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justfandomwritings · 3 years

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By The Norns (Part One - Soulmate!Loki)

Pairing: Loki x Reader, Soulmates AU

Word count: 2.1k

Warnings: Nobody was harmed in any way in the making of this story... but there was some arson.

Summary: She wasn’t a goddess. She wasn’t even an elf or a dwarf. She was a mortal, a Midgardian, a human. To Odin, she was a curse. To Loki, she was a second chance.

Notes: Don’t worry. Despite what the chapter and the description may make you think anyone whose read my stories before will know I am not a fan of soulmate aus that take away the character’s choice. This chapter is set up. Stick with me on this. I promise. Posted in honor of @muna1412 being very excited at the prospect of another soulmate au.

This is not related to Loyalty in any way... I just have an unhealthy obsession with Soulmate aus.

Fate was a funny, fickle thing. Loki knew that much. After all, he’d met her.

Them, to be more precise. The Norns.

Urdr, Skuld, and Verdandi were their names: Past, Present, and Future, as they should be known.

It was they who watered the tree, and they who grew its leaves. The task fell to the Norns to write, shape, create, and control the fate of every being under the branches of Yggdrasil.

A poor, dwarven craftsman working on the surface of Nidavellir, a beautiful, golden elf living on a hill in Alfheim, a meager, puny human scurrying around the surface of Midgard. It was they who made the dwarf rich, who killed the elf in his sleep, who let the human sow the land. They did not exchange the gold; they did not wield the dagger; they did not draw the plow. But it was by their hand, by their grace and mercy, that the worlds turned, that life waxed and waned, that the Realms drew breath.

Every birth was through their will. Every death was by their hand, and everything in between was because they decided it would be so.

All fell under the gaze of the Norns. The kitchen cook, Andhrimnir, who served the Aesir’s table at night, owed everything to the Norns. They allowed his birth into Asgard. They raised him above the station of a lowly tavern boy. They gifted him the family he cradled so dearly to his chest.

Odin, King of the Nine Realms, Protector of Asgard, owed everything to the Norns. He was born by their choice. He survived a thousand battles because they said he would do so. He married Frigga because they put her on his path. His sons…

Well, one of his sons.

Loki knew the exact moment Odin stopped looking at him as a son, the exact moment Odin chose Thor over him, the exact moment Odin turned his back on him, the exact moment his father marked him disappointment.

It was, like all things, the doing of the Fates. The Norns.

Fates were theirs to command from the highest branches of Yggdrasil down to its very roots. From king to beggar, slave to master, aristocrat to pauper, farmer to merchant, sailor to soldier. From Loki to her. She was their doing.

Love was an inevitable part of life. Not even the Norns, with all of the power of the gods and then some, could stop that. Humans, Aesir, Elves, Vanir, the sentient beings of the Nine Realms felt an overwhelming urge towards emotion, and one of the strongest, one of the most inevitable, was love.

They couldn’t stop it, but they could direct it.

It fell under the purview of Fate to decide who one loved. People, god and mortal alike, fell in and out of love all the time.

Sometimes, though, every now and then, the Norns would reach down and touch two beings. The Norns would take two souls in two bodies and braid them together, weave them together, mold them together, as if they were one.

Those who knew magic well, those like Loki, could see them, watch them, doing this.

They could see Urdr floating, invisible amongst them, deciding the pair. They could see Skuld, plucking up their souls. They could see Verdandi tying them together.

Loki watched them when they took his soul.

“Mother, Mother,” Loki tugged on his other’s silk skirts and pointed up into the rafters of the Grand Hall. “What’s that?”

Frigga followed her son’s gaze and gasped. Magic was not her proficiency, though what little she had she wielded well. She had enough to see the Norns, floating ghostlike in the air over her younger son. She had enough to see his soul in their hands, and another at their side.

In the old days, before that fateful night, it was considered an honor to be chosen by the Norns. It was a guarantee of a great, powerful destiny in the future. It was a promise of passion, understanding, and respect on the horizon. It was the mark of one who would know true love.

The Midgardians called them soulmates. The Aesir called them the destined.

“The Norns have touched Loki,” Frigga whispered to Odin at her side. “They are gifting him a match.”

“With who?” Odin asked because he could not see them for himself.

Frigga squinted in the direction of the apparitions tying together Loki’s future. “I cannot tell. She appears to be…” Frigga’s eyes whipped around to Odin, “Midgardian.”

Odin turned up his nose and sniffed.

Midgard. The word, the world, that had sentenced Loki to a lifetime of second best.

His ‘destined’, his ‘soulmate’, his curse.

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It was centuries before the soul tied to Loki’s found the body it would spend its own life in.

(Y/n), her parents named her.

They weren’t sure why they named her that. When asked, they said they saw the name once in a book. Or was it on the tv? Or in a dream?

Neither could really remember. All they knew was that, as she grew, the name suited her perfectly. Almost as if fate itself had chosen it for her.

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For centuries, millennia even, her soul had been lingering on the edges of reality, existing but not quite feeling. She floated through time and space, following the ties that bound her to existence, waiting.

By the time her soul entered her body on Earth, she had existed longer than any other Midgardian ever had or would in all of history. She had lingered for years just out of reach of one of the most powerful beings on Asgard, her soulmate. Lifetimes had passed her by in the blink of an eye, and though she didn’t remember any of them, they remembered her.

Her soul hovered above its mate, basking in the magic that dissipated into the air around him like smoke. She breathed it in, soaked it in, drew it in.

In many ways, even subconsciously, she showed her age, her mate.

Even as a baby, she never woke her mother up screaming, to the jealousy of her mom’s friends. She was the model toddler, even through her terrible twos. She almost never cried and rarely threw temper tantrums. They called her a prodigy when she started speaking in full sentences before time doctors even expected her to be learning her first words, and they called her a genius when she learned to read full children’s books while other kids were still struggling through their first alphabet flashcards. Even though she ran around playing in the mud or splashing in puddles, somehow her clothes were always pristine. She taught herself faster than the teachers could and skipped two grades in elementary school alone. She was suspiciously charismatic for such a little girl and made, literally, hundreds of dollars off her lemonade stand. She listened to a family speaking another language in the store once and ran up to them to answer a question they had; when her parents asked her how she’d learned to understand or say that in another language, she had no idea what they were talking about and seemingly hadn’t even realized she’d done it.

And yet there were other things, darker things.

When she was born, the nurses didn’t question the little shock of static that jolted through them as they held her. No one commented how, in the right light, the baby’s eyes could look terrifyingly aware. She lied as easily as she breathed and almost never got caught. A girl made fun of her friend's hair once at school, and that night ended up being rushed to the hospital by her parents with all the signs of a heart attack in a five year old child. She liked having things her way, and even when her parents refused her, they always found themselves oddly compelled to do whatever it was anyways. She had an affinity for snakes that often found her letting them in the house. The pranks she pulled on her little brother sometimes got out of hand and often resulted in loud crashes and screams, though by the time any adult arrived nothing ever seemed broken. Her father used to joke that she must be some kind of shape shifter because he swore that, from day to day, her eye would change their color. Sometimes, when he looked in them, he swore they weren’t his daughters, but when he blinked and looked back they always returned to normal.

Most of it was written off as the simple oddities of a child or exaggerations of first time parents.

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Superheroes did not exist when (Y/n) was a child.

It would be another decade before Tony Stark would stand on a stage and proclaim before the world, “I am Iron Man.” It would be even longer still before Peter Parker would put on a red and blue jumpsuit and call himself, ‘Spiderman’. Bruce Banner hadn’t even begun his research into the serum that would be his ultimate undoing. Dr. Stephen Strange was finishing up med school. Thor hadn’t made his presence known. Wanda had just been born. Hawkeye and Black Widow were still assassins working in the shadows. No one outside Wakanda had ever heard of the Black Panther. Vision hadn’t been built yet, and Captain America had been dead for decades.

Even if they did exist, it wouldn’t have helped (Y/n). Most of them weren’t born super. Most of them became so by lab experiments or radioactive insects or training or technology.

In the world (Y/n) grew up in, there were no superheroes. And if there were no superheroes... then what was she?

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She was 12.

It was her big day.

Not her birthday, she didn’t particularly care about birthdays. Something about them just felt off to her. When she turned 11, she asked her mom if she could have two of those candles that were shaped like the actual numbers, and she’d put them pressed against each other on top of the cake. She ran around all day telling everyone she was 1,111. Some people laughed, but mostly to humor her.

That was why she hadn’t had a birthday party when she turned 12. She didn’t like people fake laughing. It felt like lying. She didn’t particularly mind lying herself, but she hated thinking that people were lying to her. Especially because she could always tell when they were.

No, instead, she had this. The Science Fair.

She’d won first prize the night before. She knew she had because one of the judges had told her she’d won.

That morning, they would be handing out the awards, and she was so excited for everyone else to know the secret, to know that she was the best, even better than the older kids in her class.

The judges were walking up on stage, and any moment, once they got past the category winners they were going to call her name.

“In third place we have Jesse Martin with his project in the biology category!”

A cheer went up that, judging by the pitch, absolutely must have been from Jesse’s mom. The other parents in the room clapped while Jesse ran towards the stage, turning red in the cheeks from his family’s overzealous encouragement.

“Congratulations, son,” the Dean smiled as he bent down to shake the boy’s hand. The mike picked up a small bit of Jesse’s anxious thanks before he ran to join the line of winners.

“And in second place we have, (Y/n)! With her wonderful….”

Second place.

But Mr. Sellers, the science teacher had told her she won.

Was he lying? Did he honestly think second place was winning? Was he just saying that to shut her up? Or was he being mean? Did he want to laugh at her when his real favorite won?

The parents were cheering her, including her own. Her father was nudging her towards the stage, but she didn’t at all appreciate the gesture.

No. They told her she was going to win.

Her face screwed up in pain, and she balled her hands into fists.

At the back of the room something exploded.

A scream went out.

“Fire!” Someone shouted. “Fire!”

The poster boards up and down the hall were catching fire. It jumped easily from paper to paper. It didn’t help that there was no smoke, for some odd reason. That the sprinklers, that the fire alarm, didn’t turn on.

Someone grabbed (Y/n) by the waist. Her father no doubt.

(Y/n) barely noticed. She was still upset staring at the trophy on the stage over his shoulder.

Slowly, before her eyes, it began to melt.

She smiled. Good. If she couldn’t have it, no one could.

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“She caused the fire.” He whispered, staring down at the floor in front of him with glassy eyes.

“Wayne, that’s crazy; you know it is.”

“I saw it with my own eyes, Elle. She clenched her first and suddenly Christina Danvers poster exploded. She gets second, and the first place project explodes the moment she throws a fit?”

“Our daughter doesn’t throw fits.”

“Not normally, but she did today. She was about to, and then everything caught fire.”

“Wayne, you can’t be serious about this right now.”

“She was smiling.” He whispered. “When everything burned down, she was smiling.”

(Y/n) listened silently from the hallway as her parents talked.

She loved to eavesdrop on her parents late night. They never knew she was there. It was another one of those odd coincidences of her life that (Y/n) was the only person in the house who never made the steps creak when she walked up and down the stairs.

She was old enough to know what they were saying, what they were implying. It should’ve bothered her more than it did.

(Y/n) walked back upstairs, silent as the grave, and opened her closet.

She needed the duffle bag her father kept tucked away in the top of her closet, but she was nowhere near tall enough to reach it. As the door slid open, the bag teetered on the edge of the wire shelf and fell to the floor.

“How convenient,” (Y/n) mumbled to herself.

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“Hey Kid,” The man shouted at her out the window of his semi-truck. “What’re you doin’ out here at night? It ain’t safe!”

(Y/n) shrugged. “Not safe at home either.”

The man gave her an understanding look.

(Y/n) watched him carefully as he opened the door of his rig and offered her a hand.

Her mother had always told her not to talk to strangers, but (Y/n) had found she could always tell what people wanted. Besides, she was pretty sure she was a greater danger to them than they were to her.

“Where ya’ headed?” The man asked.

“West.”

“I can take ya’ as far as Texas.” He offered.

(Y/n) hopped off the curb and grabbed the man’s offered hand, hauling herself up into the passenger seat.

She didn’t know where she was going or why she was going there. But something inside of her told her she had somewhere to be.

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Next Time On.... Part Two

Thank you very much for reading! I hope you all enjoyed. I have just come back from a hiatus and a great deal of why I went on said hiatus was the stress of managing ‘added features’ for lack of a better expression. I like writing. I don’t like formatting or managing the blog side of things.

As such, no taglists. Please don’t ask me to be on a taglist. Keeping track of it stresses me out too much. I don’t feel like doing it. I don’t appreciate being pressured into doing it. In the olden days of tumblr, people used to follow each other, and I promise you that feature still works. If you follow me you will see part two when it’s posted.

#loki x reader #loki odinson x reader #Loki Laufeyson x Reader #loki soulmate au #loki soulmate #soulmate loki #loki fanfiction #loki fanfic #loki x reader soulmate #marvel imagines #loki imagines #marvel fanfic #marvel fanfiction #marvel one shot #loki one shot #loki oneshot #mcu fanfiction #avengers fanfiction

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foilfreak · 3 years

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BEAUTY AND HER BEAST: Chapter 8

WARNING PLZ READ BEFORE CONTINUING: This fic is rated NSFW and contains graphic depictions of things some people may find disturbing or alarming, including, but not limited to: violence, gore, unhealthy family relationships, Oedipus complexes, gratuitous amount of pornographic literature, ableist language, physical, mental, and emotional abuse, etc. If you are someone who does not enjoy fiction with these elements in them, then I suggest you refrain from reading this, because this fic will have all that, and probably a lot more. So, this is your first and final warning to turn around and go somewhere else if stuff like this just isn't your vibe, because from this point forward, your emotional wellbeing is in your own hands, and I will not be accepting blame if you disregarded my warnings and ended up reading something you didn't like. Idk why I feel compelled to write one of these despite this being Resident Evil fanfic, but I figured I'd cover my ass just in case.

(AO3 Link Below:)

Several days had passed since Salvatore had sought out both his younger sisters, requesting items like jewelry or clothing they’d be willing to part with that Salvatore could gift to Nadine, as a sort of soft and informal introduction to ease the young woman’s mind and prove he meant her no harm.

The plan seems to be going rather well, as far as Salvatore can tell. Nadine found the gifts he’d laid out for her rather easily, and even correctly wondered if the person who lived here had left them for her purposefully. She seemed wary of the items for a time, though she seemed pretty wary of everything in the reservoir at the moment, but eventually she deemed them safe enough to accept, throwing the long white nightgown Salvatore had procured from Donna over her petit azure frame, and strapping the delicate golden locket Alcina had graciously donated around her neck.

Salvatore practically drooled when he first saw Nadine, slightly sheer satin nightgown flowing elegantly in the gentle afternoon breeze and golden chain glittering beautifully against her white speckled, ocean blue skin. She looked like a goddess, a true figure of pure ethereal power and beauty. Even the biting cold of winter wasn’t enough to touch the young woman, shielded and protected by her own glowing radiance.

Despite looking every bit like an other-worldly deity worthy of unending human devotion and worship, Nadine’s face held nothing but fear, anxiety, and loneliness as she aimlessly wandered the seemingly empty docks and windmills surrounding the reservior’s watery interior. An occasional dejected “hello?” still echoes out throughout the reservoir every few hours, growing less and less hopeful with each passing round of silence Salvatore spends hiding away from view.

The disfigured man’s heart twists and stabs in pain every time he cowers away from Nadine’s soft, anxious calls, desperately wanting to comfort the young woman in her moment of confusion and fear, but still so terrified of her inevitable reaction to his appearance that he finds himself unable to do anything but skitter shamefully to his room beneath the surface and try to drown her out with one of his old romance films.

How pitiful.

Salvatore spends much of his time lamenting and pitying himself over his soul crushing loneliness and his intense desire for a love of his own, and yet here he is, taking refuge in an old romance film while he hides himself away from the real woman he could be making his own romance film with, were he not a massive coward and a horrific freak of nature unworthy of anyone’s love and affection, of course. What a cruel irony it is, to have the one thing you want, more than anything else in the world, dangled just inches in front of your face, and yet knowing, before you’ve even tried, that it’ll never be yours.

Salvatore knows that no matter how much of a romance story this whole situation might seem like, Nadine will never be able to love him in the way the gorgeous women in the movies love their tall, dashing, dark-haired lover men. Not only was Salvatore the exact opposite of tall and dashing by literally everyone’s standards, but his patches of dry, greasy dark-hair did little to salvage the violent wreckage that was Salvatore’s whole appearance.

There was absolutely no way Nadine would ever be able to love someone as hideous as Salvatore, so perhaps the best thing to do would be to contact Miranda and inform her that, while he greatly enjoyed his gift, Salvatore didn’t feel he would be able to appreciate her in the way she deserved to be appreciated in all her beauty and wonder, and that perhaps it would be better for Mother Miranda to find better arrangements for her elsewhere.

“I-it’s for the b-best… i-i think… a-after all… Nadine… d-doesn’t want t-to live i-in a d-dingy place… l-like this for… for the r-rest of h-her… l-life… m-much less with… w-with someone l-like me… s-she’d hate th-that… im c-certain” Salvatore laments aloud, dipping his head downward as tears of painful realization and sorrowful acceptance pour down his face like waterfalls of lonely depression, already fully set on contacting Mother Miranda as soon as morning came.

“While it's very kind of you to keep my best interest in mind, I do think I am more than capable of making my own decisions regarding what’s the best place for me, thank you very much” a soft voice responded suddenly, causing Salvatore’s head to whip in the direction the sound was coming from in startled shock. “This place is a little rundown, sure, but the windmills still stand tall and the water is always just the right temperature, so I don’t think this would be the worst place to live, if I had to… so long as I wasn’t alone, at least.”

Even in the dimly lit area located at the end of the hallway, Nadine still looked so gorgeously stunning and elegant. It was incredible how she managed to sound so casual and yet look so ethereal.

In the brief moment before his panic set in, Salvatore couldn’t help but pause and marvel at the spot down the hall where the young woman stood, her gaze locked directly onto him and yet she showed no signs of having seen him. She even went as far as to begin moving about behind the large boards that blocked her from entering the room, clearly trying to get a better look at the room and, more importantly, the person she suspects is in it.

After a surprisingly large jump that launched Nadine all the way up to the ceiling, just narrowly avoiding hitting her head, Salvatore’s eyes grew wide and his mouth hung open in stupefied shock as the sight of Nadine, moving the way she was at the end of the hallway, brought to Salvatore’s mind a scene from one of his favorite romance films. In the particular scene Salvatore is thinking of, the actress’ character is an aspiring prima ballerina, and she’s having a brief moment of bonding with her fellow ballerina’s after a long, but successful performance. Dressed in a nightgown not too unlike the one Nadine is currently wearing, the ballerina is showing the others how to do other kinds of dance, like polka or Irish step dancing, but by the end of the scene the group of ballerinas are all merely jumping about the room excitedly, laughing and cheering while carelessly throwing themselves into the air, only to land gracefully back on their feet.

While not exactly the same obviously, the resemblance between Nadine and the absolutely stunning ballerina in the movie, in both silhouette and style of movement, was almost uncanny.

Stretched out as high as her short legs would allow, strong and gorgeously defined muscles flexed almost instinctually with every rapid twist, curl, bend, and jump of the young woman’s tiny body. Her lucious silhouette was only aided by the feminine aura of the long, sheer nightgown as it trailed after her with every movement. The delicate satin material caresses the sharp ridges of her muscular back and shoulders with the same tenderness and love as it does the weight of her breasts or the pillowy layer of protection atop her midsection. The lower half of the nightgown, cinched just below the breasts, twisted and jerked in whatever direction was necessary to keep up with the speed at which Nadine was fluttering and jumping about upon the tips of her toes. Her legs were hidden by the ferocious speed of her movements, but Salvatore did not need to see her legs to have some idea of what they were, or perhaps merely could be, capable of.

Whether or not Nadine was actually a ballerina herself, or if Salvatore’s delusions were merely that realistic now, the young woman appeared to move with nothing but effortless grace that hides the raw power and physical strength it takes to float as carelessly and as quickly as the young woman was, clearly growing more and more frustrated the longer her search failed to reveal what she was looking for.

Still paralyzed by the sudden presence of Nadine in his personal space, Salvatore could do nothing but hold his breath and hope that the light at the end of the hall didn’t reach far enough to reveal his presence in the room. The TV was still on, but the movie playing on it had finished running long ago, meaning the only thing being displayed now was a static filled screen that proved someone had been here at some point in time, but thankfully wasn’t a dead giveaway from the start.

“Helloooooooo… I heard someone talking on my way in, so I know that someone is down here. Please… just come out, ok… I won’t hurt you… honestly” the raven haired woman begs softly, her movements slowing a bit to allow more of her air to be used for speaking rather than jumping to look over beams over and over again.

Salvatore’s heart ached at Nadine’s desperate tone, knowing all too well what the mutant woman is going through right now, but trying his best to remain strong, since giving in means dooming this perfect young specimen to a life of bitter misery and unending terror, regardless of the best effort he’d try to put in. Whatever short term gain Nadine could get from being with him would only come back to bleed her dry once Salvatore was sufficiently attached, and therefore unable to allow her to leave once she inevitably decides that she’s had enough of pretending to love a disgusting freak of nature.

Salvatore had never been very good at accurately predicting the outcomes of situations, but he knew for certain that Nadine was in no way deserving of the hellish punishment that living in the reservoir with him would undoubtedly become, if it didn’t start out that way from the beginning, that is. Perhaps the young woman could convince herself to accept her situation and play into his affections as a means of survival for a short time, but based on what he’s heard of Nadine thus far, Salvatore doubts such a strongwilled and dangerous woman would allow herself to play wife and sex slave to anyone for very long. If she didn’t somehow successfully murder him in his sleep within the first 48 hours of her “slavery”, it would only be a matter of time before she finally ran out of patience and unleashed... whatever the hell it was she did back in the labs, upon him.

For a brief moment, Salvatore entertains the question of whether Nadine could potentially be strong enough to take him out with a single hit, as well as whether that thought should be something he finds arousing or not. His thoughts are quickly interrupted however, by the sound of shuffling and grunting, and upon turning his head toward the sudden racket, Salvatore is horrified to see Nadine, just small enough to fit her tiny body between the thin cracks of the boarded up wall, attempting to climb through the barrier, and enter the TV room.

Body shaking and voice beginning to tremble slightly, alongside his already labored breathing, Salvatore unsteadily backed his way further into the room, putting his hands out in front of him as if to try and stop Nadine from entering, though he makes no move to physically eject the invading woman himself, oddly enough.

“N-nooo… p-please… don’t come i-in...” Salvatore stutters helplessly, shrinking further in on himself in fear as the young woman effortlessly slips through the wooden boards like a slippery eel, quickly and easily landing on her feet before turning back to the mostly darkened room.

“H-Hello?” Nadine calls out again nervously, taking a tentative step forward, both hands extended outward beside her until her left hand made contact with the wall. Gaining some purchase on the vertical slabs of wood, Nadine slowly turns her head to look about the room, carefully inspecting everything from atop the surface of Salvatore’s messy desk, to the very dark corner in the back right of the room that Salvatore himself was currently shoved as far into as physically possible.

Nadine stuck her arm out in front of her and began slowly walking toward the opposite wall, eyes open, but unfocused, and right hand waving aimlessly in the air for a brief moment, as though trying to feel around for the other wall despite it clearly being right in front of her. The hooded man had no idea how she hadn’t seen him yet, he could practically feel how absolutely ridiculous he looked, his bony, weathered, turtle-esque body hunched as low to the ground as possible with his chin tucked between his knees and hands covering the rest of his face, leaving only the smallest bit of space through which he could observe Nadine’s inevitable reaction to him. And yet, despite the amount of time the young woman spent glancing over Salvatore, back and forth across the room, her bright golden eyes resembling that of a ravenous alligator in their intensity and ferociousness, no scream left her plush lips nor did fear and horror suddenly mar her supple face. In fact, not only had the mutant woman not seen him yet, but it was in that exact moment that the reason why Nadine couldn’t see Salvatore, obviously shoved into the corner, just to her bottom left, became immediately clear to him.

“Y-You’re blind...”

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omniswords · 4 years

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Chronicles of a Parisian Dumbass 12

happy Chronicles update! I know I waited a while to post this one, but I feel like I’m in a good place to share it now. so, I hope you like it! it’s... an interesting one.

from: itsdjbubbles 29 July, 19:30. La Tortue. you and your group got a setlist?

to: itsdjbubbles i… could have a setlist. and we’re more of a band than a group.

from: itsdjbubbles hell yeah, dude. you’re in.

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just saw adrien agreste in person. In Person. i don’t think i can even afford his aura. or, like. the CO2 he’s breathing out?

no, i’m not going to say where. i’m not a total dickwad. just sometimes. mostly because my sister would come for me if i didn’t say so.

also, fellow parisians, who hopefully are not or have not been as much of a dumbass as me: watch this space for an announcement, maybe.

Adrien Agreste is right. There. In all his swoopy-blond-hair, thousand-euro-smile, million-euro-clothing glory. Hanging by the doorway, and seeing him standing at the register like an actual human being, and laughing like an actual human being, and paying with a debit card like an actual human being, is like looking into the goddamn sun. Or like standing in the weird static, plasma dimension that exists between the TV screen and real life. Or both.

Okay. Luka will admit that, for a time that now feels both distant and delirious, he… probably entertained a celebrity crush on Adrien Agreste. But it was short-lived, and it felt more like a warm fuzz in his stomach whenever he passed by those radiant advertisements for perfume, men’s clothing, even underwear. Really, the more he thought about it, the more he was just admitting that Adrien Agreste had a certain charm and attraction because he, like many people in Paris, had a functional pair of eyes.

It was… fantasy, really. Self-indulgent. The way most infatuation tends to be. Observation with a cause; he heard it once in a song.

Adrien Agreste is still standing right. There. At the register. And Luka hasn’t moved from the entrance. Not even when the door hits him unceremoniously in the back and the bell above it mocks him as it announces his arrival.

And then Adrien Agreste turns on his heel, slipping his wallet into his back pocket with one seemingly perfect hand and gripping a pastry box with the other, and Luka’s body reminds him to step aside. He does, still dumbstruck despite how Adrien Agreste literally smiles at him and says good morning, and the door closes behind him again, and not for the first time in his life, Luka forgets what words are or how to string them together.

When he comes to his senses and makes peace with the fact that he just shared the same breathing air as a real-live supermodel, he notices—even from this far away—that Marinette is wearing that expression again. The one from the park. The one he wishes never existed—because even if this is another observation with a cause, he at least has the good sense to know that Marinette Dupain-Cheng does not deserve to look so sad, no matter how many smiles she layers on top of it.

Until now, it seems like Marinette’s only been looking past him, but when her eyes finally settle on him, she perks up a bit from her place at the register. “You dyed your hair,” she says by way of greeting, and he swears her face starts to glow. Or maybe it always was glowing. Maybe it wasn’t because of him.

“Uh,” he replies, because when has he ever been smooth when she’ s looking at him like that? or at all? “Technically, Jules did.” He says it hurriedly, so neither of them has to worry about it or talk about it, but then she has to go and tell him that it looks good on him, and his words have to get stuck on his tongue again when he says, “Thanks, I grew it myself.”

Kill him. Now. He’s ready. Juleka can have his guitar.

“So,” he goes on, a little perkier than he means to, but it’s probably for the best. “That was, uh… that Adrien Agreste guy, huh? You know him or something?”

Marinette’s expression is almost unreadable. It is hard to tell if she regrets knowing Adrien, or if she thinks Luka must be living under a rock because everyone knows who Adrien Agreste is. She snaps back to herself soon enough, and she’s browsing the pastry cases as though it’s her responsibility to find something good for him. “We used to go to middle school together,” she explains. “Just for a while. I even used to have this mondo crush on him. Can you imagine?”

“Yeah,” Luka says, because he can’t count how many times he’s imagined her in love, much less how many times he’s imagined other people in love with her. “Huh. I pegged him as the type to get homeschooled or something.” He tosses a glance behind him, just to see if the limo is still there, but it’s long since peeled away. “What… happened?”

“What do you mean?”

“You…” He pauses. “You said, ‘used to?’”

“Oh,” she says, half-flippant, with a sheepish laugh to match. “Y’know.”

Luka narrows his eyes. “No, I don’t,” he says. “That’s… why I asked?” Even though he maybe, definitely shouldn’t have because it maybe, definitely isn’t his business.

Marinette shrugs, busies herself with boxing up a selection. He doesn’t even have to ask. (Is it good that he doesn’t have to ask?) “I switched schools. That’s all. Turns out absence doesn’t really make the heart grow fonder after all.”

It doesn’t sound like that’s all, especially if the bittersweet look on her face has anything to say about it, but who is he to push? Who is he to do anything but peek into her life and feel grateful, privileged, for what she’s allowed him?

“Anyway,” she goes on; it’s mesmerizing, watching her multitask. The grace with which she can open herself up, so clipped, while taping a box shut. “Our friend is making this music video for a summer class he’s taking. He’s really into film, you know? And we’re playing opposite each other in it. I guess he wanted to come by and chat about it, but I think he had something else in mind.”

Luka’s brow furrows.

When Marinette turns, box in hand, her lips scrunch up awkwardly. Like she’s the one who doesn’t know what to say this time. “Now he’s the one who…”

Oh. Well. Fuck.

“I turned him down,” she adds with a shrug. “In high school. And we’re still… sort of friends. We text and stuff, have a couple of mutual friends. I just get the sense those feelings—his, I mean—never really went away. There’s just… something I can’t shake. Do you know what I mean?”

Does he know what she means? Does he feel? He nods, dumbly, and maybe this moment separated by a counter and a cash register isn’t supposed to be as deep and twisted and thorny as it is. But it is, and it feels that way because he feels, and he wonders if she feels it, too. If there are parts of her that never went away, either.

“Sorry,” Marinette blurts out once the moment ends—too soon, as far as he’s concerned. “You didn’t ask to hear all that.”

“I don’t mind.” Luka offers her a smile because it’s the best thing he has on him. “Life stories, remember?”

She smiles back. It’s slow, and knowing, and it makes him melt in his shoes. “Are you gonna make a song about it, Music Man?”

Okay. Okay. Wow.

Maybe it was worth staying alive for literally this one moment.

“I could write a song about it,” he says; it’s a miracle he doesn’t stammer. “Would you come and listen to it?”

“In the park?”

“At a gig.”

Marinette looks surprised, and then impressed, and damn if he doesn’t want to keep doing things that make her make that face. “Maybe I will,” she says, almost demure, like he asked her on a date or something. (Did he? Ask her on a date?) She looks just past him, and when he follows her gaze it lands on a bulletin board by the door. “Maybe you should swing by with a flyer or something.”

“Maybe I will.” Wow, two for two. He takes the box, reaches for his wallet. “I’ll watch that video, too, we’ll call it even—”

Her hand is on his before he can even pull out his card. And it isn’t until after she’s pushed his wallet back toward him that it finally registers that she’s touched him. “Don’t worry about it,” she says. “It’s on the house. Just bring the flyer, and then we’ll call it even.”

Luka looks between her and the box a number of times, too many questions on his tongue to get any of them out. Why is she being so nice to him? why does she insist on giving him things he hasn’t worked for, or finding loopholes to prove that he did work for it? Is she flirting with him? Or does she pity him? Or is she just being nice because he’s one of her parents’ regulars? Or does she… does she, maybe…

He holds his breath, and searches her eyes, and gets lost in the music he’s still sort of trying to place. He slips his wallet into his back pocket all the same, and he takes the box from her, and it’s ridiculous how fiercely he wishes he could feel her fingers brush the back of his hand again. “You got a deal,” he murmurs—mentally kicks himself for sounding so out of touch. He backs out of the store like it’s illegal to tear his eyes away; it feels like it is, when she’s smiling at him like that. The Not For Customers smile.

Admittedly, he wonders if she ever gave Adrien Agreste that smile, once upon a time.

Maybe he shouldn’t have wondered, because his back bumps right into the door, and the bell above it jingles as though it’s annoyed. But Marinette isn’t; in fact, she giggles behind a hand, and she gives him a little wave like she’s going to keep the memory safe in the pocket of her apron. He manages a weak laugh, and a wave of his own, and then he’s stumbling out the door and walking his bike to the first open bench he can find. He needs to sit down. Put his head in his hands for a while.

Because he thinks she just flirted with him. And he thinks he flirted right back. And he knows she just touched him, in spite of everything she told him about Adrien, in spite of him being right. There. And it’s all finally, finally sinking in, and the world is spinning in a way he’s not really used to, and…

Maybe he just needs a sugar boost.

Shaking his head and sighing, he pops the seal on the pastry box, fully prepared to find a half dozen napoleons inside. There aren’t—only two pastries.

One napoleon.

And one pear tart.

His heart stutters. Makes up for how he didn’t before.

That’s how it gets him.

hey mom? mr. president? deity of indeterminate gender?

how do i go about legally changing my name to Music Man?

you know. hypothetically.

#miraculous ladybug #lukanette #luka couffaine #marinette dupain cheng #fic: chronicles of a parisian dumbass #oh boy.

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timextoxhajima · 4 years

Audio

Playlist Feels

*SHORT SERIES

Part 1: Unmask

Part 2: Fly Away With Me

Part 3: ~ (Final)

Member: chwei mountain sAN

Genre: *TW* suicide/selfharm, smut cause i feel so fucking empty from finishing that juyeon fic help i have withdrawal symptoms from my own work hng

A/N: *IMPORTANT* I CAN’T STRESS THIS ENOUGH PLEASE READ

this piece is EXTREMELY explicit and detailed, and there is an idea of intimacy being used as a way to escape personal pain in a very dark/difficult sense so PLEASE do not read if you suffer from anxiety/panic attacks that are easily triggered or if you’re not in a very good place in life right now. :( i suffer from those myself and i had to make sure i was in the right condition to write this. if i was in a bad time myself and i read this, it might set off an attack.

PLEASE DO NOT READ IF YOU ARE NOT MENTALLY STABLE

“where in the world is choi san?”

you hear someone call the name and your eyes shoot wide open, the sunlight washing into the room momentarily blinding you. you groan and turn your head away from the source of light, feeling your hair get stuck in your hoodie from the static. you look over your bed and let the sight of the boy who saved you sleep on the other side, facing away from you.

sighing and starting to pick at the tangles in your hair, you get out of bed and walk into the bathroom, completely forgetting that whatever you just heard was real.

“choi san!”

the toothbrush was just stuck into your mouth when you hear someone yell right outside your door -- or san’s --, and you hear a loud thump outside, assuming san had rolled off the bed upon the wake up call.

“coming!” he yells and bolts for your door. you rub your eyes and walk out of the bathroom, brushing your teeth while san sticks his head into the hallway.

there was a man who looked like he was in his 30s standing not at your door, but san’s. the look of confusion on his face becomes the most striking thing about him and his mouth was already opened to say something, but one younger male appears from a corner that was out of your view and screams at san.

“choi san!” the boy had black hair that was split in the middle of his head, and he throws his arms around san, the impact shoving him backwards into the room.

“you’re back so fast?” san asks with wide eyes, his lips being pulled up into a curl as his arm looks for a second boy who has blonde hair and eyes that a human shouldn’t have.

“of course, we missed you,” the blonde boy says with such a lack of emotion, you couldn’t help but laugh at his nonchalance. the older male folds his arms across his chest and looks past san, his attention now focussed on you.

both boys were also now one step into the room, and they simultaneously watch you halt your movements, the toothpaste foam sliding down the sides of your mouth.

“uh--” the older male blinks at you. “san, can i speak wit--”

“oh!” the black haired boy literally shoves san off him and walks towards you with one hand stretched out. he was wearing a comfortable button down shirt and pants, though he looked kind of jet-lagged, the smile on his face was pretty welcoming. “i’m wooyoung! you must be san’s friend! or girlfr--”

“don’t listen to him--” the blonde boy grabs wooyoung’s shoulder and pulls him back. “what is san doing in your room and did he do anything to you?”

san blinks in disturbed surprise, yanking on yeosang’s shirt and pulling him into a headlock. “yah, yeosang--”

“can i speak with all three of you?”

the older male raised his voice, arms still crossed on his chest and his brow was now raised in agitation.

wooyoung nearly pouts as he turns away from you, and san gestures to you to wait while the three of them disappear into the hallway. the heavy door swings shut and you return to brushing your teeth, utilising everything the hotel bathroom had to offer you.

you were already prepared to be kicked out of the room or the hotel altogether after they found out why you were here. no job, suicidal, tired. there was no reason for them to keep you here.

so what if san’s adoptive father was sheltering youths who needed it? they must all have their plus points for him to take them in in the first place, not to mention all of them were boys.

you strip without thinking twice, the thought of soaking yourself into the bathtub was too tempting to resist.

your back hits the cool, but warming surface of the tub inside, the warm water engulfing you like the sun if you were on the beach. your heart starts to pound at the memory of the last time you were in a bathtub.

you rest both arms on the edges and lean back, even the scent of the bathroom was forcing you down a trip to relive one of the many painful memories you somehow managed to make it out alive.

you closed your eyes and let the marks on your wrists breathe the expensive air of the space, some of the lines still stinging upon contact with the water.

but it doesn’t really bother you anymore, you were used to it.

your cool fingertips could still feel the sharp, metallic edges of the razor that you pulled out from shaver. you remember the sensation of dragging it across your skin, the pain eating you inside out but you only did it because it didn’t hurt as much as the words your mother shoved down your throat.

it never did hurt as much.

a dark, heavy energy flows through you at the flashes of images that were popping up in your head like advertisements on a website. the way the red fluid you needed to stay alive swirled in the water around you was so intriguing to watch, the pain disappeared.

you could hear your heart start to beat in your head, and your throat starts to feel like it was being strangled, yet you were sure that your face hadn’t twitched one bit.

you remember being angry when you failed. the hotel staff had come for room servicing, and you were nowhere near the end of your line with the water only looking like you were on your period.

it was pathetic to recall why you were still alive.

because you didn’t have the guts to finish it off in the bathroom.

because the hotel staff were here and you panicked.

the stinging on your forearms don’t stop, but they start to numb. all the knots in your body remains, as they have for as long as you can remember. the heat from the water starts to fog up every glass surface in the bathroom, and you hear the door of your room click open.

“are you in the bathroom?” san asks through the door.

“uh-huh,” you respond. a short pause. “just come in.”

you hear the door of the bathroom click open and close behind him, and judging by the muffled sound of his voice, you could guess he wasn’t facing the tub while he was talking.

“that was mr kim yonghwan, and the other two were wooyoung and yeosang. both of them are my adoptive brothers.”

silence.

he must’ve been waiting for you to reply with some kind of acknowledgement but you couldn’t care less. the weight of your memories were still swimming around inside you, so whatever san was saying, it could wait.

“i told them how you ended up here... and mr kim said you’re welcome to stay as long as you like, but he’d like to speak with you about future options once you’re ready to.”

huh, that’s new. he’s not kicking me out?

“i’ll thank him later and i’ll leave.”

you hear him shift around in whatever corner he was hiding in. you could feel him looking at you, not because you were naked in the bathtub, but because he knew what was running through your head. if he’s looking at you now, then he must be staring at the marks that have relieved you of some pain sometime in the past.

you finally open your eyes and turn your head to look at him. san’s eyes were hooded, and he had a look on his face that you’ve never seen on anybody before. it was a mixture of pain, sympathy, anger.

“haven’t seen them before?” your lips part and the words come out strained. you lift both arms and look at the lines yourself, as if you hadn’t already memorised the maps on your skin.

san walks over to you, not bothering that you were naked, he leans toward you and grab your hands, while scanning the area.

he was looking for anything sharp you might’ve been thinking of using.

“don’t worry, i don’t like doing it in front of other people.”

he pulls away once he was done checking, and your words push him into giving you a mild frown.

“i know,” his voice was low and quiet, the only other sound you were hearing was the sound of the water in the tub. “that’s why i have to make sure you have nothing with you.”

you turn to look at him again, slightly surprised that he hasn’t reacted to you being naked in the tub. you begin to have some respect for him, that he doesn’t care about anything else besides making sure you weren’t trying to take your own life. most guys would be panicking or going off on a rant about you being inappropriate.

if he was able to see nothing but your safety, then he must know how desensitised you were. how immune you were to showing your skin off to someone you barely know.

san leaves the bathroom, taking the razors from the sink area and bringing it out with him. you suck in a deep breath, the cool air of the bathroom causing your nose to turn slightly sour.

you walk out with a robe over your lingerie, throwing your pants and hoodie into a corner of the room you don’t think much about. san was sat on the edge of the bed, eyes glued to the television and the razors nowhere in sight. you turn to search for the bin in the room, only to find it empty.

maybe it was the comfort that those razors brought you, that they could end your pain in a flash that made you feel the disappointment. but before disappointment could take over you by whispering into your ear with sweet nothings, san appears right in front of you and blocks your view of the bin.

“you’re not going to find it anywhere, i promise you.”

your stone-cold eyes meet his, something in them begging you to stop and think about life on its own. that there was no reason for you to end it like that. that there was no reason for you to leave, now that you’ve already run away from the source of your pain.

“i don’t even know what i’m looking for anymore.”

san hears the ache and hurt in your voice, and your words come out in strained, tight sounds that felt like little cuts that paper leaves on your hands when you weren’t careful.

“i should feel relieved that i’m away from her... but i’m not.”

your breathing was heavier now, but your eyes refuse to well up with tears. not after you’ve exhausted them.

“i just want it to stop for awhile. the pain. even if it’s not real. even if it’s pretend.”

your brows furrow on your forehead, and your eyes travel to your feet. one year ago, you’d be bawling by now.

hell, you wouldn’t even have been able to say it to someone, much less a stranger.

it hit you how much a year could do to a person.

how much it did to you.

“even if it’s pretend?” san’s hands find yours and he pushes the robe sleeves up, exposing your still-healing marks. you watch as he grazes his fingers over them and nod.

“i already know what you might be thinking...” san cups your cheeks and pulls your face up to his. “but can i do anything to help you hurt a little less?”

you didn’t expect him to react like this, but you weren’t surprised. thoughts that someone should never have to think filled your head. you worry not for yourself, but for san, that he was presenting himself as an outlet for you to vent and release your feelings on.

he was giving you the option of using him.

“i’m only asking because i know you don’t feel much anymore... so if there’s anything you need me to do for you, please let me try.”

you know he wasn’t directly asking because he didn’t want you to think that all he wanted to do was get in your pants, but all it did was intensify your respect and admiration for him.

“san, i...” you shake your head, already leaning back and trying to take a step away from him. “i can’t... use you.”

he reaches out and holds your hand, eyes begging you to let him help make you a little happier.

“i know how it feels,” he tugs you towards him, his grip gentle and kind. “i know.”

you gulp as he tilts his head and leans into your nose, his palm cupping your jaw and holding your face in place.

“please let me help you hurt a little less.”

he doesn’t give you time to respond, before you find yourself in the midst of the most careful kiss. san peels himself away and brushes the hair out of your face, looking for any hint of discomfort in your face.

but the physical contact was warm, and even if it was fake and that he was just someone to you, you were grateful that he was willing to be your walking stick.

he lets you circle your arms around his waist as his lips find yours again, and the kisses gradually get harsher and needier. not for love, not from lust, but from the need to feel physically relevant.

your existence has just been floating about mindlessly, struggling to anchor itself to something or someone that offers even the smallest unit of encouragement, and it failed.

now that san was letting you touch him and feed off his warmth, you could feel parts of yourself start to seep back into existence. it felt nothing less than blissful to feel real again.

san starts taking small steps toward you and it cues you to shift backwards, and it wasn’t long before you feel the back of your knees hit the bed. you fall backwards, wet hair spreading all around your head and san climbs on top of you.

the rough, but eerily gentle kisses continue without any sign of stopping and you feel his fingers on the marks on your arms. it felt strange to have someone touching the evidence of your pain and heartache like this; most people would’ve seen them and condemned you for hating life.

your arms wrap around his neck to pull him deeper into the kiss, and his arms continue to caress your scars. he takes the time to feel every inch of scab and scar, and the sensation drives a chill throughout your body.

the kisses become light as he leans back, and agony washes through you when he presses his face into your arms where you left all your sorrows. he leaves light kisses on your marked skin, his free hand finding the knot of your robe and tugs on it.

“san--” you call out, throat a little dry from the intimacy and the cool air of the room. he stops and looks up at your through his fringe, lips nearly touching the skin of your stomach.

“don’t do it if you don’t want to... please.”

the weight in your voice was heavy, and you couldn’t swallow the fact that he was willing to let you use him like this.

“i’ll do it because i want you to hurt a little less. it won’t do much, which kind of sucks, but if it helps just a little,” he whispers as he reaches under you and undoes your bra. “then at least i tried.”

a mixture of anguish and comfort starts devouring you from inside. he pulls off the robe and your bra and attaches his lips to the tender flesh of your chest, and the intimacy starts yanking your soul back down to earth where it should be happy and carefree.

his hands find your underwear and start to pull them down. you were battling with the alien thrill of being pulled back into your own physical body, and your mind slowly starts to block out the pain that you’ve called life.

he gets rid of his shirt and you see marks on his chest that looked like scars from knife cuts. the sight of it destroys your human spirit, but your exhausted ghost looks at it with kind wonder, and it reminds you that everybody has their own pain.

he kneels at the bottom of the bed, lips tracing your inner thighs to your core. he lifts one of your legs and lays it over his shoulder, his tongue finding your nub and the contact starts to awaken the bits of humane essence that was slowly returning to your body.

your chin tilts towards the ceiling and your fingers dig into the material under you as you feel him start to suck and bite on the sensitive skin. he pushes a finger into you, his tongue never leaving your hot spot.

the thrill exposes itself in the form of soft whines and groans from your lungs, reminding you that you were every bit real as he was.

he empties you by removing his finger and steps out of his pants. he doesn’t really give you a chance to see him, because it wasn’t the point.

all you wanted to do was to feel human again. to feel like you existed.

he lays over you, hands returning to where you prayed misery could leave your body and you feel him at your entrance.

your lips part and an airy gasp gets sucked into your chest when you feel him push himself into you, and you were both familiar and not with the pain that spread in between your legs.

“tell me if it hurts.”

you nod and he stands up, pulling your calves over his shoulders. the thrusts pick up and you start to feel things you never thought you’d feel again.

“san--” you choke, your palms pressed flat against the bed next to your hips. “do me a favour--”

he pauses and re-angles himself, looking up at you through his now sweaty fringe.

“fuck all the pain away.”

he takes a second to process your words, and he pulls himself out completely before ramming back into you. the new angle forces you to feel him in a spot inside you that was deeper from before.

the sounds that were coming out of your mouth were so new, it was difficult to believe that they were coming from you.

his pace picks up and with every harsh thrust, you feel him in a new spot that wasn’t there before; with every slam into you, it was like he was tearing away all your heartbreak from your physical body.

the whole bed was shifting from the amount of energy he was investing into helping feel a little less shitty, and it was working.

a knot starts to wrap around your gut in your core, and your legs could feel the sweat on his chest that was slowly becoming difficult to ignore.

“i’m gonna-- oh, fuck--” san quickly wraps your legs around his waist and drops himself on top of you, his arms holding his weight up and he shoves his lips between yours.

your entire being goes into spasm and chills run up and down your spine like a highway. nothing but white flashes entire your vision, your body still shifting with the softer thrusts now that he was helping you ride out your high.

his breathing hitches in his throat and he pulls out just after you finish your climax, and his load drizzles your thighs and stomach.

you let your pants and heavy breathing fill the room, and the smell of sex intoxicates your nose. your eyes were hooded now, watching him finish the last of his high. his chest was raising, skin covered in little beads of sweat, hair stuck to his forehead.

he looks at you briefly, walking away into the bathroom while you huff and catch your breath.

you hear the tap of the tub turn on and a metal ‘clinks’ somewhere.

san returns with with a towel and wipes himself off you, making sure that you were alright just by scanning you.

neither of you say a word the next few minutes, as you find yourself sitting between his legs in the bathtub, back against him as he scoops water and rains it all over your skin.

“san?” the call was so soft, the water returning to the rest of it around your chest could’ve easily blocked it out.

“mm?”

“thank you.”

he doesn’t stop rinsing your skin, neither does he reply.

he taps you lightly on the shoulder to tell you he was done, and he steps out of the tub first, water rushing off his legs while he reached for the robe hanging nearby. you wait in awkward silence in the tub as he grabs the second robe and holds it out to you.

you reach out for it, noticing a soft, almost unnoticeable glimmer in his eyes under his wet strands of hair. his voice sounded like pillows and warmth, and for once in a really, really, long time, you hear something that actually made you want smile.

“i’m not giving up on you. i hope you know that.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A/N: if you managed to read through it and finish it, thank you. it took me quite awhile to write this because i had to make sure i wasn’t going to relapse myself. i

f you read this with a healthy state of mind, then i hope you never have to go through this. nobody deserves this amount of ache and pain in their lives.

but if you don’t, and yet you still chose to read this, i hope you’re still breathing. while it may have been triggering, but i hope knowing that someone else knows how you feel comforts you. there is never a moment where you are alone, so even if you do feel like it, i hope you will always find that bit of strength to reach out to someone.

i’m always here for you to talk to. i might not be great at making you feel better, but always ALWAYS know that you’re not alone. i’m not religious, but i believe that a little bit of faith and strength goes a long way.

it’s okay to stop and cry, but there’s never a correct time to stay down. i know it’s easier said than done, and i know first-hand how much convincing this will take, but there is someone who loves you. they will miss you if you choose that one option.

yes, the world will still continue revolving around the sun, and people will gradually return to living their lives, but not without remembering the hole you left inside their hearts. you matter, and i hope you never forget that.

- love, dana.

#timetohajima #san smut #ateez san #san #choi san #ateez smut #tw suicide #tw self harm #ateez fanfic #san fanfic #san scenario #san imagine

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imagine-organization-xiii · 4 years

Text

Organization XIII - As Cats

I was inspired by two things: the first was this post by boodalinski because I was watching the kill count on youtube and happened to come across it while scrolling through the tumblr tag for Friday the 13th.

I was also inspired by a fanfiction by nyargles called Phil Coulson is Not a Crazy Cat Lady - an MCU fanfic with the avengers as cats, which was fairly entertaining and I highly recommend if you’re an MCU fan.

oOoOo

Buy me a coffee here! (now with an updated and working link)

oOoOo

Xemnas

Xemnas was your first kitty, a regal black feline that had a look in his eyes that said he was a lot smarter than everyone around him. The old lady you adopted him from couldn’t tell you how old he was, only that she had him for years and that he really didn’t seem to age and didn’t act like an elderly cat. She promised that he was mostly self-sufficient and, honestly, came and went as he pleased, which he does.

You can go days sometimes without seeing Xemnas. You’ll refill his food and water bowls because the contents steadily disappear and there’s evidence that he’s been using the litter box, but you don’t actually see him even when you search high and low through the house.

There’s nothing that you can do. He is the king of your house and he will make it known. When he does bother to show his face, he watches your ever move, obviously judging everything you do. Gets pissed if you don’t give him the highest quality of food - wet. salmon. only. or he’ll just refuse to eat and meow at you like a little asshole until you give in.

Does not get along with the other cats you eventually adopt. He acts as though they’re business partners and gets some of them to do his bidding.

That cat that would stand next to that expensive glass vase that your mother gave you and slowly reach out his paw while you’re like “don’t you dare,” and he’ll just blink slowly at you like the little asshole he is before he pushes the vase to the floor and lets it smash into a hundred pieces.

Xigbar

Xigbar was a wild stray when you first found him lurking on the roof near your rain gutters. His hair was long and matted and he had more scars across his body than any animal should ever have, but he had a surprisingly good attitude when you clicked your fingers and enticed him with cat treats. Turns out the treats were useless, because he just took one look at you and the treats, turned his nose up at you, hopped down from your roof and waltzed past you just to head directly to your front door, meowing in annoyance until you let him inside.

Didn’t mind it when you dragged him into the bath, meowing wildly at Xemnas from where your first cat perched himself on your bathroom counter, watching with an intense eye that almost made you uncomfortable. Xigbar, however, didn’t put up a fight against the water and happily allows you to scrub at the dirt and grime in his fur.

This little asshole gets into everything. You can lock the cabinets and the doors and put padlocks onto the bags of treats but somehow still manages to eat his way through a whole bag of cat food and treats and oh god the bag of catnip like the rat bastard he is.

Xaldin

Xaldin is a large fluffy cat with the darkest hair you’ve ever seen - hair that seems to get tangled no matter what you do, so you need to keep him brushed constantly because he’ll go absolutely ballistic if you try to get it trimmed by a groomer to make it more manageable.

His hair gathers static electricity like whoa, so be prepared to get a static shock if you get close to him, which happens a lot because he gets in moods sometimes where he loves cuddles? But he doesn’t want you to know he loves cuddles. He’ll plop his ass in your lap and expect you to give him a few cuddles and squeezes before he’s done for the day and goes about doing whatever else he does.

A jealous cat, like horribly jealous whenever you pay one of the other cats more attention than him. He needs a lot of affection even though he’ll fight you tooth and nail through it all. He wants to be an independent kitty, okay, but he gets lonely easily, so don’t be surprised if he sneaks in to your room at night to sleep at the foot of your bed and somehow ends up half on top of your pillow with you.

Vexen

A cat that is on the uglier side because of a surprisingly pointed face with a nose that is always up in the air. He has a constant pout and is on the older side, even though you’ve never been able to pinpoint exactly how old he was.

Talks a lot. Meows at you, at the other cats, at himself, at walls, at empty air, at his toys, at everything. He never shuts up. His meow sounds like the disgruntled croak of someone who smoked eighteen packs of cigarettes a day, literally one of the ugliest meows you’ve ever heard in your life.

But that’s okay!!! He isn’t the most handsome cat in the world but by god he’s so smart and endearing. You can’t believe how intelligent he is. He’s the one who locates all of the treats and catnips, Xigbar tears open the bags, and the two of them share in the spoils of their victory.

An indecisive cat. Meows relentlessly to get your attention because he gets lonely. “Y/N pay attention to me!!!” But then when you do he’s like HA SIKE and nips at your heels or hands before he bolts away because he can’t decide if he wants affection or if he just wants to be a naughty boy for no reason.

Lexaeus

You find Lexaeus at the same time you find Zexion, the gigantic cat covering the smaller gray kitten protectively with his huge body against the storm raging outside and against you. They were hiding somewhere under your porch when you heard the tiny kitten mewls from somewhere nearby, and you somehow managed to entice them into the house with warmth and treats.

Lexaeus is one of the biggest cats you’ve ever seen. He’s protective of Zexion - and later, the other cats, too - and he’s quiet and surprisingly agile for his huge size. Of all the cats, it takes him the longest to get used to your presence. He doesn’t trust you at all for what feels like weeks, but slowly he gets used to having you around and... well, he knows that you’re now his primary food source so he begrudgingly accepts you.

But when he does get used to you? He’s a purring machine. Sounds like a small car engine with how much he purrs. The smaller kittens love to lay on him or under him or around him because he’s like a vibrating massager.

Plops everywhere. Plops on your lap when he wants cuddles, which is often. Plops on top of the older cats when they annoy him or if they’re getting out of control. Plops on top of the little cats when he can tell they’re getting anxious. Just a blob of fur sometimes.

Zexion

A teeny baby!!!! Such a sweetheart. Quiet and smart and wary of the entire world around him even though he is so curious and wants to get into everything because he has to be in everyone’s business. He likes to explore even if that means he’ll disappear and appear hours later covered in dust and dirt.

Another one of your rare cats that’s fairly okay with baths. A little lukewarm water and his favorite squeaky toy and he’ll be good to go when you need to wash some dirt out of his hair.

His favorite spot in the world? Perched on top of Lexaeus’s head. You don’t know why, but you think he might like the view from so high up since he has fairly short legs.

Not really a fan of toys in general, but he loves blankets and anything fluffy that he could dig himself in and hide. The more fluff, the better, which is probably why he likes Lexaeus so much. If you can’t find him, chances are that he’s somehow gotten into your bed and burrowed under your covers because WARM

Saix

Saix was a wild stray when you found him lurking near your rain gutters one late, rainy night, with matted fur and an odd scar across

Likes to keep to himself. You don’t own him, he owns you. Doesn’t like to be touched except for on very rare occasions. He’s self-sufficient, similarly to Xemnas, but unlike Xemnas who judges you for long distances but will begrudgingly put up with you if you pat his head, Saix is NOT afraid of swiping at you with your claws.

“Omg, Y/N, are you okay?” And your friends will just stare down at the tiny scratch marks that cover your palms and your arms and your calves. “Oh, yeah, that’s just Saix.”

Likes schedules. Somehow knows your schedule better than you do. He’s your alarm clock in the mornings, waking you up with piercing meows right next to your ear at 6:30 on the dot. Are you late for feeding time? Unacceptable. Get your ass in the kitchen and pour food into his bowl before he takes it upon himself to jump onto the counters and find something to eat for himself.

One of the cats that brings you dead animals because, my goodness you really are useless aren’t you? Here, let me just plop this dead mouse right into your shoes so you can have some sustenance.

Axel

Axel comes as a package deal with Roxas at the animal shelter. You go in to volunteer for a bit and leave with two cats meowing enthusiastically back and forth to each other.

Equally as vocal as Vexen, but his meows are a bit cuter and more high-pitched. Eagerly races after you through the house as he trills in excitement - never has any idea what’s going on, but he’s always happy to be around you!

Axel is arguably the best cat around other human beings. He’s a curious cat when it comes to people and thinks, hey this is another person to give me some sweet pets so I better be nice to them no matter what!!! Also one of the only cats that will actually show themselves when there’s a little child in the room. Sits patiently while the kid will pat him a little too roughly, well-mannered and begrudging as he noses his way around the room.

Best cat around other human beings, yes, but it takes you a while to realize it’s because he’s a nosy little shit and has to be in the middle of everything at all times. Will definitely be winding through people’s legs and whining for attention because he has to be the center of attention or else.

Demyx

Such a dumb cat. Like probably the dumbest cat you’ve ever seen in your life, but it’s gone around from being super dumb to kind of being endearing, because Demyx is such a loving cat and wants all the cuddles and love that you can give him, but he has no common sense whatsoever.

The last of your cats that likes water, and he probably likes it the most out of all of them. Scrub scrub scrub, just let him drown in that warm water, he will thank you with the best cuddles and rubs against your leg.

Follows you everywhere because he wants to be with you because he loves you! Are you heading into the bathroom? Into the kitchen to fix dinner? Into your attic? Out to your car? He’ll be right on your heels.

Makes the cutest noises when he sleeps, like little squeaks and chirps that happen when he gets too excited even when he’s unconscious.

Luxord

Shameless attention whore, without a doubt. Follows you around the house. Follows the other cats. Follows deliver people and your friends out to their vehicles. Tries to follow you to work. He has definitely made you late more than once because he absolutely knows how to sneak past you out the front door.

Most susceptible to bribes of treats. Dangle a few treats in the air and Luxord could quite literally be eating out of the palm of your hand. He gets kind of zealous, though, so get him to do what you need him to do before he starts literally climbing up your pant leg.

Shockingly territorial. He likes things to be a certain way, so if one of the other cats happens to sneak their way into his spot on the cat tower? He can get kind of violent. However, he’s also easily distracted, so fights with the other cats are few and far between.

Marluxia

A sweet, lazy cat who would much rather spread out in your garden in a patch of sunshine than run around with the other cats. He’s an observer, through and through, and keeps himself super groomed. Loves being pampered and doesn’t mind bathing, but it isn’t his favorite thing in the world.

His weak spot? His ears. Rub behind his ears for a little bit and he will literally melt into a pile of fluff across your feet. A scratch behind the ears is instantly calming for your sweet Marluxia.

Cleans himself all the time. Expect to be groomed when he grooms himself because, man Y/N you need to take care of yourself! He’s a handsome boy and he knows it, so he thinks that he’s the epitome of good hygiene. Will also try to help groom the other cats - only half of them put up with it.

Larxene

Your first female cat and Larxene immediately takes up a role as queen. She won’t let any of the other cats take advantage of her, so your boys will either avoid her completely, watch her warily from a distance, or do their best to befriend her and get on her good side.

Static. Electricity. You don’t know what Larxene does when you have your back turned, but every time you go to pet her, you always end up getting an electric shock. She’ll chirp at you and give you a lick before running off to go curl up near the window, but you’re left with your hair standing on end.

Most active at night. When all of the other cats are snoozing, she likes to be up, roaming and wandering the house and exploring. She likes being aware of her surroundings!

Larxene is also the best when it comes to car rides. She’ll stretch out and snooze where your other cats will cry, hiss, swat at you, or hide under one of the seats.

Roxas

Roxas isn’t a stupid cat - he’s actually really smart! - but he’s so clumsy. Trips on air, on his own two feet, on the other cats, on his toys, on his food bowl, etc. He jumps long distances and misses his destination, runs with an intention of leaping but slips on the floor and runs face-first into the wall. Bounces back pretty fast and is fairly resilient, so he rarely injures himself no matter how much he trips and falls.

Most likely to be found: dangling by the scruff in Axel’s mouth, meowing indignantly. Axel took a shine to the little kitten and you aren’t quite sure why, but if you’re looking for either one of them, the other shouldn’t be far behind.

Squeaky toys. Oh, man, all the squeaky toys. Has he disappeared? Just give his favorite toy a squeak and wait a few minutes. He’ll bolt down the hallway and squeak squeak squeak squeaksqueaksqueaksqUEAK

Xion

Oh, my God, the cutest kitten, almost too cute to be real. She’s small and has stubby legs but is surprisingly agile for her size and age. Probably the youngest of all of the kitties.

Has a sixth sense when it comes to human emotions. Knows exactly whenever your upset and she adjusts her behavior accordingly. You’re sad and she wants you to be less sad, so be prepared for constant purring and cuddles until you feel better. Sometimes recruits Roxas to come and snuggle with you.

Hates water, but isn’t afraid of it? Like she doesn’t want to be in the water at all, but she gets scared for you whenever you take a shower and wants to rescue you, so she’ll definitely be meowing at you until you take her into the shower with you, putting her somewhere dry where she can watch you and make sure that you’re okay.

#organization xiii headcanon #kingdom hearts headcanon

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ecto-american · 4 years

Text

Le Freak

Phic Phight Oneshot for @phantomroyalty : Natural born halfas (EX a child with one ghost parent and one human parent) used to be common place. Now they are all gone. What happened to them?

It’s been a rough day lads, and this is purely self-indulgent nonsensical headcanon stuff that I wrote while partly crying over stress! Thus, fun fact for you! You can’t critique or criticize this because if you do, I absolutely will cry again! I know it sucks, it jumps around and makes Zero Sense bc editing? idk her but I just need to be able to post my fun shit and have a good time :’) I’ll even put literally everything under the cut

Word Count: 1814

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“Cas?”

Danny looked up from his phone to glance at his mom before his eyes shifted to see who she was referring to. A dark skinned man about his mom’s height with black hair to his shoulders, in jeans and a dark yellow t-shirt was standing with a grocery cart. The man looked around confused for a moment before turning to his mom. Once facing her, he shot her a bright smile.

“Aye, Mads,” he called out cheerfully.

“Oh, I haven’t seen you since college!” Maddie exclaimed, and Danny internally groaned. He returned his attention back to his phone, continuing to lean onto the grocery cart. He began to text his friends about the interruption. “I can’t believe you came to Amity Park and didn’t tell me!”

He heard his mom continuing to chat. His name soon came up, and he glanced up.

“This is my son, Danny.”

Cas was giving him a bright smile. Danny gave a polite half smile in return, only to freeze as ghost sense went off. He noticed at the end of the isle, a young adult turning the corner, in his early twenties with very long, light blonde hair. Super long, especially for a guy. Jean jacket and dark washed jeans, a regular black band t-shirt. Very ordinary.

“Dad, they don’t have any salt,” he complained, but he paused upon seeing the conversation.

“Oh, uh, this is my son, Peter,” Cas introduced briefly, and his entire demeanor shifted. Danny couldn’t help but completely forget the texting conversation. This dude was suddenly...so nervous. “Peter, this is Maddie. We went to college together.”

Peter didn’t come any closer to them. He gave a light, polite wave from afar, and Danny knew that he was staring at his mom...almost nervously.

“I’m terribly sorry, but we need to get going,” Cas apologized. He pulled the grocery cart with him as he stepped towards his son. “Busy schedule. It was good seeing you!”

“Oh you too!” Maddie was cheerful, seemingly oblivious to the others. The father son duo left the isle, and out of sight. Danny watched after them.

“Where’d you know him from?” Danny wondered. He glanced to see Maddie putting some boxed dinners into their cart.

“Cas? He was an old classmate of your dad and I. Before Vlad, he worked on the portal with us, but ended up dropping out to care for his son, but I’m so glad to hear that he eventually went back and finished. He was always a very smart man,” Maddie replied. She glanced at the list in her hand. “We don’t have much more to get. Let’s try to get done before the rush really comes in.”

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“Phantom,” a voice called out to him. Danny glanced over to see Peter standing nearby. The halfa shot him a smile, capping his thermos and a light salute. Though inside he was a bit shaky. Was he really just? Watching that entire fight?

“Hello, citizen!” Danny put on his public hero voice. He paused, half turning away as he prepared to leave. “Well uh, ghost’s contained. I’ll see you around!”

“No!” Peter’s harsh, desperate plea caught him off guard. “Please. We need to talk. I know your secret.” Danny’s blood ran cold.

“What secret?” Danny asked quickly. “There’s no secret. I’m a ghost, what secret could I have?”

Peter’s look, that absolute knowing, scared Danny. Despite it, he didn’t seem malicious like he had feared.

“You can’t run, because I really, really actually need your help,” Peter asked. “I know you’re half ghost.” He hurriedly added at Danny’s panicked look, “But I don’t know who your human half is! I don’t care who either, I just really need to know how you’re so stable.”

The entire statement caught Danny absolutely off guard. Peter wasn’t giving off any kind of vibe like he was with the Guys in White, nor that he was going to hurt him. He couldn’t even sense anybody else around, and he had been fighting in the area long enough to have already set off booby traps if they existed. And his ghost sense...had gone off around him sporadically.

“What do you mean?” Danny asked. Peter’s lower lip trembled.

“I’m half ghost too,” he claimed. Danny stared, his heart stopping. “But I can’t...it’s literally killing me.”

“I don’t believe you,” he whispered. Peter motioned for him to move back a bit. Danny did.

There were no familiar rings or flash of light that always signaled his transformation. A dark shadow seemed to overwhelm the other, and left behind a figure that was unmistakably ghostly. Electric blue skin that was forever crackling with purple energy with matching purple eyes, the once blond hair now pitch black and floating around him softly. His outfit didn’t change, but Danny’s ghost sense did go off.

Peter held his hand up, and a purple dome shield came up. An ectoplasmic dome shield. He didn’t know how to feel at this revelation. Danny could only stare in awe at the other. There was more like him. It wasn’t just him and Vlad and Dani. They weren’t alone, there were oth-

The newly exposed halfa doubled over with a groan of pain. The shield quickly melted away, and Danny tensed up. He took a step forward.

“D-Don’t!” Peter’s voice gurgled, and Danny stopped. The newly discovered halfa fell to his knees and knees, and he threw up as his ghostly form melted away. As the form melted away, Danny could feel the air being filled with a rush of electricity and static before it finally faded.

“...Are you okay?” Danny called out.

“Yeah, that’s normal,” Peter wheezed, wiping his mouth as he stood back up, wiping his knees of dirt and gravel. “My ghost powers are super unstable. I can’t…not without...” He paused before glancing up at Danny. “Did you ever have a time where you were struggling to get your powers to work?”

“Yeah,” the teen nodded.

“I’m the opposite. I have to force myself to turn it off, and it takes so much energy, and every time I just try to utilize a little bit of power, it’s this…” Peter trailed off. “It’s overwhelming. And it hurts. And I can’t just bottle it up forever. If I don’t let it lose sometimes...it’s not pretty. I try to do it in isolated areas. Just let the excess energy out.”

Danny could only imagine the kind of destruction. If he had to guess, based on the electricity in the air, this guy had some kind of electric core.

“How’d you...know about me anyway?” Danny changed the subject.

“I didn’t put puzzle pieces together, if that’s your concern,” Peter assured him. “The other halfa told me.” Danny’s eyes widened. “It’s why my dad and I came to Amity Park. We’ve been looking for a halfa to help us, or uh, rather help me.”

“Wait Vlad told you!?” he blurted out. What the fuck, cheesehead!? Oh, when Danny found him, he was gonna.

“No?” Peter’s puzzled tone snapped him out of his anger. “There’s...more than just us three left?” Danny’s undead heart skipped a beat.

“Five,” Danny replied. “Who’s this other halfa?”

Peter stared somberly at him, glancing at his feet briefly as he toed with some of the rubble.

“...I don’t know his human name. I purposefully didn’t ask,” Peter told him. “I originally asked him to help me, but he’s in a terrible spot and needed help of his own, help we couldn’t give. Not without getting ourselves in worse trouble. He said you were a halfa though. It had to be worth a shot. There’s not many of us left anymore.”

“How’d you even become half-ghost?” Danny asked curiously. Peter cocked his head in confusion.

“I was? Born this way? Ghost mom, human dad?” he said slowly. He studied Danny curiously, and it seemed to click. “Wait were you not born half ghost?”

“You were born this way?” Danny asked back. His mind was going crazy. You could be born a half-ghost? That was possible? How come his parents never knew that? This would definitely explain why his dad seemingly dropped the Fentons as a friend... “Wait, many of us left?”

Peter’s face told him nearly everything. Something happened. Something bad. The other cleared his throat.

“Um...yeah,” he said quietly. “It’s kind of a long story. I don’t know all the details, cause I was kinda young, but basically...there was a lot of us. We had our own little section of the Ghost Zone. Do you know how the Bermuda Triangle is a giant natural ghost portal?” Danny nodded in confirmation. “There’s a section of the Ghost Zone near where it spawns most often that we used to inhabit, because of all the otherworldly crossing. Well, we were there. Before the Guys in White found out about us, and they came, and.”

His breath hitched. Danny felt sick. The Guys in White...knew. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up. They not only knew, but did this...oh fuck then that meant that there was a chance that they knew about him, and Vlad, and…..oh no.

“My dad said I nearly died too,” Peter continued. “One of the full ghosts saved me, smuggled me out. And my mom’s a doctor and was able to save me, but I was in a coma for like two months. Some made it out alive too. The unlucky ones…”

“...Died?” Danny guessed quietly. Peter let out a breathless chuckle.

“No. They’re lucky if the GIW just killed them,” he replied flatly. “It’s honestly terrible. I don’t think you wanna know.” Peter was right; Danny didn’t want to know. It was Peter’s turn to be curious. “So...you weren’t born this way? Right? So how…”

“I was in an accident,” Danny kept it simple. Peter raised an eyebrow.

“Must be one hell of an accident,” he commented. Danny chuckled nervously. Peter sighed heavily. “So, I still don’t know if you can actually help my stabilization issue…cause of the differences…”

“I’ll do what I can!” Danny blurted out. Peter’s face brightened. “Please. I’d love to know more about halfas. We can compare stuff.” The young adult let out a sigh of relief.

“Come to my house tonight, my parents can tell you everything they know,” Peter agreed. He reached into his pocket to pull out the familiar small notebook. He ripped a page out, jotting down an address Danny already knew. “Just...come alone.”

Danny nodded, holding his hand out for the paper. Peter gave it to him, and despite the other powering down, Danny still felt a bit of an electric shock as they grazed hands.

“I’ll see you then,” Danny promised.

Grasping the note, he waved a goodbye, and he flew out. He had so much to tell Jazz.

#my phics #phics #phic phight #team ghost #idek if i'm gonna put this on ffn or ao3 bc it's just self indulgent and i jsut need to write my ocs and stuff bc im gonna die one day #hopefully soon

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panic-and-procrastinate-writing · 4 years

Text

Chapter 12: A Consequential Discovery

Warnings: Murder, Kidnapping, Blood, Gore, Pain and Horror

Today was the day.

Today was the day that someone was going to die.

You could feel it.

You could feel it in the air, the way the static stuck to your arms and made your hairs stand on end. The way the air was no longer humid and exhausting, but cold and dreadful, with a chilling breeze cutting through to your core, and reminding you of the unease you felt when you passed a grave yard.

And there was the buzzing. The constant buzzing and crackling of electricity around your head and filling your ears with non-existent noise. Electric shock jarring you every time you touched something.

It was there from the moment you woke up, and it was going to be there until he died.

It was really starting to piss you off.

But you were trying to ignore it and stay calm, in favour of making a hot tea to chase away the grave feeling settling in your stomach.

You would call the Red Hood later and let him know, but for now, you really just needed a relaxing bath and some incense.

Leaving the tea bag to sit in the cup of hot water, you left the kitchen to start running a bath. Grabbing the incense on the way, you placed it in your bathroom and lit it, filling the room with a sweet vanilla scent.

It had been a couple days since you spoke to the vigilante and Oracle about what to do on your situation with Nevaeh, and you hadn’t spoken to anyone since.

Three days. Three days of utter and complete depressing silence. Three days of not talking to a single goddamn soul.

It was draining, and tiring, and you found yourself struggling even more to get yourself out of bed, the only thing keeping you alive was the thought of actually dying.

Because even though life felt worthless and you didn’t have the energy to do anything at all, you didn’t fight for your life with everything you had just to kill yourself.

You opened your bathroom cupboard and pulled out a new bath bomb. It was nothing special, all it did was turn the water milky and had a sweet scent, but it did look pretty with rose petals in the water, which is what you placed in shortly after the bomb dissolved.

The bombs and petals had no healing qualities and did nothing for your senses, but it looked charming, and after adding candles on the shelves and turning the lights down low, you felt that it was going to relax you pretty well.

Turning off the hot water, you went back into the kitchen to take the tea bag out and place in your preferred amount of milk and sugar. You brought the tea with you into the bathroom, along with a speaker hooked up to your phone, and placed them on the windowsill, away from the water.

You turned on your meditation playlist, and started to strip, getting ready to completely chill out.

Climbing into the tub, you hissed as the hot water lapped at your ankles, but continued to sink in, preferring the scalding water over the bone chilling air.

Once submerged, you closed your eyes, and let your thoughts wander.

He was going to die today. Malcolm Valetta. Today was the day that the murderer decided he should die.

But why? Why today? What was so special about today? Did it have something to do with Valetta himself? Was it a personal thing about Valetta, or a personal thing about the murderer?

Or was it just because the murderer felt like killing someone every couple of weeks, and that he chose a Monday night because the body would be discovered on a Tuesday, the second day of the week, which matched up with his body drop of 2 in the morning?

Wow. That was a really specific idea.

And…it made sense…

Maybe bath bombs and rose petals did have special qualities.

Nah, it was probably because your tense muscles were melting off in the almost lava like water, which in turn caused your psychic filters to destress too.

Surrounding yourself with beauty and natural wonders tended to heal the mind pretty well.

But if the first murder was on a Wednesday, the third day of the week, and the body was dropped at three in the morning, then that meant that the number of bouquets weren’t only the hour of the body drop, but the week day on which the victim would be found.

Goddamn. What a break through.

But if the murderer got away, which you doubted he would, his next murder would be on a Saturday, and at either 6 in the morning or 6 at night.

It still seemed pretty early though. Too many people would be out at that point, why would he place a body then?

Was it somewhere rural and unpopulated, where nobody really went and therefore the body wouldn’t be found for a while?

Hmmm. It seemed a little too far in the future for you, your senses too clouded to tell what was truth and what wasn’t.

Oh well. You were supremely chilled out, sticking your leg up and out of the water, and watching hot steam float off.

Heh. You were as red as a lobster, and boiling like one too.

The best way to bathe.

Sighing, you continued to think, but let your thoughts drift away from the case and to more current events.

Like wondering what was the vigilante was up to.

Heh. Sleeping most likely. You imagined that late nights patrolling would wear anyone down, and therefore this cold morning would have him tucked in bed all cosy.

You hoped he was. You wanted to him to be comfortable, and resting in some fun batman pyjamas. You giggled at the image that came to mind, but quickly chased it away when you realised it wasn’t right.

If he wasn’t wearing pyjamas then what was he wearing?

Your giggles quickly transformed into squeals of embarrassment when you guessed that he only slept in underwear, and realised you had hit the nail right on the head and felt the truth more than you wanted.

Goddamn it why did you have to be right all the time!?

Now you couldn’t get the image out of your head!

You hunched your shoulders and tried to disappear further into the bath, the hot water doing nothing to soothe your flushed face.

You didn’t want to think about how pretty the Red Hood was, and you didn’t want to think about how gorgeous his muscles were! But how could you not? You literally saw them a couple days ago, all tied up in a way too tight t-shirt that looked like it wanted to rip at the seams, and glistening with summer sweat.

Argh!! Curse your filthy mind! Calling him up later would be even more difficult now.

This wasn’t like you! Why were you thinking about him like that? He was your friend, not some supermodel or idol, just a person, a friend who cared about you and definitely didn’t want you lusting after him like some desperate bitch.

God you really needed to get a life.

And a significant other.

“Hello?” The vigilante answered after the 4th ring, and you stuttered back a reply as you sat at the kitchen table, playing with the hem of your shirt nervously.

“Is everything okay? Did you have another vison?” He asked worriedly, with a new robotic voice. A voice filter on the phone maybe?

“Uh, not exactly. Um, It’s more my sixth sense actually, I uh… I think it’s going to happen today.” You bounced your leg anxiously, biting at your nails, afraid of how he would take the news.

“What’s going to happen today? The murder?”

“Mmhhmm.” You hummed in agreement, unsure of what to do and how to stop it.

“Are you sure? Valetta’s under house arrest until the trail, and he has a police detail outside his house for protection.”

You breathed in and out to calm yourself, unsure of what to do or what to feel.

You wanted to believe that it was going to be okay. That with the police protecting him the murderer wasn’t going to try anything. But the truth was, you just couldn’t.

You knew the truth. And even if things didn’t turn out exactly the way you dreamt it, the murderer was still going to try and kill him today.

“Yeah, I’m sure. It doesn’t matter that he has protection, the murderer isn’t scared. He’s going to try anyway, so, if you could speak to someone or something about increasing protection, maybe?...” You bit your lip, still so nervous about the whole situation.

This was the first time you were actively trying to stop a murder from happening.

You could not screw up.

“Okay, yeah, I’ll see what I can do. Do you have any idea what time it’s going to happen?”

“Uh, no, sorry, I don’t. I only know it’s going to happen tonight.”

“Alright, thanks. Is that all you called for?” He asked as you fumbled again, and you found yourself unable to reply.

Hnng. Goddamn it just say ‘Yes, good bye!’ what the hell was all the hold up?!

“I, uh, yeah, um, but, ah.” Apparently forming coherent sentences was a skill you did not possess.

“Is everything okay?”

“Um, uh, Yeah, I just, uh, you’re probably busy so I should let you go-”

“I have time.” He interrupted. “What’s wrong?”

You opened and closed your mouth repeatedly, having no memory of how to actually hold conversations. How were you supposed to reply to that when nothing was actually wrong?

Okay, that was a bold-faced lie. Everything was wrong but talking about your feelings was gross and that was not the reason you were struggling to remember how to be a human being.

“Nothing’s wrong! Everything’s fine, great, amazing, I’m just- I- fuck I’m bored.” You barked out a laugh as the truth barrelled its way out of your mouth, and you put your head in your hands, trying to hide away in shame.

Of course you couldn’t say goodbye, you didn’t want to.

“I’m sorry, I’m sure you have much better things to do than to-”

“I can talk.” He interrupted again, and you found yourself blubbering again.

“But, shouldn’t you get on with the case? You know, stop the bad guy and all.” You floundered desperately, unsure of what you really wanted.

You really should have let him go so he could protect the target, but god you really needed company. And you really wanted to talk to someone.

“Yeah, but you said it’s going to happen tonight, right? It’s midday, we got a couple hours.” He reasoned, and you bit your bottom lip in anticipation.

“I guess.”

“Do you want me to send a message to Oracle, just to be sure? She can let other people know so I won’t be the only one working to stop him.” He asked, and you felt a little more relieved at the idea of other people being there to stop the murderer.

“Yes please.”

“Alright, Give me a minute.”

“Thankyou.” You deflated and slouched in your dining chair, listening to him rummaging around a room, searching for a laptop. When he found it, you heard the sound of it powering up and then the clacking of keys as he sent the message.

“Alright, there we go. I can stay and talk for a bit.”

“Um, okay, sweet.” You said as you scrapped your nail at a stain on your dining table. Alright, okay, cool, he could talk.

But now what?

“Um, how have you been?” You asked, starting off the conversation. You wanted this. You shouldn’t have been so nervous.

“I’ve been alright, you?”

“Um, I’ve… been.” You sunk into your seat, hunching your shoulders and trying to hide even though he couldn’t see you. You didn’t want every conversation you had to be a depressing one.

“What’s been going on?” He asked with concern, and your heart did stupid little flips at the implication that he cared.

God you were a dumbass.

“Literally nothing.” You laughed cynically, but quickly quieted down as you realised it wasn’t really funny, and it just kinda hurt instead. “But I guess that’s kinda the problem.”

“What do you mean?” He asked again.

“I’m lonely and bored. There’s a lot of problems with that when you can’t leave the house.” You replied with snark, even though you weren’t really angry. You were just feeling too much, and you didn’t want to.

“I take it you haven’t spoken to Nevaeh then. Are you still upset about it?”

“I think I’m always going to be upset about it, if I’m honest.” You answered, but it was difficult with the lump growing in your throat.

“Is there really no one else you can talk to?” He asked, and then you felt truly pathetic.

“Not really.” You sighed. “I mean, there’s you and Oracle. But I can only call you in emergencies, and I don’t want to burden Oracle.”

“Hmm.” He pondered your answer, and you waited patiently for him to tell you to just grow up. He had better things to do then make you feel better every time you spoke to him.

“I guess we’ll have to see about getting you a more permanent phone then.” He finally said, and you felt your heart burst in your chest.

A more permanent phone?

“You mean, a phone that I can call on more than once?” You said with barely hidden excitement, your previous depressed demeanour disappearing almost instantly.

“Yeah, I think it would be more useful if you had a more secure line of contact.” He said, and you sat up in your chair, excitement at the thought of having something more permanent lifting your spirits completely.

“So, if I got this phone, would I be able to call about things other than the case?” You asked hopefully. You had been dying for weeks to call him and just talk.

He chuffed at your question and then said “Sure, why not.”

You smiled to yourself in your kitchen, happy at the thought of more conversations with him.

“So, um, what were you doing before I called?” You asked, trying to hold onto the conversation.

“I was reading.” He answered, and then asked, “What about you?”

“Uh, Nothing much. What were you reading?” You questioned, trying not to sound to pathetic.

“Lord of the Flies, by William Golding. Do you know it?”

“Oh, yeah, kinda. We studied it in school, but I can’t remember much, is this your first time reading it?” You asked.

“No, I read it in school too, but I saw an old copy in a bookstore, and I thought it would be nice to reread it.”

“Hmm.” You hummed in reply. “Do you like it?”

“I like the message behind it, but sometimes I just want to smack the kids in the face.”

You burst out laughing at his reply, and he chuckled along with you. When your giggles died down, you asked “Is it because of how bratty everyone is?”

“Of course it is, all the boys are so goddamn arrogant I wanna throw them into the ocean.”

You laughed out loud again, putting your head in your hands to try and keep yourself together, heat burning at your cheeks as you could hear him breathing on the other side of the phone.

He was smiling. You could tell, and that just made the heat in your cheeks burn worse.

“They are really fucking annoying, aren’t they?” You mused out loud, a smile gracing your features with a halo of pink surrounding them.

“Yes. Jack can get fucked.”

You burst out laughing for the third time, and briefly wondered, what the fuck are you doing?

Ignoring your own self-loathing in favour of the wonderful conversation, you replied “I’m guessing you’re not gonna read this book again when you finish it, are you?

“Absolutely not. But I will finish it, I hate leaving a book unfinished.”

You hummed in reply, smiling as you saved away that little titbit about him in the back of your mind, a comforting warmth resting on your cheeks.

“How much of the book do you have left?”

“I’ve still got a few pages left; I should be able to finish soon.”

“Ah, well that’s good. You won’t have to deal with those little shits much longer then.” He laughed loudly at your answer, and you grinned brightly, your heart swelling with joy at being able to make him laugh.

“Yeah, thank God for that, this entire book has been dragging on.”

“I thought you like tragedies?” You asked quizzically, resting your chin on hand, still smiling.

“I do, but this isn’t so much a tragedy as it is just pure torture for the characters. I know it’s supposed to show that the entitlement and pride of young upper-class boys hinders any sort of progress and construction of a society, but they are kids, and it just feels unfair that they have to go through this. Even if they do need a wakeup call.”

You sat there in shock as you listened to his detailed and structed analysis, chuckling as his pure inner nerd wormed its way through the phone.

“What? What are you giggling at? What’s funny?” He questioned rapidly.

“Nothing! Nothing! I just didn’t realise you were such a nerd is all.” You continued to laugh into your hand, still so shocked at the nerd side of him.

“Oh, for fucks sake.”

“No! No! I don’t mean it in a mean way! I promise! I liked it; it was cute. You sound like you’re in a book club.” You hummed with a smile.

“Augh.” You heard him groan on the other side of the phone, and you imagined him dragging his hands down his face in embarrassment. “I’m not in a book club. I’ve never been in a book club. I- wait. No, I have been in a book club. I think. Does collecting first editions of books count as a book club?”

You giggled at the confession and then said “I think so. It’s definitely a hobby. Did you read and discuss the books after you collected them?”

“Of course. What would be the point of collecting them if I didn’t read them?”

“Then you were officially in a book club.” You giggled a little harder at that. “Who would have thought. The infamous Red Hood, in a book club.”

“Don’t tell anyone, you’ll ruin my reputation.” He said with a sigh, and you imagined him pushing his hair back and out of his face as he smiled.

You briefly thought his smile would be gorgeous, before you chased the thought away.

“Don’t worry, your secret is safe with me.”

“Thanks.” He replied, and you could feel the soft tone of his voice through the filter, and your chest swelled with something indescribable.

You continued to talk with him for a couple more hours, talking about all random kinds of things, like what genres you liked to read, and when you told him that you hadn’t read since high school, he gasped and promised you that he would make you love reading again. You had giggled at that, but ultimately looked forward to that future.

You had suggested fantasy as a genre, since you loved magic and fiction, and he began listing a few books that would intrigue you, but kept coming back to Shakespeare.

When you pointed this out, he ended up rambling about how amazing Shakespeare was and how important he was to the English language.

Wanting to understand why he loved it so much, you suggested he bring you a book or two of Shakespeare, and he promised he would, given they included magic.

You ended up discovering that he wanted to join the theatre club, and you really lost it at that. You were laughing uncontrollably, and you could tell he was pouting on the other side. When you asked why he didn’t, you discovered that he didn’t have enough time, because he was Robin.

You couldn’t believe it! He worked that closely with Batman! And when you began to gush about it, you quickly realised that it was a sensitive topic. He was quiet and you almost thought that he felt sad.

Understanding that it was a difficult topic, you quickly changed it into something more heartfelt, and you could tell he appreciated it.

The few hours you spoke to him felt almost unreal, having so much fun and smiling the most you had in years. It was impossible to pull away from the phone, unable to stop talking and leave the conversation, enjoying his company far too much.

And then the first crack of thunder broke the small heaven you had made, and you suddenly realised what time it was.

It was time for him to die.

“Red, you have to go.” You interrupted suddenly, staring out the window as another thunderclap roared in the sky, and the downpour began.

“What? Why? Is everything okay?” He questioned, the sudden change in tone throwing him off.

“No, no nothing’s okay. It’s happening. He’s going to kill him.” There was a beat of silence. Then;

“Okay, stay calm, I’m getting up and getting ready okay? We’ll catch him.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m calm. You’ll get him. Just hurry?”

“I’m already leaving Doll.” And then he hung up, and you were left alone with the screaming sky, unsure if he was right, and if you were telling truth.

Your head was screaming.

At the first sign of lightning you had ran to your room and immediately huddled underneath the covers, the thunder roaring overhead terrifying your soul out of your body.

You were crying, but it wasn’t because of the fear.

You were never that afraid of thunderstorms. Sure, you hid in your room because the loud noise brought up all sorts of horrible memories, but you never cried because of them.

No, you were crying because of the pain.

The beating, bashing, bludgeoning pain inside your skull that made you think your head was going to explode.

You were fairly certain your nose was bleeding, but you couldn’t be sure because your eyes were screwed so tightly shut from the pounding.

Were you screaming? You couldn’t tell over the noise of the wind howling outside and the rain thundering against the window.

There were images flashing across your eyelids.

There was too much colour, too much light, and closing your eyes didn’t help, because they were in your eyes.

They were in your brain.

Was this a trance? Was this what happened every other night? Was this why you could never remember, because it was always this painful?

The images were slowing down, sort of like a movie reel, and you gasped as you could finally see what was happening.

Blindly crawling out of your covers, stumbling into your living room with your eyes closed, you relied on your sixth sense to guide you to your sketch book.

You had to draw this.

You had to get this down, this pain couldn’t be for nothing.

This was too important to ignore.

You stumbled as you walked into an end table, knocking over your lamp and books, groaning as a new wave of pain pulsed inside your head and the lamp smashed on the floor. You walked on, reaching out blindly for your bookcase.

It was his face.

The murderer.

You could see him. Crouching behind some bushes, in the Malcolm Valetta’s back garden.

The rain was pouring down, and he did nothing to protect his face, his hair plastered to his forehead and his thick jacket soaking up all the water.

You had no idea who he was, but he was there, in your brain, and he was about to be in your book too.

He had to be caught, and you had to make sure that he was identifiable.

Finally reaching your bookcase, you desperately pawed away at the shelves, trying to feel for the rough texture of your sketchbook. When you found it, you pulled it off the shelf, and it hit the floor with a thud. You frantically searched for your pencil case, and you could hear all the contents of your bookshelf falling and hitting the floor.

No wonder you always made a mess when you were in a trance. You could never see anything, the pain too much to open your eyes.

The tears were still coming, streaming down your face as you got increasingly frustrated unable to find your pencil case and oh no, he was moving closer to the house.

“NO! No! Please stop!” You begged your empty apartment as you held your head, your nose a steady stream of blood, the other nostril becoming bloody too, and you could the hear it dripping and splashing on the floor.

Where was your goddamn pencil case?

Finally, your hand hit the soft texture of your pencil case, and you grabbed it, desperate to open it and get this monster out of your head.

Grabbing your 2B pencil, you shuffled along the floor, looking for your sketchbook that was buried underneath all the clutter, and when you found it, you flipped it open, and began scribbling, hoping that whatever guided you to see his face, would guide your hands to get it on the page.

Lightning irradiated the sky, but it was too late. He was in the house now. The murderer was in Malcom Valetta’s kitchen, and he was waiting behind the door, waiting for him to come get his next beer.

He had chloroform this time. A rag in his gloved hands, soaked with the liquid, and he was ready to kill him now.

You continue to cry on the floor, fairly certain there was blood getting in your sketch book, but you had to keep sketching. You had to get his face.

And then Malcolm Valetta walked into the kitchen, and you sobbed even harder. You didn’t want to see this. Why did you have to see this?

He struggled; he really did. You saw the way anger flashed in his eyes, and how quickly it was replaced by fear, and then empty nothingness as he lost consciousness.

His eyes would remain empty for eternity now.

You persevered. You continued to draw, flipping the page, sketching out the new scene that rolled in your mind, despite the pain that it caused you. You persisted.

Thunder rolled over head as he was carried him out of the house, Malcolm Valetta slung over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. He got out the same way he got in, and climbed through a hole in the fence of the back garden, hidden by the shrubbery and trees.

Where was the Red Hood? He was supposed to be there! Why couldn’t you see him? Why wasn’t he stopping him?

The murderers van was parked a few streets away, but he made sure to take the alley ways and back roads to get to it, so he could carry the body in peace, and you hated how you had to draw every scene of this kidnapping, soon to become murder.

You were still crying, but your nose was clogging up, and you could feel the blood drying on your lips and chin.

Did this mean the trance was going to end soon?

Did this mean you wouldn’t have to watch him kill him?

You prayed it did.

But until the scene in your head stopped, you wouldn’t stop drawing, so you flipped to another page.

You heard the back-door squeak as he pushed it shut again, and you heard the exhaust back firing as he drove away, again.

You tried to watch where he was going, but you had no idea where he even was. You had never left your apartment, you didn’t know what the street names were called, and you didn’t recognise them because you had never been to them. He was driving too fast for you to see the street names.

You couldn’t take this. He was speeding by, and the storm was still going insane outside.

The trance wasn’t stopping either.

In fact, it felt like it was getting worse.

You screamed in agony as another wave of pain hit your head, a burst of light behind your eyelids, and then you were seeing through the murderer’s eyes. There was a fresh stream of blood coming from your nostrils, and you began to feel something wet in your eyes too.

Were your ears bleeding too?

How much blood were you losing right now?

What was happening?

You cried harder when the murderer got to his hideout, and you knew what was going to happen next.

You dropped your pencil in favour of gripping your hair and screaming in pain.

You didn’t want to see this!

You didn’t want to feel this!

You didn’t want to do this!

You cried harder as he began his plan, and he re-enacted your nightmare perfectly, slicing and tearing open the body exactly as you had dreamt.

You couldn’t draw this. It was too much. You didn’t want to watch, but you didn’t have a choice.

“Please, please stop.” You begged aloud again, but nobody heard you.

Nobody would save him. Malcom Valetta was dying in front of you, and you were the one who was doing it.

All you could do was cry and hold yourself, your arms wrapped around your middle, your forehead pressed to the cold ground and your lungs squeezing tighter and tighter until there was no breath left.

The trance wasn’t stopping, even when you felt dizzy, even when you felt sick, the images were still going, still reeling in your mind, the horror movie not over until the body was hanging on the tree.

And when the body was placed, along with all the handcrafted messages, you finally felt peace. The images stopped flashing, the movie slowed down, and you finally stopped seeing his dead body.

When you stopped seeing him, you breathed, and then you collapsed, his face finally locked between the pages of your sketchbook, waiting to be put away.

You could open your eyes now.

The first thing you noticed when you came to, was the smell of blood. There was a pungent, heavy scent of iron in your nose, and you had an awful time figuring out why.

Groaning as you sat up, your head was pounding, and your eyes hurt, almost like you had been squeezing them shut for hours. There was also a faint feeling of crispiness to your eyes, like tears had dried in your sleep.

When you looked around to figure out what had happened, you suddenly felt very annoyed with yourself.

That stupid fucking trance thing had happened again.

Groaning out loud again, you dragged your hands downs your face, and jumped in shock when you felt something wet. Looking down at your hands, horror covered your face as your realised they were covered in blood.

That wasn’t right.

Hurriedly getting up, you tried to walk to your bathroom, but dizziness knocked into you suddenly, and the room swayed with you.

You managed to get through the lightheaded daze that had settled into you, and you staggered into the bathroom, leaning heavily on the sink and stared at your reflection.

What the fuck?

There was blood all over the bottom half of your face, from your nose all the way to your chin, and when you turned your face, you heart dropped.

There was a long line of blood, all the way from your ears to your jaw.

You had never bled from your ears before.

What the fuck had happened during that trance?

Taking deep breathes to calm yourself, you gripped the edge of the sink, you had to keep calm.

Okay, so, you apparently bled from almost every part of your face last night, no big deal.

It was okay, it would be okay, you were be gonna fine. You had nose bleeds before, maybe not this intense, but you had them before. It was always okay.

Just a sign of too high blood pressure.

God, how high was your blood pressure for your ears to bleed too?

Sighing, you turned on the hot water and began to wash your face, scrubbing behind your jaw and ears too, not able to stand the idea of being covered in blood any longer than you had to.

When your face was clear of the blood and dried tears, you brushed your teeth too, seeing as some of the blood had gotten in your mouth, and you didn’t want to taste that.

When you were done, you stretched and clicked your back, your back aching horridly, as if you had been hunched over all night. Groggily walking out of the bathroom, you groaned loudly when you saw the mess you had made.

You swore the next time it happened you were handcuffing yourself to the bed.

Deciding to clean up the mess later, you sluggishly walked to the kitchen, needing something to drink. Whether it was tea or coffee didn’t matter, you just needed something warm to fill the new cold and empty hole inside you.

Whilst walking to the kitchen, you stopped to check the time, and saw it 3:26. You were surprised when you felt nothing. No dread or surprise or joy, no indication at all as to how the night went, or if Malcolm Valetta was still alive.

Instead you just felt… tired. Tired and empty. Nothing else.

Had the trance really taken that much out of you?

If your blood pressure got high enough for your ears to bleed, it must have been a pretty fucked up trance.

Shrugging, you continued into the kitchen, and flicked the kettle on. Deciding that tea was the best option, you pulled out a mug and placed a chamomile teabag in it.

You needed something to help you sleep, not keep you awake.

When the kettle flicked off, you poured the hot water, but stopped halfway.

You were tired, yeah, too tired to tell if someone halfway across Gotham was alive or not, but not that tired that couldn’t sense if someone else was in your apartment.

“(Y/n)?”

You sighed with relief. It was just Red. You continued to pour the water.

“I’m in the kitchen.” You croaked out, and paused in surprise with how sore your throat was. Were you screaming?

Putting the kettle back down, you took your mug and sat down at the dining table, waiting for the vigilante to sit with you.

When he walked into the kitchen, he stood in the doorway, watching as you sipped your tea.

You didn’t look up, didn’t want to. Instead, you continued to sip your tea instead, favouring the warmth over the dark and grungy aura the vigilante had decided to bring with him.

His aura being that dark was a bad sign.

You weren’t sure you had the energy to deal with it.

“Did the storm get inside the apartment?” He joked, but it was tense. He was trying to make things seem better, but he was worried.

And… guilty.

That was a really bad sign.

“No storm, just a trance.”

“Oh.” He wasn’t sure what to say to that. He just kind of, stood there. Not sure what to do. “Are you… okay?”

You sighed as you put the tea down, not sure how you felt. At first you felt fucking pissed. Trances were always annoying and inconvenient, meaning you had to clean up afterwards, but at the same time, none of them had ever taken this much out of you before.

It was kind of worrying.

“I don’t know.” You answered honestly, rubbing your temples with a sigh. Your head was still aching. “Do you want to sit?” You asked, finally looking up at him, and shit your senses really couldn’t tell you anything.

Whatever dark and grungy aura you thought he had couldn’t hold a candle to his state. His jacket and shirt were completely covered in blood, there were a few gashes along his arms and legs, something that looked like a burn mark on his torso, and his helmet had a pretty defining crack in it.

He looked like he walked through hell and back.

He sighed as he slumped over and nodded yes, finally stepping fully into the kitchen and pulling out a chair to sit with you.

You watched as he flopped over and put his head on the table, clearly having had a terrible night.

You didn’t like the way it felt relatable.

“Are you okay?” You asked tensely, unsure if you were allowed to be this kind of close with him. Instead of answering, he just groaned loudly and put his head in his arms.

Sighing, you got up and walked to your bathroom, getting out your medical kit. Those gashes on his arm looked nasty, and his shirt and pants were definitely going to need a patch up with all those rips.

When you found your kit, you walked back into the kitchen and pulled your chair closer to him, spreading out the supplies on the table. When he looked up and realised what you were doing, he said “You don’t have to do this.”

You replied with “I know. But I want to.”

You thought you felt him smile at that, but you were much too tired to tell.

He began to sit up straight, and took his jacket off, his shirt soon following, and you reminded yourself it was definitely not the time to ogle.

He laid out his arm, and you began with the disinfectant, being as gentle as you could. He watched you intently the entire time, no words being said, just a comfortable, caring silence, only filled by the ticking of the clock.

When you moved onto his next arm, he broke it.

“You have blood on your shirt.”

“That will happen when you’re stitching open wounds.”

“That blood isn’t mine.”

You finally looked up from his arm and to his face, and when you saw where he was looking, you looked down at your chest and gasped.

You had about as much blood on your shirt as he did.

“Uh, I had a nose bleed?” You said dubiously, even though it was the truth, it seemed a little hard to believe you had bled that much.

“That’s a lot of blood for a nose bleed.”

“Yeah.” You said with a sigh. “That’s probably why I feel so dizzy.”

He hummed in reply, and you stopped talking after that. You resumed cleaning and bandaging his wounds, a tender silence remaining until 4 in the morning.

When you were done, he pulled his clothes back on, and you put all the bloody tissues and supplies in the bin. But he didn’t leave.

He sat back down, his aura still heavy and uncomfortable, and you knew the next conversation was going to be a bad one.

“What are your senses saying right now?”

“Right now?” You question, and then sighed. “They’re saying this isn’t going to be a fun conversation.”

He nodded when you told him this, and then said “Yeah. I’m sorry, but we didn’t catch him.”

You stared at the Red Hood as he stared back, watching to see what you would do next, but your brain was still processing.

“What do you mean you didn’t catch him?” You whispered. You didn’t mean for it to sound accusatory, but the words were out of your mouth before you had a chance to think, still unable to come to terms with what the Red Hood was trying to tell you.

“I’m sorry, I really am, but he got away, and Malcolm Valetta is dead.”

He got away, and Malcolm Valetta is dead.

You took a deep breath, and then gulped, your throat suddenly feeling much too dry to speak.

The vigilante continued to watch you, but you couldn’t look back at him.

You got up, and flicked the kettle back on. You needed coffee this time. You needed to stay awake.

You needed to keep your eyes open.

#Jason Todd #jason todd/reader #pnpstories #ao3 #writing #fanfic #dc #dark #gory #kidnapping #murder #horror #pain #blood #swearing

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slashhinginghasher · 4 years

Text

Midnight Star - Chromeskull x OFC - Part 5: Gratitude

Summary: Marena meets some of the staff. No one gets a good first impression.

This work is on Ao3

It wasn’t the worst night Marena had endured - not by far - but it still sucked. A lot. At some point between the beginning and end of her bout of hysteria, she’d gone from sitting upright to lying sprawled across the concrete floor. Her throat felt raw, her face wet with blood or sweat or tears, or maybe all three, and her limbs didn’t even have the strength to tremble anymore. The room seemed to lurch and sway like the berth of a ship in some terrible storm, like the ship that had taken her away from...

Her stomach clenched violently. She tried to stand, but somehow found herself face down on the ground. Long past any semblance of dignity, she dragged herself in what she hoped was the general direction of the drain she’d seen in the corner. Her fingers brushed cold metal moments before her empty stomach revolted, retching up thin strings of spit and bile. This went on until it didn’t, and then her arms gave out, and she was curled up on her side, and her brains were probably leaking out through her eyes and nose.

She felt… split. Outside of herself. Like there were two of her, one limp on the floor and choking on occasional hiccups of laughter, the other suspended in air and looking dispassionately upon her wretched counterpart. An abyss was opening in the back of her skulls, filled with the fog and static of greyspace. Her heads throbbed, the gaping emptiness yawning wider and wider with each pulse.

The lights snapped on like a dagger to her eyes. She tried to flinch but couldn’t figure out which body to move. There was a sense of motion, of lifting. She swatted blindly at the hands grabbing at her with all the strength of a milk-drunk kitten, digging her nails in when they encountered soft skin. A sharp pinch in the crook of her elbow. Marena tasted blood and fell back into the grey.

***

Two black-haired girls stood face-to-face in a stark grey void, twin reflections like a mirror. The one on the left shivered in a threadbare linen shift.

“Please.” Her voice was barely a whisper. “Help me.”

The one on the right stood silent, stoic in her heavy hooded cloak.

“Then let me die,” the Left One pled.

The Right One pushed back her hood, letting the cloak fall to the floor. Her flesh was cracked like porcelain, meat and bone showing through the larger gaps. Black blood oozed slowly from the wounds like tar..

“This is nothing but what you deserve.” Blood dripped from her mouth and eyes.

The Left One shuddered as her skin began to crack in patterns mirroring the Right One’s. Orange firelight glowed in the fissures, burning brighter by the second. Black smoke seeped from the Left One’s wounds, poured from her mouth and nose. The Right One bled faster.

They reached for each other, and crumbled to dust the moment before their fingers touched.

***

She was handcuffed to a hospital bed. An IV was in her arm. And she was clean. She could feel, without opening her eyes, that someone had scrubbed away all the sweat and dirt, bandaged her cuts, even neatly combed her hair. And it was that, out of everything she’d been subjected to over the past few days, that almost broke her.

Marena was no stranger to abuse. She was deeply familiar with it, almost used to it, if one could ever get used to the kind of violence she’d survived. She knew how to switch herself off during a beating, how to hold back the pain until she could get to a safe (as if safety was something she’d ever known) place to lick her wounds. But the thought of having such tenderness inflicted upon her, especially while she was unconscious and vulnerable, made her want to rip her skin off. People were never gentle without ulterior motives, and she felt sick thinking about what those motives might be.

An impatient shifting drew her attention to the man sitting in the chair next to her bed. He was unfamiliar to her. Unlike SkullBitch, this one had a full head of hair, a wicked Glasgow grin across his pretty-boy face, and although he was sitting, Marena could tell he was a normal human height, unlike his freakish giant of an associate.

“Sleeping Beauty awakes at last!” One thing Marena had learned fairly early on was that Americans were obsessed with referencing fairytale princesses in daily conversation. It annoyed the shit out of her every single time. She fixed the man with a blankly impassive stare and waited. His smug grin shrank with each passing second of silence until he looked as irritated as she felt.

Good. No one gets to enjoy themselves, suka.

“You’re not his usual type,” he said, switching tactics. He dragged his gaze over her, but it felt impersonal, like a farmer at the meat market. “Not sure if that makes your chances better or worse.” His smile held a malicious edge this time as he leaned in conspiratorially. “You’re his new Veronica.”

Marena lunged at him, teeth snapped shut a scant inch from the tip of his nose as he jerked back. She hadn’t really been trying to get him; she just wanted him out of her face. The brief flash of panic in his eyes was a nice little bonus, though. He shot to his feet with a poisonous glare, trying to look menacing, but he was too much of an open book to be a real threat, even though Marena’s hands were literally tied.

“You little--”

“Preston!” The sharp voice startled both of them. A short brunette stood in the doorway, a lanky figure in scrubs hovering behind her. “You aren’t authorized to be in here. Leave. Now.” To Marena’s surprise, Preston, as he was apparently called, didn’t argue. He gave Marena one more murderous look, then stalked out of the room with his fists clenched at his sides. The small woman sighed once and smoothed a non-existent wrinkle from her slacks.

“Sorry about him. He’s a pain in the ass.” The woman strode forward with a placid smile that reminded Marena of Dr. Call Me Linda, the “let’s be friends even though you have at least five reasons to kill me” smile. She stopped next to Preston’s vacated chair and folded her hands behind her. “My name is Spann. How are you feeling?”

Of all the dumb fucking… Marena couldn’t have formulated a response to that if she’d wanted to. Unfazed by the lack of response, Spann continued.

“You had a nasty concussion, as well as--”

“Stop.”

“Excuse me?” To Spann’s credit, her courteous expression barely wavered.

“I don’t give a fuck what’s wrong with me. Just shut up.”

Spann was probably excellent at poker.

“I know this is a difficult situation for you, but after your little stunt in the basement, a little gratitude wouldn’t be out of place.”

This bitch is delusional.

“Gratitude.”

“Yes. Very few people have seen my employer’s face and lived, let alone been left in one piece.” Marena chewed on that for a moment, though she was mostly fixated on the “employer” bit. She briefly wondered if she’d fallen into the hands of the world’s most melodramatic bounty hunter, then decided that it was unlikely and also that she didn’t care.

Spann appeared to be waiting for an answer.

“If he was on fire and I had a hose, I’d strangle him.”

Marena didn’t get to see the other woman’s composure slip, as Spann chose that moment to turn and gesture the person still lurking in the doorway forward. He was a lanky, nervous-looking man with glasses. He was carrying a metal tray, and when he set it down, Marena could see a syringe with an intimidatingly thick needle, and a black leather collar.

“The syringe has a microchip with a built-in tracker,” Spann explained. “The collar also has a tracker. Pick one.” Marena eyed the tray, a tense ache rising in her chest and throat.

“Is quick death an option?”

“No.” That infuriating smile had returned to Spann’s lips. The man in scrubs shifted on his feet. “I recommend you make up your mind quickly. None of the others were even given the option to choose.” Spann gave her a pointed look. Fucking gratitude again. The ache grew sharper.

“The fucking needle,” Marena spat between clenched teeth. Spann raised her eyebrows in mild surprise but said nothing as she gestured at the man again. Marena fixed her eyes on the ceiling and barely flinched as the needle slid home just above her collarbone. It was over in a heartbeat; the man dabbed a spot of blood away with a cotton pad, placed everything back on the tray, and left. Spann was halfway to the door when Marena couldn’t hold her silence any longer.

“How many?”

“Pardon?” Spann glanced back over her shoulder.

“How many other girls in the house?” Forcing the words out was like pushing boulders up a hill.

“None,” Spann said, seeming confused. “There’s only you.” Marena shut her eyes briefly and swallowed hard.

“And how often do I...” The question stuck in her dry throat, the threat of a revolving door of faceless men looming over her. She didn’t need to finish the sentence for comprehension to dawn on Spann’s face.

“Mr. Cromeans is not in the habit of sharing,” the brunette replied. “It’s just you and him.” She walked out, the door clicking shut behind her. Marena sagged back against her pillows and tried to focus her breathing.

She was not reassured.

#my writing #jesse cromeans #chromeskull #marena polunochnaya #laid to rest

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nedeljkovicsaysno · 4 years

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the blood of both is my limbo (two)

(aka the Angel!Robbe/Demon!Sander AU that no one asked for)

Summary: Robbe spends his entire human life in total disbelief of the whole heaven-hell-religion thing. Luckily for him, it turns out that being a genuinely kind and selfless agnostic is enough to grant him Angel status in the afterlife. Meanwhile, a series of horrific events forces Sander to make some reckless choices with unfortunate consequences…but when he’s turned into a Demon, he realizes that what happens after death is nothing like the story the church tells. AKA Skam Afterlife, because in this parallel universe Isak and Even meet in Purgatory and have to overcome the slight problem that one’s an angel and one’s a demon.

Part One

Also posted on the Archive

Fight Night’s heating up - in more ways than one.

“Hey! Sander!”

Sander’s trance was momentarily shattered; he turned his head and there beside him was Noor, Britt’s bruja friend. She was tiny but she was terrifying; every part of her looked like it had teeth. Sander thought that this was maybe not too far from the truth. He greeted her with that fiendish slice of a half smile, leaned down so they could kiss at the air beside each other’s cheeks.

“What’s up, Noor.”

“Oh, you know. Just spent the day inventing a counter-hex from scratch,” said Noor, all-suffering as she crossed her yellow eyes. “Moyo pissed some warlock off when he kept beating him at cards the other night, so the asshole cursed him. He’s been walking around with a thundercloud over his head for a day and a half. Literally. Soaked the bed through twice.”

Sander laughed out loud, but there was a piece of his mind still idly circling around the peculiar golden haze, attached, curious. “Better than any other reason for him to have soaked the bed.”

“Yes, well,” said Noor, and she smirked. “Annoying nonetheless. Where’s the crew sitting?”

Sander inclined his head to the back left, where he could dimly make out their little booth. “Corner over there. Listen, Noor, will you take this to Senne? I’m gonna go say hi to one of my friends really quick.”

“Of course,” said Noor, accepting the mug he handed her. “See you in a minute?”

“Yes,” said Sander, and he waited until she had turned to wend her graceful way through tables and creatures back to the group before he re-focused his attention back onto the shining mist.

It had moved; it was now closer to the stage, and if Sander squinted he thought he could see shadows moving within the shimmer. Fully concentrated now, he began pacing measuredly towards it, sipping habitually at his drink as he did so; the crowd near the arena was thickening but still that small space remained uninhabited. In his chest Sander could feel the call of it, the siren of power that he could not ignore, and he wanted so badly to know what was within the mist that he forgot about caution. Before he’d even realized what he was doing he was inches from where the air became saturated with glinting medal-gold and he was mesmerized.

“What are you,” he murmured, and as though they were listening to him the thousands and thousands of glitter-particles inside the fog seemed to freeze.

Within the refuge of the Shield, Jens seized Robbe’s forearm.

Robbe, who mentally was lightyears away observing the melting pot of dark supernatural beings surrounding them, twisted his head, halfway to speaking before Jens slapped a warm frantic hand over his mouth.

Don’t talk, rang out in his mind. Turn around. Slowly, for hell’s sake.

On an ordinary occasion, Robbe would have scolded Jens for using telepathy, but the urgency in his Elder’s thoughts and the unusual situation within which they found themselves that night gave him pause. He did as Jens asked, suddenly streaked through with adrenaline at the thought of what he might discover, and found himself face-to-face with an extravagant creature with alabaster skin to match his white-blonde hair and violent cardinal-red blood trickling from both eyes.

He was standing directly in front of Robbe and Jens, a concentrated expression on his face, licking absently at the ring spiked through his lower lip. He seemed thoroughly unbothered by the fact that his eyes were bleeding; Robbe had just enough time to wonder if that was an everyday sort of thing for him when Jens was thinking out loud again.

It can see the Shield.

That’s impossible, Robbe thought back, scornful, wondering distractedly why Jens had referred to the being as it and not he. Nothing can see the Shield.

Some things can.

Like what?

Jens looked sideways at him and his face was grave.

Every inhuman creature has an ability, he thought. Opposite creatures often have opposite abilities. So, tell me, little one. What’s the opposite of Shielding?

Sensing, thought Robbe, his brain sprinting, whirring. Maybe Seeing.

Yes, thought Jens, and his grip around Robbe’s wrist tightened. And what are you?

An angel, thought Robbe, and as he looked back at the ethereal being in front of him recognition slammed into him like the car that had ended his human life.

What’s the opposite of an angel?

Robbe swallowed. He had never seen one up close before, but the explanation made perfect sense: bloody eyes, corpse-white skin, black everywhere.

A demon.

Sander was half a second from stretching out a hand to twist his fingers through the sunshine air, see if it pushed back like the darkness in hell had shoved at him when he’d first been Changed, but just like that Senne was beside him, towering, calm as he always was, stern.

“What are you doing, Driesen?”

“I found it,” said Sander dreamily, still tranced-out. “I found the thing that I’m Sensing.”

Senne furrowed his brow. ��What? Where?”

“There,” said Sander, vaguely, and he pointed. In doing so his fingertip barely brushed the outer perimeter of the mist and static crackled on his skin; all he wanted to do was step forward into it, see if it enveloped him, gilded him, too.

“I don’t see anything,” said Senne, but then he looked again and his expression changed. “Wait. This empty space?”

“It’s not empty,” said Sander. “There’s something there. The air is golden, Senne.”

Senne’s eyes darted from Sander’s eyes to the emptiness in front of them and something slammed down over his face like a sliding door. He grabbed Sander’s shoulder.

“We need to get away from this,” he hissed, “right now.”

In a dimmed sort of way Sander understood that he should hearken to Senne’s tone, his body language, his words, but it was not in his nature to feel fear; he had seen the worst, lived through the darkest of times, and he’d emerged on the other side as a fucking demon. The fact that Senne - a much older and more important demon than he - was expressing distress didn’t do as much as it should have to turn him back, and again he found himself warring the urge to bridge the gap.

Inside the Shield, Jens correctly interpreted Sander’s facial expression and made a decision.

Robbe. Enforce the Shield.

Robbe wrested his gaze from the blonde demon’s face. Enforcement required a brutal amount of strength and one hundred percent of his concentration, something he was not currently willing to give: he wanted nothing more than to study the creature before him, learn him, understand what demon looked like in corporeal form instead of in fantasy. But -

Do it. It’s going to try to reach in. I’ll help you.

Robbe hesitated and

outside the Shield Sander reached forward and

Jens stepped behind Robbe and pressed his torso flush to Robbe’s back and

just as Sander’s hand met the space where the air turned light Robbe pulled from Jens’s strength and with a visceral, audible growl of effort transformed the Shield from mist to steel.

Both Sander and Senne heard the noise he made; Sander’s palm met flat resistance and he recoiled in sharp shock. Senne grabbed him by the collar, yanked him back, and Sander’s stomach went hot with shame and recognition.

“Sander,” growled Senne in his ear, “what in fuck’s sake are you doing? Do you want the wrath of God to come down upon you? Get the fuck back.”

“What - “ Sander’s palm was tingling. “The wrath of - Senne, is that an angel?”

“Yes,” hissed Senne, as he hauled him away. “Yes, you idiot, what did you think a pocket of golden air in Lesser Purgatory would be? Are you hurt?”

“No,” said Sander, but he couldn’t stop looking stupefied over his shoulder back at the obviously marked space. “I’m fine. It didn’t - Senne, it didn’t seem like it was bad.”

“Driesen,” said Senne in total exasperation, “we’re bad. Angels are the literal polar opposite of everything we are. We’re not supposed to touch them. They aren’t for our kind.”

“But why?” Sander was not clear of mind. “Who the fuck says? Isn’t all that stuff about traditional human religion bullshit anyway?”

“Yes,” said Senne, hand clenching at the back of Sander’s neck, silver chains tangling in his fingers, “but that doesn’t change the hierarchy. They are light, we are dark. We protect the low realms, they protect the high. We rule the things that humans consider sin and they rule the things that humans consider virtue. We are not meant to mix with them. They think they’re superior to us.”

He stopped, pushed Sander back against the raised side of the stage, leaned in and licked a droplet of blood from Sander’s cheekbone. It was the one thing he knew to do that would bring Sander back to himself and sure enough his Fledgling’s scarlet eyes went immediately from daydream-distant to smack-awake.

“Senne, I’m sorry,” he said, low. “You’re right. We’re not meant for them.”

“It’s fine,” said Senne. His voice was gentle. “Angels can have quite the effect on someone who’s never seen them before, and for you to be able to Sense a Shield...that’s big stuff, Driesen.”

A luxuriant, lethal smirk cut its slow track across Sander’s mouth. “I have a good teacher.”

“Yeah, well,” said Senne, haughty. He searched Sander’s sharp beautiful face, shoved back against the urge to drink from his Fledgling’s bloodsource again, but Sander read his expression and swiped a teardrop of red from under his eye. Lifted his finger to Senne’s mouth and watched with satisfaction as his Maker sucked his skin clean, sighed raggedly, almost a groan.

“I’ll never understand why you don’t drink from humans more often,” said Sander, dripping with assurance. “Real blood is what does it for you.”

“Animal blood does what it needs to do,” said Senne. His violet eyes were feral. “Come on. Forget angels, okay? You had your introduction, now you need to focus on what’s really important.”

“Like watching you get turned on drinking from me?”

“Fuck yourself,” said Senne, eyes flashing, but it was half amusement. “First Blood is about to happen, and Eurydice is on.”

Robbe felt Jens grasp him around the waist, lift him bodily away from the stage into a more protected corner of the club, diving into shadows. He was shivering with the effort it had taken to throw up an Enforcement without proper preparation, teeth gritted hands fisted at his sides, and when Jens slid down against the side wall and pulled Robbe back between his legs he did not resist.

“Hey,” Jens crooned, voice a hot brush of air at Robbe’s ear, “come on, Robbe, you’re fine, I’ve got you. You were a fucking champion, kid. That was incredible.”

It wasn’t often that Jens called him by his first name and it pulled Robbe minimally back to himself; he managed to unclench his fists to clamp them on Jens’s knees, and his Elder slid hands under Robbe’s elbows so he could reach up and scratch through Robbe’s bedlam curls. His arms were so long that even from such an unnatural angle he could reach the crown of Robbe’s head with ease.

“I,” choked Robbe, tripping over the force of his own breath as he tried to re-center, all of him aware of the warmth of Jens’s body crowded against his own, “need a fucking drink.”

“Okay,” said Jens, amused. “I can make us look ordinary enough to pass as vampires or something for a little while if you want a break.”

“The irony of that sentence,” said Robbe, and Jens chuckled.

“Say the word.”

“Give me, like. Five minutes.” Robbe’s entire body felt like a wet towel, wrung for every last drop of water before being draped out to dry. “Enforcements without Charge take everything I’ve got, even with your help.”

“I know,” said Jens, and he sounded guilty. “I should have just Disguised us before we entered the LP so you wouldn’t have had to work so hard. But it’s Drinking Night AND Fight Night in one go and I thought the Shield would be safer.”

“It probably is,” said Robbe, sighing; he let his fluffy head tumble back onto Jens’s shoulder and nestled automatically. “But I mean, fuck it, right? At least two demons already know we’re here. If you Disguise us the whole corporeal mist giveaway disappears, and they have no idea we were even involved with it in the first place. Problem solved.”

“Ordinarily I’d say yeah,” said Jens, “but if that demon can Sense, then my Disguise won’t fully hide you from it. You get close, and it will know.”

Robbe looked back at him. Jens’s face was impossibly close and impossibly magnificent; Robbe could smell the alcohol he’d drunk in Greater Purgatory wafting from his soft, intermittent breath.

“Then I won’t get close.”

When Robbe had recharged enough to move Jens pulled them into a bathroom stall to work his magic; Robbe had always loved watching him while he was Casting, and tonight was no different. Jens was an absolute scholar at trickery and concealment, thought-play, stealth; he could be hovering a hairsbreadth from someone’s back and they wouldn’t have an inkling that he was there until he announced himself. Now he stood in front of the mirror and drew fingertip lines across his own face, dulling the shimmer of his skin to matte cream, darkening his hair and sharpening the edges of his wolf teeth until they passed easily as fangs. When he’d completed his own Disguise he performed the same ritual on Robbe, who could have cried with the relief that flooded upon taking his guard down: Shielding, after a while, became overwhelming.

“Next time we come to the LP,” said Robbe as he scrutinized himself in the mirror, “you’re doing this to begin with.”

“To be fair,” said Jens, just before he snapped his fingers and their reflections vanished from the mercurial surface before them. “You didn’t give me a lot of warning.”

When they re-emerged into the club the lights had blackened even further and both the tempo and the volume of the music had increased; the crowd seemed denser than it had moments before, but Robbe deduced that this was probably because they no longer had the luxury of the Shield to afford them a suitable berth. It was strange to realize that they were drawing stares now; even Disguised as vampires, both Robbe and Jens were preternaturally lovely. Jens certainly wielded the power to diminish their appearances, but vanity was his fatal flaw, and he almost never did.

“Beauty isn’t that unusual in our world,” he defended himself, when Robbe laughed at him about it. “Why should I try to hide that? Angels aren’t the only pretty things that exist in the Afterlife.”

Apparently, Robbe thought absently now as they made a space for themselves at the bar, demons could be pretty, too.

He tried not to look around. Attracting extra attention was likely to prove catastrophic, especially if Jens was correct and the blood-eyed demon could still Sense their presence. But it turned out that Robbe didn’t need to worry about unintentionally inviting anyone’s lingering attention – at least not for the time being – because at the exact moment the bored pixie bartender handed Jens and Robbe their drinks, Exitium exploded like an atomic bomb into ruckus noise.

“Here we go,” said Jens, and in the excitement of his tone Robbe could find balance between his insistence that Lesser Purgatory was nothing to write home about and the streak of interest that had belted through his eyes as they’d been discussing it. Robbe’s eyes found the stage; it had been empty not half a second before, but directly in its center now stood a tall, straight-spined man dressed as though he was fully prepared to lead a runway show for nineties-era Versace. His posture was impeccable and his eyes were lined thickly with sharp silver and kohl and he was one of the most luridly fascinating things Robbe had ever seen.

“Is that – ”

“Milan,” said Jens, with some fondness. “He’s half-sylph, half-elf, and he’s the best thing that’s ever happened to Lower Purgatory.”

Onstage, the mesmerizing hybrid creature with the (extremely appropriate) name of an Italian city began to speak.

“I don’t think,” he said, in the tone of someone who fully understood that simply raising the volume of one’s voice was not the best way to command attention, “any of you filthy creatures are ready for this shit.”

And as the responding clamor of the crowd shrieked to a sudden crescendo, Robbe looked sideways at Jens and started to grin.

“It’s been a long time,” said Milan, smirking, clearly enjoying the collective enthrallment of the entire population of Exitium, “a very long time, I think. Since we’ve had Furies participating in Fight Night. But, theydies and gentlethem, hags and trolls, demons and dare I presume angels – ”

Robbe froze but Jens grinned; hissed sideways,

“He has no clue, he’s just being dramatic.”

“ – it’s been an even longer time since any of our lovely serpent-haired sisters have thrown their names into the pool.”

From the way the crowd rocked and screamed in response to his words Robbe understood that this was a gigantic occasion; again he looked to Jens for explanation but his Elder was already utilizing his telepathy to explain.

Gorgon fights are vicious. No one here can die, obviously, but they’re the most brutal of all creatures to participate in Fight Night. Furies are nearly as bad, that’s why it’s so crazy in here tonight, everyone wants a piece of the carnage.

Even you. Robbe was enjoying how much Jens was enjoying himself.

Even me. You picked a good night to force my hand.

Robbe smiled.

So what happens to the losers, then? Since they can’t die?

Jens licked at the new sharpness of his wolf teeth, twisted his mouth before he replied.

“They tap out,” he said out loud. “They get hurt badly, and they go somewhere to lick their wounds until they get a chance for redemption at next Fight Night. And the winner…the winner gets clout.”

Robbe searched his Elder’s face, thinking absently that the status of a Fight Night victory in the LP must equate to something like respect or fear or reverence, but then he stopped thinking at all because everything around them suddenly depleted into quiet and stillness and dark, the entire arena thrumming with ravenous anticipation. It felt like standing at the edge of a sheer cliff with toes pressed over the side and nothing to prevent the fall and Robbe was afire for it. He had no idea what was going to happen but he had never been more ready for anything in his entire existence.

He waited.

And then, when the hush was beginning to become maddeningly loud in the way that only unmitigated silence can manage, from the back corner of the stage where a curtained side entrance separated the patrons from the staff-only area of the club, there arose a steady, insidious hiss.

“Eurydice,” sang Milan, “please step into the light.”

And from out of the darkness emerged something darker.

“She’s perfect,” whispered Noor, and Senne and Sander grinned at each other.

Eurydice wasn’t what either one of them would have described as perfect – demons didn’t really believe in the word, used it as a taunt or derogatory term against the Son of God – but she was certainly commanding. One of the tallest Gorgons, her skin was a shade of mottled yellow-green akin to a fresh bruise, a direct clash with the garish coral pink of her pit vipers, and when she curled her upper lip in acknowledgement of the crowd jagged grey teeth showed. For a lesser Gorgon, she was positively terrifying.

“She could win this tournament,” said Senne casually, “if Medusa doesn’t show.”

“No way Raksha would let her fight,” said Noor, dismissing him. “She likes to keep her toys in pristine condition, and Medusa’s not exactly a looker to begin with.”

“Maybe Raksha has a newfound battle-scar kink,” said Sander. He was already nearly finished with his second drink; his close encounter with the unidentified angel had shaken him, and he didn’t know what to do to still his head but to slow his thought process with alcohol. It never worked as well as it had in his human body – demonic systems were designed to flush toxins much more effectively – but it was always enough to blunt the edges.

“I’d kill to see Medusa and Eurydice,” said Britt. “She’s the only lesser Gorgon that would stand a chance against any of the holy trinity. She doesn’t give a fuck.”

“She beat Stheno once,” said Senne, “ages ago. I was there, it was a madhouse. She lost a snake, but Stheno lost two, and the way she was screaming afterward…the stuff of nightmares.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” said Sander, his gaze tracking the kaleidoscopic gloom on the other half of the stage. “Nemesis is no pushover.”

And as though he had spoken her into existence she came forth.

Where Eurydice was furious color, constant movement and sound, Nemesis contradicted her in darkness and calm and silence. Wraithlike she strode slow and resolute across the stage, icicle eyes pinned fearless to Eurydice’s countenance, stating intent with every second she did not look away. Sander appreciated her attitude; if he’d have been placing bets that night he’d have staked on her with confidence. Eurydice liked to put on a show but Nemesis was unassuming in her presentation and somehow that felt more to him like victory. He’d never seen her fight, but he’d heard tales of her ruthlessness, and he was ready to witness it for himself.

Milan between them looked fully undaunted.

“My darling, my dear,” he said, casual like he was announcing the contestants of a beauty pageant and not addressing a deity and a Gorgon, “need I remind you of the rules?”

When Nemesis spoke it was like thunder cracking in the clouds. Her eyes never drifted from Eurydice’s face.

“I don’t forget.”

Eurydice jeered; her snakes were going mad for bloodlust.

“Nor I.”

“Excellent,” said Milan, and for the first time all night wicked interest sparked in his wide cunning eyes. “Then I’ll make myself scarce and let you two have at it.”

In a blink he had vanished; Sander spotted him instantly when he reappeared in the rafters above their heads, a smudge of yellow, overseeing restlessly from afar. Full-blooded sylphs commanded powerful magic of their own, but Milan’s mother had been a sea-elf, and with all that combined force channeling through him he was one of the most formidable beings in the LP; Sander could Sense him coming from miles away. Though Milan was not malicious by nature, he was known for ruining those who crossed him; there was a reason he had been appointed as head referee of Fight Night. If things got out of hand, he could regain control of the situation with one snap of his fingers, no droplet of sweat forming on his brow, he might have been a High Deity for the negligible effort he put forth to execute staggering feats of sorcery.

There was a beat in which Eurydice and Nemesis sized each other up; Nemesis might not have had snakes for hair but she did have literal talons and she unsheathed them now, flexing her fingers to shake them out. The pit vipers haloing Eurydice’s head reared cautiously, stretching to full length, glorious in their lethality, and when the first one struck it all became a muddle of vivid color and glinting steel. In immediate, urgent response, the crowd howled with cruel delight; Fight Night elicited the worst from Morals and Immorals both, and the presence of pitiless Gorgons in the melee only served to exacerbate their savagery.

From such a secluded corner it was impossible to see what was going on and without a thought for decorum Sander rose, placed one foot atop the table, hauled himself up so he could separate the whirling dervish of catastrophic movement. Ordinarily Senne would have chided him for standing on furniture – he could be gallingly lawful for a high-tier demon – but he was as absorbed in the battle as the rest of them and either didn’t notice or didn’t give a shit. Through the spotlit air onstage dark green liquid spurted and the crowd gave a surging howl of glee; Nemesis had drawn first blood.

Sander pushed up the sleeves of his jacket, denim dyed dark as the liner smudged around his eyes, gaze roaming unconsciously around the opposite side of the arena. He was looking, he knew, for the golden haze, but to his mild annoyance it was nowhere to be seen. He was wondering abstractedly if the angels had taken their leave from Exitium when the path of his gaze collided with a russet-haired being leaning up against the bar, and Sander forgot to think about anything else at all.

The being – who by all accounts could have passed for an exceptionally flawless member of the human species – was wearing a simple red crewneck and jeans, fringe tumbling sideways into his gigantic eyes as he observed the onstage kerfuffle, hypnotized. Corpse-pale skin and the fangs that spiked under his top lip suggested that he was a vampire, but Sander was excellent at guessing classifications, and that didn’t feel right at all. He was lithe and small and imperious, every bit of him exuding confidence as he sipped from the chalice in his hand, and never before in his existence had Sander been witness to such a striking creature as this. Reflexively he raised an arm to card his fingers back through his hair and as he did the boy’s intense gaze shifted away from the melee straight into Sander’s eyes.

Above them, unseen, unnoticed by everything else in the room, the sky shook itself out. In Sander’s ears a sudden drone whined and his stomach gave a lurching skydive swoop and for half a moment he mislaid the breath that he sometimes could not believe he still had. Again that heightened awareness slashed through him; again, the hair on the back of his neck stood up. The boy’s eyes were the strangest shade of gold, gold, gold, and there was something about him – something that Sander wanted to name but could not. He couldn’t tell if he was Sensing or reacting to the clear heat that kindled between them but he felt like he’d gone up in flames.

Unflinchingly the boy stared, face inscrutable and stone-frozen and brazen, as unafraid as Nemesis regarding Eurydice. His absolute lack of intimidation was not something Sander was accustomed to – as a human, he’d been revered for his beauty; as a mid-tier demon, let alone one who bled constantly from both eyes, his status commanded a great deal of automatic respect. In severe contrast to that fawning, fear-tinged admiration, however, this boy was observing him in the unaffected manner that one might use to watch a train pass by.

The unfamiliar feeling of being rendered ordinary by the nature of someone’s attention riled something long dormant in Sander’s chest. He could not equate the mildness in the boy’s eyes with the length of his gaze or the voltage that screamed hot through Sander’s skin; something was taking place here, but he didn’t have an inkling as to what it was. Onstage black and green blood was spraying with abandon now, both Eurydice and Nemesis roaring with vexed effort, but the combat felt planets away and all of Sander’s concentration was fixed upon bridging the space between himself and this unidentified splendid ethereal creature and proving that there was not a commonplace thing about him.

The boy was the first to cut eye contact, his attention snagged by the being beside him, a statuesque individual of equally astonishing beauty with skin only slightly less pale than his companion’s. Such a milky color looked strange against the sable of his hair and though he, too, showed fangs when he smiled, the errant, persistant thought that neither member of this enigmatic pair were vampires strayed again through Sander’s mind. He forced his focus back to the scuffle onstage; Nemesis had managed to behead one of Eurydice’s pit vipers and it looked as though his initial instinct to crown her as victor had been right.

Senne grabbed Sander’s ankle; apparently he had noticed his Fledgling’s relocation to the tabletop after all. He shouted over the din:

“How’s the view up there?”

Sander grinned down at him.

“Top-notch. Join me?”

And to Sander’s astonishment, Senne did, skipping lithely from the booth to stand beside him, moon-eyed and chill. He’d gone through three goblets of blood that night and this combined with the alcohol had made him loose at the limbs, undone the quick tension that lurked permanently just between his brows. Sander was positively delighted.

“You fucking rulebreaker.”

“This? You should have seen me in my Fledgling days,” said Senne, and when he beamed Sander saw where his teeth had stained cerise with ram-blood. He roped an arm around Sander’s shoulders, knocked the side of his head gently against Sander’s own, and the warmth that flooded the younger demon’s chest was sudden and strong: this was his most cherished being in all the infinite universes. No one had cared for him like Senne since his mother had died, and the knowledge that he was valued again, that someone worried about him, had changed him entirely.

“Yeah? You’d stand on all the tables then, eh?”

“Something like that,” said Senne, chuckling, and Sander was just about to entreat him to elaborate when ahead of them a rough, incensed shriek sliced the air. Nemesis had gone for the jugular again, and Eurydice had just narrowly escaped losing two of her snakes in one fight. The evasive maneuver she’d had to pull to save her viper had forced her off balance and Nemesis used the advantage to slam her to the ground, throw a leg on each side of her waist, pin both of the Eurydice’s hands down with her knees as she crooked an elbow over the thrashing Gorgon’s throat. It was a clever, cunning move: in positioning herself just so, Nemesis had ensured that Eurydice’s snakes couldn’t strike where they needed to.

Eurydice screamed again, blind with rage; she hadn’t lost an opening round of Fight Night in her existence, and the crowd could taste her fury. The talons on Nemesis’s free hand were curling and uncurling and her eyes were locked to the viper coiled dead center of Eurydice’s forehead and it was unmistakable what she was insinuating. Forfeit, or you lose another.

“Here we fucking go,” whispered Sander, and all of him was back in this, entranced, the not-vampire duo momentarily forgotten. Senne’s fingers tightened at the scruff of his neck; the sound of the crowd had reduced to a hornet hum, bated. So quiet was the club that Nemesis’s voice when she spoke sounded loud as a trumpet.

“Say it.”

Eurydice was vibrating with anger; chest heaving, she struggled, but Nemesis was larger and stronger than her in every sense and without the range of her pit vipers Eurydice’s force was heavily diminished.

“Or what.”

“Or I’ll cut them from your head one by one until there’s nothing left on your scalp but bloody stumps,” said Nemesis calmly, and her talons flashed.

Sander and Senne looked at each other, wide-eyed, brows elevated. Below them Britt and Noor had both risen to their feet and were standing with their hands over their mouths, not blinking, barely breathing, snake-charmed. In the rafters the canary blur that was Milan had increased its tempo of pacing and closure felt imminent. Sander said,

“Fuck,”

And his eyes automatically skipped over to search for that faultless enigma of a boy. Both he and his friend were watching the events upon the stage with centered intent, but the second Sander’s gaze came to rest upon his face, the boy glanced back at him as though Sander had shouted a name he didn’t know.

Yet.

“She didn’t come to play,” said Senne seriously, and Sander laughed; when his Elder spoke in modern-isms it never felt natural, but he appreciated Senne’s ability to adapt nonetheless.

Onstage, Eurydice hissed; there were a thousand insults in her eyes but she was nothing if not calculated and Nemesis had proved herself to be ruthless enough and she could not afford to lose another viper. She rolled her thin grey lips together, released a longsuffering sigh, set her teeth.

“Forfeit.”

The noise in the club absolutely detonated; on the opposite side of the stage, Robbe and Jens were howling, grabbing at each other’s hands wrists shoulders, caught up. Robbe’s face was flush with alcohol and Jens was more animated than Robbe had ever seen him and he couldn’t believe that this was the first time his Elder had ever permitted him to come to Lesser Purgatory.

“You asshole,” he yelled, “you’ve been keeping me from this!”

Jens grinned, guilty, letting his thin delicate-boned shoulders rise and fall. “It’s an occasion, Robbe. The LP isn’t like this every day. You have to pick the best times to come, and know when to avoid it at all costs.”

“So the first time you take me here, we not only see a Deity take out a Gorgon in ten minutes flat, but a demon almost discovers us and we have to use Shield Enforcement to hide from it,” said Robbe. He was still beaming and he felt the joy all the way in his fingertips. “You realize you’re creating a monster.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Jens, and he slammed back his drink, amused. “I created you once, I can remake you whenever I please. We have time between the next round, you want another?”

“Jens Stoffels,” said Robbe, dramatic, mock-shocked. “Are you, my unbearably strict Elder, suggesting that I, your reckless Fledgling, participate in a third round of drinks with you tonight?”

(The first time they’d drank together, Robbe had expected to be affected by the alcohol in ways that he had been as a human – lowered inhibition, blurry edges, unsteady feet, word vomit, actual vomit, sudden crushing sadness, lust with a capital L – but instead he’d been filled with an indescribable lightness, a warmth in the hollow of his stomach, closer to what he’d describe as high than drunk. Jens had stopped him after one drink, insisted that he needed to get used to the way alcohol affected the angel infrastructure before he went any further, and Robbe had rolled his eyes at him.

“I know you’re my Elder,” he’d said, “but that doesn’t make you my mother.”

Jens had grinned at him, flicked his nose.

“Nah. But it does make me your wise, all-knowing superior, whose advice you should heed at all times because you are a baby angel and therefore still learning. Come on, little one, let’s go.”

Since then he hadn’t been much more relaxed; Robbe had incalculable amounts to learn about the ways of being an angel, and Drinking Night was never something on which they wasted much time. Jens taught him how to decompress in other ways, like swoop-diving through silk-soft clouds at daybreak, chasing an infinite horizon over seas of the most impossible blue color at sunset. There wasn’t much to decompress about, really; angels didn’t experience anxiety like humans did, because everything adapted a different meaning in the Afterlife. When overarching stressors like money and bills and health and mortality were removed from the larger picture, it was incredible how limitless one could feel.)

Jens huffed, rolled his eyes. “I was going to relax eventually, you know. Besides, you really proved yourself with that nuclear catastrophe, especially if Raphael is going easy on you. My little Fledgling is growing up.”

Robbe smacked him. “You’re insufferable.”

“You wouldn’t have me any other way,” said Jens, and he cupped Robbe’s chin in one soft long-fingered hand.

In the center of the arena, Milan had already cleared the blood from the floor with one lofty flick of his hand; Eurydice had vanished, limping away in wounded fury, her dead snake clutched in one shaking palm. Nemesis was slightly breathless but her face was saturated with a forbidding sort of satisfaction, teeth bared as she lifted her chin to stare around at the pulsating crowd, shine in her eyes as she listened to them chanting her name. She was the Goddess of Retribution, the personification of vengeance, and by her very nature she was not used to being adored.

Fortunately for her, on Fight Night, any creature that could best a Gorgon was not adored. They were idolized.

Milan held up her clammy hand, arched a perfectly sharp eyebrow, didn’t speak; he knew exactly how to work the crowd, had learned to play them like a dedicated violinist learns to make their instrument sing. Nemesis stood with her chest heaving and her eyes rifling the darkness and then, all of a sudden, she smiled.

As Milan conducted a brief, spirited interview Robbe let Jens lead him by the wrist to the bar, all the while keeping one eye open for the demon who sought him so relentlessly with that glowering red stare. Robbe didn’t think the demon knew what he was, that he was an angel, but his (Robbe refused to refer to him like Jens had, as an it) interest was brash and unmistakable, and it staggered Robbe to understand that he could not detect the nature of said interest. I won’t get close, he’d said to Jens, but he could not fully lie to himself and say that he wasn’t interested, too. When their eyes had clashed across the room Robbe had never felt anything like the ensuing impact; it was disruptive, shattering, a fault line fissure.

His stomach was still hot from it.

At any rate his vigilance was for nothing. The demon was nowhere within his line of sight; the dark man who had been standing beside him on the tabletop had vanished, too, and the crowd packing Exitium to its core was by now so thick that Robbe could not envision chancing upon either of them again. By the time he and Jens were pressed belly-first into the bar, laughing giddily as they called for their drinks, the entire encounter seemed far enough away that it might have been a reverie. He and Jens got pulled helplessly into a fevered First Blood discussion with a group of phantoms; two were in full support of Nemesis’s victory while the third was bemoaning the loss of Eurydice, whose viciousness had heretofore been unparalleled within the lower hierarchies of the draw. Jens was disputing hotly with the third phantom about whether or not Nemesis had violated a crucial rule by pulling at Eurydice’s hair (“that’s bullshit, isn’t it, because it’s not fucking hair for hell’s sake, it’s a snake”) and Robbe was standing back amused, sipping his fresh drink, when to his immediate left he felt movement. The vila standing next to him at the bar had vacated her space and it had instantly been filled by someone new.

A wrench in the air pressure; a coppery smell, it was almost as though Robbe had Warped, but his feet were solid on the ground beneath him and besides this feeling was all too familiar. He thought about what Jens had said, if you get too close, it will know, but there was nothing he could do about that now, was there.

He turned his head and there beside him, draped against the bar at an indolent cocksure angle, silver head tilted as he scrutinized Robbe with loud, loud, loud, interest, stood the red-eyed demon. He was still crying blood and he was still shockingly beautiful and the air in the club was, suddenly, not enough by half.

The demon smiled, an unhurried, wicked thing, and reached over to press his fingerprint onto the rim of Robbe’s glass. Up close he was dark, delicate, all black nails and smudgy eyeliner, thin ring of silver looped through his lower lip. His fingers were adorned heavily with metal and he exuded assurance and he felt like nothing but impossibility.

“Shouldn’t you be drinking blood?”

Then I won’t get too close.

Robbe swallowed.

“Shouldn’t you be bleeding it?”

Surprise flitted briefly across the demon’s chalk-white face; he chuckled and the sound was so low Robbe shouldn’t have heard it but he felt it like a scrape across his lower stomach. Around them the crowd roared in pleased low oblivion like within it nothing at all of interest was happening, like Robbe the Fledgling angel wasn’t talking back to a fucking demon.

“I do,” the demon said, one dark eyebrow bridging. The contrast to his platinum head was stark. “It just doesn’t look like this.”

He gestured to his face, to the evenly painted lines of red that poured steadily from his eyes, and smirked as he pressed in closer. Robbe’s blood was singing but he couldn’t tell if it was meant to warn or lure.

“What color do you bleed, then,” he said, gritting his teeth to stop his voice shaking. “Black?”

“That’s an interesting question with an interesting answer,” said the demon, flighty. “I’ll make you a deal. I’ll tell you what color I bleed if you tell me what you really are, not-vampire creature.”

#wtfock #robbe ijzermans #sander driesen #sobbe #sobbe fanfiction #sobbe fanfic #wtfock fanfiction #wtfock fanfic #robbe x sander

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brooklynislandgirl · 4 years

Text

@whosxafraid

All Hands || -

who wakes up first in the morning

She’s a genius, sometimes. Preloads the coffee pot with fresh ground Kona beans and water, even sets the timer so that it brews just as he’s waking up at 0430. He supposes it’s a lifetime of being a dependant ~he doesn’t call her a brat to her face unless she’s being merciless in her teasing~ and being used to keeping odd hours. Still, it gives him time to get out of bed. Go for his PT run through Battery Park, before stopping for the paper and to bring home breakfast. He’s just finishing up in the shower when she starts to stir a few hours later.

“Mornin’, luv.” The way she smiles at him, her face still soft with sleep makes a man think better about getting dressed, and he envies the covers wrapped around her stretching limbs. “Mornin’.” It’s sin in a single word, he swears, the way she answers back.

Some days he wins the battle, sometimes he dives right back in, wrapping wet limbs around her for just a few more minutes.

who’s the first to fall asleep at night

The two times a year if she’s lucky that Luka gets to be home gets the bulk of her vacation days. Of course she’s worked at the hospital for years and they don’t have a nurse that works harder than she does, so maybe they indulge her seldom requests when she asks for it. But these two weeks at a time don’t change much of anything. When night is still newborn in it’s cradle, he heaves a yawn and drops his cheek on top of her head as he reads and she knits, leaned against him. The start of his day is typically the approaching end of hers, and their diurnal cycles are out of sync. Not that Beth sleeps very much. Still, she’s quiet though.

“Ready for bed?” she asks and they both know she’s being polite, but that if he says yes, she’ll go with him, even if it means hours of laying beside him, listening to him breath and staring up at the light patterns on the ceiling from her nightlight. “No yet,” he says. His arm around her tightens. She gets it. When you have such little time together, sleep seems like a waste. But it isn’t long before he starts nodding off.

“C’mon, sailor. Take me t’ bed,” she murmurs as she sets her granny-squares aside and slips into his lap.There’s a rumble in his throat that almost sounds like grumbling before an arm comes up under her knees, and the other one secures her to his chest. Socked feet on the floor, a slow and groggy trudge navigating living room and hallway before one shoulder shoves the door open just long enough for her to be carried inside. And while he’s careful to set her down, he practically flops down on the empty space across from her. Asleep almost before his face crashes onto the pillow. She smiles at this every time.

what they playfully tease each other over

“Target lock. Beginning approach.” She’s come back from the car where she’s spent the last twenty minutes filling up water balloons from the melted ice in the cooler. She was supposed to be reapplying sunscreen which she did, though she doesn’t need to. Beth doesn’t burn under the sun’s kiss but only gets darker, closer to the natural hue of her Kanak ancestors. “Releasing munitions.” Seconds later the stressed balloons splatter against Luka’s broad, bare back as he lies peacefully on his belly, arms folded under his head, dozing away in the warm heat. It’s pleasant and the sand beneath his towel radiates that perfect autumn afternoon up into his muscles. Or did, until he’s covered from neck to tailbone in biting ice cold water.

“Ye wee flute…be sk'eelin’ when oi’ catch ye!”

He heaves up and chases her, barrelling down like a semi versus a bunny rabbit, and it doesn’t take long before he’s got a hold of her around the middle with one arm. Hoists her up bodily no matter how much she squirms and shrieks between fits of laughter that pour over him like gold. He carries her to the water’s edge. Wades in hip deep, the cold of the sea nothing like what was splashed on him minutes ago. And down she goes, power slammed into the rushing waves that rise up and cushion the fall. She laughs harder even as she goes under. The only thing he’s done is return her to her element. This is where she belongs. And then she’s got her legs curling around his pulling him off balance.

what they do when the other’s having a bad day

When Luka has his bad days, he’s usually on his ship or out in the field. And they are relatively standard; equipment malfunctions, bad or wrong Intel, a scuffle with some shit bag from another unit or service. Higher-Ups on the food chain, because they say shit rolls down hill, things like that. All part and parcel of being in the Navy.The harder things for him to deal with come in waves, usually late at night when he’s alone. Whether it was the fears seeded into him a long time ago by Dani, or not exactly knowing what’s going with his relationship with Beth… it’s a bit of the same from different sides. Normally he’d take himself to the gym or weight room, work off that tension, or go stand under the sharp steady flow of a hot shower.

But when he’s ashore? That’s not really an option.Out of the blue, she drops her arms around him. Smothers most of the oxygen with her presence. She doesn’t ask any questions, leaves it up to him to decide if he wants to talk. Something he knows doesn’t happen with her unless she’s with him. He’s seen the texts from her father. He sees how her brother treats her day in and out and she only gets mad when it’s even suggested that she deserves better than that. So he becomes a rock that she can tie herself to, to guide her back from the rough waters in her head. He makes whatever concessions are needed, whether it’s pretending nothing is wrong and simply eating the ordered take-away, or running his fingers through her hair. She disappears for too long sometimes, but he’s patient and he waits.

They are a two man team, after all.

how they say ‘i’m sorry’ after arguments

She pours everything inside onto blank pages and bruise coloured ink. Words she can never quite get out in whole or in pieces. She tells him the reasons why she is to blame, and where those reasons come from. She apologises in a dozen different ways, and the worse she feels, the more she writes. It isn’t the same as a gesture, but to Beth it’s important to acknowledge where she’s gone wrong. To shoulder as much rational blame even if there’s nothing that really makes sense outside of the spaces in her head where she connects strange dots. She makes promises and he knows that she will go to any lengths to keep them once she’s given them. It’s very different from the way he does things. He will apologise simply. He will say that he is sorry and then follow it up with gestures that might be appreciated; soothing ruffled feathers with gentle touches. Replacing, if he can, whatever is broken or misplaced. Attempting to recreate the moment that was lost. Actions speak louder than words, he’s heard that all his life and he knows that no amount of words will ever survive contact with her ears and her psyche.

If anything, that’s one of the big issues between them, isn’t it? But he’s still grateful. She might slam a door. She might cry until she’s empty, but she’s never attacked his character as a human being, and she’s never thrown punches. Though he’s not sure that she’s got the strength to do any damage if she did. She’s a tiny thing, inexpert at fights like that, doesn’t have the heart for it. And she can’t possibly understand the thickness of his emotional scar-tissue. God willing, she never will.

which one’s more ticklish

Spartan. We thought you dead. Beth’s toes are an evil in this world. She reaches the leg she considers the good one out, glances at the inside of his knee. Feather soft, makes the muscles and tendons twitch. He lets it go with a glance away from the screen. He’s sure that the Master Chief can survive a fraction of his attention splintered away to the wee woman on the opposite end of the couch who just moments ago was reading The Frontier Nurse Practitioner: A Conceptual Model for Remote Rural Practice. Which he’ll ask her about when she’s not involve with it.

Bear your fangs, Spartan. Fight hard. But then she slinks down further on the couch and what she’s grazing isn’t his knee this time. And it looks like Master Chief is on his own in this one. And his mind goes momentarily dead air-white noise. Static and the sound of a breath, though he’s not sure if it’s his or hers. It sounds something like a half chuckled, “…’Eeey.” He doesn’t toss the controller onto the table but places it with slow deliberation onto the coffee table. Eyes intense. Never leaving her face. Watches her narrow her eyes and flick her tongue out over her lower lip, body tensing in anticipation.And he doesn’t disappoint, because he knows Elizabeth Riley’s weakness, and that she’s particularly ticklish along her inner thigh.

And die well.

their favourite rainy day activities

What begins as a sunny morning, cool and moist turns into a heavy, constant drizzle before noon. Plans made to visit the farmer’s market and maybe hike through Central Park literally wash through with the rain and its accompanying sounds of thunder. Instead of the great outdoors, they spend the day in. Music soft enough not to further drown out her ability to hear things ~but enough to temper how loud she says the rain is~ becomes curling up on the couch. Each of them taking turns reading a passage out of their joint book.

He makes them soup and grilled cheese for lunch. It’s her favourite, and maybe reminds him of when he was a kid, although he’s pretty sure the fridge back then wasn’t stocked with twenty dollar cheese, organic twelve grain seed and nut bread. In fact, the only thing really recognisable is the Kerrigold butter.

But the best part of an unexpected rainy day is pulling her down onto him. Her head resting on his chest, his arms wrapped around her, and a throw blanket keeping them warm and secure. They doze on and off together, watching the rain streak down the floor to ceiling windows and for just a little while Luka can forget about having to leave soon. To go back to combat zones and lonely hours and the very real possibility that this might just be the best moment he’ll ever have. And maybe he understands Boss a little better when he says that he’s thinking about retiring.

how they surprise each other

She sends him little things in care packages from home. Things that he doesn’t let the other guys see really; a freshly laundered towel spritzed with the essential oil blend she wears instead of perfume so that his pillow in his impossibly small bunk can smell a little like home. Toffee sweets from the particular shop in the City he likes so much. New books on his Audible account, little sim cards full of videos and pictures that he can slip into his phone. He’s pretty sure that dark purple almost black satin and lace nightie was an accident, and she tossed it into the wrong box. Just like he pretends that it was on purpose and she doesn’t want him to forget the feel of her skin or the warmth of her frame pressed into it at night. He sent that back the second he got to port, and it’s a good thing he’s a light sleeper and he never got caught with it; contraband can get you smoked. And mocked. And on your record against future promotion. He doesn’t want to be a Lieutenant forever. And in turn he wishes he could see her face when she opens the things he sends. Seashells from foreign beaches to carry whispers from both himself and the ocean in exotic tongues. An etching from a local shrine or graveyard to add to her collection. Photos of the local flora and fauna. Little worry dolls made by children in this village he can’t name, or sometimes a blouse or dress in a size that always gets him asked if it’s for his daughter. But the best surprises are when he gets to come home, even if it’s only for a few hours.

their most sickening shows of public affection

They call it dancing. It’s only a few layers of clothing away from grinding her into the club wall and he gets drunk on the look of ecstasy on her face as she loses herself in the heavy throbbing of the music, the heat of the crowd and the fire in their blood, the nearly seizure-inducing strobe of neon lights. He can all but smell the want coming off of her through her sweat, through the way she murmurs his name when she’s managed to climb her way up him, legs wrapped around his hips, his arms straining from holding her just there.

It’s almost the same way she jumps into his arms when he comes off the bus now, or the way she clings to him before he gets back on it. All that’s missing are the wracking sobs and having to pull her off him as reluctantly as he does. Or remembering they aren’t the only two people reuniting after a long tour. Ten months, fifteen days, nine hours, forty-two seconds, not that he’s ever counted. Beth is a slow death with her lips pressed against his jugular. And the killing blow is the cold shower that he knows he’s taking later, though he wonders what would happen if she walked in. Would she watch? Would she come in? It’s not something he really needs to think about, but sometimes, it’s also not anything he can help imagining. Especially when those sharp little teeth of hers threaten to break skin and she moans against his throat. Not enough whiskey to wash that away.

#whosxafraid #Wave over Wave|Seal Luka O'Rian #Sea over Bow|Luka and Beth #Letters from Home|Travelling Soldier AU #Brooklyn Stories|New York #{{reuploaded because tumblr's effing formatting issues}}

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flawlesspeasant · 5 years

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Literally any jolex fics at this point I really don’t care. Thank you SOOOO MUCH!!I LOVE YOU!!!!

Okay, so here’s one in which Alex and Jo are broken up, but Jo is hurt during the millionth disaster at Grey-Sloan Memorial, and Alex waits in the waiting room while she is being worked on.

————————

The long red hand on the analog clock, the one that measured the seconds as they passed, circled around the circumference and passed the large black "12" at the top, signaling that yet another minute had passed. Routinely, like they had been doing for the last forty-five minutes, his eyes traced the longer black hand and watched with burdening anticipation as it moved a mere centimeter to the right.

Listening to the consistent "tick-tock" sound was driving him mad. Insanity was finding its way to him. It was knocking at the door with a suitcase full of belongings, ready to fashion a cozy and permanent home deep inside his mind. It was knocking, previously had been ringing the doorbell. It was impatient now, demanding a residence...and if he didn't stop it within the next fifteen minutes, he was relatively certain that it would end up beating the door down.

His brain flooded with all the thoughts; the tips and advice that he was so properly trained to give when he was on the other side. He remembered them as if they were second nature.

Go out, maintain a straight face. Suggest that they take a walk, maybe go visit the cafeteria. Take a drink of water, stretch their legs. Get out of the chair. Don't sit down for so long. It was going to be a while, might want to get comfortable.

They were burned into the back of his mind by now, and when he came out from an operating room to do a family update, it was almost reflexive. Like a seal at Sea World trained to do all the tricks, it was fluid and slid out of his mouth like saliva during a restful slumber. From day one, when he first set foot into the hospital as an intern, he was trained to do it.

Somehow though, it was so much different now that the tables were turned and the roles were reversed. He realized now that it was easy to be the one in the gown coming out to give the waiting and worried loved ones the news, easier than it was being the waiting and worried loved one. Much easier being the hopeful as opposed to the hopeless. It wasn't in his hands this time and he felt merciless.

Insanity was much closer now, he felt it. He heard it, even. It was standing on the porch, trying to pick the lock. It was almost successful. His leg began to tremble. He was silent, but his thoughts were loud. If it takes longer than an hour… He shook his head to physically clear his thoughts. He couldn't afford to think like that. Logically, from a doctor's perspective, he knew what it meant if it took longer than an hour. But he had to have some kind of hope to hold onto. It was the only thing that would keep him from letting insanity in. If he just looked at the clock… No. He couldn't.

Don't do it, he told himself.

He rubbed his palm across the knee of his papery, navy blue scrub pants to wipe it free of the nervous sweat that accumulated on it.

Don't do it.

He brought his hand up and combed his fingers through his unruly brown hair.

Don't do it.

His eyes wandered and eventually found their way to the bottom rim of his scrub top, which was a little darker than the fabric surrounding it.

Don't do it.

The rest of his scrub top was navy blue, but the bottom rim and a few surrounding areas were black, as if water had seeped through and caused it to change. With his one, single index finger, he scraped it across the darkened fabric and held it up in his field of vision.

Don't do it.

A wave of nausea washed over his body as he eyed the brilliant red streak that was now staining his finger. It crept up in his throat and clawed its way to his mouth, begging to be let out. Instead, he swallowed it and knocked it back down to the pit of his stomach. And though he knew it wasn't a decent idea, he gave in to all his temptations and looked up at the clock anyway.

And immediately, he wished he hadn't. It was five minutes to 5:36. Five minutes. In five minutes, it would be exactly one hour. One hour since it happened, one hour since he got the call, one hour since his life changed forever. One hour.

He exhaled and his shoulders slouched. He could smell it… He could still smell it. Funny that way, how a person could remember smells. He understood how you could remember songs after hearing them, sights after seeing them, tastes after tasting them and sensations after feeling them. But the most baffling thing ever to him had always been how humans could remember smells after only smelling them maybe once. The smell was still there, though. It was clear as day, loud in his nostrils and nestled in his brain. It was a smell he wouldn't soon forget.

It smelled like rust, metal, hot water and salt. Rust, metal, hot water and salt. Those four things, combined together. That was the scent of blood. Though he'd been around enough blood for an entire lifetime, it still amazed him that he could smell it floating so boldly in the air when he entered the room. She was long gone by now, but the smell still lingered, probably because the pool still lingered.

He stood in the doorway and looked on, completely unable to move. His knees were locked so his legs were out of commission, his arms didn't feel like they were attached at the hinges and his entire body felt numb. Like the static that danced across a television screen when you've selected an invalid commercial. It was the sensation he felt across the board.

On the usually white tiled floor in front of him, a deep, Crimson red pool, about two feet in diameter, laid out. He thought that maybe if he squinted…he could get it to look like a rug. It was large and it was all unicolored, but most shocking of all, it was all evenly dispersed. It was as if someone had taken a paint brush and smoothed the edges. It was perfectly round. And it smelled horrid.

He picked up one of his feet and looked underneath it, feeling utterly sick at the sight of a bloody footprint. He didn't have to study it for long to know that all the things he was so desperately hoping to be false, were in fact true. The sole of the footprint was small and had a Nike logo in the middle. It was about a size seven and a half.

He closed his eyes and tried to take a deep breath, but he snapped them open quicker than he had closed them. He couldn't close them. When he closed them, he envisioned it. He envisioned her. Crumbling to the floor as it spilled out. Stumbling to the door, a fact he knew was true from the footprint and a bloody handprint on the glass of the trauma room door.

He wettened his lips by licking them and somehow found enough strength to turn around. He needed to get out of the room. He needed to go back to the waiting room. He wasn't even supposed to be in there. The fluorescent yellow "CAUTION" tape lining the perimeter of the room said so. But still… He just needed to have a look.

Trying to make his way out of the room, he found his vision heavily blurred with tears. He stumbled a bit, bumped into the door and finally allowed himself to kneel. He was holding it together, he was…but seeing it was all too much. He knelt down on the floor and covered his face with the collar of his shirt, but didn't allow himself to formally cry.

For the last ten minutes, he'd been replaying the scene over and over in his head. Callie rushing over to him as he stood at the nurses' station, a thick white bandage wrapped around her forearm. The look of absolute horror on her face, one he had only seen once before - when she was fighting for her life being wheeled in on a gurney...

"Karev," her voice came out in a frantic, panicky tone. From the corner of his eye, Alex watched her throat bob as she swallowed. "Karev, are you busy?"

"Do I look busy?" he quipped.

"O-okay," Callie stuttered. "I'll wait."

"What do you want, Torres?" he put his electronic chart down on the counter and looked up at her, his scowl quickly changing once he saw the abnormally worried look on her face. "...What do you want, Torres?"

"It's um…" Callie swallowed again, clearly stalling. She placed her free hand over the bandage on her arm that was soaking through with blood and shied away from him. Alex thought she looked confused...traumatized, even. "Wilson," she whispered.

As soon as he heard that name leave her lips, he was instantly annoyed. Suddenly, he wasn't much interested in anything Callie had to say anymore. What did he care about Wilson?! She wasn't his responsibility anymore! She stopped being his responsibility when she rejected his proposal last month. Why was it that everyone felt the need to report back to him what Wilson was and wasn't doing? Why was it that everyone thought he was this big, fragile mess that would be sent into a frenzy every time she was mentioned? He didn't give a damn about Jo anymore and he didn't give a damn about their relationship and clearly, she didn't either. If she gave a damn about making them work, she wouldn't have chose to break up. She made the decision to say no, not him. Screw her.

"Not my problem," he mumbled, picking up his chart again and preparing to leave. "You should get that looked at." He motioned towards the bandage on her arm and pivoted around to leave.

"Karev!"

"Not my problem anymore," he muttered under his breath, so low that only he could hear it and kept trekking down the hallway.

"Alex, she's hurt!"

With that, he stopped dead in his tracks.

Again, Alex wiped the palms of his hands across his scrub pants and let his legs tremble as much as they needed to. He inhaled deeply and glanced up at the clock without hesitation this time. She was going to be okay. He felt it. It was a feeling he got whenever he was operating himself. Sometimes, he just knew when certain patients were going to be okay. It was just a feeling he got and he had the same feeling now. She was going to be alright, but now… He just wanted to see her. He was anxious to see her. Anxious to kiss her pale pink, soft lips. Anxious to run his fingers through her silky brunette hair and most of all, anxious to tell her that he was sorry for everything and that he loved her. He thought she should know that.

Just then, the boisterous sound of double doors being opened summoned his attention and his head instantaneously jerked to the side and his legs stopped shaking in preparation to get up, receive the okay and go rushing back to the recovery room they stuck her in. He stood up, ready to greet Owen, April and Meredith, the three that were working on her the entire time.

"There was a little more bleeding than we expected, and…"

A blonde haired man with glasses, still dressed in a perfectly clean blue surgical gown approached the family sitting two couches down from where he was sitting, and with that, Alex sat back down and sighed. False alarm. He fingered the buttons on his pager and tried to tune out the gleeful celebration going on behind him, the celebration of a family that still had a loved one. He knew that his turn was coming, but he was impatient.

He gazed blankly down at his pager and found himself lost in his thoughts again.

"What?! What the hell happened?!" he demanded, pacing back and forth with harsh, heavy footsteps. Callie trembled as she stood in front of him, completely silent. "TORRES! WHAT. THE HELL. HAPPENED?!"

"I-I don't-I don't know!" Callie admitted, clearly shaken up. "I told Cross to get a psych consult because the patient clearly seemed disturbed and I just wanted to make sure and she was setting his arm and it was just a little break so she could do it and next thing I know-"

"SPIT IT OUT!"

"I don't even know how he got ahold of the scalpel! It was locked up and we weren't using it, but-"

"Where at?"

"T-trauma room thr-"

"WHERE DID HE GET HER AT?!"

"The abdomen?!"

He bawled his hands up into fists and continued pacing around the hallway, shaking uncontrollably. He felt the anger pulsing through his body, making its way until it filled him in place of blood. He had to find the guy. There was no way he was going to let him live. How could he? He couldn't just let him walk out of the hospital unscathed, psych patient or not. There was no way he was walking out of the hospital alive.

He swallowed hard, seemingly brushing all his anger away and straightened himself up. He cleared his throat and threw his shoulders back, standing upright. He turned away from Callie and faced Dr. Webber, who was standing with his arms folded across his chest, blocking the entrance to the operating room.

"I gotta get in there," he mumbled, seriousness laced in his tone.

"Karev, you know I can't let you do that," Richard contested.

"Just move away from the door, I gotta get in there!"

"Karev!"

"GET AWAY FROM THE DOOR!"

"You know I can't let you into that room! When surgeons get nervous, that's when they make mistakes! Now imagine how nervous they'd be if they had to work with the worried ex-boyfriend breathing down their damn necks! There's nothing you can do in there except get in the way. Now get away from the door. I told Grey to update us when she has some news. All we can do now is wait."

He threw his head back and took a series of deep breaths. He just wanted to go in and see Jo. That's all he wanted to do. He wanted to know her condition. He wanted to know what they were doing to save her, he wanted to know if she was going to be alright. He wanted to know the extent of her injuries, he wanted to know if she was going to come out of surgery. He just wanted to know how she was doing. Why wouldn't anyone let him in the room? Still shaking, he returned his head back to average level and glared at Webber.

"GODDAMN! SON OF A BITCH!" he barreled towards the door that Richard was standing in front of, fully intending to bust it down and take him down in the process of doing so. "MOVE AWAY FROM THE-"

"Alex!" Arizona stepped between the two of them, and with help from Callie, she pushed Alex back and away from Richard. "Take a walk! Alex, take a walk! Now!"

He glared at Webber, then at Callie and Arizona. He was going to pay everyone back, he swore to it. Everyone standing in the hallway had it coming. Webber for denying him access to the room, Arizona for stopping him from grinding Webber's head into the pavement and Callie for not getting the psych consult earlier. She's Jo's mentor. How could she let this happen to her?

But mostly, he was going to punish himself…. How could he not have been there?

He ran his fingers through his hair once again and tilted his head back to the ceiling. Deep down, he knew that Jo was going to be okay. Still, he couldn't fathom the thought of her not. If she wasn't okay, he'd never forgive himself. He should've been there for her. He should've been there to stop that punk before he decided to take a scalpel to her. He should've been there… But above all, he didn't want their last conversation to be their last. They hadn't spoken in a month, since she rejected his proposal and the last thing he recalled saying to her was "Have a nice life without me." He didn't mean that. That couldn't be the last thing she heard him say. It just couldn't.

Again, the set of double doors opened. This time, Alex didn't bother standing up. He wasn't prepared for another false alarm and he knew that if he stood up when it really wasn't his turn to hear the news, he wouldn't be able to sit back down. He was antsy with anticipation and anxiety. He just wanted to wait. A small piece of him knew it wasn't his turn to hear the news anyway. He didn't even have to look at the double doors to know it wasn't for him.

"Karev…"

In a state of shock and surprise, he turned his head and faced the rough, gravelly voice that was calling him anyway. Wow, he had been wrong. It was his turn. He wasn't usually wrong about things like that. When his gut had a feeling, it was usually right.

With deep red blood splattered all over his light blue surgical gown and on his otherwise tidy shoes, Owen stood with his hands on his hips. Alex studied his expression. He had been on the other side of this too many times and he knew the giveaways all too well. Surgeons were supposed to have brilliant poker faces when it came to giving news but Alex knew the giveaways. Owen's eyes were low and sympathetic. No, he was wrong. He craned his neck and looked at April.

April's head was geared towards the ground and she wasn't making a sound. She too had blood dispersed all over her person. She was wrong too. Meredith… Mere wouldn't lie. She would tell the truth. His eyes flashed to her next.

Meredith stood firm, worry lines streaked all across her face. Her eyes were wet and glossy, her mouth was turned down into a grimace and if he looked closely enough, he could see her jaw trembling. Her gown was bloody too. She opened her mouth, only to be eclipsed by a trembling jaw. She closed her mouth again and began to shake her head but stopped herself.

"...We did… Everything….we…could…," she spoke, tears streaming down her cheeks.

"Nah," Alex shook his head and cracked a smile. "Come on guys, stop…stop. She's fine."

He put his hands on his hips and continued to grin. Surely they were joking. It was all some cruel, sick joke. Jo was going to exit those double doors next. She'd have a bandage on her abdomen and strict instructions not to do any heavy lifting for a while but she was fine. She was going to run into his arms and laugh at how scared she made him. She was alright.

"Karev, the...blade. It pierced her celiac...we tried to control the bleeding, but her aorta… Because the celiac leads to the um… The aorta and…" Owen tried. "She coded and we were unable-"

Alex shook his head and turned away, continuing to shake it. He took a few steps towards the exit before turning back around and looking at the three people. The three that were responsible for turning his life upside down. The three that had unknowingly changed his life for the worse. Really? Was this happening for real? He thought… But he thought… He thought all the crappy things were done. When he met Jo, he thought all the crappy things were behind him. She was his future and with her, it was bright. All the crappy things were done. When he met her, his life was different. Was this really happening?

No, it couldn't be happening. It couldn't. He loved her. Jo...she was his heart. She was his everything. That was his world. His heart was beating outside his body when he looked at her. There's no way she was gone. They were joking. This was all some cruel, sick, disgusting joke. They were just trying to get a rise out of him. In fact, Jo was probably in on it. She probably convinced them to lie to him because she wanted him to be scared of losing her. Well, it worked. She could stop now. She could wake him up from this nightmare.

"Alex…," Meredith whispered his name and took a step towards him.

He shook his head at her some more and in an instant, he found his hands wrapped around the rim of a garbage can. He tossed it across the room, amidst horrified waiters and took a few jabs at the wall. It wasn't long before two fist-sized holes were in the wall just below a picture frame and his knuckles were wet and dripping with his own blood. Again, Meredith tried to put her hand on his shoulder but he shrugged her off.

"Get off me, Mer!" he yelled. "Get off! It's… YOUR FAULT! SHE DIDN'T LIKE THE WAY I CONSTANTLY… I WAS THERE FOR YOU! WHEN I SHOULD'VE BEEN THERE FOR HER! DON'T TOUCH ME!" He grabbed the fabric of his pants and squeezed. "SHE TRIED TO TELL ME WHAT A BITCH YOU ARE AND I DIDN'T LISTEN!"

"Alex, I know…" Instead of touching his shoulder, Meredith wrapped her arms around his waist to calm him down. She knew that when Alex got this way, that was what he needed. "I know…"

"GET OFF ME!"

"I know," she whispered, rubbing his back. "I know."

Alex stumbled backwards a little until his back was resting against the wall. This was really happening… It was actually happening… She was really gone? He brought his hands up to cover his face and just like that, his knees gave in. He slid down against the wall until he was flat on the floor and finally….he allowed himself to cry. Meredith sat right next to him with her arms wrapped around his body and rested her head against his shoulder. Her own stomach churned as he sobbed. She had seen Alex cry before. In fact, she remembered when. When he thought Izzie wasn't going to make it, he cried. She was there for that. But she had never in her life heard him sob...and it was a sound she wanted to forget. He really did love her. He never cried over a woman like this before.

"We were supposed to get married…," he hiccuped. "No...man, no… This…"

"I know."

"We were supposed to have babies…"

"She loved you," Meredith whispered in his ear. "She loved you and she knew you loved her too… She knew. Girls… They always know. She knew."

"I just thought…" his entire body was trembling. "I didn't even give her the ring… I threw it at her and… Never saw it again. I never looked for it. I wanted her to have it though…"

"She knows." She rubbed her face across her shoulder and wiped her own tears. "...When they're done cleaning her up… You can go see her."

"We were…" His voice trailed off and gave way to hard, gut-wrenching sobs.

"Alex…" April's voice was soft and gentle. She looked down at Alex's form; his face buried in his knees, covered with his scrubs and his shoulders clenching and unclenching in rhythmic spasms. Her own tears rolled down her cheeks. Meredith motioned for her to go away but she held out her hand. When she saw what she had in her hand, she nodded and nudged Alex as softly as possible. With red rimmed eyes and tears still just spilling out profusely, he looked up. "She said she loves you…" April sniffed. "...It was pinned to her scrub top," she whispered.

Alex held out his hand and let April drop the silver ring into his palm.

#jolex #fanfiction

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onewhoturns · 5 years

Text

fictober.16.: silence and sound

#Fictober19 Prompt: 16. Listen. No, really listen. Fandom: Oxenfree Pairing: Alex/Jonas [post-Island, stepcest] Rating: T (no warnings apply) Tags: Insomnia, literal sleeping together Word Count: 3390

The first night was hell. She couldn’t say anything about it. Sleep was elusive at best, but more like impossible. Tossing and turning all night, every few minutes imagining a hum or a click or the steady static of dead tape. Alex tried listening to music and that worked for a bit, helped clear her mind, but actual sleep wasn’t so easy. Being alone in silence tended to welcome thoughts - sights, sounds, memories - that didn’t exist. Or at least, not here. Not anymore. Or maybe never… Time feels off.

Living half-zombified is passable on a Sunday, but she’s nearing 61 hours without sleep. 61 hours to everyone else, anyway, maybe longer. She’s never entirely sure how long they were on the island. Or if they’ve left at all. A day of zoning out on the couch, eyes glazed over and breath shallow, didn’t go unnoticed. Her mother felt her forehead concernedly, prepared to keep her out of school come Monday, and Alex couldn’t do more than shrug an excuse. Her lack of sleep was blamed on some kind of illness picked up at the ‘sleepover’ she’d attended Friday night.

Illness. That was one way of putting it.

Alex had caught Jonas’s eyes while her mother worried, and he had that guarded look about him that he’d had on the island. That forcibly calm exterior, with whatever panic might be happening pushed down deep. The heavy smudges under his eyes are just as informative as his distant hollow gaze to tell her that he’s been struggling, too. They haven’t talked about it. Alex isn’t sure she wants to, either.

She kept herself upright through dinner, but by the time 8 o’clock has come and passed and she can reasonably call it a night, Alex drags herself up to her bedroom.

She tries. She really tries.

Her room is dark, her pjs are comfortable, but she just can’t sleep. A moment of drifting and then she jerks awake again, imagining noises that don’t exist. Radio chimes, empty recordings, the click and whirr of tape— none of it ever leaves. Any silence and it comes back to haunt her.

She isn’t— Alex doesn’t cry because she’s sad (though God, she probably should be). She’s not sure she’s really feeling much of anything, just unadulterated frustration. Helplessness and hopelessness that she just can’t do it, and she needs to - she’s exhausted, she feels her whole body trembling, the pulse of blood in her eyelids - she has to sleep, please god let her sleep—

Her eyes sting and burn, like all her tears have been sucked up to power the ever-running engine that is Alex and whatever’s welling up in them has been painstakingly wrung out of whatever’s left of her. Her mouth is dry but her nose is stuffy and she just can’t breathe, it’s utterly miserable, and let it end please let it end, she just needs rest for once in her life.

Alex rolls over onto her side, but that doesn’t help. She still has to pant through her mouth to get any air. Sitting up helps, but she doesn’t have the energy for it, and as soon as she props herself against the headboard and lets her eyes drift shut she’s hearing sounds again, choking on a frustrated noise that’s hardly human.

Too much. It’s all too much, and there’s not enough of her left.

…Fuck it, she can’t exactly try anything else. If there’s a chance of it working, she’ll try it. And she’d rather start with him than with her mother. At least he knows.

Alex is wrapped in a light blanket, carrying a pillow in one hand, stepping as quietly as possible as she heads up to the attic.

Michael’s door is closed, but there’s light coming from underneath. Makes sense. No teen in their right mind would be asleep before 10pm let alone 9. Then again, were either of them in their right mind at the moment? Probably not.

She doesn’t knock. She probably should. Instead, she just enters, closes the door behind her, and goes immediately to the foot of the bed, setting down her pillow and curling up on the floor.

“…Alex?” It’s the first time he’s really addressed her since they got off the ferry. Neither of them have been particularly chatty. A smattering of affirmative or negative responses for questions from their parents, rarely full words. She thinks she heard Jonas mumble something to his dad earlier in the day, but she might have just imagined it.

Alex doesn’t respond. This is how she used to fight off whatever was keeping her from sleep. Crash in Michael’s room, listen to him doing whatever it was he did before bed. His mouse clicking at his computer, or a pencil scratching away at homework. Noises of steady, reassuring life. Any unexplained sounds were given context with someone else in the room.

She lets out a breath, and her eyes are still burning, thankful to be closed once more.

There’s a pause, and then a soft creak in the mattress as Jonas lays back down. He doesn’t ask again. There’s just the gentle noises of shifting fabric, pages flipping, soft breath.

Light filters through her eyelids and it’s red like the light pouring from his mouth when they spoke through him.

Alex doesn’t have the energy to fear it, just buries her head in folded arms and focuses on the sound. He’s okay. They’re all okay. No hum of radio frequencies, no click, no whirr, no static. Sounds of life, not ghosts.

For the first time in 62 hours, Alex sleeps.

Jonas nudges her awake nearly nine hours later.

She doesn’t have the energy to groan, just rolls onto her back and looks up at him from heavily lidded eyes.

“Your mom’s prob’ly gonna check on you in a sec.” His voice sounds out of practice; hoarse and rocky and too deep. Still half-asleep.

Alex just stares for a second, eyelids gradually falling closed as her brain slowly processes his words. He nudges her again with his foot, and she wonders why she should care about what he’s saying.

Oh right.

They just met.

Probably weird to be sleeping on his floor like she would with Michael.

She cracks an eye open as she rubs at the other, sniffing, scrubbing at her face.

Jonas just watches her for a second, shifts into an absentminded stretch until some joint makes a little cracking noise, and then shrugs. “Whatever,” he mumbles, heading for his dresser; “Suit yourself.”

Alex stumbles down to her room while he’s getting ready for school. She lays awake with her eyes closed until her mom comes to check.

They both end up staying home from class. Alex isn’t sure what the official reason is - her mom seems to think they both have mono or something. She blames the supposed sleepover, and Alex thinks she might have called Ren’s parents to warn them, but Alex doesn’t have the energy to worry over their story falling through. Either way, since no one’s been throwing up, they’re left to take care of each other while she and Jonas’s dad have work.

Alex still feels exhausted. She tries to sleep, and kind of does. Except then she’s not sure, because things start to sound weird and distorted and-

“Alex.”

Her eyes drag open, but her sight is blurry, blinking haze away until she recognizes Jonas sitting on the edge of her bed, a hand on her arm. That registers a solid second before the rest of him, and her gaze drifts downward, perplexed. “…Why…” Facts click together as her eyes finally reach the material wrapped around his hips. Towel. Okay. That explains the whole toplessness part. Her brow is furrowed as she looks back to his face again, to hair rumpled from a haphazard drying.

“You were, uh…” Jonas blinks for a second, and Alex watches with a distant detached interest as his skin starts to go pink as he lets go of her arm. “I was in the— getting out of the shower- you, uh— There were noises,” he finally manages.

Her eyes slide closed again, letting out a throaty hum of confirmation. Sounds right. Noises. She rolls over under her covers, curling until her knees bump against him. He’s comfortingly solid and warm through the sheets, and she bundles up even more until she’s curled in a C-shape around him. Her breathing starts to even out, slowing down, until-

“Um.”

“…Hm?”

A hand pushes at her shoulder and she rolls back, looking up at him again through one half-open eye. He watches her for a second, brow furrowed, before his lips twitch a bit. “I kinda need to get dressed.”

“Hmmmmm.” The groan is disappointed, and a little irritated, almost a pout as she curls toward him again.

There’s a pause while he lets her settle around him. He sounds mildly amused under the weariness. “I’d carry you upstairs, but I’d probably drop you.”

“Hm?” All of her speech is inarticulate humming.

A hand combs through her hair, scratching at her scalp idly like he’s petting a dog. Alex might feel annoyed about that if it didn’t feel nice. “I mean, I’m assuming you wanna nap. And that you’d be better off in-” there’s a fraction of a second of hesitation, “-my room.” He was gonna say Mike. She knows he was, but she doesn’t have the energy to think about it.

“Mm.” He has a point. Still, she doesn’t move. The whole petting thing actually feels pretty good. Relaxing.

“Alex.” He stops her from falling asleep again. Her eyes pull open slowly only to shoot an irritated look at him. Jonas’s lips twitch into a crooked smile. “Look, this is a limited time offer, I’m the one selflessly offering my bed right now.”

Alex shrugs. “You could stay here,” she mumbles, turning to nuzzle her head into the mattress, shifting against his hand like some kind of cat on a scratching post.

“I’m literally in a towel,” he observes, drily.

“So?” Her eyes are well and truly closed again, maneuvering to get his hand in just the right spot as she lets out a little sigh before her breath settles to a slow, even pace once more.

Jonas’s hand stills. There’s a second of silence, then he pulls away, standing up.

“Jonas,” Alex whines, reaching out for him sleepily, eyes still closed, “C’mon, come back.”

With a soft huff of laughter, she hears the floor of the hall creak slightly. His voice is raised, jarringly awake. “I’m gonna change. Bed’s free for like ten minutes, then you’re on your own.”

She hears him pad back toward the bathroom, then the recognizable sound of the door closing, the vent inside still humming, clearing out steam from his shower earlier. Nice. Nice steamy shower, nice hot water, not too scalding, just-

Alex’s eyes open as she frowns.

Yeah, maybe don’t think about the new stepbrother showering. Maybe not that.

At least it’s enough to push her out of bed with a low groan. Grudgingly, she has to admit that he’s right. She’ll sleep better in Mike’s room, she always has. There were a few months after his death that she slept there every night. She’d considered just moving into that room, but… it felt wrong. So she’d stayed in hers, and then a year passed, and then Jonas was moving in. Still feels a little weird.

When she heads up to the attic again, she doesn’t bother bringing her blanket and pillow. He’d offered the bed, so she’s gonna take it. Alex slips between the sheets, instantly overwhelmed by the smell of boy. Whatever deodorant he uses he uses too much of it, but it’s not bad. Better than the alternative, she supposes. It’s kinda nice, actually, something strong enough to distract her from whatever her sleep-deprived senses want to throw at her.

She’s finally relaxed into the bed again, toes peeking out the edge of the covers, when Jonas wanders back upstairs once more. Alex takes in a breath that’s swimming with whatever dude-smell scents are packed into that aerosol spray, lets out a short sigh and murmurs, “Hasn’t been ten minutes.”

Jonas snorts lightly. “Well, you weren’t in your room, so.” There’s the soft shp sound of fabric thrown onto fabric. “Also; don’t complain.” A finger flicks at her exposed foot and Alex whines and curls up safe under the covers. “Just go to sleep.”

He settles down at the desk, and Alex listens to the fan whirring to life in his computer, his long breath out as the laptop boots up.

She falls asleep to clicks and sighs and the steady thump of his heel swinging against the chair leg.

It becomes habit. At least for a few days.

Around 9pm or a little later Alex climbs up to the attic and settles herself on the floor and listens to Jonas do whatever he’s up to until she falls asleep. One night, he’s working at his desk and she steals the bed. She’s not entirely sure where he slept that night, ‘cause he’s always the one to wake her.

Whatever they’re doing, they must know it’s Wrong in some way, because it’s always a secret. She goes to him once their parents have stopped checking in on them at night, he gets her up and back to her room before they come to check in the morning. So they must know something’s off about it.

The weekend comes, and there’s an unspoken agreement that neither of them really wants to leave the house. They’re still… recovering might be the right word. The only people Alex might feel comfortable hanging out with are Ren, maybe Nona… and maybe Clarissa. Maybe. Anyone else and she’s not sure she could take faking it.

Friday night, it’s been one week since they got on the ferry.

They don’t talk about it. Instead they sprawl over the sectional in the living room, staring at the TV and watching reality show marathons, idly snacking on popcorn and m&ms, time ticking away. At some point Alex falls asleep, the murmur of television chatter in the background.

She jerks awake however many hours later, heart pounding. The room is dark and silent, but she feels watched. Jonas must have already gone up to bed, because she’s alone. Logically she knows the red lights blinking in the darkness are just idle power on the TV, the cable box, the stereo - but they still raise goosebumps on her skin. Alex fumbles for her phone, flicking on the flashlight long enough to get a lamp on.

The light helps. At least, it helps with the whole imagining ghosts part. But the quiet is too quiet, and she can sense the click and whirr and static creeping in, can imagine the hum and steady thinning of the pitch as the radio frequency shifts. She rolls her shoulders back, shaking out her limbs, tuts her tongue against her teeth to break the silence as she walks back up to her room.

She tries to settle into bed. Really tries. Hums a little to herself, but it’s no good. The dark, the quiet; it’s too full of things that don’t exist.

So up she goes to the attic.

For the first time, his light is off. It’s past 3am. Alex hesitates for a moment, then knocks softly.

No answer. (Which makes sense.)

After a brief moment of consideration, a second waiting on the landing, Alex feels that creeping dread echoing up the stairs and makes the executive decision to just go in. Even then, she pauses in the doorway. “…Jonas?”

Again, no answer. But this time she’s paranoid. She flicks her phone to flashlight once more, just to make sure he’s there. He is. And shifting a little, a low groan as he turns away from the light.

“Jonas,” she repeats, softly.

He stretches out for a second, waves a hand weakly. “‘s all good,” he mumbles. Which feels like the okay for her to crash. Which— well, she probably would have done it anyway, but it’s better to get the go-ahead.

She closes the door behind her, then makes her way to her usual spot and curls up on the floor. Tries to fall asleep.

…It’s too quiet.

Without his usual nighttime activity, it’s dead silent. He doesn’t snore like Michael did. (A weird thing to miss, but it was comforting in its way.)

She thinks she can see red lights in the dark. The distant sound - little blips - that may or may not exist, reaches her ears. Static creeps at the edges of her imagination, and Alex once more turns on her light, setting it to shine onto the ceiling. Her breath is heavy, heart racing.

“…Go to sleep,” is murmured from the bed.

“Can’t,” Alex whispers.

Jonas sighs. There’s a moment of quiet, then a shifting on the mattress. When he speaks again, it’s a little clearer. “Why not.” It’s a question, but his tone is flat. Not exactly annoyed, but close.

“Hearing things.”

Another pause. “Like what.” Again, a flat question, but this time there’s an edge of wariness to it.

“Stupid shit,” she shakes her head, staring at the ceiling. “Island stuff. Tapes and radios.”

He sighs a little, but it’s not like he’s angry. More like resigned. “…So that’s why… the sleep thing?”

“Mmhmm.”

The pauses are less empty now, knowing he’s awake. “So why isn’t it working now?” She can tell he’s being patient with her, the way his words have slipped back to questions, tone softer, almost coaxing.

“Too quiet,” Alex breathes. “I think— the sounds, I think. Helped.”

She’s not quite speaking in full sentences. It’s closer, though, so that’s… probably good. Better than freezing up and only getting a word or two out.

“I’m not gonna get up just to make noise for you.” There’s a wryly humorous edge to his voice, even with that touch of apology.

“I know.” She lets out a breath. It’s fine. She’ll be fine.

He sighs, goes quiet.

Too quiet. “Jonas.”

He groans. “Christ Alex, just come here.”

What? “…What?”

“C’mere.” When she makes no move, he sighs again. Half of the covers are folded back and he sleepily slaps at the mattress. “Bed.”

She’s a little awkward as she rises, fumbling with her phone.

“If you shine that fucking light in my eyes, I swear to god-” he mumbles, tiredly.

Alex lets out a weak laugh at that, and as soon as she’s untangled from her own blanket and at his bedside she turns the thing off, setting it on his nightstand before sliding into bed. He flings an arm back to put the covers back over her, letting his arm stay draped across her, hand resting but not curled around the side of her waist.

She hasn’t actually shared a bed with a guy before. Well, she’s been sleeping bag to sleeping bag with Ren, but not actually in the same bed. Not that she can remember. Not when it counted. Definitely not with a shirtless guy who’s naked shoulder was inches from her face.

Yeah. Okay, yes, this is why this is Wrong. This is why they keep this a secret.

Jonas breathes out. When Alex fidgets, his hand fumbles until he gets a loose hold on her forearm, and pulls it around him. “Listen.”

Alex hesitates. His bare skin is putting off heat like a furnace.

There’s a second, and then he sighs. He tugs her closer, pointedly arching his back toward her, until her cheek brushes against his spine. “No, really listen.” His deep breath in is exaggerated, and the long exhale.

Oh. Oh.

It helps that he’s not looking at her. And that she’s really fucking tired. It takes a moment, but finally Alex tightens her arm around him, turning to press her ear to his back.

It’s a little odd, not gonna lie. But his breath is even, and the steady thud of his heartbeat is… nice. She’s not sure if he’s trying to pace his breathing, but she finds herself matching his and it definitely serves to calm her down.

It works, weirdly enough, listening to him, instead of the silence.

No static, no whine of the radio tuning: just pulse, and breath.

[source for AO3]

#fictober19 #jonalex #alex/jonas #oxenfree #oxenfree fic #my writing #prompt fill #this... got out of hand

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canumoveurseatup-no · 5 years

Text

Phantom

(Wanda Maximoff x Black!Mutatnt!Reader)

Summary: Reader’s powers get a bit out of control and sort of instills fear in the others. Some hurtful words are said, hearts are broken. (*Ariana Grande; God is a Woman voice*) YUH!

A/N: please REBLOG, COMMENT, LIKE and request if you want anything specific!! Anyway, ENJOY!!

Word Count: 8.8K (I’M REALLY SORRY AH BUT I HOPE YOU LIKE IT!!!)

Pairing: Wanda x Black!Female!Reader, Rhodey x Daughter!Reader

WARNINGS: angst, blood, death, surgery, forced experimentation, needles, guns, ANGST AGAIN (I think that’s it)

—————

Y/N’s eyes were phantom white but the veins around her eyes were plague black and crimson red. She snarled at her target and we could tell how afraid he was. Her hair was glowing a blinding silver. We were used to her powers but not like this, this time they had reached their peak. She had a deathly smirk on her lips before speaking, her short fangs becoming visible.

“...Try and hurt me again and I’ll make sure I choke you to death on your own blood-”

——————

-Wanda’s POV-

This mission had been putting everyone through the ringer, we had to fly all the way to Norway to shut down a facility that created mutants and enhanced beings. I felt myself become exhausted. My fingers burned from generating so much energy to counter the enemies attacks.

I groaned as a bullet grazed my shoulder. We were practically getting ambushed. In this area of the facility it was just me, Natasha and Steve, the others were scattered.

These weren’t just normal bogeys that followed the orders of their leader, no. These were enhanced beings with specific mutations that made it harder for us to fight off.

“Y/N, we need you on our end,” I heard Natasha yell into the com, though she was right beside me, I could barely hear her in person over the gunshots and explosions, “and fast!”

Y/N hadn’t copied and I worried. She never takes long to reply to a command. She’s usually right on top of it.

“Rhodes! Do you copy?” This time it was Steve to yell in the com.

“Uh yeah but I’m a bit caught up on my end with NO back up. So you guys are gonna have to deal without my set of hands for a minute” she sassed, I could hear the commotion in the background.

I worried for her being alone in a fight. I knew it was a bad idea for Steve to split us up like this. Not yet has our title proved to be a liability as Steve claimed it would. We worked best together, and we’ve proven that time and time again.

“Y/N, I need you to stay safe, okay?” I grunted as one of the mutants kicked me in my guts.

“Always, my love. You do the same” I could practically hear the smirk in her voice.

“Hi, hello, Avengers: We took care of the looney bitch. Finish up and let’s roll out” Tony sounded relieved to finally be done.

While it was a struggle to fight all of the guys off, Natasha, Steve and I finally got the job done.

We began running toward the exit when we heard static in our com and I heard Y/N’s panicked voice.

“Dad, I need your help. Quick!” Then a high pitched ringing seemed to come through the earpiece, only it wasn’t. The ringing was coming from the building it was darting through the halls.

Without a second thought I ran to Y/N’s location with Nat and Steve on my tail, seeing her up against a few discombobulated mutants... must have been the defective batch. I could tell Y/N’ abilities were about to come into effect, that’s the only explanation for that high pitched ringing. It happens every time when she’s about to fall subject to her mutation.

“Y/N pull back and let’s get out of here” Rhodey flew overhead with Tony and Sam by his side, out of the other entrance came Thor, Bruce, well Hulk, and Peter. Bucky and Clint came from a lower level of the facility.

“I’m trying, dad!” She was stressing out but that only fueled her powers even more.

We all moved to help her before a force field was put around her and a man in a long dark cloak came in with his hood on. I didn’t like the vibe from this guy, but who would? Some random guy comes out of random corner in a Dungeons and Dragons cloak, that is never a good thing.

“Welcome back, Y/N Rhodes” the voice of the man was scratchy and uneven, yet powerful and frightening.

This distracted her and caused the deformed mutants to twist her arms behind her back to trap her.

“My favorite subject. My biggest accomplishment,” he took his hood off and had a scar through his eye, one eye being pure white while the other was an ethereal green. He sent her a crooked smile that churned my stomach “Oh, how I’ve missed you”

Y/N’s facial expression looked pained. Not because of how she was being mutant handled but because of the man standing in front of her.

“Roscovich,” she gasped. “Ezra Roscovich” her lip twitched and the frequency of the ringing only seemed to increase.

Blasts came from up above and I could see it came from Rhodey. “You’re the asshole that tortured my daughter, you took my wife from me!!” the blasts continued as Rhodey flew around trying to hit the guy but he used a force field to counter Rhodey’s attacks knocking Rhodey out of the air.

“DAD!!” Y/N was feeling too many emotions at once, I could feel them radiating off of her, they were overwhelming me. I could see her thoughts they were running at a million miles a minute, I couldn’t keep up. She was never comfortable with talking about her mutation or how it came about and she most definitely didn’t like using it. But now I was seeing quick glimpses of flashbacks and I didn’t know what to make of it.

“You hurt my dad” She wasn’t crying, her voice was low and sinister.

The man named Ezra shrugged and turned to the rest of us.

“You think Ayalla was one you were looking for? You thought she was mastermind behind this whole operation?! Y/N , you of all people should have known better” His accent thick, he stalked toward us and his cloak flowed right with him.

“I wanted my prized possession back,” he looked at Y/N and sent a wink her way, ”It was all a simple trap and of course you took the bait. You lot are so hell bent on trying to save everyone that you couldn’t help but find yourselves here” his smile stirred something in me. I looked at Y/N and she just seemed too calm to be in this situation. Her entire demeanor changed and I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

“Why, Y/N? What is she to you?” My mouth moved faster than my brain, I tried to push through to his mind to find is motives but it all came up blank.

“Why she is everything I’ve dreamt of personified. I worked hard to make her what she is. Countless trials, numerous lives lost, endless formulas, ruined equipment. She is my beloved Phantom” he clapped while jumping up and down like a child.

“But you took her away from me. She was supposed to be mine!” He stomped his foot and his face turned red.

“She’s my daughter. She never belonged to you!” Rhodey removed the helmet to reveal his face.

“But is she?,” Ezra tapped his temple “when I created the essence to make her what she is she became anew.” He gave us jazz fingers as if this was some type of magic trick.

“Her body was like computer and the essence worked as a virus. The essence became an override for her DNA, stripping her of her humanity” he rocked back on his heels sending us a shit eating grin.

Rhodey and Tony held up their hands ready to blast the hell out of this asshole while Clint got his bow ready, Hulk got into stance, ready to pounce and crush this dude and my hands flashed red in a second, but Steve stopped us from taking action.

“This is what he wants, guys be smart about this.”

“Be smart? Be SMART ABOUT IT?!,” I finally lost my cool, “that is my girlfriend in there! His daughter! A member of our family being held hostage and all you have to say is be SMART?!”

“Wanda.” Y/N’s voice resonated within me and calmed me like it always could. “I need you to get everyone out of here”

“I’m not leaving y-“

“This is not up for discussion!,” Y/N rarely ever raised her voice at me so I knew something was about to happen. “I know the extent of my abilities. You all do not. So I need you to get everyone out and sit tight in the quinjet. Trust me!”

The look in her eyes was not the look of Y/N. Her abilities were starting to arise.

“Oh no no no,” Roscovich tsked. “They get front row seats to show! Show me what ya got, Y/N. Show me again what you can do, have you learned anything new? Show them real Phantom”

I tried to get everyone out but the doors automatically shut and locked keeping us trapped.

“Well call me Bob and fuck me running,” I heard Clint mutter under his breath.

Y/N looked at me before her eyes changed along with her hair. She slowly turned to look at the puppeteer behind this whole show, “Wrong. Move”

Right in front of our eyes, the mutants holding Y/N against her will melted like butter in a hot pan. Once she was free she cracked her neck and smiled.

“You want the real Phantom?,” she literally stepped through the force field and came face to face with Ezra. “Well here she is.. and she’s going to end you as if you’ve never existed. Making you wish you never created the thing you’ve made of her” she laughed as if she told the world’s best joke. This isn’t my Y/N.

“Y/N, Don’t! This is what he wants” Steve pleaded.

She turned to Steve and smiled like she was ever so gracious of his concerns.

“Exactly... so, let’s give him a show”

She turned back to him and raised him up in the air without even laying a finger on him.

“You want to play? Let’s fucking play” with a simple snap of her fingers he was thrown across the room.

“I suffer every day.” She raises him up in the air again, this time she contorted his limbs, them being bent in unimaginable ways and he was screaming bloody murder.

“I thought I’d taught you a lesson the last time, granted I thought I killed you. But you don’t even care what I’ve been through as long as it’s not you” her voice was so calm. It was chilling and eerie.

“With this weight I carry of being this way, I will make sure you carry a thousand times the weight so you live with what you’ve done”

From here I could hear his bones cracking, could hear him choking. The deafening ringing increased and almost became unbearable.

“Y/N, Stop!” I stepped forward but without even glancing at me she forced me up again the wall, one by one we were all pushed and stuck to the wall. It was a preventative measure on her part to make sure she isn’t stopped.

Before our eyes there are at least two dozen duplicates of Y/N. They all stood around the room, staring at the floating, contorted man,

“You will pay for what you have done,” one of the Y/N’s said. We had never seen her duplicate like this or at all for that .

“You will forever regret your sins,” this time it was a Y/N that stood near Steve and I.

“You will suffer” - “You won’t even be able to sleep at night”- “We will haunt your dreams”- “We will lurk in every dark corner”- “Every crevice of your pathetic brain” -” “We will haunt you, you will feel us and when you do, you’ll feel nothing but pain and no one will hear you scream”- “And we will make you ROT!!”

Each one of Y/N’s duplicates spoke menacing words. The original just stood there staring, she was a predator ready to pounce on her prey.

Y/N’s eyes were phantom white but the veins around her eyes were plague black and crimson red. She snarled at her target and we could tell just how afraid he was. Her hair was glowing a blinding silver. We were used to her powers but not like this, this time they had reached their peak. She had a deathly smirk on her lips before speaking, her short fangs becoming visible.

“Try to keep me captive... try and hurt me again and I’ll make sure I choke you to death on your own blood. Slowly so you can feel the blood filling your lungs, clogging your airways with no sense of relief. No mercy will be placed upon you”

“Y/N that’s enough!,” Rhodey had seen enough, we all had. I’d seen enough of my lover act out of character, in a way that instilled fear in me to the point I didn’t know if I knew her anymore.

All the duplicates turned and stared at us. They all smiled in sync

“The deed is done” they said in unison before disappearing back into the mind of Y/N.

A blinding white light flashed throughout the room and once it was gone, Ezra and Y/N were sprawled out on the floor unconscious.

The team rushed over to her as she started to wake but I stayed behind. I was frozen, I was scared to get near her. No one touched her besides Rhodey and even then he was hesitant. Everyone else kept their space, their stance ready to run or fight incase the Phantom made another appearance.

“Let’s get out of here, we need to get back,” Steve was cautious, his eyes never leaving Y/N, not even after we got to the compound until she disappeared to our room.

We cleaned up and everyone showed up to dinner except for Y/N, she was probably resting, or beating herself up for how she acted, if she could even remember. I would check on her, but I need time to wrap my head around that whole situation.

“Rhodey... I think we need to talk about Y/N,” Natasha brought her cup to her lips

“There’s nothing to be said, Romanoff. If you continue I’d watch what is about to come out of your mouth next” Rhodey’s silverware made a loud clash against his plate.

“I’m just saying that maybe she needs an eye or a few kept on her, because what we saw back there we have never seen before. It’s something worth looking after if it meant keeping everyone safe,” she put her hands up in a surrender motion as she laid down her case.

“So you’re saying my daughter is a danger to us?,” by now he was fuming, “that is pure bullshit, Natasha and you know it”

“But is it really though?,” I question

“You’ve GOT to be fucking kidding me, Wanda. She’s your girlfriend-”

“Who I am now scared of,” I sighed and felt bad as I let the words slip out.

“In my years of knowing her and loving her I have never seen or heard her act and talk in such a menacing way. That girl back there was not the girl I love and I have a right to be scared even just a bit!”

“Wanda.” Sam warned but I just shook my head

“I was going to keep my thoughts to myself but I couldn’t”

“Thanks for telling me to my face,” Y/N’s voice sent chills down my spine. “Of course it wasn’t me back there. I did what I could to protect us and get us out of there”

“By pinning us against the wall against our will?” Steve butted in.

“To protect you in case things got out of hand!” She cried.

“I’m sorry for scaring you but seeing him flipped a switch that I tried with all my might to flip back but I couldn’t,” she wiped her tears in a frustrated manner and shook her head “My own girlfriend is afraid of me”

She gave a bitter laugh.

“I tried to calm you down Y/N, but you literally pushed me away! The two dozen other versions of you, the things you all were saying. That’s frightening to anyone. It’s enough to throw anyone off. I just need time to think,” I stood up at my end of the table, I finally had the courage to make eye contact.

“Wanda, when we got together we promised to talk things out, not run away. We connected and related to each other because of our abilities and now that you've seen the extent of mine you want to check out early. That’s not fair especially when you said you’d love me no matter what,”

I shook my head and the words flew past my lips before I could keep them from escaping, words that I knew would hurt Y/N, words that I didn’t even mean,

“Someone will love you... but someone isn’t me”

I heard the gasps, I saw the light drain from her eyes, I saw the pain I caused.

“O-okay... okay.” she nodded her head before backing away and rushing off to our shared room.

“Wanda what did you just do?!,” The look Rhodey gave me was different, he always saw me as another daughter ever since I started dating Y/N but this time he looked at me like a deranged stranger.

He rushed off after Y/N and I sat back down in my seat feeling all of their eyes on me. Judging.

“For someone who has fucked up a lot of shit with their abilities you sure have some fucking nerve!,” Sam frowned at me

“Sam!,” Steve came to my defense but Sam wasn’t having it.

“Shut up, Rogers!,” He held his hand up, “Y/N stood by you no matter how bad your powers got out of control. She was there to comfort you and remove the blame when you sulked about what you did in Nigeria”

“SAM!,” Steve called out again, everyone knew that was a sensitive topic.

“SHE was the one that forgave you first and welcomed you first when you played your witch tricks and showed us all our worst fear and damn near ruined us, even after everything she’s been through” he pointed his finger, “But God forbid she wants dibs on the guy who made her into something she hates, God forbid she wants him to suffer like she does every. single. day! God frickin’ forbid she show the very person who changed her and held her captive and killed one of the most important people in her life that she is not weak like he saw her to be. She did all that for you. She loved you despite your mishaps, you’ve scared her multiple times, you’ve hurt her before, Wanda, but she loved you so damn much she worked through it to be with you and you just want to be a coward and leave the girl on her own,” Sam’s chair screeched against the floor as he also went after Y/N.

“I fucked up,” tongue in cheek, I just sat there.

“You sure did,” Peter raised his eyebrows and took a sip of his drink.

“Underoos,” Tony waved him away “Go to the lab, it’s grown folks talking”

Peter didn’t protest, he just walked away sulking like a kid going to timeout.

“You need to fix this, and fast. I’m not sure how many straws Y/N is willing to keep pulling for you after this,” Tony downed the brown liquid in his cup and looked me dead in my eyes.

“I was in the same place with Pepper. I kept fucking up yet she’s still here with me. But I got my act together because I knew if I didn’t change something and make amends I’d lose her. Don’t lose Y/N. Go after her, kid”

I sprinted to our room so fast you’d have thought I was Pietro. But when I got there Y/N was packing a bag and her dad and Sam were trying to keep her from leaving.

“Y/N,” I stepped over the threshold. She snapped her neck to look at me and just shook her head angrily.

“Stay away from me,” I’ve never seen her cry like this. I caused this. Her eyes were bloodshot red, she was shaking from anger, anxiety and sadness and it’s all my fault.

“No, baby ple-”

“You.” her tone was stone cold, “You don’t get to call me that anymore” she hiccupped and continued packing.

“Wanda, I think it’s best if you leave,” Rhodey pointed to the door but I stood my ground.

“No, I already fucked up, I need to fix this I need to fix what I’ve done,”

“You can’t!,” Y/N screamed. She never raised her voice when we argued, I knew I fucked up, big time.

“You can’t take back what you said. Even if you didn’t mean it. I’d never do you like that, Wanda. EVER” she threw her toiletries in the duffle bag and zipped it up.

“You can’t come back from telling someone you don’t love them,” She tried to walk past me but I caught her bicep while she tried yanking herself away, I just couldn’t let her go.

“Let’s sit and talk about this. Let’s solve this how we solve all of our other arguments,”

“This isn’t like our other arguments though, Wanda!” she was right.

“We can’t sit and talk on our bed, criss-cross applesauce and just gaze into each other’s eyes, We can’t hold hands and start our conversation with ‘I feel’, we can’t have a calm, loving conversation about this. I was willing, I was coming to pull you aside so we COULD but you’d already gone behind my back and told everyone else what you should have been telling me.”

I had nothing to say at that point because she was absolutely right.

“You can’t fix this. Not now anyway,” She sniffled and wiped her eyes, tightening the duffle bag on her shoulder

“I need time to think things over. Please just give me time, don’t push me. Give me the time and space I need”

“Y/N please,” I couldn’t let her run away like this.

This is our very first big argument after two years of dating. We were always that couple to walk away when we got too angry to prevent saying words that could hurt each other because you can’t take those hurtful words back. We were that couple to come back when we were calm and were able to regroup, that way we could actually solve the issue. We knew that yelling solved nothing, screaming at each other was no way to be heard, but this was completely different. I had said something way out of line and had no excuse for it other than being afraid. I didn’t talk to her directly about how I felt, I told everyone else except her.

“Wanda, let her go. You both could use some space” Rhodey came to her defense as she walked away from me.

“We don’t need space, we need closure, I can’t lose her, I can’t just let her walk away, we need closure!”

My eyes burned and itched due to the tears. I couldn’t lose her.

“Yeah well ya sure fucked up with that one didn’t you?”

“Not now, Sam! Please not now.” I pleaded. I already know I fucked up big time, I don't need him reiterating that fact.

“Well when then, Wanda? You just hurt the most precious soul on this team just because you were afraid of something you couldn’t understand. You ruined the chance for any closure when you acted the way you did. When you said the things you did”

“Sam...,” Rhodey nudged him with his elbow. “I think she gets it. I think she got it as soon as the words flew out her mouth” He gave me the most deathly glare that not even Fury could compare to.

“I’m gonna go see where she went. Don’t try to pry in anyone’s head to figure out where. Let her regroup on her own”

I was left standing there with the dresser drawers on her side of the room a mess and hanging out of the dresser themselves. There was stuff that tracked from the bathroom into our room. Small stuff like, her hair ties and her headscarf with her bonnet. I pick those to items up and felt the cool silk on my fingers. It smelled just like her shampoo. Almond milk and coconut. I had to find Rhodey and give these to him. She hates going to sleep without them secured on her head.

I rushed down the hall and found him in the common area on the phone. I could hear her voice through the phone, it sounded so broken.

“Rhodey...“ I whisper. He looked at me with annoyance which pained me. I handed him the scarf and bonnet before wringing my hands together, “I know she hates to go to bed without them so you can take these to her”

He just nodded his head and turned his back to me and I wanted to listen in but that was not my place. She wanted space and as selfish as I wanted to be, I’m giving her that space.

I walked back into our room and shut the door. I slid down to the floor, mentally beating myself up. There really is no coming back from that. There is no fixing what I said, there’s no fixing the hurt I caused the one person who’s been in my corner this entire time.

~~~~~~~~~~

It’d been a good three weeks and I’ve had no contact with Y/N. I wonder how she was doing. I haven't been able to sleep, not without her legs intertwined with mine. I haven't been eating, not without her right there cooking with me and making sure I’m eating reasonable portions, with a healthy snack between meals. I haven’t been able to look at myself in the mirror, not without her standing there right beside me doing her hair and getting ready, or me coming up behind her and wrapping my arms around her waist. I’ve been taken off missions due to how reckless I’ve become. I haven't had her yelling at me in my ear that I better make it back on that quinjet safe.

I did all of this to myself and I just want her back. But it’s not that easy.

~~~~~~~~~~

-Reader’s POV-

My mind was a mess. How do you look at someone, who you deeply loved, that hurt you... how do you look at them the same? I still loved her, I was still madly in love with her, but she had to know that she wouldn’t get away that easily. She needed to feel what I felt.

I’ve felt enough pain in my life and for someone who I trusted to a great deal to treat me and talk about me like a monster was a different kind of hurt. It hurt worse than what I went through when I was held in captivity and experimented on for years on end. She was my light at the end of the tunnel but now it just felt like her silhouette blended in with the darkness and I was just aimlessly wandering in the dark.

When my dad calls now I keep things vague. I don't want to dwell on this much longer, it’s like picking an icky scab and not letting it heal. I greatly appreciate the effort but it’s becoming overwhelming to anticipate that one phone call and knowing the upcoming questions.

I didn’t tell dad where I went, but I told him that I was most certainly safe, with much thanks to Clint. The kids and his wife loved me so he was already more than willing to let me stay. Even though me staying here kind of put him in a bad spot since he considers Wanda like another daughter and him not being able to fill her in on my status.

Right now it was me and Laura binge watching our favorite cartoon. The Misadventures of Flapjack.

The kids went to bed and she was just waiting for Clint to get back, he explained this mission to be all hands on deck but I temporarily “retired” so I told him these hands would not be working. It’s about two hours past his estimated time and I can tell Laura was getting worried.

“He’s Clint. He’s coming back home” I pat her knee and finished my glass of wine before going to fill my cup once again. I see why people seek comfort in wine, it mellows you out. It made me feel warm and with that warmth I used it to simulate human contact.

As I came back from the kitchen, Clint walked in with a worried expression on his face.

“Sweetheart how’d it go? What the hell took you so long? I was worried sick” Laura got up from her seat and set her wine glass on the table before walking up to him and kissing and hugging him but slapping his arm in disapproval. I felt the heat envy run down my body. I miss doing that with Wanda when she went on a mission without me and vice versa.

He looked at me before looking back to Laura and shaking his head.

“Hun, let me talk to Y/N alone, please”

Our breath hitched in unison, we know that was never good. Laura eyed me before sending a sad smile and heading upstairs.

“Y/N, sit down”

My body reacting faster than my brain, automatically sitting down and clutching my wine glass. He sat in front of me on the coffee table and leaning on his knees.

“I know your mind is all over the place and I don’t want to put you in even more pain than you already are but you deserve to know”

I didn’t like the sound of this. This news could be about anybody. I carried everybody on the team close to my heart and he knew that.

“Clint who is it? What happened? Don’t sugarcoat it for me, just rip the band- aid right off,” my voice began to shake and it wasn’t because of the wine, “Just say it.“

He gave a deep sigh and whatever he was about to say didn’t make sense to him, he was still trying to process this situation. He was stalling though.

“Clint, plea-“

“Wanda might not make it, Y/N”

My world literally froze. I felt like gagging, I felt dazed, like everything was spinning, like I was sucked into a black hole with no way out. I was feeling too much at once.

“W-what do you mean she might not make it, Barton. What are you saying?” my chest was past the stage of aching at this point.

“She..” He clenched his eyes shut and shook his head, “She’s been a mess... she was taken off missions because of how bad things have gotten with her since you guys separated... but since this was everyone on board we needed her but that wasn’t a good idea”

“Clint, tell me what happened to my Wanda” I felt hot tears already falling out my eyes.

“She was trying to protect Peter and Rhodey when they were getting shot at and... and she got caught in the crossfire. She’s been in surgery since we came back. That’s what took me so long,” He had tears in his eyes but he was adamant on letting them fall “Before she went out cold she wanted anyone who got in contact with you first to let you know that she never meant to hurt you and that she never stopped loving you and she’s sorry for letting her fears take over. She-“

He paused like he was conflicted over whether he really wanted to finish.

“She said that she’s glad it was her and not Rhodey or Peter. She said she’s glad to go out knowing she protected someone you loved.”

God why does this have to happen?

“But she didn’t! She didn’t because she didn’t protect herself!” The wine glass shattered in my hand.

“Take me to her, Clint, or at least tell me where she is so I can be there. She’s gonna make it, she has to!” I wrapped my arms around him and sobbed. I should have been there, I could have had her back.

“I’ll tell Laura the situation and I’ll take you to her. But only if you think you’re ready to see her the state that she’s in”

“Whether I’m ready or not, I need to go!”

~~~~~~~~

I rush in through the automatic doors of the hospital and saw everyone sitting with their heads down.

“Guys.” I sounded so gross and congested.

“Y/N..” my dad walked swiftly to me and pulled me into his arms

“It’s all my fault” I couldn’t stop the sobbing.

“No one blames you Y/N, so why are you blaming yourself?” Steve interjected.

I looked at him like he was crazy, “Well who else’s fault is it? Had I controlled myself that day during the mission none of this would have happ-“

A nurse shushed me but I was not having it

“You shut the hell up” I pointed my finger at her and she just put her hands up as she walked away.

I realized I probably should try a little harder to calm down.

“This wouldn’t be happening if it weren’t for me” I shrug my shoulders as I plop down in a chair and play with my hands.

“Y/N,” my dad knelt down in front of me and held my hands, “casualties happen, sweetie. As unfortunate as it is they happen. But I know for sure she would not want you blaming yourself like this. She’s a fighter. She’s not going to give up”

He squeezed my hands in reassurance and I stubbornly nod my head. I didn’t know how much longer I could wait for news on how she’s doing and her status.

~~~~~~~~~~

We all waited another good couple of hours. Peter curled up in the seat and biting his nails, Sam had his head hanging back and was snoring, Tony was nodding off, Bruce and Steve were fidgeting, Bucky was zoned out, Vis and Thor hadn’t said a single word since we’ve been here. Natasha got everyone coffee, for those who were still awake, but my coffee was getting cold, I was non-stop pacing, my dad and Clint just kept telling me to sit down. But I couldn’t.

I was starting to lose hope when a women in surgical attire and blood smears all on them walked in. She takes off her mask before asking, “Maximoff?”

Everyone immediately woke and stood up.

“What’s her status?” I stepped forward. “Please say she’s okay. I can’t lose her” I felt the tears resurfacing.

“Calm down, darling,” she held my hands, “It took a long time but there were some bullets lodged in some tough areas of her body. We actually lost her twice on the table-”

“What?!“ My voice octaves higher

“BUT, we were able to revive her and stabilize her. She’s a strong one. She was fighting to stay alive in that OR”

I felt the weight of the world finally fall off my shoulders. I crouched and hugged my knees and just sobbed. The ugly face, the hiccupping, the whole shebang.

“She’s going to be okay. Your girlfriend is going to be okay,” The doctor crouched right down beside me in comfort. “Whatever happened between you two, you guys can finally fix it and move forward”

“How did you know?” I wiped my nose on my sleeve and sighed.

“I’m a surgeon. I see this a lot. I have so many couples come in here and have the same look on your face of fear and regret. Not everyone is as lucky as you. You guys get a second chance. Don’t miss out on it”

She was right, life is too short and too easily lost.

“When can I see her?”

“She’s still under anesthesia right now. She’ll be under for about another half hour or until she wakes up on her own. But I’ll let you go ahead and sit in there until she wakes up. Just be warned the sight you’re going to see will not be pretty.”

I nodded and she helped me stand up. Before she took me to Wanda’s room, she explained to us how Wanda would need to take it slow for a few months and go to physical therapy.

The doctor finally leads me to Wanda’s room and I see her through the window. She looked so bad I felt another wave of tears. Her skin was greyish, The dark circles under her eyes were alarming. She was wrapped up in so many bandages all over her body. Her face was bruised. She looked dead, even though she was very much alive. She had a breathing tube in her mouth and my stomach turned.

The doctor opened the door for me and pulled up a chair right beside Wanda’s bed and sat me down.

“Try and relax. The tube will be removed soon. She’ll wake up shortly after that and you guys can patch everything up”

I gave her a gracious thank you and turned back to Wanda after she left.

“How could you be so reckless?,” I whispered as I held her hand, “How could you think I’d possibly be okay with you putting yourself in harm’s way whether we’re having a rough patch or not?”

I cried and cried, I’m not sure how I have anything to let out at this point.

“I know you, Wanda... you let pain get to you and then you just want it to end, You thought I was so upset with you that you assumed I would be happy that you were gone when I could never. NEVER, make it without you by my side,”

“Baby, you’re my everything and I’m sorry so fucking sorry this had to happen to bring us back together but we get the second chance others don’t and I don’t want to waste it”

I knew she couldn’t hear me. Or maybe she could and just thought she was dreaming.

I don’t know how much time passed. I just wanted to see her eyes again. The doctor came back in to remove her breathing tube and told me it shouldn’t be too much longer until she woke up.

I felt her hand twitch in mine and she began to cough and stir.

“Calm down, babe. It’s okay just breathe,” I stand and lean towards her, smoothing her hair down. Here eyes snapped open at the sound of my voice and instantly her red eyes flooded with tears.

“I’m dead aren’t I?,” She questioned. I looked at her as if she was crazy. “I must be... because there’s no way you’re actually here..” She cried and stared at me without blinking. She stared at me in the way that if she closed her eyes for a even millisecond I’d disappear.

“No, baby I’m here. You’re very much alive”

“You’re not really here. You hate me too much for you to actually be here.” Her face twisted in hurt and looked down.

“I never hated you, Wanda. Don’t say that”

She wheezed as she cried and I did everything I could to calm her down, she’s already in so much pain, I know this isn’t helping her situation. The bottle of water the nurse gave me, I held to her lips and helped her hydrate.

“I know this is a lot to handle right now. So let’s just appreciate the fact that we’re in each other’s presence again, despite the circumstances, we’re here. We get a second chance. I can’t risk losing you anymore. I need you. I don’t care how cheesy it sounds. I need you, Wanda. I love you so much”

“I’m so sorry, Y/N,” She winced as she turned her head to look at me, “I never meant those things I’m sorry I got insecure and so scared that I fucked us up”

I shook my head and placed my hand on her cheek.

“Everyone filled me in on how bad things have gotten with you..,” She closed her eyes and sighed, “We will talk about this when we get back home. I just need you to rest up,”

She looked at me as if she was terrified. “I can’t sleep. I can’t close my eyes, if I do you’ll be gone a-and-” her vitals started to rise and the heart monitor beeped faster than normal.

I gave her a reassuring smile before kissing each knuckle on her hand, “I’ll still be here when you wake up. I promise”

~~~~~~~

-Wanda’s POV-

I had to stay in the hospital for a few more days and take antibiotics while the doctors kept track of the condition of my wounds. Once I was cleared I was finally able to go home, with Y/N by my side.

When we got to the compound everyone was making sure I was okay before departing so me and Y/N could finally talk about the things we’ve pretty much been waiting a month to talk about.

I sat myself up against the headboard of our bed and she sat directly in front of me.

“Before you start I want to apologize for how I acted-”

“Y/N don't do that. Don’t do that to yourself, don’t take the blame,” I shake my head at her and played with my fingers, “Just...hush for a few and let me explain,”

“No, it’s my turn to go first. Last time we had to have a talk you went first, but it’s my turn this time”

I sigh and nodded my head, remembering our last talk.

“I think it’s time I finally tell you everything. From the time I was captured and how my mutation came about. I’ve kept you in the dark about it long enough”

“Y/N, you don’t have to do th-”

“Except I do,” She looked me in my eyes and shrugged while giving me a small half smile, “I know you’ve been wondering. Dad’s been wondering. Everyone has been wondering. Everyone’s story is known except mine and I don’t think that’s fair. It’s just so fucked that I was embarrassed but you deserve to know. Especially after seeing all that you did that day.”

My lips moved to talk but I’ve cut her off enough already, and I know that’s a pet peeve of hers.

(TW for next section: Death, blood, forced child experimentation, kidnapping, guns, needles)

“I uh... I was on the train with my mom. I was 10, a day after my birthday, the train ride was something I’ve always wanted to do, I told my mom that’s all I wanted, was a train ride into the countryside. The train got hijacked by a few Norwegian men. I was the only child on the train that day. I knew exactly what I was wearing. I had on a black shirt with sunflowers and denim overalls with my heelys, I loved those things so much, I skated all the way to the train station,”

Y/N took a pause and let out a shaky sigh.

“I was skating back and forth happily chanting ‘mama look at me, I taught myself a new trick’, she was so proud of me,” I could see the tears welling in her eyes, I felt like shit for allowing herself to relive this day and experience, “I bumped into a guy and as I looked up at him, he held a finger up to his lips, shushing me, before snatching me and putting his hand over my mouth and in that moment, seven other men stood up and pulled out their guns, my mom stood up to go after me but one of them held a gun to her head,”

“Y/N, you can stop if you ne-”

“I need to talk about this, Wanda” when she looked at me the tears finally fell.

“They told her if she made another move they’d blow her head right off her shoulders right there,” I moved to grab her hands and she squeezed the life out of them but I didn’t mind, “A few people had been running so the men started firing and I was kicking and fighting the guy but he... he was like a boulder that I just couldn't move, I felt so useless”

She sniffled and closed her eyes, she took a pause and I gave her the time she needed.

“Wanda, so much blood painted the seats and the floor...”

I ran my thumb over her knuckles letting her know I was here no matter what and I understood if she needed to stop.

“The men looked at me and my mom. Ezra, he had his gun against my mom’s forehead. He said ‘we take child and no one else has to die’, but my mom made an effort to get the gun from him but they were so much faster, Wanda, so much fucking faster”

I hated hearing this, I hated knowing this happened to her, I hated knowing that she lived with this every single day. I felt sick to my stomach, I wanted to clasp my hand around her mouth so I didn’t need to hear anymore, so she didn’t have to walk through this anymore. But she’s harbored it enough and she deserves my full attention and support no matter how much hearing this disturbed me.

“Everything happened in slow motion, it’s like I saw the bullets slowly come out of their chamber. I saw the look on my mom’s face before the bullets made contact. They... they blasted her like they were a firing squad and she was on death row,”

She let out the most heart-wrenching sob I’ve ever heard.

“I screamed so loud and hard my throat bled. When I heard you were caught in the crossfire while on a mission it felt like I was reliving that day.”

I tried my best to keep my tears at bay but that failed miserably.

“I saw my mom lie there with so many bullet entries it was unreal. Some shot straight through her and landed right at my feet. I could only imagine how dad felt when he had to identify her and then him not being able to find me,” she hurriedly wiped her tears and tried her best to pull herself together before continuing, “Once damn near everyone in the train car died, the men changed their clothes and forced me to get off at the next stop with them and act normal or else they’d kill me too. As appealing as it sounded, I complied . They took me to a secluded area before knocking me out with the butt of one of the guns that killed my mother. When I woke up I was strapped to a metal slate inside what I can only describe as a big test tube.”

She wiped my tears and took my hands back in hers.

“They captured nothing but children from ages maybe 5 to 12. They were in similar tubes like me. Next thing I know I hear blood-curdling screams. As I look around I see all the other children being penetrated with a bunch of needling all over their bodies. I look down and I start seeing the needles coming out of the casing of the tube towards me. I was so numb I didn’t even scream, not even when a needle pierced my eye and injected a serum right into it.”

She blinked fast and winced as if she was feeling it happen again. I felt my eyes sting and water at the description. I was getting uncomfortable at the fact she had to go through this, like people actually did this twisted shit.

“I was the only kid to survive out of the other ninety-nine that were there... because I was luckily number one hundred they continued experimenting on me. They’d inject me with different serums, leave me in rooms of different types of nerve gasses, they paralyzed me,” she hiccupped and stood up off the bed shaking her legs as if to make sure they still worked, making sure the feeling was still there, “They’d put me in different mind-altering situations. They’d beat me until my abilities started to surface and that wasn’t even until I was thirteen.”

She started pacing and I could tell she was starting to panic but she ignored my advances to calm her down.

“Once they started to show it got worse. They’d tie me up and put me in baths with dry ice, burning me. My only way to save myself was to remove a part of my subconscious and personify it to get me out. They’d lock me in vaults with deadly snakes, spiders, anything. Tie me down in a tube and remove the oxygen so I couldn’t breathe, kind of what like Wade went through. They temporarily made me blind for months on end so I wouldn’t rely on my eyesight to see my enemies and fight. They made me deaf, so I didn’t rely on my sense of hearing. I couldn’t hear my own screams. They purposely wouldn’t let me sleep so I would hallucinate, it was like experiencing death first-hand without actually dying. They tortured me up until I was 17 when I was able to kill most of them”

She finally stopped pacing and looked me dead in my eyes.

“They named me Phantom because when they forced me to hurt and kill other people the victims looked at me like they saw a ghost. Because I stalked and haunted the victims like an evil spirit. Because they fucked up my genetic code so bad it was practically gone, to where I pretty much don’t exist right now, Wanda. Because when my abilities are triggered my eyes turn a blinding white. Because I was a pawn for years to do their dirty and when I showed up on surveillance all they could see was a white cloud... like an apparition, a phantom that haunts the lonely roads...”

She sat back down with me on the bed and shook her head

“One day in my cell, the different parts of my subconscious personified themselves on their own and they helped me take them down. Seeing Ezra still alive that day triggered something horrid in me and I couldn’t turn it off. When I found my dad I felt human again. He never stopped looking for me but he came up with no luck until one day I showed up in dirty white scrubs.”

That was only three years ago. She was able to adjust to normal life some how within the span of a year, then she met me.

I hugged her tight and cried in her shoulder, I felt selfish for not even trying to understand her predicament.

“When dad helped me adjust to normal life again and the team found out about me and my abilities they accepted me and helped me use them to save people. To use them for good, to rewrite my story for a better outcome, then I met you and you were just like me and I felt whole for the first time ever”

“And I r-ruined it” I stuttered.

I picked my head up and looked at her with so much regret I felt like I was going to be sick and pass out.

“You didn’t deserve that, any of it, not from me, or them. Anyone,” I brought her body close to mine and she curled right into me, “Let me make this right”

“Wanda we’re already on the road to making things right. Yeah the things you said broke me, but we can work to mend it. I’ve probably said some things to hurt you before but we’re in this together and I don’t want to focus on mishaps. I want to focus on the now. And right now I just want to lay in your arms and love you and have you love me.”

I lay down and pull her close to me, kissing all over her face. I missed this. I don’t want to lose this ever again.

“That can be arranged,”

We were far from perfect and a lot of work had to be done on my part to fix this and gain her trust back, but I was willing to do anything for this woman that was here in my arms like a koala to a tree. I don’t care how long it took to mend us, as long as we became one again, that’s all that mattered to me.

I want her to know how sickingly in love with her I am, it’s almost annoying to some. I would accept and love all parts of her.

I would madly and truly love the being that is Y/N.

I will madly and truly love the being that is Phantom.

___________

tags- @sideeffectsofyou

AH I HOPE YOU ALL LIKED THIS!!!

This is my longest one so far and it took a while.

Please show your support and like, reblog, and comment, please!!

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xwndwmns-kept-boy-toy · 4 years

Text

Christmas Surprise

Who: @wndwmn

What: Diana gets an unexpected gift from the past.

When: Christmas

Where: The museum

Triggers: Nope!

Steve: "Owww..."

Steve groaned, one hand clutching his head and the other wrapped around his middle. He had never had a headache this bad in his life. Every time he tried to open his eyes pain lanced from his retinas to the back of his skull and when he forced them all the way open the intensity of the pain ripped a roar out of Steve's chest. It sounded like a wounded animal rather than a human being, so loud it echoed against the walls of...wherever he was.

While it had been painful as all hell forcing his eyes open had either desensitized them or overloaded the pain receptors, or something. He just knew that after he blinked a couple times the bright white faded away and he was slowly able to make out the details of where he was.

He was on a plane.

Well, shit.

The last time he'd been on a plane hadn't ended well for him. Moving slowly, because his head still hurt Steve sat up into a sitting position. Looking down at himself he frowned. Why was he naked? And covered in smears of…clay? Rubbing his hands over his face he was about to make a frustrated sound but feeling hair against his palms he froze, fingertips sliding down to his cheeks. When the hell did he grow a beard? This was…this was all wrong. Where was Diana? This seemed like the kind of thing that Diana would understand better than he would.

Like the whole…Ares thing. Which was still strange, but whatever. He had seen what Diana could do, and more than that he trusted her, so if she said it was true, then it was true.

Still disoriented from his headache and subsequent discoveries Steve wasn't paying nearly as much attention as he should've been to where he was putting his feet. Which was unfortunate, because as he pushed himself up he took a step backwards…into empty air. Surprise had him yelling as he fell, arms pinwheeling comically, and when he crashed down on a 'Captain America' mannequin that had been displaying his uniform from WWI Steve groaned, having landed on his back, all the air punched out of him.

"Owww…"

Diana: It was a late shift, but only by Diana's own doing. She had been in a foul mood all day - its catalyst remained unknown - and she couldn't bring it in herself to go home just yet. There were a few filing needs to be done that could have waited until morning, could have waited until the end of the week really, but Diana wanted to see it done.

Her eyes had begun to feel heavy, eyelids hanging low behind half mooned glasses perched upon the tip of her nose. She set them aside and rubbed her eyes. It was late. But still, she didn't necessarily want to go back to her apartment. So, she took a walk instead. Her heels clicked throughout the tiled hallways, their sounds echoing tremendously through the museum. Aside from the security guards, she was the only one inside. Or so she thought. A sound caught her attention, one heading from the WWI section of the wing. With a frown and brow set, Diana headed in that direction, eyes focused for any potential adversary.

The room remained lit and bright with light - it had been cleaned recently, which was evident by the 'wet floor signs' that remained and the smell of floor cleaner. Diana noted a figure by one of the exhibits; she clenched a fist. "I know you're there; state your name." She called out as she took a few steps forward, though remained a safe distance away just in case. She didn't have her lasso on her, nor her shield.

Steve: Lying on top of the mannequin version of Steve Rogers, Steve did a self-catalogue to check for injuries...and was surprised when he didn’t find any. That fall must’ve been fifteen feet at least, the exhibit set up in a room with high ceilings specifically to accommodate the replica of the Valkyrie, and yet, except for getting the air knocked out of him Steve was fine.

Yeah, something’s definitely off.

Laid out on the ground still Steve heard heels against tile well before the woman walked into the room, his brows furrowed as he tried to figure out what the sound was. But then he heard her voice and relief flooded him. Diana was alive, she had made it through the fight and whatever else had come after that. He had been trying not to think about how worried about her he’d been, very aware that she could protect herself, but his instinct was to keep her safe and instinct wasn’t logical.

Another groan escaped Steve as he pushed himself up into more of a sitting position with one hand, his other pushing his hair out of his face, looking a lot like a confused puppy. ”It’s me, Diana. Not sure how I got here though...wherever here is.”

Diana: It had been decades since she had heard that voice last and she had missed it every minute. She knew the waves of his inflections and the warm tones that danced with his words. She knew him by smell alone. But that didn't ease her surprise when she heard Steve's voice ring out. It was him.

Diana's brows knitted down as she rounded parts of the exhibit to reach where Steve lay upon the floor, naked and dirty. "Steve..." came her breath as she looked down upon him, surprised at what her eyes were seeing. She lowered to her knees slowly, unsure, and reached out a tentative hand. "Is it you?" Her hand just barely rested on his cheek; his beard felt foreign beneath her palm. But it suited him.

Steve: As Diana came into view Steve couldn’t help the way he smiled, wide and warm, blue eyes full of love. She was beautiful as ever. He wasn’t sure what she was wearing, but she looked amazing, but then she always did.

Diana’s touch against his cheek was electric, literally, a spark jumping between his skin and her fingertips, but he was too distracted by the woman in front of him to think of it as anything other than a bit of static shock. Reaching up he covered her hand with his own, turning his face towards her touch at the same time so that he could press a kiss to the centre of her palm. God, she smelled good, how did she always smell so good? Turning his head back towards her so that blue eyes could meet brown.

”Of course it’s me, Diana.” The look on her face didn’t match up with his memories of the last time they saw each other, neither did what she was wearing. ”Last thing I remember is shooting the bombs, then....nothing, ‘til now.” He should probably be more worried than he was, but it was difficult when he was getting to see Diana again, after being so sure that he would die on that plane.

Diana: His gaze said everything he didn't, but she could feel the affection radiate from him, even before she touched his face. The spark wasn't lost on her; it shot through her hand and up her arm, but it was quick and lasted only a second. Her body relaxed completely when he kissed her hand and held her there.

She allowed herself to smile despite her continual wave of surprise. She heard his words but she couldn't bring herself to reply, not when all she could do was pull him close into her arms. She held him there in her embrace, ignoring the clay that spread to her clothes. A sigh escaped her. "I've missed you," came her response, finally, though it was quiet and full of emotion. She could feel tears prick her shut eyes. "I've missed you so much." It didn't matter to her how he came to be here, but she was forever grateful. Her heart was forever grateful.

Steve: ”Oh, okay.” Being pulled into her arms was a bit of a surprise, they hadn’t had very much time to discover just how demonstrative they were before he climbed into that plane. ”This is nice.” That was probably stupid to say out loud. He knew that, and yet he couldn’t bring himself to care all that much. He wasn’t dead, Diana didn’t seem to be upset with him, these were all good things. He didn’t hesitate to slide his arms around her in turn, hugging her close in a grip that would be far too tight if she were a mortal woman, Steve unaware of his strength.

Diana’s words broke his heart, the tone more than anything, and needing to comfort her despite his confusion (how long could he have been gone for?) Steve scooped her up and pulled her into his lap so that he could cradle her against his chest, holding her as close as he could. ”I’m here, love, and I’m not going anywhere.” He was pretty sure his military career was over after everything they did to try and end the war.

Diana: Diana uttered a breath of a quiet laugh at his comment; this was nice. She thought she'd carry him with her forever, and she had accepted that a long time ago, but now that he was here - well, she wouldn't complain. This was nicer than anything she could have imagined.

After a moment of enjoying his arms around her, Diana sighed and pulled back enough to search his face. She touched his beard again before her eyes met his. "There's nothing else that you can remember? Nothing after the plane?" She asked; the memories of that moment flashed in her mind. Her breath hitched in her throat when she visualized the aircraft exploding in the sky. She could remember the pain she felt.

"You were dead, Steve. We all thought you were dead." Diana swallowed and turned to look at the small clock above the entryway to that part of the exhibit. "Come on, my office is not too far from here. I need to find you something to wear." She suggested as she started to remove herself from the comfort of his embrace and stand.

Steve: Steve’s brow furrowed as he thought back again. He remembered them arguing, him insisting that it had to be him because she was the one who could save the world, and she couldn’t save the world if she went up in that plane. He remembered how desperately he wanted to kiss her, but knowing they didn’t have the time for that. Remembered giving her his father’s watch and telling her that he loved her, because he hadn’t had the chance the night they had spent together and he needed her to know that she had claimed his heart for her and her alone. And then he remembered running after the plane that he knew would be the death of him.

He shook his head with a sigh. ”The last thing I remember is blowing up the plane, and then I was waking up on a different plane.” Glancing around the exhibit he looked confused as he focused on her. It wasn’t hard to figure out they were in a museum, he’d always been more intelligent than most gave him credit for, but he was confused about the exhibit they seemed to be in. ”Why did Rogers get his own exhibit? Did you get an exhibit? You should have an exhibit.” If Captain America got a whole room then Diana certainly deserved one for everything she did during the war.

He was distracted from the issue of gender inequality amongst superheroes by the news that, apparently, he had died. Well. That was disheartening. His face fell, unable to help it. He had been wondering how he survived the explosion that must have come after he shot the bombs, but it looked like the answer was: he hadn’t. Being told to follow Diana he listened, releasing her so she could stand up before he followed suit. But, mention of finding him something to wear gave the spy pause, Steve looking down at the broken mannequin parts strewn about. His fall had destroyed the mannequin, but the uniform was still intact and with the mannequin in pieces it wasn’t hard to strip down until Steve was standing there Cap’s uniform in hand holding it up as a solution to the clothes problem. ”I don’t think Rogers would mind.” They were nearly the same size (height wise at least, no one had muscles like Rogers), it’d probably fit.

Diana: Diana could only nod at Steve's further explanation; it was fine that he couldn't remember what happened. She was used to that - Bucky didn't remember much of her from the war, but she didn't hold that against him. She had to do the same with Steve, otherwise she'd be a hypocrite. At his question, Diana had to smile softly. "I couldn't tell you. I'll bring your suggestion to the other board members, though." She offered, her smile spreading just slightly.

She lifted a brow at his suggestion and gave the uniform a once over. "It might fit. You're lucky I can just ask Rogers for a replacement, otherwise I'd have to say no to you wearing it." She nodded and turned just slightly so she could give him a little privacy. "We have a few minutes before the guard comes down this hallway."

Steve: Steve managed a smirk as he gave the uniform a once over. ”Oh, I wouldn’t want to keep it. This thing just screams ‘I’m important, shoot me.’” And that wasn’t bad for people like Diana and Rogers, it was their job to be in the spotlight, to keep the enemy’s attention so that people like Steve could sneak around unnoticed and get things done that would otherwise be impossible. Luckily, he wasn’t currently being shot at, so he didn’t have any qualms with tugging the uniform on (having enough respect for Rogers to get as much as the clay off of him as he could first so that he didn’t dirty the uniform more than he had to).

Once it was on Steve was surprised at how well it fit, it wasn’t perfect, because Rogers was bulkier than he was, but it didn’t look awful, or at least he hoped not. ”How do I look?” Putting his hands on his hips he struck the classic ‘Captain America’ pose Rogers had on all the recruitment posters, a playful smirk on his lips.

Diana: His question indicated that it was okay for Diana to fully look him over, which she did, and smiled at the sight of him in the suit. It didn't look half bad, definitely better than anyone else would be able to wear. She tilted her head slightly and gave him a once over, "I think you look distinguished. Too bad it's not a perfect fit."

Diana then gestured with a hand and started in the direction of her office. "Come on. I have a lot that we need to discuss. And don't worry about the mess. I'll have it taken care of."

Steve: Steve chuckled, hands dropping to hang loosely at his sides. ”I think that’s the first time anyone’s called me distinguished.” He’d been called distinguished while he was undercover, but that didn’t count, not really.

Following after her Steve looked around the museum as they walked through it. Some of it was what he expected to see, the same kind of things he’d seen at museums in the past, but some things...some things were just really strange. He was starting to get that feeling in the pit of his stomach he got when he knew he was about to hear news he didn’t like.

Diana: Diana's smile could only grow. A familiar warmth grew in her, an affection there that she hadn't felt in many, many years. There were people that she adored, cared for, needed, but not like this. Never like this.

She opened the office door for him when they reached it and locked it behind them. She suddenly became overly aware of the memories that littered her office - in her desk and on the shelves surrounding. Diana wrung her hands together before she turned to face him, her smile soft but wary. "I think you should sit down for this."

Steve: As much as Steve was looking around the museum he was spending just as much time looking back at Diana. She was beautiful, but that was not surprising, she’d claimed the title of ‘most beautiful woman he’d ever seen’ the moment he opened his eyes on that beach and there’d been no risk of her losing it. But more than her beauty he could see that time had passed since they’d seen each other last. She hadn’t aged a day, but it was in the way she held herself, the way she moved, and just the general air about her. She’d lived a life that he hadn’t been there for, and he hated that he’d missed sharing those moments with her, but the world had been at stake and he’d done what he had to do so that she could save it.

Stepping into her office he looked around, fascinated by all the pictures and mementos. Before he really realised it he was walking around the edge of the office, looking at the pictures and things. He had just gotten to her desk when she suggested he sit, but then he was distracted by the picture he saw. ”Hey, I remember this.” He picked up the picture, confused a little by the weight of it, but he was more distracted by the content of picture. ”This was a good day.” It was after they had liberated the town, but before the Nazi’s had gassed it. The same day they had spent their single night together.

Setting the photo back down blue eyes were warm as they looked up at Diana, Steve circling around her desk to approach and stop in front of her, his hands lifting to cup her face. ”What if I don’t want to sit?” What if he didn’t want to know? He knew he had to know, whatever it was it was going to be important, he could tell by the look on her face. But that same look told him that once he knew everything things were going to start happening and they might not get another quiet moment.

Diana: The photo that Steve picked up was her most cherished possession and she inwardly tensed, but the realization that the person she'd miss if the photo were to shatter was the one who was holding it. Her shoulders relaxed then and she offered him a smile. She nodded in agreement. "It was one of my favorites."

His hands on her face were warm; she had to resist the urge to close her eyes at his touch. She gave him a sympathetic look, her brows furrowed slightly and smile at her lips. "You don't have to sit if you don't want to. It's heavily implied that you should anyway." Her voice was gentle as she lifted her hands to rest over Steve's.

Steve: Steve couldn’t help the way he laughed, the sound soft. Of course she wouldn’t let him avoid what needed to be done. It was one of the things he loved about her, her determination and resilience. Sighing, a smile on his lips he leaned down, eyes slipping closed, so that his forehead rested against hers for a long moment.

”Alright, Diana, I’ll sit.” Baby blues fluttered open and then he was stroking her cheeks with his thumbs before he released her, hands slipping away as he moved to sit in the closest chair, eyes never leaving her.

Diana: Everything went still when his forehead rested against hers. With his eyes closed and hers followed suit, the room got quiet. It felt as if the world stopped. She stopped breathing in that moment, though his voice roused her from whatever trance he had put on her.

She swallowed but nodded. Immediately she missed his touch even though he was a mere couple of feet away. Diana leaned against the edge of the desk with her hands clasped together in front of her. She gave him a smile, a silent thanks; she thought that this might be better.

"One hundred years," she came out with. "That's how long's it's been..."

Steve: He had wanted one last quiet moment with her, and he was glad that he had taken that moment when finally told him just when he was.

’One hundred years’

For a long time he just stared at her, her words echoing in his ears. His mind was having difficulty wrapping around the concept that a century had gone by while he was dead. Finally he managed words. ”A century?” As he spoke all the lights in the room flickered, Steve not realising that his emotional state was affecting them. ”I....how?!”** Another flicker, this one a bit faster than the last to match the way his voice raised in pitch as he pushed down the mild feeling of panic. If a century went by then...then everyone he knew was dead. Except for Diana, obviously.

Suddenly glad he had listened to her and was sitting down Steve slumped back against the chair, the look on his face a little dazed.

Diana: Diana could feel the panic grow within him as if it were palpable. She could also feel the energy that danced quickly through the air; it set her hairs on end. It felt like static, but it was strong. He had the strength to utter a few words, but she couldn't answer his questions. She didn't know how. She know how he had managed to come back after that long. She didn't know how he was alive.

Diana pushed off the desk and lowered to kneel in front of Steve. She took his hands in hers. "Steve..." she swallowed. "I do not know how you're here. But it's a miracle nonetheless." She didn't want to feel selfish about this, but her heart soared.

Steve: Steve didn’t see Diana approaching or kneeling in front of him, too distracted by the sheer amount of time he’d been dead. He did feel her hands cover his and that drew his gaze, the man trying to focus on what she was saying. A miracle....well, that was a word for it.

While he might not be sure how he felt about being back from the dead after a century, he did know how he felt about being back with Diana, and his expression softened as their eyes met. He had no idea what he was supposed to do in this new century, but there was one thing he knew hadn’t changed since his day, and he had been wanting to kiss Diana since before he got on that damn plane.

Freeing one hand from hers he lifted it and slid it into her hair, drawing he up as he leaned in. He moved slowly, giving her time to stop him, and when she didn’t he fit his lips to hers in a tender kiss. He just barely got the taste of her on his lips when tiny lightning bolts sparked between their lips, Steve jerking back with a yelp, more from the surprise of the strength of the shock than it actually hurting.

”Christ! Is that new?”** He didn’t remember that happening the last time they kissed.

Diana: She smiled when he lifted a hand to the side of her head; she did miss the feeling of his hand in her hair. While it was a surprise, it was wasn't completely unwarranted. It had been a long time since either had seen the other. She still loved him immensely.

The kiss left much to be desired as the pair was interrupted by the shock that sparked between their lips. Diana pressed her fingertips to her mouth as she sat back and frowned; the pain didn't linger, but it was definitely a confusing moment for her. She hadn't exactly been with anyone since Steve, and she also knew her powers had strengthened since then. Could it be her?

"I don't know. That is not the first time I have felt that same energy since finding you."

Steve: Steve’s brow furrowed as she pointed out that she’d felt the same energy before. His mind was reeling, going over all the facts available to him. 1) He’d been dead for a century, but was now, somehow, alive 2) he had woken up naked and covered in clay 3) he had fallen twenty feet onto a hard floor and wasn’t even sore 4) he was, apparently, sparking electricity left and right.

It was the clay that was sticking with him, Steve reaching out to rub his thumb against the shoulder of Diana’s shirt where some of the clay that had been on him had smeared. ”Diana...how did you say you were born?” He remembered her telling him a story on that tiny boat they’d taken off her island, but he needed her to say the words, because if he said them they’d sound crazy.

Diana: Diana wasn't entirely sure where Steve was going with that, but she recounted the story to him: of how her mother created her out of clay and prayed to Zeus that he would give her a real baby. He had given her her wish, of course, but with a stipulation.

After she reiterated the story to him, she frowned and pursed her lips. "I don't know how that would be possible..." Diana admitted, unsure as to how a new form would have the same personality as the original Steve Trevor.

Steve: At some point during her story Steve had slipped off his chair to sit next to her on the ground, his back resting against the front of her desk. Yeah, the story was just about how he remembered her telling it to him, and it sounded just as crazy as he remembered it sounding the first time. Clearly, it must have happened because Diana was here and she was by no means a normal woman, but that didn’t mean it didn’t sound any less crazy.

Looking over at her when she finished he laughed dryly, and then he was reaching out to slip his hand into hers, lacing their fingers together. ”Diana, how is any of this possible?” He was just a man (until proven otherwise he refused to think of himself as anything else), matters such as these were far beyond his scope of understanding. ”But I’m here after...everything, and I fell out of that plane and walked away without a scratch and, apparently, I’m throwing sparks left and right. I can’t explain that any other way.”

Diana: The power that hummed around Steve was undeniable. She’d felt it earlier on, when she’d first found him sprawled out on the floor, but it hadn’t alerted any flags. Not until now. She was surprised that he took this so well, after all things considering, but human men tended to surprise her. They were full of will and hope; it made her decision to be the world’s protector all the more easier. It was worth it. They were worth it.

When Steve interlaced their fingers and held her hand close to him, Diana smiled. She’d missed this. She’d missed the honesty behind his eyes, missed the understanding of his lips and the loyalty that came with the planes of his face. She’d missed his golden halo and the roughness of his palms against hers. Whatever was going on with him, whatever was happening, she’d help him to figure it out. They’d do it, together. Diana gave his hand a gentle squeeze. She didn’t want it explained; she was just grateful that he was here again. “I... Maybe. There are still many things that we do not understand about the world. I suppose it is possible...”

She shook her head. “You’re here now... That’s all that matters.”

Steve: If Steve was being one-hundred percent honest with himself he would admit that he wasn’t taking this nearly as well as he was projecting outwardly, but it wouldn’t do either of them any good if he were to panic and deny what was going on. He could do that on the inside all he wanted, but ‘keep calm and carry on’ was a motto he had taken to heart, despite not being English. Focusing on the facts helped to keep him steady, he wasn’t the type of man to go off on fantastic flights of fancy, never having believed in gods and goddesses and all of that until he met Diana.

The squeeze of Diana’s hand was returned, Steve’s smile growing a little, his thumb stroking along hers. Being a spy had given him a particular skillset and one of those skills was knowing when someone wanted to drop a subject. It wasn’t as if figuring out the whys and wherefores tonight would change anything that had already happened, so Steve let it go. They’d return to it later if the need arose.

For a long moment they sat together, Steve leaning against Diana’s shoulder, their clasped hands resting against his bent knee. Eventually he had to speak because there was one problem that they couldn’t put off for very long. He actually began to chuckle before he laughed, the sound a little tired. ”So, I guess I’m out of a job.” He was assuming they won the war, because Diana was alive and well and she would have never let the war go on for a hundred years, and if they won the war there probably wasn’t a need for spies like him. ”And a house.” Even if they were in London he doubted his flat would be vacant.

Diana: Even though she didn't put too much precedence on figuring out how or why Steve was alive again, Diana was worried. There were many ways that someone could return to the world of the living - many held dark origins. Many dealt with devils and blood pacts and rituals and sacrifice. She didn't want Steve wrapped up anything like that. She didn't want him to have to owe anyone anything.

Diana turned her attention to Steve; they were inches apart. She could count the vivid blues that were his eyes. She'd have to remember them for later, just in case she'd have to miss them. She hoped not. "You can stay with me, but, and I'm sorry to have to do this," Diana stood then as she explained and reached into a drawer to procure her lasso. "I know you won't hold this against me." She needed to be sure. He looked like him, sounded like him, felt like him. But there were imposters everywhere. Diana didn't want her heart broken again.

Steve: The apology had his eyebrows arching slightly, not sure what was coming next, but when Diana moved to stand he released her hand so that he could stand up all the way. When the lasso came out it all made sense and he couldn’t help but grimace slightly, he remembered how much that thing hurt, and even when you told the truth it still wasn’t pleasant, but she was right, he didn’t hold it against her.

Pushing himself to his feet he moved to stand in front of her, and much like he did the last time he had to prove to her he was telling the truth about a promise he reached out, took the end of the lasso, and wrapped it several times around his wrist. He wasn’t going to force her to wrap him up in the lasso, wouldn’t put her through that. He would rather do it to himself.

As the golden lasso wrapped around his wrist it burned Steve gritting his teeth as he pushed the pain to the back of his mind. ”My name is Captain Steve Trevor. Pilot. American Expeditionary Forces. Serial number 8121941.” The heat of the lasso lessened since he was telling the truth making it slightly more bearable, but he didn’t remove lasso from around his wrist. ”Ask me anything you want, Diana.”

Diana: Diana didn't want to do it, but it was necessary for her safety. It was the smartest thing to do, the most sensible, and she could see om his face that Steve understood the gesture. She watched silently as he wrapped the lasso around himself, not waiting for her to even say anything. She supposed that he did know the drill by now.

That would have been a satisfying enough answer for her, but he had to urge further. Diana pressed her lips together and stepped close to him, her dark eyes searching his own gaze. "Before you boarded that plane, do you remember what you told me? When you handed me your father's watch. Do you remember?"

Steve: Blue eyes never left Diana for a moment as she stepped forwards. He wanted to reach for her, wanted to pull her close, bury his face in her hair, breathe her in, and forget that the rest of the world existed. Unfortunately, he knew he couldn’t do that, right now they were focusing on something more important that his wants.

When he told Diana to ask him anything he wasn’t expecting the question he was asked, and he couldn’t help the way his entire face softened, expression turning warm and full of fierce adoration. Taking a step forwards so that there was no space between them he reached up with his free hand and cradled her cheek in his palm. ”I love you.” The burning of the lasso around his wrist was forgotten, the world falling away from them as he stared into her eyes, marvelling at the woman who had claimed him, heart and soul, a century ago and carried him with her ever since. Staring into her eyes...it felt like coming home.

”I love you, Diana.”

Diana: When she heard it, she felt relief flood her. His willingness to prove his truth spoke volumes, but those three words broke something in her. She had missed him terribly through those years; not once did she falter, no matter how many times she wished she had. A century had passed and yet she still held a love for him that rivaled none else, and even as he stood before her now, that love remained unchanged.

At his confirmation, Diana unwound the lasso from his wrist with a swift move of her hand and pulled him in eagerly into her arms. She embraced him, warmly, with her eyes closed and an expression of pure repose adorned her face. He smelled just as she remembered, his warmth just the same as before. Part of her refused to let him go. “I love you, too,” she whispered as her hands clung to the old uniform he donned.

Steve: Steve went easily when he was pulled into Diana’s arms, his own wrapping around her in turn, and he was finally able to to bury his face in her thick, soft curls like he’d been wanting to since he saw her again. One hand was buried in her hair near his face, the other splayed against her back and he’d be supremely happy never letting go.

”I’m sorry I had to leave you.” He murmured the words through her hair into her ear, his eyes slipping closed. He wasn’t sorry that he chose to go on the plane, that had been the right decision, he couldn’t let those bombs anywhere near civilians. His only regret was that saving innocent lives had required him to leave her. It was something he would have never done if the choice were up to him. ”I’ll do my best not to do that again.” He couldn’t promise her that he never would leave her again, because if he were put in that same scenario he’d make the same decision. Millions of lives won out over the life of one man, even if that one man was him.

Diana: There was a worry that this wouldn't last. That this was nothing but an illusion of some kind; for now, she supposed, she could enjoy it. Not unless there was some imminent danger, but for the moment, while Steve was there with her, she'd enjoy it.

Diana shook her head and pulled back to look over Steve's face. She lifted a hand to cup one of his cheeks, her expression reassuring. "Don't be sorry. You had to do your duty, I understand that." It pained her, deeply, but she had been awfully proud of him when he did it. She still was. "Hopefully you won't get the chance to. At least, not when it comes to airplanes. I can fly," she finished, a smile breaking through towards the end.

Steve: Tilting his face towards her hand there was a smile on his lips. That was another thing he loved about her, that she understood his need to put duty above personal desire. If he'd had a choice of course he would've stayed with her, but he'd had no choice.

Being informed that she could fly had his lips curling into a smile, and then a grin as he shook his head. "Of course you can." Lifting his hand he cradled her cheek in his palm, leaning forwards so that he could brush the tip of his nose against hers, their lips ghosting against one another, but never quite touching. "May I?" After the last time he figured it couldn't hurt to ask before he attempted another kiss.

Diana: Diana's hand dropped from his cheek to his shoulder; the lass had been placed upon the desk. She adored this man with every fiber of her being. She had tried so many times not to, to forget him and move on with her life, but she always found her way back to him. And now he was here. She couldn't have asked for more.

The smallest chuckle escaped her at his retort. It was baffling to those not accustomed to seeing individuals with special abilities. Diana, flying? It didn't sound real. But to her it was real. It was her life. He'd have to learn it. Her breath stilled when she felt his lips brush just slightly against her own lips. She nodded, "yes."

Steve: Given permission to kiss her there was a smile on Steve's lips as he did just that, hand sliding back into her hair as he closed the last of the distance between them to press his lips against hers. This time there was no spark of lightning, only their natural chemistry, Steve's fingers curling in dark hair as he his eyes slid shut, his lips moving tenderly against hers.

Diana: It had been too long since she’d last kissed someone properly — kissed someone not because they were a friend or family, not because she just cared deeply for them or felt a strong urge of platonic love. She hadn’t kissed someone for just the love of it, for the affection and the tenderness. She’d missed this. Diana returned the gesture happily, though slowly and purposefully. She wanted to savor it, to take her time now that they had it. She didn’t want to waste a moment with him.

Steve: Steve may have been dead for a hundred years, but it didn’t feel that way. It felt like they were picking up right where they left off, only this time they had the time to enjoy one another. For the moment he didn’t attempt to deepen the kiss, he didn’t want to get carried away here in her office, she deserved so much more than that.

By the time their lips parted he was drunk on the taste of her, humming as he pressed his cheek to hers. ”Do you have more work to do tonight?” It was soft, but not quite a whisper, Steve brushing a kiss against the soft skin under her ear before pressing forwards to breathe her in. At that moment he wanted nothing more than to go home with Diana so that he could hold her in his arms and make the most of this second chance they’d been given.

Diana: The kiss remained shallow, sweet, affectionate; she remembered the curve of his lips exceptionally well, but she was pleased that he hadn’t engaged her further. A work place was not the right setting for gallivanting, of any kind. Besides — a desk was not nearly as comfortable as a mattress.

Diana leaned into him and closed her eyes at the small kisses and touches he gave her along her skin; she was content. Blissfully content, something which she hadn’t felt in a long time. “I just have one more email to reply to,” she explained and pulled back so she could search his expression, “and then I am done for the day. It should take me no more than a minute.” Reluctantly, Diana removed her arms from around Steve and stepped back around the desk to wake up her laptop and maximize the email screen.

It took her little time to respond to the inquiry about a fundraiser and shut the machine down. She closed the laptop’s lid and slipped it into a brown leather messenger bag before she slung that over her shoulder. Her work keys jingled when she slipped her cell phone into her purse. She paused, then, as she was getting ready to leave for the day, to just stop and look at Steve. There was nothing but an adoration present in her gaze.

Steve: ”Alright.” He didn’t know what she meant by ‘email’, some sort of letter, maybe? But whatever it was he would wait, he’d wait until the end of the world for Diana Prince. He let her go as she drew away, but before she moved completely out of his arms he took her by the arm loosely, hand sliding down her forearm until he could catch her fingers, raising them to his lips so that he could brush a kiss over her knuckles before letting her go completely.

As she went to her desk Steve busied himself with looking at the various items on display on her shelves, focusing mainly on the photos, seeing what she had been up to since 1918. The sound of her fingers moving over keys reminded him vaguely of a typewriter, and it was something he wanted to ask about, but tomorrow. Tonight was for them, not for the million questions he’d inevitably have once he let himself think about the fact that a century had gone by.

The sound of keys and a bag being packed had Steve turning towards Diana, and as their eyes met his were full of affection and adoration. Moving to her side they didn’t need words, Steve stroking her cheek and tucking a stray curl behind her ear, his smile warm. He moved away then, but only so that he could open the door for her, waiting for her to pass before he followed after her, the door closing with a soft snick behind them.

#⚡️{ interaction } ⊳#ℂ𝕙𝕣𝕚𝕤𝕥𝕞𝕒𝕤 𝕊𝕦𝕣𝕡𝕣𝕚𝕤𝕖 #⚡️{ Diana } ⊳ 𝕨𝕖 𝕨𝕖𝕣𝕖 𝕞𝕒𝕕𝕖 𝕗𝕠𝕣 𝕠𝕟𝕖 𝕒𝕟𝕠𝕥𝕙𝕖𝕣; 𝕓𝕠𝕣𝕟 𝕠𝕗 𝕔𝕝𝕒𝕪 𝕒𝕟𝕕 𝕝𝕚𝕘𝕙𝕥𝕟𝕚𝕟𝕘 #wndwmn

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