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#literally all my stories are salt fics
jennycalendar · 11 months
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sometimes venturing into fic for a more popular fandom makes me realize that i have really been spoiled by giles/jenny, where the comparative rarity of the pairing means that the majority of people who write for them will really think about it, and i personally have done such careful study of all the available fic that i know which ones are good and have a little library card catalogue in my head. whenever i go into anything that has an actual wealth of fic for me to choose from and is being updated frequently, i very often end up eye-rolling so hard they're gonna get stuck like that & closing a whole bunch of tabs because He Simply Would Not Fucking Say That.
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lorarri · 6 months
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꒰꒰ ‧₊˚𝐒𝐏𝐈𝐂𝐄𝐘 𝐁𝐎𝐘𝐒 ─ 𝐓𝐖𝟎𝟎 ˚₊· ꒱꒱
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─ summary . . . ❨ their wives are bestfriends and former bandmates leave toto and chisritian in a tough place where they have to pretend to like each other. or else ❩  ─ pairing . . . ❨ toto wolff x fem! wife! spice girl! reader ❩  ─ genre . . . ❨ social media file ❩  ─ author note . . . ❨ okay so not super happy with this one but I hope you guys enjoy this! ❩
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❨ taglist | masterlist ❩
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mercedesamgf1
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liked by yourinstgram gerihalliwellhorner 23,234,234 others
mercedesamgf1 Congratulations to Red Bull on your Constructors' Championship 👏
You've set the standard for everybody else to aim at this year. We’ll be giving it everything to bring the fight in 2024. 💪
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user Red Bull and Mercedes literally carried last couple year and also whole Netflix series
user Well I didn’t expect that… but Ggs to redbull fans
user Classy move team, classy move.
user Love how the team itself can congratulate their rivals on an achievement but the fans are the ones who cause the chaos
user okay but can we agree that Y/N forced Toto to make this post... ⤷ user sorry new to f1 why would his wife do that ain't there teams enemies and I swear toto and Christian hate each other ⤷ user their wives are both best friends (they were in the spice girls) and they basically force the two of them to get along
user aht we need you back out there next year this is hurting me lol
user As a redbull fan, i didnt expect that, idk if redbull would have done the same but thats wholesome ⤷ user geri would have forced Christian to for Y/N
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yourinstagram . 4hrs ago
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seen by totowolffprivate christianhorner 67,772,124 others
mercedesamgf1
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liked by yourinstagram gerihalliwellhorner 32,234,787 others
mercedesamgf1 Congratulations on your third F1 world title, Max. 🏆🏆🏆
You’ve driven a remarkable season - and you’re joining a special group of champions!
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user W class post. L classless comment section.
user guys stop commenting "second" I can’t like them all
user Y/N strikes again
user why's max like 🧍‍♂️ in the second pic 😭😭😭😭
user bet Y/N forced admin to post this liked by mercedesamgf1
user The salt in this comment section 😂
user bet lewis isn't happy about sharing his merc mother
user Why does Russell George look like woody from Toy Story?
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yourinstagram
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like by gerihalliwellhorner christianhorner 54,676,787 others
yourinstagram yes we forced are husbands into coming with us on a double date a act as camera men
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user bet they threatened there asses with divorce to make this happen
user they are everything and there husbands are just ken
user and historians said they were bestfriends
user god they would be so hot together
user and you are trying to tell me they have husbands and kids?!?!?
user dear god I would be worried if I was there men...
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─ requested by . . .
@luvrrish ─ omg i just saw that your requests are open (i totally wasn't stalking your acc)!!! but omg can you pretty please do a toto wolff smau with wife reader who was a spice girl and was/still is besties with geri which forces toto and christian to hangout (maybe they have kids and they're besties but thats up to you) thank you so much if you decided to do this 🫶🏽🫶🏽
anon ─ hiii!!! please do more toto wolff fics bcoz i need my lamp post so bad it hurts😭
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superblysubpar · 11 months
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We Got Love:
modern!steve harrington x fem!reader
Summary: Steve picks you up from the bar after your night out with Robin and he realizes he's overwhelmingly in love. | masterlist | Title/fic inspiration song always at the bottom - steve's music | even if a fic is not marked 18+, my blog is - please respect this
WC Range: 5-10k
Warnings: reader consumes alcohol with descriptions of being tipsy / fluffy gooey hopelessly in love with each other kissing and flirting
A/N: A night out with @loveshotzz in Chicago had us thinking about Steve picking us up and bringing us to McDonald's and then a sweet anon sent a thought about Steve helping our tipsy selves and thus this fic was born. I hope you love it!💛
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Steve was in too deep. He wasn’t supposed to fall this hard or this quickly. Sure, he’s known for giving his heart away too easily, but he knew this was different. He knew you were different. He was going to take it slow this time - he had a whole plan. 
He’s never been a good planner.  
You’re sweet and soft, but you’re not afraid to bite back. You’ve got an energy about you, and sometimes he feels a little like you’re the sun. He can’t help but be drawn to you, like you’ve got a gravitational pull just for him, but if he gets too close too fast he’s gonna get burned like he always does. 
But Jesus Christ, you’re not making it easy for him. You’re so sweet and perfect already, but you have to be gorgeous too? Cause you’re always pretty, but tonight…wow. And your ass in those jeans. His hands form fists at his sides, planting his heels into the floor so he doesn’t just start making out with you in front of Robin. He’s going a little insane - like he feels like he needs to keep his hands on you at all times or he’ll literally stop breathing, he’ll die if he doesn’t get to kiss you and -
He’s so fucked. 
Hair curled and bouncing across your shoulders as Robin and you dance and headbang to the early 2000s playlist she insisted would pump you up for your girls night out. His bathroom counter is littered with lipsticks and various tubes of things you hold up to him in the store for his opinion on. He just nods and asks ‘Do you like it?’ before you drop it into the red cart with a smile and leave a kiss on his cheek. 
A laugh that has the ability to actually crawl into his chest and burrow inside of his heart leaves you as Robin gives you shit for being high maintenance. He hides a smile from his spot leaning in the doorway as you insist that the tequila shot is going to be better with the orange, “Trust me, Robs. When have I steered you wrong?”
Robin starts to list several times you’ve done just that and your face scrunches as you stick your tongue out at her. Steve watches you both lick salt from your wrists and as you make eye contact with him he clears his throat and looks down, cheeks flushing pink at the thought of your tongue like he’s thirteen again.  
Yup, totally fucked. 
The clink of your glasses on the counter draws his eyes up once more, your face squished in amusing pain as you suck on the orange slice, eyes fluttering open and removing it with a wide smile directed at him over Robin’s shoulder. Body wiggling and hands clapping together as the alcohol enters your body and another laugh leaves it as Robin begrudgingly admits to liking the orange.  
A pink stain left on the rim of the glass and one on his cheek after you skip over to him, arms wrapping around his neck. Steve’s hands find their favorite spot on your hips, fingers slipping seamlessly into the belt loops and trying not to think about how your hips and ass are gonna look dancing out at the bar without him. How you naturally sway easily to the beat, and smile around the skinny neon straw between your teeth as someone tells a story. How in between turns at an arcade game or a round of pool you use the stick or someone’s open fist to sing along to the songs playing because your walls come down a little from just a few drinks. 
You lean back to peer at him with a smile that makes his heart stutter, sure he’ll need to seek actual medical attention to get it restarted as you tap your nose to his chin. God, you’re so fucking pretty. 
“You gonna be okay all by yourself tonight handsome?”
Handsome. 
He can’t help but sigh a little when you call him that. Can’t help the way his hand moves to push a piece of your hair behind your ear like he’s a leading man in a rom com you’ve made him watch. 
He wants to tell you the truth. That no, as a matter of fact, he will not be okay alone and he needs you to stay. And it freaks him out a little bit that he wants you to stay forever and it’s not even for sex. He wants to debate about the best candy to have with popcorn, for you to shove your cold hands under his shirt and press your nose into his neck. To banter about what to watch only for you to fall asleep five minutes into it. Words on the tip of his tongue that he doesn’t want you to leave ever. Because you’re going to go out tonight and go back to your place and he feels crazy because he wants you to just move in and that’s not in the plan. That’s not taking it slow at all, Harrington. 
Raising your eyebrows at him, waiting for his response, his hands now push your hair from your shoulders gently. Swallowing harshly as his fingertips graze over the straps of your black tank top hiding under a jacket, trailing up your neck and back down relishing a little in the goosebumps that rise in their wake. A non committal hum leaves his pursed lips before he sighs, “You know, I really don't know. I think you should stay, just to be safe.” 
It’s not the words that cause the feeling of a box of bouncy balls being dropped in your stomach, but the way Steve says them with that look. Tone and eyes warm like honey dripping over every inch of you, sealing your body in a sweet and sticky heaviness. Convinced you’d melt into an actual pile of goo if he let go of you, ready to shout how you’re feeling from every open window at every tallest peak in the world. Tequila and citrus mingle with the words that dance on your tongue, making it all a little harder to keep inside. You’re far too tempted to tell Robin that there’s a change of plans and you’ll have to stay curled up next to your boyfriend for the rest of your life. 
You don’t say those things though, but you pretend to play along with his game - to see how much of his heart he’s willing to give away before you give all of yours to him. 
“Well, safety is my middle name…”
Steve’s smile widens, lopsided and rising on the right and you want to reach out and trace over his lips and memorize the smile you’re able to pull out of him - just for you. Body filling with heat at the thought as his hands squeeze at your shoulders. 
Thumbs brushing across your neck as he takes the smallest step to fully close the distance between your bodies, “Right, so really, it’s your duty to-”
“Oh god, I need another shot!” Robin smacks her head against the counter several times, “Please, for my sake, would you just kiss and say goodbye so we can go already?”
Stepping onto your toes, your nose brushes Steve’s and he sighs as your lips hover over his, “Don’t have too much fun without me, okay?”
A clink of Robin’s shot glass hitting the counter makes your lips twitch. 
“Fun? Without you? Just misery with no company here.” Steve huffs and taps the tip of your shoes with his socked foot. Pouting his lips out dramatically in one last feeble attempt to get you to stay. You catch his bottom lip with yours, pressing a soft and over too quick kiss there. 
Robin bangs her head on the counter again as his fingers slip into your hair, cradling the back of your head. His tongue pokes out to lick across his top lip, citrus and salt lingering on it. 
Warm eyes dancing between yours as he whispers a plea, “One more?”
Desperate for a pillow to scream into, to kick your legs and giggle like the lovesick fool that you are, you just bite back a grin as he tilts your head further. Lips molding around yours, soft and lazy and making you feel like you’re the only two people in the world. Noses squished together, thumbs buzzing across your cheeks, Steve sighs into you and your foot practically pops like you’re in a black and white movie and the end credits song is going to start playing. 
The tap of Robin’s foot in impatience and a loud clearing of her throat makes the smile you were biting back win as you pull away reluctantly. Unable to help yourself, one more quick peck to his top lip before you untangle your heart and hands from his. 
Tugging Robin towards the door, you glance over your shoulder to find Steve with his hands running through his hair, eyes blinking open as you smile widely. A sing song lilt to your voice as you call back through the closing door, “Have fun with your misery!”
Robin’s voice echoes down the hallway, “You’re both disgusting!”
Your voice louder and exasperated, “You told me to kiss him goodbye!”
Steve’s forehead hits the now closed door as he groans, palms dragging over the wood before they form fists. He already misses you. He’s a chump. He’s in love. He’s pretty sure you’re the one. 
So, so, so fucked. 
He tries not to wallow, cause that would be pathetic. 
He’s pathetic.
Alone in his apartment trying not to think of you, except you’re everywhere. He cleans up your pregame shenanigans, despite you insisting you’d do it earlier before leaving - he was happy to do it so you could have more time with Robin. There’s a blanket you bought for his couch, your favorite coffee mug fresh out of the dishwasher and hung on a hook. The scent of your perfume and body wash in his bathroom and a toothbrush next to his. Clothes returned to half of a drawer that was basically just entirely yours now. 
Eventually, he’s tired of his own co-dependent self pitying and crawls into bed, curling into the pillow that now smells like you. Thoughts of you lull him into a restless sleep. Tossing and turning and desperate to reach out and feel your body clinging to his, legs tangled together and cheek pressed to his chest. 
Steve would be lying if he said he didn’t love the fact he woke up at almost 2am to his phone ringing loudly, your face filling the screen. A picture he’d recently caught of you, holding a giant burrito in your hands and staring lovingly at it like it was your child. 
Just the sight of it makes his chest ache and he takes maybe a second longer to answer since he’s caught up in staring at it. Clearing his throat before he answers, “Hello?”
“Oh, fuck, you sound…I…” your voice wobbles and a barely audible sigh falls into the speaker, not expecting the heavy sound of his voice. Not prepared for the deep gruff from his chest and sleep coated word to make your thighs push together like they do. 
He sits up straighter and flicks on his lamp, “Hey, everything okay?”
“Ye-yeah,” you hiccup and giggle and then continue, “Yes. You just sound so sexy, I’m - well he does!” You’re shouting to Robin who he hears grumbling in the background and his bottom lip pulls in, tugged between his teeth as he fights a smile. 
“Called just to tell me that, huh?” Purposely whispering so his voice sounds a little raspier, practically able to see you melting on the other side of the phone. 
“Fuck…no?” His smile breaks through at the sound of your sentence ending in a question before you keep going, “I…I called because….oh! Uber! There’s like no Uber’s around and well okay there was one but we’d have to share it with these guys and…”
Steve is already pulling on sweats and the black sweatshirt you were always stealing. Pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose as he slips on the first pair of shoes he can find. Locking the front door and spinning his keys on a finger as you continue on. Somehow your story turns from Uber to Robin having a rum and coke come out of her nose because of a joke you told and how you totally crushed her at ski-ball.
He could listen to you talk about nothing and everything, just enjoying the sound of your voice and the way you light up when you tell a story. It can’t be crazy to be so in love with you already. You have to feel this way too, right? 
“Anyways, I’m talking a lot and Robin is tapping her wrist.” You laugh and a snort comes out and somehow he falls even harder. “Like she’s ever worn a watch and been on time in her life - oh really? Name one time! Uh-huh, that’s what I thought, Buckley!”
“Babe,” Steve interrupts, rubbing his jaw to fight the aching smile he’s had on his face for the past few minutes. It’s a new name still, sticky in his throat and makes his heart speed up a little at the risk of saying it every time, but he loves the way you react.
“Yeah?” A little breathless, he can hear you smile through the phone. Easily able to picture the piece of hair twirling around your finger as you quietly tack on, “I like when you call me babe, Stevie.”
He breathes deeply through his nose, forehead pressing to the steering wheel. It feels like he’s drawing each word out of his brain painfully slowly because all that wants to come out is ‘I love you’ and he needs to say, “I’m in the car, where are you?”
“Oh! I’ll drop a pin! Thanks Steve I lo-” your voice cracks as it falls off before you quickly shout, “See you soon!” and then silence. 
The entire drive to you is unbearably long and filled with Steve telling himself you weren’t about to say what he thinks you were. 
Not that it would be a bad thing if you had said it, but he wants to be first. And he knows he feels that way about you, he just thought it was all too soon. Saying those three little words out loud has burned him before, but for some reason he knows it’s nothing like the pain he’ll feel if he says them to you and you don’t say them back. 
As snowflakes hit his windshield and disappear just as quickly, he comes to a stop at a red light, the barcade just on the other side of the intersection and he smiles. You’re out on the sidewalk with Robin who appears like she’s trying not to look amused as you cabbage patch and disco to a song that must be playing. Stopping suddenly, he can tell you shout that it’s snowing and Robin must say something sarcastic back because you wave her off and start to spin a little. Head thrown back with a wide smile, tongue sticking out to catch a snowflake. He pulls up to the curb and hops out of the car. 
Your head falls forward and his name leaves your lips behind the widening smile, the ‘E’ at the end trailing off and wrapping around his heart. 
Steve’s hair is a mess, carmel and honey, lazily askew and you ache to card your fingers through it. Can you do that yet? Is jumping into his arms and running your hands through his hair after only a few hours away from each other too needy? Your buzzed brain and body are toeing the line of not really caring if it is. Especially with his glasses falling down the slope of his nose, hands in his sweatshirt pocket and a smile on his lips. Gray sweats sitting low on his hips and you bite back a smile at the loafers he probably quickly grabbed. Lit up in oranges and yellows from the streetlight and neon green of the bar sign flashing overhead. You could jump his bones right there against the car. 
Falling into his arms with a low and content sigh, your fingers lock around his neck and toy with the ends of his hair in a sort of compromise with yourself. Nose pressing into his jaw, inhaling the familiar scent you’d missed in just a few short hours. Woodsy, maybe a little leather, and Steve and you could dare to call it home already. Swallowing the thought down, you whine a little and reveal a different thought, “Fuck, you are so handsome.”
Steve’s breath catches like you haven’t called him that before, taking in the way you blink and flutter your eyelashes, wet from snowflakes melting on your skin. Arms wrapping around your waist to keep you up right - or at least that’s his excuse. 
“I’m sure you say that to all the guys,” his voice still scratchy with sleep. He clears his throat, thumb rubbing against your skin just under the hem of your shirt. He’s lost in the feeling of you relaxing into his hold completely, like there isn’t any other place you’d rather be. Realizing that he can be a little needy with you, because you are with him. 
The warm pads of his fingers on the exposed skin of your sides threaten to draw all of your attention. Forgetting what you said, what he said, or why you were even there. All information gone from your brain other than the fact that his lips are right there and looking far too kissable. 
Pulling slightly away so you can stare into his eyes, you grin, touching your nose to his quickly, “Only you, Goose.”
Steve risks sliding his hands up your sides more, your shirt rising ever so slightly and his fingers buzzing over your skin. You love the way his lips quirk up at the nickname and he loves the shiver that runs through you and the way your breath hits his cheek sharply as he touches his forehead to yours and whispers, “Flattery will get you everywhere, Maverick.”
Rising onto the tips of your chucks, fingers finally pushing up and finding a home in Steve’s hair and you sigh. The neon lights could dim, a pop song could start playing and script scrawling across the screen announcing they lived happily ever after could all happen and you wouldn’t even be remotely surprised. It all feels a little like a dream, this thing with you and Steve, and you really hope you don’t ever wake up from it. 
Mouth hovering over his, the mint of toothpaste on his breath begging to mix with the alcohol on yours, but leave it to your mutual best friend to ruin the moment yet again. 
“Get a room!” Robin’s hands tap the side of the back car door, her plea echoing down the quickly emptying sidewalk. 
Steve turns to glare at her, her body half out the window and a wide grin on her face. The two old friends in a staring contest and silent conversation when your stomach growls and a giggle slips out of your lips. Tugging on Steve’s shirt as you request, “Hey, can we get chicken nuggets?”
Robin snaps her fingers and points to you, “Yes! Now that’s more like it! Oh! And fries!”
“And a shake!” You jump up and down and Steve rolls his eyes at both of you, his hands still on your hips giving a light squeeze though. 
He fights his amusement at your tipsy state and sighs dramatically, “Any more requests?”
“Nope!” spinning past him, he opens the car door and helps you in as Robin grumbles about her not receiving any help to get into her seat. 
Steve begins to stand and your fingers tug him down by the collar, “Wait! I thought of one more thing I want.”
Snow turning to rain on the back of his neck as you lean in closer and he whispers, “Yeah? What’ll it be, honey?”
“A kiss,” smiling as your lips hover over his. 
Steve’s cheeks turn pink and you’re so totally and completely in love with him it physically hurts when he whispers, “As you wish,” and presses his lips to yours. 
It’s not a sweet and quick kiss like he intended, you’re a little greedy with it. Fingers clutching his sweatshirt, mouth parting over his and he can’t help but hold your cheeks and pull you in deeper. 
“I’m seriously going to puke in your car Steven, and it’s not from the alcoholic beverages I’ve consumed tonight.”
Robin’s annoyed tone sends a giggle ripping through you, breaking the kiss and your hands release him and Steve takes a moment to take you in longer. Lips a little redder and glossier, eyes shimmering under fluttering eyelashes and his thumbs brush over your cheeks and he sighs, “You’re trouble, you know that?”
A grin and a kiss to his palm as your eyes look up at him innocently but your mouth forms a smirk tells him you definitely know. 
He releases you reluctantly and closes the door carefully before jogging around the front of the car. Absolutely worth the flick to his ear he receives from Robin as he brings your hand up to his lips, pressing a kiss to your knuckles before letting his hand rest on your thigh. 
The drive to McDonald’s is not long, just down a few blocks, but it feels like years to your tipsy state. Steve’s fingers brush your thigh back and forth, setting your skin on fire despite the layer of fabric between them. Aimlessly playing with his fingers, brushing over his wrist before a song on the radio catches your attention. 
Steve watches as you light up, turning the dial and proceed to belt out almost every lyric wrong, but somehow manage to try to sing along to the guitar and the drums at the same time. You end up leaning across the console, fingers playing with his hair, his ear, his jaw and it takes every ounce of his willpower to keep his eyes on the road. 
“Keep your hands to yourself until I’m out of the car please, I’m begging you,” Robin moans from her totally horizontal position in the backseat, eyes glaring at you. 
Your frown is amusing, like a kid told they can’t have their cookie until after they eat their vegetables and you pout. Your fingers trail back to Steve’s on your thigh as he orders for you all at the drive thru. Perking up as you tug on his sleeve. “Stevie, don’t forget-”
“Oh, can I get extra sweet and sour please?”
Your smile is brighter than the neon light from the yellow arches illuminating the car and he knows he really is a goner after you do a little dance in the seat as the fries and nuggets hit your lips. Peeking up at him as you sip your shake, wiping your lips before asking, “What?”
He shakes his head. “Nothing, you’re just really cute.”
You duck your head down and hide your smile in your last nugget as Robin sighs around her fries. She leans forward as Steve pulls up to the curb outside of her place and wraps her arms around you from behind and squeezes, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” 
You start to turn, “What are you talking about, I’m staying the-”
Robin kisses your temple and starts to get out, “No you’re not. Have a good night lovebirds!” She calls loudly, saluting with fries in her hand before entering her apartment building. 
Snow that’s turned to rain fully and hitting the roof of the car mingles with the music playing softly and you smile at him. Voice suddenly shy and quiet as you ask, “Your place?”
Steve can't get you home fast enough. You’re all cherries and chocolate ice cream and salt - stolen kisses at every stop sign. Giggling as he tells you that you gotta stop or he’s gonna get a ticket, placating you with more fries and asking about your night. 
He’s driving himself a little crazy as he finally pulls to a stop in front of his place, fingers gathering yours and pulling you out of the car and up the front steps. Steve wants to let your hands wander, to keep that smile on your face, but he can see the food turned your tipsiness to sleep and it tugs on you, making your limbs heavier and your eyelids flutter more. He knows that as soon as your head hits the pillow, you’re going to be out. The responsible thing to do is to get you to bed. 
As the door closes, you lean in to kiss Steve like you’ve been wanting to all night. Desperate to disappear into each other without the impatient and annoyed eyes of Robin next to you any longer. Fingers tugging at the strings of his hoodie, pulling Steve’s body against yours. Your lips attach to his with no intent of ever letting them go. 
“Missed you,” a breathless pant against his lips as you continue your assault on them, hands sliding into his hair and scratching at his scalp. Smiling around his lips as he groans at the feeling, his hands landing on either side of your head to catch himself. 
Pulling away despite your whine of protest, he kisses your neck, nibbling a little before pressing more kisses into your skin. Your back arches and he sighs, this is definitely going to be harder than he anticipated. Words lost in your skin between kisses up and down your neck, “Missed you too.”
Steve can’t believe the words he’s about to say, especially when you’re looking at him like that. Kiss swollen lip tucked between your teeth, skin flushed - glitter and sweat kissed, curls of your hair falling loose and framing eyes that seem to be reading his thoughts and hungry with an equal amount of want. 
Steve’s eyes warm, cinnamon and moss melting and climbing over you and you want to let him take every inch, want to tell him it’s all his. The pad of his thumb brushes over your bottom lip as he swallows harshly. He pulls at it, letting it pop out in a pout that he kisses slower and sweeter than before. Steve sighs into your lips as you part further for him, fingers trailing down to his jaw to hold him closer to you. 
His forehead pressed to yours, his words are a breath against your lips, “Come on, time for bed, trouble.”
Is it the alcohol or is it Steve’s lips and words that make everything feel a little off kilter? He makes you dizzy, and giddy and he’s the one who’s trouble because you weren’t supposed to fall this hard for a boy like him. He can’t possibly want a girl like you. 
As your eyes flutter open, he’s pulling at your hands, thumb brushing over your knuckles and leading you down the hallway. Not stopping at the bedroom, but continuing on to the bathroom. Steve hands you your toothbrush, kissing your temple with the promise of a change of clothes. Leaving you to stare at your reflection and wonder why Steve saying ‘time for bed’ and actually meaning to go to sleep has your stomach alive with more butterflies than before. 
Steve cares about you. He’s not trying to sleep with you, he doesn’t care that you woke him up or made him get you McDonald’s at two in the morning. He let you leave and he cleaned up yours and Robin’s mess. Steve cares about you. 
He returns, setting you on the lip of the tub as he rummages in the medicine cabinet. 
“Aha! Found em,” he mumbles, pulling makeup remover wipes down and crouching in front of you. 
Instead of handing you one, Steve gently wipes at your skin whispering something about how you really didn’t need all of this stuff, you know that right? Every word and every pass of his thumb with the cloth over your skin knocks a stone loose in your resolve. A paper thin wall between your heart and his now. It aches, your heart pounds loudly in your chest, filling your ears. Palms sweating, fingertips itching, breath catching like you’re about to take a jump off of a cliff. 
Mouth dry as the words that yearn to come out sit ready on your tongue. Instead, your fingers catch his chin and you kiss him. Chaste and quick, eyebrows raised at him, “Why are you so sweet to me? What d’ya like me or something Steve?” 
Steve tosses the wipe covered in makeup, kissing your wrist before tugging at the same hand and pulling you up to stand. Heart hammering, denting and breaking the armor he keeps around it. He could say it. He wants to say it. 
But he doesn’t. 
He lifts your arms and you giggle as he pulls your shirt from you and slips one of his own over your head instead. Kissing each of your cheeks as your jeans drop to the floor and he helps you step out of them. He sighs, catching your jaw like you had just caught his. “Yeah, something like that.”
Rising onto your toes, hands on each side of his face, you whisper through a smile, “How embarrassing. You like me? Do you like really like me like me or-”
Steve presses his lips to yours, arms wrapping around your waist and you sigh, hands falling to rest flat against his chest. His lips move over yours languidly. Lazy and sweet kissing that has you melting into his body. He knows he needs to stop kissing you, that you should go to bed. But he can’t stop, like your lips have a love potion in them and he’s under your spell. 
Steve lifts you, carrying you to the bedroom and your kissing becomes a little sloppy, your smile forcing you to break apart for a breath. He lays you on the bed, arms on either side of your head as he hovers over you. You giggle into his lips as he pesters you with quick kisses over your face, “What’s,” kiss, “So,” kiss, “Funny?”
He nibbles on your bottom lip and pulls away and you’re eager to chase his lips, hands looping around his neck. Laughing into his smile and kiss as you sing, “You like me so much. You want to kiss me, you want to date me, you want to -”
Steve kisses your teasing away again, this time a little more passionately - like he’s trying to say all of the words he wants to with just a kiss. Stealing your breath from you, but then again he can’t really steal something you’re willing to give. 
He pulls away, cradling your jaw and relishing in the dazed look on your face. He whispers into your lips as he kisses you again, “I’m gonna go get you some water, Gracie Lou.”
Smiling to himself down the hall as you finally find your voice and shout, “I knew you liked that movie!”
Steve can’t be gone for more than a minute, but when he returns, your chest rises and falls evenly, puffs of breath leaving your slightly parted lips and your face relaxed. Water to your side of the bed, he lifts the covers and slips you under them, flicking off the lamp and sliding in next to you. 
Half asleep, you roll immediately. Leg slipping and tangling between his, hand on his stomach and cheek pressed to his chest. Steve lets his fingers glide over your spine, gently rubbing back and forth until his own eyes start to flutter closed. He’s going to tell you in the morning. He’ll make breakfast and coffee and he’ll finally tell you-
“I love you.”
It’s a breath against his skin, the words making goosebumps rise on it and his stomach flip. He feels you shift, your breathing heavy and your eyes still closed as far as he can tell. 
“What?” he whispers to you and you don’t respond. Raising his head to peek at you, making sure you really are asleep, daring to ask again, “Y/N, baby,” he licks his lips, fingers sweating, “What did you just say?”
Nothing but a soft snore comes from you and Steve smiles so wide his cheeks hurt. He pulls you closer, practically on top of him and kisses your temple. 
You love him. Arms wrapping around you tightly, he decides he’ll never tell you that you said it because he was going to be first. 
Steve Harrington is in love with you too. 
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Thank you for reading! Please let me know what you thought, and I hope you consider reblogging my work to get it circulated to new readers - thanks for being here 💛
Steve Tag List: @boomhauer @loveshotzz @myobmaya @sweetsweetjellybean @pastel-pillows @littlesubbyflower @aftermidnightwriting
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pastelbakugou · 6 months
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That's Not My Name: Bakugou x Reader
18+ content, so minors DNI. Katsuki here is written as an 18 year old 3rd year. The reader is written as a transfer student here, who joined class A1 at the end of the 2nd year. This fic takes place at the beginning of their 3rd year. This did end up turning into a 3 part series, you can find the other parts below
Part 1: You are here
Part 2: Here
Part 3: Here
Trigger warning ⚠️ Cussing, Katsuki pops a boner, degradation, Katsuki learns something about himself, Mina calls you girl once, but there are no other mentions of the reader's body except tight clothes. All characters are aged up to 18+ If I missed any, let me know!
Katsuki had no idea what hell he was getting into when he started to call you nicknames instead of your actual name. Yeah, his stupid classmates would piss and moan at him about the unpleasant names he called them. Or they would correct him like Iida and Jirou regularly did. But you were a whole different story.
It all first started one day after class. You were in the common area with your classmates. Mina had just put on Dance Dance Revolution and had picked out the song Salt by Ava Max. It was your current song fixation, so of course you leapt at the chance to dance to it with her. You started copying the dancers on the screen, adding some extra sass to your movements during the refrain, causing Mina to howl at you. "Get it, girl!" She cheered, copying the same movements.
You finished the dance with flare and stepped out of the way, so Hagakure and Aoyama could take your place. You walked into the kitchen to grab yourself a glass of water, leaning your back against the counter afterwards to watch your two classmates dance to Diamonds by Rihanna.
"Move it, Salt." Katsuki hissed at you, as you were blocking the cabinet he wanted to access. " 'cuse you?" You retorted, turning to face him and taking a sip of your glass while making direct eye contact with him. "You heard me." He grumbled at you. "Yeah, I did. But that wasn't the problem." You countered, setting your glass down. "First of all, 'please' would have been nice. Also, that's not my name and you know it." "Yeah, what of it?" He said, narrowing his eyes at you.
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Your eyes widened as you realized this fucker was challenging you. Well, he was in for a world of bruised ego because where you came from, you were called 'The Comeback Queen' and the 'Queen of Petty'.
"Hmph." You huffed at him, grabbing your glass and moving out of his way. Katsuki grabbed the bag of spicy chips he wanted from the cabinet, completely unaware of the emotional tirade he had just subscribed himself to.
The following day, you stood in line with your classmates as you took turns drawing cards with numbers to determine who would be teamed up with who for the next exercise. You were pleased to be paired with Todoroki for the practice, but groaned when you discovered you would be up against Momo and Bakugou.
Momo pleaded with Bakugou to listen to her so they could come up with a decent game plan as to best counter your's and Shouto's quirks. "I don't need a plan to beat that Icyhot bastard or that Salty bitch." He barked at Momo.
That did it! If he thought of you as nothing but a salty bitch then you were gonna live up to the name. "Whatever, you poor excuse for a firecracker." You immediately shot back. "Huh?! What did you say?!" Bakugou shouted in your direction. "You heard me." You said sassily cocking your head at him as you reiterated what he had said to you the day before.
For one of the first times in his life, Katsuki Bakugou was speechless, having quite literally received a taste of his own medicine. He opened his mouth to snap back, but nothing came out. "What? You can give it, but you can't take it? Pathetic. I have no respect for people like you." You spat and shook your head, pursing your lip in disgust. You knew in your heart you didn't mean it. You actually had a lot of respect for Katsuki and his abilities, and he wasn't bad looking, but he didn't need to know that.
Katsuki could feel his face grow hot with embarrassment, but to everyone else, it just looked like anger. He was also starting to grow somewhere else, much to his surprise and dismay. "Fuck.." He whispered to himself under his breath, trying to will his rising erection to go down.
Training started, and you took Katsuki head-on despite Todoroki's objections, wanting to knock him down a peg or two. You held your own against him, blocking an attack aimed at you with your quirk. "Is that all you got, you badly behaved pomeranian?" You quipped at him. Katsuki wondered to himself if you had always been this attractive, and he just never noticed?
He was now suddenly aware of the way your hero costume hugged you in all the right places and how your body rippled against the fabric. You let out a loud guttural grunt as you unleashed an attack on him. He hadn't realized he had zoned out staring at your body and took the full force of your attack.
The wind got knocked out of him as he hit the ground. He immediately recovered, propping himself up on a knee as he took cover behind a broken brick wall. "Oh, so you like taking a beating? I bet you like getting your ass spanked, too." You hollered at him from over the wall.
Katsuki had never been so grateful that he designed his costume pants to be baggy because his erection was all the way up and ready to perform. "Shut up!" He snarled at you, vaulting over the wall.
The next thing you knew, Katsuki had you pinned against the same wall he had just taken cover behind. He gripped both of your hands in one of his and held them over your head. You panted heavily, glaring up at him, but your eyes softened when you realized that something else was going on.
Bakugou was blushing, from the bridge of his nose to the tips of his ears. "Shut up, or I'm going to make you take responsibility for this." He growled into your ear as he pressed his hard-on against your thigh. You gasped and blushed, your entire face going red.
"You fucking started it." You snapped at him, referring to his name calling the day before. "I fuckin' know." He retorted, moving his crotch away from your leg, but not letting go of your hands. Your blush started to lessen as a devious smirk climbed your lips. "Bakugou, do you enjoy being degraded?" You pressed, licking your lips in amusement, when he looked away and curled his lips inward.
"I said shut UP!" He snarled, tightening his grip against your hands. You winced as the blood flow to your hands started to dissipate. "I. HEARD. YOU." You punctuated every word with a pause. "And I don't give a fuck." You venomously spat, grinning at him wickedly.
Katuski ripped his hand away from yours, finally unpinning you from the wall and turned away from you. "I told you I'm going to make you take responsibility." He grumbled at you over his shoulder. "I'm aware." You hummed at him, brushing past him as the end of training was announced.
"Just let me know when you're, 'ready for me to take responsibility', ya defective firework." You said, your hands making air quotes as you walked away. Katuski took a deep breath, knowing he was either going to have to change in stall or wait for all his classmates to leave before him. One thing he knew for certain. You were going to be the death of him.
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wisteriagoesvroom · 2 months
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📚 10 f1 fics i've loved lately 🏎️
been thinking a lot about how to organise fic recs into some sort of sensible post, 'cus there are so many (great!) pairings and (delicious!) driver combinations, not to mention so many varying styles of fic and SUPER TALENTED WRITERS!!111!!
just gonna list a bunch in no particular order, with accompanying pics, so you can get a sense of the vibes.
'cus what is f1 rpf but all about the ✨ vibes?! 🏁
p.s. people are in this community making amazing stuff for freeee!! if you liked these please leave a kudos or a comment, it makes a writer's day 🫡 
let's gooooo--
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objects in the mirror by linearity (@drivestraight) charles/max. 87k words (series), rated t then e
listen. LISTEN! charles to rbr is one of the best premises ever and i will read it in like a thousand iterations. but this fic. this fic series in particular cleared my skin, made me want to cut my hair into a bob out of sheer emotion. i would be remiss not to start with this one because its impact on my f1 rpf trajectory should be studied by science. you know when a story just jumps off the page and it's so real that it becomes your canon. a kind of meteoric inevitability. plus, i almost never cry at fics. but by the time the third act of this one hit, i just went -- damn, am i rly about to tear up at a f1 rpf fanfiction rn? (yes.)
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sawtooth by nottonyharrison (@nottonyharrison) charles/max. 40k words, rated e
max as a f1 engineer? for CARLOS at FERRARI? sign me the fuckkk up. first off, awesome premise. there's always going to be something so heartwrenching about "what ifs", especially in any universe where max isn't a racer. despite the change of circumstances, just... the sheer poetry of two characters who just inexplicably find their way to each other in any universe... 🤧 also this story nails racing scenes in a way that's so visceral, i feel like a fly on the damn halo with them. and, aside from the gourmet lestappen, carlos's whole thing in this fic is joyous! spicy! he's so unapologetic and vaguely annoying! hilarious! + the swimming pool scene lives rent-free in my head.
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salt skin by peachbellini (@strawberry-daiquiris) oscar/lando. 12k words, rated e
this fic is magic. literally and figuratively. (MERMAID LANDO???? MERMAID LANDO.) the kind of story that makes you gasp and melt a little bit. and made me want to throw my phone at the writer, 'cause it's really that good. the yearning, the metaphor for all that's monstrous, a boy who is lost (and the boy who he finds, is equally so). this is just beautifully written and a little quirky and so well executed. i think i put it in my bookmarks as "what if lando was a mermaid and it was filmed by a24" or something. pearl of a story.
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hockey!! shrimp colors :) by leafmeal0ne (@ocontraire) oscar/lando. 13k words, rated t
leaf meal one. i have only known you a week but if anything were to happen to you i would wreck everyone in the room including myself. in all seriousness, anything that leaf writes is brilliant. they're one of these writers who could do a throwaway line on the label of a ketchup bottle and i will probably scream about it. the precision, the way they switch up sentence structures, the freaking darcy-level regency yearning transposed onto a contemporary sports setting. i'd rec all of leaf's sports AUs and i'll probably talk about more in a future fic rec post. BUT. the hockeyyy one my GOD. the barely restrained violence, their mutual desire, the theme of finding your place... *wails uncontrollably*
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you almost unearthly thing by anonymous max/daniel, 3.7k words, rated g
max is a governess(govern..lad?) and daniel is the mystery man at the manor. this was a response to a request i made in the kinkmeme! (if you haven't read those fics go check 'em out, there are so many great ones, and not necessarily all rated e). this is a criminally underrated little story that has my favourite repressed feelings + people dancing around each other + gothic vibes + "what the hell is wrong with y'all in this tale" combo that i really adore. it's really well written and captures the atmosphere so well.
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the so-called narrative by antimonyandthyme (@antimonyandthyme) oscar/carlos, 10k words, rated e
i'm once again asking why there are only 7 carlos/oscar works in the tag. I'M ONCE AGAIN ASKING-- *is sedated*. *jolts awake* okay but for real this is a great story. hot, fake-friendship-to-situationship which so happens is one of my favourite places to be. also hello miscommunication/they're so weird about it/they both want each other but can't express themselves for shit/insane racer boys energy.
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and silver, and samarium by pink_mink (@on-softs) george/toto, 5.2k words, rated e
i profess i am not usually the biggest fan of A/B/O (altho!! this fandom has made me go BUT ACTUALLY HM at least a few times). and this fic freaking nails it, along with the twisted power dynamics between TPs and drivers, as seen through the lens of omegaverse. this story rattles around my head like a stubborn ghoul just from the style and prose and sheer audacity alone. george kneeling at toto's knees while he's working..... ohhhhhhhhh i was this close to calling my lawyers.
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algorithm by anney (@badboy-george) charles/max, 16k words, rated e
i LOVE, LOOOOVE a sci fi concept alright. love that shit, will inhale it like moon dust with zero regrets. and what a fantastic one this one is!! the premise is that the FIA can now statistically show the compatibility of drivers on the grid and it's very pacific rim-y drift compatible, mixed with the surreal vibes of eternal sunshine or HER or some such. it should be outrageous, but it really works. that's the beauty of a great fic right there.
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trajectory of trojan asteroids by redpaint (@redpaint) nico/lewis, 3.3k words, rated g
also one of the fics i first read when i hopped on board the f1 rpf train. the pain and poignancy just gets worse the more i learn about brocedes. you know when you're like "there's no way this was reallll" and then you're like "fuck, it was so real". then you get a fic like this that just encapsulates all that rage and loss and grief and upset, set against the starry vista of endless space. *clutches tablecloth* god.
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p.s please bear in mind that these recs are entirely subjective! i enjoy loads of f1 stories but these are the ones that have especially stuck with me for some inexplicable reason.
p.p.s if your fic is on here and you want it taken off for whatever reason, i'm happy to, no questions asked 💛
BYE for now / until part 2. (i also love talking to ppl about fics so pls feel free to send an ask or hit me up in DMs or whatever.)
xoxo, -- wizz
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sashi-ya · 2 months
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𝑻𝑶 𝑺𝑻𝑬𝑨𝑳 𝑨 𝑯𝑬𝑨𝑹𝑻. Trafalgar Law x F! Reader
🌨 a/n: so I recently been to Austria, a country I often visit since it's literally like a dream. (plus, my mom knew she was pregnant with me there, so I was used to come back to Innsbruck as much as I could with her). But in any case I got inspired there to write this little fic, that might -or not- be a multi chapter one if you all like it. The place exists and the scam part, happened to me -kinda, the airbnb existed, but not as it was listed :P- but in any case, please enjoy and don't forget to leave some feedback if you want more~ ❄ tw: a very sfw story, that might evolve into something else if you want me to keep writing about their trip 😏 ☃ wc: 2.6k
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Hijacking for the first time, what could go wrong? Maybe everything, maybe nothing.
A two-month long trip all around Europe has found you on a little village of Austria. Your boots are cold, but luckily they are snow proof ones. Your skin all bumpy, your cheeks irritated. It’s been snowing all night, and despite the sun rising for now, some clouds in the sky menace with more white blessing to fall upon your shoulders very soon.
Those little mountain streets around the Alps are wonderful, they surround mountains going up and down and in a spiral way. But those are wonderful, as long as you can drive a car with heating. And you don’t have one right now.
The crunchy sound of the snow beneath your boots mix with the melody of a glacial river running in between the mountain and the road. It is certainly beautiful, the little rocks and stones being bathed by such pure and cold water, the rests of dry leaves and some moss growing on an everlasting shadow casted by tall, enormous peaks.  Everything is worth taking a picture, but you should prioritize your battery life this time around. The GPS is sometimes wonky, being that high can affect the service.
Many cars have passed by, but none of them have stopped. Little lorries carrying logs pass, cars completely drenched in dirty snow and that mix of salt that roads have during winters.
However, just when your hopes for finding someone to at least give you a ride to the next village were about to run out, the yellow shine of an old VW ban flashes before your eyes.
There, behind a curve -a very dangerous one if you ever went to the mountains- something smells like smoke and a tall man of white furry hat swears up to the skies.
You walk towards him, carefully. Who knows what is happening? Who knows who that man is capable of? There is one thing you are sure, however, and it is that this man is absolutely mad at his old van.
When peaking behind a dark wooden tree that’s now covered in spots of white snow, you discover the annoyed man is a young -handsome- one.
His van, a little rusty but still cute, seems to be having problems to keep going and the smoke coming from it shows it very well.
“Sir? Sir! Your van is catching fire!” you announce, realizing the smoke is indeed a very serious issue.
The guy of chocolate skin and tattooed hands turns around to look immediately at you and then to the back of the van. Those 70’s vehicles had actually their engines right in the back instead of the front.
And Indeed, you were right. Apparently the climb had been too tough for the poor old VW and its engine couldn’t take it any longer.
He quickly opens the back door, maybe searching for a fire extinguisher while you grab fistfuls of snow in an attempt to put down the incipient flames. Quickly enough, and with not many damages to count, the fire stops, and the only thing left is a big black spot on the back of the caravan.
“Thank you” he says, as dry as hopefully your socks. “No problem. What happened? Did the engine over heat?” you ask, curious despite his “I don’t want friends” face. “Yes; these hills are no joke. This never happened to my Polar, but there is always a first time…” he sighs, assessing the damage with a sad expression.
Apparently his van has a name; “Polar”. That’s very cute, and his eyes too. A golden shine in them looks even beautiful with the pristine white around. His tattoos do as well. You wonder about his name, and what is he doing on the road, but you are not sure if it’s proper to ask. However, he asks first.
“What are you doing here? do you have a car?” he mumbles, his voice is as attractive as he is. His eyes scan the place, but nothing catches his attention.
“No, I am actually hijacking. No one stopped so I started walking before the sun starts going down. I definitely got scammed; the Airbnb I was supposed to stay in didn’t, in fact, exist.
He grunts, almost silently. Apparently he is not happy with what happened to you but that’s it.
“Well, that’s so unsafe. I am sorry I can’t give you a ride right now. Apparently none of us have been blessed with good luck today” he says, walking around his vehicle with long legs covered in spotted jeans.
You nod. Your tongue is aching to ask about him, but you clearly catch the hint… he doesn’t want you there.
“Yep. Well, I wish you luck! I must keep going” “Same to you, be careful”
He doesn’t even look at you, something that makes you -somehow- very sad. In any case, you start walking away. There is no point in staying there… even if you have great mechanical skills that could help.
And as you do, you also have a very, very loud consciousness voice screaming at you on how could you leave him with no solution if you know it…
“Sir, you should check your water level…”  you shout, a few meters away from him. The sound of your voice echoes in the huge natural immensity of the Alps and his golden eyes finally fall upon you.
He stops moving for some seconds, lost in you. You, as well, wait for him to say something else. Something like “stay with me” or “don’t go”. A total stranger you want to hang up with. A total unknown woman he wants to protect.
“You know how to fix this?” “I do…”
Or so that was what you thought.  
No more than a couple of minutes took you to help him out. VW vans are noble machines; they are durable and easy to fix despite their particular design. And soon, as a part of your payment, the man that you learned is called Law and you drove away through intricate roads and huge snowflakes.
“Where are you going, (Name)-ya?” he asks, handing you an old cover from an old comic, Germa 66.
“I was supposed to stay for a couple of days in Bad Goisern, and then I thought of visiting Salzburg. I am on a long trip through Europe. What about you?”  you ask, cuddling with the blanket. A certain blessing for your freezing hands.
He nods, checking the breaks before going down the hill.
“I am too. I just graduated medical school and I thought of taking a little vacation before my residency starts. I’m going to be a surgeon. A cardiac surgeon” he tells, full of dreams he fails to cover up behind a tough guy expression.
You celebrate his success, and the next couple of hours become a ping pong of questions and answers. A smile on your face that leaves your cheeks hurting accompanies you until the sun hides and the little lights on the mountains start to scatter.
You didn’t want to go down in the first village, nor the second, nor the third. Law, didn’t want you to go down his van either. You named Salzburg, and he promised you to take you there.
But the night found both of you, and apparently your mechanical skills weren’t as good as you thought the would… Polar decided to stop, in the middle of nowhere during a dark, very dark winter night.
You close your eyes as the sound of rusty gears fail and Law’s annoyance grows stronger than ever. When Polar finally loses all of the power, Law manages to agonizingly park on the side of the road and a huge sighs escapes his lips.
You peak through your left eye; his DEATH tattooed fingers squeeze the wheel, and you know he will snap at any moment. But he doesn’t…
“I’m sorry. I thought- I-“ you try to give a plausible apologize, even though you had nothing to do with it.
“No. It is not your fault… it is mine- As we didn’t stop, I have completely forgotten to fuel Polar up” Law says, absolutely mortified for such stupid mistake. Apparently you were enough distraction to keep him from the basics of road tripping.
You breath alleviated and try to stop your upcoming laughter. Your grimacing did nothing to hide it, and a big burst of laughter took over the van and everything around.
Law looks at you pissed, but a soft smirk garnishes his lips. You can’t stop, perhaps it isn’t that funny… but you feel so happy right now. And you have no idea why, since you are literally stranded in a very dark wood with temperatures below 0C and snow pooling on top of that van.
“Welp, it’s ok. We should wait until tomorrow, then” you say, knowing the risks. “You- you prefer spending the night in here? aren’t you afraid of dying?” he asks, surprised.
“I am, in fact, scared of dying. That’s why I know very well I can’t walk during a snowstorm in the middle of the night in the Alps. Plus, you are too sweet to be considered a threat” you joke, searching for some chocolate inside your backpack.
Law narrows his eyes, deepening his frown. Apparently being called “sweet” and “not a threat” is not something he enjoys.
“I could cut you open and took all of your organs out during the night” he says, serious as hell. “Go for it. Don’t forget to steal my heart, doctor” you laugh, taking your jacket off.
Law is flabbergasted; he has never confronted someone like you before… but he is beginning to like it now.
A bar of chocolate that you had kept in your backpack for too long lays too close to his nose. You shake it, offering its sweetness to him.
He takes it but doesn’t eat it. Instead, his hand gets pressed against the window behind you. Law has pinned you against the door of your side. He is not a very muscular man, but he is indeed very tall and lean… if he wanted, he could do anything to you.
Your eyes widen, big as the moon. You swallow, thinking maybe walking through the forest might be a safer option.
“L-Law… I- didn’t mean to-“ you tremble, asking yourself where did you put the Victorinox blade you bought in Switzerland… it should be enough to defend yourself, right?
You notice his chest is also tattooed as his clothes open just a little. His arms, are too. His scent, despite the danger, smells deliciously tempting…
“Don’t trust strangers that easily, (Name)-ya” he whispers, a few centimetres from your lips. Letting you go after and biting the chocolate bar as if nothing has just happened.
You remain there, frozen up with your eyes widen and your lips softly trembling. He is, in fact, very right. Law is indeed a stranger, after all.
When oxygen finally begins to reach your lungs and brain again, you move and blink the dry eyes away. Silently you sit back, properly. You aren’t able to say anything, somehow you have run out of words.
You squeeze the blanket he gave you, covering you as much as you could, making yourself as tiny as possible on that old leather seat.
“Are you ok?” he asks, so nonchalantly.
“Ye-yes, I’m… ok” you mumble back, almost sticking yourself to the passenger door. “Is it ok if I go to sleep? I’m tired”
Law nods, confused. Maybe he was just joking around, but it did scare you big time. He goes down the van and opens the back doors. You look at him disappearing in the darkness until a very little glimpse of silver light coming from the moon filters through the doors.
But, soon after, fairy lights illuminate the back allowing you to discover a very cozy space behind the front seats.
“I am glad I installed this independently from the fuel tank. I have a little power generator for the back. It’s not a hotel bed, but it does the job” he says, showing you a precarious mattress covering the entire floor of the vehicle.
You smile softly, it looks cozy and pretty. The walls are full of random posters and maps, and there is even an old picture of a younger Law with three more guys wearing fancy hats with something written in the snow. You take a closer look at it, to discover it says, “Pirates of Heart” and you giggle. What a peculiar gang name.
“Law, this is really cute. You even have a lot of blankets and cushions!” you chime, easing a little bit.
“My best friend Bepo decorated it for me, I only helped him with the lights” he says, a little embarrassed.
You jump right back, leaving your backpack in the front seat and forgetting everything for the moment. What a reckless lover girl.
“I am going to sleep in the front seat, don’t worry. Use as many blankets as you need” he informs you, closing the back doors and leaving you there. You most probably were to say “no, stay here” but you simply couldn’t.
After all, this tattooed doctor is a gentleman. Right?
You let yourself rest for a bit on that improvised bed, with your sight blurring while looking at the fairy lights. The scent of the blankets and pillows is the same as him, something you secretly enjoy without even knowing. You catch a glimpse of the reflection of him sitting in the front through the back windows, at how he takes his hat off revealing a dark shade of onyx spiky hair.
For the next half an hour, or maybe less, you both become silent. The only sounds are the huge slaps of snow falling from the sky against the van and the subtle whistle of the wind filtering through the doors.
It is cold, but it’s probably colder in the front as Law is only using his Germa 66 blanket to cover up…
“Law? Are you awake?” you ask, shyly.
“Mh? Yes... why?” he asks back, with not much emotion but a soft tremble on his voice. He is probably cold, very cold.
“I feel bad for you; you must be freezing. There is plenty of room back here, you could sleep here. It’s ok with me” you say, taking advantage of not being in front of him.
Law takes a few minutes to move, but he ultimately does. He hops to where you are and sits there crossing his long legs. He is not wearing his black leather boots, so you can see Sora’s socks.
“Cool socks” you say, sitting right in front of him watching his cheeks go blushed. “Here, cover up. You are freezing, doc”
Both of you cover up with heavy blankets and fall into the mattress at the same time, facing each other.
Maybe, it is too strong to deny it. The attraction is natural, and you both can’t stop it… Exactly like the wind and cold reaching your skins.
“I am still cold” you mumble.
“I read in one of my books that the best way to keep the warmth of our bodies is to share it… skin to skin” he whispers, unable to take his eyes away from your lips.
“Is that so?” you breathe, coming closer to his embrace, allowing his arms to surround your frame and your hips to join with the other’s.
His forehead slowly touches yours, the bridge of your noses do as well. Your fingers, playfully but slowly, crawl to the crook of his neck. While his, squeeze your waist with delicate dominance. A leg that snake into the other’s, crossing, tangling…
Lips coming closer, so close. Breaths warming up, going faster and bumpy. Hearts that indeed had been stolen, the first kiss of two strangers, meeting for the very first time like two snowflakes join while falling from an endless sky
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤWill they continue their journey together? 🦢
153 notes · View notes
its-time-to-write · 10 months
Note
Thank you so much for the response to my request <3. the fic was better then I could have hoped!!!!
I have a new request (but feel free to focus on the story themes you were wanting to do!), I have been really wanting to see a Jamie fic where he takes care of sick reader. Could be period or illness (no preference) and Jamie has no idea how to help but tries his best. I think its a cute idea
Can't wait to read more of your fics!
Thank you so much for requesting!! Literally love when people ask me to write things. Also, apparently everyone loves a sickfic because my other one has the most notes of everything I’ve written. Anyway, here’s your fic!
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there’s orange juice in the kitchen
You are not sure of much, but you know one thing: you’re in pain. It’s 2am, and you’ve gotten a grand total of two hours of sleep. You’ve given up on laying in your bed and have filled up your bath with hot water, bubbles, and bath salts. Lots of bath salts. Your abdomen feels like it’s shredding itself and you suppose, technically speaking, it is. You’re just relieved that tomorrow is the weekend and you don’t have to slog through a work day, white-knuckling these absolutely ripping period cramps. 
You don’t have regular periods like, ever, and your doctor’s concerned about your fertility. You remember waving it off with the statement, “That’s a problem for another day.” Thing is, that was just a cop-out. You didn’t want to think about it for a single second because then it would become real, and you make it a personal point never to complain about a period no matter how brutal it is because at least it’s something and never mind that your last one was four months ago, you’re ok. You have a good life and good people and you’re fine. 
It’s just the principle, you know? The desire of choice. 
The hormones don’t help either. 
But anyway, you’re in your tiny bath trying to soothe the pain you’re in, trying to make yourself tired enough to fall asleep once you get out. You breathe, in, out. In, out. 
You’re up till 6am when you finally doze off. 
You wake up in a sweaty haze. You’re in soft pants and a large t-shirt, on top of your sheets rather than in them. You reach for your phone then pull your legs in with a sharp gasp. You’re still in pain. 
It subsides so you reach again and check the time. 9:01. You groan. Three hours of dubious sleep is not enough. You have a missed text from Sam (remind me which brand of kitchenware you use?) two missed texts from Keeley (look at this absolutely adorable puppy! Attached: 1 Image), and a missed call from Jamie. 
Ah, right. Jamie. 
Your boyfriend. 
Who you were supposed to meet for breakfast exactly sixteen minutes ago. 
Shit. 
You call him back and he answers on the first ring. 
“Hey love!” he says. “You alright? Not like you to miss breakfast.”
You grimace. “I uh, I wasn’t feeling well last night and I haven’t slept very good. I forgot to text you. Didn’t fall asleep until 6.”
“A.M.?” Jamie asks and you reply to the affirmative. He lets out a long “shiiit,” followed by a, “how contagious are you?”
“For you? Not very,” you say. “For another girl, incredibly contagious, although some say that’s an old wive’s tale.”
Jamie is silent in confusion, then- “Ohh, I get it! You’re not sick-sick, you’re on your fucking period.”
You chuckle, despite remaining curled up on your side. 
“Yes,” you reply, “My fucking period. I feel nauseous and tired and I am bleeding so. Much. It’s like my body’s making up for the last four months of nothing.”
Jamie’s silent for a moment and you internally cringe, kicking yourself for over sharing. You haven’t been together that long, about a month and a half, and he doesn’t need to know that about you. He’s a famous footballer, after all, and a guy’s guy. Probably gets grossed out about periods and stuff. 
Then he says, “Can I come over? I’ll bring food,” and your worries almost completely evaporate. 
“As long as you don’t care about how disgusting I am or the fact that I hurt a lot, sure,” you say. “I’ll leave the door unlocked.”
Jamie’s at your flat in 40 minutes, which is fast considering how much food he walks in with. He’s brought a bag of Chinese takeout, plus two overflowing grocery bags. 
“This is for now, these are for later,” he explains. He’s in a pink sweatshirt with matching shorts and socks, and maybe it’s the damned hormones again but he looks hot. His hair is pushed back with a headband and you want him to fuck you. You don’t think you can convince him, though, what with the blood. And the fact that he’s Jamie fucking Tartt. And that he probably doesn’t do shit like that because it’s gross. 
Your brain whispers, but he’s here, isn’t he? so you just push that thought down to live with other scary ones like, I will never have kids, or I’m going to live with this pain for the rest of my life.
Jamie is oblivious to this, just pulling everything out of the bags and chattering on. He’s kicked off his trainers near the door, and he hasn’t made any comments about the fact that you’ve wrapped a blanket around your shoulders like a shroud, or that your hair is in the messiest bun in the history of the world. Not the sexy, reader-insert fan fiction type of messy bun, either. Just an I-did-not-get-anywhere-NEAR-enough-sleep-last-night messy bun. 
“-and me mum always drank orange juice, swore it helped with bloating or hydration or somethin’, I don’t really know, but I got some of that too and this tea that’s supposed to help with cramps, and also a shit-ton of chocolate because I didn’t know which kind was your favorite. I was thinking we can sit on the couch and watch a movie or play Animal Crossing or some shit while eating the takeout, then I can cook you a proper fucking meal later. Coach always says it’s important to have a balanced meal when you’re under the weather, and I think it applies to this too.” He stops when he notices you just looking at him. “You alright, babe?”
“Yeah, I just- why did you get all this?” you blurt out. 
For the first time since you’ve known him, Jamie looks unsure of himself. “I dunno. I mean, I do know. You didn’t sound great over the phone, and Keeley’s always telling me to fucking listen to other people, and me mum was always the same on her period so I used to get her the things she wanted all the time. And-” he takes a breath, “and I picked up on what you said. The fuckin’ four-months shit. That ain’t good babe. Even I know that. And, we haven’t been together that long, but I’m pretty fucking sure you know that too, and I wanted to let you know I’m sorry.”
You’re momentarily fixed on the way he says certain words. Keeleh. Sorreh. It’s sweet, for some reason, and it causes a dull ache in your chest. You realize what he’s actually said to you and that ache deepens. You’d kiss him if you weren’t sure your breath was gross. 
So instead, you settle for nodding and staring at your kitchen wall. That’s because option one is kissing and option two is crying. You can’t do either right now.
A traitor tear slips out your eye anyway, and you hope Jamie won’t see it. He does. 
“Hey, hey.” He comes around the counter and pulls you into a hug, blanket shroud, messy bun, and all. “Love. It’s alright. It’s alright. You’re not alone, and we’re going to go sit on the couch and eat as much food as we can and then pass out, alright? We’re not going to think about anything else except what’s right in fuckin’ front of us.”
“That was,” you sniff, “weirdly philosophical. And very sweet. And I’m sorry for being disgusting.”
Jamie pulls away from you, and you think this is the first time he’s realized how gross you are. 
“Don’t say that shit, babe,” he says, and you laugh before you realize he isn’t joking. 
“I’m serious,” he continues. “You might feel disgusting, but you aren’t. You smell like fucking lavender, for Christ’s sake. Your pajamas are clean, and so’s your hair. Might be fuckin’ messy right now, but me mum also taught me to braid, so it’s nothing that can’t be fixed.”
You pull him back against you and let some more tears come out. 
“Why are you being so nice,” you ask, voice muffled through his sweatshirt. 
“Oh, dunno,” he replies, hint of a smile in his voice, “Think you’re fit. I like shower sex. You pick.” He pauses. “Maybe both. Heard that it can help with cramps.”
You laugh wetly into his chest. He’s warm and comforting, and so completely not what you expected him to be. You both stand in the kitchen for another minute, his cheek resting on your head before he says, “Oi, you hungry?”
“God, yes,” you say, “I could eat a fucking horse.”
“Good.” Jamie picks up the bulging bag of takeout and a roll of paper towels. “Lead the way, babe.”
It’s not until much later, after you’ve eaten, watched a movie, and showered (and all that implies) that you realize you’re finally tired. Finally calm. You let yourself relax on your bed in Jamie’s arms, breathing in his clean smell. In, out. In, out. By the third breath, you’re asleep. 
477 notes · View notes
annathesillyfriend · 9 months
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Hey there! I hope summer is treating you well 🌞I am currently crying over the fact that I didnt get to see Lizzo at a festival 30 km away from me last week and that I won't see Harry tomorrow in Warsaw, so I decided to distract myself with making this list 😅 I hope that next time I'll be able to tell you that I menaged to get Taylor tickets, so please keep your fingers crossed for me 🥰
To all the writers - I love you and I appreciate you so much!
To all the readers - please, share the fics you read and love. The reblog really makes the change! It’s the least we can do to show our gratitude.
Also, please, mind the writers’ warnings!
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🌊JAKE 'HANGMAN' SERESIN🌊
it's what you make it and and honey, i'll make it all okay by @seresinhangmanjake
↳ two-shot, part of oh, baby universe which is an amazing dad!jake series and you should totally give it a try
you're safe now and bite me by @seresinsweetie
↳ two-shot, 18+, enemies to friends to lovers, i want a weighted blanket for my birthday this year and by weighted blanket i mean jake seresin on top of me, please and thank you
crossing all the lines by @//seresinsweetie
↳ one-shot, 18+, not it's time for a rooster x hangman x reader threesome and it's as hot as it sounds 🥵
hungman by @ddejavvu
↳ one-shot, 18+, roommate!camboy!jake, do i have to say more? whenever i see Daisy's url on my dash, i drop everything i'm doing and go read, such a talented writer!
a love you don't find everyday by @//beccaanne814
↳ series, this story has kept me on my toes and then surprised me in the best way possible, amazing fic 💕
head on your chest, heart in your hands by @jupitercomet
↳ one-shot, soft!jake has a special place in my heart
same 'ol situation by @topguncortez
↳ one-shot, 18+, roommate!jake and it's so good!!
🌊BRADLEY 'ROOSTER' BRADSHAW🌊
how could i forget by @roosterforme
↳ one-shot, I put this particular fic here because it was the first one I read in June but I recommend going through Emily's whole masterlist. I could go on and on about how talented she is 👏I start every single one of my days by reading one of her works. Like literally every day. Thank you for making my morning more bearable 💕
give me your hand and here is my heart by @sometimesanalice
↳ two-shot, 18+, this is a part of a bigger universe that I love with my whole being. please, do yourself a favour and go read it all!
hey, salior by @//sometimesanalice
↳ one-shot, 18+, i am YELLING
warm blood by @notroosterbradshaw
↳ one-shot, another phenomenal fic from another phenomenal author 👏👏 keep slaying!
home and viva la vegas by @honeysimagines
↳ two-shot, i read this like four times in the last month, my love for those fics is out of control
i'll guide you by @bradshawsbitch
↳ one-shot, 18+, i get dizzy and warm all over just by thinkign about this fic 👀
you left your name on my lips by @blurredcolour
↳ one-shot, beautiful fic!
love and loss by @bradshawsbaby
↳ one-shot, what a stunning piece. we all need this kind of support in our lives
if i knew it all then, would i do it again? by @ofstoriesandstardust
↳ one-shot, part of the same mistakes-verse which is a god tier series. this one left me speechless
i was supposed to sweat you out by @theharddeck
↳ one-shot, 18+, friends with benefits, simply delicious 👏👏
i think i love you by @thewulf
↳ one-shot, best friends to lovers, i loved this so very much
where do we go? by @thatlovinfeelin
↳ series, 18+, amazing fic, beautiful story!
salt air, and the rust on your door by @daniellarussoo
↳ one-shot, just a sweet little husband!bradly fic 😌
to love and be loved by @callsigncherub
↳ one-shot, i seriously debated jumping into the sea after reading this one
all consuming by @inklore
↳ one-shot, 18+, Lauren's back at it again with a bloody banger
🌊JAVY 'COYOTE' MACHADO🌊
a little bit of fun and it's not rotten work (not if it's you) by @sushiwriterhere
↳ two-shot, 18+, javy x reader x jake fics, this is just great, i love everything about those stories
the double negative effect by @beyondthesefourwalls
↳ one-shot, there are not enough javy fics out there so i cherish every single one i find, especially ones as good as this one!
training accident by @//foreverrandomwritings
↳ one-shot, another great javy story!
🌊ROBERT 'BOB' FLOYD🌊
supernova by @laracrofted
↳ one-shot, 18+, bob x reader x pheonix threesome, a dream come true 😫
the worst date by @lovingperfectionsblog
↳ one-shot, love this one 💕
the wingman by @//roosterforme
↳ one-shot, 18+, okay we all aready know how much i adore Emily's work but i just had to put this one here cause bob needs all the love he can get!!
shut up and dance with me by @beccaanne814
↳ one-shot, man, the things i'd so for him to dance with me
sick day by @writingdumpster
↳ one-shot, bob's a little bit stuborn here but we're gonna let it slip just this once
girl in a coffee shop by @ohgodnotagainn
↳ one-shot, coffee shop!au, bob as a barista!!!! yes yes yes that all i need in life
🌊MICKEY ' FANBOY' GARCIA🌊
opposites attract by @foreverrandomwritings
↳ one-shot, husband!mickey and he's just so 🥺🥺
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🌊STEVE HARRINGTON🌊
all the time by @bookshelf-dust
↳ one-shot, friends to lovers and fake dating -> ✨cheff's kiss✨
cardigan by @supernovafics
↳ one-shot, professor!steve x professor!reader, angst with happy ending, great work 👏
car kisses by @iridescentprose
↳ one-shot, there is just something so kissable about steve driving a car. i would, too, risk my life to pour some love on that man
this fic by @spicysix
↳ one-shot, being stuck in an elevator may not be an ideal situation but it's whole other thing when steve harrington is there with you
steve-o by @bettysupremacy
↳ one-shot, i just adore this steve
midnight love by @loveshotzz
↳ one-shot, 18+, fuck boy!steve but we fall for him anyway
this fic by @lovebugism
↳ one-shot, 18+, SO DAMN BLOODY GOOD i can't even
this fic by @forever-rogue
↳ one-shot, broke my heart and put it right back together
bad for ussiness by @upsidedownwithsteve
↳ series, 18+, enemies to lovers is the superior trope and this fic is the perfect example, my favourite steve fic honestly
a good dream by @solarluvs
↳ one-shot, 18+, the fact that this will never happen to me in real life is just criminal
keep trying by @lilacletter
↳ one-shot, 18+, an obligatory baby making fic™, they just hit different
cool about it by @mysticmunson
↳ one-shot, if you feel like getting your heart broken, that's a fic for you :')
this love by @forevermoreharrington
↳ one-shot, 18+, a masterpiece really
🌊EDDIE MUNSON🌊
brain like a sieve by @munsster
↳ one-shot, AHHHHHHHHHH is all i have to say on this 😅
sunscreen and chlorine and blue raspberry syrup by @eiightysixbaby
↳ two-shot, 18+, lifeguard!eddie, perfect summer read, just like ice cream on a hot day 🙌
something like this by @taintedcigs
↳ one-shot, a good old truth or dare fic, just what we all love
love me tender by @oneforthemunny
↳ one-shot, 18+, janitor!eddie x teacher!reader, what a stunning piece of work that is 🥺
hot rod by @shamevillain
↳ one-shot, 18+, you will need a shower after reading this 🥵
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🌊RHETT ABBOTT🌊
right where i want you by @//sushiwriterhere
↳ one-shot, 18+, sort of enemies to lovers, i am so normal about this 🙂
hell on heels (part 2) by @strawhbrrries
↳ two-shot, 18+, that bloody cowboy will send us all straight to hell
wildflower, widefire by @sebsxphia
↳ series, 18+, the perfect balance between sweet and sexy 😌😌
the ferris wheel by @lewmagoo
↳ one-shot, i just wanna share funnel cake with rhett abbott, is that too much to ask???
invisible string by @wkndwlff
↳ one-shot, 18+, BEAUTIFUL 😭😭
172 notes · View notes
red-balloon12 · 3 months
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Everybody Hates Lila (And Why It’s Concerning Sometimes)
Lila Rossi is not a stranger in the Miraculous fandom. In fact I’d argue she’s more infamous than Gabriel in some cases. She’s despised by nearly everyone and while some reasons are more justifiable than others, she’s all around not a good person and a mid at best character.
But here’s my deal with it. The fandom hates this girl to I’d like to say an….unhealthy degree. Like the amount of salt this character gets is unmatched. And I feel like the causation of all of this salt doesn’t really live up to the response.
Lila is a liar who causes characters to act out of character very often. And not only that but she also is Marinette’s main rival now and is a jerk to her. She’s underutilized and her lies aren’t that convincing and yet the story wants to convince us she’s more important than she really is pre butterfly miraculous.
This is Lila’s character summed up. At the most I’d expect is frustration mixed in with mild dislike. Reasonable but not over the top. Instead though, I see SEVERAL people make so many salt fics and talk so much shit about her that I just have to sit down and say….y’all need to chill. You all seriously need to chill.
The fandom talks about this character like she’s the spawn of Satan, something we’ve been criticizing Astruc for doing with Chloe, all because she doesn’t have as many redeeming traits as her. Did we forget that they’re BOTH kids? Both of them still have room to improve on themselves.
And I’ll admit it, I was one of those people who kept on saying “Why demonize Chloe when we have Lila” but thinking on it now, neither of them deserves to have that fate. If we REALLY need a character to do the whole “people don’t change” thing, why not Gabriel?
It’s so much better to have this lesson taught to adults to not be like Gabriel, to accept change and loss and to be better. To teach how heavy the impact of a lost love can be and how old age isn’t an excuse to be “stuck in your ways”.
Plus the lesson works better for someone who’s older than for teenagers who’s literally at the stage of their lives where change is everything. And I’m not saying Lila needs to be redeemed or she isn’t allowed to be a villain. What I’m saying is that the over salting on her character, a character that can be easily fixed and patched up, is kinda dumb and kinda annoying to see…especially when some people do like Lila.
SPEAKING OF WHICH, don’t think I’ve forgotten what happened years ago with that one fan that claimed that they loved Lila. That’s what happens when you take salting on a character WAY too far. And I can say that it’s only gotten a little better.
I just don’t understand why people can’t spend their energy talking about how to make a character better instead of salting on them 24/7 and this goes for all of the characters in ML.
I’m gonna be in the minority when I say this but Lila doesn’t deserve to be salted in as much as she does. She deserves reevaluation and a true villain arc. The constant bashing and insulting her at any chance ain’t it.
But you wanna know the thing that frustrates me the most about the Lila salt? How she started getting salted on in the first place. Aka, her being another barrier to Adrienette.
If y’all don’t know already, I don’t like the lovesquare and even back then I didn’t like it. And when I started seeing people hate Lila for this reason, I got very annoyed. It’s the same reason as to why people hated Kagami and it’s a stupid reason (imo). At least the other reasons why she’s hated had some foundation and sense.
TLDR: Lila is a mess but she’s not a mess that’s beyond repair but the constant salting on her and her character isn’t going to do anything. (If you really wanna salt on someone, salt on the writers for making her writing so subpar)
60 notes · View notes
etoilesombre · 4 months
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Fic Master List
I got tired of having to decide which fic post to keep pinned, so I made this. Proper summaries, tags and warnings all on AO3.
Black Sails
Another Way - Silverflint, E, 29,399 words, complete. Dubcon! But in a very old-school fanfic trope fuck or die way. It diverges from the scene where they get captured taking the warship. They do work through everything in the aftermath, and the end is very sweet actually.
By Faith of my Body - Silverflintmadi in various combinations, but emphasis on the flintmadi relationship. E, Chapter 1/4 posted. Flint and Madi bond over books, the weight of leadership, and being in love with John Silver. FealtySub!Flint, shameless use of literature for my own nefarious purposes, and so much pining.
Another Troy to Burn - Series. Silverflint longfic series, my special precious baby and literally the first thing I ever wrote. It's canon where they're fucking the whole time but it doesn't change anything. There is a moodboard (thanks @jaynovz) and also a playlist.
A Composite Unity - E, 20,366 words, complete. The first two seasons, Flint pov. He is not having a great time.
The Salt and the Sea - E, 60,495 words, complete. Set during the season 2-3 break, how Silver decided to stay and what happened with the gold. He is also not having a great time.
It Only Made Me Real- E, chapters 4/? posted. Silver adjusting to his role as quartermaster, Flint being Flint during the raids. I swear upon everything holy that I WILL finish this series if its the last thing I do, but, it has been on hiatus for a while.
I'll Carry You Home Tonight - Silverflint, E, 6,604 words, complete. This one is just porn. Season 3-4 break, the guys are newly in a relationship, they get Pirate Date Night. It's working title was 'impact play and 5 phases of ass stuff'.
long as amber of ember glows - Silverflint, E, 7,933 words, complete. If 3.10 ended the way it should have. There are love confessions, and they fuck on the gold. No literally, on it. It's very sweet honestly.
Our Feast is But Beginning - Series. Silverflint Cookingverse! Flint teaches Silver to cook.
Spit-Roasted - M, 5,821 words, complete. The one where Flint shows Silver how to roast a pig. It's canon! Flint is very weird about sex.
Gentille Alouette - E, 11,618 words, complete. Late night cooking dates on the Walrus, continuing intense sexual tension, Flint is basically edging himself. He sure is a way.
Princes of the New World - E, 38,145 words, complete. This one got a little out of hand, it has many things in it, including lots of hurt comfort and caretaking, the guys finally getting together and also not hiding their relationship, some intense gender vibes (Silver gets to be a pampered pretty princess) and yes, even some cooking.
Our Shadows That Are Bold - Silverflint, E, 4,912 words, complete. Dom Silver. The first little iteration of fealty sub Flint, he sure has some feelings about Silver coming into his own as king.
So We Begin - Silverflint, E, 4,038 words, complete. 3.7 missing scene fic that is exactly what you would expect after stomp stomp and the "how good it feels" conversation.
The Soft Animal of Your Body - Silverflint, E, 3,398 words, complete. The watersports one. Yep sure is, omorashi style, with a good side of hurt comfort stuff and also Flint telling a weird dirty story. Set during warship recovery time. This is basically an outtake of longfic because it doesn't quite work there but wouldn't leave my brain.
the sound that you found for me - T, background silverflintmadi, but its really about Silver and Betsy the cat. Yep. 5,699 words, complete. Kittenfic!! Written for the Beach Blanket Black Sails Ficfest, the prompt was 'Betsy has kittens and Silver wants to keep them on Maroon Island.' It's really about Silver and trauma and there are sad parts but nothing bad happens to any cats and there is a happy ending.
stitched with its color - G, silverflintmadi sort of, 1,344 words, complete. The conversation where Madi tells Flint that Silver is alive.
Such Terrible Hungers - E, Flintvane, 3,357 words, complete. Instead of fuck buddies, they're fuck enemies. Fight sex and Flint angst, that's basically the fic.
to pull me from myself again - E, Silverflint, 7,419 words, complete. Written in response to a Tumblr prompt asking for s1 dynamics softe silverflint, Silver's first time with a man. That is indeed it, that's the fic
What Lies Beneath - E, Silverflint, 3 chapters, complete. 11,031 words. Demon Flint AU! Basically make the demon in Flint literal. Silver is fascinated of course.
The Fetch Phillips Archives (aka Luke Arnold's books, go read them!)
announcing your place in the family of things - E, Fetch/Satyr, 6,865 words, complete. The first creature Fetch meets when he leaves the human city is that unnamed Satyr, and that feels like a conscious choice to me. Coulda said 'faun' and we wouldn't be here Luke. Anyway monsterfucking, but in a lovely way.
The Exorcist (tv)
The Smoke of Their Torment - M, Marcus/Tomas, 572 words, complete. A snippet of Marcus angst and pining and also jerking off in a shared hotel room there may be more someday.
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ddarker-dreams · 6 months
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Hi! I have a question, you can ignore this if you want to but I’ve found myself really loving the way you write and the range of writing you can articulate as well. Speaking from someone who is nowhere close to that level of skill you possess, would you mind being able to explain your journey of writing, if you practiced any particular methods or anything else to get to this stage you are at right now? Unless you have been gifted the talent of writing from birth and didn’t need to try for much long or long enough to call it a journey. Could you also spare some tips and advice for someone who wants to start writing stories and what to look into/practice?
I love your work a lot and I am constantly waiting for the notification of your new posts, despite not being a writer myself I do love breaking down and analysing writing and your stories are always such good options for me to look into. Thank you so much for writing and sparing your time to produce such well done pieces of work — I felt extremely corny writing this, excuse me for this language, I promise I’m not a pimp!
THIS ISN'T CORNY AT ALL!!!! ❌🌽❌!!!!
i'm deeply grateful for all your kind words, thank you so so much 😭
i don't mean this in a self-deprecating way, but i've never considered myself a gifted or super incredible writer, i just get hype about story ideas and try to make them as good as i can. due to that, i start sweating when people ask for advice because i don't consider myself qualified... i do have a writing advice tag, but take everything i say with a grain of salt!! if it's fanfic literally all that matters is that you enjoy whatever you're writing.
i'm more than happy to share my writing journey though!! it's kinda fun to reminiscence.
i've loved reading and writing ever since i was a little lock. while thinking about this ask, it occurred to me that what i've always been the most invested in are the characters. i'd think about 275894275 different storylines with them. i didn't start writing fanfic until i was around 11 though, everything was handwritten. or in flipnote hatena.
i did a lot of fanfic writing from 11-14 buuuut then my interest in it kinda fizzled out. it wasn't until i watched hxh for the first time that i took it up again bc chrollo is that powerful. that's when i started conceptualizing HWR. i looked at my early writing folder, the first HWR fanfic i wrote was in 2016 when i was 15 ?? here's a cursed excerpt:
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anyway, once i started making googly eyes at chrollo, it was gg. i've been writing often ever since.
what's helped me the most is to focus on the elements i find interesting. for example, i like fleshing out my MCs, focusing on dialogue, and developing a universe around the main pairing. because i enjoy this so much it's (mostly) always easy to devote time and effort toward it.
so i think it comes down to finding out what niches you like and working with those. some writers prefer to write with heavy prose, others are more succinct, some writers like dialogue, others prefer to be more action based... etc etc. this does require a little time if you're completely new to writing, but you know yourself best. you'll eventually pick up on what part of the story you're most excited to write.
this isn't particularly mind-blowing or anything but i hope it helps some 😭 what completely Altered my mindset was when i realized i can be as self-indulgent as humanly possible. cringe is not in my vocabulary. write a MC where every single character is in love with them if you want. write a 100k word fic about your OC being isekaid into x world. post about your f/os, draw art of you with your fav, go ham.
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beskarandblasters · 9 months
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Updates/Fic Recs
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My updates:
Halloween from my Punisher series was posted last week
Copycat Killer with a Chemical Cut (part two of Punisher, the story) was posted yesterday
Salt in the Wound, a little drabble based on the song by Boygenius was posted last week for my 500 follower celebration
Scott Street, another little drabble based on the song by Phoebe Bridgers was posted earlier tonight for my 500 follower celebration
Upcoming from me:
Yesterday I announced the folklore series with some fellow writers who are amazing, here is the masterlist for that!
You can expect the next installment of Punisher, Chinese Satellite, some time in the next few days!
You can also expect my first installment, august, of folklore sometime soon, too. The other authors & I decided that we're not posting these in track order, just as they come to us 😊
I've also decided to do a part three of Punisher/Copycat Killer because I can't let those two go just yet🤭
And also as a reminder, my requests are open rn!!! I don't have a lot going on aside from my own series so I'd love to work on some one shots, too!!!
Onto the fic recs!!!
@atinylittlepain posted this killer Joel x reader vampire fic called Only Lovers Left Alive and it's fucking amazing, this concept is so fresh and exciting!!! So excited to read the rest of these. I'm hella obsessed with this pair.😈
Lie to me by @swiftispunk on AO3 is so fucking hot. I’m a slut for dubcon and when it’s done right it’s so 🔥🔥🔥
@tieronecrush posted this lovely Frankie fic called 102 and it's so good!!! I'm not really a Frankie gal per say but this fic has me simpinnnn👀
@proxima-writes has this Din fic called Hokaanir Riduurok and it has me WEAK, Din is my fav Pedro boy always and this fed into my delusions that we're gonna run away and get married🥰
I would actually let Night Walks Joel from Night Walks by @toxicanonymity do literally anything to me, I'm a slut for him through & through. I'm not sure if I've posted that much about Night Walks but I literally think about it all the time lol🥵
Be Polite by @jksprincess10 another Frankie fic that has me simpin' 🥵 but this time Frankie's being subby, loooooved this one😮‍💨
That's it for this week, folks!!! Be sure to check out all of the amazing authors on this list!!! I’m always down to read more fics so if you’d like to be included or just think I’d like what you’re cookin up just tag me
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yesiknowimshort · 1 year
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looking at the fanon from canon with tim drake
(to the best of my own knowledge; take with a grain of salt; i’m open to discussion and disagreement; we can take this like an english lit class analysis)
this is inspired by discussions with @boredandboredmind about misconstrued info with jason and tim on their own posts about it.
also do not take this as hate to tim fic writers, you’re amazing and you best believe i’m checking the tim x reader tag constantly. i just want to be able to help give you easy access to half-canon-compliant info, and you can choose to take it or leave it.
and especially if you only know tim through online media (which is always valid and i’ll hear no argument!), it can be hard to differentiate between what it is “out of character, completely fanon” behaviour, and what is actually plausible.
RELATIONSHIPS
with his dad
tim’s relationship with his dad is extremely complicated. they both loved each other… but both of his parents had a very different way of showing their love to what tim needed.
for the majority of his life, his mother and father were super neglectful of him and his interests, which of course is how we had nine year old tim drake running around figuring out people’s identities and tryna convince nightwing to go back to batman bc tim said batman wouldn’t cope without a robin, as if he knew them personally.
bruce generally disapproved of tim being left alone while his parents were on business trips, so he looked out for tim a lot during those times.
after the death of tim’s mother, his father was all moody for a bit bc his company had gone to shit… oh and his wife died. anyway he was acting like mr crabs when he loses his money for a while until his physiotherapist dana winters was like “yo get a hold of your life man”. so jack attempted to reconnect with his son… but tim was already deep in the mantle of robin and hanging out with bruce wayne.
tim was a little reluctant at first but after a while he did really appreciate his dad trying to be a dad for once… but it conflicted with the life he had already made for himself.
tim was sneaking out to do hero work, skipping school, coming home in the early hours beat and bruised, being snarky and angsty to his dad, super secretive; basically coming off as a reckless hooligan teenager (even tho he really wasn’t) which made jack incredibly angry at tim a lot of the time, causing them to have a lot of fights.
jack was also super insecure as his position as tim’s dad as he felt inferior to the relationship tim had built with bruce.
so one day while tim was out, jack raided tim’s bedroom (10/10 parenting skills there, well done jack) which dana winters was horrified by and actually sided with tim when tim came home and blew up at his dad -anyway jack found out tim was robin.
he stormed to bruce and was like “fuck you and fuck my son’s role as robin. he’s going to boarding school”.
long story short, tim resumes the mantle of robin and his dad deals with it and they begin to really get along again, like a true father and son… and then his dad is murdered. tim finds him and is distraught, and that’s when we get this classic image of tim and bruce:
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(it’s horrible obviously but i love this illustration so much. the way tim’s half in and out of the robin gear, the single eye you can see, the way he’s half collapsed over his father’s body and clinging to bruce for dear life) anyway then tim goes into the care of bruce wayne.
with bruce
lemme start of by saying: tim would only ever use the wayne name for business means as future ceo/controlling shareholder of W.E.
tim will always be a drake.
he quite literally made up a fake uncle so he wouldn’t get adopted by bruce, even though bruce really wanted to adopt him. not only that- he went as far as to forge a new will including this fictional uncle to avoid being bruce’s son
he struggled a lot with bruce’s “affection” after his father’s death since he never saw bruce as a father beforehand, only ever as a mentor. and of course, up until later in his robin career, he wasn’t even an orphan. he still technically wasn’t since dana winters ended up marrying his dad and becoming his step-mum, but she’s basically forgotten sadly.
he also consistently makes a point to make sure people know he made himself robin, and it wasn’t batman’s choice at all.
he appreciates bruce of course, but it’s more on an intellectual and emotional level than anything else. tim came from money (albeit, new money), and even though his parents' company basically died with his father there would’ve been some amount of inheritance money. not to mention without a shadow of a doubt, he would’ve had an account his parents had been saving for him.
living in another manor house and working around international companies and important people, wouldn’t be too different from what his life would’ve become had his parents not died.
tim would appreciate bruce not for the life he gave him, but simply because of bruce being intellectually stimulating for him. remember; tim sees the life he has as the life he made.
he reminds me of damian in the fact that both of them would struggle with dealing with people who bored them, people who couldn’t offer them anything.
anyway bruce = respected equal, bruce ≠ tim’s new dad.
 with jason and damian
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boom. all you need to know.
nah but seriously...
jason attacked tim in the tt tower when he came back to life but can you really blame him? he was replaced, and it made sense for him to come after tim since as we know, tim forced himself into the role and did, technically, steal jason’s spot before bruce realistically would’ve replaced him.
but they never held that grudge throughout jason’s reintegration into the family. of course they’d have sibling fights (note that tim doesn’t think of any of his adoptive brothers as real brothers; but jason is closest to), but a little roughhousing is normal. i’m the eldest of 6 brothers and believe me, we fight all the time. literally yesterday one of them and i bit each other while fighting (if you don’t think damian and tim would do that, you’re kidding yourself). but we love each other, and if anything happened we’d jump to each other's defence.
moving onto damian...
the way tim views damian is very telling of tim’s worldview and childhood. when damian arrived, tim demanded that regardless of being batman’s son or not, damian must work to earn the love and respect of bruce, “like everybody else” he had said. clear projection from tim here, since up until dami, tim was the only one who wasn’t “wanted” per se, and also tim’s had to work for people’s affection and attention his entire life. look at his parents; they were the half-arsed “that’s great honey” and then back to their phone call type of people (well we know where tim gets his steadfast work ethic from).
anyway, tim finally had the spotlight on him for a while only to have it turned for some little genetic abnormality.
tim’s suffering from the “been the only/youngest child for too long” phenomenon; they do not believe there is room enough in one's heart for more unconditional love. it’s quite sad if you think about it; he was in his mid-late teens by this point.
tim was quite patronising of damian when they were introduced, but he quickly pulled the “i’m just messing with you” card and did try to fix it, but stubborn-as-tim damian just started to preach his favourite “i’ll inherit everything without even trying” play. this obviously pissed off tim to no end. it seemed damian knew the perfect way to get under his skin, and it was putting tim even more on edge. it made him feel insecure in his place with bruce. for the first time tim didn’t think he was gonna be able to get his way easily.
eventually though, batman assures tim that damian being his biological son doesn’t change anything that he has with tim, and that tim doesn’t have to prove anything to him.
yes, if you look up tim and damian, you can see that damian has done some horrible things to tim and the two have very thin patience for each other, but that’s simply because they both understand the perfect ways to piss each other off. it’s just so easy for the both of them that they can’t help themselves.
i also will say that damian views the relationship as much more “mortal enemies” than tim does, but he is a child several years younger than tim, so it’s natural for him to view it as a bigger deal than tim.
all in all, jason and tim, and tim and damian are simply just brothers, and if you have more than two siblings, i’m sure you know as much as we deny it, everyone had a favourite and a least favourite sibling -it’s natural. for tim, his favourite is jason, and his least just happens to be damian.
just like damian’s favourite is dick, and least favourite happens to also be tim.
with stephanie
(now i don’t know as much about steph as i do for tim so feel free to correct me)
stephanie brown got into the hero scene by being the best little shit i’ve ever heard of and messing up her villain dad’s plans. her dad was cluemaster, a friend of the riddler, and she would literally just show up and spoil their plans in annoying ways (hence her name; spoiler).
she was tim drake’s girlfriend -it’s important to note that she wasn’t robin’s. she had no clue about his double life and broke up with him because she thought he was being unfaithful (fair enough).
when tim’s dad took robin away from him, steph stepped up to the plate with a made up robin costume and (like tim) demanded to be the replacement.
her 71 days in the spotlight as the first female robin ended in a couple different ways (thanks comics for making it hard). bruce dismissed her for his belief that she couldn’t follow orders, but he also didn’t believe that she could live up to tim... ouch. he didn’t even approve of her as his partner until she was killed. oh god here we go again...
i personally don’t acknowledge that she died. just- nope. i always look at it as wrong place, wrong time for steph. she could’ve been a great robin, but tim left massive fucking shoes to fill, and i reckon bruce was looking for any little reason to fire her -disobeying one order to not involve herself in a fight just happened to be the perfect opportunity (according to bruce). not to mention steph (and this isn’t necessarily a wrong thing) was undisciplined in hero-ing.
not to say tim was straight-laced and serious, more that him being at an equal mental level to bruce, and the both of them having built strong trust in each other, gave him a lot more leeway to do what he wanted and have the means to back up his actions.
ORIGINS OF POPULAR FANON
obviously i’ll never know exactly where something came from. this is more my speculation and attempt and supplying the headcanons with canonical evidence or debunking them.
where does “tim is a sickly boi” come from?
his lack of a spleen.
i’m not sure if most people now know that’s the reason why, but that’s gotta be how it started.
without a spleen, our body's other organs like the liver can take over many of the spleen's functions. you'll still be able to cope with most infections but there's a heightened risk that a serious infection will develop quickly, especially from certain bacteria and parasites like malaria.
if he got on antibiotics and rested when he started to feel ill, he’d be fine, but tim would never remember to take antibiotics and gods forbid he let himself rest so... he’s working until his body forces him to take a break.
mimi approved fanon  👍
where does “tim doesn’t care for himself” come from?
he’s a stubborn person. people don’t emphasise this enough. usually, people just use the motivation of depression (which, fair, it could be included in it). however, he will literally do whatever the fuck he wants because he’s tim fucking drake and that's all the excuse he feels he needs. like he is prepared to sacrifice everything *cough cough* himself to see his plan go through.
he’s also stubborn in his need to prove himself as we know. as a self-appointed robin; his mantle had felt fragile to him. not to mention damian made his grand appearance to push tim into that sweet sweet middle child category.
and as we already know, his dad also forcefully took the mantle from him and stopped him from seeing bruce. every time things start to go well for tim... it all seems to go to shit.
this in turn led to the fanon of ‘chronic perfectionism to the point of halting self-care in order to complete x, y z to prove himself’.
he also canonically doesn’t care much for sleep; in teen titans when superboy finds him awake tim just goes “it’s only three, i’m checking my emails”.
mimi approved fanon 👍.
where does “tim’s a coffee addict” come from?
he actually is only ever depicted drinking/buying coffee like 3 times (i don’t know for sure, please correct me if it’s more/less).
it ties in well with the previous point; tim’s coffee addiction is a way to justify how he can still function when he’s on 5 minutes of sleep, battered and bruised and still able to kick arse and be intelligent.
mimi approved fanon 👍
where does “tim have abandonment issues” come from?
his mum dies and he loses how his dad used to be.
he gains a better version of his dad and then his dad acts like an arsehole.
his dad gets better again and then his dad dies.
he had steph and then she left him because he just couldn’t explain who he was.
he gets bruce and then damian shows up.
he gets bruce back and then bruce dies, and nobody believes him when he says he’s alive.
yeah... it makes sense.
would be mimi-approved fanon, but i’ve never like the way i’ve seen it portrayed in fanon.
i see a lot in fics he does the “i’m pushing you away first to protect us both” and i just don’t personally agree with the depiction. call me petty but that’s my thoughts.
where does the perception that tim’s the soft one come from?
no fucking clue honestly.
mans blinded deathstroke’s (/jericho, hard to explain) good eye on purpose while delivering a one liner about fighting blind, and then told the man he just fully blinded that he agreed with deathstroke that he (tim) could be vicious when he had to be.
that one-on-one moment in the teen titans comic is demonstration enough of tim being the opposite of the soft one. none of the robins are soft. if we’re going off who’s the most “sensitive”, then it’d be dick or damian -those two have the shortest fuse.
tim blinded someone by throwing his fucking birdarang at the guy’s one good eye and was sure enough and committed enough to what he planned to do that he had the precision to make sure not to take the eye out completely -only debilitate him. that’s some calculated callousness right there.
he also boasted to the teen titans about lying to batman, after he just lied to starfire about staying put in a fight (and his lie used that ‘goody two shoes’ perception of himself; he’s self-aware of how he can come off)… and then he broke his friends out of the tt tower by cutting glass in the shape of a bat. dudes cocky as.
not to mention he literally stalked batman and ran around solving murders and dropping off the evidence to gordon before even being a robin. he was on the CIA’s watch list for crying out loud.
tim is extremely underestimated. to the point where (as @forcesofnatureunleashed accurately described) this “uwu” version of tim has taken over the fandom and made him out to seem like a mega wimp and a quiet tortured soul.
i’m not dismissing the shit he’s actually gone through, i’m just saying he’s gone through enough that you don’t need to make up that he was berated by his dad, can’t talk about his pain, and relies on his tech, when he’s quiet literally the best martial artist in the family and highly respected by ra’s al ghul.
you don’t just get respected by ra’s al ghul; especially if you were an overly sensitive, shaky-knee-ed, spineless, weakling.
STRONGLY mimi disapproved fanon 👎
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msmargaretmurry · 8 months
Note
What is writing advice you would give to someone just starting out?
ohhh you know i love to talk about WRITING. this is mainly geared at people just starting out writing fanfic but most of it can probably be applied to original fiction and other types of writing too 💕
first of all: be patient with yourself. like all other skills, writing is something that takes practice to get good at! i've been writing for YEARS and am still constantly learning and growing as a writer. if you're just starting out and you find yourself getting frustrated that the stuff on the page doesn't match the stuff in your head, it does NOT mean you're bad at writing. it just means you need more practice. do you think the first fanfics i wrote were good? no, they were incoherent and you will never find them.
write about things that you're excited to write about. whether this is the most popular pairing in the fandom or a rarepair you made up on your own, go with your passion! i know this can be hard because everyone wants the higher amount of comments and kudos that comes with posting popular pairings, but i promise that writing something you're excited about is like step one in getting yourself to write regularly. literally if you read a story you love and think "i want to write a story like that" then write a story like that! figure out how to take the things you loved in it and make it your own. drop the author a note and say they inspired you!
take all writing advice with a grain of salt. i watch a lot of writing advice videos on youtube, and i read craft books and articles on writing craft, and i've learned a ton of stuff from those over the years, but i've also learned that it's totally okay for me to be like "actually i think i disagree" and do it my way. (this does not apply to basic punctuation and grammar tho. please learn those, or get a beta reader who knows them really well. and then you can tactically decide if/when you want to break the rules sometimes.)
everyone has their own writing process. you can watch a million youtube videos on outlining but if outlining just doesn't work for you, videos aren't going to fic that! i used to outline a lot and now i mostly discovery write (i find the term "pantser" so unserious, lol). it took me a long time to develop a writing process that worked for me, and it'll take you some time, too, so don't be afraid to try new things and then set them back down if you're not working for you.
READ. read read read!!! do not just read fanfiction. do not just read the kind of thing you want to write. read WIDELY. and think about the writing while you're reading! if a fic or book is doing something really well, think about what's making it work. if it's doing something that you don't like, think about why it's rubbing you the wrong way and/or how you would fix it. i always say that even if i wind up not loving a book, i always learn something from it, craft-wise, so i very rarely feel like i wasted my time.
TALK about writing with your friends!! i know this one can be tough if you don't already have friends who are into writing, but i am so serious about it. buddy-read books or fics together and then get together afterward to talk about how you felt about the writing, the plot, the characters, the story as a whole. find someone(s) who will let you bounce your own writing ideas off of them, and who will read as you write to cheer you on and help you with tough spots. do the same for them if they want it! writing is such a solitary act that you have to be deliberate about building community around it, and having that community is so worth it.
on feedback: yes, having someone beta read your story can be pretty nerve-wracking. i have (once again) been writing for years and i still get nervous sending something off to be beta'd. but! having a beta reader you trust is so good for your writing. sometimes it really does just take a second set of eyes to spot typos, find plot holes, call you out on writing quirks and habits that you can't see for yourself because you're too deep in it. and it definitely helps to have a friend whose taste and skill level you trust to help make your story better. have a conversation with your beta beforehand to discuss what kind of feedback you're looking for, the timetable for how long they think the beta reading is going to take, how harsh or gentle they should try to make their feedback. if you're nervous about getting a lot of suggested edits, ask them to point out things they really like in the story as well.
OH ALSO. it's totally fine if you're struggling a lot with a story to just set it down for a while and work on something else. as you keep writing, you'll get better at figuring out what kind of writer's block you can beat by pushing through and what kind you need to deal with by just giving a story time to percolate more.
ok i think that's all i've got tonight. 💖
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clatoera · 6 months
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Always Remember We're Burned For Better Chapter 20: We Will Never Go Back to That Bloodshed
Well everyone...we made it. It has taken nearly nine months but here we are. We are at the end of ARWBFB (save for the Epilogue). This has been one of my biggest undertakings and I am so so so proud of it. You guys have followed me through two board exams, applications, and so so so many different speciality rotations during this journey. You have been incredibly patient but also incredibly supportive. I NEVER could have finished it without you guys. I wanted to get this up sooner or at least on the 13th. I failed at both of those, but I hope you will understand when you see that this chapter is the longest by a significant amount. I am so proud of this fic, and I hope you all decide that it was worth giving your time to sharing with me.
The chapter title comes from The Great War. A fun fact would be that this line actually loops back to "we will never go back to that bloodshed, crimson clover" with Crimson Clover being the title of chapter one. It's come full circle (save for the epilogue).
This chapter is designed like Chapter 4 was. Each segment is divided by a lyric that encapsulates the vibes. It is not as happy, but it is the start of happily ever after.
AO3
Masterpost
As always..this is for everyone who has helped me and loved me and supported this story. I cannot even tag everyone but I will try. A LARGE portion of this goes to @ohhowwehavefallen who has talked about MOST things that happen in this chapter with me in depth and has enabled me (VSC immortalized forever with this one, so is Cato buying the academy). @kentwells who actually helped me make major decisions regarding the sequel, which affected the way Marvel and Glimmer ended here. Thank you for putting up with me. @dukeysquid and @mackcoleslaw for the constant constant support. @clarascrabarmy who talks me off the ledge and is my go to night reader (and night validator that im crazy). @mollywog who has tolerated this fic for 9 months. @crookedlyniceperson who comes in with the memes EVERY single time. @cyansadnessI dont even get to talk to you much any more but you were an OG reader and I am giving you kisses for your love. There are so many more who I am afraid I may have missed (and I know I have missed) but i'm emotional and hormonal and crying as I type this.
This is, and always has been, for you guys who have given me your support and love. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I never would have finished without the love and support of every single person who has read this.
Thank you.
How evergreen, our group of friends
The kitchen, despite the literal war that had raged on outside in District One, was quite literally untouched. Untouched, as in, no one had ever used it even prior to the games or the war that should have resolved the house itself to rubble. 
They had quickly discovered that despite varying levels of damage to the districts, the Victors Villages were left nearly untouched. Call it symbolism, call it fate, call it making a point, but this was not a fact any of the surviving victors were going to debate or question. 
For now they were all just going to be thankful to even have a place to live, especially one that wasn’t an underground bunker in a district that resented them. 
It’s Clove, who is opening and shutting every single cabinet in the bright white kitchen. The golden handles and marble countertops are pristine– perfect and completely new. Every drawer is completely stocked with spices and the same sorts of things her own home had come with, but it is evident that these cabinets had remained untouched from their initial stocking. There was no dusting of cinnamon around the pores of the bottle, no slight film of salt from pouring over a steaming pot. They were still perfectly alphabetized, perfectly aligned in the spice drawer, as if the kitchen itself was taken right out of a capitol home decor magazine. 
Funnily enough, though the kitchen was clearly new, it was so…Glimmer. Or at least the Glimmer she had been forced to become.  
Gorgeous white marble countertops, shimmering golden metal for every door handle and knob on every drawer. The utensils were a beautiful gold, and even the appliances were designed to blend right in with the shining and glamorous surroundings. 
In one drawer, she found incredibly sharp knives with mother of pearl handles, in another were soft baby pink pans. It was very much designed for the fifteen year old teenage girl who had won the house as part of her victor’s spoils.
Somehow, even without the Capitol’s influence, Clove still believes Glimmer would have turned out a golden, pink-loving girl. Or at least, it’s comforting to imagine it that way. 
Clove curls her fingers around the shimmering handle of one of the paring knives, bringing it to eye level to inspect it. The blade is alarmingly sharp for one designed to dice vegetables or carve into fruits, further supporting Clove’s suspicion that it had never been used prior to well, right now. She weighs it in her hand, feeling the way it settles in her palm. Her other hand comes to run over the couple of inches of metal, evaluating the quality. It was top of the line in terms of cooking, of course, nothing but the best for any victor, but it may even serve well in terms of slicing through-
She drops the knife, flinching only a little at the realization of how the metal colliding with the marble will dull the beautiful little blade. It startles her, not the sound of the metal on rock, no that any District Two girl could sleep through like a lullaby, but by the harsh realization of her own thoughts. She would likely never slice through anything but food again, there would be no more blood spitting on her from pulsing arteries, no more tendons severed. 
Clove would probably never kill anyone else ever again. The thought is both disconcerting and comforting, leaving Clove alarmed and settled.
“Are you okay?” A soft, sleepy voice asks from around the entrance to the kitchen. When Clove looks up she sees Glimmer, rubbing at her eyes with her long cream colored sleeves. She shuffles into the kitchen in fluffy white slippers, a sweater that reaches halfway down her legs, and exceptionally messy loose braids that tell Clove that yeah she probably did just wake up.
“Good morning, Princess.” Clove scoffs, gently grabbing the dropped knife and twisting it nimbly between her fingers. “It’s four in the afternoon, Glimmer. Did you have a busy night?” 
“I was with Cash and Gloss all night, we’re trying to figure out what to do about our parents.” Glimmer sits herself at the island continuing to rub at her eye with the heel of her hand, exhaustion written all across her pretty face. “I didn’t come back until this morning.” 
Clove flinches at her own insensitivity– while she was well used to being, well, alone. An orphan. On her own. Whatever, it was..new for the others. Cato’s family was still in the wind, but Glimmer and her siblings, as well as Marvel, were new to the world of being parentless. “God, Glimmer, I’m sorry–”
At least Glimmer had Cashmere and Gloss, the same could not be said for Marvel, who was the only surviving member of his entire family. Clove could easily relate to that, because even if anyone survived, they were dead to her long ago. 
Glimmer just nods her head, acknowledging but not verbally accepting the apology her friend offers. 
Nothing had been necessarily right between the four of them since the vote. Cato and Clove, they were perfectly fine, of course. Marvel however had lost any progress he had made with Glimmer, and Cato nor Clove had yet to fully return to her good graces. It wasn’t even like any of them could blame her for being mad. She had been right. 
“Thanks for letting us stay with you.” She decides, instead filling the space between them with gentle words of appreciation. “Like..literally in your house with you.”
“You don’t have to thank me, you know that.. It’s nice not to be alone.” Glimmer sighs, resting her chin on her hand and looking across the island to Clove, who is still twisting a knife in her hand. “I don’t know if i’m quite ready to be alone yet.”
They weren’t necessarily far from anyone. Marvel spent the days over here with them, Brutus was in one of the empty houses, Cash and Gloss each in their own and then Enobaria was– “Is Enobaria staying across the street in the empty one or down the road–”
Glimmer cocks an eyebrow, the littlest smirk making an appearance on her face. “She’s staying with my sister.”
“Oh!” Clove looks nearly taken aback as she opens another drawer, absently sorting through the perfect, unused cutting boards and kitchen aids to distract herself from the awkward tension between her and her host. “I didn’t know they were even friends.”
“Girl..” Glimmer giggles, leaning in closer on the island, nearly pressing her upper body into the marble. “You know Enobaria and Cashmere are..” She makes a gesture with her middle and pointer finger that Clove can’t interpret, and the confused look on her freckled face must convey that to the blonde girl.  “Right?”
“I don’t know what that means.” 
“Do I need to spell it out for you, Clove? They’re fucking. They’re a thing.”
“What! No, I mean just because they’re staying together doesn’t mean–” The heat in Clove’s cheeks at the realization leaves her flustered, and flustered is not a look Clove wears well. 
“Well that's what everyone thinks about the four of us.” Glimmer teases, before bringing her hand out infront of her to inspect the remnants of her nails. “Seriously. They’ve been a thing for like…god Cash won sixty-four? So… ten…ish years? Probably? I dunno. But it’s not a secret. I’m shocked you couldn’t tell.”
“Well I didn’t see them together much, okay? And noone thinks that the four of us are all fucking, Glimmer. That’s crazy Capitol type shit.” Clove defends, desperately looking through the drawers for a change of topic. Maybe she could understand why Enobaria got so irritated when ever she and Cato got caught–
Yep. Okay. Makes sense!
“Sure they don’t Clove, you don’t see the looks people give us?”
Clove digs through the drawers, finding the still boxed mixer and the perfect white plates, nothing seeming even a little out of place. She is flustered and the heat in her neck and face won’t even allow her to respond to such comments. 
“For fucks sake, Glimmer, have you used anything in this kitchen.”
“Drawer closest to the refrigerator has two little plates and two forks. We used to …uh…we would eat a lot of cake.” Glimmer finds herself grabbing at the skin around her nail with her teeth, tugging at the cuticles until they ripped off. She couldn’t resist the urge to constantly be picking at and degrading something about her body, and right now her nails were all she had access to.  “Other than that, not really.”
“How did you survive, Glimmer? Seriously?” Clove rests a hand on the back of her hip, strumming along the top of her hip while also trying to massage out some of the pain of her lower back that never seemed to go away. 
“Well, everything I ate was precooked and preweighed, I had to keep a certain look you know?” Glimmer shrugs, kicking her feet just a little at the height of the chair, twisting just ever so slightly to keep herself comfortable. “I wasn’t really allowed to go beyond that. Cooking was never important.”
“You’re gonna have to learn to make something Glimmer, especially if you ever have kids–” Clove teases, but the biting response of Glimmer wipes the smile right off of her face. 
“I told you in the Capitol I'm not doing that. I’m never doing that. I don’t want to.” Glimmer snaps before she pushes herself out of the chair so she can make a quick escape if the conversation goes any further south. 
“You used to, I’m sorry, Glimmer. That's who I knew you as. The girl who wanted to settle into her life and be someone’s mother. And for what it’s worth, Glim Glam, I think you’d have been good at it.” Clove puts a hand up in defense, before she awkwardly goes back to going through the remaining cabinets, stopping prior to the refrigerator and pantry.
 She pauses, and turns to face her friend. She gives a heavy sigh, bracing herself on the counter behind her, when she begins.
 “I’m sorry. I am. About the vote. You were right, and as soon as you pulled me into that room– I knew you were right. About his sister and about our friends’ kids and everything. I just wanted to feel like some wrong was made right, Glimmer. It wasn’t going to be me back in the games, and I wanted them to feel what it was like. But then you mentioned Cora, and god knows if she’s alive, but if she is she couldn’t ever go to the games. Or Finnick’s kids, or yours or– I don’t know. All of a sudden it wasn’t just like..nameless kid tributes. It was people we knew. It was kids we knew. It was little girls who looked like you and little red heads in four and! It was kids we love or will love and– you were right. And I’m sorry.”
There is a stunned silence for a few seconds that feels like years to Clove, as Glimmer looks at her with the look of a doe caught in the lights of a car. 
“....thank you.” Glimmer whispers in response, but something palpable has finally shifted between them. Whatever permafrost had threatened to take hold on the boundaries of their friendship started to melt away in that moment. Maybe not a heat wave, but a start. “I…thank you, Clove.”
Clove gives Glimmer another once over as they stand staring at each other. The months of this war had taken a toll on Clove of course, evidenced by the aches in her body and the scars along her skin. Her scars would fade, as her bruises had, and even the pain isn’t visible. On the outside Clove still looked almost exactly like she always had. 
On Glimmer though, the changes were blatant. The golden glow of her skin was long gone, replaced by pale, nearly gray undertones. That long platinum hair was longer than ever, but now revealed multiple inches of a honey blonde natural color that had been hidden since before she even won the games. Even the actual structure of her face and body had changed. Any capitol enhancement had long since grown out or metabolized away, leaving Glimmer with deep collar bones and sinking skin on her cheeks. 
She looked exhausted but she also looked starved. She looked sick. 
“Glimmer…you look hungry.” Clove gives her a look that must be riddled with pity, for the blonde looks away and at her hands instead. “Will you please let me make you something? I know there probably isn’t much in here but I can send the boys out…” B
Before Glimmer can argue or decline, Clove swings the door open to what she expected to be a barren refrigerator and is taken back by the fully stocked fridge that awaits her. 
Well. Full. And Stocked. Maybe not with actual kitchen staples or ingredients for meals, but definitely full. 
“What in the fuck–”
“Marvel does that sometimes. And Cato’s been talking nonstop about your cooking for literal months. They went yesterday, I think. I..don’t think either of them knew what they were doing but they’ve got the spirit. They mean well.,” Glimmer explains, not bothering to put up a fight with Clove and deny her this opportunity. Even if she didn’t eat it– Cato and Marvel sure fucking would.  This was their new Hunger Games.
“Good intentions…that's why there’s seventeen tomatoes?” Clove raises an eyebrow, the ghost of a smile gracing her face as she surveys the fridge. Sure it was a little..odd.. Seventeen tomatoes, three bags of flour, at least fifty eggs, a dozen heads of garlic… odd but good intentioned nonetheless. “I’m going to guess they wanted pasta?”
“That sounds right. I think I heard Cato saying something about that, but they lost me when I heard them trying to remember if onions and garlic are the same thing.” Glimmer shrugs, but finds herself going back to sit at the island, no longer on the verge of running out of the kitchen at any moment. 
Clove starts grabbing armfuls of the tomatoes to transfer them to the countertop, feeling the soft flesh of one under her fingertips. She probably wouldn’t even need the chef’s knife, but damn if she wasn’t going to take the opportunity to use it. “Do you have a big- you know what, nevermind.”  
She decides against asking for a stock pot, knowing fully well Glimmer would have no idea what she was talking about. Instead, she rummages through the cabinets until she does in fact find a blush pink soup pot practically bigger than Clove herself.  She immediately sets herself to gently slicing the skin off of the tomatoes, delighting in the way the acidic juice dripped down over her fingers.
“You should give him a chance, Glimmer, he’s a good guy.” Clove suggests, tossing each individual skinned tomato into the giant pink pot one at a time. 
“I’m not the one not interested, Clove, you know that.” Glimmer reminds her bitterly, reaching forward to attempt to grab a tomato, dropping it when the acid in the juice burns the raw skin around her nails. “He doesn’t want me.”
“Now that isn’t true and you know it. You two seemed fine and then the vote happened and you shut him down again.” Clove points out, turning to the cabinet behind her to grab her selection of the endless array of unused spices. “Which, I get it, you were hurt–”
“He can’t just make my trauma a personal vendetta, Clove. He can’t advocate for slaughtering babies in an arena under the name of defending me and the things that happened to me.” Glimmer hops off the chair once again, this time letting herself scope out the refrigerator and whatever the hell the boys had come up with to fill it with. 
“It happened to him, too, Glimmer. Maybe not as much as it did to you. But it happened to him, too.” Clove collects salt and sugar and various other jars of spices she currently can’t name but knows for some reason she needs to add them. “Glim. Sometimes we care more about avenging the people we love, rather than actually doing what's right. The things that are done to people you love..sometimes that's just worse.” 
“You don’t know what it’s like, Clove. To be seen as the girl who fucks everyone. Whether I wanted to or not. And trust me, I didn’t want to. And no matter how hard I try, for the rest of my life, that is how everyone is going to see me. Do you know what the best part of all this is, Clove? That I never have to be seen in public ever again.” She filters through the fruit– half a dozen containers of strawberries, a single mango, an entire box of blueberries– before letting herself grab a single blueberry for a snack. 
“We don’t see you that way, you know? Not me, not Cato, and god Glimmer you know Marvel doesn’t either.”  Clove assures, using the palm of her hand to measure out the various herbs and spices she’s tossing in. There’s no recipe– she’s just doing what feels right. Such is the theme for all aspects of their lives right now.  “And you never have to do that again. Hell, never have sex again at all for all I care, obviously I do but–”
“Yeah, Clove, I know. We share a wall. The wall your bed is on.” 
“Oh! Right! Well.. anyway!” Clove fakes a grimace and mouths ‘sorry’ before she places a lid on her creation. “Come on. Let's go find the boys, then I'll show you how to make the pasta.”
“I think they’re laying in the yard.” Glimmer waves off, before grabbing another handful of berries to pop into her mouth.
“They’re…laying in the yard?” Clove raises a dark eyebrow, confusion mapped across her face. “Are they dogs?”
“Something about missing grass and fresh air in Thirteen, I don’t know, I could hear them through the window.” Glimmer shakes her head, but stands in the doorway of the refrigerator. “Do you need anything out of here?”
“They’re fucking weird.” Clove clears off a workspace to knead and roll out the pasta, recognizing that this is probably the first time these counters have been used for anything ever. “uh yeah I need eggs and flour… Honestly, I usually make Cato come do this part because I like to watch his hands knead the dough but…let them…become one with nature or whatever they’re out there doing.”
“Why do you need flowers in noodles? I didn’t think you could eat those?” Glimmer cocks her head, holding out the cardboard carton of a dozen eggs to her, but pausing with a perplexed look on her face as she searches the refrigerator for a bouquet of some sort. “I can go check the garden–”
“What? No Glimmer, Flour not flowers.” Clove wipes her hands on the side of her shirt– Cato’s shirt, actually–, and comes next to her friend to point at the various bags on the bottom shelf. “It’s like..it’s white powder, I can’t explain it. It makes bread. Noodles. Cookies… pizza. It makes all the good stuff you probably don’t eat. But we are going to change that.” 
There are a few moments of  silence, as Clove measures things. It’s nearly peaceful, with the only sounds coming from the dough being flopping and kneaded into the marble. 
Silent, that is, until Glimmer finally breaks. 
“Thank you for staying with me.” Glimmer manages to get out, when tears Clove didn’t even know were coming just start pouring out of her friend. “I-i’m going to be alone for the rest of my life, I don’t want to be alone yet.”
Clove pauses her hand folding, brushing her flour covered hands on her shirt before she rests her elbows on the counter, leaning in to truly hear her friend. “Glimmer, you aren’t going to be alone forever.”
“But I am! Yeah, Cash and Gloss are here but..they aren’t here. My parents are gone. You and Cato are going to go home, I don’t want to be alone yet.” Glimmer sobs, furiously wiping at her eyes with her sleeves, Mascara from god knows when smearing along them. “Noone wants a girl that everyone has had, at least not for more than a night, Clove! I’m alone and when i’m alone I just..I swear it’s like someone’s going to come in and they’re going to touch me and they’re going to hurt me and–”
“You’re scared.” Clove realizes, and her heart completely and utterly shatters for the girl. She sees her not as the twenty something girl in front of her, but instead a scared fifteen year old victor she never got to grow out of being. “It’s okay to be scared, but no one's going to hurt you anymore.” She nearly reaches for her hand, she nearly reaches to do anything to comfort her, but something tells her that sudden touch is the furthest thing from what Glimmer needs right now. 
“Someone is always ready to hurt me, Clove. It’s all anyone wants out of me. Noone wants me but they all want me. I just think about all the things they’ve done to me, Clove. How many times they’ve shot me up with something or gave me a handful of pills and just told me to swallow them. Who knows what they’ve done to me…” Glimmer cries, hot tears tracking down her face and onto the fabric of her sleeves. They speckle her sweater, soaking into the cream colored fabric and turning it dark. The levee has broken within Glimmer, and the rushing waves of grief cannot be stopped. “When I won..my sister and brother used to sleep down here. So when I wake up screaming they could come up to me. And then in the Capitol I was NEVER alone and as soon as I was…Cash would come in. She’d hold me, tell me how sorry she was that she let me become a victor, that she didn’t stop me from trying to go to the games. And then, god, once I had Marvel, he practically moved in and he slept me and I actually felt safe. I could sleep. Even back when we were just friends…he’d let me sleep in his room in the Capitol, he was never touchy or pushy or anything. He just let me sleep and sometimes he’d hold me and it was the best sleep I had since I won.”  Glimmer wipes at the tears  again, ignoring how messy she had to look right now. It was her own kitchen and really what did she have left to lose? Glimmer rambles on,  “And you two are here and so I try to sleep and it isnt working as well as it used to and in thirteen I was so afraid every time I heard someone was in the hall that they were going to come in and —“
“When was the last time you slept, Glimmer? Actually slept?” Clove eases, sliding her a dish towel to use to clear the tears from her eyes. “You have to be exhausted.”
“Probably the games, funny enough. Weird that I felt safe enough there but- it is what it is. I tried in Thirteen! And here! it’s just…I can still feel their hands on my skin a-and feel them breathing on my neck and hear their voices and the sound of their feet coming to get me. If I fall asleep they’re there taunting me and grabbing me and-and-and!“ Glimmer  continues to recount her nightmares and real life horrors, her breath catching in her throat and coming out in heaving, panicked, desperate gasps. “I just don’t see what the point of all this was. I don’t have anyone and I’m terrified in my own house and my parents are gone and what did I survive it all for if I’m going to be alone?” 
“You aren’t going to be alone. You aren’t, and you can stay with someone or something but, God Glimmer. Out of all of us, all of the things we have gone through, you Glimmer deserve a happy ending. You deserve to feel safe and loved and god, Glimmer, you deserve to be happy.” Clove finally grabs at her arm, gently squeezing her forearm. “You are safe, Glimmer. And no one gets to hurt you ever again. I promise, Glimmer. You are going to be happy.”
Glimmer…does not learn how to make pasta that day. 
Ten minutes of egg and flour stuck to her fingers is enough to send her back to the verge of tears and back to a safe distance away where she instead watches only. 
Once the dough is chilling and the sauce is stewing, they retreat to the living area, sprawled out on the baby pink couches. 
They sit in comfortable silence while the sauce cooks, Glimmer curled up on the foot of the couch, Clove outstretched on the other end with a book of District One history spread out in her lap. 
It’s peaceful. Comfortable. Safe. 
When Clove notices the Glimmer has fallen asleep, she grabs the fur  throw blanket from the back of the couch and tosses it over her friend. Never in her life had she planned to care for some random victor girl from District One, with enough trauma and abuse in her short life for all of them combined, but here she was. War, she supposed, changed the way you see the world. 
She doesn’t even need to call the boys in for dinner like a mother calling for her kids to come in at sundown, because like the bloodhounds men tend to be, they all but run through the glass back door like the children they never got to be once the smell of dinner reaches the outdoors. 
“Clove? Clove, are you cooking? Do I smell food?” Marvel slips in the door first, literally just edging Cato out to get in before him. “Holy mother of god, that's food. I can SMELL the spice, there's salt in it isn’t there. You’re a fucking saint.”
“You’re a moron.” Cato rolls his eyes, but pushes Marvel out of the way just so he can beat him to the island. “…there is salt and stuff right?”
“You’re also a moron.” It’s Clove’s turn to roll her eyes instead, as she fishes a single pasta noodle out of the water to try it. “If i remember correctly you did talk about my cooking every day for weeks…”
“Months.” Glimmer chimes in as she makes her appearance. It’s only been a couple of hours since she fell asleep on the couch but even the brief nap has her looking noticeably better and more rested. “Every day for months.”
Clove catches Glimmer (but not Cato) off guard with how fast she moves when she reaches out to grab Marvel’s wrist as he goes to dip a spoon into the sauce. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“Clove, I'm serious,this is the best moment I've had in months, let me have this. I need something good in my life.” Marvel half pleads, and the tired tone in his voice paired with the exhaustion behind his eyes is all that it takes before Clove is releasing his wrist and turning away. 
“Do NOT go in twice, I will cut off your fingers.” She threatens and has to nearly slap Cato’s fingers away from the pasta noodles where they are cooling. “You two are like fucking children.”
“Oh my god.” Comes from Marvel, but it sounds somewhere between a cry and a gasp. “Clove this is the best thing i’ve had-maybe ever. Maybe that's the war trauma but-” Ignoring her threats he risks it for another dip, and then steps immediately a few steps out of her reach. “Can you stay here? Seriously, can we keep you? Cato you can stay too, if that helps.” 
Marvel slides to the other side of the island, safely out of reach of all three of them as he debates just dipping a coffee cup and drinking the sauce. “For fucks sake, Cato, kiss her. Or Glimmer, you do it. I don’t care. One of you..just..appreciate her.”
“I’ll still kill you.” Cato warns, but he is slightly distracted by the handfuls of fresh pasta he is dropping into his mouth. “Clove is very appreciated, thank you very themuch.”
“.....are you crying?” Glimmer leans onto the counter, propping her chin in her hand as she outright smirks at her once boyfriend. There's the spark of light behind her eyes that Snow had snuffed out long ago starting to glow just a little again. 
“No!” Marvel defends himself indignantly, but they all hear the sniffle and the stifled“......maybe a little.”
I can go anywhere I want, anywhere I want just not home
Two months after their initial arrival in One, at the end of the second great war, after months of Clove feeding them, many tears from Glimmer at their goodbye, and promises of continued communication under the new mechanisms and options– phones communications, along with travel between districts, were allowed once again– Clove, Cato, Brutus, and Enobaria were on their train home. 
Maybe it was irony, or maybe it was fate, but they take the incredibly short trip home on the same train they had come to the Capitol on in their prior games. Neither had ever noticed how the high speed trains went from One to Two in under half an hour, but then again, why would they have paid attention when they were young invincible victors with the entire world at their fingertips?
Still, even a twenty seven minute train ride feels like absolute eternity when you do not know what waits for you on the other end. 
She is sitting as she always has on these trips– curled up with her back against his chest, settled between his legs, head resting on his shoulder. Her fingers snake up to where his arm is resting on the back of the couch, and she laces her fingers in with his. 
Clove sighs as her eyes flutter shut, choosing not to watch the passage of destroyed buildings, burned farms, and mass civilian graves.  There was a time in her life where no amount of bloodshed or the loss of life made her bat an eye— it was what they were trained for— but now…something about it made her stomach turn. 
“It doesn’t feel like we’re going home.” Cato mumbles into the crown of her head, sliding his other hand firmly around her waist and holding her tighter to him. “It doesn’t feel like we even have one.”
“I don’t think we do.” Clove twists in his arms just a little so that she can see his face and languidly brings her free hand up to graze along his jawline. “I mean, we have a house, but I don’t think anyone will want to see us. Exiled to Victor’s Village ..” Her nails scratch along the planes of his skin gently, as she cranes her neck back to really look at him. 
She has spent over half of her life looking at him, learning with him, and ultimately the last six loving him. Looking at him now, though, it’s almost like seeing him through new eyes. 
Scars that the capitol would never take from him along his arms from retraining, golden blonde hair that had grown out enough it reached nearly to his eyelashes, the brightest sky blue eyes that harbored exhaustion far beyond that of a twenty one year old man. 
And yet. It almost felt new to look at this man right now, in the same position on the same train they had been in time and time again. 
It was new to see him in a world without The Hunger Games. 
In a world where they would not wake up day to day to train the next class of tribute children, a world where they would not mentor victor and victor to parade home with pride to their district. A world where they would not raise their own children to volunteer for the games, where they would sacrifice them with a smile on their faces for the glory of being the parents of their own victor child, or pretend it did not shatter them to lose that same glorified baby to the games because they wouldn’t want to raise anything less than ideal little victors. 
There was a version of them, somewhere, that dedicates the rest of their lives to the Hunger Games. 
This is not that version of them. Not anymore. 
Maybe it is because she knows what the life of a victor truly holds now. She learned in the confessions of Finnick, in the strangled screams of Glimmer in the middle of the night. She learned in the stories of Johanna, in the depravity of Haymitch. She learned in the desperation of Katniss, the destruction of Peeta. She learned of it in the loss of her mother. 
She learns of a different life of a Victor, now. In the disapproving, but secretly adoring, looks from Enobaria when Cato carries her across a room. In the appreciative murmurs of Brutus, when he has pancakes with chocolate chips before him. In the updates on Annie’s growing family, in Marvel’s silly, stupid, but nonetheless endearing jokes. 
Above all else she learns of it in the love of Cato, who saw her at the lowest shell of herself, and loved her even still. 
Cato raises an eyebrow at her, shaking her just a little. “You’re thinking of something.” It’s his turn to bring a hand to her face, unwinding from her waist so he can tilt her chin up to meet his eyes more properly. “The corners of your lips twitch when you’re thinking too hard.”
Clove smiles gently, allowing the corners of her mouth to come to a soft grin. “I was just thinking about the last time we were on this particular train. On our way to the Quell. I didn’t think we’d be on our way back like this.”
“I also thought we were only leaving that arena in pine boxes. I didn’t think I’d be coming home. I never thought we’d come home together alive. ”  He nods, looking past her rather than at her as he recollects the feelings and emotions of that day, leaving their district for what they expected to be the last time. Their days were numbered, or so they had every reason to believe. 
For the first time, maybe in the entirety of their short lives, that was no longer the case. 
Clove stretches both her arms out to wrap them behind his neck, relaxing fully and truly into his arms. “Is it crazy to say it feels like we won?”
The station is barren and silent when the train stops. There is no great crowd to welcome home the newest victor this time, no officials to celebrate them. 
And yet, when the four of them are back on the train platform,  surrounded by the rubble of what was once the greatest district in the country, there has never been a sweeter homecoming. 
My house of stone, your ivy grows, and now i’m covered in you
The walk home is harrowing. Two months of cleanup had barely touched the majority of the evidence of the violence, especially along the bases of the mountain, where the various villages had to stack their dead. Slowly but surely they had been transported back to their towns to properly be buried under the traditions of each of the different villages.
That, of course, was just for the bodies that had even been recovered. 
Nearly half of District Two’s population was unaccounted for, and reconstruction efforts had only barely begun to move the piles of rocks that represent the rubble of what was once towering buildings and neighborhoods full of homes. 
The true carnage of the war, the gravity of the loss in this district alone was yet to be understood and tallied. Cato cannot say a word on the walk home, as every time he thinks about the bodies of his parents and sister rotting away under the ash of two, his throat feels like it is going to close on him. Clove by extension says nothing either, only threading her arm around his, holding that same arm with her other hand. There are no words to negate the pain of loss, to ease the ache of the unknown. 
The gate to Victor’s Village is somehow perfectly intact, and from what they can see beyond, so are the pristine lines of ornate houses. A layer of ash covers the ground like fallen snow, and the air feels unseasonably cold up here. It is as if the ghosts of the victors, the families, all of the dead haunt these gates, encasing them in a blanket of melancholy as a reminder that they are the survivors yet again. 
The chill especially wraps around Clove, sending an ache deep to her joints, a reminder that while she is a survivor, she was a victim, too. They have survived but they do not come home unscathed, they do not come home the victors they left as. 
There are lights on in the two houses across the street from their own, and the reminder of life of their mentors is one of the only calming thoughts they can cling to.The rest of the houses sit empty, stale air circulating through them with no victors left to call them home. There is no evidence that there was once life in these houses, no shoes on the porch, no watering cans in the yards. Just like that what was once the fullest victors village has become a ghost town. 
The decision to come back had not been an easy one. District One was in a far better condition, and frankly, none of them were quite ready for life on their own after so much time relying on each other for company and sanity during the war. They didn’t even really have motivation to come back– what did they have waiting behind for them. Eventually the announcement came – much to the dismay of many many many citizens– that the surviving Victors would continue to receive monthly stipends (albeit not near as much as pre-war days) as reparation for the torture and violence inflicted on them at the hands of the prior government  ever since their victory. It made it easier to know that upon their return they weren’t going to have to assimilate into societal roles (and for Glimmer, the real relief came that she would never have to work in retail in one). 
Ultimately, the decision to come back was their own. This place, despite the horrors, the violence, the brutality…it was their home. Maybe it was those things that made it home. 
They stand in the charred grass at the very edge of their yard, Clove with her head resting against his body, Cato running his hand over her arm in an attempt to warm her body to ward off the ghosts of pain that the cold brings on. He rests his head on top of hers as they look at the grandiosity of the home they left behind, still frozen in time, as a relic of the time they were eighteen and in love, feeling invincible. 
“Hey…babe?” Cato wrinkles his brows together, lifting his head from atop hers. “Do you have a key?”
Well of course they didn’t have a key– it wasn’t like they had considered leaving one under the doormat on their way to their certain deaths. 
“Fuck.” Clove laughs against his arm, burying her face in the dark wool of his coat. Her laugh is contagious to him, and he’s shaking his head with a laugh not too long after her. Out of all the obstacles that should have kept them from ever crossing the threshold of their home again, they had not thought to anticipate a key being one. 
She flashes him a playful smirk, raising her eyebrows teasingly. “Are we going to break into our own house?”
Sure, Cato could probably just go through the front door. Of course with the current state of Two, that door would not be replaced because a couple of kids broke into their own house. 
“We left the bedroom window unlocked.” Cato reminds her, catching her off guard as he grabs her by the waist and throws her over his shoulder. “I mean.. I hope we left the window unlocked.”
Clove nearly shrieks as she ends up in the air, his hands giving taunting pinches on the very top of her thighs as he fully carries her to the back yard. The grass is overgrown in some places, burnt in others, Clove notices as she stares at the ground from her place on his shoulder.
Cato surprises Clove again when he flips her from his shoulder to his arms, one hand under her knees and the other under her shoulders as he cradles her against him. “Okay. You’re going in.”  
It’s not even surprising how easily he lifts her to a standing position on his hands, how he can push her towards the bedroom window with such ease. All that to say, Clove's short arms and legs do not make it any easier, with her fingertips barely able to reach the window screen to pry it off. When she does she sends it flying down behind her, and only from the groan she hears from Cato can she tell it hit him. It is using all the dexterity of her little fingers that she is able to slide the window up and open.
“Got it!” Clove calls down to him, and lightly twists her ankle in his palm. “You gotta throw me a little.”
“I can’t throw you through the window–” Cato scoffs, shaking his head adamantly. “No way in hell.”
“Cato I can’t reach, You need to just give me a little boost-”
“A little boost i’m already holding you above my head–” 
“Cato! A little toss!” Clove insists, jolting her foot with a little annoyance. “I’m serious, we need to get in–”
“Fine! But if you bust your face open don’t blame me.” Cato grumbles, and grabs her by the bottom of her shoes. “Okay, ready?”
Clove nods, already bracing her hands on either side of the window. When he gives her the little bit of a toss (more than a little, considering the strength he doesn’t even realize he exerts sometimes), Clove is able to flip in through the window. 
All Cato can hear is a slight scream from his wife as she tumbles into the house.
“Clove…babe…you alright?” Cato calls up, an edge of panic infiltrating his cool tone.  “Baby…”
Clove appears in the window, resting her elbows on the window ledge as she smiles down at him with a coy smirk. “You look like you’re here to beg me to sneak out.”
“If I remember correctly it was me who had the house first..” Cato responds to her smirk with his own, running a hand over the side of his hair. “Will you let me in? I didn’t throw you through the window just so I could still break down the door.”
“Patience, patience, Cato.” Clove teases, but the smile on her face could keep Cato going for the rest of his life. “I’m coming, meet you out front.”
Cato beats her to the front door. Patience has never been his strength, and frankly, it’s fucking cold and she is taking a weirdly long amount of time before she comes down. “Clove open the door, I'm not playing around.” 
When the door does swing open to Clove, somehow already changed into one of his shirts and one of his shirts only, she greets him with a dark smirk, looking up at him from thick lashes. “Welcome home.”
The thin layer of dust that covers every surface in their house is a problem for another time.
Later…after.. Clove sits between his legs in the bath, the water as hot as they can possibly get it, soothing every ache in the crooks of her spine. His fingers trace imaginary shapes over the back of her hand, her head against his chest and shoulder. Hot water had been one of the biggest losses in Thirteen. Clove had imagined this particular moment for months. So much so that it was the first- well…second– thing they did once they were back in their home. 
Their names were still carved into the bedpost, their laundry still in pre-sorted piles on the bathroom floor.  Clove’s skin yearns for the softness of the clean sheets they had left behind (though maybe they were not so clean with the dust and ash layer on every surface). In the morning, Clove will treat herself to tea with the rest of the honey in the cabinet above the sink and to the left. 
“You know, I think Enobaria had the spare key.” Cato realizes with his lips on Clove’s neck, and he deserves the light smack to the side of his head once he says it.
“I do not want to think about Enobaria right now, thank you very much.” Clove mumbles, tilting her neck so he can have more more more as she feels his other hand wrapping around her waist and sliding lower. 
“We made it home, sweetheart.” Cato kisses into the skin of her neck, pulling her somehow even closer. “We’re home.”
“We are home.” Clove repeats, but the emphasis she places changes the meaning of the statement. Yes, they are home. But they are home. 
He is hers and she is his. 
They are home. 
And If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were still around. 
Home is not as idyllic as they may have remembered, but it was home. 
The thunderstorms that once lulled her to sleep, jolted her awake with a racing heart. The sound of rain no longer rain, but too identical to the distant sound of bombs in their homeland.  When she ends up sitting on the porch in the middle of the night, forcing herself to face it, she is always joined by a heavy blanket being draped around her shoulders, and Cato sitting wordlessly beside her. What they don’t know is that in a district not too far away, another girl screams herself awake from nightmares of the past, and is joined by the innocent affection of a man who slides into bed next to her only to sleep, who holds her only with the intention to comfort her while expecting nothing in return. 
The cold hurts more than she imagined it would. It is not just the recollection of nearly freezing to death that frightens her anymore, it is the pain in her body. Their home is somehow always chilly, her wrists and shoulders and back always aching fiercely. Cato knows her, he has her entire life, and is always adamant to add another blanket to the bed or turn up the heat even when it leaves him himself sweating. 
Brutus and Enobaria still let themselves in multiple days a week for breakfast.
A few weeks into their return, a knock on their front door long before breakfast startles them both. He’s sitting at the kitchen island admiring the concentration on her face as she carves into something she will undoubtedly transform into something fantastic in an hour or so. 
“Who comes to see us?” Clove raises an eyebrow, but doesn’t look away from her task before her. “Enobaria and Brutus have never knocked, and you know Glimmer and Marvel couldn’t be awake this early..”
“They’ll leave.” Cato shrugs, reaching out a hand to nab some of the intricately carved strawberries Clove had already finished with. “Ignore it.”
The knocking only increases in frequency and volume, and Cato rolls his eyes as he pushes himself away. “I’ll get rid of them.”
Clove can’t wipe away the smirk that rises as she watches him walk away, all shirtless with sweatpants slung so low on his hips that it wouldn’t take much effort from her when he comes back to–
She hears the door swing open but does not hear him scare anyone off with a threat, nor does she hear anything at all. “Babe?” Clove calls out behind him, wiping off the blade of her knife with a towel before she lays it down on her cutting board. “Cato?” She calls again, quickly covering the distance from the kitchen to the front door. Cato isn’t even in the doorway, and Clove doesn’t know why that makes her heart race.
Once she makes it to the door, to see what is waiting on the porch, her heart fully stops. 
Wrapped around Cato’s torso are the long baby limbs of his baby sister, little arms clinging around his neck, long blonde curls covering where her face is absolutely buried in his neck. He’s got both arms around the girl, one hand holding her head to his shoulder.  Immediately to his left, with her hand on his arm, is his mother. War was unkind to her, as the woman Clove once looked up to and yearned to emulate in some ways looked more fragile than ever. 
“Hi Clove, Honey.”  Cato’s mother greets her with an exhausted, bone tired smile. There is a lack of light in those blue eyes, a sorrow Clove hopes never to imagine. 
Clove furrows her eyebrows, tilting her head just a little and it is enough of a question for the older woman to perceive it.  
His mother takes in a sharp breath and shakes her head very quickly in the negative and it is all Clove needs to see to know that this is it, this is all that remains of Cato’s family. A mother and a sister.  
“I missed you, so so much kiddo.” Cato whispers to the girl, gently running his hand over the back of her head over and over again. 
Clove steps forward and gently places a hand on the taller woman’s arm, ever so slightly squeezing. “I’m so sorry.” 
The blonde woman presses her lip together and nods, taking her arm off of her son and instead wrapping them around Clove in a hug. “I’m glad to see you again. I don’t think he would have survived it without you.” 
“I wouldn’t have either.” Clove admits, allowing herself to squeeze a little tighter to the woman, analyzing her change in body structure. 
“He’s been gone a long time.” His mother informs them both, patting Clove’s cheek gently before she goes back to wrap her son and little daughter in her arms. 
“Where have you been?” Cato gets out, his voice nearly cracking as he looks down on his mother. “Where did you go?”
“We’ve just been on the move, huh baby?” His mom brushes Cora’s little arm, pulling her attention from where she is hiding in her brother’s arms. “We have just moved constantly, no one could catch us if they didn’t know where we were.”
“Is home…” Cato starts, unable to force the rest of the words out into the world. 
“Gone. long gone.” His mother explains, as Cora raises her head and latches eyes with Clove. 
“You can stay in my house.” Clove immediately offers out, waving slightly at Cora. “Hi, sunshine.”
Immediately Cora lifts her little blonde head and practically wriggles out of Cato’s arms, nearly running into her once she has her little feet on the ground. With his arms free Cato wraps his arms fully around his mother in a hug, and Clove can see the way he melts into his mother;s arms like a little boy
Clove initially wants to kneel to Cora’s level, to become eye to eye with her. However, this six year old child is nearly to her shoulder’s already, and Clove is taken back by how tall this little girl has become. “You’ve gotten so big!”
“I’m as tall as you!” She cheers, and this bright angel of a child wraps her arms around her sister in law. “I missed you, Clove.”
“We missed you too, Cora Jade.” Clove promises, leaning down just a little to kiss the top of her head. “I think you’re going to stay in the house next to us for a little while!” She can no longer scoop her up, with how tall and gangly she has become in the last year. Clove tries anyway, scooping Cato’s sister to sit on her hip despite the fact they are nearly the same size. Cora immediately relaxes against her, and somehow, some way, Clove feels like something deep inside her relaxes with relief, too. 
And though I can’t recall your face, I’ve still got love for you 
For kids who had been trained to kill, who have taken lives, they were more surrounded by death than ever before. They hadn’t expected the influx of funeral services and war memorials they would be expected to attend. 
His father had of course been the most painful, with the heart broken sobs of his baby sister, asking when she’d see her daddy again. It was devastating for Cato, too, who had to learn how to be an adult man in a world without games without his father to guide him. The loss had hit him harder than he dared to admit. 
At the end of what felt like the tenth funeral service they felt obligated to attend, this one of an old classmate and her younger sister, while Cato played nice with another ex-classmate Clove found herself wandering to a part of the cemetery that she had never allowed herself to cross into. 
It was sacred ground, really, treated with utmost respect. Perfect lines of simple limestone grave markers stretched in perfect lines of 25, save for the last row. No tribute came home to be buried from seventy five. The victors, they were in a separate area even still, with lavish, over the top headstones. But here, in a well maintained corner of the District Two cemetery, rest every single tribute who did not make it to victor status. 
The boy from her games did not even have solid grass on top of his grave plot yet, and the ceaseless bombing did nothing to aid in that process. The girl from Cato’s games is a little further grown over, with a thin but respectable layer of fresh grass that grows in all directions. She can remember some of the others, mildly. The boy who lost against Glimmer, the girl who Johanna took out. 
It is not her own peers, though, that interests Clove. 
She weaves through years and years of games, of either single or double headstones from every single Hunger Games, from 75 to 62, and finally to the one she had avoided the entirety of her life. 
Six feet below her feet was the remaining body of Sevina Kentwell, being the closest Clove has been to her mother in nearly eighteen years. 
It is a simple marker, like all of the others. With the name of the tribute, the date of their birth, and what place they came in their games.  Somehow, seeing first runner up, though she had known it the entirety of her life, manages to rip her heart from her chest, coating the white limestone with the spray of hot, wet blood. 
Or at least it’s how it feels. 
There is no mention of the life Sevina had prior to the games. No mention of the daughter she left behind, how she was a mother who loved deeply and to the last day of her life, how she was the daughter of a cruel woman who only became that way after the loss of her child. 
Clove does not know when exactly she ends up on her knees, kneeling before the stone that is no taller than her in this position. 
It is when she notices the little symbol on every stone– some knives, some stars, some hearts– that she realizes there is some small personalization that makes these tributes people. Children. 
Clove’s right hand reaches out, shaking just enough that she notices, as she traces her pointer finger over the etching of her mother’s name. It is then, as she reaches the I, that she realizes the dot over the initial is a clover. 
The weight of a war, of physical torture, of two Hunger Games, the destruction of her home, and a loveless, empty childhood hits her. If she were not already on her knees she would have fallen to them, as it feels like she is the one who just had the breath slammed out of her against that cornucopia. 
The death of her grandmother meant next to nothing. She had openly spoken out against Clove after her appearance in Two, proudly sharing the narrative that she was a traitor and that her daughter died because of this mistake of a child. Yes, she raised Clove and turned her into a victor with her cold demeanor and cruelty, and for that Clove had no choice but to be thankful, but still, she did not feel a great loss at the news of her death by rebels in Two. 
She thought nothing of the news that her father and his entire new family also died in the roles of loyalists. He had been dead to her long before the war. 
The entirety of her family would die with Clove. Maybe tomorrow, maybe in sixty years, but there would be no one left to remember any of them after her inevitable death. 
Maybe that was the gift she could give to the ghost of her mother– the erasure of the people who treated them so cruelly. 
That of course meant the erasure of Sevina Kentwell and Clove herself, as well. 
While Clove had spent the entirety of her life to become a victor, to carve her place in history, right now the idea of slipping into anonymity and living a mundane enough life to not be remembered didn’t sound like the worst ending in the world. 
Sevina Kentwell died nearly eighteen years ago, but somehow it hits Clove like it is the first time all over again. This feeling– the elephant on her chest, the choking, gagging sobs that she could not control, the tears that felt like burning salt on her cheeks– may as well have been from the little girl whose mother never came back for her. 
She felt an overwhelming need to speak out loud– to the air, to the universe, to whatever could hear her– that she couldn’t really explain. It felt silly, to just speak into thin air, and yet she doesn’t have it in there to stop herself. 
Clove wipes her tears on the back of her sleeves, rocking back to sit on her heels. She pushes her hair behind her ears, before she crosses her arm over her chest, tucking her hands along her hips on opposite sides of her body. 
“I’ve always kind of wondered what was so wrong with me as a baby, if I was so unlovable of a little girl that it was just..so easy to leave me. Grandma always told me thats the case…that I’ve been fucked up since I was born and that it was easy to leave a crazy little girl. That the risk of dying was better than having to spend eighteen years with me. I believed it, too.” Clove leans her head back, squeezing evergreen eyes closed and taking a deep, shaky breath to the sky, desperate for cool morning air to fill her lungs and quench the burning that ravages the back of her throat.  “I can’t remember what you look like. I’ve seen pictures but I can’t remember. I don’t remember the sound of your voice, or what it was like to be held by my mother.”
“I want to be angry and I want to blame you for everything that is just so fucked up about me, but I don’t know. I probably wouldn’t have been sent to training if you were a victor, huh?” Clove sniffles heavily, the skin of her face burning from the continued assault of tears that just cannot cease to flow. “And then I wouldn’t be a Victor..And then I never would have met Cato.” 
She isn’t quite sure she can believe it, though it is rational. If she had not needed to win the games herself, she never would have been sent to training to become a victor, and by extension would have never crossed paths with Cato. 
There is another part of herself though, the far less rational part, the part that let her fall for her training partner, that believes in any universe, in any version of reality, some way somehow, they would always find each other (though that she would never say out loud). 
“I married him, you know. I’ve never said it out loud.. I’ve never told anyone about it.” Clove whispers to the universe, words barely falling past her lips. “But I did. I guess I wasn’t so terrible and unlovable after all, or maybe I was, and he’s a little terrible and fucked up too. We’re made for each other in that way. He’s…the love of my life.”  She finds that her right hand is twisting at her left ring finger, the empty digit lacking any physical or public reminder of such love. It didn’t matter. They knew. “Enobaria took really really good care of me, too.  Like she had promised you. I don’t know if I would have survived without her. Both literally as a baby, but also in the games.” 
She exhales shakily. Her breathing is weighty and consuming, as she feels her throat tightening with the burning feeling of exhaustion. “I wish I had a mom these days, not that you’d know what a world without the games is like anyway…but it would be nice. To have a mom for the rest of my life….Whatever it looks like.”
Clove rests her body weight on her hands in front of her, steadying herself as she catches her breath and regains her composure. She raises her left hand again, branching herself on her mother’s headstone so she can push herself to a standing position. She brushes off the grass on her knees, smoothing down the skirt of her formal black dress. Digging the heels of her hand to stop the tears, she is unconcerned with the fact her makeup is certainly smeared around her eyes. Clove takes a shaking, stabilizing breath, gently reaching down to pat the top of the rock. 
“I miss my mom. I miss you, and I don’t even know you but I know that I love you.” Clove brushes her deep hair behind her shoulders, standing up straight like the victor she will forever be. She is all that is left of, and all that there will ever be, of the woman who eternally rests deep under her feet. “I owe you, quite literally, for my life. In all senses of it. So uh..thank you. For ruining your life to give me mine.” 
Clove takes one final shaky breath, craning her neck to the sky to stop the flow of tears. She wipes at her cheeks quickly, before shoving her hands in the pocket of her coat. Clove weaves back through the tribute corner, and before she even reaches the little gate she sees Cato leaning against one of the metal posts, one ankle crossed over the other, hands in the pockets of his own coat.
As soon as she’s within reach his arm is around her shoulders, using his hand to smooth down the hair at the top of her head before he kisses the crown of her hair gently and swiftly. Of course he can see the tracks of tears, the pink tint under the field of freckles, but he doesn’t comment on it. This was a private moment for her. 
“Ready to go home?” He pulls her in closer to his side, body heat warming her against the cool, rainy air. 
“I think we have one more stop to make.”
Everything you lose is a step you take
The only thing left of the academy which they met, trained, and ultimately, became themselves is a set of chipped marble stairs. The grand archway is reduced to piles of rubble, the long stretch of the building that was once home rests in various piles of rocks and decay. 
Their classmates were mostly dead, either after being forced into roles as peacekeeper soldiers or victims of various bombings. There were no more dorms that they had once snuck around, no more rooms full of knives or spears or dummies to use as target practice. There were no more closets to sneak off too or bad showers with cold water and low water pressure. 
All that was left of their childhood were the very steps they sat on now. 
Cato sits beside Clove, hand in hand. 
“I thought we’d spend the rest of our lives in this building.” Clove admits, brushing the hand that is not interlaced with his over the remnants of the grand staircase. “I imagined we’d be the most successful mentors, well, ever.” 
“Spend our lives in the building? I thought we’d own it. Rename it to the Kentwell-Hadley Training Academy, then we could claim every District Two victor forever. It would be like our legacy.” Cato teases, but the longing edge in his voice tells Clove that no, that is not entirely a joke.  He clears his throat, shifting so his chin was sitting on top of the crown of her head instead. “Do you ever think about the day we met?”
“Yeah, you broke my collarbone.” Clove smirks, craning her neck so she can look him in the eyes. They would never be back in the place they met, in the place she realized she loved this arrogant, temperamental boy. This, right here, was as close as it would get. “I thought we were going to hate each other forever…that we’d go out killing each other in the most violent, showy way we could. 
“And you stabbed me!” Cato indignantly nudges her with his shoulder, but brings his other hand up to cradle her face in his. I never thought, in a million years, we’d be lucky enough to be right here, Clove.”
“Alive?” Clove teases, but takes the opportunity to lean in and press her forehead to his. “On the rubble of the academy?” As much as she teases, she knows what he means. He means hand in hand, far from the enemies they were the day they met. He means the love they share.
“Together. I never thought we’d get to be together.” Cato admits, leaning in somehow closer still, so that their noses also could touch. “All this shit Clove, and the only constant in my entire life, from the time we were actual children, has been you. It has always been you.”
“Yeah, well, you’re not getting rid of me any time soon.” She promises, wrapping her arm around his neck so that she can pull her upper body flush to his as she finally finally finally connects her lips with his. Clove melts in his arms as he fully wraps his arms around her and holds her as close as he humanly can to him. When she pulls back, resting her nose against his once again, she laughs. “What do we do now with the rest of our lives?”
“I could say each other–” Cato taunts, but laughs as he gives the slightest shrug before she can refute him. “I don’t really know. We’ll figure it out, like we always do.”
“Together?” Clove teases, leaning back so she can fully lock eyes, green with blue, as a coy little smile creeps onto her face. “I love you. More than I loved the games.”
“Aren’t I special.” Cato soaks her in. Wet dark curls framing her face, freckles like constellations across her nose.  If he got to see this for the rest of his life.. He’d die happy. Hopefully not for many many many years, but happy nonetheless.“I love you too. More than anything.”
“You just have to one up me..” Clove rolls her eyes playfully, but she does not actually move from her place in his arms. “You know, if you want to actually get married again, you do have to ask again.”
“Are you going to say yes?” He pinches her hip playfully, causing her to squirm in his arms which he uses as the opportunity to grab her even tighter. 
“Depends on the day.” She warns, but grabs his face in both her hands immediately after. She can see it all in his eyes. The nine year olds they once were, the twenty one year olds they are now. Their entire past lies crumbled beneath them, but with her arms around his shoulders and his around her hips the entirety of their future rests in their arms. 
All the uncertainty of this new world, it didn’t matter. The future, whatever it would be, would be okay.  Whatever their future held, would be just fine, so long as it held them. 
Cato and Clove.
“Always and forever, Cato. It’s you and me, always and forever.”
I had the time of my life with you. 
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omgpourquoi · 5 months
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Kofi4ACause- Trying to get to $30 to submit as a donation for the ‘thanksgiving’ holiday
Donate $5 for a short fic request! Read the collection: https://archiveofourown.org/collections/Kofi4ACause
All requests will have a week grace period as I like to think over fics before writing them. Give me the ship, a place, and an action.
Ex) Nurseydex, Annie’s, fighting about pizza toppings
Currently, all donations are going to the Tamástslikt Cultural Museum. It is the only museum on the Oregon Trail that tells the story of western expansionism from a tribal point of view. https://www.tamastslikt.org/
When I change charities, I will make a transparency post with the recipients of donation!
Let’s do some good and write some fun stuff!✍️
List of ships I’ll write on below!
- Nursey x Dex (omgcheckplease)
- Jack x Bitty (omgcheckplease)
- Shitty x Lardo (omgcheckplease)
- Beau x Yasha (Critical Role)
- Caleb x Essek (Critical Role)
- Pike x Scanlan (Critical Role)
- Fjord x Jester (Critical Role)
- Vax x Keyleth (Critical Role)
- Corazon de Ballena x Prudence (Oxventure)
- Any combo (all or some) for Oxventurers tbh (Oxventure)
- Eddie x Silas (Oxventure: Deadlands)
- also non NSFW Oxventure Deadlands! Any combo
- Marlowe x Lyra (Salt and Serpent)
- Piper x Dis (Salt and Serpent)
Pay $10 for NSFW content of ships above👀 be aware that I will write intimacy in a very specific way— bc I’m demisexual— if you would like, go read some of my previous work and see if it’s up your alley!
No NSFW available for these, they are minors! Still some cute fic potential!
- Percabeth (Percy Jackson)
- Tratie (Percy Jackson)
- Fierrochase (Magnus Chase)
- Nick & Charlie (Heartstopper)
- Literally any of the 7 (Dimension 20)
- The Bad Kids (Dimension 20)
- Zelda x Gorgug (Dimension 20)
- Tara x Darcy (Heartstopper)
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