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ground-riot-jack · 3 years

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Number 1 | K. Bakugou |

idk what this is man, an origin story maybe?? idk bakugou is an asshole and reader is a badass

The ratings where in, this is it, the big moment. After years of hard work and dedication, you’re finally about to find out if you made it the number Number 1 Hero Spot. You walk out on the stage with the other Top 5 heroes, one being your long term boyfriend, Bakugou. You’d been dating since highschool and worked at the same agency that he created.

“And for our number 2 Hero, we have...Ground Zero! Number 1... Angel! Thank you heroes for protecting and sacrificing your lives for us!” The announcer practically yelled at the large crowd of people.

You couldn’t believe it. You did it. You were the number 1 hero in all of Japan and your boyfriend was right behind you. The lights of the stage felt like power surging through your body. Your large white wings fluttered in excitement. You took your place at the number one podium and felt warm tears of joy stream down your face, you feel pata on your back and can hear congratulations swirling around but you can barely stand up straight.

Soon someone hands you a microphone, the crowd quieting down.

“Thank you all so much, I will work hard every single day until my body gives up to make sure this great nation is protected. I’ve worked very hard to get here so thank you all for recognizing my hard work and determination. I wanna thank Ground Zero, for being the best partner and for helping me get where I am. It won’t be easy but I will take this number 1 spot and wear it with pride. Thank you, i love you all” You spill out happily, you turn and grab onto Katsuki, hugging him and congratulating him on Number 2. You’d both climbed so high and so quickly since you’re UA days, it’s made you happy that you’ve come so far with the person you love most.

Bakugou however, didn’t look happy. It was extremely rare to see a smile on his face, but at the very least you’d expected his bored face. But now, he looked angry. He looked like he was ready to level the city withy he scowl pressed on his face.

“babe, what’s wrong? you good?” You grab his large bicep, getting him to look at you. His bright red eyes snap to yours and you feel locked in with how much animosity they hold.

“I’m ready to go home” He spits out before turning and walking back to the car you’d both arrived in.

You took a few more pictures with fans before following your grumpy boyfriend. As soon as you sat in the car, you could feel the tension thick in the air.

“Ok seriously babe, what the hell is wrong? We got the top spots, that’s amazing!” You turn towards him as the driver head back to your place.

“It’s nothing” He managed to say through his teeth with his are locked together with how tight he’s clenching his jaw.

“It’s something, you’re getting ready to blow this car up”

“I said it’s nothing, Angel” He speaks, the name oozing in malice and anger. Suddenly it clicked.

“You’re jealous that I got the number one spot while you got number two. jesus christ katsuki, could you be any more pessimistic. Why can’t you just be happy for me that i’ve reached a goal i’ve been trying to get my whole life? Number two is in no way shape or form bad.” You huff and fall back against the seat, you watch Bakugou clench and unclench his fists while staring out the window.

“I have to be number one and be better than All Might” He growls quietly, you knew it was a somewhat sensitive subject, but you couldn’t believe your ears.

“All might? Katsuki, you’re 23 years old, you can’t truly expect to be better than All Might right now? All might wasn’t even this good at this age yet, you’re way ahead of schedule. You can’t be happy for me because you wanna be better at 22 years old than All Might was in his prime? You’re delusional katsuki.”

“I HAVE TO BE NUMBER ONE”

“THATS FINE BUT WHY CANT YOU BE HAPPY THAT TOUR GIRLFRIEND IS NUMBER ONE?”

“BECAUSE IT SHOULD BE ME”

“so you think I don’t deserve this katsuki? You think what? I haven’t worked hard enough? I’m nor strong enough? I’m not good enough? WHAT IS IT KATSUKI? Why don’t I deserve to be number one? Why do you think your were unfairly judged?”

You both stared at each other in silence for a while, anger boiling into the atmosphere. You understood the only thing that drove bakugou in highschool was his need to be number one. You were both adults now, and you were in love with each other. You’d hoped that you’d made a big enough impact on bakugou that your life and love together would be enough of a motivator to be great, the way it was with you.

You felt that car pull into your large home, and immediately jumped out, racing up to your shared bedroom. You got out of your hero costume and into leggings and a tank top. You took off all your makeup and picked the confetti out of your wings. You looked up as Bakugou walked in the room.

“Im not sorry that I’m not settling for number two, I never will and you know it, but i am sorry for yelling at you and the way I acted.” Katsuki grumbled while looking at the floor. Usually, his awkward and hesitant apologies warmed your heart and made you gush at how cute your angry boyfriend was, but now you find yourself staying angry.

“That’s not an apology katsuki. You refuse to be happy for me, even though you promised you would be. You refuse to even acknowledge how much work I put into this to be number one. I am THE youngest Hero to hit number one and you can’t even say good job babe. Instead you get angry and jealous and mean because it wasn’t you. Never mind the fact that you jumped from 10 to 2 which is THE biggest jump anyone’s seen in years bakugou. You won’t even let yourself be happy at what you’ve done, because you’re too busy being jealous” You poke his chest, finally standing in front of him.

“It’s not a bad thing to want to be the best” He crosses his arms, getting defensive.

“Of course not babe, I want you to be the best too. So why don’t you want me to be the best?”

“It’s not that, it’s-“

“It’s what Katsuki?”

“I made a promise to myself-”

“YOU MADE A PROMISE TO ME KATSUKI. You gave me this fucking promise ring and told me that you you’re gonna support me no matter what. That we were gonna work hard to get to where we need to go and we were gonna do it together. You promised me you’d be by my side. That’s the difference between us babe. You need to be number one for yourself, I need to be number one for us. You’ve forgotten that” You wipe your tears and move around the tall man in your way. It hurt that Katsuki couldn’t see this was bigger than his highschool days. This was your life together. You hadn’t spoken to All Might or even Midoriya in years, so why was it so hard for him to accept you as a permanent part of his life.

“Baby, i’m sorry I just. I get one track minded and I was so hopeful that this was finally the day. I needed so bad to be number one-“

“THIS IS NO LONGER ABOUT BEING NUMBER ONE KATSUKI, THIS IS ABOUT HOW YOU CANT SEE THAT YOURE TREATING ME LIKE A SIDE CHARACTER. I AM YOUR GIRLFRIEND!! For fucks sake katsuki, we live, work, sleep, eat do and do everything together, so the fact that I’m not even one of the reasons you go out and do what you do hurts because this” You pause and gestured to everything around you. “This is the reason I wake up every morning, you are the reason I fight crime and your reason is, a childhood rivalry. You’re am adult now, you’re supposed to be friends with midoriya and all might and you’re supposed to be over this whole thing. This isn’t supposed to be the thing that drives you. I’m not saying I have to be too of the list but it would be nice to be on the list” You sigh and look at your boyfriend. You knew this wasn’t healthy to yell at each other like this, but you needed him to understand where you’re coming from.

“Baby, Of course you’re my reason for waking up and being a hero, I would do anything to protect you, it’s just I always pictured me at Number 1 with my agency and you and a family. I have a need, a primal urge to be number one and that’s never going to change. Doesn’t mean i don’t love your dumbass”

“Well I’m number one Katsuki, and I earned the hell out of it. I worked my ass off day and night for weeks and months and years so that I could have this. And to see you pout and complain and look me in my face and tell me you don’t think I deserve this spot hurts more than some cute little apology where you call me dumbass lovingly. So i’ll ask you again, why don’t you think I deserve this spot? What makes you better?” You squinted your eyes at the tall man and clench your jaw.

“Im physically stronger-“ You interrupt your boyfriend by grabbing his arm and kicking his legs out from under him, using your wings to flip him over in his back, pinning him down.

“You’re so close minded katsuki, that you don’t even know what i’ve. been doing for the past 8 months. I an the number one hero you think i didn’t train to be stronger than everyone around me?” You ask, hurt laced in your voice.

“Fine, you deserve this spot. You’re the best.”

“You dont meant that, I’m gonna make you fucking mean it Katsuki. One day you’re gonna see me and i’m gonna be the best and you’re gonna be in awe of my power and then you’ll finally see that i deserve this.” You push off of him and stand up your wings tucking close to your body.

“Just-give me a week babe. I promise I’ll make it up to you and I’ll show you I am happy for you, it’s just difficult being let down like this. I’m a sore loser and you know it.” Bakugou grabs your shoulder and pulls you close to his chest.

“You haven’t even said you’re proud of me yet. or that you love me. or even good job katsuki. You don’t believe i’m your heart that i deserve this do you?” You look at him, heart in your throat.

“I believe I should be number one. Every time.” Katsuki mutters in your hair like it was a compliment. You push him back, rage filling your body.

“You’re fucked up katsuki. I’m fucking leaving” You spit, throwing on a jacket and shoes, heading towards your front door.

“Where the hell are you going?!” Bakugou snarls as you move past him.

“Katsuki, I love you with every fiber of my soul, but right now looking at your face makes me wanna throw you across town and beat the shit out of you. I’ll be back tomorrow maybe” You mumble the last part, not really sure how long you wanna be away from your hot headed boyfriend.

“you can’t just fucking leave y/n, how do you expect to be number one of you can’t even stay and win a fight against your boyfriend.” Katsuki let’s out a dry laugh, causing you to turn away from your front door.

You lunge at Katsuki, ready to punch him until he understands you’re the number one hero. You two roll around fighting and spewing things typically reserved for villains. Bakugou pins you down on the floor, his knee on your chest and his hands holding both your wrists beside your head. You close your eyes and focus all your energy into your chest, a faint ball of white light glows from your heart. Ktsuki looks at it with realization before the energy is expelled from you and your boyfriend is sent flying across the living room.

“You did not just use Power Surge on me.” He growls. wiping the sweat from his brow.

“I did, and i’m fucking leaving and your not gonna say shit or so help me god katsuki, i will shoot a beam of light so bright and hot that you wake up blind, burnt and fucking single.” You use your wings to send you flying straight to your front door, you look back at your confused boyfriend once more before taking to the sky.

Bakugou began the cleaning process, shocked and confused. Why didn’t you understand he wants to be happy for you, he truly does, but his pride won’t let him get away with not winning. He decided to let you fly off to calm down for the night, opting to call and talk to Kirishima. The two friends ended up talking for a bit longer than expected, bakugou trying to get kiri on his side, not his girlfriends. It didn’t work however, Kirishima understood that bakugou would let his emotions cloud his mind, even when it came to you. By the end of the conversation, bakugou was almost has heated as he was while fighting you. He concluded the best option was to head to his agency and train for the night.

He arrived and decided to do some things around the office before heading to the training and workout wing of his large building. While going thru last minute files, there’s a knock on his door.

“Ground Zero, i wasn’t expecting you to be here so late.” A stranger smiles in Bakugou face as he opens his office door, his secretary smiling sheepishly.

“Who the hell are you?” He cocks his head and tries to figure it out before he’s told, one of those weird habits he’s picked up being a hero.

“My apologies. I’m Niko Takeyama, I work for the Hero Commission. How would you like to be the number one hero by this time next month.”

#bnha imagines #bnha x reader #mha fanfiction #bakugou smut #bakugou imagine #katsuki bakugo imagine #mha bakugou #bakugou x reader

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jonspurpleskirt · 3 years

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Sharing Comfort

A/N: This is for @archivalpride. Prompt was “Sharing Clothes” and “Pre-Canon” so I wrote a fluffy piece to celebrate the quiet moments of trust. 1.7k in word length. No warnings apply.

___

Jon did not make friends fast. Most people he found to be too intimidating, boring or exhausting and not many knew what to do with his sudden info dumps and sharp comments that shot out of his mouth seemingly at random.

He'd been alone in Research for a long while because of it and happily so. Things had changed when Tim had joined the Institute, though. Tim had come into the library and sat down opposite Jon with a thunder cloud hanging over his head and pain in his dark eyes. He'd been quiet and snappy in a fake cheerful way that screamed undealt trauma. At least to Jon, who seemed to be the only one to feel the vibes of "Leave me alone" and "I'm grieving" that Tim gave off in a constant stream.

Having Tim as his desk partner was an intense experience despite the way they only ever nodded to each other in greeting at first. But it was also intriguing. A mystery. Jon loved mysteries.

The instances he had ever willingly initiated a conversation with a stranger could be counted on one hand. Which marked the day he tapped Tims shoulder - after roughly two months of co-habiting - to tactfully ask him what he was groaning about as a very special day indeed. They steamrolled into friendship from there, both personalities clashing in the best ways possible.

Jon pulled Tim into nerve wracking research expeditions, Tim flirted them out of being arrested a few times, they went out for drinks and karaoke and movies and stayed late nights to crack nutty cases of supernatural bullshit together.

This went on for months. A nice, comfortable new routine. Jon wasn't alone anymore. And Tim broke out of whatever had pulled him down so much, becoming more cheerful and flirty by the day. Which didn't matter to Jon because Tim would always come to him the most, would always seek out to partner up with Jon and would defend his prickly personality to his dying breath.

And then Sasha joined them. She came from Artefact Storage, which made her a prime target for every curious researcher in a five mile radius. Tim and Jon included. Alright maybe they were the worst of the bunch.

Although Jon only thought of himself as a partner in crime in this one. He had been dragged along by Tim, after all. Sure in the end he had been the one to ask the most questions, but that wouldn't have been the case if he had just been left alone to be antisocial in front of his laptop.

Sasha and Tim, much to Jons chargin, hit it off within the first few seconds. And ever since then their cozy two-someness had turned into a group effort. With specially leverage put on the word "effort".

"Morning Jon!"

Jon let out a deep, rumbly hum, voice not up to the task of supporting words this late in the- He glanced at the little clock at the bottom of his screen. Ah... early in the morning.

With a laugh that was far too cheerful however you would describe the current hour, Sasha sat down next to him. She leaned in to look at what he was working. He leaned away to get her out of his personal bubble.

Her legs brushed his and the rustling drew his gaze downward. She wore a thick wool skirt, long enough not to go against the dress code. It was a somewhat dull navy blue and fell down in enticing waves around her crossed legs.

It looked very soft and comfortable. Jon itched to touch it. Instead he rubbed against the stiff fabric of his own cream coloured dress pants.

"Would you mind?" He snapped at her.

"No. You spelled 'aboriginal' wrong."

"Thank you for your insight. Don't you have anywhere else to be?"

"Don't you?" She shot back, light and quick as though they were just bantering and not fighting over the right to sit at this table.

Sasha huffed at his glare and slid a cup of something steaming over to him. "You keep staying so late that I can buy you a drink at the asscrack of dawn and be sure you're still here to consume it hot. I'm not usually one to judge anyone's sleep schedule. But I'm judging your sleep schedule."

"And yours is any better?" Jon muttered, taking the offering and peeking inside. Black tea with a bit of cream and hopefully enough sugar to rot his teeth out of his mouth. He needed both the coffein and the sweet energy source.

"I'm getting at least two more hours of sleep than you do on a daily basis, so I'm good."

"Tim would have both of our heads if he knew."

Sasha put her hand on the table and stretched out her pinky. "I swear secrecy if you do."

With a snort Jon linked their pinkies. "I'll hold you to that."

So... Maybe Sasha wasn't that bad. She was a little aggressive in her befriending techniques, Jon mused. At least he hoped the early morning chats and cups of tea and coffee were that and not an elaborate plan to get rid of him via slow poisoning. But she was about as curious as Tim and Jon and her skills with computers were very happily exploited by the both of them. So Jon eventually had to admit that she was actually a very nice addition to the group.

Not that he could have ever said no to their friendship. Tim and Sasha put together were a maelstorm of affection, sucking Jon in with a force he had no chance to defend against. And before he knew it they had successfully gotten him accostumed to friday nights at the pub and saturday mornings in their flats, smashed together on a couch or a bed or a mattress depending on who had had the misfortune of playing host that week.

Jon hadn't been this comfortable since Georgie. And that wasn't only the booze talking. It was one of those nights where they ended up leaving the pub early to lounge around Sashas massive sofa instead. Jons head was swimming within a blissful haze of tipsiness.

He was slouching over one end of the couch, head tilted just so that he could watch his two friends bicker. The words didn't really register, but the noise was nice and their expressions were funny.

Without his conscious saying so, his gaze slid down to Sashas leg area. She wore a very eye catching, fluttery red skirt this time around and the way the warm glow of the ceiling lamp was reflected in the material was mesmerizing.

"Oh Jonny boy, don't you know staring like that is rude?" Tim half-joked as he noticed.

Sasha slapped him on the shoulder. "Shush you there's like zero sexual longing in his gaze, Tim. You don't need to go all protective big brother on me. He just really likes my skirts."

"They look comfy." Jon muttered, sinking deeper into the couch.

"Awww. Jon. Jon my love. My friend. My buddy." Tim scooted over to him, nearly face planting on the floor in his eagerness to slide into Jons side. "Is this jealousy I hear?"

"No. Did you just degrade me from lover to lowest friendship tier?"

"Oh I beg to differ." Tim sang, ignoring the question and making Jon scowl harder.

An arm got thrown over his shoulder and Jon was tugged into Tims side, relaxing into the tight hold against his will.

"You know if you didn't make it a sport to buy the most uncomfortable clothing ever, you wouldn't need to glare at Sashas fashion choices all the time. Making other people think things about your intensions."

"Fuck other people."

Jon waited until the surprised laughter of his two friends ebbed down to speak again. "I wanna be comfortable too..."

"Say no more. Sasha to the rescue."

Tim and Jon both whined as she hopped off and darted away into her bedroom. She hadn't been part of the cuddle pile, but her presence was still dearly missed. Thankfully not for long because a few minutes later she reappeared with a long, purple skirt.

"Here you go mister. Go on try it on."

Trading places with her Jon didn't hesitate to shug his trousers off and slip the skirt on. Tim wolf whistled behind him and Jon dutifully showed him a finger. The yelp he heard shortly after told him that Sasha must have taken more direct approach to disciplining Tim.

"Bad boy. I picked that colour for a reason."

Jon flushed at the reminder that Tim and Sasha knew. That they knew and accepted him and even went out of their way to make him comfortable.

"I may not be allowed to touch, but I can still appreciate beauty when I see it."

"Do you need glasses, Tim?" Jon couldn't help but ask while he settled back down.

It was his turn to be slapped on the shoulder. "Nu-uh! No self depricating jokes in my household!"

"Yes ma'am." He scooted over to Sashas side, marveling at the slide of the soft material against his legs. "Anyway. Touching yes. But no sex, only cuddles."

Sasha laughed in delight as she pulled him closer so he could stretch out, the two of them nearly shoving Tim off the couch.

"Wait, wait, wait Jon you're definitely not comfortable yet!"

"Hm?" He frowned at the renewed shifting, jeez everyone was being so squirmy today.

"Dress shirt? Really? Wait a sec."

Tim ended up finding a truly attrocious night shirt he had stored in one of Sashas cupboards. It was rainbow coloured, but at least it was made of a soft cotton and about a size too big on Jon.

"Awww Jon you're adorable!"

"Timothy Stoker don't you dare take a photo."

"Fine, fine. But I will remember this day forever."

It turned out that he didn't need to. The next time they were over at Sashas Jon asked to borrow their clothes again and the next time after, and the next time after that, too. It kind of escalated from there, clothes mixed together until it was hard to remember who owned what.

And that was perfect. Because the most comfortable clothes were always the ones that belonged to his friends.

#tma #archivalpride #my writing #jontimsasha #jonathan sims #tim stoker #sasha james #week one #prompt: sharing clothes #hope i'm doing this right #can be read as friendship #or platonic polycule #i honestly have no clue where to draw the line #fanfic

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jpegjade · 4 years

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Baby Delivery Day! - Spencer

WELCOME TO DAD!SPENCER TIME!

Thank you to the anon who made me think about Spencer being a dad! But I’ve decided that any time I think about Spencer being a father, I’m going to write about it. I guess you could call that a series? Idk man. It’ll be sporadic though so there’s no schedule for it. So this won’t be the last of dad!Spencer

Warnings: Swearing. Lots and lots of swearing in the beginning. Also fluff. Lots and lots of cuddly fluff and happy dad!Spencer.

_________

Twins. Twins. Twins. Spencer kept saying it to himself but it never registered. Twins… “Oh fuck, I’m having twins.”

“Last time I checked, you weren’t carrying two extra people inside of you so shut the fuck up.” You said, gripping his hand hard. It was baby day and all you could do was yell at him because you were in pain. He wasn’t phased by it because each time you said something, you immediately followed it up with, “Oh god I’m so sorry baby. I promise I’m not doing it on purpose.” And that was immediately followed by more groaning in pain.

“Okay, breathe. Your contractions are getting close enough to get an epidural, which will significantly help. Just don’t think about the statistical probability of significant nerve damage with the injection of the-”

“Spencer goddamn Reid, I swear to god. This isn’t the time to be fucking smart, you smartass.” You said. “Oh fuck, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

He kissed your hand, staying by your side. The nurse came in to check on your vitals and see how you were feeling. She stayed for a moment, looking over at Spencer’s eager face. Of course, he was eager. He was going to be a dad. He couldn’t stop smiling, which pissed you off because you were in the worst pain of your life. He finally got to fulfill his dream of being a father to his own kids. Not a godfather, not an unrelated uncle, a dad.

For months, the two of you had been talking about having a kid. A single kid. One. Uno. But when you got to the ultrasound that day, you found out you were having two and you passed out. He had never been so scared for your health and excited for kids. When you came to, he wouldn’t stop talking about how there were two little Reids waiting to come into his life, waiting to change his life forever.

“Baby, please climb in with me. It hurts so badly.” You said, trying to stay calm. Unlike Spencer, you were scared out of your mind. You didn’t know how to interact with kids, let alone raise them, and now you were terrified that you were going to fuck them up from birth.

Spencer climbed in the hospital bed, although half of him was barely on it. It was so small for 4 people to lay in. Four people, thought Spencer. He put his arm around your shoulders and pulled you into him.

“In a couple hours, we’re going to be parents…” He said, almost to himself. It was quiet in the room when you weren’t groaning in pain from a contraction. He put on classical music on his phone and put it next to your stomach.

“Spencer if you don’t turn that shit off, I will kick you out of the room and deliver these demons on my own.” You threatened him. Classical music always made them move around and the last thing you wanted was for the little ones to move anywhere.

“Okay, sorry.” He grinned, kissing the top of your head. You fell into another silence, interrupted by screaming.

“Go. Get. The. Nurse.” You said through gritted teeth. Spencer slid his arm from behind you and almost ran into the door with excitement. It was finally time to get these babies out into the world, literally.

Spencer was supportive through the whole process. Hours of pushing and a scare later, you had two beautiful girls. The genders were a surprise until this moment, when you held the second born in your arms. She almost didn’t make it due to a complication but the doctors were amazing at figuring it out.

“Oh my god…” Spencer said, holding his older daughter in his arms. “Baby, you did it…” He whispered. He was so scared of waking them up that he refused to speak louder than a whisper. As the two of you laid in the hospital bed together, holding your daughters, you couldn’t help but get choked up.

“Spence… What did we do?” You said, a mix of emotions finally showing themselves. You didn’t know what you were feeling but you knew it was a mix of things rushing at you all at once, not all of them good.

The nurse came in exactly when Spencer was about to answer. She came to get the girls so they could be placed with the rest of the babies for a little while. He was disappointed but excited because that meant he could show the team his daughters as they slept in their small beds.

“We created a miracle.” He said, taking you in his arms. He was so happy that the pregnancy stage was over. You were much nicer when you weren’t in extreme amounts of pain. But he was really glad it was over because he missed being close to you. When you were carrying the girls, you seemed so far away. Now, he could hold you close like before.

“What if I fuck them up? What if I passed something down? What if…” You trailed off, not able to look at him.

“Hmm?” He said, curious about what you had to say next. He had something prepared already but he waited for you to finish first.

“What if I’m bad at this? I know you’ll be an amazing dad but… What if I’m not good enough?” You finally looked up at him to see his face relaxed as if the idea didn’t phase him. Probably because it didn’t. There was something annoying but comforting in the fact that he wasn’t bothered by your worries.

“Right now, the only way you could fail is by forgetting I’m right here with you. Who knows what kind of parents we’re going to be. My dad walked out on us. I had to take care of my mom, even now. Your parents fell out of love with each other and you suffered because of it. We weren’t led by prime examples in our lives so our parental compass isn’t great. But we know what not to do. We know the effects of negative reinforcement and we have the chance to make things right by taking it one step at a time. So that’s what we’re going to do. Take it one day at a time.” He said, never breaking eye contact with you.

“Okay.” Was all you could say before he brought you in for a sweet kiss.

“Hey y/n?” He said, an eager look on his face. “Can I show the team the girls?”

“Only if someone stays with me while you’re gone. I like Penelope. She’s adorable and I think she loves me.” You said, watching Spencer slow roll off the bed. You groaned because you were still sore from hurling two beautiful angels from your body.

“I’ll go get her.” Spencer kissed you one more time, a longer kiss, before he nearly skipped out of the room.

You couldn’t help but smile to yourself. Yawning, you didn’t realize how tired you really were. You closed your eyes for just a couple seconds. Penelope walked in to find you sleeping soundly so she sat in the chair next to your bed and started building a castle out of all the jello she requested from the Nurses’ Station. She also added some of your favorite show’s mini figurines.

Meanwhile, Spencer was hugging everyone else in the waiting room. They all congratulated him, so excited that they got to see the two newest additions to his family.

“There they are, the ones without names.” He said, pointing to the two beds pushed next to each other. The other beds had some space between them but it was like the nurses knew these two had a little bit more of a bond with each other.

“Pretty boy has twins!” Morgan said, slapping him on the shoulder.

Spencer had kept so much of the pregnancy a secret because everything was touch and go for a while. Once he was sure everything was permanent, he was able to tell them things. He kept this part a secret the whole time though because it seemed like a great surprise.

“I’m proud of you, Spence,” JJ said, hugging Spencer again. She had been detrimental in keeping you and Spencer sane during this whole process.

Hotch shed a tear. An actual tear and a smile. He knew how long and hard Spencer had fought to keep his hope in love and the world alive and now, Spencer looked like he was glowing like never before.

For the next 20 minutes, everyone was gathered in the hallway as they watched the girls sleep and turn over. The older daughter smiled in her sleep and Spencer almost broke down. When it was time to feed them, they all said goodbye to Spencer and he returned to your room.

Walking in, the girls were already there but you were curled up and gently snoring. One of the beds was empty but when he looked at Penelope, tears were running down her face as she smiled. Out of everyone, she was the most excited about the two of you having kids.

“We were supposed to ask together but I guess I’ll have to do it alone,” Spencer said, picking up the younger born. The way he could tell them apart was a little black freckle that the younger one had on her left cheek while the older daughter had it on her nose, like a piercing.

“Are you about to ask me to be the godmother? Because I will start sobbing.” Penelope said. Her eyes twinkled with more than tears.

“I was but if you’re going to cry then I’ll wait until a more appropriate time than when you’re holding the second light of my life.” He said, looking down at his daughter.

“Yes, yes, yes.” She said, smiling. “Who’s my baby daddy?” She said, just curious about the godfather.

“Morgan.” Spencer said, his daughter’s tiny hand grabbing onto his finger. He was open and closing her tiny hand because he was just fascinated and she grabbed on and wouldn’t let go. Slowly she opened her eyes and he smiled at her.

“Oh so my baby daddy is my babies’ daddy.” Penelope said, in a complete joke.

“Penelope, meet Alexandria Maeve Reid.” You said, barely opening your eyes.

Spencer’s breath hitched in his throat. “What?” He was barely able to get out.

You and Spencer had played around with names before but he never told you about the middle name thing. Fresh tears came to his eyes at the thought of it.

“And Spencer has Chloe Gideon Reid.” You were more exhausted than ever. “I thought about it and Spencer left the options up to me so I just went with it. I hope that’s okay, baby.”

You barely had the strength to stay awake any longer so you went back to sleep as soon as Spencer climbed into bed with you, Chloe in his arms.

“Hi Chloe…” He said. Almost on queue, she opened her eyes and stared at him with a little smile spreading on her face before she closed her eyes again. He looked over at Alexandria, who was opening and closing her hands. “Hi baby Alexandria…” He whispered.

__________

Dad!Spencer makes me so angry at CM bc he would be the best dad.

Tags:

@winchestertardis

@ancailinaerach

#spencer reid imagine #spencer reid fluff #spencer reid x reader #spencer reid #criminal minds #spencer x reader

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writingithink · 3 years

Text

Improbable Multiversal Transcending Temporal Spacetime Event Pairing: Metacrisis Tenth Doctor/Rose Tyler Rated: T Word Count: 7,101 Summary: The best way to show someone you care is to blow up their job ... right? Notes: I'm back! And it's not a Tangled Timelines update (sorry!) But it is something? I've had this in my WIPs for awHILE now, and when I was cleaning my studio the other night I found a planning page for it in a random tote bag and was like ... oh yeah. And the ending just came to me and I love it when that happens. Hopefully there will be another chapter up for Tangled Timelines soon, though!

As always, infinite thanks to my wonderful beta, @hey-there-juliet who is fine with me randomly sending her fics at all hours and with no warning XP

All mistakes are mine, as always.

<<READ IT ON AO3>>

If the other him in the other universe had taken the time to imagine their human life together in a parallel universe, the Doctor doubted he would have pictured this. His imagination, when it came to Rose Tyler, was always quite whimsical. Happiness had made him impractical, really. Because despite all of the drawbacks, all of the reasons he currently loathed himself, the Doctor knew every single reason why the other truly felt like this was the best possible option.

But maybe it wasn’t.

Sometimes, despite it not occurring too often, he was wrong.

They had spent five and a half hours on the beach at Bad Wolf Bay.

(I create myself.)

She had been so upset; said that after everything they’d went through, everything she did to get back, the other him owed her a proper goodbye. She had stopped speaking to him when he told her that, actually, he would never give her a proper goodbye.

And she didn’t let him explain why. Now that he finally could.

Now it had been 57 days since she’d last spoken to him. Since he’d gotten more than a brief glimpse of her with his own eyes. That he’d spent piecing together a picture of what her life had been like here, without him. Such a short time, really, now that it was over (almost over), but yet also some of the worst moments of his entire existence.

It seemed fair that the multiverse would demand just that extra sequence of pain, considering everything he could potentially get in return. What another version of himself could only hope for, bitterly gambling eternities, following their timeline through all of it’s complicated swirls and turns, names weaving around each other, stamping themselves on the structure of creation.

Forever isn’t something that ends.

(How long are you going to stay with me?)

Quite the opposite, actually. And he knew, eventually, she would remember that. Knew it, but didn’t feel it.

The Doctor finally understood what all of the human writers meant about falling in love. Not just the terrifying sensation of the unstoppable freefall, but also the immense pain of crashing into the immovable object at the end of the journey.

They had sat on opposite ends of a Zeppelin. He had gone back to the Tyler Manor with Jackie, and Rose had gone back to her flat. Hoping to see her, talk to her, he had immediately joined Torchwood (once they agreed to his very detailed, highly specific, entirely ironclad contract). Their paths rarely crossed, and when they did it was just tiny, insubstantial moments.

A flash of her at the far end of a hall. Her name in a report (a lot of reports). Snatches of her voice, there one moment and gone the next.

It all made everything hurt so much more, somehow, having her so close but yet further than he could have possibly imagined.

But yet …

His imagination, when it came to Rose Tyler, was still quite whimsical. So when he tried to think of the bigger picture, waxing poetic, alone on his office couch, the Doctor tried to look at the last few years as the impact, and this as the aftershock. Still, philosophical jaunts weren’t exactly a solution to his problem. A temporary solution was moving his office even further away, so that’s what he did.

Plus, he found it kind of fitting, commandeering the inside of Big Ben. UNIT may have it in the prime universe, but in this universe he had the fancy landmark office. Well, office-slash-home (without Rose Tyler, a proper house with doors and things was absolutely unthinkable). Not that it was just about having a private laugh. The gears soothed him, the sound of ticking helped the gnawing emptiness that had filled his mind ever since the TARDIS dematerialized without him in it. The Doctor had thought it was kind of fitting - the closest he could possibly be right now to time.

Not that he wasn’t spending every possible spare moment working on the baby TARDIS, just a tiny piece of coral still, currently sitting in the extended electro-percussive environment chamber. He wondered if, in three years (his best-possible projected timetable), when the new TARDIS would be ready for flight, she would still not be speaking to him.

Incidentally, the emergence of that thought and the start of his supposed ‘self-isolation’ coincided to an alarming degree for how coincidental the two really were. The fact of the matter was, he was busy. Tons of experiments to run, alien equipment to identify, classify (and more often than not remove from Torchwood entirely), a baby TARDIS to tend to, and a backlog of Rose’s mission reports to hack into made spending slightly over three weeks in his tower easy.

The problem was the fact that during that time the Doctor avoided sleeping, barely remembered to eat, and existed on overly sugared tea alone. Not sleeping didn’t put the demons at bay, but at least when he was awake he wasn’t forced to confront the man he never wanted to remember being.

It had been 57 days since Rose Tyler had last spoken to him, and the Doctor detonated a bomb in the abandoned annex Torchwood had scheduled to be demolished and rebuilt.

Then the counter reset to zero.

“What do you think you’re doing?!” she yelled, barging into the top floor lab where he had been checking the readings on the EEPEC.

Everything that he wanted to say to her, and the Doctor was struck mute.

“Whatever plans you think you have, however good of an idea it is, for the good of the planet or, or the galaxy or what, you don’t just go blowing up buildings without a word to anyone! Do you know that everyone else was too scared to come up here and have a word with you, because that highly confidential ridiculous contract you drew up made its way through the gossips and isn’t so classified anymore. Now no one wants to go toe to toe with the man who ‘speaks for the planet’,” Rose growled through the air quotes. “So tell me, Doctor, what genius reason you’ve got for blowing up the Records Annex?”

A slow smile spread across his face.

“It worked.”

“What?”

“Remember ‘run’?” he asked, bouncing away from the baby TARDIS and circling her, picking up his new sonic screwdriver as he did and deadlock sealing the only door off the floor.

“Run?” she frowned as he circled back.

“Run,” he whispered in her ear as he passed, running up a small set of stairs to flip a giant switch that activated the clock-lights outside of their automated timer. Likely no one noticed outside with the sun still out, but it lit up the lab. “Henrik’s basement, Nestene Consciousness, shop window dummies, you and me. How did that night end?” he asked, with a manic grin as he skidded to a stop in front of her.

“Oh, that ‘run’,” Rose breathed, trying to fight back a smile. “You blew up my job.”

“I blew up your job.”

She huffed, blowing her bangs out of her eyes, and crossed her arms. His shoulders fell, exhaustion pressing down onto each and every bone of his new, much more fragile body.

“I just want to talk,” he told her, only a moment away from begging.

“Alright then. Talk.”

Everything he wanted to say to her, and all of it felt disjointed in his overtired mind. Yet she was here now, and if she left he didn’t have a new idea for getting her back again. So he talked.

“I’m sorry. That I made this choice for you, even if it was technically a different me who did it. I’m sorry that this is the best option, the safest option. I’m sorry I never got the chance to explain everything to you before. But I am never going to say goodbye to you, Rose. Never. And I know that the power of words doesn’t translate as well for you, the science of psycho-kinetic-telepathic influence on the elements of creation. But there are some things I can never risk saying aloud. There are some beings that exist, at least in our original universe, that could easily- … still, no matter what universe we’re in, I’m never going to say it. Forever, Rose Tyler. It’s longer than you can comprehend. An eternal silence stretching infinitely ahead, timelines swirling in every direction. This one is ours, if you’ll- if you could just- if you could see in twenty-odd dimensions and focused on individual temporal waveforms, the quantum reality of specific-”

“Doctor!” she shouted when his legs gave out, immediately grabbing hold of him, joining him on the floor.

“I’m fine,” he insisted, but when he moved to get back up she easily held him down. Rose gently manipulated his face, giving him a basic medical check. He couldn’t help but smile a little at how much she had learned while they were away, only to then frown at how hard he imagined it all must have been for her. Floundering, he tried to make a joke. “So, I’m still the Doctor?”

Which went ignored.

“You look like a wreck,” she told him, and it wasn’t new information. The Doctor now made much more frequent trips to the restroom and was well aware of how pale he was, of the dark circles under his bloodshot eyes. He had at least been making a disjointed effort to shave, which was another activity that had increased with his meta crisis, and admittedly it had slipped his mind for a couple days.

“It’s not easy, doing this without you,” he admitted. “But if you need more time, I want you to take it. I really am alright. There’s just so much I need to tell you, now that I can.”

“What do you mean, ‘now that you can’?”

“Different universe, firm walls in between. I don’t have to worry about using the wrong words at the wrong time and having cosmic consequences … for a lot of things, not all things. With our timeline in a different dimension and reality back as it should be, at least for the moment, I can tell you all sorts of things. Though the most important one, the one I’m never going to miss an opportunity to say, is that I love you, Rose Tyler. Forever.”

“I love you, too,” she sighed, caressing his cheek for a moment before helping him up. “But I’m still mad at you. Now you need sleep.”

“But I’m not done talking,” the Doctor complained, dragging his feet as she led him over to the sofa in the corner.

“We’ll talk more after you’ve gotten some rest, okay? I promise.”

“Thank you,” he sighed, more horizontal than he remembered being just a moment ago. Something soft and warm ensconced his body. He hadn’t realized how cold he had been until just then.

Another breath and black oblivion overtook him. Peaceful until it suddenly very much wasn’t.

A shockwave. A rift in time and space. A breached void. A crack in reality. A big red button. No more. Howling, howling, howling.

“Wake up!”

His eyes snapped open.

He didn’t know where he was. Nothing felt right; not the air, not time, not even his own body. The Doctor tried to do a quick systems check, and the results were all wrong. His hand flew to his chest, where only one heart was beating.

A choking scream echoed through the space, which seemed to be tick tick ticking, and he didn’t realize that it was him who shouted until soothing hands were brushing through his hair. Vision focusing, he saw Rose Tyler kneeling next to him, or at least it was something that looked like Rose Tyler. She felt too cool. Or maybe he was too warm.

“Are you real?” he asked, hoping that she wouldn’t lie to him.

Just one heart working, and it was beating too fast, refusing to slow down. The air was too thick, he couldn’t breathe.

“Yeah.” A sad smile. “I’m real.”

The Doctor didn’t know if he believed her, closing his eyes so that he wouldn’t have to see the moment she inevitably vanished. “I’m dying,” he told the being-who-might-be-Rose as he shuddered and collapsed back onto some sort of sofa.

“You’re fine,” she lied, but it was a lie she seemed to believe.

“Only got one heart beating,” he admitted, trying to get his breathing under control as his malfunctioning body began to sweat. The room ticked away, and he wondered if all of this was about to explode, if he should be running, if he even could run. His legs felt like lead. So did his arms. The air was too thick, dragging him down.

“That’s-”

The Doctor shut his eyes tighter, tears escaping that he hadn’t even realized were there. She must have vanished, just like he knew she would. And if she was never real to begin with, why did it have to hurt so much for her to go?

A weight rested on top of him, and he would never forget the feel of her. He vaguely wondered what it meant for him, to be having tactile hallucinations. Olfactory hallucinations. Even the buzz of time that had never left her skin after she took in the vortex was present.

“You’ve still got two beating,” Rose whispered as his arms wrapped around her in a tight hold that didn’t feel nearly strong enough to keep her. He wasn’t strong enough to keep her.

Her heart beat steadily over where his right heart had failed.

“I’m scared,” the Doctor admitted, eyes still closed though it was oddly easier to breathe.

“I’ve got you.”

“Please be real,” he whimpered, even as his mind grew foggier.

She said something, but he didn’t know what. Everything was fading away, darkness becoming darker, becoming void.

Nothing.

The Doctor awoke alone on the couch in his office. According to his time sense, he had slept for eighteen hours and twenty-one minutes. He felt better than he had in weeks, but also so much worse. He grabbed his pillow and screamed into it.

“What’s wrong now?”

The pillow dropped from his hands and his eyes locked with Rose’s as she raced up the slight stair onto the platform that separated his primary workspace from the rest of the top floor.

“What?” His voice cracked.

Rose Tyler sat next to him on the couch, hand immediately resting on his forehead, primitively gauging his temperature. The Doctor cleared his throat before trying again.

“Rose, what are you doing here? Not that I’m not glad, I’m so very, very glad you’ve come.” Her hand dropped away and he was able to get a good look at her, dressed in a pair of his boxers and one of his shirts (Jackie had bought him a ridiculous amount of clothes before he left the manor, all of which he sent out to be cleaned). He swallowed audibly. “W-why are you wearing my clothes?”

“‘M locked in here. Door’s deadlock sealed.”

Flashes of memories began to speed through him. Attaching a re-calibrated Tziklian implosion grenade to a newly-repaired retroreflective Clishtahrr drone. Obsessively trying to circumvent his vision in order to peer at his own timeline, making himself sick. A contained rift event in the lower levels of the tower that made him feel like he had looked into the untempered schism again.

(Run, run, run!)

“I’m sorry. I don’t … I’ll just …”

He pushed himself up onto unsteady legs, found his sonic screwdriver and unsealed the door. And he wished he hadn’t trapped her with him, even if he was starting to remember why (inky black terror crawling up his spine, wrong universe, wrong universe, wrong universe).

“Do you remember what happened yesterday?” she asked, following him as he went to check the TARDIS on autopilot, looking as if she was worried he would collapse (again).

“It’s coming back to me,” the Doctor admitted. Still had a good four hours to go before the shatterfry process would be complete. He straightened his shoulders, trying to stand tall as he turned to face her. “Things got a little, uhm, unpleasant. I’ll do better.”

“Unpleasant,” Rose scoffed. “I’m pretty sure you had a bleedin’ breakdown!”

“It’s been a difficult regeneration,” he deflected, turning away, leaving the platform and making a beeline to the tiny kitchenette tucked off to the side. Tea. He just needed more tea.

“So, this how it’s gonna be, then? All that stuff about wanting to talk, but now you’re just done?”

He nearly spilled the kettle with the speed of his turn, brows furrowed and mouth falling open. “What? Of course I want to talk!” the Doctor exclaimed. “Just, er, what did I say? Before?”

Memory was still a bit of a blur. Successful energy funnel for the TARDIS’ growth tank. Vodka tasting different in a universe without potatoes. Reports saying: Correct universe. Wrong time - past. No contact.

“You don’t remember?”

“I said it was coming back to me, it’s just not coming in the right order.” he sighed, refocusing on the tea.

“Well, what’s the last thing that you vividly remember?” Rose asked, moving around him, easily finding mugs and sugar and milk.

“Thirteen days ago, creating a temporal disruption chrono-field manipulator. Needed to siphon rift energy for our TARDIS. She needs a very specific growth environment.”

“Thirteen days?! Wait, siphoning the-” She leaned against the tiny countertop and covered her face with her hands. The only sound for a few moments was of the electric kettle quickly boiling the water. “Our TARDIS?”

“If you want,” the Doctor muttered, lifting a hand, wanting to touch her, but then thinking better of it. He clenched his fist as it dropped to his side.

Rose groaned as she turned back to him. “Of course I want that, you daft alien git! But you don’t exactly make things easy, do ya? I spent years getting back to you, and then suddenly there’s two of you and one of you abandons me just like I was always afraid of, but one of you stays and I’m expected to be able to process any of it? And then for weeks it’s an effort just to give myself space, knowing that wherever I go you’re so close, part of me wondering why I’m even trying to stay away when all I wanted for ages was to be back with you. Then suddenly you’re gone! I still know where you are, but there isn’t a chance that I’d actually run into you. And I still don’t know what to feel, but coming here yesterday, seeing you … I don’t think I’ve ever seen you look so broken.” There were tears in her eyes. His nails dug into his palms with the effort it took not to wrap his arms around her, to wipe them away. “I can’t help but feel like it’s my fault.”

“It’s not. It’s my own fault. You haven’t done a single thing wrong,” he assured her.

“That’s not true and you know it,” she tried to laugh, but it came out watery. “I’ve been an absolute cow. And I still haven’t answered your question. You’d said some things about words being a type of science, and that you could say things here that you couldn’t in the other universe. Like you were paranoid, under surveillance or something? I think you tried to describe how your time sense stuff works, but you almost fainted.”

“Fifty-seven days without you and that’s what I was talking about?” The Doctor grimaced.

The kettle clicked off.

“If it makes you feel better, it was kinda romantic. The stuff about not saying goodbye and forever and blowing up my job.”

“Blowing up your what?!”

“That’s why I had to come here. You blew up the old Records Annex.”

“Riiiiight. That explains the drone bomb. It’s not like they weren’t going to blow it up anyway. Didn’t I help?”

Rose rolled her eyes before moving to fix both their teas. “We’ll get into that later. Right now I don’t even want to talk about us. I wanna know about you, what you’ve been doing these past two months. Because I didn’t even stop to think what this all must be like for you.”

Cuppa in hand, the Doctor led her back to the couch as he tried to think of how best to explain something that he barely understood himself.

“I was created in a two-way human-Time Lord instant biological meta crisis. Hundreds of years as one being, then suddenly two. Exact same mind, almost the exact same body, but different enough that I can barely comprehend existing in it. If you remember, the first forty-eight hours of the regeneration cycle are complicated and dangerous. Barely a few hours into mine I was dropped outside of the prime universe that all Gallifreyans are meant to exist in, cut off from all telepathic contact as the walls of reality continued to sway, slowly falling back into place. It’s been … an adjustment. Sometimes things don’t feel real, even when they are. Sometimes things feel incredibly real, even when they aren’t.”

“You had a nightmare,” Rose told him, placing a hand on his shoulder, thumb rubbing soothing circles through his layers. “I woke you up, tried to help. You didn’t think I was real. You thought you were dying, because you only had one heart.”

He tried to smile, and the action felt painful. “Sounds about right.”

“I’m sorry. If I hadn’t been so selfish-”

“There’s nothing for you to apologize for. I want you to put yourself first.”

“But I can’t stand seeing you in pain like this. What can I do to help?” she asked, a desperation in her eyes that he couldn’t bear.

“You’re already helping,” the Doctor sighed, finally giving in and leaning into her touch, lying his head on her shoulder. It was the closest he’d felt to time since they’d been left on that bloody beach.

Memories were still racing through his head. Energy coils radiating artron energy into a centrifuge. The smell of burnt flesh against the remains of a Bverni navigational system. Reports saying: Correct universe. Wrong time - future. No contact.

“The other Doctor said that you needed me.”

He laughed, but there was no humor in it.

“Yes, because he needs you. He also said that I was dangerous. I am. He is. We are. But you already knew that. It’s easy, you know, to yell at yourself. Not often that there’s actually a separate you there to yell at. I destroyed the Daleks, but we’d already done that before we met. In fact, so did you. The other me was lashing out, knowing what he would have to do but not wanting to do it.”

“That’s another thing,” Rose said, moving to face him, dislodging his head, “you said that us being here, in this universe, was the best, safest option. What was that about?”

“Something’s coming. Has come. Ended and began. There’s a massive paradox surrounding me in the other universe. Incredibly dangerous, potentially catastrophic. All I know is that it has something to do with a woman named River Song who claims to be my wife.”

“Your wife?!”

“I said claims. And she did seem to be telling the truth, besides the fact that what she was saying was entirely preposterous. My soul is entirely bound to yours.” The Doctor took her hand and squeezed it. “So I think I have an idea of the kind of man I’ll have to become in order to keep the universe intact.”

“What’s that?”

“A liar. If she is going to believe that I could possibly join myself to someone else, someone who isn’t you, I’m going to have to lie. I’m going to have to forget. I’m going to have to lie so well and for so long that even I believe the fiction I’ve created for myself.”

He wondered what the other him in the other universe would think, then, whenever he caught a rare glimpse at their timeline surrounded in gold, bound with Rose’s for all eternity. What kind of explanation he would craft. The Doctor shuddered.

“But that sounds horrible!” she cried.

“It’s the sacrifice he’s making for the sake of the universe. My timeline is dangerous and someone, something is tampering with it. You and I made one tiny little paradox and it almost destroyed everything. This one is circular, might be able to be maintained, but the scale of it, Rose. And who knows if it will even work. River seems great and all, at least I hope so, but I don’t think she has much of a handle on time travel. That, or she’s a manipulative psychopath. Suppose that’s a surprise for the other me to find out.”

Rose sniffled and he pulled her into a hug.

“He’s going to be all alone.” The words were muffled into his shoulder, his shirt growing damp with her tears. He cringed and tried to think rationally, that of course she would feel this way, that it had nothing to do with how she felt about him him. But then again, maybe it did.

“He won’t be alone. He’ll find someone. I always do, eventually.”

“B-but I-”

“We’ll figure it out. How to get you back there, once it’s safe,” he whispered into the top of her head. Maybe that would be it- what she needed this him for. And if so, it would be enough. It would have to be enough.

“Really?”

The Doctor nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

“So it’s not- you really weren’t abandoning me here?” Rose lifted her head, eyes brimming with a hope that had been missing before.

“Never.” The word felt as if it was torn out of his very being.

She cupped his cheek, stubble beginning to smooth out into the beginnings of a beard. He really needed to shave.

“I thought you said to never say never ever?”

“That was before.”

It occurred to him that he had tea, so he took a sip - it had gone cold.

“Oh, right, all the, uhm, psychic-kinetic-telepathy science stuff.”

He opened his mouth to correct her - she was very close, though - but was interrupted by the ringing of the giant clock. It was heavily muffled by the sound proofing adjustments he had made while setting up the office, but still audible enough.

“It’s eight now, yeah?” Rose asked, even as she moved away.

“Yes.”

She walked over to his desk, where the Doctor now noticed a pile of her folded clothes sat. He frowned when she brought them over to him.

“Do you think you could sonic these clean for me? I’m gonna quick hop into your decontamination shower.”

“Th- there’s a proper shower, it’s two floors down. First left, third right, door marked ‘Security Level Alpha’.”

“What, really?”

“Didn’t want random lab techs using it. Has a retina scan. It’ll let you in.”

Rose laughed, ruffled his hair, and gave him a kiss on the cheek before disappearing to get ready for work. The whole thing left him confused. He went through his list again, checking and double checking to make sure that this all was real . It was, just as it had been all morning.

More memories. Recalibrating the tower’s new sub-basement weapon’s vault. Burnt toast and no more jam left. Reports saying: Correct universe. Wrong time - future. Contact made.

It wasn’t fair that she had spent almost an entire day with him yet he had missed most of it. Still, he sonicked her clothes, as well as his tea. Finished his cuppa, and then had a second before Rose came back from her shower.

“Why’s there no one around?”

“Dangerous radiation leak,” the Doctor shrugged. “I fixed it almost as soon as it happened, but apparently there’s ‘procedures’. How’d you get in?”

She bit her lip, fighting a smile. “Mighta shot a few of your doors,” Rose admitted, picking up an electro-pulse blaster off of a nearby cart. Non-lethal on organic matter. Very effective on fancy doors. “Nobody told me anything about a radiation leak, though.”

“Classified radiation leak.”

“And why’s that?” she scowled, hands on her hips.

“Everything to do with time travel is classified to this office. Bethany is not being very cooperative about putting you down as a liaison-whatever. Please believe me, I wasn’t trying to keep anything a secret.”

“Oh.” Rose glanced over at the EEPEC, absently biting her thumbnail.

The Doctor didn’t know what she was thinking, didn’t know if he should ask. After a moment she disappeared into the loo to change, promising to be back in a tick.

It was a funny multiverse, really, that his reunion with Rose Tyler would be such a stilted thing. That it would be about him and her, but not this him. Acknowledged with a few questions after his health, sure, but that was just polite. She’d always been compassionate, caring for others. Rose didn’t see him as the Doctor. Not the proper one. Sure, she used his name, but it would be easier for her to do that this time around.

He looked just like him.

He was him.

But he wasn’t.

Memories were still coming. Adjustments to Torchwood’s alien tech retrieval protocols. Nutrition shots. Reports reading: Correct universe. Wrong time - past. Contact made.

He went through the list again. Still real.

Unless it wasn’t.

Unless he wasn’t.

What would have stopped the other Doctor from knocking him out and uploading him into a matrix? Giving him a half-life with a programmed Rose Tyler?

The air here felt wrong.

(Wrong universe. Wrong universe. Wrong universe.)

“Doctor!”

(Daleks exploding. “What have you done?!”)

Pressure against his hands. Why was it so dark?

The Doctor opened his eyes to see Rose in front of him, pulling his fingers away from his palms. Oh. He was bleeding. Hadn’t even noticed.

“Sorry, sorry.” He spun away from her in order to grab the first aid kit from his desk.

“What happened?” she asked, vibrating with barely contained panic.

“Nothing, nothing. Things just got jumbled for a second,” he assured her, efficiently cleaning his palms and wrapping them in gauze in a practiced motion.

“How often do you-”

“Hard to say. I’ve been graphing them. Seems to be stress contingent, but generally decreasing. My senses are gradually acclimating to this universe, so I have to hope that once they do, I’ll be fine. Perfect. Molto bene. No inconvenient lapses.”

“Stress? What h- oh.”

He didn’t like the sound of that ‘oh’. The Doctor clenched his jaw before facing her.

“We still haven’t talked about us,” Rose pointed out, approaching him slowly. Like he was a wild animal. Like he would hurt her. “And you … you don’t really remember yesterday still, do you?”

“Not really.”

His hands hurt. His body ached. One heart, and it was beating so quickly that he was sure it would give out.

Rose wrapped her arms around him and he automatically returned the embrace.

“Maybe I should just call in,” she suggested as she pulled away. “We can just take the day?”

“Or don’t and stay anyway,” the Doctor couldn’t help pointing out. “Some bits have come back, and didn’t they send you here?”

She burst into laughter. “Oh my god, they did!”

And it was beyond words, how great it was to hear her laughing again. To see her smiling.

But …

That was wrong.

Rose was upset with him.

Time didn’t feel right.

The air tasted off.

Wrong Universe. Wrong Universe. Wrong Universe.

The Doctor staggered backwards.

His respiratory bypass was malfunctioning. It was like it wasn’t even there. He couldn’t get air into his lungs.

Everything went black.

There was a shot of gold, and then a different kind of black.

“Doctor,” said a whisper in the dark. “The timer went off for the TARDIS. ‘M I supposed to take her out of that thing?”

A TARDIS timer?

TARDIS … timer …

The timer for the extended electro-percussive environment chamber!!!

The Doctor shot up from where he had apparently been lying on the couch and ran over to the EEPEC, swiftly shut it off, removed the tank housing their baby TARDIS, and then poured in the pre-prepared aqueous nutrient solution before inserting the tank into the quasi-dimensional artron chamber (currently set to it’s highest opacity setting).

“Hah!” he exclaimed, punching his fist in the air and itching to switch the chamber’s outside view settings to transparent. He turned to Rose, opened his mouth to ask her, and then paused.

It all came back to him, all of it, not just the jumbled recollections he had been getting earlier. Apparently he had fallen into a healing coma, and it seems to have been just what he needed … but it all truly hadn’t been fair to Rose. Though, to be fair, she was currently smiling like it was Christmas, so-

Christmas. Healing comas.

Huh.

“Shall we switch it to transparent?” the Doctor asked, unable to reign himself in any longer. “It was clear when Benny - quite the coincidence, right? - helped me set it up. This is a quasi-dimensional artron chamber. It’s funnelling in rift energy and centrifuging artron particles, and the end result in that chamber is the specific environment needed to properly grow a TARDIS. Well, along with the chrono-nutritio aqueous habitat. Benny describes looking into it as being similar to taking DMT, which, by the way, is completely inaccurate. It’s exactly like looking into an Eye of Harmony. If it’s malfunctioning, it’s like looking into the untempered schism, which I don’t recommend. But everything’s stable now, we could-”

“I thought I wasn’t supposed to look into the vortex?” Rose interrupted, and …

“Right … erm, well ,” he hedged, scratching the back of his neck, “I mean, it isn’t actually the vortex, but you’re probably not completely wrong. Best not risk it.”

Excitement abating, the Doctor slumped against the chamber and at that moment realized that he had been changed into jim jams.

Jim jams. Healing comas.

Huh.

At least these were his own pajamas, and not some ‘friend’ of Jackie’s, though how strange was it that he owned his own pajamas in the first place?

“C’mere,” Rose said, beckoning him back toward the couch, which she was sitting next to, but not on. Not your typical decision, but he had likely taken up all of the space earlier. “I made you some tea.”

It really wasn’t worth it, cataloguing the similarities between this and when he had first regenerated into this body … even though the list did seem to be growing.

“Perfect! Just what I need!” the Doctor smiled as he walked over, taking a seat next to Rose on the floor.

Silence fell as he sipped his tea, and he found himself unsure of what to do or say next. There was too much to say, and he’d certainly done a piss poor job of organizing his thoughts earlier.

“Feeling better?” she asked, after another moment.

Small talk. He could definitely do small talk.

“Mmm yes, very much so.”

“Better enough to talk?”

The Doctor coughed, having swallowed his tea incorrectly (bloody hybrid body, still acting up), before nodding. Rose moved onto the couch and he scrambled to join her.

“So,” she began and paused, face scrunching up in concentration (it was nice to know that he wasn’t the only one who found this whole business incredibly awkward), “I guess … what is it that you actually want? Aside from a working TARDIS, that is.”

His brows furrowed.

Sure, there were plenty of ways he could answer that question and have all of them be true, but he had a feeling that she was looking for a specific type of ‘want’.

Problem was, the Doctor wasn’t quite sure what that was .

“What?” he asked, in lieu of any better things to say (as the runner up response was to ask for some jam, or maybe a banana, or some of the takeaway from the shop down the corner and blimey, he was hungry).

“This whole time, all of it, since you c- since you were- since you stopped just bein’ a hand- ” the Doctor had a list of complaints and corrections that he barely held in “- nobody’s asked what you wanted. The D- the other Doctor chose for both of us, really, and I hadn’t really looked at it that way before. An’ I wanna know. What do you want?”

Removed from the actual experience itself (and therefore not feeling incredibly, deathly ill), visions of the slight peek he’d gotten four days ago of his own timeline played in his head.

The Doctor grabbed Rose’s hand, weaving their fingers together.

“I want this.”

She smiled and gave his hand a squeeze.

“Care to elaborate?” she asked with a slight laugh.

“Nope,” he replied, popping the ‘p’. “Because as long as you’re happy, everything else is just- just semantics. I mean, obviously it’s going to be a bit dull until the TARDIS has grown enough for proper travel, but I think we can make do?” At least, he really hoped so. It hadn’t been going swimmingly so far, but the Doctor sincerely hoped that he could chalk all that up to the initial side effects of the meta crisis, compounded by all of the, er … technical difficulties he had run into while constructing the TARDIS’ growth tank. Also, his new hybrid body needed much more maintenance than he was used to, including sleep. Really was rubbish without regular sleep. Such a waste of time.

“So, if I were to suggest you moving into the flat?”

He opened his mouth, intending to immediately agree, but then frowned. The TARDIS was here, after all. And he absolutely could not move her. Not at this stage. Not until she could connect to other dimensions on her own. The Doctor looked over at the quasi-dimensional artron chamber, once again wishing that he could switch it to transparent and watch the process unfold.

“How moved in is moved in?” he asked once he forced himself to turn back toward Rose.

“You’d sleep there, shower there, eat some of your meals. Most of your clothes an’ stuff would be there. Y’know. It’d be where you live. With me. If you want.”

“And that’s what you want?” he double checked, trying not to telegraph his surprise - he must have missed a lot while in a coma, as last he knew they were teetering on the edge of a row.

Rose rolled her eyes, and that was much more in line with where he thought they were at, er, relationship-wise.

“Well, I don’t fancy living in a clocktower office. When I’m done working, I’d like to not still be at work, ta.”

She did make some excellent points … but still, it all implied that they would be staying together. And that was what he wanted, of course it was, but the Doctor still couldn’t help but feel he had missed something crucial despite the fact that he could now remember everything clearly.

“You blew up my job. ”

“I love you, too. But I’m still mad at you.”

“You’ve still got two beating.”

Maybe there wasn’t something to have missed. Human emotions were relatively complex, after all, and there was no rule requiring them to happen in isolation.

“Are you still mad at me?” he asked, realizing as he did that to Rose it was coming from seemingly out of nowhere.

This was confirmed as she blinked, brows furrowing.

“I don’t know. Maybe a little, but …”

“But?” the Doctor repeated, unable to stand the suspense.

“It’s hardly the first time we’ve had a fight, yeah?”

He nodded, unsure of where she was planning on going with this and hoping that he wouldn’t need to begin apologizing for every insensitive thing he’d said or done since they first met. It would take ages.

“Well, we always end up workin’ it out. And we did live together, travelin’ on the TARDIS, whether we had a row or not, so …” Rose shrugged, now examining her fingernails.

Speaking of the TARDIS, though …

“First things first,” the Doctor began, rubbing the back of his neck as he stood up and began pacing, “I want it on record that I would absolutely love to live in a flat with you, with carpets and doors and things. Assuming we’d spend much of our time traveling about, that is.” He turned back toward her, having paced his way back over to the TARDIS’ QDA chamber. “The thing is, it’s … I don’t want you to think that- the TARDIS. She needs me here. This is a critical development period. For the next three to six months, the TARDIS will be growing in the chamber, learning how to connect to and create dimensions. Until she can manage it, I can’t move her and she requires near-constant monitoring. Every hour or two.”

“She’s like a newborn baby,” Rose commented, getting up and joining him at the chamber, where she stroked the side.

“Exactly.”

“Well, I suppose this’ll have to do then,” she reluctantly … agreed? “As long as we’re living in the flat as soon as she’s moveable, mind. The bathroom here is two floors away.”

“It’s a clocktower, Rose! There’s only so much space.” The Doctor scrunched up his face as he said the word.

“Then why’d you pick this place? I know because of the Rift, but doesn’t it stretch further than just the tower?”

“Nope,” he shrugged.

It’s not as though he hadn’t checked.

“Really?”

“Small rift.”

“Yeah,” Rose laughed, “a small rift right under Big Ben.”

The Doctor laughed with her, amazed that he finally could.

Then he frowned.

It was all a little too good to be true.

Was this real?

“Hey.”

He refocused. Rose was right in front of him, their eyes locked.

“You were getting that look in your eyes,” she informed him.

“Look? What look?” the Doctor asked, though he was pretty sure he already knew. Some sort of dazed tell, some sort of glaringly obvious indicator that his grasp on reality was failing him.

“This look you get when you start thinkin’ you’re in the wrong universe.”

Wrong universe, wrong universe, wrong universe.

“Well, I am in the wrong universe,” he couldn’t help but point out.

“Yeah, I know. Me too. But y’know what?”

Rose wrapped her arms around him, and it was almost as if she were his tether, grounding him to this new reality they’d found themselves in.

“It’s better with two.”

#TenToo x Rose #doctor x rose #pairing: rose x doctor #timepetals #fic: improbable multiversal transcending spacetime event #fandom: doctor who #my fic

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bigasswritingmagnet · 3 years

Text

When History Comes Calling Ch 6/14

art by @snuffes

Fandom: Mass Effect Rating: Teen Pairing: none, some background Fshep/Garrus

Summary: In 2170, Mindoir was attacked by slavers. Hundreds were taken captive, hundreds more were slaughtered. Kiryn was the only Shepard to make it out alive. For years, he buried his grief, kept his head high, and did whatever he needed to survive.He survived Mindoir and the batarians and when the Reapers came he survived them too.

But when the war ends and he escapes his batarian masters to the Citadel, the discovery that his twin sister is alive and well might just be the thing that breaks him. The Hegemony's greatest assassin will remember what it means to have something to lose.

AO3 link in notes! “How come Joker gets a whole bed and I have to sleep on a couch?”

“Because I have brittle bone disease, and you once won hand to hand combat with a krogan.”

“I have to sleep on a couch too, and I’m not complaining.”

“Because you fit on a couch, Esteban. You’re couch sized.”

“You could ask Garrus if you can bunk with him.”

“No thanks. I’ve been shot all the times I want.”

A faint pinging noise.

“Shepard says if we don’t bring breakfast in ten minutes she starts breaking windows.”

“Ah jeez. Garrus! Come on! We gotta go before Shepard pisses off the nurses again!”

“I hope they let her out soon, I don’t know how much more of her that hospital can take.”

“Well the doctor says…”

The voices faded as the speakers passed out of the bug’s range. Kiryn very nearly scowled in his frustration. This was the third time he’d missed out on information of Keris’ medical status.

He needed to get more listening devices. One for every room of that stupid, oversized cavern of an apartment. Nobody ever stayed put when they started a conversation, even an important one. He never should have wasted one in the office. Nobody spent any time in there, because it was Keris’ office, and she was in the hospital.

The kitchen had been a good call, but apparently people had conversations about highly confidential top secret Alliance projects anywhere they damn well pleased, up to and including the bathroom. Weren’t these people supposed to be professionals? One of them was the Shadow Broker for crying out loud.

The emails had been worse than disappointing. They had been concerning. Not in content, but in quantity. He had expected the bulk of his sister’s communication to be work related. But out of an entire year’s worth of correspondence, barely fifty of them had been entirely unrelated to her work. At least they had been relatively positive messages, mostly requests to spend time together in a non-combat situation. He just hoped Keris had taken them all up on that offer. She never seemed to reply to the emails she got.

Kiryn sat up, startling the man on the other bed. He wasn’t sure what to make of the man, who went by Tucker. He couldn't possibly know Kiryn's reputation - he was from a colony just outside Alliance space, and this was the farthest he'd ever been from home. He'd been a beet farmer, of all things.

Kiryn had never threatened him. In fact, Kiryn barely spoke to the man. He spent most of his time staring silently at the ceiling, listening to the conversations via his listening devices. Tucker couldn't hear anything, Kiryn had made sure, so there was no way that was worrying him.Kiryn was never rude or angry or moody; he kept up his neutral expression as he always did, showing no emotions whatsoever.

So why on earth was Tucker so afraid of him?

“Good morning,” he said.

“Mmhmm,” Tucker said, dropping the datapads he’d been trying to sort. He started to retrieve them, only to drop them again when Kiryn stood up. Kiryn stared at him, trying to think of something to say that would reassure the man. The only thing that really came to mind was “don’t worry I only kill people for money and I promise I wouldn’t take a contract on you if anyone offered it”-- and Kiryn suspected that wasn’t quite going to cut it.

“Have a nice day,” he said, finally. Tucker shrank away from him as he slipped out the door. What a strange man.

As obsessive as C-Sec was about keeping tabs on the refugees, they sure weren't doing a very good job of watching all the possible ways in and out. This had been a loading dock, which meant there were all sorts of service entrances. Sure, those doors were locked, but they used the same keycards as the open entrances. All Kiryn had had to do was get his hands on a security pass -- neatly snagged off a passing officer too busy talking on his omnitool -- and he could come and go as he pleased. There was one door that the cameras didn't quite reach, around a corner the guards didn't bother to keep an eye on.

Kiryn was becoming quite fond of C-Sec, in a condescending sort of way. Bless their little hearts, they tried so hard. If Kiryn had been interested in doing any real damage, they'd never catch him until it was far, far too late. Truly it was fortunate that everyone was too busy trying to get themselves sorted out to even think about the kinds of political maneuverings that required murder.

He found that he enjoyed exploring the Citadel. So much of it was a novelty: being able to disappear so easily into the crowd, not needing to keep constant watch for security systems or guards, to keep to his own schedule rather than that of his target, to just casually be . He could go into a store that caught his interest without a purpose, or sit on a bench and watch people go by, or even just meander aimlessly around with no destination in mind.

Perhaps this was what it meant to enjoy freedom.

He didn't even need to be efficient when he did have a goal in mind. He could go to the wards and find the quiet little shop that discreetly sold the tools of his trade, buy some more listening devices, and take himself up to the Presidium for lunch before heading back to Keris' apartment. No rush at all, so long as he got there before visiting hours ended. He'd been listening in for long enough to get a good sense of everyone's schedules. They tended to take shifts at the hospital with Keris, but they also had their own jobs to do. In general, the apartment was all but guaranteed to be empty between 10 am and 3pm.

"I'm getting a little worried about you, Garrus," said Tali'zorah vas Normandy, and Kiryn nearly choked on his noodles. Reaching out to grab a napkin, he turned the silver holder until he could see beside him. Only one seat away, three of Keris' friends were sitting down to lunch.

Of all the worst luck... He hunched his shoulders and tried to be as invisible as possible. They don't know what you look like, he tried to remind himself. For that matter, they didn't even know anyone had been in Keris' apartment. They weren't looking for anyone. But if they did figure it out, he couldn't risk someone looking at the security cameras and remembering the guy at the noodle place.

"What are you talking about? I'm fine," said Garrus Vakarian, the turian his sister was, actually, as a matter of fact, dating for real. Kiryn still hadn’t figured out what to think about that.

"No, Tali's right. You spend every minute you can in the hospital." James Vega was even bigger than he sounded.

"Where else should I be?" Vakarian snapped. Kiryn watched his reflection jab irritably at the electronic menu. "I can do my work from there just fine."

"I know," Tali’zorah said, gently, "but you don't do anything else. Or go anywhere else. At all."

"You want me to just leave her in there alone?" There were even fewer turians in batarian space than there were humans, so Kiryn wasn't as good at reading them, especially when distorted by a reflection. But even he could hear anxiety pretending to be anger when he heard it.

"C'mon, Scars, we're not saying you should never visit her. But she's not going anywhere. She's fine now, she said so herself."

"She said she was fine when she was barely out of the coma, too," Vakarian said. "After what happened last week, you still think she's fine?"

Last week? What had happened last week? Nobody had said anything last week. Unless they'd said it out of range of the listening devices. His hand tightened on his chopsticks, his ears straining to pick up every word over the bustle of the crowd.

"It was just a bad reaction to the medication. The doctors fixed it."

"And if she has a bad reaction to this stuff too? What then?"

Kiryn tried to remember to keep eating, to just blend in, be another member of the crowd. Everything suddenly tasted foul; it was hard to swallow. He agreed with Vakarian whole-heartedly. A mental image of Keris sitting small and alone in a dark hospital room, flashed across his mind. Just the thought made him feel cold. These were supposed to be her friends!

"Hey, can you pass the soy sauce?"

The voice was so unexpected Kiryn looked up. He turned away again, but the damage had been done. Vega had seen his face. Kiryn slid the bottle over, muttering something, trying to look engaged with his soup.

"Hey, do I know you? You look real familiar, man."

No. No, no, no, no.

He shook his head, his stomach twisting into knots.

"Military, right?" Shit . "I was stationed out on Arcturus Prime a few years back; were you ever out that way?"

Kiryn shook his head firmly and stood.

"No."

"But--"

Kiryn turned quickly and left, knowing this was suspicious, thinking of a thousand better ways he could have handled it... but his heart was thudding against his ribs so hard he couldn't breathe.

He should hold off on going back to Keris' apartment for a few days, until the incident had faded from their minds. He wasn't going to. The reminder of just how much information he was missing was not one he could easily put aside. What if Vakarian was right, and something did happen and Kiryn never knew about it?

He would just need to be quick, and careful.

This time he did not go in the front door, even though he knew the code. He could not risk being seen by the cameras out front. But he'd had a chance to get his hands on blueprints of Tiberius Towers and the buildings beside it. There was a parking garage beneath them. All three had access.

He walked faster than he should have. The adrenaline and something tight in his chest he couldn't understand drove him on. He found the elevator and stairwell. He took the stairs, but only two flights. There was the opening to the air vents. Unpleasant, slow, and difficult, but much, much safer. No risk of being seen. He could be absolutely sure no one was in the apartment before he entered.

The added bonus was that it forced him to slow down. He had to focus on making as little sound as possible, regulating his breathing, and counting the floors as he went. The cold air in the vent went a long way to clearing his mind. By the time he was high up enough, his heartbeat had slowed and he could think straight again, although he still couldn’t shake that tightness in his chest.

It had been an unfortunate coincidence, and he hadn’t handled it well. However, given that no one knew about the bugs, no one was on the alert for any strange behavior. As far as they knew, he was just a weird guy at the ramen place. Right? Right.

So just calm down and get a grip. Everything was fine.

There was a series of laser tripwires criss-crossing the vents leading to Keris’ apartment. Before he could pull up his omnitool and figure out how to deactivate them, they turned off. That was….weird. He checked their schematics and found that they had genetic sequence readers, just like the door. They didn’t seem to be set to track any coming and goings. The alarm was simply wired not to go off when certain people went by. And apparently the readers weren’t very advanced, if 50% was close enough to do it.

It might have been making his life more convenient, but he wasn’t any less annoyed at how slipshod Keris’ security system was. She should really know better.

Kyrin had a lot of little tools in his kit, things that weren’t necessary but made his job easier. Some were quite specialised. You couldn’t get past everything with an omnitool. Of particular use was a device that looked almost like something you’d find at a dentist’s office, which was able to unscrew things from around a corner. Like, say, the screws to a vent cover from inside the vent.

Kiryn was at the top of his field for many reasons. His physical prowess and tactical skill made him one of the best. But there were two things that made him the best: he minded the little details, and he always always managed his escape routes as he went. It was for this reason that, despite his urgency, he took the time to strip the screws and glue them into place on the vent cover, so he could come and go with ease.

This time he was not going to dawdle. In, plant the bugs, get out. He’d go to the wards and find a hotel that charged by the hour, ridiculous or not, and work on his sniper rifle. That would make him feel better. Or at least calmer.

He put a bug in every room in the apartment, every hallway. Under every couch, the poker table, the conference table, hidden in the branches of a tree, at the bottom of a painting. One in the bar, at the far back where it couldn’t be seen.

Nothing was ever going to happen to Keris that Kiryn did not know about. Not anymore.

#mass effect #commander shepard #femshep #dudeshep #twin au #alternate universe fic

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letterstotheone-whomilovemost · 3 years

Text

7.11.21 (42 days)

My birthday is in a week, how crazy is that? I've been not so "excited" about my birthdays for the past couple of years. To think this will be my first birthday with you. It makes me so happy to think that I will get to have you by my side on my birthday. I don't think I've been this excited for a birthday, in a very very long time. More than likely the first time since I was a small child, haha.

I'm so sleepy that I can barely keep my eyes open, and I'm also slightly nauseous (have been all day). I have to take mom to surgery at 8 in the morning. I will continue to fight my eyelids, I want to keep writing to you.

We got to spend Wed 7.7 - Fri 7.9 together, and honestly that made me so happy. I got to be around you for over 24 hours. It was definitely well needed. I crave being around you. My heart flutters every time I get a message from you, when you look at me, or when I hear my phone ringing and your name lighting up on my phone.

I don't think I'll ever get out of my "honeymoon" stage with you, if I'm being honest. I love this feeling. I'm addicted to you, I've always been. It's this overwhelming sensation, I feel all warm and stuff when I get to see you or talk to you. It makes my days when you tell me good morning and/or when you tell me goodnight. I will say it's been fairly rare as of late for you to tell me goodnight, but I know it's because I stay up later than you and you tend to fall asleep without warning. You're a hardworking man, so it's understandable for you to be so sleepy.

Today was kind of long, I spent most of it alone, working on art. I even picked up my guitar for the first time in a little while. Learned how to play the riff of What's My Age Again by Blink-182 by ear, and needless to say-- I definitely missed having music as an outlet. Just jamming playing all sorts of chords, trying to see which one's sound pretty together... A whole hour passed by before I even knew it!

I spent my entire day just doing the things I love, the hobbies I enjoy. I'm starting to fall in love with my life again. A part of that, owes a thanks to you, all things considered. You're kind of like, my light at the end of a long, dark hallway. How cheesy!

Today was "lazy" but not really. I thought it was going to storm pretty bad, so I opted out of working at my side job. I stuck with doing the things said above, watched some anime, started a new show, wrote a bit, studied a bit, and even did my laundry. Even though today was "lazy" I realized that my off day was long. I would never complain about a long off day. Now that I'm back to a "regulated" job, with a set schedule and such, I look forward to my off days. Being able to enjoy hobbies is quite a feat. I think that's why it's healthy to take "breaks" from things. I look forward to doing my hobbies more on my off days, rather than when I could just pick when I wanted to work. I don't feel like any of my days are wasted anymore. I get to see you on my off days sometimes, and that makes me extremely happy.

I look forward to the day that I get to fall asleep next to you for the first time for the rest of my life. Waking up and you still being there, going to sleep and you still being there. Man, a dream. I can't wait to get that. It's going to be so worth it all.

I'm working hard on making sure that I can show you all of the love I have for you. You've told me "I hope so" when I tell you I love you, sometimes. While it does hurt, I know you don't say it to hurt my feelings. I know how it feels to not know if someone loves you. This entire project of letters is prime example of that. While we were split for almost two years, I started to feel like you had never loved me. I know why, now. It's because I had forgotten how soft your eyes got when you look at me. Now I can just, feel it. I can tell that you love me, now, because your eyes speak louder than words.

I can see myself spending the rest of my life with you, and I want that more than anything. I never want to lose you again. I can't see myself with anyone else, ever again. I only want you, it's always been this way.

Earlier you said, "I'm nothing". I was curious what you had meant by that. You never clarified or told me what you had meant. It left me scratching my head. I'm not sure if you were just in your own head, or if someone said some hurtful things to you. You may think that you're nothing, but you're everything to me, babylove. You're seriously everything to me. I want to protect you from the cruel world, I want you to know that you're safe with me, I want you to feel loved. I want you to be able to love the world around you and see just how beautiful everything is. I want you to be able to look at yourself and see the man I see. You're everything. Charming, handsome, loving, kind, a good father, smart, funny, god-- I could go on forever. You're literally perfect to me. Flaws and all. I hope one day I can help you see that.

My eyelids are getting angry with me, I can feel them getting heavier and heavier.

I hope to speak to you in the morning. I hope you sleep well & have sweet dreams. I love you so much.

[yours truly]

#letters to the one i love most #letters to you #love letter #letters to the one i loved most

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ashintheairlikesnow · 4 years

Text

Get Real Angry: Interrogation, Final

CW: Institutional brutality, whump of a minor (in the form of a video Jake watches), beating, electric shock, very vaguely referenced past/potential noncon, violence in response to self-soothing stimming behavior, referenced familial abuse, sleep deprivation, creepy whumper behavior

The final part of Jake’s interrogation during his very bad week. Tomorrow I hope to get his reunion with Chris written, and then Jake’s first day back in class after that, and then we’ll return to your regularly scheduled comfort programming now that this little mini-narrative is out of my head!

To understand the frat guy reference (a reference to @deluxewhump‘s Alex), please read this piece here.

INTERROGATION: PART ONE PART TWO

Tagging @burtlederp, @finder-of-rings, @endless-whump, @whumpfigure, @stxck-fxck, @slaintetowhump

When Everly wheels the TV in - big and blocky, on a little metal wheelie cart with a squeaky wheel and rust spots along the frame - and settles it in front of the chair Jake has been encouraged to sit in, Jake is reminded, bizarrely, of a movie he saw a few years ago.

Weird arthouse movie about a guy that takes another guy captive and his boyfriend or whatever tries to hunt him down, they watched something on a TV in an old house… shit, what was it called… Jake’s head hurts, throbs with a kind of foggy ache, and he closes his eyes, head drooping just slightly.

He could drift off just like this, with his wrists still zip-tied, his shoulders screaming pain at him. Since waking up at the sound of the cops banging on the door, sleep has been a twenty-minute nap here and there, as long as they’ll let him drop off, slumped in his chair, forehead resting on the table in the interrogation room.

Everly left for a while, he assumes to get some fucking sleep. They’d set up some kind of weird blaring alarm system that went off while he was gone, going off every hour or so, waking Jake up. His head feels weighted down with the fucking need for sleep.

Once his eyes close, he can’t quite seem to force them open again. God, he could, he really could fall asleep now, with Everly staring right down at him. Rescues talk about it, about curling up on the floor, covering their eyes with their arms to try and find the tiniest bit of darkness in the unending white light, just… drifting away into some kind of doze and fuck, what he wouldn’t give for a real nap right about now-

There’s a slam, palm on metal table, rattling it, and Jake jerks his head back up, staring wide-eyed up at the handler, breathing in harsh pants. Everly’s not even wearing his stupid fake cop uniform anymore. He doesn’t even try to hold up the pretense.

That’s how Jake knows - for sure this time, not just a hunch - that that camera in the corner by the ceiling definitely isn’t turned on.

Wanted to contract you but I was overruled. Jake’s bloodshot exhausted eyes stare up into Everly’s calm, almost pleased flat gray, and he shudders. It’s a thin line between protecting people who need help and being turned into one.

He kind of wants to send a thank-you card to whoever decided he was too much trouble to abduct.

“Wake up, sunshine,” Everly says, pleased as can be, pleased as punch Jake’s nana would have said, when he was little. Tiny little old southern woman, genteel beachside accent, sweet tea on the table, Sunday dinner, what happens between you and your husband is your business, Maggie. Jake shudders, all over.

When you run from a man who won’t stop hurting you with your kid in tow, you have to run from all the people who just can’t give enough of a fuck to help you, too.

“Pretty-… pretty sure sleep deprivation is torture under th’ Geneva Conventions,” Jake mumbles, forcing his head to stay up, his spine as straight as he can make it. Leaning against the back of the chair helps, but shit, what he wouldn’t give-

That’s how it starts, Jake. You think you’d give something up just to sleep, and then they take that, and take more than that, and eventually there’s nothing left.

“Probably,” Everly acknowledges with a careless shrug. “But you’re gonna have one hell of a time proving you were here and not just the unfortunate recipient of a beating outside a bar or whatever the fuck you do in your free time.”

“In m’free time,” Jake slurs - weird how being this tired has made it harder to move his mouth, even, “I mostly feed homeless people. Not… ‘zactly a violent hobby.”

“Weird how that happened to you, then,” Everly says brightly. He picks up a remote on the cart and starts pressing buttons. The TV powers on with a sudden flash of colors and Jake winces as the light hurts his eyes, blinking rapidly, trying to focus.

It’s harder than it should be. Everything is harder than it should be. He’s not even sure he could stand up on his own any longer, his legs feel like noodles precariously balanced on top of concrete blocks.

“No… no folder t’day?” Jake asks, staring as the menu pops up. Smart TV, of course it is. He stifles a laugh at the sight of the little Netflix icon, Hulu, Amazon Prime. “Y’watch a lot of, of fuckin’ TV when you’re torturin’ innocent people?”

“Shut up, it belongs to the police station.” Everly chooses an app off to the corner, something called KINECTREMOT, the letters dancing and refusing to settle as Jake tries to read them. Does it start this way, with the rescues? Does it start with it just getting harder because you’re tired, and then one day the letters start to hurt?

Or is there something else, to that? Something to the training the rescues can’t explain, maybe don’t even remember?

No, Kauri remembers. Kauri’s head is a fucking mess but he remembers more of training than any of the others seem to be. Maybe that’s why his head is a mess. Jake groans, trying to focus, to think.

Everly’s humming to himself, a soft little tune on his lips, as he inputs a login username [email protected] and a password that just shows up as little circles. He fucks it up the first time, has to redo it. Jake holds back a snort.

“Y’tired, too, huh?” He asks, false sympathy dripping from his tone. “Real tired? Wanna schedule us a fuckin’ naptime, man?”

Everly glances back at him, then leans over and grabs Jake by the back of the head, casually slamming his forehead into the metal table, listening to Jake’s cry of pain with a faint grin on his face, then jerking his head back up, to look into exhausted, foggy light-colored eyes. “Have some fucking manners, Stanton.”

“Fair ‘nough,” Jake slurs, head pounding with pain, slumping to the side. “Can I please request a fuckin’ nap, sir-”

“No.” Everly goes back to humming, tries the username and password again. Wrong again. Jake wonders if he fucks it up again, if he’ll get locked out. Since this is clearly meant to be some kind of dramatic reveal, the idea strikes him as funny. Not just funny, fucking hilarious. Jake starts to giggle, unwillingly, almost helplessly. Big tough guy can’t figure out his fucking password for his Big Villain Moment. It’s funny, right? It’s really fucking funny, and shit, he’s so tired the glint of light off the table and the little spot of blood from his head, smeared across, seems funny because it’s like looking at clouds, what shape is this? and Chris on the grass bouncing up and down on his feet and saying it’s it’s it’s a kangaroo, Jake, it’s a kangaroo, in Australia they call them roos, they just say, say, say say say roo I saw a man on TV he said, said roo, he just said roo and that cloud looks like-

There’s a flash of pain, impact of palm across bruises that have already blossomed dark on his face, and Jake grunts, jerking to the side, somehow managing to stay in his seat.

“Stop laughing. Stay quiet.” Everly narrows his eyes, tries one more time to put the password in. This time it works and the screen flashes black with the KINECTREMOT logo across the front, a soft chime of sound.

What he’s looking at now, Jake doesn’t really understand. Some kind of inbox, but for pictures and videos. They’re all labeled with six-digit numbers, a long list of them, with the words PRIMARY, SECONDARY, TERTIARY next to each one. Not always the same word. Some of them say one thing, some say another. Some of them just say CALL IN or EMERGENCY.

Everly chooses a search bar option and starts painstakingly entering a number, and Jake stares, dumbly, wondering what the fuck he’s looking at, but with a sick certainty that he really, really does not want to know.

Everly’s still humming that stupid song, and Jake realizes why it’s sticking in his head, now. “Are y’… are y’humming Hotel California?”

Everly stops, blinks, looks over at him, genuinely baffled. Then he laughs, a rumbling sound. Jake hates that fucking smug piece of shit’s laughter. “I guess I am. Hadn’t noticed. It was playing on my way from the hotel this morning. You like that song?”

Jake stares at him, as evenly as he can, his eyelids trying to droop down, body desperate for sleep. “Used to.”

Everly chuckles again. “Yeah, it’s overplayed. Anyway… here we go.” He’s picked one number out - 223499, it doesn’t mean anything, and next to it he reads PRIMARY/SECONDARY and what the fuck does that mean? A long line of little thumbnail images pop up, with labels next to them. INTAKE, ISOLATION DAY 1, DAY 2, DAY 3.

The drop in Jake’s stomach gets worse. He feels almost nauseous with fear - not for himself, exactly, but for what he knows he’s about to see. “Wait, wait-… what are you-”

“Shut up, Stanton.”

“No. No, I, I can’t-… what are you goin’ t’do?” Jake looks up, bleary, frightened now. Everly just smiles back down at him, that smug fucking shit-eating grin, and Jake pulls hard on his restrained wrists, feels a flash of bright agonizing pain as the plastic, caked in two days of dried blood, reopens the raw wounds. He grunts at the ache, but everything from his shoulders down has hurt like hell since day one.

“You know, I requested authorization for injectables, too-”

“What th’fuck are those?”

“It’s pretty obvious from the name, I think. Got overruled on that one, too. Fuckin’ higher-ups worried about traceable compounds and shit. I mean, I get the concern. We can’t keep you long enough for that shit to get fully out of your system. But it would’ve made getting to watch this part a lot more fun.”

Everly selects a thumbnail, and the screen opens up - it’s like some bizarre fucked-up snuff-film take on a Netflix episode choice, with the thumbnail suddenly blown up to a larger size and a small description next to it. Someone made a computer program for this, Jake realizes with an even sicker drop in his stomach. Disgust ricochets around his body. Somewhere, at some point, someone built a computer program designed to let these assholes show him a video of… of what?

223499 - CONTRACT SIGNING he reads, just as Everly pushes play.

“Why show me this?” He asks, in nearly a whisper. “D’you… d’you think this is gonna make me not want to, to help?”

“No, I think you won’t break today, and today’s all I got. Give me a week and a white room and I’d have you taking food from my fingers, but sadly, our time together nears its end. Here’s what I can do, though. I can show you something you can’t ever prove. And I can watch your fuckin’ face the whole time. I can get you all riled up, all angry, and send you home with that bitterness just roiling around inside you.”

On the TV screen, Jake sees a small table in a blank room. No pictures on the walls, no decorations at all. Just a small table, two chairs, one on either side. Sitting in one chair is a woman in a suit - everything about her screams lawyer. Behind her, leaning against the wall, in a prim pantsuit, is a woman Jake has seen on TV before, that Renford bitch.

Antoni walked into the room when she was on TV once, turned around and walked out, and didn’t come out of his room for the rest of the day. Kauri flinched when Nat had to wear heels for a meeting and came walking down the stairs.

Jake knows pure soulless evil when he sees it, and there it is, looking bored.

There’s another person, too, mostly hidden by the shadows in the corner, but there’s something weirdly familiar about what Jake can see of him, something he can’t quite place. He’s wearing a pastel-colored polo and light slacks, weirdly fussy looking, like he’s dressed in case he ends up on TV.

Which, Jake guesses he kind of did.

They’re chatting - the sound of it too low for Jake’s tired brain to parse into words he can understand. Just easy, comfortable talk. Coworkers chit-chatting about their weekends, waiting for the day to start. Lawyer’s got a mug of coffee in front of her, takes a sip. It’s normal inane corporate chatter and these are people who do unimaginable damage to other peoples’ lives and they don’t feel a fucking thing about it.

“I won’t get what I want today. But I think I’ll see what I’m hoping to see on your face - and I think you’ll go home with something stuck in your head that you can’t get out.” Everly moves around behind him, stands with his hands on Jake’s shoulders, rubbing thumbs in like he’s giving him the world’s most painful backrub. Jake grinds his teeth together to keep from making a single sound. His eyes want to close, to look away, but there’s some sort of fascination that keeps his eyes glued to the screen.

He’s always wondered what the contract signings are like. The rescues never remember them.

There must be some sound - everyone kind of shifts around in their chairs, straightens up, and the lawyer pulls some papers out of a small folder in front of her, slides them across to the other side of the table in front of the other chair, sets a plastic pen down next to the paper. Fiddles with it, shifting it back and forth minutely, until it’s perfectly parallel.

A door behind the empty chair opens, and Jake stares in perfect horror as Chris is shoved into the room, a man Jake doesn’t recognize behind him, wearing the handler uniform and prodding Chris with a black stick.

He’s so… small, isn’t he?

Jake rarely thinks about how small Chris really is. In the video, he’s hunched over, his hair looks weirdly clumpy. He’s wearing a loose white V-neck T-shirt that’s way too big for him, like it’s oversized or they just couldn’t be bothered to get him one that fit. His knees stick out from under a pair of thin black shorts.

“Oh my God,” Jake whispers. His heart feels like ice in his chest, the cold is spreading through his veins, right to the tips of his toes in his sneakers, now bloodied like everything else he was wearing when they dragged him in here two… three? days ago.

Thumbs dig into his shoulder blades and he hisses, jerking forwards away from the pressure. “Recognize him, huh?”

Jake sets his jaw. “I recognize that you’re a fuckin’ monster piece of shit-”

Everly grabs his head and slams it down on the table again. Jake goes limp, groaning at the spark of white-hot pain, little spots in his vision even with closed eyes. Then his head is jerked back up. Motherfucker really likes walking the head injury line. “Watch. The. Video.”

“This… this won’t make me any less angry,” Jake manages to force out between numb lips. “None of it will.”

“Good. Then you’ll fuck up. The angry ones always do.” Everly grabs his chin from behind him and forces it forward.

On the screen, Chris is sitting in the previously empty chair now, the handler’s hand on one shoulder, thumb rubbing back and forth across the back of his neck. He’s shivering so hard Jake can see it in the slightly blurry video, looking around at everyone. There are deep visible shadows under his eyes, and Jake watches the way he sits, with his hands sort of between his legs, can tell from the tension in his arms he’s gripping onto the chair. “Wh-why am, am, am, am-”

“Fuckin’ broken record,” The handler behind him says, a man Jake has never seen, and smacks Chris hard against the back of the head. He jerks forward, whimpering, and Jake would give anything to be able to crawl into the screen and save him.

There are tears in his eyes he has to blink away, but now that he sees him he doesn’t want to miss a second. He’s so little, even though he’s almost the same age he is now. Being in that place, with those people, makes him seem so small, so deeply in need of protection. He’s so fucking scared and none of them even care.

“No one mentioned a stammer,” The man in the corner says. His voice is familiar, too, it sounds like it’s tailor-made for TV. Smooth as silk, with something rotten hidden underneath. “I’m not interested in a fixer-upper, Karen.”

“I’m not selling you one, either,” Renford replies, and Jake’s hands curl into fists behind his back. “He hasn’t been trained yet. No one starts training until they sign.”

“What…” Chris - not Chris, not really, this is whoever he was before he became Chris - flinches and looks backwards up at the handler, as if checking for permission to speak. Jake swallows back bile when the handler nods, and Chris looks back forwards again, his gaze jumping all over the room. He doesn’t seem to see the man in the corner at all, and Jake squints as he realizes there’s some kind of one-way glass along that area, angled so the camera sees everyone, but he’s pretty sure Chris can’t see the man. “Who’s… talking?”

His words are slurred together and deliberately, carefully spaced.

He talked like this when he first arrived at the shelter, for days after. Flat, meaningless syllables dropped and run from, certain he’d be hurt if he made a single sound that wasn’t allowed.

“Not important, trainee,” The handler says. “Pay attention to what is important.”

“Yes, um… yes, yes, sir,” Chris says in a low, weak voice.

“Bet you’d like to commit murder right about now,” Everly says from behind him.

“You’d win that bet,” Jake growls.

“I always fuckin’ do.”

“What, um-… what’s happening?” Chris asks, softly, looking around the room.

“This is your consent form,” The lawyer says, tapping a fingernail on the paper between them. Chris winces, slightly, hunching back into the handler’s touch. “All your information is there as provided by your adult guardian-”

“Joanne? Aunt Jo?” Chris is looking around, confused, blinking. “But, but, but but she… she, I’m supposed to, to live with her now-”

“Not anymore, you’re not,” The handler says, with a laugh.

“What, what, what-what, what, what does that-”

The handler hits Chris hard across the back of the head again, and he bites down on his lower lip and goes silent.

“You’d have gotten her an even higher payout if you didn’t talk so fucking much,” The handler says, grumbling, like Chris is the problem here.

Chris’s expression collapses from a nervous, frightened curiosity to an awful well of pain and grief. “Gotten her, her, her a what?”

The lawyer ignores him and keeps speaking. “… and your legal identification, confirming that you’re overage-”

“But, but I’m not, I’m, I’m n-not, I just turned, uh-” Chris is struggling, and Jake wants to climb into that screen and hold him, calm him down, help him slow his mouth to find the words. Chris’s eyes are wide, and his fear can be read, oddly foggy and dazed, like he’s operating on a slight delay. “I just, just just just-”

The handler behind him grips the back of his neck, like a man grabbing the scruff of an unruly dog, and Chris’s voice cuts off like turning a radio dial.

There’s a moment of silence where Jake can hear his harsh, panting breaths.

“What did we talk about, ‘499? About lying?”

Chris’s hands come up onto the table, tapping on it, not loud enough for Jake to hear. “N-not, not, not to lie to you, but-but, um, but but but I’m, I’m not-”

“Stop that shit with your hands. Now.”

Nothing visibly changes but Chris goes quiet again, staring straight down. His hands stop moving. His shoulders are hiked nearly to his ears and Jake wonders if the handler holding him by the neck tightened his grip.

“How old are you, trainee?” The handler asks the question heavy with loaded double-meanings, obvious enough Jake can read them. Give the right answer or get hurt.

“Eighteen,” Chris whispers, with wide scared eyes. Everyone in the room seems satisfied with the blatant, obvious lie.

“Good. And is that the legal consenting age?”

“… yes.”

“Good boy.” The handler pets heavily through Chris’s hair, and the boy shudders in disgust - Jake has never seen him react to touch like that, not from anyone. Just one more sign of a person that’s been totally erased.

“Pl-please, please don’t, please don’t-don’t, don’t touch me-”

“That’s not an option available to you any longer,” The handler says, pulling the black stick from his belt - and Jake knows what those are, he knows exactly what those are, he’s had one raining down on his back and his ribs and his arms now, had one stuck against his knee to force electric shock into his nerves. He wants to push back, but he’s so, so tired. “Your options are to take the touch as it’s given and thank me for it, or…” He taps the black stick on the back of one of Chris’s hands. The boy’s hand jerks back, but when the handler tsks, clicking his tongue against his teeth, Chris lays the hand slowly back out on the table.

“Why would you ever tape this?” Jake asks, barely aware his mouth is moving.

“Lunchtime entertainment,” Everly replies, blithely. The two of them watch as Chris says something, but there’s a strange rushing sound in Jake’s head and for a second, he’s so… furious… that he can’t even hear. All he can do is stare, the rushing sound drowning him out, and then the black baton comes down on his fingers and Jake cries out, as Chris’s mouth opens in a painful wail, as he tries to pull his hands protectively back to himself only to have them forced back onto the table again.

And hit again.

And again.

Jake’s going to be sick all over the floor if it goes on any longer.

The man who has been watching, hidden in the corner, laughs at the sight. He laughs harder, louder, when the handler forces Chris to thank him for the pain.

It’s his laugh that Jake recognizes, finally. It’s the laugh that turns him from shadowy and familiar to a face that Jake’s seen on TV a dozen times or more. Jake has protested his speeches on the human pet industry, has written essays on the complicity of government in human atrocities with this very man in mind, but when he was thinking of complicity he was never, ever thinking of this.

“You sold him to the fucking Governor?”

No wonder he’s so fucking cozy with WRU. They sold him a goddamn teenager for a personal toy-

“Took you long enough.” Everly pats him on the head, good dog, and Jake jerks away from the touch, thinking of Chris doing the same - and how he pushes into every touch now, good or bad, can’t tell the difference. Has to be told, over and over again. How many days without letting me sleep would it take to get me to give in like that? “Watching you watch this… you know who that kid is. You’ve seen him before. Lie to me or don’t, your face gave it all away. Our informant told us you’ve been bringing a kid who fits the description to your classes.”

Oh, God. The raid was my fault.

On the screen, Chris is signing the contract, hands shaking, the handler’s palm still laying flat against the back of his neck, over the heavy black collar he has around his throat.

“Just a homeless kid,” Jake grinds out, staring at Chris’s terrified shadowed face. Watching as he’s dragged back out, stumbling, with the handler’s grip iron-tight on his thin arm. Chris was tapping in the video, Jake thinks. He tapped before, that’s part of him, not something he picked up. Did he hit his head, before, too? “Could’ve been him. Wouldn’t know. He left.”

“Different story than where we started when I brought you in,” Everly remarks. He puts a hand on the back of Jake’s neck. Rubs his thumb, back and forth, just at the nape where skin and soft, short hair meet.

Just like the handler in the video, with Chris.

“Who called?” Jake asks, holding himself very, very still under the touch. He’s seen Antoni go like this, he thinks - just holding himself like a statue, his eyes straight ahead, not looking. When he has a bad night and spends the day on edge, when any little thing sets him off. “Who told you it was us?”

If it was that fucking frat guy - he’s in one of Jake’s classes, he’s probably seen him with Chris, could even have seen him doing yoga over on the grass, could have seen them in the coffee shop or eating lunch in the big seating area, anywhere, really - Jake will hunt down which frat he’s in and personally set the whole goddamn house on fire, starting with that asshole’s bedroom-

“A Professor Gregory Barnham,” Everly says. The words mean nothing to Everly. They mean entirely too much to Jake.

“My fucking Ethics in Political Philosophy professor?” For a second, his brain just refuses to reconcile what he’s been told. He’s been careful in that class. He’s kept his head down, stayed quiet, and the professor never told him not to bring Chris and the professor has smiled at Chris. Said hello. Nice guy, if definitely not super into the pet lib thing, and Jake had been so careful, bringing Chris in the back, keeping him carefully separate from the other students.

Not careful enough.

That son of a bitch saw Jake with a kid who was slowly coming out of his shell and he thought, better call WRU on this one. Better have that kid all fucked up again.

He’s probably not going to go back to that class. He’s probably going to fail it. He’s probably going to spend the next week convincing himself not to light the professor’s house on fire, and feeling like he kind of owes Frat Guy an apology for assuming the worst.

Sorry, dude, you trusted my intentions enough to be fuckin’ vulnerable about your shitty fucking fraternity buying a fucking preson, I decided to repay the favor by assuming you’re the asshole who could have gotten my family killed-

Jake doesn’t think about calling them his family. The word doesn’t even register in his tired mind. It’s just there, the foundation of the thought.

“Why tell me who called in?” Jake asks. He can’t figure out this guy’s angle. He’s giving Jake too much information, isn’t he? Showing him Chris’s video, the contract signing of an underage kid, the fucking governor the one apparently buying him… telling him who called him in… why give him all of this? Why give him all this information?

He’s too exhausted to try and outthink him. He… just doesn’t get it. He needs three days of sleep and probably some serious medical attention at this point, and he can’t even begin to try and think through this until he gets at least one of those things.

“Already told you, numbnuts.” Everly lets go of him, and Jake breathes a sigh of relief as he steps away. “I’m making you nice and angry. Go on, Jakob Collins Stanton. Go be the face of the fuckin’ movement. I can’t wait to see your fuckin’ dumbshit expressions on TV. Go on, Stanton. Get real… fucking… angry.”

Jake sees the black baton unhooked from the guy’s belt in the corner of his eyes, and his muscles tense, but he doesn’t move.

“Why tell me it was the Governor?” He asks, but the baton is already swinging at his head. When it connects, Jake’s head smacks forward into the metal table, he drops to the ground, and everything goes black.

He wakes up and the metal table and chairs are gone. The TV and its little wheelie tray are gone. The zipties on his wrists are gone and his shoulders scream as he pulls his hands forwards, looking at how deeply the plastic dug in. His head is pounding, throbbing, and he feels even more exhausted than he did before.

He cries, for a while. There’s a cop in the room who doesn’t stop him or help, just kicks a box of Kleenex across the floor.

Eventually they tell him he’s been charged with resisting arrest, but that his bail’s been paid. No one tells him but he sees a calendar on his way out, limping heavily, walking in bloodstained jeans and T-shirt looking like he lost a fuck of a fight, and realizes he’s been here for three days.

Chris has been alone for three days.

Any hint of pain Jake is feeling is washed away by the panic that takes its place. Chris can’t handle being alone that long. He needs touch, needs it, the constant never-ending compulsion for human contact that all of the ones like him have. Who even knows what he’d do - go next door or let anyone who knocked in or, shit, just start testing people, like he does, and that could get him hurt or killed or taken advantage of or-

Unless Nat…

“Uh, um,” Jake stumbles over his words, and the cop glances at him, dismissive. “Natalie… Natalie Yoder. The woman with me. Is, is she… was she let go before me, or…?”

The cop gestures ahead of himself, and Jake raises his eyes to see Nat sitting on a bench with a vaguely familiar man that Jake has never actually spoken to before, although he’s seen him watering flowers outside his yard. He looks like some kind of cowboy.

Natalie looks like hell - rings around her eyes and a few bruises littered across her face - but he can tell he looks worse, because both she and the man who lives across the street from the shelter recoil when they see him.

Natalie jumps to her feet. “Jake, what the hell-”

Jake walks to her, as fast as the cop will let him, and nearly collapses against her, resting his head on her shoulder. She puts one hand up over his hair on the back of his head and the other around him, holding him tightly. “I resisted arrest,” Jake says. “Apparently.”

“Yeah,” Nat murmurs. “Me, too. Jefferson here’s our neighbor, he’s come to take us home.”

“Is… everyone safe, there?” Jake asks, low-voiced, just above a whisper.

“We’ll talk in the car. Come on, we’re all paid up, they’re ready to sign off on us going. I… didn’t know about your dad, Jake.”

Jake stiffens and pulls away from her, looking away. “Yeah, well. I didn’t know about your job history, did I? We both kept secrets.”

There’s a silence, long and uncomfortable, broken only by the sounds of the department around them - people working at computers, talking on phones, chatting over coffee. It makes Jake think of the lawyer in the video, sipping her coffee before they dragged a teenager in to sign his life away, watching with a passive, uncaring expression while they beat his hands with a baton.

“Guess we have some things to talk about in the car on the way home, huh?” Nat says, trying for cheer. When Jake responds with silence, she sighs. “Fair enough. I should have told you.”

“Yeah. You should have. I have some other stuff to tell you, too, about who called-”

“I know,” Nat says, heavily, rubbing at her eye with one fist, looking oddly like an exhausted toddler. “They told me. That landscaping company that works down the street.”

“Wait.” Jake frowns, looks around. No one’s really looking at them, now. “Wait. I got told it was one of my professors.”

“You did?” Nat hesitates. “Then they gave us two different stories, Jake. So… which one is true?”

“If you ask me,” Jefferson says, in a soft, unobtrusive voice, “probably neither of them. Come on, we can continue this little guessing game in my car, yeah? I’ve laid down some towels, I had a feeling you might still be, um… bleeding… like that.”

They leave the police station in silence, Jake sitting in the backseat of Jefferson’s ancient Subaru, beat half to hell but the thing’s still running, somehow. All he can think of is getting home to Chris, keeping his promise.

“Look,” Nat says, after they’ve sat in silence other than Jefferson’s quiet NPR playing from the car’s radio. “When I started the job-”

“Not yet.” Jake cuts her off, and his voice is harsher than he means it to be. His eyes have closed and he’s not sure how he’ll ever open them again. “Chris first.”

“You know, your, um… Chris is really doing fine-” Jefferson starts.

“Don’t care. I don’t want to think about anything else just yet.” Jake’s face throbs. His head feels like it’s stuffed full of cotton dipped in acid. His shoulders ache, his wrists look like they’ve been wrapped in razorwire, one of his ribs is probably bruised, he knows his torso is a fucking mess of black and blue, he’s exhausted and starving and pissed off and all he can think about is that fucking handler saying, go on, Stanton. Get real fucking angry.

What does it mean that they want him to be? And if they gave he and Nat two different stories about who turned them in, which one is true? What if neither of them is? What’s their plan? Or is there one? Maybe they just want him to get paranoid and freaked out, see if he stumbles, fucks it up. Maybe this is all just to get him wondering exactly who is out to get him.

Maybe Everly just thought it’d be fucking funny to get him all worked up.

He can’t think about this now. He’s too tired, he’ll only make the dumbest fucking decisions if he tries.

No, he just…

He just has to get home to Chris.

Keep his promises, first. Figure out everything else after that.

Told you I’d come back for you, man.

Jake thinks of the boy in the video, asking about his Aunt Jo, the look of crumbling sorrow in his face at their reply.

I made a promise to you, and I’m going to keep it.

But I am definitely real fuckin’ angry.

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hellofromthe-otter-slide · 4 years

Text

we should just kiss (like real people do)

Okay, so the other night I couldn’t sleep, and “Like Real People Do” by Hozier was stuck in my head, so from that, this fic came about.

Enjoy!

Summary: For just one night, Adora wants to forget everything. She wants to forget all of the hurt and anger and pain and be with Catra like they used to be, and Catra would do anything to have Adora in any way ever again.

Read on AO3.

Catra isn’t really sure how they got here. Adora has been ignoring her since Mara’s old ship touched down outside of Castle Bright Moon, and it’s not like Catra blames her. In fact, Catra has been doing everything in her power to give Adora all of the space she needed. She memorized training schedules and war room meetings in order to avoid Adora at all costs.

And yet here they are, with Adora in Catra’s bedroom and nowhere for Catra to run.

Catra wants to be snarky. She wants to purr out her usual, “Hey, Adora,” and make some joke about an invasion of privacy, but even if they were on good terms, even if Adora didn’t rightfully hate Catra down to her very core, Catra just doesn’t know how to be who she was.

Whoever she was, whatever she claimed to be, it dissolved and disintegrated on Horde Prime’s ship.

So, Catra sits and waits.

But Adora doesn’t say anything. She walks over to where Catra is sitting on the bed and sits right beside her, and Catra doesn’t really know what to do. Years of muscle memory are hard to fight, but she refuses to let her tail brush Adora in any way, and she scoots away just a few inches, putting just enough space between them.

Adora sighs. “Can we just forget everything?”

Catra isn’t really sure she understands what Adora’s asking, but she doesn’t get a chance to ask for clarification before Adora continues.

“For just one second, can we forget everything that’s happened between us?” Adora looks at Catra with this determined look that Catra hasn’t seen since they were still together in the Horde. “Can we forget about opening portals and all the fighting and scars and supposed hatred and just be us for one second?”

Adora’s voice is soft as she speaks, but Catra doesn’t miss the small desperation hidden underneath that tugs at her.

She would love nothing more than to forget every horrible thing she’s done in order to be better and stronger for just a few normal moments with Adora, but that doesn’t stop her from being realistic.

“I don’t think it works like that,” Catra says, turning from intense blue eyes.

“Who cares?”

Catra looks up in surprise, because in all the years she’s known Adora, she’s never heard her so dismissive of what’s meant to be right, but this isn’t the Adora she used to know.

They are both entirely different people, whether they like it or not.

“We were never going to become the people we believed we were meant to be,” Adora says softly, looking down at the mirrored floor, “And we were used and manipulated to become something else entirely, believing it was destiny or giving us strength when really, we were just pawns.”

The truth of Adora’s words sink deep, and Catra fights back Double Trouble’s words in her head.

“You try so hard to play the big, bad villain, but your heart’s never been in it, has it?”

She thinks of Shadow Weaver’s manipulation and Hordak’s threats if things didn’t go exactly as planned, and she also thinks of that empty pit deep inside her when she should have been her happiest.

“So, who cares?” Adora asks, her voice tinged with anger, “Who cares how it’s supposed to work?”

“Adora, I’m—”

“Stop.” Adora grabs Catra’s wrist, and even that small amount of contact is enough to make Catra freeze. “No apologies. Not right now.”

Catra doesn’t pull her wrist out of Adora’s grip, and Adora doesn’t let go.

“I don’t understand,” Catra confesses, because she doesn’t. She doesn’t understand why, or what made Adora decide to have this conversation.

Adora drops Catra’s wrist and brings her hand up to cup Catra’s cheek, her thumb running over short, coarse fur. “I’m tired,” Adora says, and Catra closes her eyes against the contact, sinking into the softest touch she’s felt since Adora left the Horde, “And being mad at you is so exhausting. I know I’m supposed to be mad at you, and I am, but I’m also done pretending that I didn’t miss everything about you after I left. We’ve got so much time to talk about anger and hurt and all of that. I just,” Adora sighs, “I want to be here with you without everything else.”

Catra relaxes and allows herself to scoot closer to Adora, because for right now, there’s nothing else besides the two of them and the quiet that surrounds them. “Okay,” she whispers, nodding her head slightly and wrapping her tail around Adora’s waist.

They sit like that for a while, and Catra wonders when this bubble they’re in is going to pop, but Adora doesn’t show any sign of leaving, her thumb brushing along Catra’s cheek never stopping and her other hand reaching out to grab Catra’s.

“Can I ask something?” Catra whispers into their comfortable silence.

Adora nods.

“I just don’t understand why.”

Adora smiles, and Catra doesn't know what that smile means. She has no idea what Adora's going to say next.

She doesn’t say anything, though. Adora moves her hand from Catra’s cheek to the back of her neck and pulls Catra in, kissing her like they hadn’t spent so long fighting on opposite sides of a war, like Catra hadn’t tried over and over to destroy the Rebellion and kill She-Ra, like Catra hadn’t almost destroyed reality itself just to get the revenge she thought she was due.

And this isn’t their first kiss. Their last one feels like ages ago, just a few days before Adora stole the skiff and found the sword buried deep in the Whispering Woods. They were just kids back then, no betrayal to tear them apart, no hatred fueled by a need to prove themselves, just two girls who loved each other despite never being taught what love is.

This kiss is different. It’s desperate and messy, Adora pushing Catra down in the plush bed and Catra grasping at Adora’s jacket and pushing off her shoulders. There’s so much more buried underneath, loving and longing mingling together with hurt and regret.

It doesn’t answer Catra’s question. She still has so much that she wants to ask and even more that she wants to apologize for, but Adora doesn’t want talking. She doesn’t want admissions of guilt and discussions of all the pain they caused one another.

All she wants is this, and Catra has wanted this since Adora refused to come back with her in Thaymor. She’s wanted Adora back for so long that she’s willing to keep all of her questions for later and just exist in this moment, her lips against Adora’s and fingers running through golden hair.

Adora bites at Catra’s bottom lip and pulls, and Catra purrs, remembering the first time Adora did that and the confident smirk that Catra’s purrs elicited.

“Shut up,” Catra remembers saying, her younger self shoving a smirking Adora away from her.

“Did you just purr?” Adora had asked, grabbing Catra’s wrists as she went to shove Adora again.

“Pfft, no,” Catra lied, but Adora could see through it.

Adora could always see through Catra’s lies.

Adora doesn’t mention anything about the purring this time, but Catra can feel her smirk into the kiss, and she almost responds like she used to, almost shoves Adora away and tells her to shut up, but she doesn’t want to do anything to stop this moment.

They aren’t the kids they used to be.

They’re not the them they used to be.

Catra isn’t even completely sure who she is without what she used to be, let alone who Adora has become without her.

She gets her moment when Adora breaks the kiss for air, allowing Catra to kiss up her neck to a spot right underneath Adora’s ear, and her soft nibbling gets the reaction she’s hoping for.

Adora gasps, her hands gripping Catra’s hips, and Catra does it again before Adora’s hand in her hair pulls her back and their lips come together again.

Things move quickly after that, and Catra barely has time to think before Adora’s hands push up under her shirt and pull it over her head.

They don’t speak besides small encouragements and curses, gasps and whimpers and moans filling in the spaces in between. They fall asleep holding each other, Adora running a hand over Catra’s stomach absentmindedly and Catra’s low purrs filling the silence.

When Catra wakes up the next morning to an empty bed, she isn’t surprised. She knows the bubble had to pop at some point, that her and Adora had to return from their pretending, but the ghosts of the night before push and pull at her as she sinks back into the bed.

It won't be long until she has to pull herself out of bed, and she's sure at some point today, she's going to see Adora and have to pretend that last night never happened.

For right now, though, Catra lays back in bed, closes her eyes, and remembers everything, because being with Adora, even for just one night, makes her feel more whole and content than winning battles and rising in the ranks ever could.

And for right now, Catra can pretend like last night with Adora is something she'll get to have again.

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supernaturalee · 5 years

Text

Green and Gold: Part 1 - Gwilym Lee x Reader

Pairings: Widow/Single Father! Gwilym Lee x Reader

Warnings: Deceased wife/mother, slight angst/sadness, and Karen.

Word Count: 5.4k

Summary: When Gwilym lost his wife two years ago he feared raising his daughter alone in a small coastal New Jersey town would be difficult. In the two years since her death, Gwil and Brianne are finally ready to start moving on. Following the words of a child psychologist, Gwil signs Bri up for cheerleading with the local youth squad, something Gwil knows nothing about. As he is thrust in the world of cheer bows and back handsprings, he will learn it takes a lot more than green and gold uniforms to mend his and his daughter’s hearts. Hopefully through the squad they will find strength, friendship, and possibly a spark of new love for the widow himself.

Taglist:@the-baby-bookworm

Author’s Note: So a lot of this series will come from stories of my own childhood as a youth cheerleader. It is really near and dear to my heart. I really hope you enjoy it and please let me know if you want to be tagged in future installments.

Gwilym sipped his morning cup of tea as he enjoyed his few moments of peace and quiet in the hour before Brianne was awake. The ingredients for her lunch, laid in front of him as he placed the union jack mug down, a gift from his mate Ben. Today was Wednesday, which meant it was ham and cheese wraps with carrots, pretzels, and a gogurt. As he started making her lunch, he realized tonight was the first night of her cheerleading practice. He let out a breath as he rolled up the wraps before packing the snacks into the purple lunchbox. Filling her water bottle, placing it all in her backpack. He took out her homework from the night before, looking over her math and then her English. She was a smart kid, smarter than he had been in his fifth year. Gwilym believed it was all from Angela, she was brilliant and that showed in Brianne.

It was a humid September morning in the small town along the New Jersey coastline. The tall Welshman grimaced at the thought of another overly warm day with no promise of rain. Sometimes when he longed for the gray skies that England promised him, he would remember the excitement in Angela’s voice as she spoke about the town of her childhood. The way her brown eyes would go wide with joy as she told him of the wonderful memories she had of that place and how she longed to raise her own family there. It had actually been decided when she told him she was pregnant that they would move back to her hometown to raise their incoming child. It also didn’t hurt that his company had offered him a large raise and the covering of moving expenses to take over a better position in their New York office. So the young couple moved transatlantically and settled in a small two story home not far from Angela’s own childhood home. It had been a happy homecoming for Angela and the promise of an incredible life together for Gwilym with their new child, a beautiful baby girl named Brianne.

That was until two years ago when the small but happy family lost Angela what seemed like very suddenly. Life became difficult from that moment on. Two years of grief therapy for both father and daughter, many sleepless lonely nights where he would reach out to her spot to pull her close like he had done so many times before, only to find the coldness of the sheets, and maybe one too many scotches on the nights when it became too much to bear. Friends that the couple had made didn’t know what to do with the now single father and his young seven year old daughter, so they distanced themselves from him. Ben, his friend from back home in England, flew in and stayed for two weeks while Gwil and Angela’s parents planned the funeral for the twenty-nine year old wife and daughter they had just lost. Two years passed and the loss and loneliness had not completely faded.

Gwil moved to make two bowls of oatmeal for breakfast and thought of his workday ahead. After the death of his wife, the publishing company he worked for allowed him to take a small leave of paid absence and then worked with him on working from home a few days a week as Brianne was still young. When he did have to commute into the city, which was an hour and a half train ride away, Angela’s parents would watch Brianne. He had even cleared her new cheerleading schedule with them. Brianne spent every Friday night with them and Gwilym would get a night to himself. Through most of the time, he would spend it thinking about how much he missed his daughter and how he couldn’t wait until she was home again the next morning.

Angela’s parents Mario and Justina had been incredibly supportive with both the young girl and the widower father. He knew how hard it was for them after losing their only child, it was the main reason that Gwil didn’t move himself and Brianne back to England. They deserved to be an integral part in their granddaughter’s life. Gwilym shook away the thoughts of his late wife again as he placed the bowls of oatmeal on the island. He poured Bri a glass of juice and glanced up at the clock. He moved through the house to the staircase, taking the stairs two at a time he reached the top landing quickly. He let out a breath of success before moving to Brianne’s room down the hall from his own. He pushed opened the slightly ajar door more before sticking his head in.

“Bri, honey, it's time to get up.” He stated before moving inside the neat room and opening the curtains, letting in the sunlight of the day. The nine year old stirred and groaned softly at the sudden light filling her room. She sat up, stretching her arms out.

“Morning dad.” Brianne rubbed the last few morsels of sleep from her brown eyes and looked at her doting father. Those brown eyes of hers were one of the last pieces of Angela left on the Earth. Angela was almost disappointed when the baby’s eyes were brown and not blue like Gwilym. He just chuckled and said he would rather have two pairs of the most magnificent brown eyes in the world than two pairs of his own. Angela never said another word about it from that moment on. Brianne pushed back her light brunette locks from her face as she moved off the bed. Gwilym moved back to the doorway and looked at the young girl.

“Breakfast is ready, come eat and then you can get ready for school.” He said. Brianne smiled wide and turned making her bed. Gwil didn’t mind making it but in Brianne’s big ‘I’m in fifth grade now dad,’ speech she made last week right before school started she had promised him that she would always make her bed from then on. Gwil moved to his room, changing from his sweats and an old rugby shirt into a pair of plain blue jeans and a white button up. He pulled on some gray socks and moved down to the kitchen.

He knew he had no video meetings today so mostly that meant he was going to be reading manuscripts that prospective authors had sent in with the hopes of being published which meant dressing down. He ran his fingers through his short brown hair and looked at himself in the master bathroom mirror. Only the small bags under his eyes gave away how truly tired he was. At least last night he didn’t dream of her, he actually hadn’t dreamt of her in months. He was just restless, constantly up checking on Brianne just to make sure she was sleeping okay. Gwil inhale and ran his hands over the short beard he had grown. He had been toying with the idea of shaving for a few days. Angela had liked him clean shaven. He shaved every morning for six months after her death almost as if begging for some higher power to bring her back to him, to bring her back to their daughter. It hadn’t worked.

“Dad!” Brianne’s voice from the kitchen had pulled him from his thoughts as he moved downstairs.

“Yes love?” He said as he sat down beside her at the island.

“Did you pack my lunch?” She asked hopeful that he said no and would just give her money for chicken nuggets like a lot of the other children got.

“Of course.” He smiled proud of himself and the recipes he learned from parenting sites across the internet. Brianne frowned before starting to eat her maple brown sugar oatmeal.

“What did you make?”

“Ham and cheddar wraps with the mustard you like from Prime deli, carrots, and pretzels.” He said slightly unsure even though he packed the bag not even forty minutes previous.

“Did you give me a go-gurt?” Her eyes now hopeful for the sweet tube of yogurt the kids loved.

“You-gurt I did.” He made the terrible pun. Brianne’s face went dead pan.

“Dad!” She gave him a petty chuckle. “That was a really bad joke. “ Her chuckle turned into a soft giggle as Gwilym laughed.

“As your dad I’m contractually obligated to make at least five bad jokes a day. I’m sorry darling it is in the guidebook to fatherhood.” He smiled at her. Brianne’s giggle turned back into a chuckle and an eye roll as she returned her full attention to her oatmeal. “Nervous or excited?” Gwil asked after a few moments of eating between the two.

“For tonight?”

“Yeah, first big cheer practice!” He gave her a hopeful smile. She nodded.

“More nervous than excited I guess.” She said scooping up a spoonful of oatmeal and pushing it around the bowl. “What if I’m no good? A lot of the kids have been cheering since they were five. I never have!” Her eyes moved to her father, they were filled with doubt. It took everything in him for Gwilym to not pull his daughter to his chest and hold her, promising her that everything would be okay.

“So you’re a little behind, so what. You don’t have to cheer if you don’t want to.” He said. “Its okay to quit if it's for the right reasons.” He hoped that she wouldn’t ask him what the right reasons were because he wasn’t entirely sure he knew them himself.

“No!” She said quickly shaking her head. “I want to! I’m just gonna have to try harder than some of the girls. I can do it.” The strength returned to her voice.

“That’s my Bri.” Gwilym smiled wide with pride. “Has any of the kids shown you any moves?” He asked.

“Well this girl Jasmine has. She’s on my team and in my class. She’s super cool and I really like her. “ Brianne smiled. Gwil had heard bits and pieces about this girl and how much Brianne liked her. “She showed me the game cheers at recess this past week and I’ve been practicing them. I think I got most of them down.”

“Wait, game cheers? Are those different from the cheer cheers?” He asked slightly confused.

“Game cheers are for the football games when we cheer on the teams. The cheer routine, dad, is for the competitions.” She confirmed for him.

“Oh. Okay.” He blinked letting the information file itself in the new file on American cheerleading and football he had in his mind. When he had signed her up, he knew she would be at games but when the woman there asked if she was competing competitively Gwilym understood none of it. It took Brianne confirming that she wanted to compete. “Got it. You have got to teach me this stuff darling. In England, we don’t really have cheerleaders.”

“Okay.” She nodded finishing her orange juice. She hopped off her stool taking her bowl and glass to the sink, placing them down.

“Bri.” Gwil said watching her.

“Dishwasher, I know.” She took her dishes from the sink and put them in the half full dishwasher. Gwilym made a note to himself to run it after he got back from dropping her off at school. He finished his last few bites of breakfast as she ran upstairs to brush her teeth and get dressed. He moved putting his dishes in the machine, before putting on his shoes. After about ten minutes, he grabbed his car keys and wallet before looking up the stairs.

“Ready?” He called up.

“Yeah.” She jogged down the stairs in shorts and a t-shirt. She moved pulling on her sneakers before taking her backpack from Gwil’s extended hand. They got into his black Chevy Cruze and pulled from the driveway. He started the short drive to the elementary school.

“So how many kids are on the team?” He asked as he turned down the morning drivetime radio.

“Thirty-five including me.”

“Thirty-five! Doesn’t that get a little crowded and complicated?” He asked.

“Dad the best routines are complicated. The coaches know what they are doing. They were so good last year they got third in nationals!” She said excitedly. The way her voice talked about the team Gwil knew that she had made the right choice picking this sport. The nervousness from earlier had evaporated. “This year, Jasmine said, that we’re gonna win nationals. And if we win nationals we get really cool jackets! I wanna win, I wanna jacket. Mom won when she was my age.” Brianne said with the last part of her statement being quieter than the rest. Angela was still a hard conversation topic between the father and daughter.

“I know love. She would be so very proud of you no matter if you cheered or not.” He

said honestly. Angela had been proud of their daughter’s accomplishments since day one. He pulled into the drop off line. “I’m gonna pick you up at two like always. We’re gonna go home do our respective work, then head to practice at five thirty, does that sound good?” He asked as the cars slowly inched up the line. She nodded.

“Can we eat dinner after practice?”

“Sure, honey. But that isn’t until almost eight o’clock.” He said worried it was too late for her.

“I just want to make sure there is no chance I puke up dinner all over the mats.” She said. Gwilym couldn’t help but chuckle which eased her own tenseness.

“Okay, but just for tonight.” He said as he pulled up to the curb and dropped her off. He leaned back kissing her cheek. “Have fun, but not too much. Learn but not too much that you’re more bright than your dear ole dad.” He said.

“Brighter, dad.” She smiled.

“See you’re already smarter than me.” He smiled as she got out of the car and walked towards the door. He watched her disappear in the sea of back packs before pulling up and out of the line. He began the drive home as he thought about googling some basic information about American cheerleading and the importance of it. It was going to be an interesting day.

______________________________________________________________________________

“I think I know everything I need to know love.” He says as he stopped at a red light on the corner of Van Zile Road. It was nearly five thirty and the two were on their way to the practice facility. “I know all about High V’s, low v’s, T’s, Broken T’s. Pretty good for your dad.” He smiled over at her, proud of himself. Brianne nodded, giving him a similar proud smile.

“That’s great dad.” She said, holding her cheer bag eagerly in her lap. Her hair pulled back into a ponytail with the green and gold cheer bow she had been given on sign up day. “What about stunts? Half up? Fulls? Liberties? Basket tosses?” She asked interested now in her father’s knowledge of the sport she was taking part in. It made her feel like a proud daughter to know that her father had taken a liking to it.

“Stunts?” His smile turned into a slightly confused look. “Well… maybe love, I don’t know as much as I claimed to.” He chuckled, noticing the red light had turned green. He pushed down gently on the accelerator.

“I’ll help you. When I learn something, I will teach you it too.” She said.

“Promise?”

“Promise.” She grinned. “I can’t wait to learn all the things it takes dad! And parents

usually only stay the first practice okay? So please don’t stay for all of them.”

“Why not? Am I embarrassing?” He teased her. “Is it because I am not the one who brought it on?” He was trying to make her laugh, even though she was eager and ready to cheer. He could see behind her eyes the nervousness that laid there ready to attack the young girl.

“It’s Bring It On dad.” She giggled as Gwil turned onto the road leading into the industrial park.

“Are we going the right way?”

“Yeah, Jasmine says that it is by all these warehouses. It's the only place big enough for

all the cheer mats.” She says.

“You will have to introduce me to Jasmine and Jasmine’s parents.” He said, pulling up to 1942 Swarthmore Ave, he parked his Chevy into an open spot and looked around the lot. He counted about 7 minivans, and 9 SVUs. It was the older red Jeep Cherokee that stuck out to him. It seemed out of place in the sea of stick figure families and my child is an honor roll student stickers that stared back at him from the windows and bumpers of other vehicles.

Bri got out of the car quickly, moving inside the large warehouse. Gwilym tried to follow her just as quickly. Once he moved through the door, he noticed how huge the place actually was. There were four full sets of cheer mats, nine panels each, in which two of the floor were spring floors to make tumbling easier. There was a large tumble track and foam pit along the back wall. There were two small sets of bleachers inside for the parents to watch and a wall full of cubbies for the teams to put their bags.

A young man sat at an out of place desk with his headphones in. He pointed to a sign in sheet with the four different teams on them. Gwilym moved over to the list looking for Brianne Lee, signed his name under the sign in section. He looked up to spot his daughter talking to a shorter dark haired girl who placed their bags in cubbies next to each others. This must be Jasmine, he had heard so much about over the past few days.

Gwilym moved towards the small sets of bleachers, trying to find an open seat. He could clearly distinguish two different groups as a few more parents came in and separated. On one bleacher sat parents that looked like they stepped out of a J.Crew or a Vineyard Vines advertisements. On the other set of bleachers, sat a few sets of parents. A man in a suit on the phone speaking Russian at a quick pace, an older woman knitting something as she watched the littlest girls on the far back mat. His eyes then moved to a trio of parents, a young man with short dark curly hair was listening intently to the story being told very animatedly by a reddish-brown hair man whose hands almost smacked the young Y/H/C woman in the face. She jerked her head back and started laughing at him. The two men started to join in her laughter, Gwil decided those were his kind of people. He took another step towards them before he was cut out by someone else.

“Hi Honey. You must be Mr. Lee. I’m Karen Diguimi. McKenna’s mom” A woman with a short cropped haircut that swooped down in the front and then spiked up in the back stood in front of him. She wore a green and gold mustangs t-shirt with the names of her four children on the front over four running horse. In the gold glittering letters it said, ‘Karen’s Corral.’ Gwil gave her a polite smile as he nodded.

“Yes, I am Gwilym. Brianne’s father.” He shook her hand that she had jutted out at him.

“Oh you’re British!” Her heavily mascaraed eyes went wide as the smile broadened

across her face. A light blush came to Gwil’s cheeks as his accent was always getting him more attention than he wanted.

“Yes ma’am I am.” He said.

“Well, that is just incredible honey! You must come sit with us.” She gripped his arm with

her green and gold nails pulling him away from the parents he wanted to sit with.

“Umm, okay.” He politely followed. She sat on the front row of the bleachers, pulling him down to introduce him to the Vineyard Vines and J. Crew parents.

“This is John, Melissa, Linda, Frank, Tracy, and Vanessa. Guys, this is Gwilym. He is Brianne’s father.” She said pointing to each parent as she said their name. He nodded with each, shaking their hands. “This is just some of us, with some many kids on the team, most of us car pool. We could get you in on it if you want.”

“Maybe. I’ll, uh, let you know.” He said kindly. He looked over onto the blue cheer mat, watching his daughter stretch next to Jasmine and a young auburn haired boy. He smiled as she made friends and he turned his attention back to Karen who had launched into a talk about a fundraiser for the competition buses.

“Wall gets those nice buses for their kids, I am just saying. They have won nationals three times over the last five years. It has to be the buses, so I want to come up with some kick booty ideas to raise money for the kids to take those charter buses.”

“Oh what about chocolate bars?” Tracy said. A few other parents threw out some ideas like tupperware, donuts, or pasta shaped like little footballs.

“No, they never sell that well. How about candles that smell like pumpkin spice or vanilla marshmallow? It is almost fall and that would be perfect. We can even include the holiday ones. They make perfect Christmas gifts for your friends and neighbors.” Karen smiled knowing this was her winning idea.

“Shouldn’t we be asking those parents as well?” Gwil said as he looked over his shoulder at the three parents who talking about something on the woman’s phone. How Gwilym longed to be over there with them instead of here with these parents.

“Oh them. No no, they won’t have any good ideas.” Karen pursed her lips in slight disgust.

“What’s wrong with them?” He chuckled looking at her. He clearly saw no problem in the set of them.

“There is nothing wrong with them per say but they are different from the rest of us.” She said losing the digested tone but keeping an air of rudeness about her. “Rami is probably the most mellow of the bunch. Sometimes he makes kind of crazy faces and it doesn’t weird me out as much as it did but its still odd. His wife Lucy thinks she’s better than us because she’s not from here. We rarely see them together because they have another daughter who plays soccer on the other side of town.” Karen said dishing what she thought was dirt to Gwil. He just thought Rami and Lucy seemed like good parents and it was probably the other way around about Karen thinking she was better than Lucy.

“Oh okay.” Gwil shifted a bit from her, slowly trying to make his getaway. The woman sitting with Rami and the other man looked over at Gwil, noticing his physical discomfort. She moved up off her seat and slowly maneuvered off the bleachers.

“Joe is divorced and his son is the only boy on the squad. He doesn’t like to fund raise and he doesn’t wear the team parent shirts Tracy and Melissa make.” Karen said. Joe and Rami watched the woman move in front of Gwil, holding out her hand.

“Hi, I’m Y/N.” The young woman smiled, as Gwil placed his larger hand in hers and shook it. “Karen.” She pulled her hand away looking at the mother. “Love the shirt.” Gwil tried not to laugh in Karen’s face as it turned fifteen different shades of red as Y/N smiled still. Oh, these were people Gwil wanted to hang out with. Angela would have loved Y/N.

“Gwilym.”

“Rad name. So what were you two talking about?”

“Oh nothing.” Karen quipped.

“Selling candles for bus fare.” Gwil said.

“Well, that is interesting. I wouldn’t mind selling a candle or two.” Y/N said. Gwil could hear the two men on the other bleacher snickering. This caused him to smile more.

“I haven’t decided if this what we are going to do yet. But I will let you know.” Karen said with dripping sweetness.

“Why don’t you do that?” Y/N said back with the same sweetness. “Gwil, if you want, there is plenty of room on our bleachers. You can join us if its too full over here.” She smiled genuinely at the man before moving back to Joe and Rami. Both whom high fived her as she sat back down.

“Y/N is one more snide remark away from me telling Coach Nancy. She doesn’t have a child on the team.”

“What? Why is she here than?” Gwil looked back at Karen after watching Y/N smile and push her hair back from her face. It was the first time in a long time, Gwil had looked at a woman like he had looked at Angela when they first met. Now Karen was stopping him from looking at Y/N all together.

“Well her niece is on the team. She is her legal guardian. Her brother and her sister-in-law died and left Jasmine to Y/N. God, we miss Nick, he would have never let his sister talk to me like that.” Karen said with no sympathy for the sister or the child. Gwil seriously doubted that she missed the man at all.

“That kind of makes her a team parent, she’s a parent to her niece.” So Y/N was Jasmine’s aunt, that fact made a small part of Gwil’s heart spark for a mere moment in a place that had long been dark since Angela passed as he knew Y/N would be around more due to their children’s friendship. “You know Karen, I really want to be involved with Bri’s team because I love my daughter and I want to fully support her endeavors, but I think I am going to sit with them for now.” Gwil stood up and moved to the other set of bleachers. “Can I sit?” He asked as the smile on Y/N face grew.

“Of course. Gwilym, this is Joe and Rami.” Y/N introduced him, two more hand shakes down.

“Rami, Joe, this is Gwilym. He’s new to the squad, his daughter is Brianne.” She said.

“Welcome to the mustangs, we’ve got spirit. My daughter is the dark curly haired one, Selma.” Rami said smiling. Gwil took note of her as he found a spot next to Y/N. He sat beside her as Joe pointed to the auburn haired boy.

“Welcome to the team man. That’s Joey, he’s my boy.” He smiled the same proud father smile that Gwil knew all too well. “It is nice to have new faces not being sucked in by Karen and her cronies.” Joe added, patting Gwil’s arm. This made Gwilym laugh.

“Well she definitely tried. Complimented my accent, told me what a bunch of misfits you all were.”

“Aw, how sweet she’s thinking of us.” Y/N said. “Just be careful she might try to seduce you with the promise of nonfat vanilla pumpkin frappuccinos next.”

“Misfits? I prefer the term outcasts but I guess that is all ‘I was homecoming queen and won’t let anyone forget’ can come up with.” Joe said.

“Karen and him went to high school together.” Rami said. “She likes to be the homecoming queen for every trunk-n-treat that the town puts together.”

“It was years ago, find a better costume.” Joe softly exclaimed between them.

“No because I would like to speak to the manager is not a viable costume, Joseph.”

“She was a bitch then and she’s a bitch now.” Joe said. “And I mean that with no ill will towards dogs.” He added. Gwil laughed more, turning his attention to his daughter who was currently in what he could assume was a stunt group. The conversation died down between the parents as they watched their respective child.

“Y/N?”

“Yeah?” She looked at Gwil.

“What is Bri doing? I don’t know much about cheerleading.” He admitted.

“Oh so she’s basing the stunt, which means once they get the flyer up in the air, that’s

Jasmine actually, Bri will hold her foot so that she is balanced and won’t fall.��

“Flyer, base...the girl in the back?” He said trying to add more information to his

cheerleading knowledge card to impress Bri later.

“She’s the backspot, she holds the flyer’s ankles so that she is more stable. Bri is pretty

good for someone who has never cheered before.” Y/N said. “Jasmine hasn’t stopped talking about her since school started. I’ve been waiting to meet you.” There was that small spark again in Gwil’s heart that quickly died down.

“Yes! I hear about Jasmine daily, she’s definitely Bri’s best mate.” He said. Y/N smiled as she took the next hour and a half, explaining the different kinds of stunts they were trying. First with a half, then a full, and then a liberty. It was true, after he understood the mechanism of it all, that Bri was a sturdy base and quick to recover if the flyer moved.

Gwil watched his daughter look happier than he had seen her in a long time. Maybe it was the connection to her mother or being on the squad with her friends, it was definitely worth the money spent on the cheer clothes, the sign up fees, competition fees, everything. If Gwil had to deal with Karen and her cronies every day till Bri was eighteen than so be it, if he knew she would smile like that. As the practice came to an end, Bri ran off the mat to her father.

He scooped her up, hugging her close before putting her back down.

“You did amazing love!” He said.

“Oh thank you dad! I had a lot of fun.” She moved to her cubbie grabbing her bag. Jasmine moved next to her, whispering into Bri’s ear.

“She looked like she had a blast.” Y/N said moving and standing next to him.

“She did and thanks for your help. You know a lot about this stuff.”

“Anytime and I was a mustang myself until I joined drama club in high school.” She said. Y/N was a bit younger than Gwil but maybe she did know his late wife, not that he told her about Angela. “Oh hey, I was going to ask if maybe you wanted to join our carpool. Sometimes I take Joey and Selma home, and vice versa. Just in case you want a night in or if you’re busy with your significant other.”

“Oh I’m not…” He started, he wasn’t ready to bring up the widowship yet. He put his smile back on as he nodded. “Yeah that sounds fantastic.”

“It’s just our kids, no Karen, no crazy cheer parents.” Y/N said. “I’ll give you my number so that we can work out all the details.” He nodded as Bri tapped his arm.

“Dad?”

“Yeah love?”

“Jasmine and Ms. Y/L/N were going to get pizza. Can we go with them please?” Brianne battered her eyelashes at him, putting on a small pleading pout.

“Yeah please Mr. Lee?” Jasmine chimed in with her sweet voice.

“I don’t know. Is it okay with you, Y/N if we tag along?” He looked at the woman.

“Oh yeah, totally. We’re going to Squan Tavern, best thin crust in town.” Y/N smiled.

“Awesome, lead the way and we will follow.” Gwil said. Brianne and Jasmine exclaimed happily as they moved out of the warehouse. Chattering about the things they had learned that night and what was to come in their practices. Gwil walked behind Y/N out of the building as she turned to him.

“See you two in a few.” She smiled, taking Jasmine’s hand leading the girl across the asphalt. She headed to the older red Jeep Cherokee in the parking lot. As Gwil stood at his car door watching them he smiled. In that moment as she helped her niece into the car and then got in herself, Gwilym knew that maybe cheerleading was going to be good for both of them. Maybe even small sparks of gold could make the green shine again.

#green and gold #gwilym lee x reader #gwilym x reader #gwilym lee imagines #Gwilym Lee #bohemian rhapsody #midsomer murders #reader #ben hardy x reader #joe mazello x reader #rami malek #lucy boynton #joe mazzello #ben hardy

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fanforthefics · 6 years

Note

3. Sidgeno

3. teacher/student au, or:

The Class of the Magi

Sid gets out of bed early, like he always does. It is, maybe, hard to leave the warmth of the bed, but he’s been doing his early morning workouts for years now and he’s not going to stop now.

So he wakes up early, rolls out of bed, and goes for a run. It’s the best sort of wake up there is, he’s always thought, getting his muscles moving, watching the town wake up.

Then he gets back, downs about a bottle of gatorade, and jogs back into the bedroom, where the lump on the bed still hasn’t moved.

“Hey.” Sid leans down, shakes his shoulder. “Wake up.”

Geno rolls over, gives Sid a baleful look. “Nyet.”

Sid grins at him. His hair’s all messy, and he looks so grumpy, and Sid loves him a lot. “It’s time to get up.”

“Time for crazy person to get up,” Geno mutters, and tugs the blankets up. Sid catches them. He’s all sweaty so he doesn’t really want to properly straddle Geno like he’d like to, so instead he just leans down closer.

“I’m going to go shower.”

“Good, can sleep more.” Geno shuts his eyes again.

“You could join me.” One of Geno’s eyes open. Sid smirks. “I’m just back from my run.”

Geno’s other eye opens. Sid doesn’t bother looking innocent. Sid knows, and Geno knows he knows, just how much he likes peeling Sid out of his workout clothes. Sid doesn’t really get it–he’s gross and sweaty, it’s not particularly attractive–but Geno’s into it, and it gives Sid even more motivation to work out, so everyone wins, and Sid’s not going to not take advantage of it.

“Evil, Sid,” Geno tells him, and then he grabs Sid’s t-shirt and pulls him down as he rolls, so Sid ends up on his back with Geno on top of him, glaring down in a way that would be a lot more convincing if he weren’t also staring at Sid’s lips.

“Come on, Geno. I’m gross. Now we’re going to have to change the sheets,” Sid complains, also probably not convincingly. He’s got no complaints about where he is.

Now it’s Geno’s turn to smile smugly. “If we have to change anyway, might as well take advantage,” he decides, and really, he has a point.

///

They do eventually shower, and then Geno works on getting dressed as Sid goes into the kitchen to start on breakfast. They aren’t usually breakfast people–Sid’s the type to grab a protein bar or smoothie on his way out, and Geno’s the type to sleep until noon when breakfast is no longer relevant, which he claims it the prerogative of a grad student–but today, Sid thinks its worth it.

Geno wanders out of the bedroom a few minutes later, comes over to watch as Sid beats some eggs into batter. “Pancakes?” he asks, hopeful.

“First day of the new semester pancakes,” Sid agrees. “Coffee in the machine.”

“Love you,” Geno tells him, dropping a kiss to the top of his head, which always makes Sid make a face because he’s not actually short, dammit, and goes to get coffee. “We have bacon too?”

“Are you planning to make it?” Sid asks. He’s finished making the batter, so he pours a careful cup onto the griddle.

“Siiiid,” Geno whines, and comes close again to crowd against Sid’s back and nuzzle into his neck. Sid can smell the coffee on his breath, mixed with the mint of his toothpaste. “Bacon best way to celebrate first day of semester.”

“Oh it is?” Sid asks, rolling his eyes, but they both know he’s going to cave, because Geno is an unrepentant bully about shit like this and Sid has a problem saying no to him.

“Yes,” Geno informs him, and there’s a shit-eating grin in his voice even if Sid’s not going to look at him to see it. “Definitely.”

“Ugh, fine.” Sid sighs. “Go get it.”

“You best,” Geno informs him, and goes to get the bacon.

They eat at the counter, Sid shoveling in food because he’s still hungry from his run and Geno half eating and half laughing at Sid. it’s mainly in silence, because they’ve done this for almost two years now, but it’s comfortable. Easy. Sid can imagine doing it for another fifty. Even if he hasn’t actually said as much yet, because he knows he gets intense fast and it can be a lot for some people. He doesn’t think it will be for Geno, but it’s better not to risk it.

Sid’s phone buzzes halfway through beakfast, and he grabs it to check it, smiles.

“Flower and Vero are really enjoying Paris, it looks like,” Sid says, handing the phone to Geno so he can see the picture of the two of them in front of the Eiffel Tower. “Even if they’re going to the most touristy places, seriously.”

“Good that they can manage schedule like that,” Geno agrees, handing back the phone. Sid lets out a longing sigh.

“Next year,” he promises, like he has for a semester. God, he is so sick of classes. “I won’t be tied to classes anymore.”

“You want to travel, then?” Geno asks, looking at Sid’s phone with a twist to his lips.

Sid shrugs. “On two grad student’s salaries? Let’s be real. Flower swung that trip because Vero is actually gainfully employed.” He barely pauses at the brief confusion on Geno’s face. “She’s employed in a real way,” he clarifies. He’s used to that–Geno’s english is great for someone who only came to the US for his PhD, but it’s far from perfect. The little translation things like that are easy. Sid knows that it gets harder, sometimes, when they both get frustrated about their inability to communicate big ideas or what they’re feeling, but little things like this are easy.

“Okay, but–if money does not matter,” Geno insists. “You want travel? Go to Europe?”

“I mean, it’d be cool.” Sid shrugs again. “I’ve never been. I’d like to be someplace interesting, for a change.” He grins at Geno. “You could show me Russia.”

Geno’s face does the complicated twisting thing that comes up when he thinks about Russian politics, which isn’t what Sid meant to do. He knows that the mere fact of him makes life difficult for Geno, and he can’t regret it, really–he doesn’t want to be anyone other than he is, and he wouldn’t give Geno up for anything–but he doesn’t like that it’s true.

“Anyway,” Sid goes on, before Geno can think about it too much. “It’s just a pipe dream, because we’re going to be paying off student loans for the next forever, and until you discover the cure for cancer, traveling’s not in the budget.”

“How about when you become prime minister?” Geno counters, smiling again, and Sid rolls his eyes and tries not to look pleased about how much Geno believes in him.

Then he looks at the clock. “Oh, shit, I should get dressed.” he puts his plate aside, then leaves the door to the bedroom open as he pulls on jeans. “Are you in the lab until late?”

“No, can be home by seven,” Geno calls back. “Library?”

“I’ve got class until three.” Sid grabs a plain grey t-shirt and tugs it on, then comes back out into the living room, scooping up his computer and the notebook it’s sitting on so he can shove it into a bag. “Then yeah, I’ll be in the library. Text about dinner?“

“Good,” Geno agrees, and catches Sid by the arm to reel him in before he goes to put his shoes on. Sid lets him draw him in, then kiss him, long and slow. “Happy first day of semester,” he says, and Sid grins back at him.

“Happy first day of the semester,” he agrees, and heads to his first class.

He has a seminar on Intellectualism and Democracy in Post-War North America first, and then he grabs lunch on his way to his next class. He settles in near the back–it’s more of an undergrad class, even if he spots a few other grad students he knows around–and opens up his computer to take notes on. Geno’s texted, proposing Indian for dinner; Sid agrees, but only if Geno picks it up from the good place that doesn’t deliver.

The professor starts talking about the syllabus, and Sid glances up, sees him–a man probably ten years older than Sid, with blonde hair that’s thinning in a way that Sid associates with Russians, even if he will never ever tell Geno that–then looks back down at his computer. He has emails about the grad student hockey league to field, and his advisor’s starting to push him on really narrowing down a topic for his thesis.

“And also here with us are our two teaching assistants,” Professor Gonchar goes on. Sid tunes in with half an ear–they’ll be doing grading, have office hours, Sid knows how that works– “Natasya Ivanov, and Evgeni–” Sid looks up, eyes wide. And yes, there he is–Sid would know him from miles away at this point. “Malkin.”

Geno looks out at the students, and Sid can tell the moment he meets Sid’s eyes, because he is clearly feeling the same as Sid–oh, shit.

///

“Fuck.”

“Yes,” Geno agrees. They’re standing in the hall outside the class–thankfully, no one had given them second looks as everyone else left class, probably because no one knew either of them yet. Geno leans against the wall.

“What are we going to do?”

“Maybe I’m not grade anything of yours. Not a problem.”

“That’s not a solution!” Sid hisses. “Why didn’t you check the roster before class?”

Geno rolls his eyes. “I’m think only undergrads take Introduction to Russian.”

“Why are you even TAing a Russian class?” Sid demands, because that’s easier than freaking out completely. “You have a full schedule, with your other TAing and your labwork.”

“I fit it in,” Geno says, but he’s looking shifty.

“Geno.”

“I want little more cash, fine.” Geno crosses his arms over his chest looking sulky like he always does when he’s forced to admit something he didn’t want to. “Why you in the class?”

Sid focuses on Geno’s face. “I need it for my thesis.”

“If you want learn Russian, I teach.”

Now Sid rolls his eyes. “Geno, the Russian you teach me is not something I can use in my thesis.”

Geno’s smile flashes. Whatever, maybe Sid’s getting conditioned to hearing certain Russian phrases in bed, and maybe it really works for him. That’s not relevant right now. “We can’t both be doing this. It violates–some code of conduct. And looks really bad for both of us, if it gets out. You’ll have to back out of TAing. Can you find someone else to do it?”

“I’m not back out!” Geno protests.

“You don’t need the money–”

“Why you not drop class?”

“I need it for my thesis!”

“Your thesis on Canada and US, not Russia! It not relevant. Can drop.”

“My schedule’s set for the semester, if I drop it now it’ll mess everything up–”

“So I have to mess everything up?” Geno demands, straightening up to his full height so he can loom. Sid is very into it when he does that to be sexy, but not when he does that to intimidate. Especially because Sid has plenty of muscle on him. “Why not you?”

“It’d be easier for you–”

“I’m make commitment, Sid!”

“I can’t change my schedule, Geno!” Sid snaps back, and then they’re both glaring, breath coming hard.

Geno breaks first, and by breaking it means literally breaking into a torrent of angry Russian. “You so fucking stubborn,” he spits at Sid, who glares back. That’s not a surprise to anyone.

“No duh,” Sid retorts, which he knows as soon as he says it is the wrong thing to say, because Geno hates people condescending to him more than anything.

“I’m not drop class,” he tells Sid, and stalks off down the hall.

“Fine!” Sid yells back. “You can be the one violating policy.”

“Fine!” Geno yells over his shoulder, and Sid doesn’t wait to hear more before storming out the other way.

///

Sid spends an angry afternoon in the library, trying to do reading and getting distracted trying to find the university policy for this. He can’t seem to find anything–there are policies for undergrads, and for professors and their grad students, but nothing for two grad students who are in a preestablished romantic relationship who end up being in and TAing the same class. Sid doesn’t get it. They can’t be the first people in this situation.

Finally, he gives it up for lost, and goes home. Geno clearly hasn’t been back to the apartment since he left this morning–the dishes are done from breakfast but the griddle is still soaking in the sink, and there’s still the pile of clothes on the bed that Geno always goes through before he chooses an outfit that he usually ends up putting away when he gets back, if Sid hasn’t done it first.

Sid has gotten here first, so he puts the clothes away this time. They’re all so ugly, Sid thinks, fondly. He does not get Geno’s aesthetic at all.

“I can do,” Geno says, when Sid’s mostly done. Sid looks up. Geno’s leaning on the doorframe, watching Sid warily. His taste is so bad, but Sid could still look at him forever. “Was going to.”

“I got home first, it’s fine.” Sid hangs up the last shirt. “There, done.”

“I pick up dinner,” Geno tells him, a clear peace offering. Sid nods.

They set dinner out on the coffee table, pushing aside the assorted books that usually cover it, and dish out their usual orders. Sid takes a bite. It really is good. And it’s out of Geno’s way. And he can feel Geno watching him, wary and sidelong.

“I just don’t know how to make this right,” Sid says, setting his fork down. “I’ve been looking all afternoon, and I honestly can’t tell if it’s a violation, but I don’t want anything to smear your reputation, and this could look really bad.”

“I know.” Geno sets his fork down too. “Sid, why you want take Russian class? Not for thesis.”

“I–” Sid glances down at his plate, but it’s Geno. He trusts Geno not to be overwhelmed by him. “I just imagine this lasting a long time, and if it does, it’s not fair to you that I can’t speak Russian, at least a little. I want us to be able to communicate. And that means I need to learn Russian.”

“Sid,” Geno breathes, and there’s the sort of wonder in his voice he had when Sid asked him out. When Sid agreed to moving in together. Sid looks up again, and Geno’s looking at him like he’s the only thing in the world. Then he grins, breaking the moment. “Think that sweetest thing you ever said.”

“Fuck you, I can be sweet,” Sid retorts, but he knows he’s grinning stupidly too. “What about you? Why do you need the extra money so badly? I thought you were fine.”

“Am, but.” Now it’s Geno’s turn to go a little red. “You talk about travel, about how Flower and Vero go places, Tanger and Cath–I’m want to take you somewhere nice too. You work hard, deserve it. Deserve all nice things.”

“Geno,” Sid says, but he can’t help his smile. “You know I don’t care about that. I’m happy wherever you are.”

“Not mean you not deserve nice vacation,” Geno insists, stubborn. “Also, want to fuck you on beach.”

Sid snorts. “That I can get behind.”

“No, I be behind,” Geno corrects, eyes glinting, and Sid bursts into laughter.

“So, this doesn’t resolve anything, though,” Sid points out, when they’ve finished laughing and Geno’s foot is pressed agains this thigh again. “I mean, we could both drop the class, but–”

“We can ask,” Geno suggests.

“Ask?”

Geno shrugs. “If policy not clear, maybe no rule. Worst thing, Professor Gonchar says no, and we figure out then.”

Sid considers. “Can’t hurt, I guess,” he admits, and Geno grins, then takes Sid’s plate, and sets it aside.

“Fight done?”

“That was barely a fight,” Sid objects. Their fights tend to be long and passive aggressive and end in someone sleeping on a friends’ couch.

“Sid, fight done,” Geno asks again, and scoots closer. “Means we made up.”

“Oh.” Sid still doesn’t love the semantics of it, but also, “Yeah,” he agrees, and tugs Geno in for some make up sex.

///

“I don’t think it’ll be a problem.”

“What?” Sid asks. He’d expected Professor Gonchar to put up at least a little more of a fuss. “Just like that?”

“We can make sure that Natasya or I grade all your papers, and we’ll make a note that I’m aware and have agreed to it.” Professor Gonchar nods. “Neither of you are undergraduates, and from what I’ve heard from faculty, both of you are good people. That should be fine.”

“But–” Geno’s hand closes around Sid’s waist, his fingers digging in.

“Thank you,” he says in English, then adds something else in Russian. The professor chuckles.

“I’ll expect a lot from you, Sidney, if you have your own private Russian tutor,” he says, and then gives them both the sort of look that means a professor is moving on. “Anything else?”

This is too easy. Sid’s still not sure this is right. “Professor–”

“No,” Geno interrupts, and pinches Sid, hard enough that he has to work not to jump. “Is all. Thank you, Professor, see you for meeting.”

Professor Gonchar is clearly trying not laugh at them, but he doesn’t say anything as they leave.

“I still don’t think it should work like that,” Sid says, as soon as the office door closes behind them. “That doesn’t seem right. I could definitely like, get you to tell me test answers, or–”

“Sid–”

“Or even just hints on the test, or–”

“Sid,” Geno says again, and puts a hand over his mouth. Sid shuts up, but glares. “We win. Is good.” Sid glares harder. “And if you so worries about morals, then probably not a problem.”

Sid waits for him to move his hand, then, “But other people might not be– fine, I’ll stop!” he yelps, dodging Geno’s hand.

“Good.” Geno grins. “See, no problem. Is fine. You learn Russian and we go on trip.”

“Yeah, we really worked the system,” Sid agrees, but he knows he’s pouting.

“Hmm.” Geno hums, then he glances around, and pulls Sid into an empty class room, and then in short order against the door. “You want test answers so bad? Maybe need to ask really nice.”

“What– Geno!” Sid sputters, when Geno waggles his eyebrows at him. “No, that’s creepy, we actually do teach kids.”

“I actually do teach you, now,” Geno points out, and then murmurs something in Russian that Sid has definitely heard him say before when things are getting good.

“That’s unfair,” Sid complains, but he gets his hands into Geno’s hair. “Also, we should do this at home.”

“So boring, Sid,” Geno sighs, but he steps away from Sid–or he would, if Sid let him go. Which he hasn’t.

“Yeah, but you like it,” Sid points out, grinning. He pulls at Geno’s hair until he leans down, closer to Sid. “Now what do I have to do to get a Russian lesson around here?”

“I’m give you lesson,” Geno grumbles, and then stops grumbling when Sid shuts him up with a kiss.

#pens fic #my fic #here have 3k of silly established relationship fluff #instead of the edgy power dynamics that i think you wanted #sorry :/#actual teacher/student stuff squicks me out #so have cute instead!#Anonymous #pens tumblr fic

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ckret2 · 6 years

Text

The Door In Petrex’s Quarters

So there’s a cool new blog on Tumblr called @tfspeedwriting where they post a bunch of prompts on Saturday and you choose one and writing something! There’s basically no rule except that you have to do it in under two hours. So anyway this took me about four hours, which were spread out over a total of ten hours.

I’m good at this game.

(If you're on mobile, the readmore malfunctions, and you gotta scroll past all this, I'm sorry for your suffering.)

Prompt: Pick a music playlist on a device of your choice. The second line of the third song is your prompt. (“Song 3”—I swear the title’s a coincidence—by Stone Sour: “So I'll keep you close, and keep my secret safe.”) Continuity: made-up Shattered Glass AU for IDW continuity Ship: Prowl/Tarantulas, but you’ll wish it wasn’t. Wordcount: 5200-ish Summary: They say that Petrex, leader of the Autobot Justice Division, can’t feel love. Petrex prefers it that way. Or: how Prowl tamed his pet scientist. Tags: Angst, abusive relationship, all hurt no comfort.

They say there's a doorway in Petrex's private quarters where his berth is supposed to be.

It's an empty metal doorframe. The space where there should be a door is filled by cement mixed with strange, dark, multicolor rubble. They say that Petrex sleeps on it, curled up on his side, a hand pressed against the surface of the shut doorway like he wants to press through to the other side.

They say the door still works. They say it goes somewhere. They say all you have to do is turn it on.

They say a lot of things about Petrex.

They say the reason that he wears a cold white Autobrand-shaped mask is because he has a cold white Autobrand-shaped face underneath, and that he'd rather people think he's hiding his expressions than let them know he doesn't have any expressions at all. He is as icy, and as hard, and as unmovable, and as implacable as marble; and Terminus save your ember if you dare try to chip that marble.

They say that nobody has ever joined the Autobot Justice Division willingly—nobody except for Petrex, its founder, its leader, and its symbol. They say that every member of the Autobot Justice Division is someone who tried to flee or betray the Autobots, but who had potential, had a use; and so, as their punishment, instead of adding them to the AJD's list for retribution, Petrex added them to the AJD itself, chained them in service to himself, and turned them into essential cogs in the machine that grinds up other criminals and turncoats.

They say he's not a person, but a drone, a machine designed for order and logic and laws, capable only of understanding emotions in a theoretical sense, and then only far enough to determine how he might make use of them.

Petrex doesn't deny anything anyone says about him.

"Mesothulas. Mesothulas!"

Mesothulas started, almost dropping his welder. Terminus below, he wasn't expecting Prowl so soon—he wasn't supposed to come for another two weeks, was he? Why was he early? Had something gone wrong, had his latest offering malfunctioned? Part of him hoped desperately that it had; the rest of him dreaded the consequences of such a failure. Maybe Prowl had forgotten their schedule and come early? Mesothulas had never known him to do so before, but oh, if he had, if he was expecting Mesothulas's next work to be done today and it wasn't— Or, even worse, what if Prowl was right on time, what if Mesothulas had forgotten the schedule—

"I'm here!" He dropped the welder to the floor, ran for the stairs to the lab entryway, skidded an about face to go turn off the welder, and sprinted for the stairs—woe to him if he kept Prowl waiting a second too long. "I'm here, I'm here, I—I'm so sorry, Prowl, I didn't know you were coming. I was working, I'm sorry."

Prowl was standing, waiting, in the middle of the entryway. (Ostaros was so close to him, just a few feet to Prowl's left. Mesothulas's plating crawled—he shouldn't have left Ostaros out in the open like that. What if Prowl spotted him, decided after all that work that he didn't like the result? If anything happened to him—) His helmet was already off, tucked under one arm, and his red optics were so bright they were pink, nearly the same shade as Mesothulas's armor. Was he mad or happy? Mesothulas couldn't tell from the top of the stairs.

"I should hope you were working," Prowl said. "You've only got a couple of weeks left to finish the guilt extractor." So Mesothulas hadn't forgotten their schedule—that was a relief. But then why was he here?

"Yes, I know, I—I'm right on schedule, it'll be done in time." He stopped at the bottom of the stairs, and waited, his heels pressed up against the bottom step, not taking a step closer.

And then Prowl walked toward him. Mesothulas's ember jumped into his throat. The way Prowl moved—even in armor—Mesothulas could practically visualize how his joints moved underneath it. There was such control, such confidence, such precision in his motions; he radiated such strength that Mesothulas felt weaker just for being in his presence. Everything Prowl did made him feel weaker. His fuel tank fluttered, his ember guttered, his fans sputtered.

When he was alone, he told himself that it was fear—very rational fear, for more than once he and his slipped schedule had been on the receiving end of the infamous wrath of the Autobot Justice Division's Petrex.

("I'll teach you to keep on schedule," Prowl had said before; and it was both an indulgent offer to take him under his wing and a threat. "Every cog ticks in time around me. I make sure of it.")

Yes—Mesothulas told himself the weakness he felt around Prowl was born of fear. But when he was in Prowl's presence, he knew that was only half true.

When he was with Prowl, he was almost desperate to impress him.

Words tumbled out of him: "I'm—I'm almost done with the guilt extractor, actually. Ahead of schedule." It was risky business to tell Prowl when he was ahead of schedule. On the one hand, yes, he'd be immediately gratified with Prowl's approval—and oh, when Prowl approved of him, it was heavenly. For a moment, on the timepiece that was Prowl's carefully-wound life, Mesothulas was a jewel mounted in the center of its face, sparkling in the light of Prowl's delight. But Prowl never forgot a promise; and when Mesothulas promised a faster delivery, Prowl updated his expectations accordingly. If he fell behind again, it meant Prowl's wrath was twice as hot; because now, not only had he failed to meet Prowl's schedule, he'd also lied about getting ahead and maliciously stolen some of Prowl's approval.

(So Prowl made him feel, anyway. Sometimes Mesothulas nearly believed it.)

But the way Prowl's optics lit up made Mesothulas immediately forget the consequences. The consequences would come later. Today—now—Prowl's arms were outstretched, and he said, voice a little louder, "That's wonderful!" Prowl's tone of voice never changed; it only got louder or softer, and either direction could be good or bad; but whichever direction it went, it could make Mesothulas's ember flicker with fear or blaze with joy and longing for more. "I can expect it sooner, then. Would you say by the end of the week."

Without stopping to think, Mesothulas said, "Without a doubt," and immediately felt faint; although he wasn't sure whether it was from the monumental scale of this promise, or from the way Prowl's arms wrapped around him: one pressed to his upper back, pulling Mesothulas's face against the chest of his armor; and one pressed lower on his back, so suggestively low that Mesothulas's armor burned where Prowl's fingers touched him. Mesothulas's own fingers burned as well, itching with the urge to wrap his arms around the thick waist of Prowl's rad suit—but to do so without explicit permission was dangerous. Mesothulas had courted enough danger by promising the guilt extractor so soon.

"Good," Prowl said—his voice was so soft now, and Mesothulas's legs were weak. "I'll hold you to it."

Mesothulas's ember filled with dread, and he wanted even more to wrap himself around Prowl—not just physically, but spiritually, to bind himself to his... to his perverse muse, the walking inspiration for all the most wondrous things he'd ever created.

"But that's not what I'm here about."

... And the most horrible things. He tensed with the urge to pull back, but couldn't. Not until Prowl was ready to let him go.

"Oh, I've—" Mesothulas spoke quickly, "—I've been working on another project too, since I'm getting so far ahead on the guilt extractor—you'll be pleased, I'm sure—it's the one you thought up, to make use of all those scraps of reality I've got sitting around—"

"I'm sure I will be pleased." Prowl finally let go, and stepped back, and Mesothulas wasn't sure if that was a good sign or not. "But that's not what I'm here for, either." His head dipped down slightly, and not for the first time Mesothulas marveled through his fear at how much Prowl could express through nothing but the tilt of his head and the way his gaze came through his mask. "And I know a distraction when I hear it."

"I—I'm sorry, I just thought you'd want to—"

"Mesothulas."

"Yes! Forgive me! Y-you were saying? You're here about—?"

"Carpessa."

Mesothulas's fuel tank twisted. He had heard of the neutral city. He'd never been there before. He had no connection to it. Prowl had never mentioned it before. Mesothulas knew exactly what happened to it. "Th... The bomb...?"

"Worked flawlessly," Prowl said, and the bottom of Mesothulas's twisted fuel tank dropped out completely. "I don't know how you managed to cobble together a bomb out of pathetic Decepticon parts that has such explosive capacity, and yet can still be mistaken for something they made—but I must hand it to you, everyone was fooled. Even the Prime is marveling at their unanticipated savagery. This will throttle their chances to get any interstellar allies rallying behind their cause, when they can't play the poor innocent victims. A job well done, Mesothulas. For the most part."

Every word was an icicle through Mesothulas's ember. It took him several tries to choke out the word, "S-survivors?"

Prowl hesitated. "Too many," he said. "There were less than fifteen hundred fatalities. That's why I'm here, to discuss my requirements for the next model. Which I'd like you to get to work on as soon as possible. I was going to give you an extension on the guilt extractor so you could begin to work on the bomb immediately, but if you think you can be done in a week, then you can finish it first and get to work on the next bomb—"

"No."

He hadn't planned it. He hadn't meant to say it. And if he had the choice, he'd rather throw himself on Terminus's teeth than spend one more nanosecond watching in horror as Prowl's head slowly tilted down, and his optics blazed brighter.

Quietly, Prowl said, "No."

For a moment, the lab was so quiet, Mesothulas could hear Ostaros's vents cycling air. Ostaros. Never mind what Prowl might do to him—what might he do to Ostaros? Prowl could rip Mesothulas to shreds, but the mere thought of him scratching Ostaros's soft paint, the enamel hadn't even cured yet—

"Well," Prowl said, just as quietly, "if you'd rather keep to the original schedule, then—take the extension on the guilt extractor, and work on it and the bomb simultaneously..."

For a moment, the heavens opened up, a beam of light shone down on Prowl, and a holy chorus played. Prowl didn't offer second chances. Never. The Autobot Justice Division culled and amputated all limbs of the Autobot Army that no longer served what Petrex considered to be their appropriate purpose. Weakness was to be eradicated. Mesothulas should have been honored to be so indulged after wavering from the path Prowl had assigned him. All he had to do was accept it, and get back to work. Continue singing the songs his muse wrote for him. All would be well and beautiful, and if Mesothulas was good, every once in a while Prowl would touch him as kindly as he had a moment ago.

And there would be more Carpessas.

No. No, he couldn't, not again. Damn whatever Prowl might do to him—to them—oh, Ostaros, Mesothulas is so sorry—but Mesothulas and Ostaros were only two people. How many had died in Carpessa? He couldn't let it happen again.

His voice was barely a whisper. "I can't."

Prowl's optics flashed brighter, and Mesothulas flinched. "Excuse me." Yet another chance to correct his errant wording. Mesothulas was drowning in indulgences today. He wondered if Prowl had ever before been so lenient with anyone else. If he was smart, he'd take this chance.

But Carpessa. "Forgive me, I'm sorry, I—"

Prowl lunged forward, seizing him by the collar of his chestplate, and Mesothulas cried out, nearly sobbing. "You've always been so obedient," he hissed. "You've done your job so well. It's what I like so much about you." (Even now, ready to die, Mesothulas's ember blazed brighter at the praise. Terminus, Terminus, Mesothulas would do anything for Prowl—not just out of fear—but he couldn't do this. Over a thousand lives were already on his hands.) "After all that, you haven't suddenly developed a streak of naughtiness, have you."

"No! Never!" Mesothulas grabbed at Prowl's gauntleted hand. "I—I'm still useful to you, I swear! I can build you more troops—reliable troops—without waiting for Terminus to reawaken—"

"Surely you're not referring to your vapid pet project that smiled at me when I came in."

"He's not done. When he's finished—"

"I asked for a bomb!" He shook Mesothulas to emphasize the word. This time Mesothulas did sob.

"Wh-w-what about the guilt extractor? Or—or the project with the reality scraps? I've stitched it into a serviceable prison, I—I could show—"

Prowl shook Mesothulas again, and he fell silent. But Prowl said nothing. It was more terrifying than anything he might have said. Even a death sentence would end the suspense.

But finally—voice back at its usual volume—he said, "Show me."

Surely, no one in all of Cybertronian history had been shown as much mercy as the merciless Prowl had shown to Mesothulas today. "Oh—th-thank you—you'll be so pleased, I'm sure of—"

"Just move." Prowl let go of Mesothulas, and shoved him backwards. He tripped backwards on the stairs, crashed down, and for a moment in his panic actually tried to clamber up them backwards on his hands and heels before he managed to roll over and rush to his feet.

"This way!" He took the stairs two at a time, and heard Prowl following heavily behind.

He had to get out. He couldn't stay here, not like this. This would only work as a distraction, and Mesothulas couldn't risk Ostaros's life again. He'd done it in the spur of the moment, but next time he'd be weak, he knew it. It wouldn't be long before Prowl figured out he could get whatever he wanted if he threatened Ostaros.

He'd get through this. He'd hand over his prison if Prowl asked for it. And then he and Ostaros had to disappear.

"I call it the Noisemaze. It's—I-it's—" He'd had a description of it he'd been working on, trying to figure out how to convey what it was while leaving out all the words like horrifying and monstrous and unconscionable, all the little descriptors that Prowl didn't like to hear Mesothulas say; but the words failed him now, and all he could say about it was, "it induces sensory overload."

"Is that it."

"Extreme sensory overload," Mesothulas protested. Keep talking, keep talking, impress him. "The kind that—that completely fills your RAM. You can't think through it. It destroys all higher rational thought." He entered the room where he'd been working on the Noisemaze, looked around for something other than the doorframe to focus on—there was the welder he'd discarded, he should pick it up—and tried not to think about whether offering Prowl this torture prison was any less evil than bombing civilians. At least a bomb was quick. (Evil, that was what it was—that was what he was, now—he'd done evil. He'd done evil for Prowl.)

"How painful."

"I can think of nothing more painful." He set the welder on a workbench, and climbed up the two-step pedestal so he could flip the switch on the side of the frame. A hum, and the shadows of the room were stirred with soft, moving turquoise and orange lights. "It's—unending torment. It skips straight past the more fragile vectors for pain—limbs, nerves, all of them are things that can be destroyed, turned off, or burned out. But the Noisemaze attacks your mind directly. It harms you through your senses without harming your senses. Nothing you can do will turn off or block the barrage except destroying your own senses, all of them—but the Noisemaze would leave your mind too addled and overloaded on pain to even think of such a thing." It wasn't the description he'd meant to go for, but he was fairly certain he'd left out any words that would make Prowl tetchy. Prowl didn't care how awful it sounded, as long as Mesothulas didn't imply that to do it was wrong.

Prowl ambled around it, examining the controls. "And it's finished, you say. You certainly showed initiative."

"Well—the hardware used to access it needs some refining—the prototype is practically held together with hot glue and scotch tape—but the Noisemaze itself, it'll hold together indefinitely." He leaned an elbow on the doorframe to gaze into the Noisemaze. The landscape shifted and the sky spun, and even with the thin membrane of the doorway separating him from the maze, watching it undulate and roil made him dizzy. How many would Prowl put in here? Maybe he could find a way later to steal it back. Once he and Ostaros were out of here—he could get Ostaros with one of the neutral populations fleeing the planet, he could join the Decepticons, use his inventing abilities and knowledge of Prowl for good—

He heard Prowl climbing the doorframe's pedestal, right behind him; and yet, he still flinched when Prowl's arms wrapped, slowly, gently, around his waist. "It's beautiful." Prowl's voice was a whisper; and his fingertips grazed across Mesothulas's stomach so softly, so tenderly, it almost made him cry. "The perfect prison for the Autobot Justice Division's needs. The ultimate tool for reform—destroy their mind and remake it."

Mesothulas's abdominal armor trembled under Prowl's touches, and the Noisemaze spun nauseatingly before his optics. Oh Prowl, love him, praise him, use him, keep holding him just like that. Mesothulas couldn't leave, he couldn't leave. He'd get Ostaros away and bear the punishment for it, but he couldn't leave. "Is—is th... I didn't think the AJD focused on reform? Just punishment?"

"We reform a few," Prowl said. "The few cogs that aren't too broken or too dull to be of use, but rather would help the Autobot machine tick more efficiently, if only the rough edges could be sanded smooth." One hand grazed Mesothulas's waist, leaving a path of tingling light in its wake as it languidly circled around to the small of his back. "The ones like you."

Mesothulas's spark froze. "Wha—?"

He tried to twist at the exact moment Prowl shoved him. He grabbed Prowl's gauntleted wrist. "Prowl!" He hung by one hand and the tip of one foot in reality; his other arm and leg wheeled wildly in the Noisemaze, trying to help him keep balance, but he couldn't even tell which direction he was spinning them. A dozen directions at once. Prowl's mask melted and twisted in front of his optics. "Please! Don't— I— Take me— Ostaros—"

"When you get out," it looked like the Autobrand had melted onto Prowl's face, like it moved and shifted with his words, like he spoke through its mouth, "I expect your head to be empty of everything except thoughts of obeying me. If your Noisemaze works as well as you say, that should be no problem."

"No, no, no no no no—" He managed to get his other hand back through the portal, and the tip of his other foot, and he grabbed Prowl's hand. Prowl's optics blazed bright, the same pink as Mesothulas's armor. (Was it still pink? He couldn't see himself anymore, he was turning black, only his hands and the tips of his feet still looked pink.) "Please." He squeezed Prowl's hand. "Please."

Prowl stared at him, even as the edges of his face started to fall apart. And then he squeezed Mesothulas's hand back. Hope surged. Was he reconsidering? He was going to pull Mesothulas back in, this had just been to scare him, he still had one more chance—

"When you get out, you're going to make me an army, Mesothulas. Just like Ostaros." With his free hand, Prowl unlatched his gauntlet. It slid off and Mesothulas tumbled into madness.

The lab was dusty; the lights were out. Everything that Prowl could find an off switch for had been shut down months ago; everything he couldn't, had been left to run or burn out. Something had exploded. A couple of wings of the lab were rubble, now. Radiation from outside leaked in through a destroyed wall. Prowl had sealed all the doors he could between here and there, but he still wouldn't dare so much as take off his rad suit's helmet inside the lab.

A second suit was settled against the wall, waiting for a passenger, as Prowl ascended the pedestal to the Noisemaze's doorframe. Six months was long enough. Mesothulas was ready to come back.

Prowl pulled the lever to open the door.

Nothing happened.

He turned it off, and back on. And again. And again, more forcefully. "No." He looked down, getting off the pedestal, dropping to his knees to check the power cables. He grabbed every point at which they connected and twisted them together, tight, making sure the connections were secure. He risked exposing a sliver of armor under one gauntlet so he could hold his wrist against the cable, checking to make sure he could detect a flowing EM field through it. He latched his gauntlet back in place, and walked up to the doorframe again, to flip the switch one more time.

Sparks flew from the frame. Prowl stumbled back as something popped, and smoke spewed from behind the switch. "No!" He waved the smoke away and stormed up to the frame again, flipping the switch over, and over, and over. "No, no, no—" his voice got louder with every word, "—give him back, give him back. This is incarceration, not an execution!"

Nothing. He waved an arm wildly through the doorframe, ducked through it, quickly examined the doorframe from the other side, circled around it, circled around it faster. "No! Dammit, he's—he's mine, he's—give him back! Give him back to me!" He grabbed the frame, shook it—the lever coughed out a sad puff of smoke—and he leaned through it again. "Mesothulas!" As though the Noisemaze was still right through the doorway. "Mesothulas!" As though he could reach him from here, if only he was loud enough.

There was silence in the abandoned lab.

Prowl's hand slid off the doorframe. He dropped to his knees in the middle of the dead portal to the Noisemaze, cradled his head in his hands, and rocked back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

They say that the doorway in Petrex's room goes somewhere—or it would, if only somebody knew how to turn it on again. They say that it's a prison; they say he keeps something terrible locked away, and woe to anyone who's there when he unlocks it. They say that when Petrex sleeps on his doorway, hand pressed to its cement-and-rubble surface, sometimes something on the other side will scratch at it, desperate to get out; and sometimes, in his sleep, Petrex will scratch back.

They say many things about Petrex. A few of them are true.

Here's what they don't say about Petrex, but perhaps they should: he is icy, and hard, and unmovable, and implacable in public; but in private, he screams, he rages, he cackles, he dances, hot and explosive as a fire raging through a fuel refinery. You can see his optics behind his mask, wide and wild and red, but sometimes they're white-hot, and at those times his mask doesn't look icy but white-hot too. Here's what else they don't say: nobody has ever joined the Autobot Justice Division willingly; and most of those who join are criminals and turncoats that Petrex has reassigned to more important functions; but a few, a few are those who he has not chained to himself with invisible ununtrium links, but rather tied to himself with sinewy red threads. A few are those that he's loved too much to ever let escape.

Nobody says that about Petrex because nobody knows that he can feel love.

Petrex prefers it that way.

"What's the point of all this, Tarantulas."

Even when Prowl was on the ground and Tarantulas—what a stupid name, a grotesque alien name for an animal, a name that clattered and chattered against the back of Prowl's teeth, t-t-t—Tarantulas was pulled up high, huddling like a fearful creature against the wall—even at this range, Prowl had mastered the art of tilting his head just so, so that the way his mask framed his optics made it look like he was glaring down at Tarantulas. And he was glaring down at Tarantulas. Because no matter what a putrid beast he'd made of himself, no matter what a lowly bug he was now compared to Prowl, no matter all Prowl had achieved or all the power he'd amassed or all the soldiers at his beck and call—Autobot and Decepticon alike, now—the truth was, Tarantulas had blackmail, and Tarantulas had an invisible army, and Tarantulas had a prison in a pocket dimension where he'd trapped Prowl and where nobody knew how to find Prowl—and Prowl was terrified. And he would never, ever let Tarantulas know that.

"The point?" Tarantulas drew back, visibly surprised, and Prowl was pleased by his confusion even if he didn't understand it. "I—Isn't it obvious?"

"As obvious as you are pink." Tarantulas wasn't pink, anymore. He was black, all but for red biolights and the cotton candy pink on his feet and the filthy fuzzy tips of his new spidery limbs. Tarantulas flinched, looking down, self-consciously running a—it wasn't a hand, was it?—a hairy sausage over the black fur on one thigh, and Prowl made note of the insecurity to exploit later. "So what is this. Explain yourself."

"This is..." For a moment, Tarantulas wilted, visibly bewildered. "This is... what you asked me for."

Prowl stared at him, just as bewildered but much less visibly. "Explain more."

"You... you told me to empty my thoughts of everything, except obeying you." Tarantulas crept down the wall, his many legs squirming agitatedly. "You told me when I got out, I'd make you an army. And I—I have. I am."

Prowl stared at Tarantulas, as he lowered himself back to floor level. "You don't mean the Chimeracons. I thought they forced you to make their meat suits." The damage they'd left Tarantulas with was still visible, the melted and matted fur, the breaks in two of his spider legs. Of all the mysterious affairs surrounding Prowl's kidnapping, Prowl still couldn't figure out why, when Tarantulas commanded the Noisemaze and could shrink to the point of invisibility, he had put up with their abuses. Perhaps Prowl had trained him to tolerate too much. "They've already kidnapped me. They'd have tried to kill me if you hadn't intervened. What kind of army is that."

And once on the floor, Tarantulas kept lowering himself, kneeling at Prowl's feet. "I had to let them use me, to get the resources I needed to get close to you. They're irrelevant—they're only the start. Now that I've perfected the technology, I—I can pick up where I left off with Ostaros—y-you remember Ostaros, don't you?—just like you wanted. Making your army from scratch. Yours to do with as you please—overthrow the Prime, vanquish the Decepticons, reorder Cybertron to your specifications—all yours, Prowl. All of it. All—all of me." Prowl's ember leapt into his throat.

So he grabbed Tarantulas's. "Don't play with me."

Tarantulas flinched, but he didn't even try to pull back. "I'm not." His voice was shaky—Prowl couldn't see the fear on his face, he didn't know how to make sense of his new features yet, but he could hear it. "I'm not, I would never. I—Prowl, you're—you're all I thought about in the Noisemaze. When I could think. I—I was wrong to challenge your orders. I'm sorry. You're everything to me. You're my muse, my inspiration, my life, I—I'm yours. Anything you want from me, it's yours."

Prowl stared at him. And swallowed hard, trying to put his ember back where it belonged. He squeezed tighter. Tarantulas's visor widened, but he didn't even grab at Prowl's hand.

"Anything."

"Anything," Tarantulas whispered. It was the most beautiful word Prowl had ever heard.

And funny. Because Prowl remembered how it had been "anything" before, too—up until suddenly Mesothulas changed his mind, and then it wasn't.

Last time, Prowl had been too soft on Mesothulas—he'd liked him too much. He'd eased him into his new duties, slowly escalating the amount of energon he had to spill. That worked on most people. They'll commit any atrocity you ask for, as long as it's only just a little bit worse than the one before.

He wasn't making that mistake this time. While Tarantulas was still malleable, still vulnerable, still dizzy with adoration and desperate to regain Prowl's approval—Prowl had to make him do the worst thing he could imagine. Something so awful, that nothing else Tarantulas could possibly do would ever be worse.

"I do remember Ostaros." Prowl let go of Tarantulas's throat. Tarantulas swayed forward, following Prowl's hand, as though he wanted to be choked again. Pathetic. Gorgeous. "I took him with me. He's an Autobot now."

"He's—still alive?"

"He is. He's named Springer, now. 'Ostaros' was a stupid name." (Tarantulas flinched, gaze wavering, but he didn't argue.) "He'll be coming to rescue me as soon as he figures out where I am, I'm sure. You'll get to meet him."

Tarantulas's visor practically sparkled. "Oh! I—"

"When you do, you'll kill him."

Tarantulas stared at him. His strange rows of mandibles were frozen at irregular angles, as though he'd been caught with his mouth hanging open. "I... I don't understand, I..."

"I will not have divided loyalties." Prowl cupped Tarantulas's face in his hand, running a thumb along a ridge over his cheek. "If you're mine, then you're mine. No part of you will belong to anyone else."

Prowl could see the exact moment Tarantulas decided he would obey Prowl's order. It was the moment a light behind his visor died.

"... What does he look like, now." Tarantulas's voice was as hollow and toneless as Prowl's.

Prowl tilted his helm in just that right way to imply a smile. "I'm sure you'll know him when you see him."

The Noisemaze was falling apart. From Prowl's vantage point in Debris, he could see it convulsing and collapsing on itself. With one hand, Prowl stroked Tarantulas's head, as Tarantulas sobbed brokenly. Tarantulas's arms were flung around Prowl's waist, filthy claws clutching pitifully at whatever kibble he could latch onto, rocking back and forth as he wailed. Prowl had heard the wail of a grieving parent before, but never from a Cybertronian. He wondered if Tarantulas even counted as a Cybertronian now.

With his other hand, Prowl carried Springer's head.

Prowl was sorry for Tarantulas. He truly was. Prowl had always hated hurting him the most. But after this, everything else would come so much easier.

The Noisemaze was nothing but shreds and void by the time Tarantulas's sobs grew silent and his convulsions reduced to mere trembling. Only then did Prowl speak.

"Welcome to the AJD."

Tarantulas was silent.

After a long moment, he said, hoarsely, "I—w-we... we're named for our hometowns, aren't we? In the AJD. I... I was... truly... truly born in the Noisemaze, s-so... so, I guess..."

"No," Prowl said. "No, people get names. You're no longer a person. You've turned yourself into a beast."

Tarantulas didn't even wince. Something in Prowl shuddered at it—had he gone too far?—but he consoled himself: maybe Tarantulas was beyond pain, now. Everything would be easier from here on. Everything would be easier.

After another long silence, Tarantulas asked, "Then... what...? What's my...?"

Prowl rubbed a thumb affectionately over one of his horns. "You're my Pet."

Now, they say there's a monster in Petrex's private quarters that lives under his berth.

It's as black as Terminus's gaping maw and has just as many fangs, and it's just as likely to kill you. It's a freak that used to be Cybertronian, but now it's made of meat and metal, the metal rotting the meat and the meat rusting the metal, and it shambles around in the dark on too many legs, and it climbs the walls and ceiling and nests in the corners like a ghost trapped in the room where it died, trying to get free.

They say that Petrex can love; but his love is cruel, and cold, and it will suck the life out of you and leave you a husk of the mech you used to be before you caught his fevered gaze.

They say that when he finds somebody he wants, he chains them to himself with invisible ununtrium links, or ties them to himself with sinewy red threads, or, in one special case, webs them to him with sticky white silk.

They say that Petrex sleeps on a doorway, filled in with cement—a door that doesn't go anywhere. He presses his hand to it when he sleeps.

Sometimes, something scratches on the door from underneath.

Also on AO3.

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#prowl #tarantulas #transformers #maccadam #shattered glass #prowlrantulas #my writing #tfspeedwriting

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neshatriumphs · 5 years

Text

(R)Evolution 01: What You Know Is Right

A city. A mood. An atmosphere. She wished that there was at least some uncertainty that it was good or bad, instead of the knowing dread that it was bad - not all bad, but mostly. None of these people had good intentions. She could tell. She always just knew. As her dark brown fingers fiddled with the spade symbol pendant on her necklace, she bundled up, wondering what in the world was wrong with this weather? Honestly, she should go back home, right now, as the dread was growing, almost exponentially, like a seen danger impending, but she didn’t see anything. Her breathing became heavy and she shut her eyes long enough to try to either calm herself or accept whatever this fate she feared was.

“Ouch!” she hissed. Her eyes flew open and she held her neck. Was that a mosquito? That stung a bit much for one of their bites and wasn’t it too cold for mosquitoes to be out, anyway? She continued to walk, nervously, and now light headed. “What the fuuu…?”

She collapsed and fell onto someone and heard a man’s voice say, “There, there, princess. You’ll be alright.” How did he know that I’m called a princess? She wondered, as she fell unconscious, not too far away, if she could have seen - from a community bulletin board with numerous missing persons attached to it.

♡

Six years in prison hadn’t been the terror that she would have imagined. Embezzlement, fraud, and robbery - for the things that she needed in order to survive in a world, in a country that felt like it was constantly trying to destroy her. Okay, so perhaps she was melodramatic about her plight, but she robbed the rich. It wasn’t like she kept babies from their mom’s breast. Her targets were richer than anybody should even be allowed to be, hence the reason why she wound up getting in trouble when she got caught.

As she was prepped for her release, the president was on the tv in the background, “America has evolved and is constantly evolving. We will only continue to flourish, because we are a nation of survivors. We are a nation of the fittest. We’re resilient. We’re resourceful. We continue to rise…”

“Evolving,” she repeated and rolled her eyes as she was handed her belongings. Her ride was waiting for her outside and she immediately went to sleep in the jeep.

♡

Folami had a job waiting for her as an analyst in a laboratory, and was under strict supervision with no access to anything connected to the funds. It had been a generous set up for her, and she was grateful to be able to easily return to some degree of normalcy. Of course, in a lot of ways, she would never be normal again, but at least she had a good job that made her great money. “I don’t understand what my exact purpose is here,” she admitted to her supervisor. “My credentials say “analyst,” but I’ve mostly been taking notes and watching interviews. Is that what I should be doing, or…?”

“If you go into the company’s intranet system and view the job description for analyst, you should understand better. If you can’t, then we can have a discussion about your future here.”

Whenever he left the room, a girl in the room asked, “Do you have a criminal record?” She turned around suddenly to give her a look for the gall. “I’m just throwing it out there, that if you do, they hire you because they know that a lot of people won’t. They pay you well to do trivial things, and if need be ever arises,” she whispered, “To be an alibi or witness.” The girl was cleaning up as she said, in her regular voice, “It’s a shady place, but to wipe a few counters, throw out some trash and dust mop… I probably get paid what you get paid to grab coffee and read unimportant emails.” Folami couldn’t be insulted. But, she was curious.

“Analyst!” Somebody called and she reflexively turned around. They handed her a box and said, “Document these items, bag separately and store the box.”

“Done,” she said.

She put on her gloves, reached into the box and began to record herself bagging the items, as the computer typed up her report. “One pair of black cashmere gloves, one black fur shawl, one pair of thigh high black boots, one… necklace… with a card symbol on it.” She paused the recording to look up the symbol, then resumed, “A spade.” She boxed put the items into a new box, one of the ones that they used for filing away the test subjects things, as they were in testing, printed out a label for the post it note that had been put onto the former box Princess of Spades, and put it on the shelf for P’s.

♡

Walking to the subway, Folami passed by the missing persons bulletin every night. It wasn’t too far from the lab and almost right at the stairwell. She reflexively looked at it, all the time. Just, because she felt bad for all of those people. So many were missing, and the number seemed to grow everyday. Her view automatically zoomed in on the missing black faces that she saw, the women in particular. She shivered, shook her head and fought back tears. Nobody even seemed to be looking for those people. In fact, most people seemed to try to avoid even looking at the board, much less for the people posted on it. Damn, she hated this world.

♡

“Analyst!” She sighed, but forced a smile and went to the counter. “New admission. Key in the information.”

“Please,” she added for the admissions technician.

He gave her a look and corrected her, “Now.” Folami snatched the clipboard and the admissions tech left the woman at the counter to go gather some materials.

“Well, somebody was having a bad day, huh?” she asked.

Folami shook her head and commented, “Girl, they’re always like this. I get that they work really hard on, I don’t even know diseases or cures or something, but I leave my house black everyday, so they can calm down.” She checked the paperwork, “Dahlia. Oh, that’s pretty.”

“Girl, it’s a flower. My mama didn’t even know when she named me that. She’d just heard the word and thought it sounded pretty.”

“She was right,” Folami said and continued typing in the information. After she printed out an ID for her, she smiled, handed it over and said, “Good luck, Dahlia.”

“Thank you. Hopefully, they’ll figure out what to do about my condition.” She smiled gratefully and returned to the seat to wait for the team to come retrieve her. Folami went back to her shredding party of blacked out pages, with the TV on in the background. “Lord, I hope that they find that sista,” Dahlia commented. Folami looked up and saw the face of a woman, probably around her own age, with similar markers - dark skinned (though a few shades darker), dark eyes, long hair, thin, but with fuller lips, smiling from a photograph. Who is she? She turned it up.

“Daughter of political activist, Tejumola Uchechukwu, the recent college graduate was scheduled to meet with her father and some business partners about a possible future assignment, but never showed…”

Tejumola Uchechukwu, a man who Folami could tell was of Nigerian descent, like her dad, was very emotional as he expressed that he had many enemies, but his daughter was the kindest, most moral person that he knew and he would stop at nothing to have her returned to her loved ones.

“It’s so sad. She do charity and stuff. Her life was just bout to start. I hate to say it, but she been missing for days. They probably not gonna find her…” She didn’t want to say alive, but if they found her, it would likely be dead. But, something caused Folami to march closer to the TV and stare up at it, centering in on it as admissions came to retrieve Dahlia. She didn’t even hear her say, “It was good to meet you!” Because she was focused on the necklace in Niyilolawa Uchechukwu’s photo. One spade necklace…

“Analyst.” The voice was softer than usual and almost quiet. She turned, more shocked by that than when it was barked at her. “Make sure that you do your job and don’t get…” he searched for the right words, “Buried in the details, too much.” That was a threat. But, she simply nodded her head and turned off the TV. Someone else came and handed him a box, which he passed to her. “What do you do with this?” He asked.

“Document these items, bag separately and store the box,” she repeated her job description.

“Thank you,” he said, for a change, then left.

She did her job, documented and put the box labeled “Bloom” in the B’s… But, ashe couldn’t help but to go check that other box. She remembered it was in the P’s, but couldn’t remember the label. Pendant spade? Prime spade? She searched for several minutes, before seeing “Princess of Spades!” She grabbed the box, looked inside of it and couldn’t find the necklace, but she knew that this was the box and that she had put it in there. She went into the records and her recording had been edited. There was no record of her placing the necklace into the box. She frowned and sighed. This was super shady. Did they have somebody here, against her will, or did this person enter a crazy program and failed to tell her parents?

♡

Whenever she came into work the next day, after virtually no sleep, she entered to the face of her work bestie, the secretary/front counter receptionist. “Hey… They want you to meet them upstairs as soon as you clock in.”

“Shoot, what’d I do?” she asked.

“Probably just paranoid. I guess you accessed some file without permission, or something. I mean, you’re still new so they shouldn’t trip too much. Probably just will remind you of the protocol.”

But, her heart leaped into her throat and she nodded her head, “Okay. Thanks.”

“Have lunch with me today. I gotta show you this commercial that I saw last night. It is a riot. I was gon’ text it to you, but I wanted to see your face.” Folami went to her workstation, clocked in, put her things away and headed upstairs. Her immediate thought when she came in was that she was in deep trouble. She saw the admissions tech from yesterday, her supervisor and one of the scientists. This couldn’t bode well, but whenever she got all the way into the room, she saw her.

“Hi…” She said, confused. Niyilolawa Uchechukwu nodded once, with a soft smile and fiddled with her necklace pendant.

“Have a seat for us, Analyst Adebowale,” Her supervisor said. So, today, they know my name. She did so. “We just wanted to bring you in, because admissions was concerned about your interest in a very sensitive case that we’re currently working on. We wanted to make sure that you could sleep tonight, by knowing just enough to smooth over your concerns.” How they know I couldn’t sleep last night? “This is Niyilolawa Uchechukwu. You may have seen her face on the news, as her parents issued a missing persons alert for her. However, she has entered herself into the program, and for the safety of others, as well as herself did not wish to publicize her decision.” Folami looked at the woman. She forced a smile, but Folami knew that in distress look anyway and her conscious ached for something to do to help this person. “When it was noticed that you accessed her file, and searched her possessions box, we brought her in to speak to you, personally.”

Niyilolawa said, “I turned over my necklace at admissions, but was allowed to have it back, later.”

“We remove possessions from record whenever we give them to the guest, so that we’re clear that it isn’t in our care,” the scientist said. “However, protocol dictates that you not access the files without instructions from a scientist, supervisor, or technician, so why were you in her files?”

“Because, I recognized the necklace, in the news. I double checked to make sure that I had made a mistake, and thought until just now that I must have.”

Niyilolawa could sense Folami’s fear and her struggle, so she reached for her hand, “Thank you for your concern. I’m sure that you will do what is right with what you know.” You know that I do not wish to be here. You know that I am missing. You know that these men are evil. Please help me… Her eyes said.

“Well, if you in the future have any concerns, see your supervisor. Stay behind for a moment.” The others left the office and it was just Folami and the scientist. “How has the job been treating you?” he asked.

“Good. It’s treated me well,” she answered, her soul shaken up by the encounter with that woman.

“And it’s been enough for you to get back on your feet, so that you no longer have to live with your four sisters?” he asked.

She felt like this was yet another threat, but answered calmly, “We want to live together. Life is hard and the world is dangerous. There’s safety in numbers.”

“That there is. You all look identical. How does anyone tell you apart?” he wondered, looking at her social media profile photo of five women with the exact same face.

“They don’t, but we know,” she said.

“Hopefully, nobody ever has a grudge with any of you. I can’t imagine how it might feel to get on someone’s bad side, then have someone else suffer for it.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time, so, we’d manage.” She clasped her hands together and wondered, “Is there anything else?”

“Yes. Do your job and mind your business. There are various levels in this facility, and you are at the very bottom. I won’t feel the need to explain myself in the future.”

“Of course. I will do what I am paid to do,” she told him and nodded her head…

“I can’t just do what I’m paid to do! Something is happening there. Something bad. I can feel it. That girl’s voice is burned into my head and I don’t know… When she touched me, it was like I could read her cry for help, right there in her eyes. I could hear her voice begging me to do what I know is right.” She looked at her four identicals and said, “We… have to do something, right? We gotta try to help her, or am I on my own?”

“Now, when have you ever in life been on your own?” the other four asked in unison.

#Original Story #(R)Evolution #Revolution Reboot #(R)Evolution 01 #neshatriumphs

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yunhogf · 6 years

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soft bias tag!!

i was tagged by one of my first babies,,, @dreamsaboutnct!! ♡

1) who is my bias? + my little itty bitty nana baby!! the babiest of baby boys, na jaemin!! the absolute love of my life!! oh my god. i would like to protect you from everything baby

2) what made you notice him? + when chewing gum came out, i just noticed the boy in the blue and red hat!! his little rap and his special voice made me...alkdjflksdjfali. and his face?? oh sweet jesus i’m in love

3) what’s your favorite thing about them? + his...smile...and the way his mouth tilts when he speaks. there is nothing greater in the world. i am alive but i am barely breathing

4) who would initiate skinship more? + oh, heck, um,,.,,... probably me????? i have such a strong desire to hold him/hold his hand/hug him/kiss him at all hours of the day

5) who would hog blankets more? + him because he said he likes to be extra warm :) what a cutie. mom i love him

6) who would be more clingy? + both of us tbh

7) who would say “i love you” first? + him because i am too afraid of rejection :))

8) who would be more easily flustered? + do you hear half the stuff that comes out of his mouth? me. i would be.

9) what cuddling position would you two have? + facing each other, laying on our sides, my fACE in HIS CHEST,, arms and legs all tangled together. there’s just something about this cuddling position that really gets to me oh look i’m crying again

10) which colors remind you of them and why? + pink!! big surprise there lmao i say this because pink!! is really soft!! but can also be hot at the same time AKJLFSLADFAWESDFGHJK

11) which season would you like to spend with them? + autumn!! it’s the prime sweater/cuddling weather. it can still be warm outside, but also nice and cool! there are so many things to do in the fall, and he’d likely want to take full advantage of that :)

12) who would bake cookies and who would steal the batter? + i would be baking the cookies, and that little brat would steal the batter. i bake a lot, and i actually daydream about this alkfjsdlkfjd leave me alone please

13) which one of you would make bad puns and how would the other react? + this kid would be making the bad puns. i would laugh and cringe with a big smile on my face. i love bad puns and stupid jokes, i think the fact that they’re “bad” makes them 10x funnier. plus i love literally everything he says soalgjsldk his voice keeps me alive

14) who would want to adopt 50 dogs and cats? + we would get 25 dogs for him and 25 cats for me!! we love babies ♡ ♡

15) which one of you would nearly burn down the kitchen trying to microwave a pop tart and who would come to the rescue? + i would be the one to nearly burn down the kitchen. i overcook things sometimes and i rarely ever make pop tarts so i would most definitely screw that up. imagining his little giggles gets me so :(( while he tells me to be careful “bAbY” alksfjdlskjfklaHNGGGG

16) who likes to lean over trail railings and who pulls them back? + he would lean over the railings, i’d pull him back. he’s,, mischievous. i love.

17) what would watching a horror film with them be like? + i don’t know, actually! i love them, even though i...scream...and cuddle really tightly...so that would probably be what would happen :’) i want to know which types of horror movies he likes, if he likes any at all! or does he/does he not and i just don’t know it akdsjfsdljfsdakj i’m sorry

18) who would be the cheesy flirt and who would be the smooth flirt? + are you seriously going to ask this with na jaemin as the subject okay well...um... i mean... i’m a really smooth flirt so this is difficult,,, but i’ll put myself as the cheesy flirt. with you guys i’m kinda smooth (i guess?? sjlfs idk) but with him...i want that brat to giggle. i’m going to be cheesy with him.

19) who is more competitive? + .......you’re asking this of both a leo and a capricorn...why why are you doing this for the sake of love...him. even though i want to beat him and rub it in his face because he deserves it for everything that he puts me through

20) who would have to be given constant reminders (reminders to eat, don’t forget your keys, etc.) + half of the time i would be reminding him bc i worry about him bc god knows that sm isn’t caring enough; the other half of the time he would be reminding me because he wouldn’t be around all the time :(( i love you jaemin i hope you’re sleeping well right now i want nothing but the best for you my love okay

21) who sends memes and who sends cute “i miss you” texts at 3am? + ...heck the last relationship i was in,, he actually told me to stop saying ily so much bc it worried him that something was wrong but to be fair he was a god awful bf,,, but considering his schedule,, he would probably be telling me he misses me, and i would be sending the memes. because i need to make him laugh!! what if he had a bad day, i don’t know!!

but yes this was incredibly soft and it took all i had in me not to cuss or call him names. i had to keep it up. but he makes me feel so many things jsafkdjfsjk this was so hard but!! i’ll be tagging: @timeless-nct2 @peachchenle @renjunchokingtaeil @huarenjuwun @kimzeuswoo @softseongs @xalichan @yukhass @qteaxuxi @jenosmochi @neoteen @berrymins @mintirene and @peachyxuxi !! ♡ ♡

#LKSFJASLJFDLSODJAIF #THIS IS SO SOFT AND CUTE I HAD A LOT OF FUN DOING THIS #don't feel obligated to do this though!!#wow #me? actually doing a tag thing for once?? damn you go bitch #tagged #fun #save #remember #me #jaemin #about me #cute #soft #look at when soft #my sweet baby boy #thoughts

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minxiebutt · 6 years

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Pink and Red

Merry Christmas @daringstars and happy new year! I was thrilled to be given the opportunity to create something for you. Here's 2500 words of fluffy eruri spankings, the tiniest peek of smut, and a lot of sensual loving care. I hope you enjoy this.

Admittedly, Erwin was not a coffee-drinker until recently. It had come to his attention that a very handsome young man was newly employed at a coffeehouse near Erwin’s workplace, and curiosity got the best of him and subsequently gave him a new habit. The establishment is cute and whimsical in a purposeful way. Furniture is all mismatched to the decor, giving the place a sort of eclectic pastel-meets-quirky-fifties-housewife feeling, though oddly, it is very energising when Erwin comes in most mornings, and not just because of the bright colours.

The handsome young man, for the most part, does his best to wave off Erwin’s flirting, but most of the time, he joins in. It’s innocent… usually. Because usually, there are other patrons of the establishment. They trade friendly banter or gripe about the city. The handsome young man recently moved here, much like Erwin himself. There’s a steadiness in their daily exchanges, trading off new information like secondhand sources: what food to avoid, where to pursue entertainment, what’s the best of the best here.

And sometimes their flirting is not-so-innocent. Because sometimes, it’s just the two of them and the machinery. Erwin likes those times, when the handsome young man slides him his drink, he can take a sip, and then moan with appreciation for a job well done. The handsome young man will flush up to the tips of his ears and swear and call Erwin a pervert. He won’t even defend himself, only smile back. In the most boring or stressful parts of his day, Erwin will think of the handsome young man in his pink argyle apron and the name tag that reads Levi with a heart in the place of a dot on the i.

“God, you’re here a lot,” Levi says one morning when Erwin makes it to the front of the line. It’s just a momentary rush, four orders all at once, but he drops his change into the tip jar regardless.

“There’s a very good reason to be here,” Erwin says playfully. “Doesn’t hurt that the reason is easy on the eyes.”

“Uh-uh,” Levi scoffs and holds up his left hand, showing off the exquisite diamond ring. He must be cherished deeply with a ring like that, Erwin muses. “I’ve got a husband.”

“Likewise,” Erwin grins, and shows off his own band. “On my honour, I’m only looking.”

Levi turns away but not before Erwin catches red blossoming on pretty cheeks. He lets the barista make his drink without distraction, but the mood is decidedly turned sour when Levi slams the disposable cup in front of Erwin.

“Look,” Levi says. “This is fun and all, but I need more than flirting as if we’re strangers, Erwin. This fucking city never sleeps and I’m working nights because of it, and you’re at work all day, and this bullshit is literally the only time we see each other. We just. We’re skew. We miss each other-- constantly. We’re out of sync. I need more.”

Erwin’s mind is blank for a moment at the explosion, and then he’s brought back into focus by the woman behind him clearing her throat. He gives her a passing glance but then leans in. “What do you need, then, Levi?”

Levi looks at him long and hard, like he’s deciding whether he should be honest or brush the whole thing off. As if it hurts to admit aloud, he murmurs, “Reassurance, Erwin.”

It takes another week, but Erwin aligns their schedules so that they have a full twenty-four hours together. That’s not a long time, but nevertheless, Erwin will not rush through his surprise plans.

When the day comes, he gets home from work early, a whole hour before Levi’s evening alarm would wake him to get ready for his overnight shift at the coffeehouse. He’s not scheduled for today, but he will still drag himself from bed at the same time.

Erwin showers quickly and quietly so as not to wake his husband, and then he slides into bed beside the warm, sleeping lump. Levi’s just begun to come out of his deepest dreams, and he rolls into Erwin possessively, murmuring a little bit of his special brand of sleepy nonsense that Erwin hadn’t realised he misses until now.

Erwin kisses Levi's cheek and then nuzzles it, breathing out a soft, “Good morning, my love.” Levi moans in response, one eye cracked to glare at Erwin.

“You're early,” Levi says, and then a few breaths later, “I’m off tonight.”

“You are,” Erwin confirms, finding the pulse at his husband’s jugular and licking a long stripe up his warm neck. Levi is a furnace in his slumber. He curls his body so tightly that not a wisp of heat can escape, and Erwin likes the way it tempts him.

“And you're off tomorrow,” Levi continues, shifting to allow Erwin unfettered access. This is the first time their schedules have aligned in a few weeks, and Levi is suddenly awake with all the numerous possibilities. He twists his head and bites Erwin’s stubbly chin. “Fuck, finally, we have some time.”

Hot desperation awakens in his belly, and this time, he doesn’t deny it. Erwin’s freshly showered, his skin puffy from hot water, and Levi bites at him again, taking in a mouthful of his stubbly throat.

“We have time, my love,” Erwin whispers, and when Levi surges up to bite him with fervor, he takes a handful of black hair and tugs. Levi stills in his grasp, voice caught on the uphill of a moan. “We have time. I have all the time in the world to work you.”

Levi’s lids lower and a fine shudder runs through his body where it lays flush with Erwin’s own.

“There,” Erwin coos, slowly releasing his hold. “There you go, sweet prince, lay still for me.”

Levi swallows hard enough that the flash of movement makes Erwin’s eye flit down to capture it before levelling on his husband’s bottom lip, tightly drawn between teeth.

“Grab the headboard,” Erwin tells him. At first, Levi’s hands push out at his sides, and then he slithers them sensually through the bedsheets upward to their destination. He grabs hold of the wooden slats that make the chevron pattern, his hips raising as his back arches in sinful anticipation.

“Yes, my king,” he finally answers once his body settles still. Erwin sits up on their bed. The sight of his husband, sleepy-eyed and bed-headed, waiting obediently. It’s breathtaking.

“Oh, so lovely.” Erwin places his palms against Levi’s hips, spanning them completely in ownership. To be newlywed and newly-moved, this period of distance has taken such a toll on Levi, and Erwin feels fluttering in his chest with the hungry expression on his face. God, he’s missed him.

Levi’s hips give another little rut into the air with an unbidden moan and lights Erwin’s mind on fire. They have so much time, more time than ever since they’ve been here. They could go see a movie or try a restaurant or walk through the botanical gardens, but all of that pales in comparison to staying in bed and inside one another.

“What are you thinking?” Erwin asks him gently, large hands kneading into Levi’s giving abdomen.

Levi shakes his head, eyes catching Erwin’s and refusing to look away. “Too much. Thinking too much.”

Erwin’s fingers curl and then Levi’s briefs are being slid down his thighs, but not off, just enough to expose his cock, hard from waking and from Erwin’s proximity. Levi hisses with the cool air against his sensitive glans, but his erection does not shy back.

“Filthy, aren't you,” Erwin says more than asks.

Levi nods, helplessly, flexing his cock to keep it from brushing his stomach, before sighing down into the bed, “Yeah, I am.”

Erwin smiles down at his husband, and without warning, he dips and takes Levi wholly in his mouth until his nose presses into the dark, coarse curls. The groan that fills their bedroom is guttural and raw and god damn, Erwin has missed this.

“Erwin,” Levi pants, giving his sounds away freely in the place of movement. The stoic and aloof shell is cracking open with every breath to reveal his vulnerability. “Erwin, it feels so good, it's so good….”

Erwin pulls up and off, then kisses the tip where it peeks through the foreskin. Another kiss is followed by his tongue exploring the slit and Levi’s responsive hiss fizzles down into a cry of, “Yes, yes, please!”

Like a crafty serpent, Erwin slips the barest tip of his tongue below the foreskin and pushes it back so that the glistening head is naked, and then he sucks it into his mouth. Levi's hips buck reflexively before he forcibly relaxes back, and Erwin smiles as he sucks the head with nibbling teeth and hollowed cheeks. Wrapping a fist around Levi's cock, Erwin begins to jack him off, all his movements in sync on the throbbing flesh, and he brings Levi to the edge without sending him over. The frustrated cry at being denied has Erwin's mouth lifting in a proud grin. He teases, “What do you say?”

“Thank you,” Levi squeezes out between grit teeth. Erwin leans down and laps at his husband's exposed navel. Nuzzles it, too. “Will you show me? Show me that I'm yours, please?”

“Do you need a reminder?” Erwin asks, remembers the way he'd looked in the coffeehouse a week ago.

Without shame, Levi begs. “Please, I need you to send all these bad thoughts away. I only want to think of you, sir. Please, make it so I can only think of you. Please tell me how much you want me. Tell me how good I am. Please, sir.”

After a little clumsy rearranging, Erwin gets Levi laid across his lap, his naked ass and thighs at that prime angle that makes Erwin’s palm itch. With his left hand, he strokes Levi’s hair softly, making it a bird’s nest.

Sucking him off without letting him cum has set his nerves on fire, so Erwin takes advantage of that, ghosting his hands over Levi’s skin, catching on the fine hairs that cover him and nothing else. There's a tight groan from Levi’s throat as he stifles his twitching and lets the sensation consume him. He's so good, he's always so good.

“That's it, there you go,” Erwin encourages him every time he successfully fights a shudder. Delight surges through him when he causes Levi to burst into goose flesh, because he knows exactly how sensitive he's making him. Without warning, Erwin taps Levi’s ass, nothing hard or even painful, but Levi's hypersensitivity convinces him otherwise and he yells out.

Erwin rubs the spot as he gives long, soothing shushes. When the noise quiets from Levi and he begins to sink into Erwin's lap once more, Erwin spiderwalks his right thigh for a few minutes before tapping that one, too. By the time he's got goosebumps raised on Levi’s left thigh, Levi is twitching and jerking with anticipation. Erwin doesn't leave him hanging.

“That feel good?”

Levi moans and nods and then finds his voice. “Yes, sir,” he whimpers. The tap makes him gasp into the sheets.

From there, Erwin begins the steady work. He taps across Levi’s backside, bringing a rosy pink tinge to the skin, and then he goes a little harder, just enough to get Levi's body to prepare endorphins. He knows Levi is close when Levi begins to whine high and lift his head back, so Erwin brings him relief, giving him stinging, spread-finger slaps, concentrating the efforts onto his sit-spots until he throws his head back, moans, and then settles down, limp.

Erwin lightens up on the spanking but continues to stimulate Levi through the rush with his hands and words. “You're a darling for me, you good boy.”

He leans over and kisses several of the notches in Levi's spine, brought to peak with the way he’s puddled over Erwin's lap and the bed. He whispers into the skin, “There is nothing that will ever make me give you up or forget you. You are mine, and I am yours. You will always have me.”

Levi gives him a tiny squeak of acknowledgement but Erwin continues on in the spanking, building Levi up toward another endorphin release with steady slaps against his ass, a rhythm long-established between them, a promise, you, are, mine, and, I, am, yours. Erwin thinks the words with each crash of his hand on the reddening skin, and he knows Levi can hear them in his own mind.

Giving Levi this, giving him what he needs, it brings a burst of pleasure into Erwin and he takes those words and says them aloud to the rhythm of his hand, and when Levi is ready for another release, Erwin keeps the pace but increases the force, and then Levi is unravelling further for him.

It's beautiful and Erwin can't find any words but, “Good, Levi, so good.”

Erwin doesn't cease the spanking, yet. He holds back on the strength of his blows little by little, until he's back to simply tapping Levi’s abused skin. By that point, Levi is coming down from his pain high, whimpering again to vocalise his happy discomforts.

Carefully, Erwin removes himself from under Levi and sets the small man down on his back in the sheets. He climbs on top of him and bundles Levi into a ball below his weight, as if he is a blanket. Levi shifts and whines and moans, but when Erwin presses gentle kisses into the dip behind his ear, he purrs with contentment.

“Don't ever think that I don't want you, Levi,” Erwin commands him. “No matter how hard things get, I want you, Levi, and I will walk through hell to keep you.”

Levi sighs and gives a slight nod, so Erwin praises him, “Thank you for telling me what you need, Levi. Thank you for always being so good.”

Levi's breathing hitches but Erwin can see the welling of tears in his eyes so he pulls Levi's ear into his mouth for a sloppy kiss. He wants there to be no doubts hiding in the corners of Levi's mind. “Good, so good, Levi, always so good. Tell me, sweetheart, tell me what you need now.”

“Just this,” Levi breaths. “Hold me like this.”

Erwin wiggles his hands out from under Levi's shoulders and frames his face, forces his chin up and takes a deep kiss. Willing and pliant beneath him, Levi lets Erwin devour his vulnerability, and Erwin feels all the more protective for it. He drops just the right amount of his weight on Levi to ground him in the coming drop, and then he talks in circles, going between praising and promising and reminding Levi that regardless of his past, Erwin is staying. Erwin will always stay with him.

By the time Levi's alarm rings, they're both feeling like themselves again. Erwin fills their bathtub with near-scalding water (Levi's usual after a drop) and then after he bathes him, he orders Levi to the sofa and brings him dinner, making sure that Levi does not have to lift a finger at all for the rest of the night.

#erurisecretsanta #daringstars #penned

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