “I was being morbid... I just... it’s all becoming real to me, I think...”

Blue remained silent in this awful darkness, simply listening, simply holding her wife’s face.

“The inevitability that one day, my mother isn’t going to call me on the phone to chew my ass out about the company again... she’s just always been so stubborn, so implacable, that to imagine her as anything else is...”

But she trailed off, opening her eyes again. They were strangely filmy, bright but simultaneously dull.

“Well, you know what it is,” she finished awkwardly.

The words sprung immediately to Blue’s clever and elocutionary mind: unbearable, unfathomable, cruel.

She decided quickly, though, against saying any of them aloud; thinking them was punishment enough.

“I know,” she whispered, continuing to study the planes of her wife’s jaw by touch alone. She chose not to say anything when there was sudden dampness on the side of her hand.

“What do I do, Blue? The question was hushed, strangled, barely articulated into the night. “What happens next?”

Blue Diamond didn’t particularly know grief yet, the harrowing nature of it, its iron-sharp teeth.

And so that was the only answer she could give her wife in the end, as intelligent as she was, as intuitive, and as sensitive to the natures of others.

“I don’t know,” she admitted gently, “but I promise you, Yellow Diamond, I’ll be by your side through all of it.”

In sickness and in health.

’Til death did them part.

’Til Weezer apparently one day played over their grave.

“How sentimental of you,” Yellow laughed humorlessly in a failure of an attempt to hide that she was touched.

Blue leaned over then and pressed her lips against Yellow’s cool forehead, fingers still cupping her face. And when the stalwart general of a businesswoman’s entire body shuddered, she was merciful again; she pretended not to notice.

“Yes.”

Tuesday, July 10th, 7:22PM:

Steven: i’m sorry for just getting back to you, Blue. It’s been a rough couple of days.

Blue: I know how that feels.

Steven: it’s just kinda hard to get outta my own head right now.

Blue typed and sent her reply just as the door leading into the penthouse suite abruptly swung open: I know how that feels, too.

When she glanced up from her phone from where she was sitting on the couch, Yellow Diamond was limping through the threshold in such a way that it was painfully obvious that she was trying to hide that she was limping—holding her shoulders ridiculously straight and grimacing as though to subjugate any pain she was feeling in the firm press of her mouth.

Though she was dressed in a button down with black slacks and a suit vest to match, she wasn’t quite coming home from work; rather—as she’d told Poppy to tell Blue earlier that morning—she had been at the hospital all day.

Doing some more tests.

Placing her phone facedown on the nearby end table, Blue narrowed her eyes in what she hoped was sympathy but probably more so resembled fear.

“Yellow?” She asked softly, her voice small and tremulous and terrified of its own aggrandized shadow. She loathed herself; she didn’t know how to be anyone other than herself. “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” came the immediate and stubborn reply as the woman shuffled over to the couch, her face unbending in unsubtle relief when she finally collapsed into a sitting position. Her palm immediately went to her right thigh, which Blue knew had been the one heavily bruised in the accident.

Blue’s brow bent pointedly over her arctic eyes.

Coldly.

“No,” Yellow amended herself, abashed, embarrassed, sniffing haughtily. “It’s only my leg, though. I was on it too much today.”

“I told you you could borrow my cane.”

“And I told you that that was the last thing I wanted to do,” she muttered, flushing, continuing to rub the inflicted area. “Besides, you need it more.”

Because it was always a competition between them—who was suffering the most. And for some odd and likely unhealthy reason, it was one competition that the ambitious CEO didn’t like to win.

Blue sighed heavily at this silent observation, disturbing the heavy braid that was slung across her shoulder, before slowly pulling herself upwards from the couch, drawing her wife’s incredulous, harried gaze.

“Wait! I didn’t mean for you to leave—”

But Blue only shook her head, quelling Yellow’s protests with the gesture, before slowly hobbling over to the kitchen and slowly hobbling back, this time bearing the ice pack that she sometimes took to bed with her and a gray towel to wrap around it. Using the head of her cane cane as leverage, knuckling it tightly, she nudged the white ottoman towards Yellow with her good knee until it was right in front of her.

“Prop your bad leg up,” she commanded quietly, her voice taking on that same authoritative note that she had once used with her pupils. “Elevating your leg will help drain some of the tension from it.”

And like the best of the headmistress’s former pupils, Yellow knew it was best to swiftly comply.

Laboriously, with obvious discomfort, she used her hands to drag her right leg onto the ottoman, wincing a little with each microscopic adjustment of her thigh. Blue, careful to give the limb wide berth, lowered herself down to the ottoman, too, where she encased the ice pack in the towel, neatly tucking the ends in together so that the cloth wouldn’t unloose itself.

Yellow watched all of this with offensively wide eyes, staring at Blue as though she was turning water into wine or doing somersaults in the middle of the living room. Self-conscious, hyperconscious, anxious, painfully aware, she tucked a stray strand of silvery hair behind her ear and tried not to pay attention to her as she gently pressed the ice pack against her leg, meticulous to cover the entirety of the affected area.

“Cold helps,” she only proffered in explanation. “I can instruct one of the maids to change it out for a new one in a few hours or so.”

“Thank you, Blue.” Yellow’s voice was constricted, tender, raw.

Blue didn’t think she deserved such an outpouring of emotion for such a simple task, this tiny, most minuscule of kindnesses; she glanced away, feathers of color dusting her hollowed cheeks.

“It’s nothing,” she returned gently. “You would do the same for me…”

A slight pause.

Loaded.

Unbearable.

She felt the need to extinguish it at once.

“You have done the same for me,” she added with quiet forcefulness, still not quite looking in Yellow’s direction, drawing both of her hands into her lap. They were cold now from handling the ice pack, rigid and stiff.

“So many times over.”

After all, how many times had Yellow Diamond sat vigil by her bedside in these past four years? Bathed her? Accompanied her to doctor’s appointments? Taken care of her the best way she knew how?

The number was unfathomable to Blue, innumerable even—both from a lack of attention and from the stunning knowledge that indeed, there were probably too many times to count.

There was a shifting noise then—Yellow adjusting herself on the couch, perhaps—and when Blue finally forced herself to glance up, she could see that there was a rumpled look in her wife’s eyes—the same messiness of an unironed collar, the stain of tea spilt on a tiled floor. She had jerked forward as though to reach out and touch Blue, but the position of her extended leg had made it difficult.

“But I could have done so much more, Blue,” she said softly, with quiet pain, the barren and fervent truth of it shining in those liquid gold eyes. “I watched you suffer more than I ever helped you… I’m so sorry.”

And when Blue immediately opened her mouth to protest, to rearticulate that it wasn’t as straightforward as that, that they had both done inconceivable wrongs to each other, that Yellow had done the best that she could, Yellow shook her head ferociously, her aspect taking on that same indefinable sense of authority which had so permeated her reign as the CEO of Diamond Electric.

And like the wisest of Yellow’s colleagues, Blue knew when it was best to simply stand down.

“No! I’ve been thinking about this,” she continued doggedly, “and I’ve come to the conclusion that just because we’ve both hurt each other doesn’t very well cancel out the fact that we did. That’s asinine, Blue—fallacious logic. I hurt you. I pushed you away. I didn’t want to acknowledge your grief for the inglorious reason that if I did, I would have to acknowledge my goddamn own.”

She raised her voice only at the end, flinching when she did, looking away.

The pale light flooding down from the strips in the ceiling cast strange shadows across her beaten face, and Blue Diamond’s heart bruised with the utter surreality of it all.

The confession.

The accountability.

The simple agony in Yellow’s voice, laid bare.

There were no barriers between them now, no walls, no facades, no meticulously constructed pretenses—only words.

Words and words and words.

Yellow Diamond had been there for Blue in so many different ways in four years… but she had hurt Blue so many times in so many different ways, too, and that was apparently something that neither of them were allowed to forget.

How many times had Blue laid in the horrible dark by herself, silent tears streaming down her face weathered? And how many times had Yellow insisted to her physician do up her meds, as though the underlying problem of grief could be treated first and foremost with a pill? How many times had her wife raised her voice at her—so devastatingly harsh, aloof, and cruel?

The number was unfathomable, innumerable.

Blue could not immediately swallow the lump in her throat.

“I… I remember thinking that if I could just keep myself together on the outside,” Yellow half-whispered, “I could be strong enough for both of us. I couldn’t bear being weak.”

And she flexed her fists on top of her powerful thighs, scraped knuckles trembling.

And she somehow found enough courage to look Blue in the eye.

And Blue stared at her right back, her eyes melting with awful tears.

“Grief isn’t weakness, Yellow,” she said ardently, with all the conviction she could muster, with all the atoms in her broken body.

Because she knew grief; she understood it; it was her closest companion, her very best and most horrible friend.

Yellow sniffed and swiped a hand across her face as though it would do anything, as though it would annihilate the over-brightness of her eyes.

“What is it then?” She asked, and from the quiet tone of her voice, Blue thought that she’d already guessed the answer.

But she said it aloud anyway, for both of them to hear and to know and to never forget again.

She reached over and gently took her lover’s hand and whispered, “Love.”

Tuesday, July 10, 9:02PM:

Blue: It’s such a hard feeling to contend with, sweet boy—the feeling of everything, the feeling of nothing, the feeling of drowning in the empty space of your own head.

Blue: I was there.

Blue: Some days, I still am.

Blue: But please know, Steven Universe, that I am here for you.

Blue: So many people are here for you.

Wednesday, July 11, 6:58AM:

Steven: thank you, Blue

vi.

Once upon a time, there was a princess, a knight, and a dead queen to mourn and to bury in a one-hundred thousand dollar casket.

On the day that White Diamond died, Blue washed her wife’s hair when they showered together that night, rubbing her fingers gingerly across her scalp as the steaming water broke across the crowns of both of their heads.

Yellow braced her shaking hands against the marbled walls and tried not to make so much as a sound.

Her shoulder blades were knife-sharp with the excruciating tension of holding herself together.

(Of not falling apart.)

Blue kissed the skin right between the middle of those tremulous mountains and scrubbed those places tenderly, too.

And when they dressed in their pajamas and went to bed together later on, loosely intertwining hands and painfully letting go, Pink Diamond came in, wearing one of Yellow’s old t-shirts as a gown, and wrapped her arms around Blue’s neck first, pressing a gentle kiss against her head. Her dark eyes were red from where she had been crying, for she had loved her Gran dearly, even if the eighty-five year old woman had taken habitual offense to the teenager’s choices of music.

“Goodnight, Mom.”

Blue closed her eyes in her daughter’s warm embrace and inhaled the scent of her floral shampoo.

“Goodnight, Pink.”

“I love you so much.”

“I love you, too.

She used to say it so easily then, and she said it so often, too.

It was commonplace.

It was habit.

(What had ever happened in the intervening years? Blue Diamond, to her eternal condemnation, could not know.)

And then the sixteen-year old dutifully shuffled over to the other side of the bed, where Yellow was sitting on the edge, staring blankly into space, the lines beneath her eyes stark, as though dictated in black ink. And Pink wrapped her arms around her other mother, too, burying her nose against that tall column of a neck.

Tears flowing down her freckled face, she whispered, loud enough for Blue to hear, “I’m so sorry, Momma.”

Yellow Diamond didn’t seem capable of moving a muscle at that very moment, more statue than human, obelisk-like, calcified.

But Blue watched as their beautiful daughter squeezed all the tighter, uncaring that she was meeting stone, her slender shoulders wrenching with a sob.

“I’m going to miss her, too.”

Yellow hadn’t cried since she had first gotten the call earlier that morning, and she didn’t start then either; Blue knew her too well; she was desperately afraid to be vulnerable for anyone to see.

And yet, with slow rigidity, with a tenderness that almost did not befit her, labored though it was, the businesswoman reached upwards and encircled her arms around her daughter, drawing the sixteen-year old girl into her lap as though she was that same child who had perpetually come into her mothers’ room after a bad nightmare.

“Shh,” she croaked, and there was pain in her fractured voice.

Pronounced agony.

Love.

Blue’s heart stuttered at the sight and at the sound.

“Shh, Pink,” she repeated, cradling her child, tangling her fingers in that wild, pink hair. “I’m here.”

vii.

Thursday, July 12, 7:12PM:

Steven: hey Blue?

Blue: Yes, Steven?

Steven: You can come visit me tomorrow if you want.

Steven: Would morning be okay? 9:00 maybe? I think they have some more tests to do on me in the afternoon

Blue: I’ll be there.

The summer evening was flush with soft colors—pink and indigo and aegean blue, all bleeding into each other, all melting, until the sky was falling with hazy radiance, white stars dotting the sky like angels in the night. Blue was on the balcony when Yellow arrived home, listening to a familiar piano arrangement that was playing on the classical radio station; the portable stereo was sitting on the table between the chairs.

“You’ve always liked this one,” Yellow said fondly, and when Blue turned around, she saw that her wife was leaning against the sliding glass doorway, dressed as impeccably as usual in a black button down and well-tailored khakis. The collar of her shirt was popped up around her sinewy neck, and there was a manila folder tucked neatly beneath her unhurt arm. She’d spent yet another day at the hospital, doing heavens only knew what.

At least she wasn’t coming home with any new injuries, though.

“Debussy?”

“Chopin,” Blue smiled faintly, and the gesture stretched a little stiffly across her unpracticed lips. “Nocturne in E Flat Major… I used to play it at my parents’ estate for our guests…”

“You used to get so frustrated when you pressed the wrong key,” Yellow teased as she pushed herself off of the door and ambled over. She didn’t quite sit down in her chair, but rather placed the manila folder down in front of the stereo before straightening up again, her silhouette tall in the burgeoning night. “Your brow would furrow just in the middle before you’d start all over again, intent on getting it right this time…”

Blue Diamond’s heart gently pulsed in her throat as she stared upwards at this figure she knew so well—so stern and so simultaneously magnanimous, so magnificent and so undeniably… broken, the lines beneath her eyes fixed scars, her face an angular canvas for cuts and oddly healing bruises.

“I’ve always been a perfectionist, you know.”

“Yes, I know.”

Yellow drew a purposeful step closer, and Blue instinctively leaned back, her stomach clenching against wild and irrational and warranted fright.

“Yellow…”

Because then, with a little awkwardness in her eyes, with a hell of a lot of fear, Yellow Diamond slowly proffered her hand, the metal band of her watch catching in the golden light that illumined the balcony.

There was no mistaking the gesture.

It was an invitation.

“The song’s almost over,” Blue whispered, her throat savanna-dry.

“So?” Yellow meant it to be casual, Blue inferred, but the sound came out too agitated. Color leaked from the sky and seemed to scribble the hollows of her cheeks in. “That’s never stopped us before.”

She was embarrassed.

It was adorable.

And strange.

And oddly sad.

And so, Blue Diamond swallowed her fears.

She took her wife’s hand in the star-strewn darkness.

They could be embarrassed and strange and oddly sad together.

Relief shattering her face, Yellow leaned forward then and wrapped her arms around Blue to help her stand, going slowly, with all consummate gentleness. Their bodies were so close that they could hear the hummingbird beating of each other’s hearts—loud, quick, and desperately afraid.

Blue placed her chin on Yellow’s shoulder and allowed herself to be held by her wife for the first time in four years.

The thought and the sensation nearly made her want to cry.

Yellow Diamond led them slowly and carefully as the arrangement lolled through its sweeping notes. With Blue’s bad hip and Yellow’s sore leg, they couldn’t do much more than turn around in careful circles.

Once upon a time, they would have both sworn that they could out-waltz a king.

“I had an interesting day today,” Yellow said suddenly, as though this was explanation enough for why she was dancing with her wife. Her breath was warm against the tip of Blue’s right ear.

“Oh?”

“Indeed,” she nodded, her chin briefly pressing against Blue’s shoulder, “but I’ll have to tell you about it later, I’m afraid.”

“You’re such a tease,” Blue murmured, but the accusation didn’t come out quite as light as she wanted it to. Her voice shook, and her hands trembled where they were resting on the woman’s back.

Tears danced in her sea-dark eyes.

“Something of the sort, yes.”

The song continued on, but it was nearing its beautiful end—a series of high-lilting lifts and then a final, graceful fall.

Blue greeted every note like it was an old friend, long lost at sea, now come home.

“I’m going to see Steven tomorrow,” she whispered as they continued to draw their slow circle upon the floor. “Early. He asked me to come visit.”

A slight pause.

The piano tinkled a spray of final notes.

And then, there was silence.

“I don’t think his head is in a good place.”

The silence made the proclamation all the more wretched.

Yellow stopped them in their place but didn’t quite let go of Blue, her fingers curling into the thin fabric of her dress.

“I don’t find that hard to believe,” she murmured. “We wouldn’t be in a good place either if…”

But rightfully so, she let the end of that particular hypothetical trail off into the night, for Yellow and Blue Diamond both weren’t in a good place either yet. They were dancing, and they were tentatively smiling, and they were learning how to love each other all over again.

But that was only the beginning.

The start of another piano arrangement began to rise softly from the stereo.

“Bach,” Blue said automatically to smooth the rough moment over. “One of the Goldberg Variations, I believe.”

And so they began their gentle revolutions again, swaying, barely moving their feet to the solemn melody. The wind ran its fingers across them, stirring Blue’s heavy braid, ruffling the collar of Yellow’s shirt.

“Do you know what you're going to say to him?”

It was a remarkably intrusive question, or perhaps it very well wasn’t. Perhaps Blue was judging off the standard that four years of standoffishness from her wife had taught her so emphatically. The questions she most associated with Yellow now largely had to do with whether or not she’d taken all her pills.

She shivered a little, even though the air was mild.

“No,” she replied, closing her sunken eyes. “I haven’t the faintest idea…”

She hadn’t been able to rouse herself out of four years of grief; despite whatever Pearl seemed to believe, she wasn’t entirely sure that she possessed the words that would be enough to help Steven Universe. For even he hadn’t given her words that fateful day in the cemetery.

He’d given her kindness.

He’d given her a flower.

“You’ll figure it out,” Yellow said with an assuredness that made Blue’s heart flutter again. It was a wonder that she could even breathe.

“You say that with such confidence on my behalf.”

And as Bach’s mournful contemplation scored that profound night, Yellow Diamond drew back, so that Blue could see her face, every sharply drawn facet of it, illuminated in that softly scattered lamplight—fifty-six years of life, pressed into the layers of her skin, lines and shadows and lines. These were the lines that had formed beneath her eyes when their daughter first died. And there was the cut that raced across the bridge of her nose from the car accident. And here were the stitches that currently served as a memento of that scary night, too. And there were the slight parentheses formed around her mouth whenever she frowned, relics of time and age and grief.

Her golden eyes were bright with emotion and ancient with the weight of so many passed years.

“Because I know you,” she returned simply, “and I love you.”

They were merely three words, but Blue’s heart nearly failed to hear them.

Spoken to her.

Meant for her.

By the person whom she loved.

Oh, dear God, when was the last time anyone had ever told her that they loved her?

She could not say; she strained to remember.

“I love you, too,” she whispered it back, even though it was only four words, and they were all so very semantically simple.

But the expression on Yellow Diamond’s face was anything but as she, too, registered what it was to be loved by another, her mouth agape, pleasure and pain and ecstasy and terror warring across her face in dizzying swirls.

Oh, dear God, when was the last time she had told Yellow that she loved her?

She could not say; she strained to remember.

And there was hesitancy then.

And vast, godawful fear.

And there was longing then.

And tender, unquestioning desire.

And they both leaned forward then…

And tilted their heads in just the right way…

And they…

viii.

Once upon a time, there was a princess, a knight, and a master bedroom that smelled like a fresh coat of paint.

It was empty as of yet, hollow and silver-walled and woefully unadorned—the movers had just placed the bed and mattress down. They’d be coming back later on that day with the nightstands, armoires, and dressers—all custom-made for the Diamonds’ penthouse suite.

For their first home.

“Wait,” Yellow said, and there was mischief in her twenty-eight year old voice that took Blue by pleasant and tender surprise. “Let’s finalize this bridal style.”

“Yellow,” she laughed, her face coloring pink, “don’t be ridiculous.”

But the heiress only shook her head, grinning with all the self-assuredness of her love and general air of arrogance, as she bent down and scooped her wife into her well-toned arms. Instinctively, Blue wrapped her own arms around that corded neck to help support her weight and found herself so close to Yellow’s face that she could not help but be enchanted.

By her.

Because of her.

This golden-eyed knight.

“I’m not being ridiculous,” Yellow scoffed, pressing a quick kiss against her head. “I’m being romantic. Haven’t you heard of the concept before?”

“Abstractly,” she teased. “In novels and fairytales and the like.”

“You read too many books.” “And you read too little.”

“Nerd.”

“Neolith.”

And they grinned at each other with unbearable affection as Yellow Diamond walked them over the threshold of the room, careful to maneuver her body in such a way that Blue’s feet didn’t hit the doorframe.

When they were on the other side, though, she gently placed her down, so that they were directly in front of the bed that would soon be their own. Blue would assume the right side and Yellow the left, and on some nights, they would meet directly in the middle.

“Soon,” Blue murmured, softly interlinking her fingers with Yellow’s. The bands of their wedding rings clinked delicately at the touch.

“No more bumming out in my mother’s mansion,” Yellow smiled, playing a little with Blue’s hand, swinging it.

“And hearing her daily tirades about being late to breakfast…”

“Oh, yes,” came that harsh, lovely laugh that Blue so loved. “I certainly won’t miss those.”

And they turned to face each other then, light playing in their youthful eyes.

And Yellow reached up and tentatively brushed back a strand of loose hair behind Blue’s ear.

And Blue leaned into the touch because she could not imagine ever doing anything else in this world.

And their futures stretched before them, ribbon-like, graceful, spiraling into each other’s lifelines with an inextricability that they simultaneously believed in and found hard to fathom. They were each other’s beginnings and their ends. They were partners, soulmates, wives. They dreamed, in that very moment, tiny though it was, of all the things that they would do together over the course of an interconnected lifetime. They would chase their ambitions with wild abandon and climb to the very height of them side by side. They would take long walks in the park near their high rise. They would go see musicals on the date nights that Blue chose and drink the most expensive bottles of champagne over steak and lobster on the ones that Yellow preferred. They would fall into the same bed every night, the very bed in front of them now. They would fall asleep in each other’s arms—warm, loved, secure. Maybe they would get a cat at some point, even though Yellow swore up and down that she was allergic to them. And maybe they would travel the world, seeing all the sights and wonders and ultimately concluding that somehow, even the Eiffel Tower paled in comparison to the view that they had of each other.

And maybe, one day, they would even adopt a child to love, to raise, and to cherish.

For Blue had always wanted a little girl.

The possibilities were endless.

And so, they leaned forward then…

There was nothing else left to do.

And they tilted their heads in just the right way…

And they…

ix.

Thursday, July 12, 7:45PM:

Steven: I’m scared, Blue.

They danced in the incomplete darkness for as long as they could both bear it, but eventually, their bodies caught up to them—Blue’s aching hip and Yellow’s sore leg and the overwhelming awkwardness of it all that arrested their limbs, too, as they slowly remembered what it was to touch each other.

They hadn’t touched each other in so many years.

Holding on to the head of her cane for support, Blue leaned down and turned off the stereo, while Yellow collected that curious manila envelope from the table and tucked it beneath her arm again.

When they both straightened up again, their noses were inches away from each other.

Blue could see every microfilament in her wife’s expression, softly realized by the amber light above. She was a beautiful creature, down to every last line that had struck itself across her face. Those dark lashes and golden eyes. The way her teeth gently pressed into her lower lip in tender and shy hesitancy.

With this sort of notable self-consciousness, though, she stepped backwards and away, giving them both space to breathe.

Blue’s heart felt as though it was going to beat right out of her chest.

“You can shower first,” Yellow said, rubbing the back of her neck. “I have some paperwork to attend to anyway.”

Oh.

She’d forgotten, for however long that they had been on the balcony together, that it was commonplace for them to part at night.

That they weren’t together.

How awful and how unbearable.

How completely and utterly cruel.

Yellow’s gaze flicked down to the manila envelope, but Blue’s remained centered on her wife’s face as she struggled to articulate the words she desperately wanted to say and ardently dreaded to, her lips partially cracked open, her entire body electric with nerves.

“Blue?” Concern bent Yellow’s brow. She shifted her weight uncomfortably from foot to foot.” Are you—”

“Come with me, Yellow.”

Oh, the awful and beautiful and terrible words—how they fell so clumsily and stupidly off her laden tongue.

“What?” The businesswoman’s eyes flew wide open, stretching the lines beneath them into almost comedic proportions.

Blue tried again, slowly extending her hand, palm up, her oversized sleeve dangling from her wrist.

Her skeletal fingers were trembling, but there was no mistaking the gesture.

It was an invitation.

“Come to bed with me, Yellow,” she whispered as tears reflexively blurred her eyes. It was no small wonder that she still had the capacity to cry after so many days and nights of weeping herself undone.

“Please.”

What complicated emotions were going through Yellow Diamond’s mind then, Blue could not entirely say. Sundry emotions seized across her eyes; her mouth wrenched itself open; and for what felt like an eternity, an infinity wrapped into excruciating seconds, she was simply and utterly speechless, staring at that outstretched hand as though she was seeing God for the first time.

How many nights had this woman dreamed of this moment? Blue wondered to herself, pain and love and fear commingling in the column of her throat.

And how many nights have I half-wanted it?

Half-dreaded it?

Craved it.

Pushed it away.

She did not have time to answer these profound questions, though, for with astonishing tenderness, with paramount and equivalent fear, Yellow took her hand, palms against palms, the striations of their fingers aligning themselves perfectly.

“Are you sure?” She asked quietly.

She was thorough as ever; she was giving Blue a readymade out.

Blue Diamond had never been more unsure about anything in her life.

“Yes,” she whispered anyway.

And so they…

Thursday, July 12, 8:15PM:

Blue: It’s okay to be scared, Steven.

Once upon a time, there was a princess, a knight, and a king-sized bed that had always been meant for two.

Theirs was a sad tale.

A tragedy.

Their daughter died, and that was something that neither of them would ever entirely recover from.

But, and all the same, they could love each other nonetheless.

They could be there for each other for the rest of their dwindling days.

Holding hands.

Learning the shapes of each other’s collected and accumulated scars.

Braving the night together, one second, one minute, one fraction of a vast and incomprehensible infinity at a time.

In that dark bedroom, silent tears streamed down Blue Diamond’s face as her wife tentatively held her, her face against her shoulder, her arms encircling the softness of her gowned belly. She rested her slender hands on top of those of tall, leathery ones and didn’t know whether to be devastated that this was the first time they had shared a bed together in four years or so utterly relieved.

Yellow kissed her head.

And the back of her neck.

And her cheek.

And kept asking if she was okay? Was her hip doing fine? Did she need more space?

And Blue replied, every time, in the strongest voice she could muster, “No.”

No, she was not okay.

No, her hip was not fine.

No, she didn’t need more space.

It was all paradoxes and contradictions: grief and love and so many wasted years. The potential for a better future. The awful fear that things could eventually become worse. Blue’s softness and Yellow’s sternness. Blue’s selfishness and Yellow’s tender care.

But they went to bed together, and that was what mattered.

And when Blue Diamond finally fell asleep, for the first time in a very long time, she did not nightmare.

She did not dream.

xi.

Friday, July 13, 7:22AM:

Steven: you think so?

Blue: I know so.

Blue: Being scared is how we know that we are alive.

By the time Blue had woken up and gotten dressed and made it to the kitchen the next morning, Yellow was already gone to work according to Livia, who was fixing Blue’s choice of tea. The slightly bitter aroma sharpened the air.

“She left something for you, though, Mrs. Diamond.” The slight maid used a spoon to point towards the counter. “She asked me to tell you…”

“Thank you, Livia,” she returned gently as she proceeded to the directed area, one doleful cane clink at a time.

Laying on top of the cool marble was the manila envelope Yellow had brought out onto the balcony last night. It was clasp-side down, and the businesswoman’s squared, utilitarian penmanship had dictated a short note to Blue in black ink.

Before she had the chance to read it, though, Livia was sliding the steaming cup of earl gray across the counter, the dark liquid gently sloshing against the rim.

“Do you need anything else, ma’am?”

Blue glanced up and studied the maid’s face, which was tentative with kindness and shy with awe. It suddenly struck her then, with all the precision of a lanced sword, how hard these past four years must have been for her, too.

“No,” she murmured softly. “Thank you, Livia… I think I’m…”

But then, she remembered.

Yes, there was in fact something she required before she went to the hospital today.

“My checkbook if you would, please, Livia… I haven’t the slightest clue where I’ve last placed it.”

If Livia seemed surprised by this odd request, she didn’t betray it in her features, simply nodding with all the delicacy that her natural constitution seemed to entail.

“Yes, Mrs. Diamond.”

“Thank you again.”

And the girl fluttered off, wisp-like in her movements, towards the dark corridor, leaving Blue alone with her thoughts and her tea and the manila envelope beneath her. She looked down again, running her fingers across that familiar scrawl.

Test results. The doctors rushed to get them done. I love you. - Yellow

Blue’s harrowed heart lurched against her ribcage as she comprehended these words, as they seemingly fell to the pit of her stomach.

Sickening her.

Immediately goring her.

She flipped the envelope over and unclasped it with almost indecent haste.

There were about twenty papers in all, neatly stacked; the first sheet was the same shade of light pink that had once been their daughter’s favorite color, and the reminder nearly ruined her where she stood.

But eventually, with trembling fingers, she negotiated the papers out of their sheath, her dark eyes scanning the neatly printed words.

And when she comprehended them, when realization swept down across her body with glorious, sweeping force, Blue Diamond did something she had not an occasion to do for years upon years now.

Strangely enough, though, in these past few weeks alone, it was becoming something of a commonality.

Her lips tilted upward in the barest, most gentle of curves.

And she...

#bellow diamond #blue diamond #yellow diamond #pink diamond #white diamond #steven universe #s: steven universe #mimiku #flower child #i'm going to weep #i cannot believe i completed this chapter

120 notes · View notes

plounce · 3 years

Photo

what if gay CATS........... were gay PERSONS

(info on this au under the cut)

theyre all shitty young adults just kind of. getting through their early 20s as best they can. or as much as they can. maybe things will get better someday, but right now they’re kind of spinning their wheels

magic exists but like eh it’s not a big thing don’t worry about it. it’s around but like whatever. not many people have it and it’s mostly just like. a curiosity or a party trick

demeter and bombularina are together, tugger and mistoffelees are together, bombularina and tugger occasionally fwb, it’s cool and aboveboard and it’s all fine

demeter:

bisexual with a preference for women. 24 years old

semi-psychic (not as powerful as tantomile or coricopat). tends to have vague and confusing prophetic dreams

dropped out of grad school for sociology due to trauma and ensuing intensified mental illness. kind of bitter about it, but tries to get through every day. general anxiety disorder even before all that

very nervous around most men she doesn’t know & trust

currently working at a barnes & noble starbucks, which sucks. she recently became the assistant manager, which turbo sucks because now she has more work for only like a buck raise, but at least she’s getting reliable shifts

her go-to therapy is cutting her hair with scissors. her hair is fried to all hell from regular bleaching

she’s learning how to crochet because she’s decided she needs to do something physically productively creative with her hands to distract herself from Stuff

bombalurina:

bisexual. 24 years old

got her bachelor’s in english two years ago and hasn’t found a job in her field and has kind of given up on it for now

she’s been bartending for like four years, does freelance editing work on the side. will occasionally write listicles for clickbait sites if she needs extra cash

literally any extra money she can save goes to tattoos. her right sleeve’s almost done

has natural red hair but dyes it cherry red

a hedonist to cope but is also just a natural hedonist. likes a good bath

i know that like the typical thing fandoms say about female characters is “doesn’t take shit” for the girlboss points but she truly does not take shit anymore. she used to take people’s shit sometimes but at this point in her life she’s tired and she has a girlfriend to be protective of. she has a couple people whose shit she will take (mostly just tugger) but besides them (and having to practice basic customer service to keep her job) she’s tired of other people’s shit! enough!

my personal take on bombalurina is a mix between the riot grrrls of the 90s and 80s punk girls, and then a dash of the greaser chicks from grease. i saw that spiked collar and my brain went OH okay i can run with this somewhere fun. same for demeter, but less so - she just has the piercings.

demelurina:

bombalurina met demeter in college at a women’s activism club, noticed her because of her dimple piercings and was like “oh someone else with a lot of metal in her face, i’ll sit next to her”

they were each other’s first off-campus roommates and were close friends. made out a couple times, but it was mostly a lot of sexual tension. there was a lot of bombalurina staring at demeter while she or demeter made out with someone else

demeter was on and off with her high school boyfriend munkustrap and bombalurina was like “oh he’s so much more stable/calm than me and she needs that, i party a bit too much for her, i shouldn’t try anything” so she just sort of. lets their almost-there peter off

(this is all bombalurina’s internal thoughts - demeter always was interested in her, but thought she was too boring for bombalurina. so neither of them thought they could pursue it)

bombalurina graduated and moved somewhere cheaper further away from campus. they kind of drift apart

munkustrap and demeter peter off and he moves away for a job (they’re still good friends, it was a very amicable breakup) and then demeter gets with macavity, which is a deeply toxic situation for her and sucks hugely and throws her whole life really off track. won’t go into further details

she finally manages to break up with him and calls bombalurina at like 2 am asking if she can pick her up, and also if she can sleep on her couch, it’s okay if that’s not okay, she just. really needs a place she feels safe, and her gut is telling her to. and of course bombalurina says yes

bombalurina also knew macavity and had also made out a couple times with him at like parties and stuff (see: staring at demeter as she makes out with people). something about transference of feelings - bombalurina was into him for a couple moments because he and demeter had a thing.

this is due to me interpreting the song “macavity” as actually about bombalurina wanting to fuck demeter and her singing as a half-repressed expression of that. i use my really good wlw brain to reach that conclusion. it’s kind of a non-competitive version of eve sedgwick’s take on the love triangle. (<-- normal thing to say)

but anyway demeter stays on bombalurina’s couch and she tries so hard to stay on track but eventually she just has to drop out. bombalurina helps her with that too. she’s just really supportive even as demeter’s life is at its lowest point. when she gets home from bartending she gets demeter to go to sleep

she just Stays with her and makes her smile and reminds her that her life isn’t over, there’s still things in her day to enjoy, to keep her trudging forward

bombalurina is roommates with tugger at this point - he also recently dropped out and demeter knows him because he’s munkustrap’s brother, so he’s Trusted and also is like “hey it’s okay that you dropped out, im here and im chilling and you like me and respect me at least a little, and you have a bachelor’s degree at least!” (more on him later)

demeter is like “oh god ive been crashing at their place for so long not paying rent, theyre gonna ask me to leave, im such a freeloader, they wont take my attempts at paying rent” but then bombalurina and tugger are like “hey! the lease is almost up! we found a pretty good 3 bedroom, do you wanna have your own room for real?” and she nearly cries because 1. the RELIEF 2. oh my god you want me around???

cut to bombalurina helping demeter put together an ikea dresser (tugger got banished to the kitchen to make crystal light lemonade for them because he’s useless with a screwdriver) and demeter has two epiphanies:

1. i thought i was ready to d*e four months ago and here i am making a dresser to put clothes into in my new apartment where i live and feel safe and loved. im still not happy but im still alive and im making a dresser

2. holy fuck im back in love with my best friend, and ten times more than i was back then.

so she like kind of freaks out because she’s already imposed so much on bombalurina, how could she impose her FEELINGS on her like this, oh no oh no oh no

meanwhile bombalurina’s back in love with her even MORE and she’s also like no... she’s already dealing with so much... i don’t want to make her uncomfortable or feel unsafe in her own home especially after her recent relationship trauma... i just want her to feel safe around me...

you might think tugger as their roommate would be like “JUST KISS” but he is in fact pretty oblivious because he is self-absorbed. mistoffelees on the other hand..

eventually they do have a big confession of feelings after demeter has a bad day and it’s very dramatic and they make out in the rain. and it’s like. well this is a movie scene. but also im cold and damp. let’s head inside our home and get warm and dry :)

and then they go inside and and talk through everything, all their feelings (not just their romantic feelings but like ALL their feelings) and their shared histories and bombalurina is like “do you think you’re... ready for a relationship right now? like that would be a good thing for you?”

and demeter considers it. she does stop and think. and then she says, “with anyone else... probably not. but it’s you. and i feel so safe around you, and we’re already so close. you make the future feel more worth it. you make more days alive feel not just tolerable, but something to look forward to. and knowing you’ve loved me all this time... it’s nice. it’s good. i’m - i’m understating it so much, it’s more than nice, it’s just - it’s a lot. i wish i had noticed back then.” “hey, hey, don’t blame yourself. i’m the one who never said anything.”

anyway. everything works out, and they start dating for real :)

tugger:

bisexual. 22 years old

dishwasher at the same bar bombalurina works at. she got him the job. he keeps bugging her to teach him bartending tricks and on slow nights she will agree to

he dropped out of their four year, but he managed to secure an associate’s in communications before he dipped

trying to be an ig influencer hotboy and hopefully get modeling jobs from that but his phone’s camera sucks shit so his account isn’t really going anywhere. but he continues to post his low resolution shirtless selfies

trying to cope with being the failure son who does not have a fancy nonprofit job with a salary and healthcare by being self-absorbed and self-aggrandizing

it works about 60% of the time and 60% of the times that it doesn’t he’s able to hide it

he dropped out right around when bombalurina graduated and he was like HEY! ARE YOU LOOKING FOR A ROOMMATE WHO DOESN’T CARE IF WE LIVE TEN MILES AWAY FROM CAMPUS? WELL HAVE I GOT A SOLUTION FOR YOU: ME!

to which bombalurina (who has fooled around with him here and there and thinks he is funny little man and genuinely goodhearted, and also he has rockin abs as a plus) says munkustrap already asked me if i need a roommate and if i do to consider you, because you don’t want to move back home. in other words: yes, you little idiot

they do fool around with each other but they are both very understanding that it is strictly platonic and for fun, especially once they become roommates. they both do not desire each other for anything serious

he did have a bit of a crush on each other when they met (hot punk older girl who’s friends with his brother) but 1. it dissipated pretty quick after they fooled around for the first time because it was not a very serious crush 2. she was in the middle of being in love with demeter so she was focused on that, emotionally

he got his ears pierced a couple times in high school but bombalurina inspired him to get a couple more. she went with him when he got his nose pierced

demeter has always understood that him and bombalurina are strictly fwb, has never been an issue.

she and him like to bleach their hair together when their hair schedules line up (he bleaches his way less often then she does), but she refuses to use his fancy conditioner that keeps his hair unfried because it’s expensive, even though he tells her to go ahead and use it, please, the health of her hair is giving HIM anxiety, demeter please. please demeter

mistoffelees:

gay. 20 years old

has magic. it’s pretty good magic but again: magic is not a big deal in this concept

a bit spooky. skulks around. a bit of a bitch but also very very nice. chooses when to speak

he has postings on craigslist and fiverr about finding lost objects and people with magic. like a gig economy private detective

side job is a waiter at a fancy restaurant

sometimes he gets paid VERY well from the private detecting, depending on the client. he does ask his psychic friends (tantomile & coricopat) to give a quick glance over on some of the more suspicious clients just to make sure he isn’t finding someone who should not be found by that person.

doesn’t go to college. is roommates with his sister victoria, who’s a freshman and studying dance. moved into town with her so she wouldn’t have to live in the dorms by having a guaranteed roommate.

tuggoffelees:

the general vibe i want for these two is mistoffelees walking around town or driving around in his shitty toyota camry while tugger tags along because he’s bored and thinks this is cool as shit

the general tone of the au is “magic isn’t a big deal” except for tugger, who thinks mistoffelees’ magic and his magic freelancing is the coolest shit ever. this is mostly because he just likes mistoffelees. “there are people who can do cooler shit than me, tug” “yeah but i don’t KNOW them also theyre not as COOL as you” “you had to explain to me how instagram reels work”

idk how they met i just think tugger shows up at his and bombalurina’s apartment one day (this is when demeter has moved in but they havent moved to the 3br yet) with this dude to dash in and pick something up and bombalurina is like “uh. who’s this” “oh this is mistoffelees he’s SO GOOD AT MAGIC” [mistoffelees nods hello] “okay bye bombalurina see you at work!!!” “uh. later”

after that he just shows up a lot. sort of ambiguous if theyre dating or what for a while before bombalurina straight up asks like “hey does the dude you’re dating know we fool around” “the dude im - what?” “... the little magic guy who keeps using our hot cocoa mix. misty.” “oh. uh. we aren’t dating.” “... do you want to? because you’re kind of all over him constantly” “um. well! haha, if i wanted to, i could! haha!” “yeah get back to me on that”

tugger trying to use his ig clout to get mistoffelees more work even though 1. he has no clout 2. mistoffelees has a very stable client base. but mistoffelees appreciates the effort. the self-promo guy promoing someone other than himself... the highest expression of love...

mistoffelees is A Nonthreatening Man plus he’s pretty obviously gay so demeter is chill around him pretty quickly. when mistoffelees is over they’ll sit on the couch where demeter sleeps and watch documentaries quietly while she crochets

they both occasionally say spooky shit at the same time because magic stuff. bombalurina and tugger are both torn between “that was cool as fuck” and “god that’s unnerving”

just a lot of tugger following mistoffelees around on his jobs and mistoffelees letting him because he’s fond of him and them occasionally getting into minor peril and interesting shenanigans, but it is 90% fetch quests

i think the first time they met tugger was taking selfies in front of a hydrangea in a public park and he saw mistoffelees walk up with a shovel and start digging in one of the flower beds and he thought he was hot so he went over and offered to take over on the shoveling to look strong and masculine and he ended up digging up a skull, which mistoffelees picked up and said “thanks” and then walked away

mildly terrifying but also very interesting and tugger’s days are kind of boring and dishwashing kind of sucks as a job to do like every night and he is a person who thrives on novelty so. moth to a porchlight

i think they do start making out for fun here and there and then a while later theyre out on one of mistoffelees’ jobs and someone asks “who’s the guy with you” and mistoffelees replies “oh that’s my boyfriend, don’t worry about him” and then it’s like. “HUH? I’M YOUR BOYFRIEND?” “uh. yeah? i assumed. is that okay?” “i mean yeah of course i think you’re great! how long have we–” “oh like a while.” “oh. uh. cool!!”

they just hang out a lot. mistoffelees enjoys teasing him and enjoys his warmth and bombasticity and tugger likes watching and helping him solve little mysteries around the county because it’s always something new. they’re kind of a comedy duo. they just enjoy spending their time together and following mistoffelee’s internal magic gps to find lost dogs and lost necklaces

yeah right now this au is just vibes and just sort of. continuing forward with your days and your weeks and your months. just young adults hanging out

#cats the musical #mr mistoffelees #rum tum tugger #demeter cats #bombalurina #tuggoffelees #demelurina #chirps #bird in the hand

108 notes · View notes

ciriceart · 2 years

Text

@ghostbcfandomevents OC Week Lightning Round: Day Four through Seven

Sucre's intro | The Chauffeur's intro | day two | day three

Day Four - Somewhere in between - What steps did this character take to get to where they are now? Feel free to choose a specific time/era to focus on and describe what your oc was doing.

Sucre isn't anywhere particularly impressive and didn't make many steps of her own to get where she is - she was brought into the church's care as a child, grew up with other ghouls of her age, and as an adult was given housing on the property.

The Chauffeur has worked his ass off to get where he is, basically. He went through a lot of education/training and informed consent paperwork related to his whole "becoming a ghoul" thing. Not to mention the weird, awkward, and sometimes unpleasant biological elements that come with the process himself. And just because he enjoys driving doesn't mean that it isn't difficult for him to stay working long hours as what is basically a glorified uber driver. Drunk partygoers puking in his car, kids getting crumbs all in the back seat, getting lost, GPS issues, high demand... It's a lot. But it's going to be worth it.

Day Five - Where are they now? - How is this character doing with the current state of events for Ghost? Do they like Impera? How do they feel about Papa Emeritus IV?

Sucre doesn't work a conventional job, but other ghouls and siblings have dipped into her garden once or twice for ritual components and the like. She only really kicked it into gear when she found out how extensive the church's library really is. She thought hopefully that they might have some literature on the plaguebringer, or that she would somehow find a fellow follower. She has no interest in converting anyone, so she has little interest in people whose interest is piqued through her influence. She's somewhat irritated by all the fuss about the new collection of songs and sermons the new Papa has released. She doesn't hate Copia, just mildly annoyed by his existence because it slightly inconvenienced her once or twice.

Present day, The Chauffeur does in fact live up to his namesake. Just for funsies, he's the guy that brought Papa III and his ghouls to the Meliora Grande for the opening of Square Hammer. I can do whatever I want. He's driven Copia around once or twice as well, but mostly it's the ghouls. "We drank too much, come pick us up!" "We got lost after the ritual, can you come get us and bring us to the hotel?" and things like that. He doesn't have a deeper relationship than that, but he's incredibly pleased with himself that he's considered a trustworthy member of the congregation to be in the position he's in. At first he was worried that working closely with the Papas would shatter the illusion (never meet your idols, etc), but they never treated him like a servant and were cordial and polite enough that it was never an issue. He also won't tell anyone about how Copia likes to listen to his own music more than people might expect. It's pretty good.

Day Six - Endings - How do you think this oc’s story will conclude? Where do you expect this character to be in ten years? Will they have a happy ending?

I have legitimately never put any thought into how I would like Sucre's story to conclude, but if I had to pick, I'd say that she fosters her relationship with her brother and becomes less overtly hostile to others who don't share her fringe beliefs. Her behavior/personality is a result of her being neurodivergent in a way that is unpleasant and difficult for strangers to understand or want to understand. I wouldn't want that to go away or to be fixed because that's jut how I wrote her brain to be, but I would like it if she learned how to work with it in a way that it's no longer an active detriment to her quality of life.

He gets the job and he gets the girlfriend. That's what I had in mind for him the entire time, even when he was first introduced as a one-off character early in my II/Cirice fanfiction. He's a perfect boy and he deserves it. I don't know about the far off future. But he does remain in contact with Father Cirice and they consider themselves old friends, even after Father Cirice kind of fucks off and The Chauffeur's job kind of makes him less accessible. He's a personal driver now, not operating a taxi service out of his 1998 toyota camry, but he'll still taxi people around every once in a while just so they can have the thrill of being in Papa's personal vehicle. Copia doesn't mind, it fosters the parasocial relationship/idol worship dynamic that he needs.

Day Seven - Exploration - Feel free to choose anything about this character you wish to elaborate on. If you wanted to dive deeper into their relationships or if you wanted to explain their past more, or if there’s anything at all that you want to talk about now is the time!

Up until age 10 or so, Sucre grew up not knowing that she was a ghoul. She certainly didn't think she was a human. Her caretaker before the church was kind of a human, and they didn't look very similar aside from the same number of limbs and phalanges, same number of eyes, same general structure... It was a very confusing time for her, growing up with only one other person who was undoubtedly like her, and then being put in a whole community of people like her. But they weren't like her, and they weren't like her brother, either. Salt and Sucre took opposite paths when it came to dealing with this. Salt tried his best to blend in and learn how to conduct himself "properly" to varying success. He is still noticeably weird and has a marked level of anxiety and difficulty regarding socializing, even as an adult with a job and relationship. Sucre did not try to assimilate whatsoever. Fuck 'em. She figures she's going to be noticeably weird and have a marked level of anxiety and difficulty regarding socializing. What's the point in making herself suffer unnecessarily for the comfort of others?

The Chauffeur is my attempt at making an oc who isn't completely tragic and isn't an asshole in one way or another. He's kind and supportive of people around him, but to a realistic extent. He's still allowed boundaries and he's imperfect and falls short. Bad things do not really happen to him during the meat of the plot. There's hints that he had a less than satisfactory home life, but it's nothing extremely traumatic. Distant family members and a sense of malaise. But then he comes to the church after many long nights spent agonizing over it. He made a choice to do something big for himself and he's better off for it. Also, while he isn't elemental at all and not very powerful, he's learned just enough trickery to be able to warp his face in ways that are increasingly unsettling and disgusting. He uses it like a party trick. I love him. He is my darling boy.

#ghostbcocweek2022 #the chauffeur #sucre

6 notes · View notes

sunsoothed · 3 years

Text

lightness

jang hanseo character study kinda fic i promised. i'm not sure if this is a character study anymore. i have no idea what this became. anyway! i wanted to explore hanseo and give him a bit of a backstory, so here it is!

*deep breath* content warnings: graphic descriptions of violence, physical abuse, blood, injury, canonical character death (not hanseo), recreational drug use, underage drug use, implied drug abuse

word count: 1866

read on ao3

hope you like it!

When Jang Hanseo is seven, he is acquainted with elder brother. Regal; nine-years-old and already hunting.

He still hides behind their father with him when he pretends to be terrified of the sound of gunfire.

Hanseo says nothing. He never brings up how his brother had thrown the bloodied rabbit and his rifle to the servant attending him, never brings up how thoroughly he washed his hands to hide the evidence of his independence from his father.

Never brings up how his brother assessed him with just a look and nothing more.

The first words Jang Hanseo’s brother says to him are as follows:

“Don’t call me hyung.”

Jang Hanseo blinks, traces his eyes over the leather of his brother’s jacket, over the blood that drips from his gloves, over the rifle he holds in his hands. He smiles.

“Okay, hyung-nim!”

A scoff, but some appraisal. Jang Hanseo doesn’t understand the half-smile he receives that autumn afternoon, but he remembers it until he beats his brother with a hockey stick, striking his head trice ‘til he’s out and his back once just for good measure, just to see the blood coming up to his mouth for him to choke on.

The first time his brother hits him, Jang Hanseo is eight. The ice rink is dark, and his brother is more geared up than he is.

Jang Hanseo misses thrice, scores once. He is rewarded with a swipe of the hockey stick on the back of his calf, and he thinks it is a game.

For that, he is rewarded with his first broken bone and a seared memory of a hand heavy on his throat. A laugh without mercy.

When Jang Hanseo is thirteen, he is offered alcohol at a party his father is hosting.

He declined, having seen first-hand what alcohol does to you, what a rage it puts his father in as he breaks porcelain, the scar he left on his mother’s cheek that lasted till the day she died.

When Jang Hanseo is fourteen, his brother kills four people. Classmates, he tells him, when he comes home with red speckled on his face. They weren’t worthy of being my classmates.

Jang Hanseo celebrates his fifteenth birthday with the diagnosis of his brother being a psychopath and accidentally tearing open the letter of a one-way ticket to the United States.

Instead of cake, he consumes his own blood, and instead of a pat on the back, he has a dislocated shoulder.

When he wakes a day later hooked to an IV, his brother is gone. The phantom of his laugh lives on, searing long into Hanseo’s conscience.

At fifteen-and-a-half, his father sends Hanseo to his grandmother’s for the summer. His father is undergoing a trial, on the charges of bribery, abetting murder, and perjury. With one son shipped off to the States and another to Jeju Island, he has no pawns he will feel ill about sacrificing. It’s not that he loves them. It’s that letting your son die because the ransom money you can very well afford would require you to take some shares out, and that’s too tedious of a process to go through.

So Jang Hanseo boards the short flight, stares out of the window for the longest one hour and fifteen minutes of his life so far. He’s never met his grandmother.

He wonders if she’s like his father, knowing she’s raised him, or if she’s worse.

She’s leagues different from anyone in his family.

Halmeoni scans him up and down when the driver drops him off at her estate. At the front door itself, she says, “We have a lot of fixing-up to do.”

It leaves an impression, that’s for sure.

The best summer of his life, Hanseo learns how to uproot weeds and catch a chicken without screaming like his life was being threatened. His halmeoni owns a farm, some 150 acres of greenery and animal and mansion.

Halmeoni teaches him first how to eat well, how to fill his plate and not feel bad about it, how to overeat and regret it. Halmeoni teaches him second that he is the most important person to himself; never his father, and not his hyung-nim.

Halmeoni teaches him third that he has no one else in the world but himself.

This, Jang Hanseo remembers the most.

(But his brother’s —)

With his brother’s absence, an anxiety sets into Hanseo’s veins so intensely that upon looking up his symptoms, he sees words like psychosis and personality disorder and promptly closes his laptop shut.

Unbidden, but not unwelcome, he remembers the rages his father fell into. He remembers the embers of gold in those small wide glasses that abeoji owned, remembers the crates of bottles that they used to have moved into the house. He also recalls the putrid smoke that used to emerge from the study. The smell of something burnt and something that made him cough so hard it alerted his father of his presence.

It’s in the boys washroom that he smells the scent again. By the open window, out curls smoke.

Jang Hanseo catches the eye of the assailant. Oh Yeonwoo will get him into this mess and then out. He will be Hanseo’s first true friend.

Jang Hanseo tries it for the first time on the terrace of the school. One joint between the two of them and nothing but heaving coughs from him until he learns how to take air after smoke and allow its natural passage back up. The joint is over by then, and Hanseo feels nothing.

Yeonwoo bumps their shoulders together, carelessly tossing the filter over the railing of the terrace. “You’ll get the hang of it,” He assures. “I didn’t even make it after a couple of joints, so you’re doing better than me already.”

Hanseo lends him a half-smile. Better than him, he thinks. When have I ever been better than anyone?

“Hanseo-yah, what’re you thinking with that scowl, hm?” Yeonwoo bumps their shoulders together again. “You’re so scary when you space out.”

“I am?”

Yeonwoo nods again. Hanseo notes something hazy in his eyes, something completely unguarded in his demeanour. He blinks cautiously.

“Hanseo-yah,” Yeonwoo whines, “Stop staring at me.”

“I’m not,” He replies. “Are —” Are you okay? Hanseo was going to ask. Stupid. Yeonwoo has settled against his shoulder now, humming some tune. He stretches his legs out in front of him and sways his feet to the rhythm. He seems better than okay.

So this is what it does, Hanseo thinks. Lightness. He wants to be light.

And so, Jang Hanseo, age sixteen, falls into something whose magnitude he cannot guess. Addiction is only the half of it. The other half had started the day Yeonwoo showed him something called shotgunning, which had taken his first kiss and his first experience with intoxication whose harm had lasted longer than its euphoria.

When he lies beside Yeonwoo, all too hot and all too cold, unable to distinguish which fingers are his when they hold hands, he finds it. The lightness. When Yeonwoo turns and exhales into his neck, prickling sweat and prickling hair to stand on edge, Hanseo smiles.

And when Hanseo wakes up, the dread in his gut is deeper than it’s ever been.

(— his brother’s —)

So it seems that boys with no family and boys with brothers who know nothing but violence and boys with a terrible, terrible blankness to them can also, by some grace of humanity, fall in love. And so it seems, as Hanseo feels the telltale thumping of his heart and lightness in his abdomen, that Yeonwoo will keep having this effect on him.

Subtlety, Yeonwoo tells him, the afternoon they sit on the roof and stare at the sky and at the smoke. Subtlety will let you get away with everything.

Subtle touches, then. Hanseo’s fingers lingering a moment too long on Yeonwoo’s arm, Hanseo’s hand firm between his shoulder blades. Subtle words, and subtle smiles, and subtle smoke between their mouths as they chase lightness.

Subtle kisses, too, when Hanseo feels he can see his own eyes in Yeonwoo’s, when Hanseo still finds the thrill of sealing his lips with Yeonwoo’s to be a minefield of his own feelings. Subtle kisses that Yeonwoo always blackens — drags them down into teeth and tongue and desire. Hanseo doesn’t know, then, that this is what differentiates them. What puts him on a curved, unshapely parabola and Yeonwoo on a straight line.

Feral, Hanseo once thinks, his gaze only slightly unclouded, as Yeonwoo bites at his lips, his neck. Feral, in the way he never kisses to coax Hanseo’s mouth open; never to cherish feeling. Only to chase after something so much deeper.

At seventeen, Jang Hanseo implodes from heartbreak.

Transfer student. Short, ebony hair, in that oh-so-timeless straight bob. He has a nice smile, even Hanseo can tell, and he has a charming walk. He’s also assigned a seat beside him. This, of all things, was the catalyst.

Yeonwoo didn’t want to kiss him anymore. Yeonwoo wanted to smoke with him, but Yeonwoo also bought a new companion along with him. Yeonwoo, it seemed, never wanted what Hanseo did. Yeonwoo, it seemed, never felt the way Hanseo did.

Hanseo knows that he knew, somewhere, beneath what his world had become, that this would not stand for long. Its foundations were, in the end, smoke.

But it does not surprise him, Hanseo thinks, seventeen and a quarter, something vile in his veins. It does not surprise him that he’s here.

His head hits, dully, the floor under him. He laughs. And he laughs some more, as the world turns from dust to sky to ocean. And he waits for the servants to find him in his father’s study.

They tell him that he’s lucky, later, in the hospital. Jang Hanseo thinks this is what death feels like, on the verge of eighteen. He states blinking at the ceiling. Hospital rooms are white on all six sides, and heaven is supposed to be white on all six sides as well. He wants to laugh, so he does.

And it hurts.

Hanseo stops laughing.

(— his brother’s laugh —)

Hanseo laughs. Ten years past, ten years perished, Hanseo laughs until his heart hurts. His brother’s heart is still beating. His blood is still warm, the three hits to his head and one to his back hadn’t kept him down. Hanseo laughs as the blood splatters on his face, sprinkled red on his chin and lips, a sprinkled red dancing in his eyes as he brings the hockey stick down, down, down.

For everything Hanseok has made him — less, more, just enough. For all these little things that had changed Hanseo more than broken bones could. For lost love. For things that weren’t, in the end, Hanseok’s fault.

Hanseo beats him till his heart stops fighting back and the blood pooled in his mouth flows quietly. Till Hanseo feels no fight left in him, and then some, till the exhaustion in him takes over.

Hanseo slumps over his brother’s dead body, and Hanseo laughs.

(But his brother’s laugh will always be louder.)

#tvn vincenzo #jang hanseo #jang hanseok #vincenzo fic #tw violence #tw abuse #tw drugs #whovie writes

48 notes · View notes

callmeelle22 · 3 years

Text

Blue Dream VII

Pairing: Iris West x Barry Alen

Rating: E

Chapter Word Count: 9, 034

Summary: A series of sporadic dates between Iris and Barry turn into something more, a story in its own making.

Chapter I: Primetime

Chapter II: It's Cool

Chapter III: Anything

Chapter IV: Comfortable

Chapter V: The Way

Chapter VI: Say Yes

Chapter VII: Brave; They fuck with the rain like a soundtrack behind them, like a song that swells and stretches, telling their story, but you're so brave; stone cold crazy for loving me; yeah, I'm amazed; i hope you make it out alive, a song that rises and rises, that sounds too good to be real, that might destroy you, but only in the best way. (Read below or on AO3 linked on the chapter title.)

Chapter VIII: Blue Dream

Brave

Broken hearts are made for two

One for me and one for you

Tell me have you heard the news

We are now in love

Fall break from school is scheduled during the last three days of the last week of October. Before she can take some time off, Iris has midterm articles to write and grade. Barry is busy testing DNA samples or whatever it is CSIs do so they don’t see each other for several days after he leaves her house the morning after Wally’s party.

On the Wednesday of Fall Break, the first day off, Iris lets herself sleep in until almost 10, and then she packs up her bag, stuffing a notebook, a couple of pens, and her laptop in, before dressing comfortably in a pair of dark leggings, and a white oversized CCU hoodie she stole from her brother. Throwing on a pair of white low-top Chuck Taylors, Iris heads out to Jitters. It’s a rainy day, and other than workers who’ve no choice, not many people are out. A storm is brewing for later in the night, the sky dark and cloudy, but for the moment, it’s just a steady rain that has Iris walking carefully to her car and driving a lot slower, thanking her lucky stars that she finds a parking spot right in front of the coffee shop.

Back in high school, especially once her dad had gotten her a used car during the beginning of senior year, Iris and Linda would come to Jitters to do homework or stare at the college boys who would come in. The coffee shop has expanded since then, buying the small antique store that had been next door and adding more seating and a bar that specializes in alcoholic coffee brews. It’s still one of Iris’s favorite places to work because now the manager is a young Black woman with wild curly hair always dyed in one bright color or another and a soft spot for mid to late 90s R & B female singers. The shop is comfortable, with couches and overstuffed chairs in mismatched browns and beiges and blues set up near the walls and windows and several tables, two- and four-tops, taking up the space in the middle. Two of the walls are exposed brick and the others are painted stark white and feature framed prints in wild colors. It’s changed since she was a child, but Iris likes to think that she’s changed with it, that as this integral part of Central City has grown and added light and color and comfort, so too has Iris.

Today, her plan is to outline at least two entire stories from interviews she’s completed over the last couple of weeks before she even thinks about leaving the coffee shop. She settles into one of her favorite spots, a soft navy armchair behind a small circular table. She sets up her laptop, her notebook with her notes, her pens, and once a waiter drops off her brown sugar latte and a chocolate muffin, she lets the sound of the rain, and the Erykah Badu playing on the speakers, get her into her work.

“Hey, beautiful.”

Iris looks up just as Barry stops beside her. She’s been at Jitters for just over three hours now, and her shoulders are cramped and she’s coffee high and hungry. The rain is still pounding down, so hard that it looks like it’s raining sideways, and Iris curses her inability to get any work done in her own home. Besides all that, she’s reeling. She’s just outlined a story of a man explaining the story of the woman he’d loved his entire life: from growing up together in a small city in North Carolina, to becoming best friends and de facto siblings when his parents died and her dad agreed to foster him; from not dating but seeming like it in high school, to falling for other people in college; from having other spouses and children to one night of passion before they found their way back to each other when she decided to leave her husband after his wife died. It was a ride from start to finish, such a roller coaster of feelings—of love and pain and joy and heartbreak—that make Iris feel a bit heavy with them, a little loopy with them.

Barry stands to the side of her, towering above her, in as simple an outfit as what she’s wearing, a pair of black joggers and a white sweatshirt. She’s startled that he's there because she figures that he should be at work, but her heart does tick up at the sight of him. That is, until she lets her eyes rake over his lean frame. He looks a little...down, like a physical manifestation of the story she’s just outlined. His hair is messier than usual and his eyes aren’t carrying their usual sparkle, in addition to the darkening bags that frame them. He’s also a little stubbly, his jaw covered in a fine layer of coarse hair, his pallor a bit ashen.

(Iris will also admit that she thinks he looks sort of, well, good, like this; but that’s neither here nor there and she feels terrible—and maybe a bit perverted—that she’s lusting after him when he’s obviously going through something.)

“Hey,” she responds softly, and she stands up to assess him further. He seems so much taller than her like this, when they’re both in sneakers. She hasn’t seen him since the morning after Wally’s party a week ago when he dropped her back off at her car after spending the night at her place. They’ve talked a bunch and FaceTimed once, but she’s missed him. She reaches up into his hair, rubbing at his scalp a little until his eyes close and he lets out a soft little moan. She keeps at it and then touches gingerly at his face, at some of the moles dotting his cheeks, at the stubble he’s grown. He reaches up to stop her, eyes still closed, and it startles her a little bit. She goes to pull her hand back, but then he holds on to her wrist to bring her hand down and presses a kiss to her knuckles.

She’s never seen him like this. He’s always so open and, maybe not happy, but never so melancholy. There is always a pep to his step, as her grandma used to say, a smile on his face that always said that he feels some sort of contentment in his life. And obviously, people are allowed to have days like this. But it does something to Iris, to see him this way. She wants to lash out at whoever has made him look like this, like he’s drowning in emotions that he can’t easily pull himself out of.

“Bear, you okay?”

He nods, a little woefully, and he catches her eyes again. She bites at her lip as she stares back at him and, on impulse, she leans up to kiss him. It’s just a little more than a peck, something to tell him that she’s there with him; but he takes it a step further, kissing her harder, biting at her lip enough that there’s more pain than she’s expecting. She moans at him and he pulls back, breathing labored.

“I’m sorry,” he speaks. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“It’s fine,” she says. “You didn’t hurt me. Well, a little, but I didn’t hate it.”

That gets a more real smile out of him, and he thumbs at her bottom lip. “Hmm, I guess my good girl is a little bad.”

Iris rolls her eyes and gives him a look, sobering for a minute. “Bear, what’s up? You okay?”

He doesn’t answer her question. Instead, he nods at her table and asks, “you get a lot of work done?”

She eyes him, wanting to ask again. But she knows how she is when she doesn’t want to talk about something and so she lets it go. For the moment.

“Yeah. Or, at least, I’ve done most of what I set out to do.”

He nods, casts his eyes out of the glass, looking at the rain for a moment, watching it fall in heavy sheets. Normally, Iris likes the rain. It’s soothing and she enjoys how it makes the world take a moment to slow down. When she was a little girl, her grandma (her dad’s mother who grew up somewhere at the bottom of Georgia) used to say that when it was raining, and particularly when it was storming, that the Lord was doing His work and that it was the time to be still. They’d have to sit quietly, usually with the TV and the lights off, and just be. And while life doesn’t allow her to drop everything because it’s started raining, there is always a hushed feeling that comes over her when it rains, something tranquil, but also a little turbulent, a little uncontrollable, quite like the very rain she’s reveling in.

“Wanna come over?” he wonders, voice unsure.

She nods readily. “Okay, yeah. Sure.”

He goes to return her mug and plate while she packs her bag back up. He meets her at the door, opening up a large umbrella and throwing an arm over her shoulder to lead her out into the rain. She walks with him past her own car as he takes her a short black away to where his Jeep is parked. He helps her into the Jeep first, watches as she tucks her bag under the seat, and then closes the door before walking around to the other side.

They ride to his house in silence. He lives far on the south side of town, a good twenty or so minutes from downtown if they hit the highway. Instead, he takes the streets, adding another ten minutes to their drive. Iris doesn’t mind; as she said, she likes the rain, and in this big Jeep, tires sluicing easily through the flooding roads in a way her car definitely can’t, she’s enjoying the ride. He had silently connected her phone to his car’s Bluetooth, so she took it to mean that the music choices were hers. She contemplates finding something that he might like, but she figures he likely wouldn’t even be paying much attention. So she decides on one of her slower playlists, ones with songs that dip and fade, that take listeners on a journey of highs and lows, and she lets it play. The lyrics tell too much, so i guess that i should mention; that i am in no condition; to put you in this position; i might fuck this up, although with the heavy weight on Barry’s shoulders right now, she can’t tell if she’s talking to him or vice versa.

He takes them past one of the major shopping districts in the city, past the Apple store and the Michael Kors shop and the one restaurant her dad took her to when she graduated college where pasta dishes run nearer to forty dollars. These shops, and the nicer mall and a couple business buildings that rise as tall as those downtown, lead into longer stretches of road where trees interspersed with beige or cream apartments begin to take up where businesses once stood. He turns into the familiar subdivision that she remembers; it’s a little older than some, which makes sense if his parents were able to buy and pay it off before they were gone. That also means that none of the houses are the same cookie-cutter versions that tend to make up most subdivisions these days, where houses are identical save for the color and the trim and what children’s toys litter the front yard.

He presses a button on his visor and the garage opens as he maneuvers the car so that he can back up into the driveway. He stays in the driveway, though, the music cutting out—but whatever the case, you're my favorite mistake; more than happy to make you—when he turns the ignition off. She waits for him to come around with his umbrella and he half picks her up to pull her out, holding on to her as he walks her through the garage.

She’s as quiet as he is, taking in her surroundings, trying to get a better sense of who he is by what he’s got going on in his house. There isn’t much in the garage; there are a bunch of boxes neatly stacked on one wall, a couple bicycles in another corner. There is a wall full of tools and a couple tables that have science looking tools on them, like a microscope and several bunsen burners and petri dishes, though nothing looks as if they’re currently being used.

He leads her through a door that opens up into the kitchen as he presses another button to close the garage. His house is as cute on the outside as it is on the inside, although she wonders how he might feel if she were to call it cute. The kitchen is large, done in white, gray, and green, with steel appliances, gray marble countertops, and the look of a place that doesn’t get a lot of use. They both stop to toe their shoes off right outside of the kitchen where a couple other pairs of Barry’s shoes lie. His living room is pretty big: a wide space that features a real stone fireplace as the focal point and a large screen television situated above it; a huge sectional in a slate gray with a few throw pillows; and a big square wooden coffee table. It’s masculine and clean without being gaudy or too bro and Iris wonders if he did this himself because even if she never knew her, she doubts a woman who loved flowers as much as his mother would decorate her living room this way.

The dark curtains on the windows are open wide and Iris can see the backyard but the rain coming down in sheets keep her from being able to make out much besides the patio with what looks like a grill and wicker furniture. Iris remembers being told that his dad had been a doctor and his mom some sort of university researcher and the house matches that.

Barry lets her hand go to tug his sweatshirt off, revealing a plain white t-shirt that rises up over his taut belly. She doesn’t avert her eyes, giving herself permission to track how the sweatpants hang off his slim hips and how he isn’t so much sculpted as he’s hard and tight, with just the beginnings of abs. He catches her staring and he smirks at her before dropping down in the corner of the couch, one leg spread out along the seats of the chair.

“Come here,” he tells her, and she moves toward him, sitting so that her back is pressed against that hard chest and his arms are wrapped around her. She grabs a hold of his forearm with both her hands and settles her head in the crook of his elbow. She’s surrounded by his scent, lemongrass and clean cotton, and for a while, the only sounds are his breathing and the pounding of the rain. He touches her, the hand she’s not holding on to stroking up and down her thigh. Her leggings are pretty thin and she feels his touch fully; if she concentrates enough, she can feel those beloved calluses on his hands. He rubs his hand towards the juncture of her thighs and then over her hip and then back again, and like always, his touch ignites something in her, even as she’s wondering how she might be able to help him out of whatever funk he’s found himself in.

“You ready to tell me what’s up?” she wonders a while later.

“Hmm,” he hums, pressing a kiss to her forehead. “Not yet. Tell me about your day.”

She shifts so that she can look back at him, noting the way his eyes have darkened a touch, become grayer like the sky outside, and it’s different from the bright blue-green she remembers from the day of the festival or the wicked blue-gray they always are right before he pushes hard into her.

He blinks down at her and licks his lips slowly. It’s not an explicitly sexual act, even if her body thinks it looks that way, and Iris finds herself lost in it, in whatever he’s emanating. It’s erotic in that it’s intimate, a whirlwind of whatever hurt made him seek her out at Jitters, of whatever still lies unexplored between them, of the attraction that doesn’t ever seem to dissipate.

When she pulls herself out, she tells him, “I was working on a story today. One that made me feel a little bit like how you might be right now.”

“Yeah?”

Wanting to look at him more comfortably, she uses his pause so that she can turn around fully and seat herself on his lap, straddling him. His hands automatically go to her hips, one sliding inside the waist of her leggings so that he can touch her skin.

“Tell me about this story,” he requests. She knows that he’s asking so that he can think about something other than what’s on his mind, so she does, giving a little more than she would originally, working out how she might want to tell the story in her blog.

“It was a couple,” she starts, “that grew up together, in the country. They bonded by playing together in the lake, climbing trees, and playing pranks on each other. And then they start to grow up. Their swimming becomes fraught with tension, the bathing suits showing the same skin, but more, ya know, both of them recognizing the differences, cataloging them, thinking about them, remembering them. They don’t act on it, because they’re friends, and he doesn’t actually understand what it means, that he’s 13 and he keeps dreaming about her at night, waking up with a wet bed and a pounding heart. And then his parents die and her dad, who’s a do-gooder in the community and had been his parents’ best friend, takes him in. Now they’re siblings, but of course not. Regardless, it makes it all harder and odder because she sleeps right down the hall from him, their shared bathroom always smells like her, and he understands now, that he likes her smile and the way she speaks and the curves she seems to develop out of nowhere.”

Barry squeezes at her and she pauses as he asks, “And what about her? How does she feel about him?”

“Well he doesn’t know it, but she’s there too. At first she thinks that she’s just conflating it, confusing their friendship. Because she doesn’t laugh with anyone else like she does with him and she never has as much fun with anyone else as she does him and she never feels as comfortable with anyone else as she does him. He’s her best friend. But she sees him, one night, in his room where the door hasn’t fully closed and he’s, well, he’s masturbating, touching himself, eyes closed and moaning, and for the first time outside of the books she’s read, she feels something. And she knows it’s not just because she’s seen him naked because she’s kissed boys before, she’s felt them hard under her before, but something about this feels different for her.

“But she doesn’t act on it. And he doesn’t either, because remember, he only thinks this is one-sided. They graduate. They go to the same college. But their majors are different and their friends are different. She joins a sorority; he gets into a couple of clubs. Their paths separate, even if they still laugh and talk and be when they’re home for the holidays. Then she gets a boyfriend.”

“She never had a boyfriend before this?” Barry questions.

Iris shrugs. “Sure. But it was high school and the beginning of college. They were mostly hookups that didn’t last. This guy is serious. He’s a couple years older, got his own place, and eventually she moves in with him. Heartbroken, he gets a girlfriend too, one of her friends. That doesn’t last long because she figures out that he’s a little bit in love with the main girl, and then he moves on, to someone sweet, someone who’s been not so subtly hinting that she wants to go out with him.”

Barry seems to be engrossed now. She can’t say that the dark look he was sporting is completely gone, but she can see that he’s not as deep in it, interested in the story she’s weaving.

“They go on to marry these people, even if their hearts are not fully in it. His wife has a kid first, her baby comes next. And meanwhile, they’re still friends. Her dad is still his guardian, so to speak; they are together for whatever holidays they don’t spend with their spouses’ families. They still laugh and talk and be. They still look a little too long and want a little too much.

It comes to a head one Christmas. The gods or fate or just some movement on their parts mean that they both go home to her dad’s house with their spouses and children coming in the next day. But her dad is called in to work so they order take out and watch movies in front of a fire. And they laugh and they talk...and they hug and they kiss and they…

“Be?” Barry tries, a tiny little smile on his face.

She matches it. “Yeah. And it’s beautiful, transcendent. But they’re married. To other people. With kids. So they vow to forget it, to never bring it up again. A couple of years pass. They don’t laugh as much, don’t talk as much. She’s having troubles in her marriage. He is too. He actually consults a divorce attorney because he thinks that it’s unfair to both him and his wife, to live like this. And then the wife dies in a car accident.”

“Oh damn,” he mutters.

“Right,” she agrees. “He’s wracked with grief and more than a little guilt, because he loved her but was never in love with her and she had no idea he was going to leave her.”

“What about her? The one he loves?”

“She’s there for him. She consoles him, cares for him, takes his kid when it gets too hard. Her husband doesn’t like it though. Thinks she’s doing too much, thinks that there’s another reason she’s over at his so much. Later, he learns that this wasn’t a new accusation, that even before she and her husband got married, the husband would question their closeness, would wonder what, if anything, had ever happened between them.

“Eventually she gets tired of it. Her kid is older, in their teens now, and she leaves her husband, packing her things and her kid’s too and moving back in with her dad for a while.”

“And what happens between them?” Barry wants to know.

“He and his son come over more. They hang out more, the four of them, going to dinner and to the movies and to the arcade together. And when their kids are gone, at sleepovers or game nights with their friends, they laugh again, talk again. Fall in love again.”

The ending is implied. Iris closes her eyes when she’s done, letting Barry continue to rub at her back, his fingers so so warm on her skin.

“It's a happy ending,” he says, eventually. “But getting there was a little...depressing.”

Iris chuckles softly, lightheaded again at having gone through that again. It likely didn’t make Barry feel any better, but she’ll take the win that it took his mind away from his own problems, if only for a little while.

“Yeah, it is,” she agrees. “But it reminds me that just because it’s not easy and just because it takes some time, it doesn’t mean that things aren’t worth it.”

He nods, slowly, thinking.

“What about things that are...easy? That come like breathing? That start as a simple dance and just, just keep going?”

She stares down at him and she knows that this is rhetorical. She can see the question in the depths of his eyes, feel it in his hands still kneading her flesh. It would be easy to retreat, to tell him that nothing is ever easy, even if the reality is that it is because they are, because they fall into each other so effortlessly, that she’s terrified. There are always hiccups, obstacles, and the fact that she can’t find any keeps her on edge, waiting, anticipating trouble she knows must be coming. She doesn’t want to believe it, wants to stand firm in them—stand firm in the lyrics she keeps hearing, if you decide to stay, know that there is no escape; there's no one here to save you—and she holds onto that as he asks,

“Don’t you think it’s worth it, Iris? Even if it’s this easy?”

She can’t speak, but his eyes are imploring her to answer. Pleading with her for a response. And however terrified Iris is, or however much Iris tells stories, she is not a liar. So she nods and whispers to him, “yes.”

Without waiting for her to say anything more, he kisses her. He squeezes at her waist and leans up to capture her mouth. She meets him with his same fervor and it’s different, this kiss. She knows the passion of his mouth when he’s high, the boldness when he’s teasing her. But this is new, this is fervor, warmth and agony and doubt and pleasure, all wrapped up together.

(Something also tells Iris that there is another word for this, that this is the part of the story where feelings would be laid on the table, where hearts would be splayed open and she’d say it, or he would, and the other would respond in kind, with declarations of adoration, of infatuation, yearning, of any other word that means what she can’t say yet.

But she feels it, what she’s wanting to say, what she thinks he is saying, in this kiss. It is slow and nasty, all tongue and mouth. Her eyes flutter closed at the feeling, at how he licks into her mouth and then sucks on her bottom lip, at how he licks against her tongue and then holds her face to bring her closer to him. She feels it, she feels it, she feels him…)

He stands, holding on to her, and she wraps her legs around his waist, tightening her arms around his neck as he carries her through the house. The kisses don’t stop, though they become shorter, more mouth now, and he takes her down a long hallway past several doors until he turns into one at the end of the hall. She makes a quick note of the light gray and burnt orange decor, the side tables holding books and knickknacks, the one window that spans nearly the entire wall, but she focuses most heavily on the king-sized bed on which he throws on her, the soft comforter half hanging off the bed.

Her clothes come off first, Barry pulling her sweatshirt over her head and yanking her pants over her hips. He comes out of his own clothes as she discards her underwear, and then he’s between her thighs again. But she wants something else first so she taps his shoulder to flip them and then she’s hovering above him.

She gives him a kiss, slow and sweet, and then she makes her way down his chest, kissing as she goes. She loves the feel of his skin against her lips, likes how his skin tastes as she presses tongue kisses on him. His belly clenches and unclenches under her ministrations, and by the time she’s looking back up at him from her position near his crotch, she can see the way his chest rises and falls with his heavy breathing.

She reaches for him, wrapping her fingers around his dick. It’s long like the rest of him, and thicker than she would have expected just looking at him. It’s a pretty dick, the base the same color as him, the head slightly pinker. It’s a little veiny, but the skin is smooth, and already he’s starting to leak. She lifts her eyes to find him watching her, his own gaze hooded. In her peripheral, she sees his hands grip the bed sheets and she revels in how she hasn’t even done anything and his control is starting to slip.

“Tell me what you want, Bear.”

She says the words softly, but Barry doesn’t miss the cheek that lies under it, if the slight smirk he gives her is any indication.

“Your mouth,” he says. “I’ve been dreaming about that pretty mouth wrapped around my dick.”

She shudders at the tone of his voice, at the vision of her on her knees for him. She likes it.

“I bet you have too,” he guesses.

Without a response, she licks him, holding him at the base and running her tongue up one side of him. She does it again, and then one more time, acquainting herself with the taste of him and the satiny feel of him on her tongue, and then she adjusts and covers the whole of him.

“Fuck,” he breathes out.

She hums around him and she sucks him down, taking him until he hits her throat. Then she pulls back until just the tip remains. She licks around his head and sucks him there, letting the spit pool in her mouth, letting it mix with his own wet. She opens her mouth and lets it slide out, dripping down onto him, and her own body starts to drip at his wrecked whisper, “god, baby, look at you.”

She adds her hands, palming his testicles in one and rubbing her spit down the length of him with the other. She finds a rhythm, sucking him down, inch by inch, hollowing her cheeks as she goes, and then stroking his back up. Barry keeps his hand clenched in the sheets, but he cants himself into her mouth, rocking his hips lightly. She’s getting into it, loving the way he responds to her.

“Come here,” he says, suddenly, reaching for her, and she pulls back with a soft pop.

“Barry?” she furrows her eyebrows in question.

He gives her a gentle smile and grabs at her arm; Iris moves at his request, crawling up his body.

“But you didn’t finish,” she says, pouting a little.

“I know. I want to come when I’m inside you.”

She’s mollified by that, and he settles her on his lap.

“You were so good though, baby,” he says, kissing her. “My good, good girl.”

He reaches down to touch her, slipping his fingers easily into her sex. He groans into her mouth at the feel and he pulls back to ask,

“Is this all for me? Did you get wet sucking me off, good girl?”

She nods, rocking her hips against his hand, against his sex still hard beneath her. “Can, can you…?”

He tilts his head at her, fingers still caressing inside of her. “Can I?”

She huffs out a small laugh because he’s always fucking with her. “You said you wanted to come inside of me,” she reminds him.

“I did, didn’t?” He takes his time removing his fingers, eyes on her as he does. Even with the window curtains wide open, the dark sky has the room dark

(and she doesn’t dismiss the fact that the window faces the side of someone else’s house, where they could be seen if the neighbors were so inclined to watch)

and his eyes look a little like molten lead in the faint rainy light like this. He goes to reach over to his bedside table but Iris stops him.

“I want to feel you,” she says.

He licks his lips and she doesn’t mistake the twitch of his dick she feels under her. “You sure?”

“Yes. I’m on birth control. And I trust you.”

He nods once and again, and then he takes her by her hips and slides her down his cock.

After, Iris decides that this time is the single most erotic experience of her life.

They fuck with the rain like a soundtrack behind them, like a song that swells and stretches, telling their story, but you're so brave; stone cold crazy for loving me; yeah, I'm amazed; i hope you make it out alive, a song that rises and rises, that sounds too good to be real, that might destroy you, but only in the best way.

She rides him, and he’s so full in her like this, so deep in her like this. His back is against his fabric headboard and she’s so close to him, her knees jutting into the headboard, her thighs holding around his hips, her breasts rubbing against his chest, nipples pebbling with each brush on those hard planes.

She holds on to him with her hands holding the back of his neck, softly scratching at the nape. But he’s touching her, always touching her, his hands caressing her spine, and then holding her waist, and then squeezing her hips. He guides her: keeps his favorite pace, smooth and languid; bring her up to the tip and fucks her back down; shows her how he wants her to roll her body when he’s full in her, so her clit is brushing the soft hairs on his pelvis, the sensation incredible.

He uses his mouth too: to kiss her throat, deep tongue kisses that’ll leave marks she knows she’ll have to cover up; to whisper against her mouth, “see how easy this is; see how good, baby; fuck, see how good this is; yes, yes, yes, my good girl.”

And Iris feels so caught up in it. She can’t stop looking at him, loving when the lightning slashes across the room and illuminates those eyes, the constellation of moles on his skin, his wet, pink mouth. Her body hums with pleasure, soaking her thighs and his, tightening around his dick as if it never, never wants to let him go. She voices her satisfaction, in soft sighs and heavy pleas, and his name on her tongue like a chant, or better, a song, “Bear, Bear, Barrryyy.” They’re so close, her skin sticking to his wherever they’re touching, chest to chest and ass to thigh. She feels full and whole and filled...with him and with desire and with, and with love, the thought of it making her shudder and close her eyes.

“No,” Barry whispers. “Don’t. Just let it, just let it...stay here with me. Can you do that for me? Be brave for me?”

She nods, head heavy as her body starts to reach its climax, as her body loosens at the same time that it tightens and she has to fight to hold on to him. “Yes,” she moans again, holding his gaze again.

He touches at her face, holding her cheek and staring back. “Good girl.”

She doesn’t know whose climax triggers the other. She just knows that at the same time that her body explodes, fluttering wildly around him, he comes too, so hard that she feels him throbbing against her walls, that she feels him filling her up with his cum.

He doesn’t let go of her right away. He just holds her, hands at her hip and her face, and then he kisses her, cementing what they’ve just done, cementing what Iris feels for him.

“It’s the anniversary of my mom’s death,” he says, out of the blue. “And when I went to visit my dad earlier, I found out that he’s sick, something with his heart, and I’m-I’m reeling.”

It’s been a long while since they separated and Iris climbed off of him to pad into his bathroom and warm a hand towel under warm water to clean them both. They’ve been lying in his bed, only half under the covers as they let their bodies cool. It’s quiet now, so quiet that Iris has thought he’d fallen asleep; she’d almost fallen asleep. But when he speaks, she blinks wide and then turns her head to face him.

“14 years today,” he adds. He’s looking up at the ceiling as he talks, but Iris feels the hand that’s settled at her waist tighten, the move bringing her closer to him. She understands that he just needs the contact, so she turns so that she’s all the way curled on him, one of her legs thrown across him, her arm tossed over him too, hand settled on his heart. It’s beating slow, steady, and so she strokes his bare chest, right it.

“How’d you find out?”

“I was still at school,” he tells her. “It was a Friday and some of my friends had convinced me to go to a football game, so we were there pretty late. Games could run until 11. I was 17 so I had my own car. It was an old car; we’d bought it from a guy she worked with. By this time, my dad had been gone for a couple years, and my mom was always working late at the lab, so when I got home around 10:30 that night and the lights were out, I wasn’t surprised.”

He shifts a little and continues. “I took a shower, put some leftover pizza in the microwave, and just as I was sitting down to eat, the doorbell rang. It was the police looking for her next of kin to tell them what had happened.” He sighs heavily. “I got lucky. The courts let one of my friend’s parents take me in until I graduated a few months later. I was able to get a work study job in college to pay my bills since the mortgage was already paid off.”

He says it all like he was lucky, but there is nothing lucky about losing both of your parents in that matter, even if one of them was still physically alive. Iris knows from experience that he doesn’t want pity, doesn’t want anyone to feel sorry for his story. But she can’t help the way she wants to comfort him, and so she lets herself do that, tightening herself around him, snuggling even more into his chest.

“How are you feeling about your dad?” she asks, mumbling against his skin.

“Devastated. He looked like, like, I don’t know, like he’s giving up. I don’t get to go see him too often, every couple of months, really. And he looked so different from when I saw him last: smaller, frailer. I think there might be something he’s not telling me. Like he’s been sick longer than he says he has.”

“Is he supposed to get out soon?”

“Another couple years. But I don’t know if he wants to hold on that long.”

She feels them first, the tears. She tries to hold him even tighter, tries to crawl into his skin almost, trying to stem his pain. He doesn’t cry for long, just a few sobs, and then he’s inhaling deeply and wiping at his eyes. But it must be enough because he sounds a little hollow when he says,

“And truthfully, I’m not so much sad as I am mad, that he seems to be giving up. On getting out. On me.”

She hums, not dismissively, but because she understands. “Wanna know a secret?”

“Yeah.”

“Sometimes, I hate my mom.”

He sort of jerks up at that. Not fully, he looks down at her, eyes widened in shock. However inappropriate it might be, she finds herself laughing a little at his expression. Then she explains.

“I know that addiction is not a moral failing. I know that she struggled right up til the end. I know both of those things as completely as I know anything else. But sometimes I wonder why my dad wasn’t enough, why me and Wally weren't enough. I wonder what she was trying to find in those pills that she couldn’t find in us, and I get so pissed that she let it take her away from us.”

She’s startled when he moves. He pulls himself from under her, letting her fall onto her back, and then he’s hovering above her, holding himself up on his elbows. He falls into the spread of her thighs, his sex nuzzling comfortably against her still warm center.

“I’ve seen some of the worst effects of addiction,” he says, “when their bodies end up on a slab of metal and it’s my job to dissect the things around them, to even sometimes help detectives dissect their lives to figure out what happened. And something I’ve learned is that it’s always, always about them. Never about the people they love.”

He searches her face, brushing a piece of hair back from her forehead. “And whatever your mom was or wasn’t thinking, you are enough. You are more than enough, Iris.” He leans down and gives her a kiss, deep and dirty, and she moans in frustration as he pulls back from her. He gives her a grin, one more reminiscent of the Barry she’s used to.

“Repeat after me,” he commands. “I, Iris West…”

“Really, Barry?”

“Yes, come on. I, Iris West…

She sighs, but says it. “I, Iris West…”

“Am more than enough.”

She licks her lips then, blinks, works to not let the tears that have suddenly gathered in the corner of her eyes escape.

“Am more than enough,” she whispers, finally.

Barry’s smile turns fond. “Good girl.”

She shakes her head because she doesn’t know what else to do besides kiss him. Which she does, deeply, reaching down to grip him in her palm. She pauses, just for a moment, to tell him “you know that you are enough too, right?” and she kisses the look of awe off of his face. It’s a long while before she stops kissing him, and then it’s only to moan into his mouth, to let him whisper his dirty somethings into her ear.

“What are your plans for tonight?”

They’ve just shared a shower. Barry is throwing on another pair of sweats and a hoodie and Iris puts her own leggings back on, sans underwear, and thumbs through Barry’s closet for another sweatshirt to put on.

(There’s no reason that she can’t put hers back on, but she’s feeling particularly sentimental and she wants to take something of Barry’s with her, something that smells like him, that feels like him.)

“None, really.” She pulls out a red sweater that reads Central City University Track & Field and throws it on over her bra. “Why? You kicking me out.”

Barry rolls his eyes. “Of course not.” He glances down at the watch on his wrist. “Wanna get dinner? And then go with me to my tattoo appointment? It’s at 8 tonight.”

She smiles at that. “Sure.”

They take the highway back downtown. The rain is still beating steadily and there is still the occasional rumble of thunder, the sporadic flash of lightning. He parks a bit further in the arts district, in front of a restaurant specializing in wood-fire pizzas and craft beers. This time, she knows to wait for him to come around and open the door for her so that she can walk under his umbrella. Once he locks his jeep, he grabs her hand, and they walk the couple doors down and into the restaurant.

The place is brightly lit, in direct contrast to the dark sky and even the faint light that had been on at Barry’s place. The weather assures that it isn’t densely packed, just a couple booths of families and what looks like a couple, so they’re seated quickly and easily. They eat fast since they’ve only got an hour before his appointment. In the meantime, they both keep the conversation light. It’s been a day, for the both of them really, and Iris doesn’t think that she can cry twice in a day.

After he pays, she goes to the bathroom and he tells her he’ll wait at the door for her. She goes in and it’s as brightly lit as the rest of the place and she quickly does her business and washes her hands before heading back out to where he knows Barry is waiting in the little space between the outer door and the door to the restaurant.

She walks through the place and out of the restaurant door, likely too quickly and without really looking. She takes several steps, straightening out Barry’s sweatshirt again, and then she’s bumping into what feels like a solid wall, almost falling backward. A quick hand reaches out to catch her, the hand large, easily wrapping around her forearm.

“Shit,” she says, shaking her head to clear it as she looks up. “I’m sorr..Scott?”

He doesn’t move back right away and so she has to look up, up at the man holding on to her. Scott Evans is the literal definition of tall, dark, and handsome. He’d been her editor when she’d work at CCPN right out of college, and she’d had the biggest crush on him. Tall with dark caramel skin and a neatly trimmed beard, he’d been the one to help guide her in the ways of mass story-telling. They’d gone on one date and Iris is not actually sure why they’d never gone on another.

“Iris West.” He says her name slowly, his grin widening at the same pace. He gives her a once-over, slow and heated. “How’ve you been?”

“R-really good,” she says, stumbling a little at that grin. Even if she doesn’t actually regret never seeing him again, Iris can admit that a man this good looking makes her a little tongue-tied.

“Yeah? I’ve been catching your blog when I can. It’s some good shit, West. I can see why you left our little paper.”

“Please,” Iris rolls her eyes with a little laugh. “There’s nothing little about Picture News.”

He shrugs, humble all the way. “Still, I’m proud of you.”

“Thanks, Scott. I appreciate that.”

“It’s the truth.” He looks down at her, swiping at his lips with his tongue, and she suddenly realizes that they’re still too close. She steps back fully from him, glancing over Scott’s shoulders to see Barry watching them, his expression unreadable.

“Um,” she speaks, catching his attention. “I gotta go Scott.”

“Oh yeah; of course. We should get together soon. Maybe do dinner.” Scott looks back out of the window where rain steadily pours. “It’s still raining out. Can I walk you to your car?”

Her eyes don’t leave Barry’s and he tilts his head, waiting for her answer. “Scott, I’m not alone.”

He turns as if he’s just realizing that Barry is standing there. Barry is still quiet and only lifts his eyes to look at Scott when he mutters, “oh, hey man.”

Barry nods. “What’s up?” Then he looks at Iris. “You ready?”

“Yeah, I am.” Her voice is soft, cautious, and she throws one more glance at Scott. “It was good to see you.”

He graces her with that smile again. “Yeah. I’ll see you around.”

Barry takes her hand and they walk back to the truck. They’re on the road again, driving to a neighborhood near her own. For a second, she thinks he’s going to take her home, but he passes the road to her apartment and goes on to a neighborhood featuring several bars and little shops that cater to the college crowd. He pulls into the parking lot of a place called Black Gold, the lights inside near as bright as those in the pizza place.

Again, she waits until he comes around and turns as if to get out. He stops her though, holding the umbrella high, standing in front of her open legs. He does his thing, his stare like he's trying, and succeeding, to get inside her mind.

“That your ex-boyfriend?” he wonders.

She shakes her head. “Ex-boss.”

His expression doesn’t change. “All your bosses look at you like that?”

She swallows at the sudden feel of his hand on her thigh. The rain is pounding and drops fall on them, but she’s not noticing it. Instead, she’s caught in the storm that’s returned to his eyes, in the feel of his hands inching steadily toward her center.

“Don’t tell me you’re jealous,” she says, instead of responding to him.

One corner of his mouth lifts, and the confident, bordering on cocky, Barry is looking at her now, even if that sparkle hasn’t returned quite yet.

“Nah,” he says. “Not jealous. You’re here right now. And you were with me earlier, moaning for me, coming for me.”

He slides his hand between her thighs and because she is, almost literally, always thirsty for him, wet for him, her legs spread easily. He fingers at the crotch of her leggings, and she knows that he can feel her warmth through the thin material. He thumbs at her until she gasps against him, finding her clit in a way that reminds him that he knows her body better than she knows it herself.

“He ever touch you like this?” Barry asks, voice a whisper above the rain. “Make you whimper even without getting your clothes off?”

She is whimpering, as he keeps his thumb on her clit, rubbing on her in slow circles. That’s all he’s doing: touching her with one hand, looking at her with those eyes that tell as much as they conceal, with his voice a deep rumble that rivals the thunder. He might be turned on, but he’s proving a point, naming himself as someone who, well, who owns her, even if she recognizes that no man should claim any power over her.

Heat spreads through her, a low, simmering sort of heat, but it’s enough that her folds grow slicker, start opening like the flowers of a petal waiting to be plucked. He keeps rubbing at her, staying on her clit, staring in her face, so much that she can’t hold his gaze. Because it feels better than it should, and her wet is soaking through these too thin leggings, and her breaths are coming in longer, coming in heavier.

“Tell me he hasn’t, Iris,” he says, commands, and Iris throws her head back, legs widening at their own volition, hips canting against his hand. “Tell me.”

“No,” she moans, eyes fluttering closed. “He never even touched me at all.”

“Tell me it’s just me,” he adds and she’s too far gone to note the pleading in his voice. “Tell me no one has ever touched you like this.”

“No,” she shakes her head. “Just you, Barry, shit, just you.”

“Good,” he groans. “Good, good girl.”

Even if touch is the word he’s using, Iris understands that it’s more. She understands that they’re both wrapped up in uncertainty, never too sure of where they lie in others’ affections, never too sure of where they lie in life at all. She understands that he’s asking her if she feels it too, if she’s there with him, if this too easy, this too natural, feeling is a first for her too.

He’s asking if she’s brave enough to tell him the truth, if she undertands is meaning-understands that I'm no walk in the park; all these scars on my heart; it’s so dark here-even as she’s wondering the same, as she’s feeling the same, wondering if the churning feelings of abandonment make her unworthy somehow. Wondering if he’ll come to see that unworthiness.

Barry leans forward, just a touch away from her mouth, eyes blazing.

“There’s only you too, Iris,” he says, unprompted. “I swear I’ve just been waiting for you.”

He closes the distance to kiss her and that’s enough to take her over. It’s not a powerful orgasm, not like usual, but it does make her shut her eyes tight, make her limbs seize up as she rocks her hips through it. She breathes out, and she can’t stop the little laugh that comes out.

“You really are a dick,” she muses, opening her eyes slowly.

“A polite one, though,” he says, as he stands straighter and holds his hand out to help her down from the car. He holds the umbrella high over her. “See how I’m making sure you don’t get wet.”

“You didn't think of that earlier.”

His grin is devastating but it doesn’t hide the plethora of emotions in his eyes: the simmering lust, the faint traces of insecurity, the grief that’s been hovering all day...the love she doesn’t think he wants to hide anymore.

She hikes up on her tiptoes to plant a kiss on his cheek, and then she walks beside him into the parlor, words flashing in her head like a sign, but if you’re a warrior, there’s nothing to fear; nothing to fear.

And later that night, as she cuddles up next to Barry is his large comfortable bed, she listens to his soft breathing, the sound a melody to the rain still pattering against his windows. She listens and she stares at him, taking in his features, softer than they were before, the stress of today easing away with every second he’s lost to sleep. A flash of lightning lights the room, and it catches her eyes again, the new tattoo, the purple ink bright on his skin, covering the space from a lily on his shoulder to just over his heart. It goes dark again, his room blanketed once more, but in her mind’s eyes, she can still see the vibrant ink on his skin, the pretty drooping petals of an iris.

Cause you're so brave

Stone cold crazy for loving me

Yeah, I'm amazed

I hope you make it out alive

#westallen fanfiction #westallen #barry x iris #iris west #strangers to lovers

20 notes · View notes

yourdeepestfathoms · 3 years

Text

for anyone curious, my newest book is about the Salem Witch Trials! it’s at the point of view of Mary Warren and how she went through trials, ultimately ending in her downward spiral into madness as the trials deteriorate her mental health. it’s called Servant of Evil.

here’s the first segment of the first chapter!

— — —

She was gathering crops the first day she caught wind of the hysteria.

It was late January and sunny, the last warm day in what would soon feel like forever. The sickle in her hand was wickedly sharp and gleaming in pale yellow light, and the stalks of the corn she was cutting away were rough and sharp beneath calloused fingers. Already, the skin on her hands was shredded, oozing ruby droplets of blood and staining bright green stems. Her legs ached from crouching in the dirt, muscles locked up and tense. Somewhere beyond the pillars of corn stretched out before her, she could hear her master’s children talking in high-pitched voices, dogs barking, and horses neighing. Even closer than that, however, she could hear heavy footsteps tramping through the field, and she knew the owner of this land would not enjoy such galumphing through his crops. But she also knew that the one who appeared through the stalks wouldn’t care much for the fiery point of John Proctor’s scorn.

“Something weirdish is going on in Salem.”

Without looking up, Mary Warren answered the unexpected visitor, “Something is always going on in Salem.”

That much was true, at least right now. Salem was a town of rich trade and sea salt, characterized by a sparkling harbor that was bested only by Boston’s and a habit of fighting with itself. For years, Salem had been split between two forces: the nobles up in Salem Town and the farmers down in Salem Village. The two territories were never not fighting with each other; they were always mad about something the other did, and it was easy to lose track of who hated who and for what reason. Salem Village didn’t like the control Salem Town held over it, while Salem Town was annoyed by Salem Village thinking it was its own settlement, but they all detested the British church, which was mutual. Salem Town often pulled men from Salem Village to be a part of the national guard, which made Salem Village nervous because then they would have nobody to protect them, and Indian attacks were a regular fear throughout the civilization. Aside from its harbor, the other thing Salem had to owe to its popularity was its unfortunate position in front of frequent ambushes. And if it didn’t suffer ambushes first-hand, then it suffered ambushes through the survivors of such raids, many of which populated the city and would soon help with the grisly events that turned the community over on its head.

But the only other thing Salem Village and Salem Town could agree on was that the Indians were an issue. Unfortunately, that was where agreements ended and arguments began- Salem Town wanted more men to train, promising protection; Salem Village refusing, saying they knew how Salem Town lied, and if they didn’t, then they only saved them because of their bountiful trade and not because they were their people. It wouldn’t be long until the yelling broke out, testaments from the Bible were quoted, and grown men argued like two children fighting over who was their parents’ favorite kid.

However, Salem as a whole had fallen silent recently. Things were peaceful. It was as though a grace period were opening up before them all--or, perhaps, it was actually ending.

Except for right now, in the Proctor corn field, of course. Because her visitor would only bring silence if she were dead, and she had proved to be too slippery for death’s fingers three times over after surviving several Indian attacks throughout her young life.

“This is different.”

Wiping a sagging green sleeve over her damp brow, Mary looked up and squinted through sweat and sun to look at none other than the Putnam’s maid, Mercy Lewis.

Mercy was a fine example of everything the Puritans didn’t want. Despite her name’s sake, she was stubborn, brash, and spitfire, though she was smart enough to never act in such a way in front of the church. And she was, indeed, smart. She was more clever than a fox, easily outwitting several situations despite the minimal education women had in their lifetime. The only thing she was merciful to was her younger cousin, Ann Putnam Jr. Her parents were better off naming her Big, Loud, and Vulgar.

Mercy was nineteen-years-old, two years older than Mary, and built like a small bear. She was short, compact, and sinewy, her muscles and joints well-honed from rough maid work. Her temper was black and her teeth were sharp. Her curly dark brown hair was tucked up in her blindingly white bonnet, and she was dressed in a nondescript dress of purple. Storm cloud grey eyes bore down on Mary with bright amusement.

The two of them met three years ago in Elizabeth Proctor’s tavern. Mary had been struggling to wipe away a sticky stain on one of the tables; Mercy was looking for fresh meat. They both were in the right place at the right time.

Mary hadn’t heard her come in. It was as though the shadows of the tavern itself had unfolded the sixteen-year-old before her because she was suddenly there, towering over the front of the table, and Mary ended up spilling the bowl of soapy water she was using all over herself upon noticing her.

“My, are you jumpy,” the strange girl had observed, peering over the edge of the table. She didn’t offer Mary her help or even an apology. Mary didn’t ask for one. “Were your parents murdered by savages, too?”

“What?”

“Ooo, no, then. Got it.”

Mary blinked up at her for a moment, then carefully got up out of the sudsy puddle and retrieved a dry rag to clean up the newest mess. The entire time, the strange girl watched her as she dripped droplets and beads of white soap from the bottom of her old lavender dress.

“Can I help you?” Mary asked as she got back down on her hands and knees to clean the floor.

“Oh, no,” the strange girl answered. “I just came to say hello. Introduce myself. You work for the Proctor’s, yeah?”

“Yes,” Mary nodded.

“Interesting, interesting. I work for the Putnam’s. Thomas is my cousin, actually.”

Mary nodded again. She looked back down at the puddle, trying to focus on that. The girl didn’t move.

“Mercy.”

Mary looked back up again. She blinked. The strange girl blinked back. Was this a game?

“Pity.”

The girl stared at her for a moment, then burst into loud laughter that seemed to shake the walls. Mary was startled; she had never heard anyone laugh so hard in her entire life. Especially in a town as strict as Sakem.

“No, that’s my name,” the girl said after calming down. “My name is Mercy. Mercy Lewis.”

“Oh,” Mary’s ears heated up. “Right. Your parents were feeling pretty creative, weren’t they?”

Another bout of laughter. “Yes. Yes, they were.” She squinted at her. “And you are?”

“Mary. Mary Warren.”

“Well, Mary ‘Pity’ Warren, I think we are going to be very good friends.”

And she was right.

Mercy, as menacing as she could be, made life in Salem a lot more bearable, especially when Proctor’s whip frequently began lapping at Mary’s bare back. Together, they formed a cohort of sorts, sneaking away into the woods with other village girls, hiding away from the Lord’s watchful eyes to discuss the most sinful of things.

And today, Mercy wanted to carry on with their long-running traditions.

“Different in what way?” Mary asked.

Mercy rolled her eyes. She kicked a cloud of dust at Mary, and Mary sputtered, nearly falling backwards into the corn.

“Different-different,” Mercy answered. “Something is wrong with Abigail. Betty, too, I hear. We’re gonna go up to the Reverend’s house and see them. They’re ill, you know?”

“No,” Mary shook her head. “Mister Proctor didn’t tell me anything. They’re sick?”

“Yeah. Real sick. Ain’t wakin’ up. The Reverend has been throwin’ a huge fit over them.” Mercy explained, “I’m surprised you never heard him howlin’!” Then, doing a horrible imitation of Reverend Samuel Parris’s voice, she wailed, “Oh Betty, Betty! Wake, my sweet daughter! Wake! Why won’t you wake?!”

She clung to Mary’s arm dramatically. “God! God! Why have you forsaken me?! What have you struck my little girls with?!”

Mary couldn’t help but giggle softly. Still, her mind was made up on the whole ordeal.

“Tell them my pardons and prayers,” she said, grabbing the fallen sickle. “My master said I gotta tend to the crops. Then I can go to town. But I am not spendin’ my free time meddlin’ in someone else’s affairs.”

Mercy groaned loudly and snatched the sickle away from Mary, making her yelp.

“Live a little, will ya? Let’s go see poor Abby and Betty!” Mercy urged. “To Hell with your master right now. You can’t let him lead you around by a leash all the time. Deal with the consequences later. Let’s go!”

Mary stared into the older girl’s eyes and then sighed, giving in. She stood up- Mercy was taller than her, as she always had been. “Lead on, Mercy.”

Mercy brightened.

Together, the two of them snuck out of the Proctor property, careful as to not get caught by one of the many children roaming the plantation.

Technically, the Proctor’s had eighteen children, though four were dead and eleven were brought forth by two different women, both of which had also passed over the seasons. The only living child of John Proctor’s first wife, Martha Giddens, was Benjamin, a tall, lanky man who could never seem to grow a beard, yet had hair down to his shoulders. He was thirty-three and didn’t talk to Mary very often, but when he did, he greatly critiqued her work in the field. That farm was his pride and joy, and it was a challenge to not roll her eyes when he would go on about the importance of their crops and proper plant care.

Elizabeth II was the second oldest at twenty-nine, and helped Elizabeth Proctor run the tavern with her other siblings: Martha IV, twenty-six (the first two Martha’s had died when they were both infants, along with the woman they were named after); Mary II, twenty-five; John II, twenty-four; Mary III, twenty-three; and Thorndike, twenty. Why Proctor decided to have TWO daughters named Mary was beyond Mary herself, but it wasn’t uncommon for things to become confusing when their name was shouted for whatever reason.

Elizabeth Proctor’s children stayed on the farm, helping clean and take care of the livestock: William, eighteen; Sarah fifteen; Samuel, seven; Elisha, five; Abigail, three; and Joseph, one. Mercy often made jokes that Elizabeth had obviously been the one to name the kids, as they were actually creative and not repeating several times over.

But with so many watchmen on the property, Mary was surprised about how easy it was to slip away unseen.

The road was loose and crunched loudly beneath their footfalls. Mercy kept kicking a rock, and Mary watched it bounce across the ground.

“So, what’s wrong with Betty and Abby?” Mary asked.

Mercy smirked widely.

“There be witches about, Mary.”

#servant of evil #lizzie’s dumb book #my writing #original story #salem witch trials #mary warren #mercy lewis

28 notes · View notes

ifyouseekay468 · 3 years

Note

what do YOU personally think the teenagers (mcr) lyrics are about my friend ? like i keep thinking about them but im not sure im going somewhere

okay, ive answered this ask twice on mobile and each time my phone deleted it, so here I go, the FINAL version of this post

It's been a hot minute since I listened to teenagers so I decided to do a quick run-through of the lyrics, and while Gerard&Co were raised catholic the lyrics seem to REEK of protestant trauma, so that's what I'll be going off of, but I'm pretty sure the two denominations overlap here. The first verse is about kids in youth group, Christian GirlsTM especially, who are put there to pressure you into being "normal" into "cleaning you up with the lies in the book" (bible), although the pastor is the one giving the teaching THESE are the people who will get you to BELIEVE, who will get you to lie to yourself, who will get you to church camps that on some level utilize brainwashing techniques, and will DESTROY you with the idea that you're "Just one of them, and just need to change everything about yourself and fake your way through every last sermon to be just a part of the gang",

The part about sleeping with a gun and keeping an eye on you is about two things: one, about the idea that God can see all your thoughts, that THINKING about "sin" (ie; fantasizing about sex) is as bad as COMMITTING sin (which is fucked up entirely on its own because fantasy is SO FUCKING DIFFERENT FROM REALITY and that is a CRUCIAL aspect of sexual expression in order to safely engage in sex), AND the fact that these kids will pretend to be your friend, will prod you into doing things with them, into telling them things about yourself all the while making you feel like "part of the group" when really they're just blabbing either to religious leaders, or are ostracizing you and bullying you behind your back.

"The drugs never work"

This in my opinion points to the fact that this song is specifically about being QUEER in a christian culture. It is common for trans people to turn to drugs or psychedelics in an area that has little to no access to gender affirming care, or acceptance because they both change reality and disconnect one from the body that is causing their dysphoria. It can also help burn away the guilt, so to speak.

The methods of keeping you clean is about two things: one, about purity culture, no smoking, no drinking, no friends who drink, no sex, no porn, no masturbation, no impure thoughts. The second, is the way they're able to subtly manipulate you into hiding yourself, into lying to yourself, into forcing yourself to the point of death into being cishet. They're keeping you clean not just from the vices of addiction, but the vices of the flesh, the vice you can't escape because it's a part of you from the day youre born. On a darker note, this could also be referring to c*nversion th*rapy, given this second interpretation of the lyrics

"Ripping your head and aspirations to shreds," Is again about two things in my opinion: both the idea of "losing yourself to God's will" that usually leads one to losing their identity and getting depression and fucked up mental health, and the "shift" that happens at church when you reach a certain age. You know the kind, right? You're four years old, and church is FUN! You get to go to this big room and sing and dance on stage with all your friends! You get to play GAMES! You get to talk to the ~cool teenagers~ who are ~Just like you~ and ~think youre a "cool kid"~, you have ~best friends~ who will be with you like Jesus and the 12! but then, one day, something happens, something SHIFTS. maybe the Sunday school teacher leaves, maybe there's a new family at church, maybe the church changes buildings. Maybe none of that has to do with any of it, all you know is that now things are forever different. Church isn't fun anymore. The kids classes are repetitive, they're bribing you into memorizing bible verses with money, they DONT reward critical thinking or analysis, but they do call you smart, that's because they dont want SMART kids they want OBEDIANT ones. You have no choice but to stat going to REAL church. Suddenly, your best friends are not your best friends. Suddenly they're avoiding you. Suddenly they're lying to you. Suddenly you're too... well they don't know the word yet but "gay" for them...

"Teenagers scare the living shit out of me"

This is what youth group does to you, it isolates you from your entire generation because there are few people your age and a whole lot older than you, and everyone is so much DIFFERENT from you for some reason, but neither of you know why, not yet anyways. This makes you distance yourself from teenagers, because you can't SEE yourself as a teenager, because youre nothing like other teenagers.

"They could care less as long as someone will bleed,"

This is the martyr complex that permeates youth culture like the smell of wine, the problem? these kids love to make a show of themselves and their martyrdom, but they're unwilling to martyr themselves, so what do they do? They throw someone else to the wolves and take the glory. They ostracize and eliminate the unique in the name of preserving their faith. They convert and convert and god help anyone who doesn't want to convert.

"So darken your clothes and strike a violent pose"

This is about deconversion, how the moment you leave the church you never want to see another cross till the day you die, that you want to avoid christians of all costs because you don't want them To drag you back into the pit that devoured you. So you do anything and everything you can to make yourself repulsive to Christians, which actually coincides with your indulgence of mundane activities previously considered as "sin"

"Maybe they'll leave you alone but not me,"

There's a different between a cishet ex Christian and a queer ex christian, and that difference is that a cishet atheist is more likely to be left alone than a queer one, especially a queer one whose whole demeanor screams "Christians be gone," that shit is like... it summons christians faster than free winter jam tickets! They swarm to you frothing at the mouth with holy water waiting to either convert you or exorcise you into purity, depends on if you want them or not. Again, you don't even have to be OPENLY gay, they can TRACK this shit. it's like fucking... INSTINCT or something.

"The boys and girls in the clique, the awful names that they stick, you're never gonna fit in much kid,"

as alluded to above, this lyric is about how, even from a young age, BEFORE youth group, this toxic culture kind of develops. ESPECIALLY around christian girls. They don't have the vulgarity of slurs, but they can make up for it with slang like "tomboy" "nancyboy" "too boyish" "a sissy" "Weird" etc, youre NEVER going to fit in, because the moment that "shift", from fun games and songs to Real Church, occurs, you have a target on your back.

"But if youre troubled and hurt what you got under your shirt will make them pay for the things that they did,"

This is probably a gun. But that's a tad too boring for my taste. If you were raised protestant you KNOW that being an ex protestant, after the craziness of evangelicalism, you would not hesitate to burn down your old church. It could be a secret tattoo, top surgery scars, hell maybe even nipple clamps. Whatever it is, it's symbolic of revenge. I know that anytime I wore my labrys necklace to church I would always hide it under my shirt. I hid books and CDs under there too. Again, it's about revenge, it's about breaking free, gun or no gun, the point is getting out and getting back at them.

and thats pretty much my take on the song. Again, this is not about artist intent this is just what the lyrics reminded ME of personally (as you can see from the over biographical bullshit I wrote), I'm always open to contradicting interpretations though as I always have like 2+ interpretations of a song or book! I never really saw the song through the lens of youth group specifically but when I went over the lyrics again in retrospect it all seemed to really click (pun not intended) well! Thanks for the ask!

#anon #okay to rb #religious trauma #ex christian #religious trauma syndrome #ex baptist #ex protestat #apostate #MCR #mcr #my chem #my chemical romance #the black parade #welcome to the black parade #gerard way #ray toro #frank iero #Mikey way

28 notes · View notes

soracities · 4 years

Note

what are some of your favourite quotes at the moment? ❤️

“A heart’s a heavy burden”

— Diana Wynne Jones, Howl’s Moving Castle

“This is what language is: a habitable grief. A turn of speech for the everyday and ordinary abrasion of losses such as this which hurts just enough to be a scar. And heals just enough to be a nation.”

— Eavan Boland, “A Habitable Grief”

“I speak to you. You speak to me. Is that fragile?”

— Muriel Rukeyser, “Waterlily Fire: IV”

“Yet is grief the right word? Her grief has become her own determination. Nothing will stop her.”

— John Berger, The Red Tenda of Bologna

“Do you remember a night when I came along the dark passage to your room in a thunderstorm and we lay talking about whether we were afraid of death or not? That is the sort of occasion on which the things I want to say to you,–and to you only,–get said.”

— Virginia Woolf, in a letter to Vita Sackville-West

“Reaching for the world, as our lives do, As all lives do, reaching that we may give The best of what we are and hold as true: Always it is by bridges that we live.”

— Philip Larkin, “Bridge for the Living”

“Thoreau always had two notebooks—one for facts, and the other for poetry. But he had a hard time keeping them apart, as he often found facts more poetic than his poems. They are, he said, translated from the language of the earth into that of the sky. Thoreau knew that the imagination uses facts to fabricate images and even delicate architectures. One summer night, looking up into the sky at a particularly beautiful, scintillating star, he thought perhaps another traveler somewhere else along the coast was, like him, looking up at that same star and said, ‘Of what unsuspected triangles are stars the apex?’”

— Jean Frémon, “Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Gloves”

“But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it feel this way to you?”

— Kazuo Ishiguro, in his Nobel prize acceptance speech.

“Life, as I see it, is all about farewells rather than reunions. That is why we have songs and photographs. It is parting that makes up our lives.”

— Geoff Dyer, “Parting Shots”

“I know you, and stare at you in silence.”

— Arthur Rimbaud, “Flowerbeds of Amaranths”

“To spend the whole night with someone is agapē: it is ethical. For you must move with him and with yourself from the arms of the one twin to the abyss of the other. This shared journey, unsure yet close, honest embracing dishonesty, changes the relationship. It may not be a marriage, but it will be sacramental even without the benefit of sacraments. To navigate this together is to achieve the mundane: to be present to each other, both at the point of difficult ecstasy and at the point of abyssal infinity, brings you into the shared cares of the finite world.”

— Gillian Rose, Love’s Work

“What can you know about a person? They shift in the light. You can’t light up all sides at once. Add a second light and you get a second darkness.”

— Richard Siken, “Portrait of Frederyk in Shifting Light”

“Think of someone you want to touch whom you cannot touch, someone forbidden. Think of a room where there is nothing except the two of you: still, you cannot touch them. Think of the heat between two hands about to touch, the language that exists in that silence.”

— Chelsea Hodson, “A Simple Woman”

“And some day, in eighty years, when you’re a hundred and I’m a hundred and thirty-four, and we’re both so kind and loving we’re nearly unbearable, drop me a line, let me know how your life has been. I hope you will say: it has been so wonderful.”

— George Saunders, speech at Syracuse University (2013)

“They say a song can be a bridge, Ma. But I say it’s also the ground we stand on. And maybe we sing to keep ourselves from falling. Maybe we sing to keep ourselves.”

— Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel

“The Arabs used to say, When a stranger appears at your door, feed him for three days before asking who he is, where he’s come from, where he’s headed. That way, he’ll have strength enough to answer. Or, by then your’ll be such good friends you don’t care.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye, “Red Brocade”

“And no one can ever figure out what you want,/ and you won’t tell them, / and you realize the one person in this world who loves you / isn’t the one you thought it would be, / and you don’t trust him to love you in a way / you would enjoy.”

— Richard Siken, “A Primer for the Small Weird Loves”

“The way you sang to me that first time like Heaven is real and you only had two minutes to prove it to me.”

— Kelly Morell, “Last Night I Told You About the Moon”

“I kept fiddling with my phone through dinner because I was fascinated that every time I tried to type love, I missed the o and hit i instead. I live you is a mistake I make so often, I wonder if it’s not what I’ve been really meaning to say.”

— Jamaal May, “Macrophobia: Fear of Waiting”

“You are the moon in my palm, the dusk and the dawn; anytime I have felt a substantial magic in this frail human life.”

— L.E. Groves, “Untitled”

“I have a memory which I want to share with you. It’s about a secret practice of women, men, old people, children. We become aware of this practice obliquely, it’s not something we’re looking for, and very quickly we take it for granted. Watch trees and see how they move in the wind. Watch animals and notice how cautiously yet independently they go their separate ways—running, burrowing, ambling, flying. The same for fishes and their way of swimming […] Now consider human lives, their every-minute, every-day lives! Their lives depend upon an agreed regularity to which each contributes. Maintaining this regularity is the forgotten practice I’m talking about. It explains the arrival of the fruit in the market each day, the lights on the street at night, the letters slipped under the front door, the matches in a match box all pointing in the same direction, music heard on the radio, smiles exchanged between strangers. The regularity has a beat, very distant, often inaudible, and at the same time similar to a heartbeat. No place for illusions here. The beat doesn’t stop solitude, it doesn’t cure pain, you can’t telephone it—it’s simply a reminder that you belong to a shared story.”

— John Berger, From A to X: A Story in Letters

#quotes #quote compilation #quotes about x #ask #anonymous

518 notes · View notes

sxypigeon · 3 years

Text

Shepard is done with everyone's bullshit

Chapter 2 of An Extra Extended Ending

Summary: Because I hated the ending of the third Mass Effect game so much, I made my own with black jack and hookers. FemShep x Liara with damn near every character is the third game making an appearance.

Chapter 1

***

“How long until communications can reach beyond Sol?”

“It’s unclear,” the asari comm technician said hesitantly; the hum of the ship's electronics seemed to grow in the silence. “Quantum communication seems to be unsalvageable. That just leaves the Sol relay, but our latest reports indicate it sustained damage from the firing of the crucible.”

Sparatus sighed heavily and closed his eyes; this was a hollow victory until he knew the fate of Palaven. “Is there anyone working on it now?”

“No, sir. Those reports only came in minutes ago.”

“What about the team working on the crucible?” Tevos asked. “The brightest minds in the galaxy would have the best chance of fixing it – the sooner the better.” The asari councilor paced around a circular display in the middle of the CIC of the Destiny Ascension looking every bit as impatient as her turian colleague.

“They may be able to, but there is another group we would be foolish to ignore,” Valern muttered quietly, staring at the three dimensional screen, watching the number of surviving ships increase slowly as communication was reestablished ship-by-ship.

“What are you . . .” A look of alarm crossed Sparatus’ face. “No,” the turian said stiffly as he pushed himself away from the display.

“Is it really that terrifying of an idea? It’s only a matter of time before the geth come back online. If we act soon, we may be able to keep our alliance with them intact, maybe even strengthen it.” The salarian folded his arms across his chest and eyed Sparatus intently.

He narrowed his eyes. “Or they may turn on us the moment they realize they have nothing more to gain from our alliance. It’s one thing to cooperate when there is no choice, but what would be their incentive now?”

Valern shook his head condescendingly. “The geth are not as shortsighted as you think.” He brought up the pre-fight fleet numbers. “If even a fraction of their troops survived, it would be in their best interest to repair the relays,” he stated firmly, pointing at the image. “They value knowledge above all else and what better source is there than the relays?”

“This isn’t the first time we’ve come in contact with an AI species. There is too much at risk,” Tevos said quietly from across the room. “If we act quickly-”

“We’ll what? Destroy all of the units in Sol?” Valern shouted over the asari councilor. “How many more do you think are out there? We’d be risking another war - one we are ill prepared for.”

“And you want to send them to work on the relay?! What happens when they acquire the knowledge they seek? What’s to stop them from using it against the rest of the galaxy?” Sparatus marched back to the display and brought up images of the Citadel attack nearly four years earlier. “This is what will happen. They have no use for organics. They made that abundantly clear!”

The salarian councilor shook his head in frustration. “We know how persuasive the Reapers can be and yet even after being attacked by the quarians and being on the verge of annihilating them, they agreed to a truce. These are not simple machines, Sparatus!”

“Why are you so convinced?” Tevos asked suspiciously. She walked slowly around the display toward him. “You were vocally against curing the genophage, why is this different?” She fixed on him with a penetrating stare. “What aren’t you telling us?”

Valern scoffed at the accusation. “I see I’m alone in my conviction. What more can I say to either of you?” With a last impatient glare at his colleagues, the salarian turned and strode from the room. “If not as an act of the Council, then as an act of the salarian people, the geth will be brought back online!” he called back as the door closed behind him.

A tense silence followed Valern and lingered long after he left. “Do we even know if any of the science team is still in Sol?” Sparatus asked quietly while bracing himself on the terminal in front of him.

“No, but we will know soon enough,” she said before sending out the call for help.

***

Spirits, it’s a miracle she survived, the head nurse thought as he wheeled the patient out of surgery. At least it’s a bit of good news . . . Sure could use a bit more, though.

A sea of medics split to allow the turian and human through the bustling ward. Endless lines of beds on either side of the walkway were filled with too many injured, too many that would not last the next twenty-four hours. That’s not- No, I can’t think like that. There’s too much to do to focus on something so trivial. You’re in charge of this ward, damn it! You have lives to save. . .

He squeezed the gurney between two others and began setting up IVs and monitoring equipment. I need to make my rounds soon. We should be getting another shipment of refugees from the Citadel soon- He froze and stared at the patient. She’s not supposed to be waking up yet! “Ma’am, can you hear me?” he asked, staring down at her.

The woman drowsily blinked for a moment before lifting her eyes and focusing on the turian . . . and letting out a sudden, terrified scream. “AHHHH!!!”

Damn it, not again. “Ma’am, it’s okay. You’re aboard the Destiny Ascension.” Another blood-curdling scream. “Ma’am, you’re safe! You were injured-”

“Hey! That’s enough!” Both quickly looked over to the next bed and saw the occupant giving them a stern glare. “I know turians are ugly, but you’re going to make the guy self-conscious if you keep up the screaming.”

The woman stared, gaping at the other patient, long enough for the nurse to inject a sedative into her IV. “There you go, ma’am. Just relax.” They watched tensely as the woman quickly sank bonelessly back into her pillow. Finally. I’m not going to live this down any time soon, he thought as other orderlies snickered as they passed.

“So, who do I need to talk to to get out of here?” the other patient asked after a moment.

“Myself,” he said as he finished setting up the sleeping woman’s monitoring equipment. “Is there somewhere you need to be?”

“I figured you could use another empty bed.”

“What I need is for my patients to recover sufficiently, regardless of how much they think otherwise.” He walked over to the patient and looked at her chart. Human female, numerous serious burns, deep puncture wound to the right side, three fractured ribs – well this just goes on and on. “How are you feeling, ma’am?”

“Fantastic,” she said dryly inspecting the bandages on her hands and arms. “The pain meds wore off a while ago – No! No, I’m not asking for more.”

“If you need them-”

The patient shook her head. “I’m okay. I just,” she paused for a moment and chose her words carefully, “I need to be doing something. I can’t just lay here and – and think. Just give me a once over before you make me stay . . . please.”

He recognized the quiet desperation in her voice and the pleading in her eyes. “Fine.” With a healthy amount of skepticism, the turian gently unwrapped the bandages on her left arm. That can’t be right- He checked the chart again. How the hell? Humans aren’t supposed to heal this quickly. This is more in line with a krogan . . . maybe even faster.

“It’s not pretty, but it’s still better than it was before,” she said quietly, examining the slightly inflamed skin.

“Remarkable is what it is.” He unbandaged the other arm and stared in numb disbelief. “There has to be some sort of mistake in your chart-”

“I think you’ll find my side is sufficiently healed as well.”

The nurse met her piercing stare before pulling back the blanket and lifting her hospital gown. Spirits . . . this is incredible, he thought after removing the gauze. “How is this possible? Even if you spent the last six hours in a vat of medi-gel, you wouldn’t be able to heal this quickly.”

“I’m not exactly a normal human.” The ward around them moved on, unaware of the medical anomaly the head nurse was observing. “So what do you think?” she asked hesitantly.

I think the galaxy needs to study you, but . . . you don’t belong in the ICU. “I can see no justification for keeping you here, but we’re going to need to get you fed and cleaned up before you can go anywhere.” He noted the change in her status in her chart, shaking his head in disbelief as he did. “I’ll send someone over with a meal.”

“Thank you.”

He turned to leave but stopped, hesitating a moment. “Ma’am . . . everything you’ve done – everyone you’ve saved . . . there aren’t words strong enough to convey the gratitude we – I feel toward you. Thank you, Commander.”

The soldier nodded numbly, not meeting his eyes.

But it never feels like enough, he thought sadly. Stay strong, Shepard. I fear we may need you now more than ever.

***

“-he’s going-”

“No, it’s-”

“Where-”

A sharp radiating pain drilled between the exhausted asari’s eyes as distant voices became clear. “It all looks fine, no permanent damage. You are cleared for duty.”

Dr. Chakwas, the med bay. . . the crash. . . Shepard. . .

“Liara? Can you hear me?”

With an enormous effort, she opened her eyes. “Yes,” she rasped out. Her throat was so dry.

“How are you feeling?”

“Not at all well.” She rolled onto her side trying to lessen the pain.

“This should help.”

Something wonderful flowed through her veins, dulling the agony. “Where are we?” she asked tentatively.

“Armstrong nebula, but beyond that no one is sure. They say the planet is habitable though, with a breathable atmosphere and a comfortable gravity.” She helped Liara sit up and handed her a bottle of water. “Finish this and then get some rest.”

She gulped it down gratefully as worry began to sink in. “Do you know what happened to us?”

“Not really,” the doctor admitted. “Whatever that energy field was, it left no physical trace other than several cases of acute epistaxis – nosebleed.” She handed Liara another bottle of water. “Your case was a bit worse, likely due to trying to help the engineers restart the core for over an hour with your biotics.”

Liara sighed tiredly, staring at the bottle, “Not that it did any good. Have we been able to reach anyone back in Sol?”

“I’m afraid not. Specialist Traynor thinks the quantum communication network is beyond repair. We will have to rely on the relays and hope someone is out there to hear us.” The doctor let her cheery façade slip for a moment, long enough to hint at the extent of the worry she was trying to hide. It slid back into place as Chakwas laid a hand on Liara’s shoulder. “Get some rest, I’ll wake you if anything changes.”

But will it ever? she thought as she stared up at the ceiling, feeling the numbing darkness pull her back under.

***

“This has got to be the most confusing hell-hole I’ve ever been to.”

“What’s so confusing about it, Mr. Vega?” Steve Cortez asked as he finished his lukewarm MRE.

“It’s not the layout or anything like that – it’s the people.” Vega pushed himself gingerly off the cot on the floor of a mostly intact office building and pulled the bottle of water from the shuttle pilot’s hands. “Thanks, Estaban. It’s like no one can tell what they’re supposed to be feeling,” he muttered, flexing his injured leg.

Cortez took back his water and scanned the area. Roughly five miles from where the beam had been in central London, a small outpost had been hastily established to tend to the injured. Understaffed and undersupplied, it was not a place of miraculous medical operations, but a last-ditch effort to save as many survivors as possible – including James Vega. “After months of hopelessness, there is plenty to be thankful for . . . and just as much to mourn for.”

“It just feels – shit, I don’t know. Maybe it’s all of that blood I lost on the trek over here, but this just feels wrong. Javik, what’s your read on the situation?”

The prothean did not move from his meditative stance across the room. “Your species celebrates prematurely and mourns before the heaviest of losses are counted.” He paused for a moment before bowing his head slightly, “But even with these flaws, it is your cycle that stopped the Reapers – whether for good or just temporarily. That is more than what can be said of my cycle.”

“Yeah, that sounds about right,” Vega said tiredly. “Do you think – what set off the crucible?”

A sad smile pulled at Cortez’s lips, “Until I hear otherwise, I’m going to believe Shepard did.”

“I’m okay with that,” the lieutenant said as he laid back down. He was out within minutes.

“How is the human krogan?” Javik asked without moving.

Cortez rubbed his face roughly as he tried to shake the melancholy brought on by the thought of Shepard. “The medics think he’ll make it.”

“Good, our efforts dragging him here were not in vain,” the prothean said sternly. “Do not lose your determination – the fight may be over, but your people will need you and Vega.”

“That goes for you too, Javik. You’re one of us now. We aren’t about to forget what you’ve done to help us.”

Javik bowed his head in acknowledgement, but remained silent.

We’re going to need everyone, Cortez thought as he stared around the room at the other cots filled with injured soldiers. I just hope there’s enough of a galaxy left worth rebuilding.

***

“So what you’re saying is we’re screwed.”

“Not entirely,” Tali said hesitantly as Garrus and Williams stared up at the motionless mass effect core in despair. “What we’re saying is that it will take a while, a few weeks at least.”

“Assuming it’s fixable at all,” Williams said skeptically.

“I’m not saying it will be easy, Commander,” Adams said calmly, “but I think we’ll be able to get it up and running again.”

“That’s better than nothing,” Garrus offered.

Williams took a breath and nodded. “Okay, I’ll inform the crew,” she said before heading to the elevator.

“How is she doing?” Daniels asked as they all stared back at the core.

“She’s managing,” Garrus said quietly. “She still doesn’t know if she can fill the void Shepard left, but she knows she has to.”

“No one can replace Shepard, but that wasn’t ever the plan was it?” Tali asked.

“No, but it’s going to feel that way for a while – at least until we get a rhythm going,” Donnelly said. “Any luck with EDI?”

“Not yet.” Garrus headed toward the elevator. “I’ll let you know if we make contact with anyone. Let us know if there’s anything we can do topside.”

***

“Watch the right flank!” Grunt roared over the gunfire. He and his men were deep in the wards flushing out and dispatching Cerberus troops. “Take out that engineer!”

It was slow, grueling work. Street by street, building by building, the enemy was steadily falling back. They’d even managed to save a few civilians. It wasn’t their primary goal, but it did give him a sense of pride knowing he prevented someone’s death by causing another’s.

“Move up!” They were meeting fewer and fewer troops until recently, not that it bothered him. What worried him was the number of engineers they’d come across in this neighborhood. Something was brewing.

“Keep an eye out for explosives and turrets,” he growled as the last enemy fell. “Something doesn’t feel right.”

The squad moved carefully from the courtyard to the building interior. No resistance, no one at all. What are we missing? Cowards, where are you hiding?

“Let’s get out of here,” he ordered before they’d finished securing the building. “Double-time it!” This smells like a trap.

“What was that?!” one of his men yelled as the building shook violently.

Shooting out a window, Grunt bellowed, “Get out of the building NOW!” His men leaped from the window three stories up. The krogan commander followed and landed hard on the walkway below just as the building collapsed. “Those damn cowards,” he growled. “They’ll have to do better than that!”

***

I can’t wait to get off of this fucking ship. At least the food is decent – I am beyond sick of MREs. Jack checked her omni-tool for the fourth time in five minutes. What the hell is taking so long?

After arriving with an unconscious Shepard, she watched uneasily as her friend was wheeled away to surgery. The next hour was a blur of confusion, exhaustion, and anxiety. At some point she’d managed to sleep for a few hours. Now she was an irritable and short tempered ball of energy, desperate to get back to Earth and her kids.

“Keep that up and people will think you’re unbalanced,” a soft voice said behind her.

“Fuck you,” Jack said with a hint of relief. “I can’t believe they let you out. I mean – you still look like shit.”

“Thank you, Jack. You always know how to cheer me up.” Shepard sat next to the biotic with her protein bar and electrolyte drink. “What’s going on?”

“Who the fuck knows?” She stared at the table in front of her. “No communication outside of the system, Grunt is still securing the Citadel, still no word on my kids or the Normandy.”

“Earth?”

“Bits and pieces. Nothing yet on your boys in London.” She watched Shepard eat mechanically, stoic to the lack of information.

“I have to meet with the council and then after that, hopefully we can catch a shuttle back to London.”

“When’s the meeting?”

“Whenever I feel like it.”

About damn time you started telling those spineless fuckers where they can shove it. She stared at the softly glowing scars on her face and neck. Someone hasn’t been thinking happy thoughts. “So are we going to dick around here for a while to piss them off?”

She shook her head after she finished the last of the meal. “There are a few things I need to say before they start another victory tour. I’m going to need you there to keep me in check.”

A small snort of laughter escaped Jack, “You’re shitting me, right?”

Shepard stood and gave her a tight smile. “Let’s just say I’m a little short on patience at the moment.”

“Well, shit. I might have to film this.” She followed the commander with a sinister grin. “Let’s go make some councilors cry.”

***

“I don’t know what else there is to try,” Traynor said tiredly. “My expertise is on a smaller scale. I don’t know how to fix a comm problem on a galactic scale!”

Williams leaned on the terminal that had been Shepard’s in the CIC. “A galactic scale? What does that mean?”

The comms specialist ran her hands through her hair. “There are a couple of possibilities. First, we are the only survivors and that is why we haven’t reached anyone-”

“Let’s not go with that possibility.”

“Okay. Second, something is actively blocking our communications – natural or otherwise.”

“Reapers blocking communication,” the lieutenant commander said stoically.

“Or third, the mass relays are not functioning properly, due to damage or complete destruction.”

“From the crucible firing.” The CIC was silent as Williams contemplated the scenarios. “And none of these can be fixed while we’re stuck here.”

“No, ma’am.”

What are we supposed to do? What am I supposed to do?! Damn you, Shepard. It should be you here not me. “Let’s focus on the small scale then. What can we do to get the Normandy space worthy again?”

Traynor stared at the nonfunctional galaxy map as she bit her lip. “There are still several systems that haven’t come online that should have by now. There’s the exterior damage and then there’s EDI.”

“What’s the status of EDI?”

“Completely unresponsive.”

“Shit,” Williams muttered. “Do we have any idea how to get her back up?”

Traynor was silent for a moment. “I have a few ideas, but I’m not sure if they’d do any good. When Dr. T’Soni feels up to it, I’d like to get her input.”

“She was still passed out in the med bay last I checked.” She closed her eyes and let out a long breath. “Do what you can to bring up the other systems – keep me updated.”

***

“How are you holding up?”

Joker looked away from the foliage surrounding the cockpit and saw Garrus approaching. “Great,” he said sarcastically. “Crashed the ship, cracked four ribs, and my girlfriend might be dead. How about you?”

“I’m alive, that’s more than I expected to be honest.” He dropped into the seat next to the pilot. “In large part thanks to you.”

The pilot looked away. “Yeah don’t get too gushy yet. We may have to start calling this place home even if we can get the Normandy off the ground.”

“If that’s the case,” Williams said as she approached, “then I think our first priority should be finding something growing out there that can be distilled before we run out of liquor.”

“Good to know we’re on the same page,” Garrus chuckled. “I don’t suppose we know if what’s growing out there is levo- or dextro-amino based.”

“If we distill it enough it shouldn’t matter,” Joker said, staring back out at the jungle. “No protein in pure ethanol.”

Williams shared a concerned look with Garrus before speaking behind the pilot’s chair. “I’ve been talking to Traynor – she has some ideas on how to bring EDI back. Once Liara is up and about she and Traynor can start working on her.”

Joker continued staring out of the window as if he didn’t hear her. “Okay,” he finally said quietly.

***

Finally, Tevos thought as Shepard stepped through the open door. She looks much better, but are her scars glowing? “Shepard, we were beginning to worry. Who is your companion?”

The Spectre stood at parade rest in front of the asari while her comrade remained near the door. “Jack, this is the council. Councilors Tevos and Sparatus, meet Jack – a teacher at Grissom Academy. She’s here to . . . keep an eye on me while I’m recovering.”

A snort of laughter escaped the other human as she folded her arms across her chest. Shepard always did keep strange company.

“May I inquire where the salarian councilor is?” Shepard asked soberly.

“Valern has decided he would be more comfortable aboard a salarian ship,” Sparatus said stiffly. “That is part of why we needed to speak with you.”

Tevos activated the display at the center of the room showing an image of the Sol relay, it’s rings fractured and stationary. “It would seem the relays were damaged when the crucible fired. We have many of the crucible scientists working to repair it, but there’s been discussion about whether other groups should be recruited to help.”

“Why would we not ask everyone to fix it?” Shepard asked with a slight edge to her voice.

“This is the most advanced technology in the galaxy,” the turian said briskly. “In the wrong hands, this knowledge could endanger all of us.”

“So who hasn’t been invited to the party, the salarians?”

“No, the geth.”

Shepard frowned as she mauled over the information. “The geth are still alive?”

“They were never alive to begin with, Shepard. At the moment all units are offline,” Sparatus said, staring at the display. “Valern thinks they can be activated and recruited to help with repairs.”

Shepard fought to keep her face neutral. “Why not ask for their help? From where I’m standing, it looks like we could use all the help we can get. Don’t forget the rachni, they’ve also been proven to be very capable and intelligent.”

How does she not see the risks associated with her ideas? “Are you listening to a word you’re saying, Shepard? With the galaxy weakened as it is, it would take very little to change the balance of power and throw us all into another war.” Tevos turned and began to pace. “Caution is needed now more than ever,” she said as she stopped in front of the Spectre.

Shepard closed her eyes and let out a slow breath – her scars seeming to brighten as she did. “Are you suggesting we sever the alliances that we – no, what am I saying? – that I forged to win this war-”

“There’s a difference between having an alliance and handing out loaded weapons that could be pointed back at us,” Sparatus interrupted.

Despite remaining still, the marine radiated anger, enough to make the armed guards perk up. “If you intend on backstabbing your allies, then yes you will have something to worry about.”

“Commander, your vision of the galaxy is naïve,” Tevos stated impatiently. “You of all people should know what the risks associated with-”

Shepard barked out a laugh, breaking her immobile stance. She shook her head in exasperation. “I’m sorry, Councilor, but I can’t buy into the idea that I’m the naïve one. How long do you think it will take for the galaxy to find out your people have been hiding the best preserved prothean beacon in existence? Do you honestly think you will be able to remain the superior race? If it’s any comfort, I don’t think you will have to worry about the rest of the galaxy, I think your own people will be the ones to tear down your species. How many thousands of years have the asari been lied to, Councilor? Was that a risk worth taking?”

Tevos clenched her jaw as she fought her own anger. “And do you honestly think the galaxy will be better off without our guidance? Will the geth lead the way to the future or will it be the humans?” she asked acidly.

“I’d like to see what the galaxy can do together,” she said evenly. “But we can’t do that if we start severing alliances without just cause.”

Sparatus leaned over the galaxy map. “Shepard, what you’re saying is inspiring, but you can’t protect the galaxy with idealism,” he said standing beside Tevos. “The asari government will have to answer for their crimes, but what the galaxy needs now is stability . . . and someone they can stand behind-”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” Shepard spat. Behind her, Jack was muttering loudly about spineless politicians. “I’m not about to smile and assure the galaxy everything is fine,” she explained as she also leaned over the map, “while you screw them over when they’re not looking.” Shepard glared at Sparatus. “If that’s what’s expected of me as a Spectre then you’ll have to accept my resignation.”

“This isn’t a matter of right or wrong, Shepard!” he said with fire in his eyes. “This is about saving our galaxy and preventing a complete collapse of the community!”

Shepard took a step back and shook her head again. “A little honesty and accountability could go a long way, Councilor. We are all vulnerable, but we have an opportunity to make all of us stronger than we were before this war!” Shepard turned back to Tevos, “The galaxy will stand behind me regardless of if you want them to or not. The question is whether you’ll be standing with us or on your own.”

The drone of the ventilation system filled the room as Shepard turned and headed to the door. “How many billions died because of the decisions you’ve made?” she asked as she paused at the door. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to-” She turned to face them. “You had four years to prepare, but none of you did a damn thing. But this guilt doesn’t just belong to either of you, though. It’s just as much mine for not doing more, for not – for not-”

“Shepard, let’s go,” Jack said quietly.

“For the sake of the galaxy, I do hope there will be a change in the balance of power.” She followed Jack out of the room without a second glance.

“That went well,” the turian muttered tiredly. “If there’s nothing else, I too would like to be with my people.” He left without waiting for a reply.

The asari councilor remained unmoving long after they left, contemplating Shepard’s words and the fate of her race. Things will never be the same again . . .

***

“They have hundreds of civilians in the buildings ahead,” the krogan scout reported to Grunt.

The commander and his men were camped out in a maintenance tunnel roughly fifteen blocks away from the Cerberus stronghold. “What defenses will we face?”

“Portable barriers and too many turrets to count. A direct approach will be nearly impossible.”

Grunt narrowed his eyes and contemplated his next move. “It looks like we’ll be needing stealth then.” Several of his men shook their heads and growled impatiently. “Complain all you want, but I can promise you we’ll kill more of them this way. These tunnels run right under them. They’ll be dead before they know we’re there. Pack it up and move out!”

The tunnels, unfortunately, were never meant to fit a krogan. Crawling on their bellies single file, the soldiers pushed the lifeless bodies of keepers from their path. The tight space was making his men agitated, something Grunt struggled with just as much. Damn those Cerberus cowards. . .

As they progressed further, voices could be heard above them. “Get those turrets up now! We’ve lost sight of the Krogans and spotted a turian cruiser near the shopping center. Where are those mechs?!”

I’m going to enjoy this. Soon voices multiplied and words became blurred – the sound of dozens of footsteps echoed down the tunnel. We must be getting close. . .

The scout signaled and the squad branched off down the numerous side passages and waited. Time to finish this.

With an angry roar the krogans sprang from the tunnels. Cerberus troops too stunned to move were quickly cut down. “No more hiding!” Grunt followed after those fleeing from the chaos.

Thick clouds of smoke flooded the building he entered, blinding him. I can still hear you, still smell your fear. Staying low, he let out an angry growl and sprinted through the fog into the nearest shooting enemy, crushing him against the wall behind him. “Who’s next?!”

As he cleared the lobby of the building more gunfire was heard outside. Those aren’t my men . . .

Turians, and lots of them, were flooding the walkways, pushing Cerberus forces back faster. Grunt growled in annoyance as he moved to the next floor. Bastards are going to have this fight finished before it gets good!

***

“That is out of the question.”

“But, Dr. Chakwas-”

“Absolutely not.”

Traynor and Liara sighed in defeat under the doctor’s stern gaze. “Can we at least inspect Glyph to see if he can be brought online?” Liara asked impatiently.

“Only if you plan on doing it here in the med bay so I can keep an eye on you,” she said shortly. “I am completely serious about not using your biotics. Twenty-four hours and not a minute less.”

“Okay then,” Traynor said hesitantly, “we can at least brainstorm about what that energy wave was.”

Chakwas shook her head tiredly, “All of the symptoms were very mild and nearly identical: loss of consciousness, headaches, and nosebleeds.”

“All electronics were rendered useless, but chemical and biological systems remained mostly unaffected,” Liara muttered thinking of the glow stick Donnelly lit in engineering before the crash landing.

“It would have to have been something mostly inert to have passed through the entire ship, but leave little damage,” the comms specialist said thoughtfully as she pulled up a chair opposite Chakwas and T’Soni.

“But everything affected by it seems to be salvageable,” Chakwas said as she examined the crew’s medical logs since the crash.

“If it is inert, then there would have to have been a lot of it.” Liara shared a look with Traynor. “You’re thinking about a wave of dark matter, aren’t you? Like a dark matter EMP?”

“Neutrinos to be specific. Dark matter alone can account for ninety-five percent of a system’s mass. Neutrinos are only formed when something expending a lot of energy happens like a supernova or a nuclear reaction-”

“Or a relay firing?”

“It would seem like a logical jump,” Traynor said with some hesitation. “It’s been observed in very low levels after a ship has used a relay.”

“So, if that’s what it was then how did it drain nearly everything of potential energy?” Liara asked, letting her head fall into her hands.

“Liara?”

“I’m fine, it’s just a headache.”

“We’re stepping well past my area of expertise.”

The bay was silent for a moment as the women thought. “I do have one rather unsettling question,” Chakwas said calmly as she put down her notes. “If we can restore function to our omni-tools and maybe even EDI, could the Reapers also be restored – assuming of course that they were affected at all? Are they simply in a state of inactivation?”

The room fell silent.

“That would also be a logical leap,” Traynor said quietly.

***

Jack glared as their shuttle veered away from their intended destination. “Shepard, this doesn’t look like Earth.”

“No, it does not. Apparently we’re having a layover at the dreadnought up ahead.” Shepard felt a chill run down her spine as the small shuttle entered the cavernous hanger. I don’t think we’ll be leaving any time soon.

“That’s one hell of a welcoming party,” Jack muttered, eying the scores of armed soldiers assembling at the landing zone. “This normal procedure or are we just special?”

“We are special,” she sighed. The shuttle door opened with a hiss as Shepard exited. Immediately the soldiers came to attention and held a salute. I am not ready to be back to this.

A lone soldier marched briskly through the ranks of the others and stopped in front of Shepard with a crisp salute. “Welcome aboard, Staff Commander Shepard.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant.” Shepard tried not to think about how much she didn’t want to be there as she returned the salute. “I asked to be taken back down to Earth. I’m a bit confused why I’m here.”

“If you’ll follow me, ma’am, Admiral Ahern will be able to answer all of your questions.”

Shepard came to a sudden stop. “Wait, wait, wait. Are you referring to Admiral Tadius Ahern of Pinnacle Station?”

“Yes, ma’am, I believe that was his previous assignment,” he said stoically as he turned and led them across the hanger.

“You want to fill me in on who this guy is?” Jack asked quietly as they neared the elevator.

“I may have . . . won the admiral’s apartment on Intai’sei in a bet a few years back.”

Jack shook her head a few times before finally saying, “Queen of the fucking girl scouts . . . Have you even set foot in the place?”

“Once,” she admitted as they entered the spacious lift. “I was a bit preoccupied with stopping a rogue spectre and his army of geth from wiping out the galaxy.” Shepard found herself syncing back up with the strict protocols usually practiced on larger ships, a long way from the casual atmosphere of the Normandy. What I wouldn’t give to be back there. . .

“Commander Shepard, it’s been a while,” the gruff admiral said as the group entered the combat information center.

“Yes it has, sir,” she said, saluting. “I see you still haven’t retired.”

“Can’t do that without a retirement home, now can I?” Ahern waited for his men to disembark before continuing. “This your protégé?”

Jack frowned, looking mildly insulted. “Hell, no.”

“She’s a friend,” Shepard said with a grin. “I don’t mean to sound rude, Ahern, but why the hell am I here?”

The older man chuckled and motioned them to follow him. “With Admiral Hackett beyond Sol and Admiral Anderson deceased – a great man, the galaxy is a worse place without him – I am the highest ranking officer. It’s my job to make the big decisions.”

Shepard nodded silently, her throat suddenly unbearably tight.

“I’ve been contacted by the salarian councilor,” he continued. “It seems he wants our help with a project.”

“I’m guessing it has to do with the geth,” Jack said dryly.

“That it does. Not long after the crucible fired and we restarted the systems on the ship, we began sending ships out to retrieve as many alliance fighters as we could before the poor bastards suffocated. Some of our ships also brought back geth fighters. I’m thinking we must have over a hundred of them in the hangar wherever we could find room.”

“Are any of them online?” Shepard asked. They came to a platform overlooking the entire CIC as well as one hell of a view of Earth from the enormous widows ahead of them.

“They weren’t initially,” he said leaning on the railing. “I had some of our techs try to jump start them, but it’s a slow process. We are able to bring up basic processes, though.” He paused, rubbing the stubble on his jaw. “The problem is what happens if we can’t bring them back online completely. And now I’ve got the salarians breathing down my neck demanding access to them, but I’m not entirely sure if their interest in them is honorable.”

Shepard stared out the windows at Earth, feeling a wave of grief washing over her. “You want to help them, but don’t trust the salarians.”

“Organic or not, they came to our aid. Hell, I’m thinking of commissioning a memorial for them in London,” he said wearily with a bit of humor.

“And that’s why I always liked you, sir.”

“That’s touching, but I was hoping for a bit more feedback than that.”

She closed her eyes and took a long breath before answering. “What I know is that the turians and asari would rather leave the geth as they are.” Shepard shook her head sadly. “I haven’t spoken with the salarian councilor since shortly after firing the crucible, but I think you have good reason to hesitate.”

“I should have kicked his ass while I had the chance,” Jack muttered. “The prick wouldn’t stop going on about how saving Shepard’s life was a waste of time.”

“What stopped you?” Ahern asked, grinning.

“I was too busy fixing his and everyone else’s fucking omni-tools.”

“Shame. So what is your official recommendation, Commander?”

“For now,” she said after a moment, “allow them hands-off access. Be open to consultations, but have your men continue to take the lead on this. I’ve never known Councilor Valern to offer assistance out of the kindness of his heart.”

“That is as good of a plan as any.” He signaled one of his men to meet them. “Lieutenant Riley will show you to the armory and also get you fitted for a set of armor. There’s no telling what the situation down there is like with most of the comms down. It was good seeing you, Shepard, and meeting your protégé. Stay safe.”

Jack flipped him off before following Shepard.

***

Notes: Thanks for reading! I planned on adding more, but I forgot this existed for a few years and then lost the second half of this chapter. I'll see if I can track it down. :P

#mass effect #commander shepard #femshep x liara #liara t'soni #femshep

7 notes · View notes