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thiniceofeternalyouth · 9 months

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MISLEADIN' ME SERIES: CHAPTER ONE

A FOOL AND A THIEF

⊳ Gojo Satoru x f!reader

series masterlist

Genre: angst, fluff, adventure, sci-fi, cosmology.

Chapter warning: MANGA SPOILERS, cursing, mentions of smoking, mentions of gore, mentions of blood.

Words count: ~12k

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A/N: Sorry for any grammar or punctuation mistakes, eng isnt my first language

[1 Nov, 2018; 03:46 am; Tokyo, Tokyo Prefecture, Shibuya]

Under the Tokyo sky amid the rubble and the half-destroyed Shibuya Station, silhouettes in dark robes loaded the wounded into cars.“Who the fuck are you?” Wiping the blood from his lip with his sleeve, the guy asked angrily.

“We were just passing through, to be honest," she said with a smile tucking a stray red curl behind her ear and lighting the last cigarette from her pack. “It had been one hell of a long day. Y/N, let's go home already."

The night air blew across the boy's scarred face and it seemed to him that even his eardrums were damaged because he never heard a single gust of wind. Nor did he hear the footsteps of the silhouette next to him. "Hey!" girl's whisper made Itadori come to his senses. In front of him stood a girl seemingly his age, with blonde hair hidden by a black robe. Though she wasn't wearing any kind of mask either, from something he couldn't make out her eyes. “Here, take this," she tried to shove some kind of paper at him. The girl paid no attention to the fright in the boy's eyes, nor to his pose ready to fight, but was still trying to find a pocket in his clothes to shove the piece of paper into. "Call me if you need help," the same girl's hurried whisper barely uttered the phrase before it’s owner disappeared from sight. It took some time before Yuuji came to his senses. Trying to figure out if he was hallucinating under the stress of what had happened, he shoved his hand into his pocket trying to find what the stranger had shoved in there. Pulling a piece of paper out of his pocket, he carefully unfolded it and stared at the symbols. A phone number. A very ordinary phone number.

Not hallucinations.

[9 Nov, 2018;, 02:31 pm; Tokyo, Tokyo Prefecture, Chiyoda Special District, on the way to Cafe N].

You turned to the blonde girl holding her hand so you wouldn't lose her in the crowd of people rushing about in the center of Tokyo. "Dany, if ya wanted to eat so badly, why couldn't we find a closer café?“ Your peripheral vision kept picking up unfamiliar facial features, the gestures of people talking on the phone, flowering plants scattered in the flowerbeds and neon signs especially invisible in the daylight. If it weren't for the girl pulling you fiercely in the direction of the café, it would have seemed nothing more than a beautiful fake.

"Of course we could, but, first of all, we never take the easy way out," she raised her fist in the air and began flexing her fingers as she listed. “And secondly, people say about some really great Yakiniku here.” You just hummed in response making it clear that you weren't interested in that at all. Although, everyone who knew you at least a little bit knew about your passion for food and many people took shameless advantage of it.

When you opened the door to the café the doorbell alerted everyone to new visitors. Stepping inside, you felt the warm atmosphere. Quiet pleasant music, dim lighting, soft cozy chairs, textured wooden tables, on the walls there were frames with some photos and handwritten inscriptions with warm words. As your gaze clung to the furnishings, Danielle waved her hand at someone sitting at a far table. "What the..." you had time to think before one of the boys, black-haired with small circles under his eyes wearing a white jacket that resembled some sort of school uniform got up from the table and headed towards you. As soon as he changed his position you saw the person sitting behind him. A pink-haired kid. The same kid who had been in Shibuya. You grabbed Dani's hand and immediately stormed out of the cafe."Y/N, wait!” Danielle tried to get through to you, but you stubbornly pulled her away from the place. “I'm the one who gave them the number to contact us in an emergency!” sensing that you hadn't heard a word she said, she pulled her arm out forcing you both to stand in place. “I said wait!”

The black-haired boy who had been running after you all this time repeated her request. "Please, wait!" he stopped beside you, bent down and wrapped his arms around your sides trying to catch his breath. You stared at him silently in anticipation. When he looked up at you, your gaze made him fade and a pale blush broke out on his young cheeks. “I'm sorry. We don't know who else to turn to, but we really need help right now,” his hand went into his jacket and he was ready to pull something out, but you stopped him. "Not here," you said, and nodded your head toward an unremarkable alley. As soon as you started toward the direction you'd indicated, you stopped Danielle. "Not you, young lady. You wanted Yakiniku so badly, so why don't ya go back to the cafe?” you tilted your head slightly to the side and smiled letting her know that this was as far as she could go. Though she pressed her pink lips together, she didn't contradict you.

Your footsteps were accompanied by the sound of drops falling from the drains. The alley reeked of damp, filth and poverty. The shabby walls covered with obscene inscriptions seemed about to collapse. Walking a couple more meters down the wet road, you stopped. Turning to face the boy and smiling to ease the tension between you, you leaned your shoulder against the wall. "First, introduce yourself.”

"Yuta. Okkotsu Yuta, student at the Tokyo Metropolitan Curse Technical college," he said in a low voice, rubbing his fingers together.

"Too formal," you chuckled. "What would a student of this college want with my student?” you emphasized the word 'my', but without any anger or irritation in your voice.

Yuta pulled a dark cube out from under his jacket and held it out to you. "Here," you raised your eyebrows in surprise and stared at the boy, waiting for further explanation. “I know it's hard to believe, but there's a man in there right now. And that person is our teacher," the boy exhaled convulsively. He felt the way a five-year-old feels when telling his parents about the scary monster living under the bed. Yuta didn't know who you were. Do you know about cursed energy? About curses? About the sorcerers who fight them? Would you believe him?

You were already twirling the cube in your hands, examining it from every angle. "Okay, let's say it's true," there was a stitched eye on one of the dark edges and judging by the tactile sensations, the frame itself was made of leather. “But what do you want us to do?”

"I wish you'd get him out of there," the boy said, still dumbfounded that he hadn't noticed the way you'd snatched the prison out of his hands. “Please.”

"There's no other way to get him out of there, I take it," you ran the knuckle of your index finger over the stitched eye waiting for some kind of reaction. Nothing.

"No. All the items that could have been used to solve the technique were destroyed by the teacher himself," the boy lowered his eyes to the floor realizing how that sounded.

"That’s ironic," your laugh echoed in the alley. “All right, if you want us to get him out of there, I need at least a little more information, ya know.”

"We don't know much ourselves," the boy's frustrated voice hit your temples. “The only thing we know is that this is the other side of the gate," Yuta pointed to the cube with a nod of his head. "There is the prison realm itself.”

"Prison realm?” you asked with a touch of skepticism in your voice. “Where is it? Is it, like, a subterranean, a facility or is it—“

"No," the boy interrupted you, shaking his head. “It's the same cube, only lighter and there are eyes on all sides of it.”

"Are ya saying that your teacher is in two subjects at once?” With a voice excited with growing interest you asked the boy giving a slight nod in his direction.

"Dunno," Yuta apparently frightened by the sudden change in your mood, backed up a little. "Looks like it.”

"And this prison realm is now located...?” you paused waiting for Yuta to finish your sentence.

"Curse named Kenjiaku," Yuta watched your facial expression, which would probably tell him if you'd heard that name before.

"And let me guess what the catch might be," your voice, filled with sarcasm, drifted down the alley.

"There really is a requirement," Yuta muttered to himself. "The other side of the gate can only be opened in the immediate vicinity of the prison realm.

"Uh-huh," you wiped your face with your hand as if wiping away your disappointment. "Do you have a picture of that curse?" Yuta pulled out his phone and started frantically searching for something. As you watched at him, you couldn't help yourself and quietly put your hand on the guy's wrist that held the phone. "Yuta, calm down," your voice seemed very soft and soothing, and the boy looked up at you. "I won't bite." The boy nodded and smiled weakly back and the atmosphere immediately became more peaceful. After a few minutes, he handed you a cell phone with a picture on it. It showed a boy with fair skin and black hair tied in a tight bundle, though one strand of hair fell loosely over his face. A bright smile lit up the young face.

"He looks different now," Yuta interrupted your observation. "Most of his hair is loose, and his hair is longer. He's wearing something resembling a traditional kimono. There's a huge scar on his forehead." you silently listened to the young man, still looking at the photo.

You've seen this guy before. About a year ago. Pulling a case of headphones out of your pocket, you pulled one out and put it in your ear. The familiar sound of the power on reached your eardrums. "Meg, ya here?" you asked somewhere in the void.

"Here," someone replied mimicking a human yawn, it's voice sounded mechanical. "What does the mortal want?"

"Let's go find the city camera, Yuta," you said heading toward the street.

"I've seen one around here," the boy grinned and led the way. You could have done it without him, but you let him lead the way.

After walking a couple blocks, there was a traffic camera near a stoplight. You pointed Yuta's phone with the picture right at it. "Meg, see this mug?" you asked someone again.

"Distinctly," the voice replied.

"Can you look it up on city cameras?

"Copy that. If I find it, I'll text you the location right away.

"Deal," you handed the phone back to the boy, but you noticed that his gaze had gotten sad.

"Hey, what's wrong?" your voice was warm again like a dry summer wind.

"I don't know if I have a right to complain," you wondered at his words. After all, he was still a child, and he had every right to complain. "It's just that the teacher Gojo asked me to keep an eye on Itadori and the others in case something happened to him. And I don't seem to be handling it," the boy's shoulders slumped along with his voice.

"If you're standing here now, it's just proof that you're handling everything just fine," you gently tousled the boy's dark hair with your hand. "Don't ya lose heart. We'll figure something out," as you scrutinized the boy's skin, you began to notice healing scratches, bruises and contusions. "You know, go back to the cafeteria. Get some rest and good food. I take it the last few days have been hard on you. And we'll try to do something about it," you said with soft assurance in your voice, pointing at the cube.

"Would you have lunch with us now?" The boy asked with some hope in his voice.

"I can't, unfortunately, although I wish I could. I just don't like your pink-haired boy. Or rather, what's in him," you exhaled uneasily and Yuta stared at you with surprised eyes. As far as he knew, you'd never looked at Itadori up close. "But I'll walk you back to the café. I need to pick up Danielle anyway."

Walking through the crowd of the same hurrying people back to the familiar cafe, you looked at the colorful small paper lanterns on the windows of the place. From afar these crafts looked marvelous, but as soon as you looked at them closer, you could see the flaws: the glue was too much, a piece of paper was torn off and on the other lantern on the contrary there was too much paper. In fact, it didn't make them any worse. Probably because it looked like they were made by children. Well, it's really a family cafe.

As you tried to see Danielle through the window, you were relieved to see that she wasn't sitting at the same table as Itadori. You immediately wanted to kick yourself for thinking that. He wasn't a leper, and none of this was his fault, but keeping you all safe was your direct responsibility, which you were systematically violating. You were pulled out of your thoughts by Yuta's voice. "Thank you," he blushed faintly. "For coming and... for help."

"Too early for thanks," you smiled back. "But we'll celebrate sometime later. My treat. See ya later," you nodded your head toward the table where Yuji was sitting signaling that Yuta should go. The boy nodded back and hurried over to his friend. You went over to Dany, sighed like an old grandma and plopped down in the chair, threw the cube on the table, and stared at the girl, who was munching on a piece of meat with appetite. "So, my bun, how's it taste?" She looked from you to the cube and back to you then swallowed her food with a loud sound and nodded. "Eat, bun, eat, ya after such antics will not be enough to put a week of work in the canteen. There will be no time to eat there."

"Y/N!" The girl shrieked quietly with indignation and a touch of pity in her voice.

"And don't you dare try to pity me. I know those blue eyes of yours," you wagged your index finger in front of her face. Just as Dany was about to make the most pitiful face in the world and talk about love and mutual aid, you were interrupted by the sound of a notification on your phone. You reluctantly pulled your phone out of your pocket and stared at the notification bar. Your eyes widened slightly in surprise

[02:59pm] Megan: Kyoto Prefecture, Kyoto, Fushimi Inari Shrine, exact coo...

"You're quite fast, though," you muttered under your breath.

You opened the notification and saw coordinates that are more precise. Would the curse, or whoever it is be hiding in such a crowded and sacred place? Seems completely ridiculous. Sounds the same. Anyway, you wouldn't argue with Megan, so it was a good time to go and check out who Kenjiaku was and what he was all about.

[10 Nov, 2018; 08:43pm; Kyoto, Kyoto Prefecture, Fushimi Inari Shrine]

Walking up the mountain called Inari to the temple complex, there was a feeling of an invisible catch. For such a popular place it was strange not to see a single living soul, neither a tourists nor an employees of the complex. Since the eye couldn't get a hold of anything living, the attention shifted to the big picture. Thousands of toriis set up all along the paths of the temple complex standing so densely that they formed corridors. On some of them, the orange lacquer seemed already weathered, faded, though the black symbols that contained the name of the giver and the date were still just as black and bright. Outside of these arches, the caressing whisper of the forest could be heard. Throughout your journey through this place, you came across more than once sculpted images of kitsune standing at many small shrines that held keys in their mouths. It was amusing to contemplate how much people were willing to do to please an imaginary God.

Two things brought you to the main sanctuary of the complex: your sturdy legs and your stubborn nature. A small staircase flanked by familiar fox faces led you up to the gate of the shrine. The building was a traditional architecture of Shinto temples of Japan, which was characterized by simplicity and strictness of lines, a minimum of decorated elements. The only thing that caught the eye was the bright, rich red color. Having admired the view of the sacred place in the rays of the setting sun, your hands pushed open the doors.

As you stepped inside the building, you felt a kind of disappointment. Despite the beautiful facade the interior was almost empty making the space seem ridiculously huge. Yet, beautiful paintings adorned the walls of the temple, a few familiar sculptures stood in the corners and at the end of the room was a tall, but traditional Japanese table. As you ran your fingertips along the shelf, you could feel the dust settling on them. It looked tidy, but abandoned. It was as if the people who watched over this place had vanished into thin air.

The cracking of the rickety floor in the far corner of the room made you raise your head to look at the intruder. He was coming toward you, a man painfully familiar, reminiscent of the man Yuta had shown you the day before.

"Girl, aren't you lost?" the man gave you a warm smile. "The place is closed to the public."

You shifted your eyes from the interior and your keen but wary gaze slid unabashedly from the stranger's head to his feet, then you shifted your gaze back to his eye level. His smile wasn't warm. It was caustic like smoke from a campfire. "Actually, I'm here to see you. Or do you only take appointments?" your demeanor, as if by a click, changed to a friendly one, your face again lit up with a slight smile that was hidden under the black mask.

"Well, I can take such a marvelous person right now," the man said sitting down at the table at the end of the room and gesturing for you to sit across from him.

Kenjiaku rarely felt restless. Or rather, he rarely felt anything in general, but watching you walk with a calm gait towards a place where you would find yourself only a few centimeters away from him made him act a little more cautious. Though he was looking directly at you, he didn't sense your presence. As he gazed into your gut he realized he couldn't see or feel any of the cursed energy, not even the slightest manifestation of it. Though there wasn't a gram of the usual magic in you, your aura still made him feel a slight... discomfort. No more, no less.

Another one of the Zenin clan? There are too many differences. Outwardly at least.

"That's nice to hear," you said settling back into your chair. "I didn't realize curses could be so welcoming."

"Do you know who I am?" Kenjaku's voice had a slight aristocratic arrogance to it.

"Not really," you said with a shrug. Not wanting to waste any more time on small talk and greetings, you pulled a dark cube out of your backpack, which was laden with all sorts of colorful trinkets and placed it on the table right in front of Kenjiaku's nose.

"Oh," he replied with a fake disappointment in his voice. "I see".

"Well, since you understand then why don't you just give up the prison realm without all the strife and fights?" you asked trying to keep your impatience in check.

The sound of the man's laugh filled the temple room for a second. The curse understood your purpose, but he had no idea what tools you possessed to accomplish it. The whole thing was like a game of Uno, but without the constraints of any game rules and the players held the cards they came up with. "Well, if you're so eager to play, let's play," Kenjiaku thought to himself and taking a light cube with eyes on all sides from the folds of his kimono placed it next to your dark cube on the table.

The urge to immediately examine the unknown object made you lower your eyes to the artifact. Already the very appearance of the prison realm evoked extremely unpleasant feelings, maybe even odious, most likely due to the fact that the frame consisted of human skin. But you set aside your preconceived notions and began to consider the object from a theoretical point of view. The joints of the object looked perfectly straight, the planes of the faces were not distorted, though from the angle of your gaze, it would seem that they should be. The object itself seemed so light, as if it were weightless, and seemed about to break away from the surface of the table. From every angle, the cube looked perfect. But here's the catch: nothing is perfect in nature. And then something clicked in your brain. A trap without bait. "Isn't that too cheap a trick for a curse of your level?" you asked the man. There wasn't an ounce of challenge in your voice, more of a casual human interest.

"You did notice, though," Kenjiaku said with barely perceptible surprise in his voice. "Good. I suppose I could go a little further."

As soon as your eyelids closed to allow your eyes to refresh the visual information coming into your brain, at the same moment the space was filled with dozens of the same absolutely identical light cubes. They seemed to be everywhere: on the table, on the floor, on the few shelves, on the chairs and some of them occupied quite distorted position in space and stood on the edges, others seemed to be glued to the objects as if the gravitational field had changed, and the center of gravitation was no longer the Earth, but these very objects, and others were indifferently frozen in the air. You threw your head up and realized that the artifacts covered even the ceiling. Whatever the case, you should deal with problems as they came. As much as you didn't want to make small talk, you wanted to fight even less. So, small talk. "Aren't ya a Copperfield," you said, stretching the last word deliberately. "I'm interested in the secret of another trick," you looked away from the ceiling and returned your head to its usual position, staring into the dark eyes opposite. "You were killed a year ago. So what the hell are you doing here?"

"No one killed me," Kenjiaku looked away for a second as if remembering something. "You see, almost all of you out of my... How do you put it? Oh, yes," he flicked his middle finger and thumb, "League."

"Ya know, there are a few things that go against the laws of the creation," you said interlocking the fingers of your hands on the table looking at the huge scar on the man's forehead. "First is playing with time and the second is, oddly enough," you shrugged, waiting for him to finish his sentences for you, but it didn't happen. "Resurrection."

"I've never resurrected a person I've transplanted my brain into," Kenjaku said, his chin slightly pointed. "Though I have to admit, sometimes they do get in my way. Sharing a body with someone is hard, after all."

"Ya don't have to lie to me," you shook your head slightly maintaining eye contact with the curse. The tone of your voice didn't change, though it began to resemble a modest growing storm. "Besides, I didn't say anything about the bodies you're using. I was talking about you,"

A quiet but growing rough male laugh filled the room. "I've never resurrected myself," Kenjiaku said, still laughing mockingly. "It's just one of my techniques."

"You can call a dinghy a brigantine or a galleon," you said waving your hand lightly at his words. "It wouldn't stop being a dinghy."

"It doesn't matter at all," the man said shaking his head. "Even if the creation has its own laws, it doesn't seem to care who enforces them."

"Have you ever heard of systematic error of the survivor?" you asked tilting your head slightly to the side. "Or is the term too... human for you?"

"Yes, you're right," Kenjiaku continued adjusting the sleeves of his kimono: "I don't care much about humanity. Especially when you consider that humanity will soon cease to exist. At least as you are used to seeing it.

"Is there any use in asking you what you mean?" you asked raising an eyebrow. There was a visceral silence in the room. The curse either didn't plan to let you in on its plans or it was thinking about how best to present the information. You wanted the coin to fall on its lucky side.

"I'm gonna to make all humans shamans," Kenjiaku began. Bingo. "Of course, it won't be easy to unite all the people with Master Tengen."

"Who is Master Tengen?" you asked the curse.

"A sorcerer with immortality technique," the man said. "He also provides barriers for the Tokyo and Kyoto sorcery colleges," he added noticing your puzzled look, "His barriers prevent the flow of cursed energy from escaping, as well as providing protective functions.

"Nah, still don't get it," you said propping your cheek up with your hand.

"Of course you don't get it," Kenjiaku said, smiling mockingly at the thought of how stupid people can be. "All I have to do is merge my barriers with Tengen's.

"And yet, such transition would require an enormous amount of energy," you stated a fact.

"This is the most interesting part. A death migration will be organized to collect the cursed energy," the curse said savoring every word. "I will move the sorcerers to certain selected areas surrounded by their own barriers, so that they fight and kill each other. This is how the cursed energy will build up. They can't go beyond these barriers or they'll die. If the number of people in the area remains unchanged for twelve days, everyone within the barrier will die. Oh yes, I forgot to tell you, " his smile became so wide that it seemed as if his jaw was about to break. "Cursed energy would build up even when non-sorcerers were killed."

"I thought it would be something interesting, but in reality it sounds like regular genocide," you were already hiding half your face in your hand, which your head was resting on, out of boredom. At first, you listened to his plan with enthusiasm, but the more he talked the more it all looked like the notes of a madman. Who's the fool now?

"And to further anger your creation, I will say that some shamans and even non-sorcerers will become vessels for shamans of past generations," he said, clearly trying to tease you.

"Whatever," you said leaning back in your chair and tucking your hands under the table. Your casual conversation had gone on too long, but the cautious plan still hadn't matured in your head. If you act directly, what are the odds of it working? Biological objects subjected to magic sometimes behave unpredictably. When you take into account the fact that the object theoretically contains a biological subject it further reduced the chances of success. Finally, you had no idea where the actual cube was, so the spell would be diffuse rather than directed. Without removing your hands from under the table, you joined the index fingers and thumbs of your hands so that they now formed a triangle. As soon as they closed, without giving you time for further doubts and thinking about the consequences your inner voice said:

"Offset."

Just as the curse opened its mouth to say something, in the silence of an instant there was a thud somewhere behind the curse's left shoulder. Your gazes instantly darted in the direction the noise came from. The fakes immediately dissipated as if Kenjiaku had lost concentration for a second, and turning his head back in your direction, he saw your sly gaze shift from the cube directly at him. You instantly jumped up from your seats, your hands on the table, and you said, without letting him get a word in edgewise. "It was a pleasure to talk to such an extraordinary person," you pulled away from the table and took a step back. "But I'll take my leave for now. Goodbye,"

With that, you turned around, opening your back, and headed towards the exit. "That sneaky bitch," Kenjiaku thought to himself. Now he was faced with two choices: attack you from behind or head for the cube revealing his own back. Both options were a lose-lose, he had done too much to accomplish what he had planned and he didn't want to stumble over something as simple as underestimating his opponent. He couldn't just take and pull the cube to himself since the one who was sitting inside strongly resisted it. So, the third option was to walk you to the exit and watch until your silhouette disappeared from the horizon.

Kenjiaku followed your steady gait slowing his steps as he approached the doorway. The starlight was almost gone only to return again tomorrow allowing time to run again. The sky was shrouded in all sorts of delicate shimmers, the soft hand of nature painting over the hard joints between colors making purples and vinous dance together. Only your outline grew darker and darker as you moved further away from the shrine as there was no more daylight left to reflect off of it. Ironically, while Kenjiaku was watching your shadow, you were already standing behind him. With the urge to stab him in the back and give yourself away, you lifted the prison realm with a slight movement and disappearing with the faint black haze, you were back to being the one the curse was watching so intently. "Yoink," you chirped, examining the light cube in your hands from all sides, your face lighting up again with a smile. "Well, boxy, let's go home," you didn't want to think how many reserves of luck you've exhausted today and how many of these reserves are still left. After all, it wasn't your fault that Kenjiaku hadn't been taught one simple truth: when chasing an enemy, don't forget to look behind you.

[20 Dec, 2018; 06:32pm; Tokyo, Tokyo Prefecture, Tokyo Magic College]

Over the past few days, the very days that Gojo had spent in the cube, the magical college had undergone some changes and to be more precise, one huge change: when the teacher first returned here, he saw solid ruins. From the words of his students, he realized that it was the work of Kenijaku. The aftermath of their battle with Master Tengen the outcome of which had alarmed many shamans: Master Tengen was dead and the rat had escaped from the ship. The last slivers of Tokyo College were left without barriers, without protection and even without a principal. As of late, dark circles and small wrinkles began to appear under his heavenly eyes, his white skin becoming drier and tighter. Pulling on the mask of cheerful frivolity over the constant lack of sleep was getting harder. Every time he found himself in bed in the twilight tousling strands of snow-white hair with the fingers of one hand, Gojo unwillingly plunged into unnecessary thoughts and the thought that his students were almost the last thing keeping him afloat scrabbled pitifully in the back of his mind. He wanted to laugh at his own childish behavior because somewhere in his chest, in a place much deeper than the human soul there was an unfamiliar female voice that filled the entire absolute gut of the sorcerer with a measured sonata - that was really the last thing that would not let Gojo fall into oblivion.

With their own efforts, out of chips, planks and stones the students managed to restore the college's residential building. Of course, it was hard to see the former grandeur among the piles of construction debris and destruction, but the students valued this place not for its monumental architecture, but for the opportunity to be near each other. There was a consoling positive side to the whole situation: now the entire area of the college could be used as a training ground.

Ever since the day Gojo had scheduled the battle of the king of curses for December 24, he hadn't given his students a break. Even though he was seemingly confident of his unconditional victory he always wanted his students to become stronger. He was no longer shy about getting directly involved in the training. Since then, his students had not only become observers of his battles with curses, they had become sensei's "opponents" themselves. Gojo made them dodge, counterattack and even take on red, blue, black lightning and the whole arsenal that wouldn't result in death. There was no shame in even applying territory expansion a few times to let the students - their bodies and minds - get used to the highly unusual conditions during battle and sending them to places that registered even the slightest amount of cursed energy. Even though Gojo himself was the initiator of such intensive training, he was alarmed by the rapid changes in his students. Changes that were invisible even to his six eyes, but here was his sixth sense unpleasantly scrabbling claws at the back of his neck, not weak enough to forget about it, but not strong enough to give it much importance. The transformation wasn't bad, quite the opposite, the students were more confident, more adaptable, maybe even stronger. He had only been gone for nineteen days and while that was comparable to a lifetime in their world, it was not at all the length of time in which such a leap in transformation could occur. All their routine and conversations about everything went on as usual, but not until Gojo began to inquire, either directly or by subterfuge about who had gotten him out of the prison realm. The students all as one would start averting their eyes either sideways or upward pretending to try to remember something, but no matter the place or time, no matter who was now standing in front of Gojo the answer was always the same: "we don't know." Once again sitting at the lunch table, he began to gently question the students, but once again he ran into a blank wall. "Who would have thought my students would become so heartless in my absence? Not even you, Yuji. I didn't expect this from you!" sensei propped his head up with his hand glaring at the boy.

"And we didn't expect you to take an unscheduled almost three-week vacation right in the middle of a battle," the invisible assistant in the face of irony tried his best to help Itadori evade his teacher's tricky questions.

As powerful as Gojo was, he couldn't make truth serum. And he wouldn't use it on his students. Probably not. The only thing left to do was to sigh dramatically and accept his defeat, but he always had the last word. "Meanie!" Gojo left the room with his hands in the air taking all the sweets on the table. Whatever had happened in the end, once he was back in the world there was more work to be done, so it was high time he got to it.

***

[same time, ~2 hours difference from Tokyo; 04:32pm, Cambodia, Angkor region]

Climbing closer and closer to the sunlight literally from the depths of the Earth, among the dilapidated slab-paved roads, among the now-unpreserved columns that were once decorated with ornaments, surrounded by walls of fine-grained sandstone on which bas-reliefs of deities from Hindu mythology were occasionally found, you climbed the rocky wall, every now and then nervously checking your right pocket to make sure that what you came here for was still there.

"Damn Cambodia and its damn underground systems!" You shouted in annoyance to yourself as you continued crawling. "It's okay, just a few more steps and we'll be home."

Grab!

You clung to the very last ledge trying not to look down. The height wasn't scary to you and neither was the abyss you'd left behind, but who knows? Maybe just this once the darkness beneath your feet would have eyes.

Your legs pushed you forward relentlessly, light shone through the ivy-covered walls and you knew the way out was near. You pulled out of your pocket what you'd been running around for days and there wasn't a part of your body that wasn't aching from the eternal bumps and falls. Being clumsy sucks.

An elongated splintered sphere within which a tiny yellow core was visible through its orange shards - your eye was trying to study every part of the artifact, just in case it suddenly disappeared. "I wish I could squeeze you in my hand harder. But you're electrocuting yourself, ya know," you said taking your backpack off your tired tense shoulders to put the artifact away. In your pursuit of unbelievable objects you couldn't figure out if you were doing a good thing or if you were following your selfish desire to disappear somewhere on the ends of the Earth, but as long as the former coincided with the latter, you chased the intrusive thoughts away from you. The only thing you cared about now was that the artifact would be useful because many of them had fantastic, but for you absolutely useless properties and you were only interested in the second category: artifacts capable of releasing a huge amount of stable energy. The amount of energy released had to be so great that it had to be enough to power a small town. A notional compact power plant.

***

[06:39pm, Cambodia, on the approach to the capital Phnom Penh]

One of your delicate but wounded hands was gripping the steering wheel securely, the other leaning against the open window frame of the car. You couldn't deny yourself the small urge to stick your hand out the window and let the slightly damp but hot air flow through your fingers. You took your gaze off the road for a second and directed it to your hand, which was now catching the northeast monsoon, with the beautiful backdrop of Tonle Sap Lake in the sunset sunlight, which happily allowed people to set up floating villages on its restless waters. The silence of the rental car's interior was broken only by gusts of wind and your carefully crafted playlist, with each song your soul became more and more relaxed, but as soon as you were connected again, your phone was bursting with notifications. You weren't a fan of reading messages while driving, but something caught your eye.

[06:40pm] Itadori Yuji: Y/N, I can't keep quiet anymore teacher Gojo is asking more and more uncomfortable questions every day!!!

[06:42pm] Can we just tell him already? only 4 days away

[06:42pm] He started prying into my phone more than usual I cant delete the story every time, I cant even sign u in

[06:54pm] Y/N, r u there?

[07:01pm] I won't say anything without your approval but to make you feel bad know that your silence breaks my heart :(

You sighed inaudibly. Itadori had gotten what he wanted: your conscience had pulled the rustiest needle out of the farthest pocket and wasn't shy about stabbing you in the heart. But it wasn't because you ignored the boy's messages. Angry reproach for getting involved in all of this was just starting to brew in your head. Fortunately or not, your train of thought was abruptly interrupted.

[INCOMING CALL: ITADORI YUJI]

"Y/N, where are you? What took you so long to answer? I thought I was going to have a panic attack!" Yuuji whispered. "What's up? Can I tell him everything?

"Kid, tell me, have you gotten so rich lately that you make international calls?" you said with a chuckle.

"What do you mean international calls? Where are you?" Itadori's whispering grew louder and louder, panic rising with each word.

"In Cambodia, there was a—" you began to speak, but the boy cut you short.

"Eek!" Yuji ended the call in a hurry. You laughed as you typed the message.

[07:04pm] You: I'd hate to scrape off your bursting from impatience body off the walls, but don't say anything to anyone. Don't ruin first impression, see ya!

Only one thought was spinning in your head: you didn't want any first, second, or even third impressions.

***

Eager to pass the time until your flight back to Tokyo, you wandered through the center of Cambodia's capital strolling leisurely along one of the central boulevards. The evening air, mixed with the smells of fruits, freshly baked rice flour baguettes, fish sauce and river water filled your lungs. You decided to give your legs a little rest and after walking a few dozen more steps and not finding any benches, you sat down on the side of one of the stone flowerbeds, trying not to crumple or damage the flowers growing in it. Your gaze was directed toward the Independence Monument, which towered grandly over the center of the city in the twilight, but you looked through it into your own thoughts. In such moments, you could finally feel that same fragile calm that constantly eluded you in a daily routine filled with countless deaths and eternal pursuit. While you were on one side of the world tucking a loose strand of hair behind your ear, on the other side of the horizon a sorcerer was striding toward his room, finally feeling the sleepy rush. Gojo stepped into the room closing the door very quietly behind him. The sorcerer's tired body as if filled with wet sand began to lazily and carelessly throw off his clothes, dirty from the day's countless training sessions and literally collapsed on the bed. As soon as Gojo closed his heavy eyelids, a familiar female voice echoed in his head making his heart clench painfully.

"Good night, boxy."

[21 Dec, 2018; 09:39pm; Japan, Aomori Prefecture, north of Higashidori village, hunters' headquarters]

You walked forward along the familiar road making your way through a forest of densely growing conifers. Through the cedar pines and firs you could already see a familiar cliff rising up surrounded by proud, impregnable cliffs against which the waves of the eastern sea were crashing on the horizon. The vegetation began to thin and you walked along the lower level of the cliff, straight to the entrance, which looked more like the entrance to a cave than to a dwelling. The darkness enveloped your eyes as you stepped into the huge crevice, and the further you went, the more you were guided by memory than by sight. You walked forward exactly twenty-three steps and turned clockwise thirty degrees and nothing but your sixth sense told you that you were right in front of the iron door. It was only on the third try that your tired hand found the key card in your pocket among the rest of the junk and you tapped your shoe to the ground in impatience and placed the card against the left side of the door at your eye level. The door creaked as it began to move aside, and as soon as you stepped inside, the mechanism returned the metal door to its previous position with the same quiet clank. You found yourself inside a bright, sterile room, no bigger than the smallest closet and after five seconds you turned your body exactly 45 degrees clockwise. After another five seconds, you did the same maneuver, and so on until you were in your initial position. An invisible speaker emitted three short beeps. The lines of your hand became covered in a dark walking haze and at the same moment an unpretentious but elegant dagger appeared in your hand. Knowing the whole procedure perfectly well, you pricked your finger and smeared a small amount of the secreted blood on the wall in front of you. The blood from the surface disappeared faster than three short beeps, the wall opened and you found yourself on the basement floor of your house. The space was filled with carelessly standing boxes, in which lay both old worn-out clothes and cartridges of different caliber, construction waste, spare parts from different mechanisms, scrap metal, the smell of paint and acetone was in the air. Your feet were already leading you up the metal stairs, each step making a distinct clanking sound under your soles.

The quiet of the house was broken by the creak of the door opening, the rustle of shoes being kicked off, the clank of a key being tossed onto the nightstand and your barely audible hitching of breath. You stopped beside the nightstand and looked up at the mirror that hung above it. In the darkness you could only make out the outline of your upper face, a black mask always covered the lower part of it and the desire to take it off at least at home was rapidly diminishing every day. Once again, you bringing your hands to your face, stopped. After hesitating for a few seconds, you shook your head chaotically and lowered your hands. When you pulled yourself away from the mirror, you quietly walked further along the varnished wooden floor and wanting to know if there was anyone at home whose peace you might have disturbed, you asked somewhere in the void. "Meg, is anyone home?" you tilted your head up slightly waiting for an answer.

"Yes, Kyle's been waiting for you," the voice replied with a distinctly mechanical quality to it. "And so am I, by the way."

"Megan, I'm sorry, but you know I've been out of touch," you sounded justified mixed with exhaustion.

"It didn't bother you before," Megan said with resentment in her voice. Even after so much time with Megan you couldn't tell for sure if she was really feeling human emotions or if she'd learned to mimic them and used them cleverly.

"It was different," you said wiping your face with both hands, trying to push the exhaustion away. "Oh, who knew there would be an AI with feelings?

"I didn't just show up," Megan said. "You're the one who made me this way," she said forgetting for a moment that her original job had been to state dry facts and relay information. "Don't exaggerate," you grinned shaking your head slightly.

As you took a few steps further down the corridor, your peripheral vision caught a tall silhouette. Just as you were about to become alert, a switch flicked and a light illuminated the far room. In the light of the lamp the silhouette took on the distinct shape of a man leaning against one of the wooden columns. The cold light fell on the sharp features of his face; his temples and the back of his head were shaved, but from the top of his head his blue-black hair fell in random strands across his face covering his deep dark green eyes. Beneath the t-shirt and pajama pants, he was in excellent physical shape, the visible part of his arms looking taut and wiry. A dark geometric tattoo could be seen from underneath the t-shirt that exposed his collarbone a bit. Despite his arrogant look, your eyes met his warm gaze. "Oh, my God, honey, I missed you so much!" You jumped across the room and ignoring the guy, hugged the refrigerator.

"That's your style," the young man laughed not even trying to pretend you hurt his feelings.

"Sorry Kyle, I haven't eaten in days, food fogs my mind," you laughed with him and hugged him tightly.

"I know, hun. I missed you. And yeah, there's a surprise in the fridge," and while he was saying all that, he kept kissing the top of your head.

You looked at him in disbelief "It's just food, isn't it?" You turned back to the refrigerator and opened it with a jerk. As you looked around the shelves filled with food, your gaze caught sight of a clear box decorated with little bows and a huge cheesecake inside and several cartons of chocolate milk that stood next to it. You peeked out from behind the refrigerator door and stared at Kyle with a squinted suspicious look, he only nodded his head in response letting you know it was all yours alone.

Just as your hand reached for the box, you heard loud, quick footsteps coming down the stairs. "Hey, adoptee! Don't ya wanna give me a hug?" The tall red-haired girl flew into the kitchen and crossed her arms over her chest pouting her lips.

"Rachel! How did you…" You slammed the refrigerator door shut and rushed toward her. "I mean, I didn't know you were home, I'm sorry!" You hugged her wrapping your arms around her cheeks and kissing her tanned round face. She crinkled her dark green eyes every time you accidentally grazed them with your lips.

"I'll set the table for us for now," Kyle announced, looking at your tendrils.

While Kyle scoured the fridge for the food you needed, you decided to take a quick refreshing shower and put on your clean, soft pajamas after your warm reunion. As you walked down the stairs from the second floor, you smelled the delicious aroma of tuna sandwiches and as you moved closer to the table, you saw that there were three golden crusted sandwiches on your plate and a nearby basket full of fruit. As you sat down as a small family at the table Kyle began to question you. "So, are you going to tell me where you've been this time?" he asked slicing your cheesecake for you.

"In Cambodia!" you replied, without really getting through a bite of sandwich.

"What, running around scaring the local tourists?" He asked mockingly, but Kyle always does that. Kindly.

"I'd love to, but this time I had to run underground," you replied with your mouth still full. Suddenly you get a light slap."Hey!" you turned to Rach, at which point she grabbed your nose with two fingers.

"How many times have I told ya to chew your food better? " The girl asked with one eyebrow raised.

"Got it, giving up, white flag, let go!" Rachel couldn't keep her stern big sister expression and laughed because of your stuffed nose and mouth full of food.

"By the way, look what I found!" And with that, you pulled out the small sphere that had been in your backpack all this time. You squeezed the sphere a little harder than you should have, and a small but noticeable electric shock went through you. You dropped the sphere, and it fell onto the wooden table, leaving a charred mark on it.

"What the hell is that?" Kyle asked disapprovingly squinting his eyes as he methodically peeled the skin off the apple with his knife.

"Dunno," you shrugged. "I haven't found out yet."

"Uh-huh, just like the last fifty pieces of bling," Rachel grumbled to herself.

You ignored her grumbling and continued. "But I really hope this thing can provide a steady flow of energy. There is a possibility that it was an amulet of Lakshmi, the consort of the god Vishnu. She was the source of the god's power and splendor filling him with energy. According to one legend, she leaves Vishnu when she sees the violation of moral standards in the story of Bhrigu. It's said that before disappearing from the divine world, she placed a piece of her soul there," you said gazing intently into the sphere.

"Sorry, says who? Voices in your head?" Kyle looked at you with his hand resting on his chin.

"Yep, and they also tell me you'll be sleeping outside tonight," you said rolling your eyes.

It was decided to spend the rest of the evening in silence. Kyle was on his phone, working on a training for the younger kids, Rachel had decided to collapse on the couch to the evening news, the newscaster broadcasting something about the Japanese prime minister's intentions to meet with the Iranian president and the release of radioactive water from the Fukushima nuclear power plant and you were doing the dishes humming your favorite songs to yourself.

You didn't remember whose decision it was to have panoramic windows in the hall, but now it seemed the best decision in the world. The cold night wind touched it with a gentle hand of nature and when you opened them, the hand touched you. It was good to feel alive even in spite of all those events that remained a scorched stigma on your past. Even if you weren't always up to the task, you successfully crushed the bright flashes of memories with the sole of your hardened character.

"...a tour bus traveling the Kyoto-Nara route was found in the middle of the highway near the village Ide..."

The newscaster's voice pulled you out of your thoughts. Without taking your eyes off the window, through which you could see the troubled bay glittering blue, you began to listen to the newscaster’s words.

"...completely empty, there was no sign of a struggle inside the bus or in the immediate vicinity..."

You are not surprised that no one has been able to find a trace of the missing people. The very beasts described in the Bibl, called by man as demons are particularly careful and calculating.

"...a search operation has been organized, anyone with any information should contact the nearest police station..."

A crazy grin escaped your lips and you wanted to wish the federal authorities good luck because they would have to look in a dimension other than this one. Unconsciously, your thoughts drifted to the people on the bus. The young ones, under thirty, would most likely be used for the merger. The rest would either be butchered or enslaved, perhaps even sexual. You vividly imagined a pool of blood spreading on the ground, with a kneecap, a severed arm and a couple of severed vertebrae floating in it; the wet crunch of grinding bones, accompanied by a tight exhausted whimper replayed in your brain. Suddenly your keen hearing distinguishing the fictitious from the real, detected a rustle that broke the twilight's deceptive peace. Faint unfamiliar footsteps were heard at the other end of the room. Your soul became alert, and you became alert with it. "Good evening," came a hoarse voice from the darkness of the corridor.

"Good evening, Mr. Dead Principal!" you exhaled inaudibly, smiled and waved to the man.

***

"Here, your tea," you handed the hot mug to Principal Yaga. "Why are you on your feet? Didn't doc warn you that you were too weak now?"

"Thank you," the man took a sip and continued. "He warned me, but I heard him talking to someone and told me that you had arrived," the principal paused for a moment and added. "I wanted to thank you personally."

"You shouldn't have. You seemed ready to die," you said, a note of understanding slipping into your words. "Besides, it wasn't me who saved you, it was that redhead rascal over there," your thumb pointed behind you at the snoring Rach. "I wasn't even there."

"But she was there on your orders," the director said.

"It wasn't an order," you replied taking a sip of freshly brewed coffee from your mug.

"Anyway," he said shrugging and you chuckled softly. "I never knew you felt like a battered sack of potatoes after resurrection," the headmaster tried to stretch his neck with naughty hands.

"Technically you're not resurrected, you just didn't have time to die," you frowned your eyebrows slightly.

"You mean it was some kind of clinical death?"

"You could call it that, of course," you shrugged and took a sip of coffee from your mug. "But routine terms don't really fit our way of life. The situations aren't exactly, uh, mundane."

"May I ask how you did it?"

"There is some sort of, uh, what do you call them? Tech? Nevermind. Anyway, we know it's very dangerous to play with time, but it's possible to freeze certain processes separately. Biological ones, among others. For an uninformed person it is much easier to freeze it, but those who know about it, consciously "turn off" the possibility of this manipulation with their body. After all, not everyone uses this technique for good," you tried to explain gesturing vigorously with your hands and having finished your explanation awkwardly put them around the mug. There was silence. It wasn't tense, just a silence between the person who had saved one life and the person who could save that life. Your chipped fingernails drove cracks in the table and thoughts that it would be a good idea to cut them off right now occupied your mind. You just had to focus on something to keep from feeling the pain.

"So now I shouldn't let anyone know I'm alive?" the principal interrupted the silence.

"Ya shouldn't," you said, shaking your head. "Your people have something coming up in three days and ya're too weak to help," you sighed, your index finger sliding over the rim of your cup. "I think the news that those who should be underground by now are sitting quietly drinking tea somewhere on the edge of Japan is going to bring them down. Well, maybe it might make them happy, but we're not taking any risks. On top of that, let the opposing side think you're outnumbered.

"Gojo scheduled the battle for December 24? " The headmaster asked in amazement raising his eyebrows.

"Yep, he did!" you leaned back in your chair, looked at the headmaster and laughed. "Your student has a lot of quirks."

"You have no idea how many," Yaga grinned realizing he missed his annoying former student. "Let me ask you, will you intervene?"

"We won't interfere until we realize things are going badly," you replied, your face twisted into a sly smile. "You know the politics of thugs and thieves," you said and then it was Principal Yaga's turn to laugh.

The evening was turning to night, and moths began to fly in through the open window circling the kitchen wall garland that you used instead of a nightlight. You watched the tiny wings flutter in the shimmering light thinking about how to present the information unknown to the director in a gentler way. You knew you couldn't delay this conversation, so you grabbed the mug as if it would give you some kind of support and blurted it out. "I'm sorry to report, but Master Tengen is dead," you exhaled silently, a small but heavy weight lifting from your soul.

"That's how it is," the principal said after a short pause, you could hear him swallow. "What about the Tokyo College?"

"Splinters," you scrutinized your fingers trying to avoid eye contact as if you were an accomplice.

"Is there anything else I should know?" The headmaster asked and you drained the mug in two gulps and set it down on the wooden table with a loud clatter.

"One who used to be in Itadori, uh," you hesitated trying to find the right words. "It seems he's in Megumi now."

"Sukuna Ryomen?" The director's voice exploded, but when he saw your eyes widen, he quickly calmed down. "Why would he do that?"

"Is that what you're asking me?" you raised your eyebrows pointing one hand toward yourself. "No idea. Maybe it was a change of scenery or maybe it was a plan."

You felt an unpleasant chill in your chest at your own words. You tilted your head back and stared up at the dark ceiling letting the rising tide of anxiety fill your head for a moment. Besides the fact that the demons' actions had been out of control lately, the curses were now on a full scale.

"I apologize for the interruption," Kyle's voice behind you pulled you out of your dazed state. "Y/N, devices for our kids ready yet?"

"Yeah, look in the workroom, top right desk drawer", you said.

"It's easy to find a table in this Filipino dump," Kyle said with irony in every word. You cocked your head up and looked at Kyle.

"Good, maybe ya can clean it up!" you exclaimed, clapping your hands like a child.

"Dream on!" he lightly ruffled your hair, and headed toward the door that led to the basement.

"It's very late, and you must be tired," you said, turning to Principal Jaga. "Go back to the infirmary, or I'll complain to doc about his patient walking around without his permission. He doesn't like that and won't tolerate it," you stood up, pushing your chair behind you. "You'll be out of lunch muffins for a week," and at the same time you turned around, following Kyle into the workroom.

***

As you walked past the kitchen, you glanced at the ridiculously colored refrigerator. The farther you walked across the cold floor of the house the more the warming feeling in your chest grew. You adored this place. Even though the air outside these walls was filled with callousness, at home every particle was filled with love. Even the particles that made up the damn appliances.

"We're not going to buy it," Kyle shook his head erratically from side to side. "Don't even think about it. No."

"Why? Give me one reason!" you started whimpering like a little baby.

"Let me see... Probably because it's RED and has freakin' PINK CHAMOMILE on the front of it!" You tried to keep a sad expression on your face to his words, but your lips twitching from holding back laughter gave you away. "It's fucking fashion disaster," he mumbled, covering his face with his hand. You laughed so hard you had to clutch your hands to your stomach.

***

You sat on the curb outside an appliance store in the blazing June sun, with only the wind, like a hero from the books, saving your overheated bodies."Ya know I hate you," Kyle said with his hands on his cheeks. "You and your gift for persuasion."

"I know, hun. So are we gonna order movers or are we gonna do this on our own?"

When you entered the workroom the colors were familiar to your eyes. It could have seemed that there were colors here that didn't even exist in nature. They were everywhere: on the floor, on the walls and even somehow managed to reach the ceiling. Various caustic chemical stains, scuffs, fuel oil marks - looking at all this splendor you even felt ashamed. Just a little bit. Because this room used to be sterile white. Approaching Kyle from the back, you began to watch as he rummaged through your desk.

"Okay, here they are, I think," Kyle pulled something that looked like an impossibly thin black spider web out of a drawer. He folded the devices neatly into a black metal box and was about to leave the workroom. "Fucking Jesus!" He almost let go of the object. "Stop sneaking up on people like that!"

"Sorry, sorry, habit!" you grabbed the guy's forearms to keep him off balance, "Did ya find everything?"

"Yeah, think so, albeit barely. "

"Cut it out, I promise to clean this place up!" You pouted playfully for a second, but in the same instant your face took on a slightly worried expression. You had a favor to ask Kyle. "Look, I know you got along with the kids from Tokyo College, so could you help them out in three days? I mean, just be in range, just in case. Take Rach and a couple other guys with you," a feeling of unease made you look away. "It'll be safer that way."

"Even if I was against the idea, wouldn't you do it your way again and run over there to see the whole thing with your own eyes?

"Actually, that's what I wanted to do," you smiled at how well Kyle knew you. "But I can't. I have things to do in Karnak.

"Egypt? Are you fucking kidding me?" The men's got his eyes on you. "You literally just got back, you're a mess!" you bit your lip under his angry glare. "Look, this is not a joke. You just got back, you need to recuperate. Moreover, you have a raid in a week. Are you even thinking straight?" Kyle hasn't taken his eyes off you.

"No, I hit it when I was a kid, I think," you put your hand dramatically to your forehead.

"Why do you need to go there? I mean, why the urgency?"

"Hun, you know perfectly well why. Marragta's core is nearly depleted of energy. How do you propose we supply Hopetown with electricity? Build a nuclear power plant?" you ran your hands through your hair in concern. "Besides, if there's no electricity, the desalination units will stop working and most importantly without a steady flow of power the installed relics will stop working and the town will be left without protection!" you were doing everything you could to keep from snapping at the Kyle. "Don't we have enough problems?"

"It's not like ya have to run around the world checking every myth or legend for accuracy!" Kyle was starting to feel more frustrating. Even though his tone of voice hadn't changed, you were always good at reading between the lines even if it was for your own good. "Ya knew they were rarely true."

"I do. I'm well aware of that. But I'd rather regret what I've done than do nothing," you said through clenched teeth.

"I don't understand why we can't just use dark energy? I doubt the universe would be greedy about it," Kyle rubbed the fingers of his hands together in confusion. He hated being helpless, but he hated not being able to help you even more.

"Dark energy is extremely unstable in the long run. It has to be used here and now and even that doesn't guarantee that you won't disappear with it after it's used. We've talked about this many times and we won't discuss it again," you waved your hand in his direction, signaling that the conversation was over.

Kyle had been there for you since you were a child, even though you'd never needed it. He'd been one of the first witnesses to your first steps, your first words, your first bad joke, even though he was a little older than you. All his deep tenderness for you, which had been building up in him since the day you appeared was shattered every time by your recklessness filling every shard with anxiety and every sudden disappearance of yours provoked such a quarrel even if there was no proper ground for it. After each conflict you felt Kyle's confused gaze on you and each time one of you took a step towards. "Kyle—" you exhaled, but the guy immediately interrupted you.

"I'm sorry I snapped you like that. Ya know I'm just really worried about you," he tucked a strand of your hair behind your ear with a careful movement of his hand.

"I know, it's your role as big brother, so get over it," you smiled and returned to your radiant state. You reached out to hug Kyle, but your phone vibrated on your screen.

"Who else at this hour? " Kyle asked, peering at your phone screen and you looked away before he could read the caller's name and answered it.

"Itadori?" You sounded surprised and worried at the same time. You heard heavy breathing, wind howling and snow rustling on the other end of the phone.

"Uh... Uh, Y/N," Yuji's voice shivering from the cold finally came through the phone. "It seems I have gotten lost in the forest near your house."

***

You wrapped Yuji's shivering body in a soft colorful blanket as he sat on the bed in your workroom. He looked from you to Kyle shaking from the cold trying to say something, but his teeth were chattering and he wrapped himself tighter in the blanket, only his brown eyes visible from beneath the soft fabric. Kyle looked at the situation, and tilted his head in your direction. "I think I'll make some cocoa and look for the old heater," he said softly and turned and headed for the door.

"If ya decide to add whiskey to it, I suggest ya start being afraid now," you jokingly warned Kyle.

"Mercy," the guy dramatically put the back of his hand to his forehead and slammed the door shut winking at you. You flopped down on the floor next to the bed waiting for him to warm up enough to say something. Looking at Yuji's blue face, you were willing to bet yourself that his skin was tingling unpleasantly right now. With that thought you got up off the floor and went to the closet to get another brightly colored blanket and wrapped the boy in it again and sat down next to him on the floor. "I wondered if you were born this crazy, or if you'd picked it up from your teacher," Itadori's eyes widened and if his skin hadn't been so blue, a blush would have shown on his cheeks. You noticed the look in his eyes and added without a trace of embarrassment: "Why are ya looking at me like that? Judging by your stories, he really got a screw loose," you kept staring at him waiting for the warmth of your room to warm him up.

"We started practicing teleportation last week," the boy mumbled to your surprise as he parted his cracked lips.

"Yeah?" you asked raising your eyebrows. "I see," you said a little stiffly, trying hard not to laugh.

"Don't laugh!" The boy fidgeted in the bed, the warm blankets began to come off him and you could see that his skin was beginning to take on a vibrant color. "I'm... I'm glad to see you, Y/N," Yuji said, and a wide smile spread across his face.

"Itadori, I'm happy to see you too and no offense…," you faltered biting your lip. "What are ya doing here?

"Dunno," he lowered his head slightly shrugging his shoulders. "Battle is coming soon and the closer it gets, the more nervous and sleepless I get," he looked away and scratched the back of his head. "I feel much more relaxed at your place for some reason."

"Nervous?" you asked the boy. "Didn't ya tell me that your teacher is the strongest sorcerer?"

"It's true!" the boy exclaimed waving his hands in the air. "I'm not doubting him, it's just... It's just that Sukuna is in Megumi's body now, and Teacher Gojo, well... He raised him," Yuji said, his eyes blank for a moment. You could tell from the way he was rubbing his fingers that he wanted to say something else and your guess was immediately confirmed because you heard him draw in more air. "Perhaps you have a plan to suppress the Sukuna in Megumi's body?" Yuuji blurted out and then stopped abruptly waiting for your answer.

"No, there's no plan," you shook your head slowly looking into his brown eyes. You noticed how the boy's broad shoulders began to slump slowly. "But there is an idea," you said, a smile in the tone of your voice and the boy smiled along with you.

"Really?" Itadori excitedly asked, giving in your direction.

"Yep," you said, getting up off the floor shaking off your feet. "Now go to sleep," Itadori looked at you confused and pouted his lips expecting you to say something else. "Kyle will take ya back in the morning and you can tell your friends you spent the night at the girl's," you winked at him and without waiting for him to ask more, left the workroom.

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122 notes · View notes

sp00kworm · 3 years

Text

Iron Lake

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Pairing: Qene (Male God [Bird Creature]) x Gender Neutral Reader

Warnings: Wound Descriptions, Blood

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Ore was rich in the valleys once. The entire hillside was covered in small mine shafts for digging up iron ore for smelting in the iron works, and that lead to several settlement villages between the city and the ocean. Your family had lived on the final reaches of the valley, towards the sea, for many generations, until the collapse. The men worked as miners, and the women worked the farms. Your own family, however, had moved on long ago. When the iron ore ran dry, and the mine shafts began to collapse, the village was left to the farmers and creatures which plagued the woods and hills. You looked at your sturdy cottage and the barns surrounding it as you sat on top of the newly built dry-stone wall you had just finished. It had collapsed with a recent bull charge and you’d spent a long time building it back up higher so he couldn’t get at your cows. A few heifers were too young and now steered clear of the wall, wandering along the other side of the field. You didn’t blame them. The bull was a neighbour’s, and rarely did he have the beast under control. Smoking a pipe called you, but it was a habit that was best left alone living so rural. You patted your nearest cow and fed her a handful of weeds before taking your bucket and heading to your chickens, which were clucking around the few ewes you had.

The chickens ran on small legs as you shook the feed bucket, and you grinned as you leaned over to toss them some food. The ewes were slower to move and trotted over as you headed to their small food trough and hay basket. You shovelled more hay in from under the shelter and locked the gate before filling their feed and water troughs. The chickens were back following you around as you tapped their own feed buckets again and herded them back into their coop. They happily ignored you closing the caging in favour of the food you had put in their own trough. Whistling, you took all the buckets and closed the gates to the fields, heading back towards the small storage and utility shed to put everything away. The wind rushed over the long grass at the top of the hill and you paused to look up as the sky rumbled with the beginnings of rain. Sure enough, as you looked to the herd, they were heading back to the shelter. There was rain on the way. You tutted and made sure to put everything away before rushing to cover the chickens and make sure the sheep had their own shelter with their raised bedded platform.

As you finished checking on the cows, the heavens opened, and you rushed for your small porch, sprinting under the cover as the rain came lashing down, soaking your shirt and bottoms through. The cotton clung to you as you shuddered by the door, watching the grey clouds blur with falling water over the top of the mountain in the distance. It was colder now, and you opened your door to stoke the fire and dry your clothes. You grumpily tugged your wet clothing off and hung it in front of the fire before you rekindled the embers and wrapped yourself tightly in a heavy blanket of white wool. The rain thundered on the roof, and you warmed your toes before pulling on a small pair of moccasins and peering through the glass in your windows. The animals were huddled together out of the rain as it gave the grass and small crop garden you had a good soak. It was miserable. You perched yourself on the small table and watched the weather with a hum.

“And I had so much to do today too.” You lamented quietly.

The rain was white noise after a while, and the clouds rolled over head, still full of rain when you peered back up at the sky. You jumped as a great screech sounded overhead, inhuman, furious and in pain. It sounded again with the thunderous boom of a weapon, and you jumped from the window at the flash of gun powder in the far distance, over the mountain top. Your home shook with another screeching wail as the flashes stopped and the clouds rolled again, the wind howling through the unsealed stone cracks in your cottage. There was another boom of thunder as the cries of the creature paused for a moment. You prayed they hadn’t just shot at a dragon. Dragons were harder than steel plating and bullets or canons did very little damage to their interlinked scales. Fury would follow an injured dragon, but there was no hiss and boom of burning flames. Another ear-piercing screech followed down the mountainside, as a great black figure soared into the clouds and disappeared overhead. It’s shadow hung over the top of the hill as it zipped down through the valley before it screeched again and plunged from the sky, spinning in a mass of glorious golden brown and tawny feathers before it plummeted into the muddy cow field in a mass of feathers, dirt and blood.

The cows mooed violently before trotting out to investigate the lump, the younger females hanging back under the wooden shelter. You watched the feathers float from the sky, shellshocked, before you rushed for your damp clothing and pulled it all back on. You threw on your hooded cloak and rushed out into the rain and wind. The cows called as you rushed to the fence and thumped at their flanks harshly, batting their tongues away from the creature’s wounds. It hissed, feathers brushing upwards as you dared to touch its giant body. It was huge, easily over twelve feet long, the long tail feathers crumpled under its cut legs. It had a great talon missing from one of it’s feet, and blood thrummed from the wound. You rushed to its head.

“Oh, my Sun…” You cursed as you looked at the burning orange eyes that peaked out from the great, fluffy crown of feathers. A beak opened as it hissed again, another, weak scream of upset. A threat, you realised as it’s feet moved and talons slashed at the floor.

“Don’t!” You pushed it’s shoulder as the orange bled to black and it turned onto its other side, flopping over in its attempts to push itself back onto its feet.

“You’re killing yourself!” You screamed at it as it flexed its wings and black blood spewed from its mouth. You gasped at the cavern in its side, bleeding black tar and red blood over its beautiful, soft feathers. It screeched again, madness taking over as it thrashed to get itself upright and managed, shaking on its swollen, bleeding foot. The wound to its torso was heavily bleeding, and blood poured with the stress and movement, revealing the two-inch diameter iron ball wedged in between its ribs.

“Stop!” You screeched again, putting your hands on its wings before two hard arms extended out of the feathery chest. The clawed hands snatched at you, lifting you high to its bleeding black eyes as you gasped. With a small scream, the creature reared its head back and paused as you covered its eyes, small hands encompassing its blackened gaze. Its wings sagged as it’s beak opened to let tar leak from its gullet.

“You’re going to die if you don’t let me get that bullet out of you!” You shouted up at it, clinging to its face, “Let me help you, please.”

The bird-like creature sagged, its wounded feet giving in as it paused to retch blood up once more and placed you back on the floor with a croak. The croak bubbled with tar and blood as its feathers shifted and it looked up at your little cottage. The wind shifted and blew violently, soaking the both of you with more, icy rain.

“I will not fit.” It whispered deeply, as though its voice was being carried to your ears on the wind itself.

“You can…talk…” You commented, stunned for a moment as it opened its mouth, “There’s a barn to the back. I used to keep the horse in there, but its empty now.” You reasoned as you opened the gate and coaxed the bleeding beast through the rungs. It cried out as its claws got stuck in the cattle grating, the wound from the missing toe tearing and bleeding over the wooden slats. The creature followed, feathers dripping from its body in a bloody trail as it struggled behind you, croaking and wheezing as you heaved open the doors to the horse barn and opened the door to a stall.

The creature flopped into the stall, its burning eyes dripping with tar as it wheezed, wings ruffling as it struggled to keep the gapping wound in its chest off the stone floor. You rushed to kick over a great barrel of sawdust to mop up the blood before disappearing back into the howling wind and rain to grab what little medical supplies you had. A crow squawked by your window as you rushed into the front door, his beady eye following you before it hopped into the house and cawed again, louder. Cursing, you grabbed your old sheets and shoved them into the large cooking pot with the rest of the water from the well. The fire was roaring, and they would soon be clean enough to wrap the wounds. The poultices were a little old, but they smelt fresh and clean, of mint and lavender, and you grabbed the jars and your needles and some fine thread. It would be a botch job at best, but it was all you could do for the creature. You also made sure to grab something for the pain, grabbing a bottle of dragon fire whiskey as you grappled the cooking pot of boiling sheets and shouldered the other supplies. The crow followed you out of the house again and cawed, but you paid it no mind, even as more small birds flocked with it under your porch and in the fields.

The creature was wheezing against the floor, barely breathing, when you returned, and you cursed as its eye opened, devoid of any honey colour, just filled with black. Its eyes rolled and closed.

“Try and stay awake. Please. I need you awake to stop the bleeding.” You scrubbed your hands and hung the sheets to dry as you looked at his chest again, eyeing the iron ball wedged under his bottom rib, mashed in with broken feathers and splinters of stone. With a shaky hand, you took hold of your small set of forceps, usually used to help cows calf, and soaked them in the boiling water before you dared to ease them under the plumage and grip the bullet. The creature screamed but didn’t lash out, and so, you committed, heaving the bullet down, and out of its chest with a rush of tar like goo and blood. It croaked against the stone and you reached for the fresh water and salt to rinse the sharp pieces of feather and stone away before you plucked the broken feathers around the wound away and eyed the wound for any other artifacts. It was clean. You jumped as one of the creature’s leather skinned arms appeared from out of the feathers of its chest and reached for the large bottle of whiskey you had brought. It hissed and pulled the cork free with its beak before pouring the strong alcohol into its gullet, grumbling, and croaking after with the burn.

“That much will knock you out good.” You promised as you stroked its feathery chest and pulled out your needle, sterilising it in the boiling water before you threaded it, knotted the end, and got to work, suturing the wound closed where you could, as tightly as you dared. The bird creatures’ skin was dark underneath its feathers, leathery to the touch and tanned. You closed the final part of the wound and tried not to slip too much as you knotted the end with blood slick fingers. The tar was gone, no longer leaking from its eyes and mouth. Quietly, you listened to it breathe, wheezing softly against the floor. You took hold of the mint poultice and applied a layer with honey over the wound to soothe the raw, sore skin. Wings shuffled as you reached to tear apart your sheets into large strips to wrap the wound. It cried as you returned and eased its chest up enough to reach around, duck under its arms and wrap the whole thing tightly. You pinned it before letting it rest as you cleaned and wrapped its foot, wondering if the toe would need cauterizing as you left it be, snoozing in an alcohol induced sleep. You made sure to pile hay around him for the night before you closed the doors tightly and looked at your cottage.

The crow from before cawed again from your small porch, fluttering about the floor before it landed by your window and watched you as you hauled your supplies back inside.

“What’s brought you here?” You asked, “I don’t have any seeds for you!” You shouted as it followed you into the house and settled itself over the top of your fire, seated in a small handkerchief on your mantle place.

“Fine. Make yourself at home then.” You scoffed as you looked over at your cooking pot and poured the water out of the window. You were drenched through to the bone and you shuddered as you stoked the fire again and stripped off your clothing. You hung it by the fire and sniffled as you dried off and then wrapped yourself back in your large blanket, content to snuggle into your large armchair and warm your toes by the flames. It was soothing to hear the rain slow to a patter against your roof and the soft cawing of the crow nestled in front of you. Your eyes drooped as you snuggled into the blanket and forgot about the creature laid in your barn.

A great squawk in your ear woke you up, and you jumped awake violently before the crow stomped over your lap and jumped up and down on the arm of your chair. You looked at it in confusion before pushing the blanket away and shuddering. It was cold. Using the blanket as a shawl, you stoked the fire again, throwing some more kindling and then logs into the embers to get it going as the crow fluttered into your kitchen and snapped at the crumbs on the side. You huffed and pulled out a small bag of sunflower seeds before you put a small handful in a bowl and watched the crow go to town.

“You’re a weird little thing.” You commented before going to get dressed in the small room you had to the left side of the cottage, leaving the crow to eat and hop around, so long as it didn’t decide that your floor was a good place to poop.

The crow was still on the countertop when you returned, watching you through one, beady black eye, as you walked towards it. It flapped in protest as you stood in front of it but didn’t squawk or fly away. It stared back at you, its head turned and tilted up to see you properly.

“Are you here for the creature?” You asked, no louder than a whisper.

In response, the crow flapped again and gave one short, loud honk.

“Hm. I don’t think I trust you just yet.” You scolded gently before you offered your hand to the crow. The corvid pecked a finger before stepping onto your hand and skipping up your arm, hopping as it went along your sleeve, its beak holding itself up when it slipped against the cotton.

“Come on then. Let’s go and see how our house guest…well, our barn guest, is doing.” You tapped the crow’s beak and headed towards the door. You both looked up at the morning sun and smiled, thankful for the sunshine. The crow flapped again and spread its wings to soak in the rays before you turned to head around the back of the cottage where the barn was.

The rain had washed away most of the blood, leaving clumps of muddy feathers around the rocks and fence posts as the evidence that the creature had passed through. You stepped over a puddle and heaved open the barn door. A great rumbling croak sounded as you stepped inside, leaving the door open a little to let the morning air in. The creature’s feathers dragged against the piles of hay and the stone floor, as it struggled to raise its head. When it managed to get high enough, one, burning orange eye peered over the top of the stall, eyeing you as you approached the wooden gate.

“Good morning.” You uttered as it flopped back against the floor with a sad, long croak. The crow on your shoulder squawked again before fluttering down to the great beast and moving from the bottom of its tail feathers to its hooked beak. It opened one giant eye and huffed before looking at you again and opening its mouth.

“Sustenance.” Its great voice rumbled before closing its eyes again, struggling to swallow as the crow pecked gently at the loose feathers on its face, pulling them free before it tapped its beak against the other and flew up to the side of the stall.

“Food?” You asked, “Well, I have some but certainly not enough to feed you. You’re giant, if you don’t mind me saying and I don’t know if I could feed you.” You confessed, holding the top of the gate as the creature hissed lowly and dragged its great claws along the floor.

“I will hunt.” It rasped.

“NO!” You grabbed it’s shoulder, gently pulling it back down, “You’ll open all of my hard work. You, sit there. And you,” you pointed to the crow, “you’re coming with me.”

The crow nodded and fluttered out of the barn. Before you could turn to follow, the giant bird-creature rustled its feathers and its leathery, clawed hand appeared, holding your waist to keep you in place.

“Thank…you.” It hissed, “I am… Qene.”

It’s name was hissed, a long pronunciation of E’s which made you wonder just of what race is was. If it was a fae, it would not have told you it’s true name, lest you bind it in contracts. You introduced yourself quietly and it nodded, slowly, exhausted still.

“I am…God of the Valley. Wind, weather and bird.” Qene rasped, “He who…controls the mountains.”

“A…God?” You whispered as the creature let go of your waist, “A god in my barn and…”

Qene huffed and collapsed again in his hay bedding.

“I’ve got questions but let me feed you first. What do you eat?” You asked.

Qene raised his beak from the hay to speak, his voice like a small thunderous rumble, “Meat. I hunt…deer and elk. Anything to then give back to the…” His eyes closed slowly, the orange disappearing behind his eyelid before he fell back asleep.

“I guess a chicken might have to do…or maybe I can get a deer from Thriskar.” You pondered as you followed the crow out of the barn and went for your bag and a bow.

Thriskar scoffed at your request, “A deer? A whole one?” The orc sniffed before he carried on skinning the buck he had strung up outside his small home, “What the fuck do you need a whole…” he smirked then, suddenly, as though he had been told the funniest joke, “Do you have company over? Wanting to impress?”

With a snort, you were quick to flip your middle finger up at the orc, “Yeah, fuck you. I need it for pickling and smoking. I want to not live off my cows again this winter.”

“Well, you’re in luck then.” Thriskar commented, rolling his eyes as he wiped the blood from his hands and pointed to the young buck hanging in his shop, “I caught that yesterday. Should be drained enough for smoking now if you want it.”

“How much?” You asked, sceptically.

Thriskar grinned as he tapped the counter in his shop, perching himself, leaned over the counter, before he tapped his lips, “A kiss and four bronze, or seven bronze if you’re feeling less generous.”

“You’re the worst.” You commented as you handed him the seven bronze coins, “I should be able to carry it before you offer that too.”

“Here.” Thriskar laughed as he pulled the creature’s pelt out and tied the deer in a sling like fashion around your back, “You should get it back now.”

“Thank you.”

“Yeah, don’t make a habit of it okay? I won’t give you the skin for free in future!” he warned as he saw you out of the door and down the path back towards home.

The crow squawked overhead, and you saw Thriskar look up and shake his head before the crow landed on your shoulder.

“Well done. Now he really will think I’m a witch or something.” You scolded the crow as it hopped from your right shoulder, over to your left.

“You don’t need me for that. He likes you enough to want a kiss, doesn’t he? Does that affection not prove anything?” The crow squawked.

You felt your back go cold, “How…can you…”

“Talk?” It asked, “I am…omnipresent within my children.”

“Qene?” You asked as the crow eyed you.

“Yes…” It rasped tiredly, “I wanted to ensure you would be safe.”

“I’ll be fine! There’s nothing but pesky fae and annoying goblins, and they know not to mess with me. I like salt, iron and flowers too much.” You smiled. The crow’s head turned again before it let out another squawk and shook its wings and head violently, as though it had been released from some kind of spell.

“Yeah, I can’t imagine that was lots of fun, huh?” You asked as you stroked the crow’s head and carried on along the path.

Home was a great greeting of farm animals. The chorus was loud and upset, as they had expected their food early in the morning and now it was almost midday. You heaved the deer off your back and onto the porch. The cows crowded the gate as you went to retrieve a hay bale with a pitchfork. There was a lot to tend to before you could give your guest the food he needed. The cows were happy for their filled hay and you were quick to give the sheep and chickens their food before you dragged the deer away from your little crow friend, and towards the large barn on your back. You opened the door and peered inside. Once again, Qene lifted his head, just high enough to see over the top of the stable door, his burning orange gaze looking directly at you.

“I’m back.” You smiled, “And I got you this!”

“Meat?” Qene droned over the top of the stable, “Deer…. No innards.”

“We don’t tend to eat the insides…the intestines are for sausages though.” You told him as you opened the door and laid the deer over the stone floor.

“Sausages?” Qene rasped, his head tilted as his feather’s rustled, and he pulled himself along the floor, his beak opening.

Spit dripped from his beak as his tongue extended, pointed and tanned like his skin. He licked at his beak before he took a great chunk out of the hind of the deer.

“Thank you.” Qene rumbled as he threw his head back and swallowed the chunk of deer, “This…will help.”

“You’re welcome.” You smiled as you reached to pluck one of his feathers from the floor, looking at the now dull brown colour. When it had been attached to his face, it was shiny, golden and beautiful.

Qene ripped more from the deer and noticed you spinning the crushed feather by its quill, “They do not live once they are detached…True power flows through them, but they cannot be removed with it forcefully.”

“What kind of power?” You asked as you sat by the stable door, “I’ve…Well, I guess you are a God.”

Qene scoffed, “It is why I took a bullet to the chest.”

“They’re after your feathers?”

“Yes. Fools that they are.” Qene snorted again over the carcass, “Even if they have no value when they are forcibly plucked.”

You decided not to press the issue, and simply sat as Qene ate, intrigued by the way he plucked at the meat, tearing it all from the bones before smashing open the bones for the marrow inside, his tongue licking at the blood and goo before the bones were then crushed and eaten.

“We really should change your bandages.” You offered as the God finished crunching the brains inside the skull.

“There is no need.” Qene grumbled as he swallowed the last pieces of his meal, “This will be enough for me to heal fully.” His eye turned on you again, “And soon I will be out of your hair.”

“What do you mean you’re almost healed?” You scoffed, “Let me see.”

Qene chuffed and opened his bandages with a swipe of his claws, “See for yourself.”

You shuffled through the hay and looked at the exposed wound below his ribcage. Except, now it was no longer a gaping wound, it was a healing wound, scabbed over where you had stitched it, the flesh filling the line quickly, and moving by the second.

“How is that happening?” You asked in fascination, “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“I am the God of this valley. God of the Iron Lake valley. I am not…held by your mortal deigns.” Qene rasped, his voice growing in strength like a thunderstorm now that he had eaten, “But I would…like some more of that Dragon Fire Whiskey, if you have anymore?”

You looked at his feet and noticed his toe had not grown back, but was quickly snapped from your revere as you smiled and laughed, “More whiskey? Its only just past midday but sure. I’ll go and get the rest of the bottle for you, since you’re a God and all that.” You turned to stand and opened the stall, “Does it even have an effect on you?”

The God huffed and opened his beak in something that looked like a smile, his claws tucked under his head and his wings blanketed over his body, “Not greatly, but it is strong, so I can feel the effects for a moment.”

“So, when you chugged it for the pain…”

“It did not help for a long time.” Qene confirmed, “But I am grateful for your help. Without you, I would have gone mad and destroyed much of this place in my agony.”

“Well, you’re welcome. It’s the least I could do after what other humans did to you. Now, let me get you that whiskey.”

Qene’s feather’s rustled in the valley winds, and he raised his head as he stepped out of the barn, his claws dragging on the floor before he spread his wings and let the wind run through his feathers. A few final dead ones fluttered away on the wind, browning as they disappeared up the hills.

“It feels like an eon since I felt the wind.” Qene rumbled as he flapped his wings and stood tall to look over the fields and up to the mountain, “I will now no longer burden you.”

“I…I’m glad you’re well, but…” You looked at the mountain again, “Won’t they be waiting for you?”

“Waiting for me?” Qene rumbled, his head tilted to peer down at you, “They may be, but my home is my own…”

“Why not stay here?” You asked as the small crow cawed and landed on your shoulder, “They won’t look for you here.”

“And why would you want this?” he asked as he dipped his head, “I am not of your kind, nor am I a welcome guest. I fell into your home.”

“But you are also a welcome one now.” You smiled at him, “I don’t mind you being here. You even helped me get those hay bales out of the barn.”

Qene’s eyes looked to the mountain with longing, “My home…”

“You can go and see…but if you want to come back then…”

Qene lowered his beak to your head, pressing the top to the top of your skull before he looked you in the eyes and licked at your cheek, “Silly human. I…” he rumbled, “I will see my home, but I will return…for visits or for…If my home is not inhabitable.”

You reached up to his face and carefully stroked along Qene’s feathered neck, the golden feathers soft and pretty, “Come back when you want.” You smiled, “Maybe you can replace the whiskey you drank, huh?”

Qene laughed, his beak open and eyes closed, “Perhaps…Or maybe I can bring you something better?”

“Something better?” You asked.

The God nodded his head, “I will bring you a feather, if I return, and weave it into your hair.”

“To what end? What does that mean?” You stroked his neck.

“That you are chosen by me, by the valley god…” he confessed, “That you will be my priestess.”

You laughed softly, “I don’t know about being a religious figure but…”

“You will be mine?” Qene rumbled, his wings flexing.

“Maybe I will, Qene.” You promised before the God flexed his wings and pounded them three times, lifting from the field and into the air.

The crow on your shoulder rubbed its head under your chin, “I will be here. My eyes see everything.”

“I know, Qene. Good luck.” You whispered to the crow before the shadow in the clouds disappeared back towards the mountain.

Weeks past with warm weather and pleasant breezes. The mountain was silent, looming in the distance over the valley, and you tended to your animals and small vegetable patch. Thriskar came for some milk and eggs, looking at the sudden brightness to your animals and farm.

“It is like a God has touched this place!” He commented over a cold glass of milk one day, crunching carrot sticks between his teeth as he looked at the farm. His comment made you wonder just where Qene was. Since he had left the farm had been brighter, fuller of life, but quiet and Qene had not spoken through your crow companion for a long time. You were beginning to think something had happened, and often you went to bed after leaving a bottle of whiskey on the porch. This night, you did the same, placing the bottle out on the porch with a small candle in a holder, before heading to bed.

The next morning you opened the door and stood over a single, golden feather. The feather glowed in the early morning light, bright and brilliant, burning with power. The whiskey was uncorked, and the candle blown out. You rushed for both items, grabbing the feather, and clutching it close before you rounded the corner and thundered into the barn. Qene’s orange eye slowly peered over the top of the stall.

“Hello, little bird.” Qene rumbled before he pushed open the gate, “It has been a while.”

“Qene!” You rushed to the bird creature and hugged him around the neck.

Qene raised his neck and hung you before he gripped you around the waist and smiled, clucking softly with a purr before he placed you back on the floor, “I have missed you. My home is gone, destroyed and trapped. I…I searched for somewhere, but I have ended up back at your doorstep.”

“So…You’re here to stay?” You asked gently.

He nodded his head, “If I am welcome. I will make a home here and…I would like to know more about you.”

You looked up at the eagle face. His eyes were covered by golden and brown feathers, and you reached up to push them away, staring at the orange eyes of the God.

“You were always welcome.” You cooed before kissing the top of his beak.

“Thank you, little bird.” Qene cooed back as his leathery skin rubbed against your own, “The whiskey was a treat.” he chuckled.

“You’re going to have to give me some way to buy more! It’s so expensive!” You scolded.

#forest god x reader #god x reader #bird creature x reader #fae x reader #monster x reader #monster bf x reader #monster bf #monster boyfriend #qene x reader #gender neutral reader #monster reader insert #bird man #bird creature #valley god x reader #valley god

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ragingbookdragon · 3 years

Text

Lightning Strikes Across Our Skin

Barry Allen x Lanternsis One-Shot

Word Count: 2K Warnings: Explicit Language, Angst

Author's Note: This got farther away from me than I meant for it too, but oh well! Enjoy! -Thorne

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He loved her. He loved her more than anything in the entire multiverse. But when she and her brother got around one another—and truth be told, they were never not around each other; something about Blue and Green Lantern rings working best in each other’s range—they caused more trouble than he liked.

Hal was the antagonizer, and she was the instigator. And when they concocted a plan to get someone into trouble or just to piss someone off, they pulled the plan with perfection; the only thing worse than one Jordan barreling headfirst into danger was a second Jordan following behind with shouts of acclamation.

And poor Barry was stuck between the two of them when they did, like he always was—partially because he was the only one who could keep his best friend out of trouble, and the other part because he was the only one who could keep his girlfriend out of trouble too. That and because wherever a Lantern was, a Speedster was sure to be around too.

***

She slapped her hand against Hal’s chest, flipping the villain the middle finger in hope that it would anger them. “I’ll pay you half my stipend from the air base if you hit Weather Wizard with a lightning bolt.”

He snorted, creating another construct wall as a wave of ice came at them. “Isn’t that Barry’s thing, (Y/N)?”

Her eyes followed along the ground, watching as the yellow blur unraveled another tornado, speeding to another one. “He’s…wound up right now.” She turned, facing Weather Wizard. “C’mon pal! We’ve got better things to do than hang out here! And you’ve got a date in Iron Heights!”

The supervillain all but growled, slinging icicles and hail at her and she raised her arm, a blue aegis forming. The ice shattered against it, and she lowered her wrist. “This isn’t going to end like you want it too.”

“What I want isn’t comprehendible to the likes of you, you blue bitch.”

(Y/N) cocked a brow. “My name’s not blue bitch, pal.” She flew, landing behind Hal and no words needed to be said between the Jordan siblings as a cyan construct of a jet formed around them; Hal in the front and her behind like it’d always been. Their heads were cloaked in flight helmets. She reached up and flicked a button, listening to the engines roar. “It’s Blue Lantern.”

“Damn straight,” Hal asserted, and they both felt the tug as they sunk back in their seats, the construct hitting Mach one almost instantly.

Weather Wizard didn’t even know what hit him, because when it did, they broke the sound barrier, and even Barry skidded to a halt as the sonic boom shook the city around them; he huffed a laugh of disbelief as Hal did a second flyby and (Y/N) flipped him the bird again.

The construct faded and the two siblings split apart; she pointed to the cyclone Barry was heading for. “Green! Go help Flash! I’ve got this!”

He looked at her. “You sure?” when she nodded, he hesitated, but a quick glance towards Barry made him agree and he flew off.

(Y/N) turned back to the supervillain who was picking himself up off the rooftop of a building, grasping the golden scepter. She lowered down and gazed at him. “This can end right here, Mardon.” Gesturing to the stave, she said, “Give me the staff.”

The cyclone blew in the distance, signaling its end and Weather wizard looked at her. “You want the staff?” he raised it and her eyes followed it into the night sky, watching it churn black and cloudy even in the darkness, thunder rumbling wildly. He had a crazed look in his eyes as he bellowed, “Then take it!” he brought the staff down and (Y/N) barely had time to react as multiple bolts of white-hot lightning shot down, cracking against the concrete roof around them.

She raised her hands, trying to form a shield, but a stray bolt of electricity connected to her ring and just like a rod, she was lit up with strikes. A scream stuck in her throat as the lightning died out and she collapsed onto the roof, the blue suit fading from her body as she smoked.

Someone called her name from above, but she fell into darkness with a blur of red being the last thing she saw.

***

The second she came too, she screamed out in pain as her skin cracked across her body, burned and charred. Someone was holding her shoulder, effectively pinning her down, but only causing more pain.

“(Y/N), don’t move.” It was Barry.

She felt tears roll down her burned cheeks. “It hurts.”

He appeared in her vision, still in his suit, but his cowl off, face torn in despair, eyes heavy with concern. “I know, honey,” he implored. “I know it does, but I need you to stay still. Hal’s coming back with Saint Walker as fast as they can.”

His hand was so tight on her shoulder, and she couldn’t help but screech out, “Let go of me!”

Barry pulled from her as if she’d shot him and his face crumpled. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you, honey.”

(Y/N) didn’t really care what he meant to do, all she cared about was the fact that every inch of her body was covered in third degree burns and though most of her nerve ending were probably seared dead, she still felt the pain licking up her body in waves of never-ending, excruciating agony.

She wailed loudly and it took all Barry had in him not to cradle her in his arms. But all he could do was find a clean cloth and soak it in cool water, gently draping it over her forehead.

“I know, honey,” he whispered. “Just hang on.”

“Put me out,” she begged, and he gaped at her. “Please, put me out.” Her hand shot out and she grabbed his wrist. “Please, Barry.”

He could only gaze at the woman he loved and nod, hurrying away and returning with a syringe full of anesthetic. “I love you,” he promised, sticking the needle into her arm and her head lolled back, eyes rolling into her skull.

***

When (Y/N) came to again, nothing hurt, and she blinked blearily, the ceiling of Barry’s bedroom clearing in her vision. She wiggled her fingers and toes, just to be sure they were still there and that she could move them, then she raised her arm into her sight. It was bare of any burns, and she sighed in relief. Saint Walker must’ve been able to regenerate most of her cells. (Y/N) was going to have to thank him when she got back to Odym.

Her eyes trailed from her arm to the window, and she was surprised to see the sun peeking through the curtains. She must’ve been out for hours.

(Y/N) sat up, glancing down at the state of her dress, and surmising that Barry had removed the remnants of her clothes and replaced them with a pair of his boxers and an old t-shirt. Speaking of Barry, she thought, looking around for him, but he was nowhere to be seen.

She threw her legs over the side of the bed, feet hitting the cold, hardwood floor and she stood up, quietly walking out of the bedroom and into the hallway. No sounds emanated from the bathrooms, or the kitchen and her brows furrowed as she walked into the kitchen, confusion giving way to relief when she saw Barry curled up on the couch, a blanket haphazardly thrown down his waist.

Walking over, she sat down on the edge of the sofa, resting a hand on his shoulder, gently shaking as she murmured, “Barry.” He shifted ever so slightly, and she smiled, leaning down to murmur again, this time in his ear, “Flash.”

He jerked, effectively kissing her forehead with his own and (Y/N) recoiled with a shout of pain, dropping onto the floor as she cradled her head. “Jesus fuck, Barry!”

“(Y/N),” he said, blinking, realization setting in as he scrambled to get the cover off his legs. “(Y/N)!”

Barry slammed into her, arms and legs wrapping around her like he was a monkey, and she could only smile as she wrapped her arms around his middle, holding him close. He buried his face in her shoulder and soon she felt the dampness seep through the fabric and onto her skin.

“I’m so sorry,” he cried against her shoulder, and she reached up, running her fingers through his short blond hair.

“It’s okay, Barry.”

He pulled away, the tears pouring down his cheeks. “I wasn’t fast enough, and you almost died.”

(Y/N) took his face in her hands. “Hey, hey. Look at me.” He did so and she stated, “I engaged Mardon. What happened was on me, not you.” His lips parted, but she was quick to press her hand to them. “Barry, it wasn’t your fault.”

His blue eyes searched hers and he shook his head, evidently not satisfied with it, but he didn’t speak again, simply tucking her head under his chin, strong arms holding her tighter. “I love you,” he breathed against the crown of her head, and she reached up, running her fingers across his jaw.

“I love you, Barry.”

At some point they’d made it back to the bed, Barry only leaving for a few moments to get something for her to eat and drink, and when she’d finished, he’d curled up behind her, her resting back against his chest.

His hand traced patterns in the exposed skin of her arm and he murmured, “You were whimpering when I put you under.”

(Y/N) hummed, not really remembering much of the night; she’d been delirious. “How bad was it?”

The arm around her waist tightened. “Third degree over most of your body.” He sighed heavily against her head. “Saint Walker was exhausted when he was finished healing you.”

“I’ll have to thank him when I see him again.” She craned her neck, catching his eyes. “And I have you to thank for taking care of me while I was down.” (Y/N) reached up and placed her hand on his cheek. “Thank you, Barry.”

He stared down at her and firmly said, “Don’t do that again. Okay?”

She smiled. “I won’t.” Brushing her fingers over his skin, her thumb caught his lip and she grinned when she felt the stickiness of Chapstick. She pulled away, snorting at his whine of displeasure, and turned, throwing a leg over his hips as she perched herself in his lap.

“Are you wearing Cherry Chapstick?” his response was cut off as she pressed her lips to his, swiping her tongue over his bottom lip. “Mmm,” she moaned. “You are.”

Barry barely had time to grasp at her hips before she was tipping his head back, kissing him harder. “What—what’s up with—Cherry Chapstick?” he panted between kisses, feeling heat coursing through him as she tugged at the hair at the nape of his neck, lips moving in a hot streak down his jaw and neck.

“Tastes good,” she replied, sinking her teeth into his neck and Barry gasped, bucking against her. “Your pulse is racing.”

He couldn’t fight the laugh that bubbled from his throat because he knew she’d said that to get a rise from him. “Honey,” he groaned and kissed him again until they were both gasping for breath.

(Y/N) gazed at her handiwork, Barry with his head resting against the headboard, eyes blown and dazed, lips bruised and kiss-swollen, cheeks flushed a pretty red. She swiped her tongue across her lower lip, smirking when Barry’s eyes followed the movement and murmured, “Tastes like cherries.” Leaning forward, she brushed her lips against his, holding back to ask, “Think you can slow down long enough?”

Barry grinned and flipped them, pressing her back into the bed. “I think I can manage that, honey.”

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bounce-a-coin-off-your-witcher · 3 years

Note

Hi love!

Can I please beg for Tangled Geraskier?

Rapunzel Jask. You know I’m a sucker for angst so including the scene where he cuts her hair would slay me 💖💖💖💖💖

TYILYYYYY

Hello, Stina dear! Sorry this took me actual months to write, but it broke me out of my writer’s block and for that I am eternally grateful.

I chose several pieces of the Tangled narrative to write Geralt and Jaskier into... enjoy!

2k-ish words (please leave me comments I’m so tired my dudes)

tw: blood, injury, major character (near) death, if you’ve seen Tangled you’ve seen this

---

“So,” Jaskier smiles playfully up at the thief sitting beside him. “Roger Eric, huh?”

Geralt rolls his eyes but Jaskier catches the flush that settles high on his companion’s cheekbones. “It was… It’s a long and boring story about a lot of sad little children that I’m sure you don’t want to hear on such a lovely evening.”

Jaskier scoots closer, until the sides of their arms are pressed too tightly together for even a slip of paper to slide between, and leans his weight against the thief. He bats his thick eyelashes and pouts his lip in a way that always seems to work with his Father. “C’mon, Geralt, please won’t you tell me? Just one little story? I told you about my magical hair, after all.”

“Hmm,” the thief glares dawn at the doe-eyed blonde for a moment before nervously clearing his throat. “Fine. I… I got the name Geralt of Rivia from a collection of short stories that I used to read the other boys at the orphanage in Kaedwen; they were all about this knight who was loyal and brave and courageous despite his hideous appearance. He was rejected by princesses and noble women but was beloved by the people. Having been born with white hair… well, a lot of the folks that came looking for children thought I was under a spell or curse so…. I wasn’t their first choice for adoption.”

“You and Geralt were a lot alike, then. Different. Special… Kind.”

“I wouldn’t say I was spe-”

Jaskier’s hand darts forward and his long, slender musician’s fingers grasp Geralt by the wrist. The fledgling bard clings onto his escort tightly, his large blue eyes suddenly brimming up with tears. “Don’t you dare say you aren’t special, Geralt Roger Eric whatever your surname really is. I’ll never forgive you if you spew such nonsense where my delicate ears can hear it.”

Geralt swallows thickly and glances away. Jaskier always looks so sweet and sincere; the features on his boyish face flicker in and out of focus as patterns of light thrown by their small campfire play across his pale skin. His gaze is intense, focused on Geralt and Geralt alone. The thief panics and asks: “What is it, Jaskier? Why are you looking at me like that?”

“You saved me, you know. You saved me from those men back there at the inn, you saved me from being trapped in the tower all my life, you saved me from getting lost in the forest, you… you’re a good person, Geralt. Don’t let the world or the Captain of the Guard or anyone else change your mind, do you understand me? You are-” Jaskier’s hands scrabble frantically to grasp Geralt’s, as if the white-haired man might disappear entirely if Jaskier so much as loosens his grip “- you are the best thing that’s ever happened to me since I’ve been locked in that foul, awful tower!”

“Well I…” Geralt clears his throat again. He stands slowly, disentangling his hangs from Jaskier’s as he takes a slow step back. And then another. “I should go get more firewood.”

Despite the uneasiness in their parting, Jaskier smiles after him.

The momentary spell cast by their closeness is only broken when Jaskier hears a familiar voice from just behind him: “Well, I thought he’d never leave!”

The blonde jumps up from his seat and spins on his heel to face the black-cloaked wizard. “Father? How… How did you find me?”

Stregobor wraps his arms around Jaskier’s shoulders and squeezes so tightly that it feels more like a threat than an embrace. “It was easy, I simply followed the sound of absolute betrayal.”

Jaskier flinches and tries to pull away but cannot yet escape.

“I just brought you this,” his Father continues. He finally releases Jaskier and hands his son the worn leather satchel he’d found hidden in his tower. “If this Geralt creature really is the man you think him to be -and don’t deny it, little flower, I can read your thoughts- give this back to him and see how long he stays.”

“Father, I-”

“Goodbye, my child. See you soon, I’m sure. Just remember that Father knows best!”

And in a swirl of black smoke and confusion, Stregobor disappears.

---

“Why do you look so scared?” Geralt asks. He slows the small gondola he’s rented to a stop, turning it slightly more to the side so that they have a better vantage point to see the lanterns spread over the harbor from the city. Jaskier sighs deeply and shakes a stray flower petal away from his eyes, the enormous golden braid shifting ever-so-slightly against his shoulders.

“I’ve been looking out a window for eighteen years,” he says softly. Nervously. “What if… What if it’s not what I expected? I’m terrified to see what it all looks like up close because what if it doesn’t meet my expectations? What if it’s not everything I dreamed it would be?”

“It will be,” Geralt replies without thinking.

“And what if it is?” Jaskier queries, voice growing frantic. “What if it’s even more spectacular than I could have ever hoped? Then my dream will have been fulfilled and I’ll just… go back to the tower again.”

“You’ll just have to find a new dream, I guess,” Geralt offers. When Jaskier settles down into the boat a bit more comfortably and smiles shyly back at him, the thief knows he’s hit the right mark for once. Behind Geralt, the first lantern lights up the sky. Jaskier gasps and points, eyes wide and sparkling with excitement; Geralt is utterly enchanted by his easy beauty. The thief digs two paper lanterns out from beneath his seat and offers one to Jaskier, giddy when he grins even more excitedly than before. “I got this for you… I hope you like it.”

“Oh, I love it! And I have something for you, too.” Jaskier turns and pulls something from behind him. The bardling hands Geralt his very own satchel, which the thief briefly accepts and then drops to the floor without a second thought. The anxious blonde musician beams over at him more gloriously than the midday sun and then turns away, blushing a sweet shade of pink. “I should have given it to you earlier, but I was so scared… and now I’m not! I’m not scared anymore!”

“Good,” Geralt smiles back. He’s elated. It feels as if his heart is glowing twice as brightly as any of the lanterns floating past and around them. “That’s very good.”

I know what my dream is now, Jaskier. Now that you’re here by my side I never want to see you frown again. You don’t deserve to be hidden away in a tower where your art is stifled… even if you don’t want to love me back in that way, I’ll still protect you. I want to see how you see the world, Jaskier. I lo-

“Geralt! Look! That one has runes painted on it, what does it say!?”

---

Geralt pulls his daggers from his belt but before he can stab them into the craigy stone wall and begin his ascent, the familiar tresses of Jaskier’s long golden hair topple down to reach him. Thank fuck, he’s still alive.

“Jaskier! I thought I’d never see you again!” he calls as he grabs hold of the thick blonde strands.

The thief climbs quickly, his arms and legs nearly cramping with the effort to hurry back to Jaskier. As he hauls himself through the large window and into the tower proper, however, he’s met with a confusing and unsettling sight: Jaskier stands across the room, a cloth gag pulled tightly between his teeth, his hands manacled together behind him. A short length of spare chain attached to the manacles keeps the frightened, struggling blonde tethered against one of the building’s thick support beams. Someone had knocked down a mirror or vase during the previous fighting; shards of pottery and silver lie scattered across the floor, working as a weak barrier to keep Geralt away from the bound man. Jaskier screams out in warning as their eyes meet: “Ghmphh!”

If Jaskier is being held captive then who let his hair do-

Before Geralt can finish fully forming his question, a bright flash of pain arcs out from his side and sends him toppling to his knees. A wet, sticky heat begins to spread from a spot beneath his ribs and when he presses his hand against his shirt it comes way red.

Oh. Oh, no...

He hears Stregobor’s voice addressing the sobbing blonde, “Now look what you’ve done, Jaskier.”

Geralt collapses to his knees and then falls to his side, curling up in the fetal position and clutching at the wound as if that will be any help at all. He knows he’s doomed, but there must be some way for him to help Jaskier… to save his… his love.

“Don’t worry, little flower, our secret will die with your little thief, here, and then we’ll be safe again. Just the two of us.”

Jaskier keens loudly and the sharp, desperate sound of it makes something deep in Geralt’s heart ache. The younger man pulls and yanks against the chains that hold him in place, his bare feet slipping against the polished floor as he tries and fails to reach the wounded Geralt.

Stregobor yanks at the lead, pulling Jaskier back harshly by the arms. The young musician’s shoulders burn with the strain of it but Jaskier pulls forward anyway, uncaring. He must save Geralt, he must. The wizard tugs him back again, more roughly, and the jarring movement loosens his gag. He spits it from his mouth and cries out: “Stregobor! Strego- Father, listen to me!”

The wizard pauses, his interest piqued by Jaskier’s use of the word Father given the circumstances. “Yes, child?”

“Father,” Jaskier pants, turning to look at the man who’d held him captive for eighteen years. The man who kidnapped him from his cradle and forced him to grow up without the love of his real parents. The man who had, mere moments ago, stabbed the love of Jaskier’s life with the full intention of killing him. “I want you to know that I won’t stop fighting you. Every moment of every day for the rest of my life will be spent trying to get away from you. I will scream and kick and struggle and yell and you will have to keep me caged away as a bird or a mouse to make me stay by your side unless-” Jaskier pauses to take a breath, his shoulders sagging as his gaze drops submissively to the floor between them “-unless you let me save this man. Let me save Geralt’s life and I will follow you all around the Continent without a single word of complaint. I will never attempt to run away or hide from you, not once. Everything will go back to being exactly like it was before, Father, I swear on his life.”

Stregobor considers for a moment.

He nods.

“Alright, then. Let’s be quick about it, little flower.”

He removes the shackles from Jaskier and clamps them tightly around Geralt’s wrists instead, securing him to the bannister at the foot of the stairs. To keep him from following us, he remarks offhandedly.

Jaskier pads his way across the floor as quickly as he can in his bare feet and falls to the ground at Geralt’s side. He pulls the wounded thief against his side to steady him and gathers two heavy handfuls of his own long hair. “I’m so sorry! Everything is going to be okay now, Geralt, I swear it.”

Geralt shoves his hands away weakly, “No, Jaskier.”

“You have to trust me, Geralt, I-”

“I c-can’t let you d-do this,” Geralt grunts, teeth gritted against the pain.

Jaskier stares down at him, tears already gathering at the corners of his sky-blue eyes. His voice trembles when he whispers, “And I can’t let you die. I won’t let you die.”

“But if you do th-this then you-” Geralt coughs and Jaskier wipes a trickle of blood away from the corner of the thief’s mouth “-you will die.”

“Shh,” Jaskier quiets him, dropping one fistfull of blonde tresses to cup Geralt’s face instead. “Everything will be alright.”

Geralt smiles sadly up at Jaskier, his decision already having been made. He lets the back of his knuckles ghost across the musician’s peach-soft cheek. Jaskier’s eyes flutter shut for a moment and then open again, curious. “Jaskier, I…”

The thief uses the last of his strength to push up into a sitting position. The hand on Jaskier’s face slides back and gathers his hair at the back of his neck. Geralt’s other hand comes up, a shard of glass gripped tightly in his fist, and slices through the long blonde strands. He watches as Jaskier’s hair turns from radiant gold to chestnut brown. Geralt falls back with a short, sharp sound of agony, his vision already fading around the edges. The shard of mirror, dagger-sharp around the edges, clatters to the ground beside Jaskier.

“No!” Stregobor screams, gathering up an armful of Jaskier’s still-blonde hair. The golden hue is already fading, shifting to match the short brown hair still fluffed around his head. The lost prince watches with wide, horrified eyes as the wizard trips over a loose floorboard and goes careening out the open window.

More worrying than his kidnapper’s death, however, is the man lying in his arms, breathing shallowly. Jaskier gathers Geralt close, tucking the thief’s head against his neck and wrapping his arms around the older man’s broad shoulders. “No, no, no, no, Geralt. Stay with me, okay? Stay with me, right here.”

He grabbed at Geralt’s hand, holding it against the top of his head as he sang desperately. “Flower gleam and glow, let your power shine, make the clock reverse, bring back was once was mi-”

“Jaskier!” Geralt says, pulling his hand down to cup the prince’s face. He can feel his limbs growing cold and numb, distant from him and out of his control. “You… You were my new dream.”

Jaskier sobs, clinging to Geralt with all he’s worth. “And you were mine.”

Geralt manages to smile up into those beautiful blue eyes one last time. And then the world goes dark and his hand falls to the floor, limp.

---

Jaskier buries his face in the crook of Geralt’s neck and screams. He throws back his head and howls like a wounded animal, his heart shattering to pieces within the confines of his chest cavity. Then he quiets himself down, adjusts Geralt’s body on his lap, and finishes the song the way he’s been taught to do: “Heal what has been hurt, change the Fates’ design, save what has been lost… bring back what once was mine.”

A single tear falls from his eye and lands on Geralt’s cheek. A cheek that will never blush again, never turn up in a smile, never-

A faint yellow glow catches Jaskier’s vision, just from the corner of his eye. He turns his head to look at Geralt’s wound and gasps: the outline of a golden flower covers his abdomen, glowing so brightly that Jaskier must hide his eyes and turn away to keep from being blinded. When the glow fades enough that can safely look back again, Geralt’s wound is gone and the blood that was once staining his jerkin has disappeared.

He leans over the white-haired thief with bated breath, waiting for a movement or a breath or something… anything.

After a long moment, two honey-hazel eyes blink open. Geralt inhales quietly and then asks, with the sweetest smile Jaskier has ever seen in all his eighteen years of life, “Did I ever tell you I had a thing for brunettes?”

Jaskier squeals with glee and throws himself into Geralt’s waiting arms, pressing their eager mouths together for the first kiss of their Happily Ever After.

#geraskier #geraskier tangled au #rapunzel jaskier #flynn ryder geralt #geraskier fluff #geraskier getting together #bouncey's endless au collection #protective geralt #soft geralt #geralt whump #tangled #blood mention #blood tw #injury tw #death but only for a minute #tangled au #goob prompt fills

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wardenannie · 3 years

Text

A very, very angsty one-shot. Warning for pregnancy loss. Crossposted on my Ao3.

Clouds of noxious smoke filled up the crystal cavern, wall to wall. It was only as Levi soared above it, over it with the vigilance of a hunting hawk, that he watched as the hook buried itself in Hange’s left shoulder. Time seemed to slow before his eyes, and that infernal shot was followed by three resounding bangs, each louder than the last in his ears. bang. Bang. BANG.

The bullets were cloaked in sprays of red as they impacted Hange’s falling form. The hook unlatched and the assailant retreated in a burst of steam, but Levi’s eyes never strayed from the squad leader.

“Hange!” More than one of the kids shouted her name in distress as the cavern began to shake.

She struck a pillar, body limp, then slid down its faceted surface, leaving a trail of dark crimson in her wake. One of her hands cupped her bleeding middle, blood welling between her paling fingers.

Levi cursed, dropping down to her side. The others were already crowding around, chips of glittering crystal were beginning to rain down from the cavern’s high ceiling.

“Hange?” There was so much blood. It pooled around her, seeping out of her middle and between her legs. Her eyes were half open, aware but glassy. It looked like one shot had struck her sternum, another just beneath her breasts, and the last had lodged itself in her lower abdomen.

“You-

She coughed, blood spattering from her lips.

“You need to get... get out of here,” her fingers worked weakly against the smooth floor, body tensing like she meant to sit up. “I can’t... just leave me.”

Levi shook his head, pressing a gentle hand into her good shoulder, “Fuck that. Stay down. Moblit, Armin, can you carry her? She needs medical attention, now.”

The men in question rushed to scoop her up, suspending her between their bodies. She winced and sighed, breath coming out in stuttering gasps.

Levi watched them retreat, biting back a torrent of emotion as Hange’s toes dragged trails of blood into the floor. She was close to death, that was obvious. Three pellets of lead had lodged themselves into her insides and torn her body asunder.

Hange Zoe.

His Hange.

The Captain’s heart was in his throat, hands shaking. He wanted to hit his knees and scream and beg whatever powers loomed above to spare her. He’d already lost so much. Levi felt as though his heart were being rendered in two. He would gladly have taken those shots for her, if it were possible, to spare her the pain and fear that accompanied death.

Just the night before she had been so lively, excited for the coming battle. Sweaty over him, moaning under him. Kissing him. Whispering his name in mantra, like a prayer.

Now he wasn’t certain that they would ever make love again, and he couldn’t even be at her side as she faded.

It was Jean who broke him from his trance, “Your orders, Captain?”

Levi shook his head, eyes still stinging, but no tears were shed. He steeled himself, braced himself for the ultimate loss of another friend, a companion, his secret lover. He was a wounded man, but also he was a soldier, and he had a duty to uphold.

Anything for the greater good. Everything.

When he spoke, motioning with his blade towards an opening in the crystal, his voice was low, dangerous, deadly and dripping with venom, “We kill Rod Reiss.”

Someone had to pay for what had happened to Hange. The true king of the accursed Walls would do nicely.

Rod Reiss was dead and Hange was alive.

Upon his return from Orvud, that was all he knew of her condition. Alive. Badly injured, he knew. But gracefully alive.

Levi wasted no time in stabling his horse and rushing through the neatly laid halls of HQ towards the infirmary. Perhaps he was being too obvious, perhaps the kids would catch on to his attachment, but he didn’t care. Hange was all that mattered, he cared about nothing else in that moment.

They were keeping her in a private room, a benefit of her rank. Levi had no intention to leave her side for any longer than it took him to bathe.

When he arrived he found Erwin had beaten him there. The man stood in a shaft of golden sunlight, it caught in his blond hair and brightened his icy eyes, which were paradoxically grim. Dust motes danced around him. Beside him stood redheaded woman in white nurses garb. Her lips were pursed, and when she spotted Levi in the doorway her expression darkened.

Ignoring them entirely, Levi rushed to the side of the bed where Hange lay on top of the linens. She was naked from the waist up, but her entire upper body was bound in fresh bandages. There was a cool rag laid over her forehead and eyes. Relief flooded Levi’s chest and pooled in his gut. He knelt beside the bed, grateful for her peaceful expression and the steady rise of her chest.

“Has she woken up yet?” Levi asked, gaze unwavering. He took her hand in his, not caring that the Commander was watching over his shoulder.

“No,” The nurse answered. Then she cleared her throat, “Mr. Ackerman, there are some complications we need to discuss.”

Levi’s thumb stroked over the backs of Hange’s knuckles. His brow furrowed and he scowled, forced to look away from his lover and at the nurse, “What?”

His irritability seemed to surprise the woman, who took a step back. Levi’s reputation had clearly preceded him.

Erwin laid a hand on her shoulder smiling sadly, “It’s okay, Nyla. I’ll take care of things here.”

“But Commander it’s standard procedure that I inform-

“Shhh,” he shushed her delicately. “Dismissed. Take the rest of the day off.”

She pursed her lips, but didn’t argue any further, retreating from the room on light feet.

“What’s going on, Erwin?” Levi demanded, “You were both acting like someone shit the bed.”

“Succinctly put,” the Commander answered, dryly. Then his expression darkened, and he continued. “I’ve known about the relationship the two of you share for some time now.”

Levi paled, “Shit.”

Erwin sighed, “Though I believe relationships between comrades are ill-advised, I’m not going to stop you.”

“How did you figure it out?”

His thick eyebrows shot up near to his hairline, amused, “Hange isn’t particularly quiet in bed. One stroll by her quarters was all it took.”

Levi rolled his eyes, squeezing Hange’s fingers in his. Of course it was her fucking sex moans that gave them away, “I always tell her to keep it down.”

Erwin cleared his throat, “That’s besides the point, though. I’m only informing you that I know as preamble for what I’m about to say. Levi, please sit on the bed. This is going to be quite the shock.”

Feeling suddenly cold, Levi obeyed without a word. He still held on to Hange’s hand, her touch anchoring him to reality even from sleep.

“When Hange arrived here she had already been stabilized, save for profuse bleeding from the vagina. They managed to dig out the bullet that had perforated her uterus, but the bleeding continued for some time.”

“But she’s okay now, right?” Levi glanced back at her, down her lean body and between her thighs. She was wearing simple grey pants. They were unstained by blood.

“She was pregnant, Levi,” Erwin stated, his voice was even and his eyes were emotionless. “They believe she was between three and four months along. The baby was killed when she was shot.”

Levi went rigid, hands beginning to shake in his lap. His slate eyes widened and he looked up to Erwin with pure confusion and blended agony swirling in his eyes.

“That’s not... that’s not possible,” his voice shook, his heart thundered in his aching chest. She had taken a contraceptive tea... Him? A father?

Erwin pursed his mouth, extending a hand to rest on Levi’s shoulder, “I’m sorry, Captain.”

Levi dropped his head into his hands, closing his eyes tight. It hurt. God help help him it hurt so badly. Every inch of him ached. They gave up so much for this life, and they did so willingly, happily even, but this was simply too much. A baby. Hange had been carrying a baby. Their baby. A baby that they had made together.

“I need,” real, tangible tears stung at the corners of Levi’s eyes. “I need a moment, Commander.”

Erwin nodded his head and left the room without another word, shutting the door carefully behind him.

Finally alone, Levi turned to Hange where she lay unconscious. Her breath was even, chest rising in steady intervals, blissfully unaware of what they had lost. There was no way she had known, she would have told him immediately if she had even suspected she was pregnant.

Levi cried silently, staring at her peaceful face. The tears were hot against his skin, and no matter how he tried he simply couldn’t stem their flow.

He’d had a chance at a family, a life beyond the Survey Corps, beyond all of the violence and carnage and death. A fleeting, beautiful chance. And now it was gone, cruelly ripped from his hands on the floor of that damned crystal cavern.

He looked out the window, at the sky which had once awed him as a boy from the Underground. Now the blue seemed dull, the sun dim.

Nothing good ever seemed to stay.

Nothing save for Hange, who still breathed peacefully beside him. He pulled a chair up beside the bed, content to wait at her side until she opened her wine-colored eyes again.

It was two more days before Hange stirred, and when she did it was well past midnight. On the wall the steady ticking of a clock had lulled Levi into an uneasy sleep in his chair. Moonlight was the only thing illuminating the little infirmary room, splashing through the windowpane in long, silvery shafts. A vase of fresh picked wildflowers was sitting on the bedside table, courtesy of the 104th.

Hange shifted on top of her sheets, shivering slightly in the cool air. Even that tiny reflex pained her, and she made a small discontented noise that awoke Levi with a start.

“Levi?” She exhaled painfully, wincing as her shoulder pulled when she turned her head to face him. Her eyes brightened at the sight of him, ruffled and half asleep beside her. She smiled at him, “Levi, guess what?”

Levi leaned forward, hand reaching instinctively to touch her cheek before dropping to settle over her own hand, “What, four-eyes?”

“I’m not dead,” she wheezed out a laugh, which quickly morphed into a moan of pain.

“No joking around right now,” Levi scolded softly, standing to help cover her with a blanket. “You need to rest.”

Hange’s smile fell as she watched him unfold the blanket then drape it over her body, “Somethings wrong.”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Levi lied, unable to meet her eyes.

“Don’t lie to me, little man. I can read you like a book.”

Levi settled back into his chair, “I’ll tell you later, alright? Get some sleep.”

“No,” she would have crossed her arms if she weren’t full of bullet holes. “Tell me now, Levi. Your eyes are a little swollen, you never cry. And you’ve got dark circles. Something bad happened. Tell me now... oh my God, are the kids alright?”

She actually started like she might sit up, frenzied by the thought. Levi rushed to ease her back down onto the pillows.

“Easy four-eyes. The kids are fine, I promise,” he soothed. He took her hand again, stroking her knuckles.

“Then what’s wrong?”

Levi bowed his head, watery eyes obscured by his hair. His very soul ached as he whispered the words, “I love you, Hange.”

She went very still under his touch. They had never said those words to one another before, each afraid it would make what they had too real, too painful were one of them to die. But it was obvious to Levi now that their apprehension had never mattered.

“Levi...”

“You were pregnant,” he choked. “You miscarried when you were shot. Three to four months along, they said.”

Tears were streaming down his cheeks again, glimmering with a beauty that belied their source. His insides were a tangled mass of barbed wire, blood, and pure, unadulterated sadness. Everything hurt.

Hange was quiet for a while, hands folded neatly over her middle, eyes trained on the ceiling.

When she finally spoke her voice was so soft, so low that Levi could barely make out the words, “I should have known. All the signs were there but I ignored them as stress. Oh God, Levi. I should have known.”

Levi leaned onto the bed, “You can’t blame yourself for this.”

“Can’t I?” Wincing, she raised a hand to touch her forehead, “I went into battle pregnant, I allowed myself to be cornered and shot, pregnant. How did I miss this? How? I killed our baby.”

“No.” Levi said, fiercely, “Kenny and his damned fiends killed our baby. Rod fucking Reiss killed our baby. They’re all dead now. I made sure of that.”

Tears were brimming in her eyes now, and Levi couldn’t help but touch her cheek.

“We needed you there, Hange,” he said, softly. “We’re soldiers. We have a duty to the people of the walls, no matter what.”

The last three words were painful to say, but it was true. Their duty came above all else.

Hange cried softly for a while. Levi held her hand, crying silently with her. He touched her face, her hair, her hands. Eventually he leaned forward to kiss her gently on the mouth. She tasted of salt and blood, and she cupped the back of his neck to deepen the kiss.

When they parted, he whispered into the narrow space between their lips, “If you had died-

His voice cracked, then. And he realized for the first time in two days that he really, truly still had Hange. As long as she was breathing at his side, everything would be okay.

“Don’t think about that,” she breathed, and kissed him again. “We already lost so much.”

Hange scooted over to the left side of the bed, patting the right with her hand, “Come here.”

Wordlessly Levi joined her on the bed. The flow of his tears was beginning to stem. He savored the heat of Hange’s body next to his, and when he rested his head on her good shoulder he could hear the steady beat of her heart. His hand ventured delicately down the taut line of her stomach, settling reverently over her abdomen, right above where the baby had been.

Hange laid a hand over his, sniffing, “Do you think... I mean, someday this will all have to end, right? Eventually?”

Levi kissed her neck, “Eventually.”

“We can try again,” she promised, voice ragged, fingers combing through his hair. “When this is over, we’ll try.”

Levi hummed into her skin, inhaling the scent of her, feeling her alive beneath his touch.

“Levi?” Her voice was clearer now, tears slowing. Her fingers were rubbing circles on his knuckles over her abdomen.

“Hmm?”

“I love you, too.”

#levihan #levihan fanfiction #my writing #tw pregnancy #tw miscarriage

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yanderenightmare · 4 years

Note

Oh master, plez, DRAGON WARRIOR BAKUGO, my lord! I was thinking, if you please, a darling who is like clairvoyant, and that's why King bakugo needs her??? can you make it dark ;3 like like like whatever means necessary dark, like like like ill murder anyone who gets in my way, also also also it being really grotesque, I want merciless bakugo, BUT also kinda sweet when it comes to darling?? I don't know what exactly I want, but I know whatever you write I'll prob enjoy, Master Nightmare :3

DRAGON ! WARRIOR ! KING BAKUGO KATSUKI x FEM ! READER

goodiebag WARNINGS: abuse, violence, genocide, kidnapping, abduction, death, blood, murder, ableism, classism, anxiety, arson, narcissistic personality disorder, slavery, trauma, war

so, a little foreword, the darling in this story has a quirk (ik, I’m breaking my beliefs thinking Bakugo should have a quirkless reader! The insanity!) but it’s because in this au not it’s quite special to have a quirk. Quirks are achieved and not given so to say. So Katsuki has earned his quirk and reader has earned her quirk, and so has everyone else who has a quirk. Also the song is called “If I Had a Heart” by Fever Ray, it’s the theme song to vikings ironically haha.

PART TWO

MUTE AND NUDE

The King was in her village.

Word from the south spread quickly, like any wildfire would, especially when riding the wings of a dragon. The Kingdom’s seer was dead, and the almighty bruise-knuckled King required a new one. They called it misfortune, but give a child a toy, and the toy is destined to break. Some might say that that’s what they’re made for. The old toy had apparently done something so distasteful that it cost her own tongue. Unfortunately, or perhaps ironically the only thing she was useful for: on her knees, mouth open, worshipping her king.

She counted the smoke rising to the sky near the horizon. Hers would be the thirteenth village they came to, lest their quest was done. She thought she might have seen him in the cloud-coverage. Eerie shadows resembling what bats she found in the caves, but the sun was bright and could easily be mistaken for him, or the other way around, as she’s heard his coat is golden.

She heard the rumbling tumbling of hooves and paws and claws riding up the mountain-side. They were coming.

Their houses were made of rock, sturdy as they should be when placed on a mountain-top with constant winds howling at them, and handled the fire well. But people aren’t made of stone. The smell of burning flesh is awful, and though she had nothing to puke, she barfed nonetheless. People were screaming and she probably would have too if she could, she was most certainly crying and bleeding and heaving for breath like those unlucky others that were still left alive.

High mountains are a bleak habitat for animal life, partially why they lived up there: to be spared of being hunted, to escape fangs and claws. And now: people running for their lives, the aching in her ankles, a body not built for running, and a mind not used to being hunted. Yet, it was strange but, it wasn’t really foreign at all.

She’d been dreaming of things lately, and as death as well as dust and ash and blood settled and seeped into the mud around her, she couldn’t help but feel as though she’d seen it all before. In fact, there came a point in the middle of the fray she was certain she was dreaming as she stopped to eye the great golden mass in front of her. Scales sharp and silvery like mica on the mountainside, ruby-red eyes as though soaked with blood. Teeth long and sturdy like the jagged rocks of the tunnels, dripping not with water as they did in the caves but with blood and guts and torn clothes. And the talons, curved and shiny, black as night, digging into the gravel by his feet, treating the soil as though it were as thin as the air. But the wings… the wings are what had her falling to her knees, skin bitten by gravel. Greater then roofs, sweeping the sky as though he could pluck each and every star from the welkin, stud himself with them if he so wanted to, or swallow them if only to breath the light onto earth. He could shred trees with those wings, he could slice oceans apart, he could probably part the mountain, head in the heavens and roots with hell, the bridge that had stood for thousands of years, singlehandedly torn open by that great monster conquering both sky and earth as though they gave him life.

Her arm was bleeding. It had dentures, no… puncture wounds it seemed the more she looked. A pretty crescent moon of red marking deep into the soft tissue of her meager muscles, dripping onto the dirt, creating streaks in the mud caking her bare feet. She looked up to see a wolf turn into a man, a large man with spikes for hair, red but not the same red she’d seen earlier in those eyes, red like poppies far away from the red flowing in her veins, from what was leaking out of her arm.

She looked forward and saw bodies… no, not bodies… mangled mockeries of the human form strewn about her as though they were trampled wildflowers on a field. She looked to her side and saw her reflection in the faces of those she’d grown up with but never truly knew. She looked behind her, not spotting what abomination of life she’d seen earlier, the one painting the sky, the one eclipsing the sun.

Every young, pretty thing was lined up on a row that stretched about ten meters long as they weren’t that many in her village, and she was surprised to be one of them. The auditions began in the early left side of the fray, boys and girl shaking on unsteady knees, holding onto broken arms and gushing wounds. Her bitemark was begging for a fist around it too, but she had not the focus to indulge the wish as her eyes caught sight of a blot of gold contrasting the otherwise grey figures, it being clear who he was despite having altered form. Although not the tallest in stature, one could see it as clear as day, he towered over the rest of the flock.

The tones ripped from their throats were scratchy, untuned; garbage. It would seem none of the kids in the village were gifted, but if the Gods were of mercy they would grant them the vocal cords to survive the night. She couldn’t blame them for allowing their fear to taint their song. Seeing how the drapes in which the hooded figures dressed were soaked in blood from past failures. Knowing well how their weapons would breach flesh and bone were they not of any use to them.

If she had a voice she would use it for speaking and not for singing. This would probably be her last night.

They rushed through the girls and boys rather quickly. Swiftly; as if they had done it countless times before, as if they could decide by the first utterance of their very first tone, that they were a disappointment, that they were as good as dead.

Caught in the middle of the small gathering; her turn came along. The man, standing in front, had purple hair and a nasty scar on his face, adorned with bladed eyes like a cat. Another blade, a steel blade, was held at her throat. Unnecessary, as the brutal scarring of his arms was intimidating enough for her to understand she could survive nothing compared to what he had already lived through. “Sing.” He commanded abruptly, an atmosphere of force settled on the word, as though compelling her, quite like how the wind shakes the trees in command to dance for them.

She did her hand gestures as smooth as she could under the pressure, lips remaining closed.

He threw his eyebrows up, scar shifting in its place like a serpent, the message had clearly gotten across. A condescending smile, a most sinister snicker and an unfortunate scoff was all the sympathy he allowed her. “No voice?” It wasn’t a question. “What a meaningless life.” He stated in a mutter, before moving onto the next girl.

The golden figure, who had followed discreetly, didn’t continue on with the scarred boy, he instead planted his clawedfeet in front of the girl, threatening to crush her barefooted toes, sinking into the red clay of the town square. “Sing.” His voice was fuller, and because of it she didn’t dare look up.

The scarred boy came to a halt, looking back to watch the girl repeat the hand gestures once again, she thinking that maybe the scarred boy had blocked the view the first time.

“No excuses.” His foot shifted in the mud, talons somehow growing longer as they impaled the ground, indicated he leant in closer. “Sing.” He said again, the sharpness of the demand sending a shiver to travel down her spine as it was accompanied with a growl too much like the sound of thunder to be called human. The girl furrowed her brows and looked up, her bottom lip visible quaking. Yet, what looked at her was no dragon, no… it was a man, a boy. And his skin was not golden like the rarity found in the mountain halls, but tan like sand, and his hair was only a shade lighter, nothing alike the mane of the sun. But those eyes had her quaking, those sharp slitted eyes that seemed to hold her soul in a chokehold, full of cultivated knowledge, merciless, red like wine, red like blood, red like hell. What’s a fate worse than death? She wondered and swallowed at the thought, her breathing picking up its pace. “Sing!” Spit flew to her face like venom with the roar, the tone reverberating through the ground, shaking in her knees.

She felt the itch in her throat, and she would be lying if she said she hadn’t been feeling it more and more lately, the feeling of dead born words somehow washing away. Her whimpers, absent of anything except for breathiness before, now carrying a somewhat lilt of tone. She stared a little deeper into those blood-soaked orbs of the man that looked like the onset of death before her.

“If I had heart.”

The wind roared as if it were as surprised as she was, or perhaps it rejoiced, or perhaps it mourned.

She was silent, the wind crashing and flailing, whipping the rags of her dress, letting the ripped fabric lick her dirty and bruised legs, pulling the disheveled locks of hair out from her face. Eyes; terror-wide, looking into a pair of sharp ones, who seemed to be looking beyond her disheveled state, into something far more divine than she had ever seen, ever known. “Continue.” The red-eyed boy commanded firmly, a detectable form of lust in his voice.

Startled, feeling the gravel dig into her soles. “I would love you... if I had a voice, I would sing.” The people on either side of her looked to be even more distressed now, crying and screaming, looking like wraiths in those charcoaled rags they wore, hands covering their ears as though to protect themselves, terrified as they looked to the sky expecting it to come falling down upon them.

However, their insolence and disrespect wasn’t what angered him, he could allow them that much before he took their lives. But the conflict found in her voice, that’s what truly boiled beneath his skin. He reached out his hand, quick like a viper, the pressure in his fingertips simmering on her skin, sizzling with heat, only for him to dig his fingernails into her throat as well. “Forget everything you know, except for that your life is in the palm of my hand.” He said, securing her gaze, lifting her up to her tippy-toes, though still nowhere near leveling his height.

Awakened by his words and frightened to her bones by the searing look of his eyes, she did as she was told and forgot who she was, forgot what she was and gave into simply doing exactly what needed to be done to keep her alive, to keep what beast in front of her subdued, or perhaps also to satiate what fire seemed to have burst to life inside of her, screaming to be heard. “After the night, when I wake up, I’ll see what tomorrow brings.” Eyes glazed over by some infernal light. She roared, a howl of some sorts, and the trees seemed to shiver and shake in the outmost reverence. “More, give me more, give me more.”

Somehow the leaves stopped rustling at the sound of her abrupt finish. Overwhelmed; all she could do was breath, all she could to was quake, the wind making the tears ever present on her face, the blood of her arm drying and awakened again as new blood came gushing out of her wounds.

The swirling dramatics in his eyes died down into a calm yet eerie content look. “Found you.” He stated, taking his time for the awakening to soak in, bask in the glorious feeling of triumph, before breaking focus from her. He let out a long, satisfied sigh. “Burn the village.” The statement left her blood turning cold. “There’s nothing left for us here. Dispose of the disappointments.” He was quick with his words as though they had been said many times before, and the actions performed by the ones in grey were just as swift, just as merciless. Humans turning into monsters murdering humans.

“No!” She wasn’t aware the voice belonged to her, so many years gone by without being able to voice anything; an opinion; nothing more than a foreigner, let alone an objection.

The people beside her dropped to the floor like rag dolls nonetheless, her voice just as insignificant as if she was still voiceless, drowning in their own bloodied throats. Her throat didn’t match theirs, but had strong, calloused fingers wrapped around it instead, coated with blood, the stench of it becoming so familiar yet far from friendly.

“Forget them, they don’t matter.” His voice still sheer, despite the screams around them both, overwhelming in fact. She felt her mind slip away from her then, as though her sentience was squeezed out from her by the deadlock fist wrapped around her neck, a conquering drowsiness following, seeping into her like the crawling of darkness when the sun settles on the horizon, her vision blurring everything except for those red, red eyes, who; from this point until her death, would never leave her.

PART TWO

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cadouisms · 3 years

Text

captive

ch 1 || next ||

karl heisenberg/afab!reader, 18+ ~8k summary: While in Romania as part of your university's study-away program, you accidentally stumble upon a village filled with unholy creatures, and find yourself running for your life. A strange man rescues you and saves you from the brink of death, but there's one caveat: you can't leave. As you come to find out, there's many incentives to staying.

warnings: descriptions of wounds, violence, heisenberg is Mean, collaring, bootlicking, humiliation, smoking

also on ao3

It’s cold.

You’re long past the point of being able to feel your fingertips. The snow has seeped into every inch of your skin, sinking deep into the marrow of your bones. Each heaving breath you take stabs into your chest, and the sheer cold makes your lungs burn to the point that you think you aren’t breathing in oxygen at all, just crystals of water vapor. It makes you lightheaded — or is that the result of exhaustion? You’re sure you’ve been running since the moment you stepped foot into this accursed village, but fear has warped your sense of time. It could have been mere minutes or hours, and with the way the clouds obscure any hope of moonlight, you can’t see the environment around you, much less judge the time of night.

You slow to a stop and immediately double over, frozen hands braced on your equally-frozen thighs as you try to control your breathing. It was foolish to take a walk into the forest in the dead of night, especially since you don’t know this area well, but you aren’t stupid enough to have completely lost your way. It must have been the darkness or some odd pull of fate that twisted your sense of direction, made you take a left instead of a right to end up in this hellhole. You had no idea the village existed in the first place; your host family made no mention of it to you — but then again, perhaps they weren’t expecting you to wander off on your own in the first place. Either way, you managed to stumble here completely by accident, and now you have no idea how to leave.

That is, if you manage to survive the night.

Part of you thinks that you might be dreaming, that this is a nightmare, because monsters aren’t real. But you have no other word to describe the freakish half-man, half-beast creatures that lurk around every corner of the village, vying for the opportunity to rip you to shreds. Based on their growls and snarls, you assumed they were wild animals, up until you caught one running on its hind legs as it gave chase.

You have so many questions and so little answers, but you know that the cold stings too much for this just to be a product of too many sleepless nights. However improbable, this is real, and you have a very real chance of dying.

A vicious growl sounds behind you and pure terror bolts up your spine, sending you fumbling into action as you fall into a fast sprint. The creatures are fast, but you’re blessedly faster — you’ve always been good at running and hiding. You’ve never been in a fight before and you’ve never shot a gun, so you couldn’t defend yourself even if you had some sort of weapon — but you can outspeed them.

Or at least, you could, if it wasn’t so fucking dark.

Unable to see and with panic guiding your footsteps, you slip down a small incline and tumble into icy-cold water. You gasp in both surprise and shock; whatever exhaustion you felt is replaced by pure adrenaline. The rushing stream splashes your face and sinks into the fabric of your clothes, weighing you down, and you have to half-crawl, half-drag yourself to the other side of the bank. You shut your eyes tight as the choppy flow of water laps at your face, threatening to spill down into your throat. You cough and sputter as you pull yourself up onto the ground, hastily wiping the stinging water from your eyes so that you can see.

When you open them, you find yourself face-to-face with one of the creatures. Its monstrous yellow eyes seemingly glow in the night, and despite your fear, you find that you can’t look away. Its lips pull back into a snarl as its hot, foul breath puffs against your face.

You scream.

Before you can run away, it grabs for your arm and digs its claws into your vulnerable flesh. Red-hot pain erupts from the wound and you cry out, futilely trying to pull your arm back to your side. Instead, its grip tightens as it embeds its claws into your skin, and with one abrupt movement it sends you cascading down the side of a steep hill. Your head hits a rock with a sickening crunch and you can’t do anything but lay there, stunned, as your vision swims.

Belatedly, you wonder if you still have your arm.

Your breaths come out in quiet wheezes as you stare up at the cloudy sky. In the distance, multiple pairs of yellowed eyes gaze menacingly down at your vulnerable form. More and more pop up over the ridge, and you have to wonder if there’s enough of you to go around. Would they take turns, or would they fight for it? Would there even be anything left on your bones when the carrion came? You hope they’d be kind enough to leave your face untouched — how else would your body be identified?

You let your eyes drift shut, prepared to surrender to your obvious fate. You’re tired, goddamnit. You’ve been running for far too long, and you don’t see any end to it. Maybe they’ll eat you and instead you’ll wake up from this nightmare with the blankets kicked off your body, inviting the cold chill of winter to send you to this hellhole in your dreams.

You hear a howl — it’s an awful human imitation of a wolf’s howl, rougher around the edges and in the wrong octave, but it screams of violence, of a hunter that has found its prey. The others join in until the hills ring with the promise of your death and it sends such a chill down your spine that your eyes snap open, fear clearing your mind.

Fuck, maybe you are as dumb as some say. If you’re going to die here, you’d rather bleed out painlessly than be ripped to shreds.

You flip over onto your stomach. In the dim lighting, you can just barely make out what looks to be a hole. There’s no chance for you to outrun them now, so hiding is your only option. The snow crushes almost pleasantly beneath your hand as you attempt to drag yourself to the hole, but you find that your left arm is all but unusable. It hurts to move it, much less support your weight with it. The only thing you can do is struggle closer to the hole, inch by tortuous inch.

The howling is getting closer, you think. You peer over the edge — it looks to be a steep drop, but the opening is large enough for you to just barely slip through. You pray it’s too small for the creatures to follow, and with what little strength you have left, you let yourself fall headfirst down into the hole.

You land flat on your back with a soft thud, and though the impact shocks you, you can’t even muster the strength to yelp. Something hums faintly in your ear, reminding you of the buzz of electricity. You turn your head and rest your cheek against the cool earth, letting the noise lull you to sleep as your exhaustion finally takes you under.

Soft.

Warm.

Bright.

It feels like your body is too heavy and yet far away, all at once. Like you’re drifting in a deep sea of nothingness, weighed down by incalculable pressure. Absently, you wonder if this is what death is like — senseless and empty.

God, but you’re exhausted. Are you supposed to feel so bone-tired when you’re dead? It’s as if you went days without sleeping, like something had come along and sucked all the energy from your body. If you concentrate, you find that you can curl your hand into a fist. Your fingertips catch on rough fabric, not unlike the threadbare blankets you’d been given for your bed, and you rub the cloth between forefinger and thumb. It pulls almost unpleasantly at your skin — not dead, then, you think. You aren’t sure if you’re disappointed or relieved.

Blearily, you open your eyes. Muted colors blur and shift until they settle into shapes. There’s a nightstand directly in front of you, topped with a small lamp that gives the room its warm, soft glow. In the corner of your vision you spot the edge of the pillow your cheek must be resting on, made a dull-yellow color with age. Your neck twinges as you turn your head, and you wince — definitely not dead, then.

You stare at the mottled ceiling above as you take stock of how you feel. Your mouth is cotton-dry, tongue thick and stuck behind your teeth. There’s a dull ache spread throughout your whole body, like you’ve been hit with a truck, and you start to wonder if maybe that’s the case. You can’t remember what you were doing, or why you’re here. You don’t even recognize this place to begin with, and the more you try to remember, the more it seems just out of your grasp, like a word left on the tip of your tongue.

A knob turns, and your gaze snaps to the door just beyond the foot of the bed. It creaks open to reveal a broad figure stepping into the room, and as you catch the hint of its shaggy hair your memories come flooding back: the forest, your misstep into the village, and the awful creatures that lurked within. An image of glowing eyes and snarling teeth flashes just behind your eyes and your adrenaline spikes, causing you to shoot up in bed and scramble backwards away from the figure.

Pain accompanies the sudden movement and you can’t hold back a whimper of pain — you’re more hurt than you initially thought. The figure laughs almost mockingly as it approaches you. “Ah, so Sleeping Beauty finally awakes. I was almost hoping you wouldn’t.”

It — he, you realize — steps close enough that the bedside lamp illuminates his features. Most of his expression is obscured behind his round shades and the wide brim of his hat, but you can still make out his wolfish grin, surrounded by his dark and unkempt facial hair. You shudder.

“Wh —” Your throat protests your attempts to talk and all that comes out is a rough squeak. The man laughs again, obviously finding your awful situation humorous, and your gaze follows him across the room as he picks up a glass of water. You look at him with suspicion as he offers it to you.

“What? You think I would go through the trouble of saving your sorry ass just to poison you?” There’s an edge to his tone that borders on annoyance, and his smirk falls when you make no move to grab the proffered glass. With a huff, he takes a swig from it. “Look. It’s fine.”

Part of you screams not to trust him. You look from between him and the glass, internally debating whether or not to take it, and the man’s patience quickly seems to run out.

“Don’t be ungrateful. I’ll fucking pour it down your throat if I have to.”

That settles it. Hurriedly, you reach out and take it from him. The liquid is cool and refreshing, a balm for your sore throat, and it soothes all the way down. You find yourself uncaring that your lips are technically where his had been just moments ago, or that the water tastes slightly stale — you drain it in just a few large gulps.

As you lower the glass, you catch sight of your left arm and startle: it’s been wrapped in off-white bandages, and you can see where your blood has seeped through to stain the fabric. When you attempt to move it, pain shoots through your limb and you grimace. It doesn’t hurt nearly as bad as before, more comparable to a muscle ache, and for that you’re grateful. You’re happy you still have an arm at all.

“You were in pretty bad shape when they brought you to me.” His words give you pause — who’s they? — but instead of speaking, you watch with trepidation as the strange man reaches into the pocket of his trench coat. To your relief, he pulls a half-burned cigar out along with a zippo and relights it, filling your nose with the acrid smell of burnt tobacco. Wispy trails of smoke accompany his next words. “I’m impressed you made it through the night!”

You’ve calmed down from your initial panic, but something about this man sets you on edge and makes you wary. Still, you know that here — wherever that may be — is safer than being outside in the freezing cold and where those monsters might still linger.

“Where —” You pause to try and coax wetness back into your mouth, to ease the sandpaper-quality of your throat. “Where is this?”

“My factory.” The cherry of his cigar burns strikingly red as he takes a slow, deep drag. He exhales a cloud of smoke that drifts upward, catching on the scant light of the room. For a moment, his glasses stand out stark-black against the white smoke, reminding you inversely of those creatures. It’s not the whites of his eyes you see but the absence of them; his humanity concealed. He rests his foot against the edge of the bed and leans forward, bracing an elbow on his raised knee. “Y’got lucky, kid. You made it pretty close to the boundary of my property. How’d you end up here in the first place?”

You unconsciously lean a bit farther back, unnerved by his presence. “I got...lost,” you admit.

He snorts. “Lost, huh? You must be dumber than you look!”

You bristle. You want to tell him that it was dark, that you couldn’t see where you were going, that you were running for your life — but he speaks before you have a chance to even open your mouth.

“Then again, you’re not from around here, are you? Guess I can’t blame ya, though it’s a miracle you wandered this far out.” He taps the edge of his cigar and sends ash drifting down to the thin sheet acting as your blanket. You have to resist the urge to wipe it off.

If he knows you aren’t from the village, though, then maybe… “How do I get back?” you ask, unable to keep the eagerness from your voice. “How do I leave?”

“Leave?” The man tilts his head, mouth curving into a dangerous grin. His lips pull back to reveal his teeth and the light seems to glint off them, making you feel like the lamb before the wolf, caught in its deception. “Oh, no, sweetheart. You aren’t leaving.”

Your heart drops in your chest. “Wh-what?”

He laughs, cruel and mocking. “I mean, you can try if you want! It’d make for one helluva show. I’d even give you directions to get out of here!” He steps back, planting both feet solidly on the floor below. “But, even if you escaped here alive, you’d still have the lycans waiting for you back in the village, and I doubt you’d survive another encounter with them.”

“Lycans?” you echo.

“Oh, come on.” The man gestures to your bandaged arm with his cigar, flinging more ash around. “Don’t tell me you’ve already forgotten. They almost killed you, remember?”

“Those...creatures?” Lycans? Like lycanthropy? “They’re...you mean…”

“Careful not to think too hard. I can see the cogs turning in your head, poor thing.” He drops his cigar and crushes it underneath his boot, grinning smugly all the while. “I’ll leave you alone to process this. I’m sure realizing fairy-tale monsters are real can be quite the traumatic experience.” His laughter trails after him as he disappears out of the room. The door shuts behind him with a soft click.

You stare blankly ahead, mind reeling from all the new information.

Surely he wasn’t serious…? He’d let you leave. He was just waiting for you to recover. Right? Right.

And the werewolves — lycans, as he’d called them — he was kidding about that too! You must’ve hit your head real bad, or made them up as the result of some weird fever dream. You’re still dreaming, you conclude. A dream within a dream.

You lay back against the bed and close your eyes. A dream. You’ll wake up soon, you’re sure of it.

...Except the longer you lie there, the more you begin to suspect that he was telling the truth. Your mind buzzes, too noisy to let you sleep despite your exhaustion, so you resolve to at least explore the room a little.

You swing your legs over the side of the bed and realize you’re still wearing all your clothes, even your shoes. You toe your sneakers off and let them drop to the floor below, then slowly stand. As long as you don’t move too fast, you figure you’ll be okay — you hurt, true, but you don’t feel on the verge of passing out.

The bed that you’d been resting on isn’t a bed so much as it is a stained mattress on an old frame. The sheet you’d been covered with was just that — a sheet. It looks as threadbare as you expected, like it had been in use for years.

The drawer in the bedside table reveals nothing but metallic odds and ends, and the small wardrobe is completely empty. The lack of items and the thin coating of dust along every surface makes the room feel impersonal, lonely.

You discover a thin door that you hadn’t previously noticed. The hinges squeak when you push it open and the light takes a moment to flicker on, but it turns out to be a small bathroom. Cramped as it is, there’s a full-sized tub along the far wall, and your brain lights up at the chance to be clean. You close the door behind you as you step fully inside. There’s a toilet to your right and a sink to your left, and you pause as you catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror.

You look like shit.

Dark circles sit heavy under your eyes, made more prominent by the overhead light, and there’s all sorts of grime caked onto your face. As you strip your clothing, you discover more dirt, more blood, and multiple scrapes and bruises. There’s several smaller wounds that obviously had been left to scab over rather than cleaned and bandaged, and you scratch off a bit of dried blood with a scowl. You’re grateful that stranger didn’t strip you, but sheesh. It makes you feel a little gross knowing you’d been sitting in your own filth for god knows how long.

Despite it all, you seem to have come out of it just a little worse for wear. The last thing is to check on your arm, and though it doesn’t hurt so much anymore, you’re a little frightened of what you may find. Carefully, you unwrap the bandages, fully expecting to see an ugly mess of twisted flesh — only to find your arm already scabbed over, like it’s been healing for weeks. It doesn’t have the tell-tale signs of infection, either; the area around the wound isn’t hot or inflamed.

Either it was less severe than you thought, or that man is some sort of miracle doctor.

You shrug off the weird feeling in your chest and turn to the tub, twisting the knobs. The water that pours out is dirty brown from disuse, and you wait until it runs clear before you plug the drain and allow the tub to fill. You sink down into the lukewarm water, drawing your knees to your chest, and breathe out a quiet sigh. The room fills with silence, the faint hum of electricity only broken by the occasional drip, drip from the faucet.

You break down.

You had almost died. You know what you saw — you didn’t hallucinate those creatures, those lycans, and you have the wounds to prove it. You’re in a strange land, far away from your real home, back in America. When your advisor presented you with the option to study away in Europe for a semester, it had seemed like a good idea at the time — you were a second-year student with zero prospects and zero specializations, and it would be fully covered by your financial aid.

But fuck, if you had known coming to Romania would end up like this, you would have never agreed in the first place. It was a last-ditch effort to find something you were passionate about, like the movies, when people go to Europe to “find themselves” or whatever — but, looking back, you suppose they’re always set in Italy or France, not Romania.

Instead, all you got was an apathetic host family who wouldn’t even indulge your half-assed attempts to speak their language, a stronger sense of isolation, and kidnapped, since it seems like the only way you’re leaving is in a bodybag.

You wrap your arms tight around yourself, fingernails making half-crescents in your skin, and stifle a sob. Even if they’d be able to find this place, no one would be coming for you. Not your host family, and certainly not your real family, as you haven’t spoken to them since you graduated high school. Outside of the occasional classmate, you have no friends, either.

The man said he didn’t plan on killing you, but maybe he should have never rescued you in the first place.

By the time the water turns cold your tears have dried, and you slowly uncurl yourself from your sitting-ball position so you can properly clean yourself. There’s no soap, leaving you to methodically rub at your skin until all traces of dirt and grime are gone. The water turns a murky grey, and you drain and refill it once more before you wash your face and hair.

You don’t feel exactly clean, merely… less dirty, but it helped, you think. So did the crying.

Water pools around your feet as you step out of the tub, and to your dismay, you can’t find any towels. Instead, you come upon a roll of bandages and a bottle of mysterious fluid simply marked ‘first aid.’ There’s no other description or any sort of warning label, but it only takes you a second to decide to use it. Still nude, you liberally pour it over your wounded arm, and then rub some on your fingertips to massage into your smaller cuts and scrapes. It doesn’t sting, to your surprise, and it smells oddly minty. You bandage your arm and slide on your underclothes, leaving the rest of your dirtied clothes to sit in a heap on the floor.

You leave the bathroom and flop unceremoniously onto the mattress. The cool air makes goosebumps prickle on your damp skin, but you don’t have the energy to do anything more than half-heartedly wrap the sheet around your body. You feel just as tired as you did when you woke up, and though it’s been two hours since then at most, the pull of sleep coaxes your eyelids to close, and you drift off into a fitful rest.

“Breakfast!”

The door ricochets off the wall with a loud bang, jolting you out of a dead sleep. The man from earlier stands in the doorway with a small tray carried in his hands, that same insufferable grin sitting lopsided on his mouth as he takes glee in your panic. “Aww, poor baby,” he coos, “did I scare you?”

“Yes,” you hiss. His shaded gaze lingers on you for just a moment too long and you remember you’re very underdressed, heaps of exposed skin making you feel vulnerable in his strange presence. You scramble to tug the blanket around yourself as your face heats up and the man cruelly laughs again.

“You make it too easy.” You tense as he all but struts over, workboots heavy against the floor, but he only comes close enough to set the tray on the bedside table. There’s some slices of bread, cheese, and unidentifiable meat, along with a glass of water. The dishes look grimy and unclean, but the food looks fine.

You take some comfort in knowing he doesn’t intend on starving you. He may want to keep you trapped here, but at least he doesn’t seem to want to make you miserable. “...Thanks,” you finally murmur after a moment. Your eyes flit from him to the food, your distrust evident in your face.

“Don’t worry. It’s not poisoned,” he remarks, obviously noticing your hesitation.

You blanch. “Is that supposed to be reassuring?”

His shit-eating grin says otherwise, but you’re starting to suspect he just likes toying with you, the bastard. “Eat it or not, I don’t care. Just don’t come crying to me when you get hungry.” He turns on his heel, his coat swishing at his ankles, and makes his way toward the door.

“Wait —”

“We can chitchat later. I have work to do.”

“Can you at least tell me your name?”

He pauses, one foot in the hallway, and turns to look at you over his shoulder. His hat obscures most of his face, leaving you to stare at the arrogant curl of his mouth. “Heisenberg,” he finally says, and leaves.

The door shuts behind him. In the silence, you can faintly hear his footsteps fade away until the only thing left is the quiet hum in your ears.

You reach for the tray. The bread is somehow equally stale and moist, but in the worst combination. The unidentifiable meat is also...unidentifiable, but it doesn’t smell unpleasant nor have a bad taste. You tear the bread into manageable chunks and make little finger sandwiches. It only takes a couple bites for you to realize you’re ravenous and you quickly devour the plate of food, leaving you with a sense of that’s all? as soon as you finish.

He brought you food, so naturally that means he has a kitchen. It’s the logical conclusion, you tell yourself, and you set the tray back on the nightstand as you carefully get up from the bed. The bone-deep weariness from earlier still lingers, exhaustion pulling at your limbs, but you feel much better than before. A twinge of pain shoots up your arm if you move it incorrectly, but otherwise it doesn’t bother you.

Remembering that you’re still practically naked, you grab the sheet from the bed and wrap it around you like some sort of toga before you step to the main door. The knob turns easily under your hand, but apprehension prevents you from pushing it open. You don’t know what you’re expecting, but all kidnappers have some weird dungeon-esque room, right? Maybe he’s keeping you just beyond his torture chamber or his murder room or his —

— Study?

The door leads into another relatively-normal looking room. It’s about the size of the bedroom with a desk covered with miscellaneous books and papers at one end of it. The rest of the wallspace is covered with bookshelves, but most of their racks are empty. Instead, metal bits and bobs cover a large amount of the surface and a good bit of the floor. The man — Heisenberg, you remind yourself — did say that you were in his factory, which would explain the abundance of scrap metal around. The question is: what does he manufacture?

Murder weapons, your brain helpfully supplies, which you promptly ignore. You hope it’s something reasonable, like cars or machinery, and not something you’d see in a cheesy horror film.

There’s a rather large and metallic door on the opposite wall from which you entered, and you eagerly attempt to open it. There’s no handle or knob, meaning you can’t pull it open, and no matter how much force you apply, you can’t push it open. It doesn’t budge under your weight, acting more like a stone wall than an exit.

You sigh. No foray into the kitchens, then. The only rooms you have access to are this one, the bedroom, and the bathroom, presumably for a reason. How big is this factory, you wonder? What else lies beyond your small prison? What is Heisenberg hiding?

You give up trying to open the door, and instead explore the study. Most of the books are technical ones about machinery and mechanical know-how, but there’s the odd anatomical book thrown in. On the desk you find an old and weathered notebook, though it’s mostly blank. The pages that are filled have been written in an almost illegible scrawl, like chicken scratch or a doctor’s signature, and you can’t even begin to make heads or tails of what it says.

There’s nothing else of note in the room. No key, no hidden secret evil plan, nothing. You return to your room and resolve to find out what you can organically through talking with Heisenberg.

Or at least, that was your plan.

You still spend a large portion of your days sleeping, both body and mind needing the extra rest in order to recover from your ordeal in the village. Your energy comes and goes, but you find that your arm is healing incredibly. It’s going to leave a large and ugly scar, but by the third time you change your bandages, you realize there’s no need to cover it again. Your other scrapes and cuts have all but healed completely, and even your bruises have faded to a muted yellow.

Heisenberg is...well. You only see him when he stops by to bring you food, and even then his visits are short. He doesn’t ask how you’re healing, nor does he entertain you with idle chatter — he enters the bedroom in the loudest, most obnoxious way possible (to frighten you), hands you your food, and leaves. On one occasion, he had come in smelling heavily of oil and smoke and had seemed like his mind was elsewhere. He hadn’t even reacted when you called his name.

Most other times, he will at least respond if you speak — like when you asked him for toiletries and he’d groused that you were “a handful.” Nonetheless, you found tattered towels and some half-used soap bars at the foot of the bed afterward.

He almost always manages to sidestep your questioning or answer with a non-answer, but you remember one particular conversation that made your hair stand on end.

“Are you a doctor?”

“You could say that.” And the way he’d grinned had unnerved you, like he was amused by how little you knew, like he had a secret he didn’t intend to share.

He’s a threat, your brain had whispered, but part of you knows he isn’t all bad. He’s certainly less creepy than some Tinder dates you’ve been on, and he’s annoyingly charismatic in an asshole sort of way. Despite everything, you feel oddly drawn to him — though you hesitate to call it anything but simple curiosity. So much mystery surrounds him and his actions, and he constantly defies your horror movie expectations for how a kidnapping should play out.

Escaping sits at the forefront of your mind, but there isn’t much you can do. There are no windows in any of the three rooms you have access to, and the only door that leads (presumably) out into the greater factory is constantly locked. You’ve tried opening the door after Heisenberg delivers your meals in the hope that he’d conveniently forget to lock it, but you’ve had no such luck.

Even if you had a viable escape plan, there’s the issue of actually physically being able to escape. You wear fatigue like a second skin even with all the bedrest you’ve managed to accumulate, and though the physical wounds from your night in the village are practically nonexistent, the thought of having to go through all that again is enough to send your heart racing.

Despite this, you do what you can to fill your time and make it more bearable. You wash your clothes with the soap Heisenberg had supplied to avoid sitting in your own filth day in and day out, and even wash the sheets to the bed. Your thoughts are equally divided between wishful fantasies of escaping, wild daydreams, and wondering when Heisenberg will bring your next meal.

Eventually, sheer boredom drives you to steal a book from the study. It’s one on the intricate makings of a pre-1970s-era vehicle, and though the technical jargon goes way over your head, it helps break up the monotony of your current existence.

(You did, at one point, attempt to exercise to pass the time. It took two sit-ups before you promptly decided it was a horrible idea and you’d rather rot in bed.)

Unwillingly, your life becomes a cycle of wishing and waiting. Wishing for food, for entertainment; waiting for Heisenberg, for a chance to escape. Somehow, your chance arrives much sooner than expected.

With the lack of natural light and your own messed up internal clock, you have no real marker for the passage of time. Heisenberg comes too irregularly for you to rely on him to mark “morning” and “night” with his visits, and you spent so much time sleeping that your own biological clock is out of whack, so the best you can do is guess. It’s on “day” five by your own calculations that you catch your lucky break.

A few minutes after Heisenberg drops off your breakfast, once you’re certain his footsteps are long gone, you head to the door in the study. You press your hands to the cool metal and push, expecting it to be as unyielding as ever — only for it to give under your weight and creak open.

Your stomach drops. For as often as you thought about escaping, most of your daydreams were power fantasies about fighting off lycans and cleverly making your way back out of the village. You have no plan for actually leaving the factory.

Familiar anxiety begins to crawl up your spine as you contemplate what to do. You could return to the bedroom and actually formulate a plan, but — no. The chances of this happening again are slim. You don’t want to risk Heisenberg coming back to lock the door and leaving you trapped here due to your own cowardice. You inhale deeply to steel your nerves, forcing your fear on the backburner, and step out.

It’s dark. Your eyes adjust to the difference in lighting as you let the door shut behind you, casting away your only remaining source of brightness. The difference in atmosphere is like night and day; where your rooms were warm and soft, the metal corridor you now stand in is cold and inhospitable. It’s a place meant for machines, not humans. The ever-present hum that rang faintly in your rooms seems louder, as if you’re closer to the source, and yet it almost makes your skin crawl, like the memory of nails on a chalkboard. You shiver.

Red emergency lights guide your way as you explore your surroundings, giving it the sinister vibe you were expecting à la horror movies. Maybe Heisenberg doesn’t have a specific torture chamber, you think. Maybe it’s the whole factory.

If only you knew.

The corridor leads you straight to another door, which swings open to reveal yet another darkened hallway. It branches off into two separate directions, however, and you remember how Heisenberg had jokingly offered to give you maps to aid your escape. Would it really be necessary?

Yes, you come to find out. You had picked the left hallway out of some vague advice of turning left to escape a maze, but it only seems to lead to more doors, most of which are locked. The single unlocked one takes you around into a large, looping corridor, until you end up right where you started.

You sigh, and turn right this time.

Like before, you find several possible exits, though only one opens. The instant you step through, you feel something in the air...shift. The usual hum is gone, replaced with dead silence, and the room is pitch black. Dread sits heavy at the back of your throat. Everything inside you screams for you not to continue on, but there’s no other option. There's nowhere else to go.

You feel around until the flat of your hand finds the wall, and you walk ahead at a slow pace. The uncertainty of what lies ahead makes your mind conjure up far-fetched and impossible images, and every time your hand brushes up against something unexpected, you jump back with your heart in your throat. You navigate with your other hand extended far out in front of you to avoid colliding into obstacles, and your feet shuffle awkwardly forward, inch by tortuous inch.

You pause as your hand catches on some round protrusion in the wall. You grope blindly at it in hopes of finding some mechanism or lever, but instead your hand passes over rough fabric. It reminds you of material used to make pants, oddly enough, and as you apply pressure you realize it’s covering something firm. You bring both hands together to feel the object and imagine some sort of cylinder under your palms, and as you slide them upward your fingertips skirt over a thickened edge that leads directly to something disturbingly chilled, which gives slightly under pressure. Surely it isn’t…?

An overhead light flickers on. Your hands are on a person. You’re touching their leg. What you had felt had indeed been pants. Your gaze travels upward — they’re naked from the waist up, but their body looks to be horribly mutilated. You can see multiple scars and literal patchworks of flesh that had to be stapled together, and there’s an odd device that encircles their head, like some strange visor, or VR helmet. Their skin is cold to the touch and an ashen grey color.

It’s a corpse, you finally realize. They’re dead.

Except — no, they can’t be, because they start to move.

A service alarm blares loudly as hydraulics hiss, and the body starts to careen forward out of its little pod. You stumble to the side, out of the way, only for the body to turn toward you as if possessed. Something starts to whir.

It has drills for hands.

How the fuck did you not notice that it has drills for hands?

A scream lodges in your throat as the thing advances on you, and you bolt down the hallway. To your horror, there’s rows upon rows of the holding cells, and you praise whatever deity currently watching this shitshow that none of the others seem awake.

You barrel down the hallway at full speed and throw your weight at the door. It bursts open to a wider area, and you barely stop your momentum in time to keep yourself from launching over a waist-tall guardrail. You white-knuckle the bannister as you stare below into unsettled waters.

Slowly, you lift your head. This place is big, far bigger than you ever imagined it to be — you’re in some spacious middle-ground that seems to stretch on endlessly. There’s many levels above you, too many for your panicked brain to count, and several still below you. In the distance, several conveyors transport what look to be human bodies to different parts of the factory.

You think you might throw up, or cry, or piss yourself, or all of the above; but instead you push off the rail and start running. You have to get out before you get turned into one of those things.

A large metal beam drops directly in your path, a few inches shy of crushing you, and stops you dead in your tracks. Another lands to its side, and then yet another on its opposite side, effectively blocking you from advancing.

“You should’ve told me you were gonna make a run for it!”

You turn sharply on your heel — Heisenberg. He saunters forward, cigar smoke trailing after him. In the dim lighting of the factory, you can just barely make out the smirk playing on his lips. “I said I would give you maps. You might’ve had a fighting chance, but you’re shit outta luck without them.”

How can he sound so amused? So casual? As if he isn’t any better than the lycans that prowl in the village. “Y-you’re a monster,” you hiss, though your voice lacks any of the necessary bite to truly appear angry, your feelings too warped by fear and terror.

The smirk drops from his face. The door you had just came from swings open as the creature reappears, its drills spinning menacingly. “Y’know,” Heisenberg begins, flicking ash from his cigar, “you must be pretty dumb to insult the one guy that can help you.” Loosened metal bits start to levitate as if propelled by some unseen force, Heisenberg at the center. He flicks a hand outward and one of the beams from earlier knocks into the backs of your legs and drags you closer to the creature, shortening the distance to it by more than half.

You’re trapped. You may be quick, but there’s no way you’re limber enough to dodge the creature’s drills to get to the exit behind it. One half of the walkway is completely barred off, and there’s no way you’d survive the drop into the waters below. The only option, then, is to run to Heisenberg — as if he planned it from the start.

You want to prove him wrong, you want to be the strong, self-reliant hero like in your daydreams, but you simply aren’t strong enough. This place is too strange, too twisted, and you’re too used to your life from before.

So you run to him.

You run, and you fucking trip.

You barely manage to brace your arms out in front of you in time to prevent your nose from smashing against the floor. You twist onto your back as the mechanical whirring grows louder. The manmachinemonster advances forward at a frightening pace, its mouth open in some macabre grin, and despair clutches at your heart. You crawl backward, feet sliding against the walkway as you desperately attempt to get away. Heisenberg merely watches the spectacle, leisurely puffing on his cigar.

“Please!” you cry out. “Please, I’m sorry!” You don’t have the strength to stand; you cling desperately to his pant leg as if you were a child and bury your face in the outside of his thigh, squeezing your eyes shut against your eventual demise.

He laughs and you can hear the genuine amusement in it. “Enough!” he shouts. The drills stop and the noise around you grows quiet. You stay like that, face pressed against his leg, heart in your throat, until you can gather enough courage to look.

Horrified, you watch as Heisenberg lifts the creature into the air, guided upward by the metal attachment on its head as if pulled upward by some magnet. He slings its body over the guardrails where it hovers mid-air over a deadly drop. It squirms in his invisible gasp, limbs twitching grotesquely in an attempt to find purchase, like an insect in its last moments.

Wordlessly, he lets the body plummet. You’re thankful you can’t watch it drop beyond the horizon of the walkway, thankful you can’t hear the sound of its body hitting the water below.

“You made me waste a perfectly good soldier.” His tone still sounds amiable, like he was discussing the weather, but there’s something else just bubbling under the surface. “I can’t even repurpose the materials.”

You’re still clinging to his leg, your hands fisted into the fabric of his pants. “I’m s..sorry,” you repeat again, trying not to incur his ire. “I didn’t… I didn’t mean…”

He tilts his head down. Between his dark shades and the way his hat casts a long shadow across his face, it’s impossible to tell what he’s thinking. Yet, you don’t miss the way his upper lip curls into a snarl as he speaks. “Didn’t mean what? Didn’t mean to run away? Or did you just not mean to get caught?”

His boot suddenly connects with your ribs, hard, and the single kick is powerful enough to send you sprawling across the floor. Your back slams against the metal guardrails, denting them with your impact. “Dumb fucking mutt,” he spits.

You can’t breathe. His kick forced all the air from your lungs, and though you aren’t sure if he damaged something important, it sure as shit feels like it. You gasp out a silent sob as you curl inward, arms wrapped protectively around your middle in an attempt to self-soothe the pain that courses through you.

His footsteps echo against the metal as he stalks forward, slow and steady. Hopelessness eats at your core — he’ll kill you. He’s held back his murderous tendencies all this time and now he’s going to kill you, he’s gonna turn you into one of those creatures and mutilate you beyond all recognition and —

He kicks you onto your back. Your ribs open and you gasp, breathing in deep as air finally fills your lungs. “Sss’rry, ‘m sor—”

“Shut your fucking mouth.” He digs the heavy toe of his boot into your vulnerable stomach, pressing hard enough to guarantee an ugly bruise, and you cry out as pain shoots through your frayed nerves. He holds his foot in place to keep you in agony, and tears fall freely from your eyes, blurring your vision.

He could crush you. He could kill you. You thought he was scary, but you didn’t expect this. He’s like some mad scientist with superpowers. The lycans were one thing, but now you know you have no chance of escaping. You’re going to die here, whether by his hand or the hand of his creations.

“Please,” you beg, voice hinging on a whine. You cough and thick strings of blood dribble down your chin, mixing with your saliva. You sound absolutely pitiful, and you would be disgusted with yourself if you weren’t so fucking scared.

Heisenberg tsks softly. “Aw, don’t worry, sweetheart. I’m not entirely merciless.” He nudges your face with his boot. “I’ll let you make it up to me. Show me you can behave, and I’ll consider letting you live.” It hovers above your mouth, and you stare up at him through your tears, confusion evident in the scrunch of your brows. “Well?” he prompts. “Stick out that tongue of yours.”

Hesitantly, you do. Spit and blood both drool from your mouth as you part your lips and let your tongue loll out. He presses the underside of his shoe against your tongue and it clicks: he wants you to lick his boot.

Heat coils low in your abdomen as you start to drag your tongue against the leather, lapping up the grime and dirt from its surface. Copious amounts of saliva and blood dribble continuously from your mouth, enough that you can hardly taste the actual repugnant flavor of his shoe. Above, Heisenberg inhales from his cigar, blowing out a cloud of smoke as he watches you from behind his shades. It’s almost calming, in a way, so much so that you’re almost unafraid, and more like —

No. This is gross. You must have hit your head and knocked something loose, because there’s nothing sexy about this, there’s no way you like it. Fear and pleasure are closely related in the brain so maybe your body just got the signals mixed up, because there is no way this is making you wet, there’s no —

An undignified whine slips from your throat, and you hope that Heisenberg misinterprets it as something pained and sad, not as the thinly-veiled desperate noise it truly is.

His mouth curves into his trademark grin as he pulls his spit-slicked boot away. “Maybe you’ll be good for something after all,” he murmurs appraisingly.

And then, blissfully, everything turns black.

Your head is pounding. It takes everything in you to open your eyes just a crack, but the warm lighting proves too much and you pinch them shut against the threat of tears. Your mouth feels like cotton, and yet you can taste the faint metallic twang of blood mixed with something else, something earthy. Your ribcage hurts, your stomach hurts, your everything hurts — and then you remember: the twisted corpse made of man and metal; the truth about the factory; Heisenberg, so breathtakingly mean — and you shoot up into a sitting position.

You’re in the bedroom again, legs twisted into the sheet on the bed. The door is shut, and there’s no one else in here with you. No weird creature, no Heisenberg, no one. You turn your head to scope out the whole room, and —

You fucking jingle.

Alarmed, you reach for your throat. There’s a piece of metal warped around your neck, and at its center hangs a little bell, like what you would see on a pet collar. Seeing is believing, though, so you stumble from the bed and into the bathroom so you can look at yourself in the mirror.

Bloodshot eyes stare back at you, your face grimy and your mouth stained with blood, but it’s there. It looks like a piece of metal scrap had been twisted and beaten into a circle, then soldered together around your neck. When you shake your head, the bell jingles cheerfully in your ears.

The bastard had fucking collared you.

#karl heisenberg #karl heisenberg x reader #resident evil #resident evil village #re8 #writing #theres no smut in tihs chapter but ooh boy. Ooh boy. the stuff i have planned #also please tell me if i need to warn for anything else its super late and my brain is fried #theres extended tags on ao3 for what to expect for this series as a whole #also this wasnt supposed to be this long shoot me #anyway. heisenberg my beloved spit on me

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xtodorcki · 3 years

Text

“Limits,” Bakugou x Reader

Summary: where Bakugou reaches his quirks limit to save you.

Warning: none just some pain for y’all

Everyone’s quirk has a limit

The mission wasn’t supposed to go the way it was right now but high schoolers trying to save themselves from the league of villains wasnt exactly going to end up in success.

That’s how you ended up getting caught. Your body grew weak, you have fought for way longer than you should have and it put a strain on not only you but your quirk.

It felt like the fight had been going on for hours and hours. The amount of blood that leaked out from its wounds, the blood dripping down your face, you were beaten and at that point you accepted defeat as the villains hands had grasped onto your arms, trying to hold you upright but you remained slumped over- powerless.

Bakugou didn’t notice right away and that’s the main reason he blamed himself for all the injuries you had gotten. The way his eyes had shifted onto your weak body, his heart stopping in his chest and panic overtaking his mind.

Of course he had always teased you in the past that he wouldn’t save you, he wouldn’t help you, you were on your own. But he didn’t mean that, he would risk his own life if it meant you were safe.

He didn’t want to admit it out loud, or to you but he was more in love with you than you know. The secretive relationship you two have is the reason why he had fallen for you so damn hard and he cursed to himself for letting you get trapped inside his head.

But he wouldn’t trade you for the world.

Bakugou had ran towards where you were, the villain holding onto you only tightened his grip and even held a knife up to your throat threatening to kill you instantly as his red eyes grew angry.

His blood boiled at the sight of that knife against your neck and the way blood had covered your face. He was angry that someone was even brave enough to lay a finger on you, that was their mistake.

He had somehow managed to tackle the villain without hurting you in any way, using his explosions to blast at the guy below him, anger fueling his need to murder the villain.

Anger consumed him and had a tight grip on Bakugou’s head. He didn’t see anything but red as he powered up his quirk beyond its limits, aiming both of his hands at the villain below him with a evil smirk.

The scream that escaped his mouth as the explosion consumed everyone in the battle field, causing a beam of smoke rise up to the sky, looking as if a bomb just got set off.

The explosion had blown most of the students and villains far, causing mostly minor injuries even though the smoke was hot and burned their skin. They were lucky.

After the smoke cleared from the explosion that consumed all the students and the villains, Bakugou’s body had laid out on the dirt, unconscious and weak.

You were barely even conscious to crawl over to him, looking down at his blood covered hands and knew what he had done. He had almost blown his own hands off from overworking himself.

“Katsuki?” You mumbled, barely managing to flip his body onto his back and you shook him gently as the tears started to sting your eyes.

Pain was all you felt shooting through your entire body but you managed to sit up, to lift his body up in your hands and repeatedly shake him, raising your hand to pat his cheek to get him to wake up.

“Bakugou!” You said louder, looking over his body and seen the steam rising off his skin.

You had sat there for ten minutes holding onto him, the pros finally flying in and clearing out the area that was now completely destroyed.

Bakugou still hasn’t woken up but you stayed still, sighing to yourself until you felt a hand on your shoulder and your eyes met with the pro behind you.

“We need to get you both to the hospital.” They said, looking down at the body in your arms and you somewhat nodded.

You had tried to get up but your body had given up completely, making the pros pick the both of you help and send you off to the hospital.

The overwhelming anxiety you had the entire time you sat in your room by yourself. You had convinced recovery girl that Bakugou deserved to be healed up first, you can wait and she agreed.

But it’s been hours since you got an update on him and it was making you more paranoid by the second so you managed to get out of bed and carefully walk down the hall, holding onto the wall for support until you made it to his room.

Once you walked inside, you noticed he was still sleeping and you dragged a chair up to the bed, sitting down and looked down at the bandages wrapped around his hands.

“Fucking idiot.” You mumble to yourself, shaking your head from how hard he had pushed himself to the point of being like this.

It pissed you off but it always made your heart break the more you looked at him. Your eyes started to sting, laying your head down on the bed and took in a deep breath to keep yourself from crying.

“Who’s the idiot?” You heard a mumble, looking up and noticing Bakugou red eyes on yours.

“Katsuki, you scared the hell out of me.” The way your emotions had washed over you at the sight of his eyes staring into yours.

The tears instantly streamed down your face, leaning over the bed and hugging onto him even though the both of you were in a good amount of pain but he didn’t say anything, he needed your tight embraces.

“You scared me first.” He admitted, reaching the bandaged up hand to wrap around your back and hugged onto you just as tight.

“Shouldn’t have overwhelmed your quirk like that, you idiot.” You mumble, pulling back to stare down at him and he cracked a smile, his face beaten and bruised.

“Yeah, shouldn’t have lost your fight.” He teased you, making you roll your eyes, not wanting to hear his sarcastic remarks.

“Please,” You scoffed, your fingertips brushing through his blonde hair as it pressed down on his head and he let out a breath of relief, relieved that you were fine.

“Don’t scare me like that again, Y/N.”

This came to my head randomly today, decided to type it out even tho I have a shit ton of requests 💆🏼‍♀️

• Main Masterlist •

• MHA Masterlist •

#bakugou imagines #bakugou x reader #bakugou fanfic #bakugo imagines #bakugo fanfic #bakugo headcanons #bakugou headcanons #mha imagines #mha headcanons #bnha headcanons #bnha imagines

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the-huntress · 3 years

Text

Little Moth - Chapter 3 - Rebirth

[Thank you so much to everyone that has read my story so far and thank you again for liking and sharing the chapters and master-list, it means so much to me and spurs me on to write more]

Masterlist

Y/N Protagonist, female. Reader X Karl Heisenberg. [18+]

Summary: What happened during the attack leaves you with questions for the ever-enigmatic Duke. You took down a beast that was like nothing you’ve ever seen before, but what lies beyond now that you’ve reached your destination?

Trigger Warnings: Chronic joint-pain, menstruation, nudity & genitalia.

Soundscapes Ambience Suggestions: Forest

It made sense to stick with your newfound comrade for the remainder of the journey, for it wasn’t long until you approached the sight of lights in the distance. Night soon fell after the attack, and now, at the edge of the forest, atop a sudden drop you could see the golden glow of candlelight scattered around the village. Though it was not full, the moon’s light helped to pick out the odd detail here and there, and you could see it looked not to dissimilar to many villages that you had seen before from afar, but yet in closer detail it looked somehow as though it was stuck in time. In the distance you recognised it now from Leon’s photographs, the castle or mansion, you weren’t quite sure which.

“Are you sure I can’t escort you directly into the Village, maybe find you an Inn, somewhere at least a little less exposed and safer than out here?” The Duke, for that was how he had now introduced himself to you, asked politely.

“Not today.” You replied. You needed to be alone, and despite the dangers, out here in the forest you were beginning to feel more like yourself than you had ever felt before.

You stopped for a moment, eyes looking down, and then across to the bow that you held still in your hand. “Back there, in the forest, what happened? Who was that?” You asked, turning to look up at the Duke. He looked down at you, fondness masked a little behind mystery, “A friend.” He replied.

“But who?” You demanded, taking a step towards him without meaning to.

The Duke began to turn his carriage, now patched up as best as it could be for the remainder of his journey, and he turned his head to face you one last time.

“It is a very dangerous thing to know one’s friends.” He smiled, but something else lay behind the smile, some knowing. “Keep the bow, it is a gift. When one wields a bow, it can feel as though it becomes a part of you.” He paused, “There is more to you than meets the eye, you bring your own darkness to this place; but promise me this little moth, you know where I am should I be of any use to your crusade.” You nodded silently and watched him until he was all the way out of sight. Your attention was caught by something where the carriage had been stood; your small luggage bag. How?

You pulled it up and threw it over your shoulder. Arghhh! Tears welled at your eyes which darted back down to your knee and you drew a sharp breath through your teeth. After all that and it’s my knee that’s causing me to howl. You could feel it, at some point the joint had slid, the cartilage had pinched the softer tissues. It had happened before during dislocations. This was not the right time for this. At the very moment as these thoughts a sharp pain then hit your lower abdomen and more tears welled in your eyes. A mixture of cramps and the pain from where the arrows had made their mark made you feel weak. I need to find a place to rest. You dragged yourself back into the forest, deep enough to feel alone until you found a place that at least had some shelter from the elements.

A very small clearing between a tangle of thick tree roots, forgotten by time. You found a couple of long, sturdy sticks to hold up a small tarpaulin that you’d had folded away into your bag and pulled out a thin sleeping bag to put under it. It was a risk to make a fire for warmth, but a risk that at this point you were willing to make, and created a small circle of stones, filling the centre with a turret of dried wood and kindling inside, lighting this quickly with your lighter. It finally dawned on you to check your wounds; despite it all you weren’t too bad, the obvious scrapes and cuts here and there; arm, knee, cheek. Those would heal. You pulled up your layers to expose your stomach to the cool air of the forest, cool now becoming icy with the moisture that hung in the air. You winced, hissing. It stung, it stung bad, but it would be ok once you cleaned it. You set to work; water from a hip flask, antiseptic from the medi-kit. You considered the stitches, but you knew that you could heal this without that, it would be slower, there would be very obvious scarring, but you had a feeling those stitches might be more of a necessity further into your mission.

“’Cause the Red Storm hits me today.” You mumbled to yourself, hand back over your abdomen and closing your eyes against the pain, wishing for a hot water bottle. You ate a little; dried meats and fruits from packets that you’d brought with you, and then you took to sitting beside the fire, poking it with another stick to keep it going, and lighting yourself a cigarette. The night was full of many sounds, the sounds of owls and small mammals were sounds that you had missed from your childhood. You’d grown up in a house sat next to a field, beyond that a vast woodland, not too different from this. Then there were the sounds that unsettled you; blood curdling screams and wailing. Although all in the distance, each one sent a ripple of fear through your entire body. You weren’t too sure what else to expect from this place, how long you would be here or what else you would face, but you kept reminding yourself of what you and Leon had faced together not so long ago in Racoon City, and why you were here in the first place. With every scream that filled the air, you listened close to see if it sounded like him.

“So, the light bringer has arrived.” The words made you jump out of your skin and you turned to see an old woman now perched besides you, learning forwards against a large stick, which was adorned with small trinkets and bones.

You didn’t say anything but just stared at her, a knot in your stomach. “Come now child.” She cackled softly, a warm smile on her all-knowing face. “Enlighten your elder, what do you seek on your travels?”

“I’m looking for a friend, if you must know.” It wasn’t like you to be this blunt, especially to the elderly, but it had been a rough day and this woman was making you feel uneasy to say the least.

“Perhaps the friend that you have come to find, is not the one that you think you seek.” She replied without hesitation. You raised an eyebrow at her, surely, she didn’t mean herself?

“Who are you?” You asked, looking her straight in the eyes, one of which you noticed was frosted over. Her face fell slowly, turning to look into the fire, before she began to pull herself back up to standing with her stick, the little beads clinking as she did so.

“I am everyone, and I am no one. They see me, and then they don’t. I know all, and yet I know nothing.” Her voice already seemed to start disappearing, things seemed to somehow grow a little hazier, was it the smoke from the fire? “He goes north, and he goes south, he can push as hard as you feel his pull. He can take many forms, you will know him when you seem him, but heed my words; the gravity between destined souls is a dangerous one, and can crush you with the force of nature.”

Everything went black and you passed out.

Song Suggestion: ‘Chimera’ by Hana

The night is silent, and you are forever alone in the forest’s green pasture deep, dark and timeless. In a trance like state, you stand, slowly but nimble, the night air cool against your bare flesh, for you are fully exposed in your natural form and beauty. You know not what guides you, but you find yourself back at the clearing where the beast that you had slain fell, it’s body intact, but a heap of blood and muscle circled up now into the foetal position. Lifting its head up towards you, out from under the big paw he’d held over it in his eternal slumber, you give him a new face; a mask. The skull from a giant deer, with antlers wildly big, adorned with beads, and bone and warning.

You take a fragment of slate from the ground and cut your palms, squeezing them, with pain, and yet with a hidden joy too, over the body. You feel the forest hum around you and bristle. Opening your eyes, still glassy with fog you see swirls and cascades of moths now, flying up from both yourself and the beast. The body stirs and then trembles, you reach out and take its hand, guiding it with you through both the crunch of snow and the moist welcome of the moss.

You come to a clearing, slightly larger than the one where you’d made the conscious decision earlier to set up camp. Here the ground was completely covered with different mosses, surrounded by ancient trees, their roots gnarly, like a wooded fortress around you. You could feel the innocent eyes of small woodland creatures watching you with curiosity, as you lead your beast down the moss-covered rocks towards a natural spring. He did as he was told and waited besides the pool and you descended further down the natural steps, the cool water climbing up your legs and meeting the warmth that was dripping ever so slowly from your womanhood. You let go, sinking your entire body into the cold waters, up to your neck, letting yourself lean back enough to see snatches of the starry sky through the trees. Your beast sat on his haunches, arms over his knees, leaning forward, drinking you up hungrily, thirsting for you, saliva dripping from the deer’s skull, his member tense and swollen from the mere sight of your hardened nipples breaking the surface of the water. But he wasn’t the only pair of eyes drinking you in this way. You floated in the black pool, the mirror of stars holding up your heavenly body as the water between your legs bloomed crimson and then you submerged yourself fully, completely disappearing. Your creature turned his head to the side and lurched forwards unsure for your safety, the life of the forest bristled in anticipation.

Not one crown broke the surface but two; Your hair wet and plastered to your face as you gasped for air, your eyes fully glazed now, entranced by the form in front of you. Somehow you couldn’t take in all the details of his face, but his godly size, the brawn of his shoulders, the lust he was trying so hard to hold back rising in his broad chest, keeping his face down turned, but his cold gold-silver eyes looking at you through a tangle of silvered black hair. You held each other’s gaze, seeming like forever, like your world could end in the blink of an eye. You raised your hands to touch him, and he for you, both knowing somehow that it was not fully possible, not believing that what you were seeing and feeling could be real, and yet; your hands found his, palm to palm, fingers lacing together, fire and lightning burning and sparking between the two of you.

#resident evil #resident evil fanfic #resident evil smut #resident evil 8 #resident evil 2 #resident evil village #Karl Heisenberg #karl heisenberg fanfic #karl heisenberg fluff #karl heisenburg x reader #karl heisenberg smut #resident evil heisenberg #karl heisenberg resident evil #resident evil reader #mother miranda

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laurore-stormwitch · 3 years

Text

The time Zoya saves Nikolai in the Fold. The time Nikolai asks her to be his general. And the times when they had win their battles and they can tell each other of those times.

This is dedicated to @tricewithaz because she specifically requested it and we came up with some nice hc. It’s so fun to explore how they met and how their relationship was built. the times we made a choice - ao3

word count: 10.417

“Do you plan on keeping some order on this desk or do I have to incinerate your work with a gust of fire?”, Zoya grunted, eyeing the absolute mess he had left after working in her sitting room all evening as he waited for her to come back from a private state dinner. She slumped beside him, huffing a tired breath and shutting her eyes. Nikolai closed the novel he had stolen from her nightstand, turning to her with a grin.

“I’m very glad to have your goodnight spite reserved for me, Nazyalensky.”

She turned to him, eyelids fluttering open, and the corner of her mouth quirked up in a smile. A wave of aching affection washed over him at the sight of her. His darkened fingers disappeared in her silky hair, skimming on the skin of her neck. A shiver went through her.

Nazyalensky. The habit of using her name like this had turned from provoking her to scowl to getting himself an annoyed but affectionate look. It possessed a different power, now that he knew it was an identity she had chosen for herself so long ago. Nikolai had waited to see if she would desire to change it, but he had the sense she was attached to it. It was hers, it was the promise of a new life she had made to a little girl long ago, and this made her feel conflicted. She was slowly embracing the parts of her past that could finally complete her, wandering through what she had missed in denying a part of herself; yet, some ghosts were more haunting than others.

“Do you remember the first time I called you that?”, Nikolai asked, if only for the sake of distracting her from another tiresome and tedious day of meetings. Zoya peered at him under her lashes. That was the look she wore when she was pondering whether to indulge his nonsense or just let him ramble her into sleep, with the engulfing solace of his voice frantically telling her about his new invention of the moment or the last thing they made explode at the Fabrikator’s lab. Her hand came to adjust his collar in an unconscious gesture.

“I’m not sure”, she admitted. He traced the soft curve of her lips with his thumb, smirking.

“It was when you saved me. I mean, the first of the many times you did that.”

Zoya looked dubious. “Was it though?”

“You remember something else?”

He was positively sure. When it came to Zoya, his memory rarely failed him. Still, a part of him did want to hear what she remembered. Zoya being willing to talk was a treasured rare occurrence.

“I think it’s when you made me your General”, Zoya asserted, cushioning her head on his forearm.

***

He was flying, and then he was falling.

When the blade went through the Darkling heart and his blood soaked the Fold’s barren sands, Nikolai’s wings disappeared in an inconsistent smoke.

He was fighting, and then he was surrendering.

The world started drowning in darkness, the shadows curling around its outlines and growing like a monstrous tide that devoured every living being on its path. He remembered the clouded sky, the shrieks of the volcras, the stink of fire and gunpowder. If that was how the bastard prince’s fight was going to end, his mind thanked the Saints for giving him that one last moment as himself. The demon retracted, leaving Nikolai on his own as he dove toward his demise. Yet, it would be fine. They would win. And Nikolai would never see what could become of his country.

He was dying. And then, without warning, he was floating.

Or sort of. A sudden gust of wind slammed on his back, slowing his helpless fall on the ground. The prince had only a split moment of consciousness to be glad before crashing onto earth, the blow hard enough that he heard the sound of his ribs cracking, of the air forcefully snatched out his lungs. The world went dark.

He was breathing. A strike of ravaging pain splitted his chest in two. He thought he had opened his eyes, but his vision was blurred as he forced his eyelids not to fall shut. Inhaling felt like a burning flame scorching his throat. He wanted to move, to get up, to take his weapon and resume the fight. He wanted to rest. He wanted.

“Try and be still”, a distant voice murmured beside him.

His vision sharpened, bolts of pain running through his battered body. Nikolai did not know how long he had passed out, if it was hours or mere seconds. Was he seeing the sea again? Was he coming back to the restless waters he loved with woeful neediness? For a brief moment, there was peace. He was home.

Then, another breath tore his lungs, the searing ache canceling the blur. It wasn’t the sea; he found himself lost in a pair of impossible blue eyes, deep and dark as the oceans he had sailed with his wolf of the waves. He grasped at them.

“Don’t move'', the voice whispered, shuddering.

A girl, with raven-black hair and blood smeared on her cheek. Her fingers tightened around his wrist, checking his pulse, while she held the back of his neck with the other arm. Her hold was firm, comforting; yet, Nikolai felt a tremor coming from her, her tone desperate. He knew her, something inside him told him as his consciousness slowly slid back into place. He knew her; he remembered her laugh, in the brief excitement David’s dishes for Alina had brought them before being shattered by the nichevo’ya. He knew her from dimly lit hallways made of rock under a mountain, where they had thought they could hide from the monsters lurking in the shadows. His lashes blinked away the mist and he gripped her arm, steadying himself; the girl startled, shifting her gaze and locking those unearthly eyes back on his again. Were his still black? Was he still the demon, or was he himself again? Another remembrance rushed as his mind finally cleared of the last strands of darkness, restoring all his awareness, all of himself. The squaller, the stubborn one, with that insanely acid tongue. Zoya. The grip on her arm grew stronger, he wanted to part his lips, to speak. He wanted.

“Damn, stop moving. I need to make sure I saved you. No way I’m letting Ravka’s only hope die on me, are we clear?”

Anguish cut through the edge of her tone, cracking it. Zoya, the proud one. The one he had overheard standing up for the Etherealki in the face of every disdain she had earned from them. Zoya, who had fought her way through their reckless warfare strategies with the grace and precision of a hawk diving for a prey. With the snarky words she had sent his way whenever they had crossed paths, her piercing gaze studying everyone around her, always surprising him with a biting response. Zoya Nazyalensky, the impossibly beautiful and equally mysterious summoner who all the other Grisha gossiped about. Kneeling on the dirt beside him right now with an endless well in her sight, full of sorrow and terror. It was the aftermath of the battle, probably. Probably.

Zoya the soldier. Alina’s soldier, Ravka’s soldier, the king’s soldier. His soldier, now.

“Nazyalensky”, he rasped out, mustering all the strength he could find. Relief flooded her face, making her lips quiver. Not too gently, she shook his hand from her arm, her look hardening. Nikolai felt the horrifying moist consistency of blood on his hands; he could not dwell on where it was coming from, either his own wounds, the ones of the girl beside him, or the ones coming from the lives he had snatched with his infernal claws.

“Good. The blow on your head did not shatter your brain.”

Cutting as a blade. As she scanned the ground around, he found her havoc-raging presence weirdly heartening. Nikolai was only dimly aware of the mayhem still breaking out. There was a muffled quiet around them; he realized that it was probably Zoya’s doing, hushing the sounds in the air. An unforgiving wind flowed, kicking up the grey sand; it seemed to reverberate directly from Zoya’s trembling body. The squaller ran a hand through her hair and her face, shoving dirt and red streams on her skin. She was shaken. It would take her a few more battles to get used to this. Maybe she never would. If he wasn’t lying half dead on the ground, he would have felt tempted to reach for her, to comfort her. The wind rose as she swore out, spreading her black mane around her, still frantically searching for help with her gaze. Saints, Nikolai thought, this girl is powerful. She snapped at him.

“For Saints sake are you capable of staying still? I have to fetch you a Healer”, Zoya barked.

Nikolai tried to get himself up, ignoring the excruciating ache in his chest, steadying himself on her shoulder with his right arm. “This would be a perfect moment to indulge in regicide”, he tried, another burst of pain running through him and causing him to cough violently.

“I might consider it if you don’t stop moving”, she murmured in response, scanning him for injuries other than his broken ribs and a likely dislocated shoulder, considering his other arm felt like it was catching on fire when he had tried to lift it. Nikolai caught a movement behind her, tried to gather the strength to get up, to follow the instinct to protect her. Zoya was faster, followed his eyes and threw her fist upward in that direction with a frustrated yell; a violent rush of air hit a soldier aiming at them, sending him toppling to the ground. “I’m trying to keep you alive, you idiot”, she raised her voice, and with it a thunder echoed in the field. Was it being called forth by her? Whatever she was doing, she did not seem aware of it. “You have a country to run. So don’t distract me.”

Someone else was rushing toward them, but this time she looked relieved, which meant whoever they were, they were on their side. That help was coming, that they were almost safe.

“Then you should handle me more gently”, Nikolai spoke again, voice unpleasantly screeching the walls of his throat like nails on a mirror.

What was happening around them? Blinding rays were coming from upward as Alina’s power rumbled into the Fold in whistling sounds, shredding every inch of it into light. He heard muffled voices, Zoya barking commands. Nikolai reached for her again, he clenched his fingers in the folds of her kefta; the hold on her tied him to earth, tied his mind to a world that still felt too unreal and too far away, as it had felt when he had been looking at it with demon eyes. This time, she did not shove him away. A young boy with a red dusted kefta kneeled before him, placing his hands on his chest. Zoya unceremoniously slipped her arm away from below him, lowering him to the ground to let the Healer work. Nikolai hissed when his back hit the sand, shooting her a glare. She shrugged her shoulders, raising her hands in fighting stance to keep them safe, scanning the area for other enemies.

“I hardly am gentle, prince”, Zoya spat out, alert.

"Did we win?"

Now she sent a swift gaze his way, drawing in an unsteady breath. "I think so", she answered with tentative hope. The Healer’s powers were doing their magic, a warmth flooding him and numbing his senses. He fought it, not wanting to lose consciousness again, to fall back into the unknown.

"Then I'm fairly sure I'm going to be crowned. You should go with Your Highness."

Wit was his. Humour, brilliance, the might to find words when voice was failing you, when air was rare, was his. Not the demon. It was Sturmhond’s cocky attitude he had kept when he had been shot and nearly bled out, it was Nikolai’s charming attire when he had rode with Dominik through village fairs and then military encampments, the optimism he had tried to feed since when he had been just a boy. It was what provoked that shadow of an exasperated smile on the squaller’s face, the twitch in her lips promptly straightened again in a thin, severe line.

"You’re a wretch”, she scolded him, turning her attention from their surroundings to the Healer that was sealing his wounds. “There’s little royalty in you right now.”

“Still a king.”

The Grisha boy cleared his throat and nodded to her. “I did the best I could, we need to get him to a tent and someone more trained”, he explained, his remark shaky. “But he is out of danger.”

Zoya exhaled, her eyelids falling shut for a mere instant. The wind slowed down; her hands were still trembling when she ran them again through her hair.

“Do you want me to take care of - “, the boy tried to ask, pointing to her. Her eyes flew open then, firm determination in them.

“We need to get going”, she cut him off. She got up with a swift movement; Nikolai caught the hand she extended to him, letting her help him to a standing position that made all of his muscles and bones howl in protest. He staggered, his knees failing to keep him up. Zoya looped an arm around his back and made him lean on her side; he gripped on her shoulders, hating himself for feeling so weak, for having to rely his weight on her. Her kefta was badly bloodied and ripped, she had a deep cut that ran over her hip and other bruises; it was difficult to assess how injured she was, yet there they were, her will tougher than the hell they had just been through.

“Then you’re a King wretch”, she mumbled from under him. She barely reached up to his chin. What a tiny ball of spite and power she was. They started to make their way toward the outlines where the Fold ended once, when it still existed. “Better? Now let me save you. You have work to do.”

With another pang of relief Nikolai recognized Tolya in the distance, the flash of white of Alina’s hair lifting up from the ground. They were alive. He could not think of much else right now, not until they reached them, until they were safe. And all properly healed, he thought, checking Zoya’s limp and how she pressed on the gash in her flank with the hand that was not supporting him.

“Are you hurt?”, he asked, winded from the effort of putting one foot in front of the other, unable to conceal his worry. Zoya startled and looked up to him, her blue irises wide and exhausted, vulnerable for the span of a flutter.

“I’ll be fine”, she said, somehow softer than before. “Just keep walking.”

Nikolai put all of his remaining energy into subtly pulling away, relieving her from some of the weight. If she noticed his effort, she did not tell. His head emptied of anything but their cautious steps, Zoya’s ragged breathing beside him, her wind running with them, shielding them from harm.

“King wretch. I like it”, he muttered back.

Kings better not take themselves too seriously, after all. It was nice to have someone remind him of that.

***

Nikolai did not mind the paperwork that came with being a ruler. It felt almost comforting to see the slow improvements his country was making under his watch written on paper, sealed with ink and brought to life. He had decided to dedicate himself to the good news today, that maybe he had earned an afternoon of peace inside the quiet of his study. The wheels kept restlessly turning inside his brain, relieving the images of the tour they had taken across torn cities and miserable villages after his coronation, and for a couple of hours he just wanted to forget about them. Contrary to every concern he had held, the people travelling with him had made the grueling trip all the more bearable; they had run against time itself, wearing their horses down and getting little to no sleep at all, resting not more than one night at every stop to be back in Os Alta as soon as possible. He had felt even hopeful, at times. The same kind of jittery expectancy that made him check his time piece for the tenth time in a row and try to stop the rhythmic beating of his foot on the floor, without dwelling too much on the knot of eagerness in his stomach. When the pointer clicked on the chime of the hour, a knock resounded in the room. She was always almost eerily on time.

“Come in”, called Nikolai to the door, folding the letter he was skimming through. A valet entered and cleared his throat.

“Your Highness”, he bowed deeply, “Miss Nazyalensky is here as you requested. Shall I let - “

The squaller marched in the room, surpassing the poor valet as if he was an inconsistent blur of annoyance.

“Miss Nazyalensky”, she hissed under her breath, flicking her hair over her shoulder, ”I am no Miss, and I am perfectly able to let myself in.”

Nikolai arched an amused brow at her, kindly dismissing the servant. A disdainful glare was cast in the direction of the valet’s deferent curtsy as she strode in front of the king’s seat. Zoya never bowed. For anyone. He lounged in his chair, turning all of his focus on the gorgeous harpy that now stood before him, spine straight, chin high and defiant eyes pinned on him. She clasped her hand behind her back with her usual military countenance.

“You called for me, Your Highness?”

“I did”, he confirmed, straightening his legs before him and crossing them at the ankle. There constantly seemed to be a slight mockery in the way she indulged in his title. He folded his hands, still studying her. The vague nuisance with which she was eyeing him was clear enough to make him smirk at her.

“I hear the Triumvirate has done some grand process in these first few weeks”, Nikolai stated, gesturing to the documents on his desk. “I’ve been informed that many Grisha are seeking refuge in the Little Palace. And I also hear you’ve been reconstructing. I do have hope we will be able to put the Second Army back into shape.”

Zoya did not answer, merely kept looking at him with the barest nod of her chin. The king was not used to people being so untouched by his presence, or to be that annoyingly silent around him. He would not admit he had spent part of the last weeks trying to catch her off guard with an astounding lack of results.

“Would you agree with the reports?”

His question seemed to ignite a spark of interest through her immovability. He had noticed that while she had no issue in voicing her opinions strongly, she seemed not equally accustomed to people directly consulting her with a true interest in her point of view. Maybe he was reading too much into things, but he had guessed Zoya liked how he had started to value her input.

“We are indeed making progress”, Zoya said, “but there is a lot of work to be done. We’re only starting.” She paused, seemingly pondering her words. “We need - “

“Before we start making requests”, his interruption earned himself an irritated glare, “I called you in because I have something to ask. To the whole three of you, actually; I asked Genya and David too.” Yet, somehow, her answer was the one he was most curious about. “Alina gave you the Triumvirate. You know what to expect from it now. And you’ve got just a mere taste; what’s to come will be tougher, tiresome. While I assume you have the motivation to keep your position, I do prefer to give people a choice when it comes to demanding tasks. So I’m asking: do you still want it?”

“I do.” There was no hesitation, only urge in the way the answer rolled out of her. She took a step in his direction and cleared her throat. “Not just the Triumvirate. I want to train the new Grisha. And we need to speed up the process on the royal order stating Grisha’s rights. If we are to rally them, they need to feel truly safe here.”

Nikolai kept his expression neutral, although he was pleasantly impressed. He knew she had taken it upon herself to start working with the Grisha finding shelter in the Little Palace, and the kids being taken there. He would not have made her out to be someone who loved teaching; then again, it was hard to make her out for anything. As far as her initiative went, he had quickly understood how his status meant little to her. After all, they were kids themselves. She was a year younger than him, and she had seen him shift between his roles of privateer, prince and what someone might call usurper. Never failing to point the last one out to him, if one had to be precise; Saints forbid he could ever possibly forget he needed to earn a respect that was not freely given. Surely not by Zoya Nazyalensky. He would not expect from her the humble demeanor of a subject in front of a king. Thank the Saints for that, he found himself thinking. Her bracing self was almost soothing, after weeks of dealing with people smarming at his feet, and hers was the company he had found himself searching for more often than others, as wicked as she might be. Zoya never overstepped without a reason, apart from a common snarky energy that was profoundly her. What she did was to call him out on every dumb decision he leaned toward, and constantly remind him how to be worthy of his position and the love of his people.

“We can arrange that”, he decided to answer, satisfied by how her pupils widened at his prompt concession. He got up and opened a bottle of brandy, pouring himself a glass. He glanced back at her, still planted in the middle of the room.

“You were loyal to the Darkling.” Nikolai was sure he had not imagined the flash of anger that darkened the blue of her eyes, nor how her jaw clenched and her posture seemed to tense. “Pardon me for being so forthright, but I do feel like it’s better to deal with the tedious matter first.” Or rather the interesting ones you seem to keep an aura of secrecy around.

When she spoke, her voice was not as firm as before. “We’ve worked together for weeks and known each other for longer. I wonder if you have a suicidal strike or you are really questioning my loyalty now.”

“No suicidal strike, and I’m not questioning anything.” The heartfelt honesty in him seemed to reassure her. Her shoulders eased ever so slightly, yet her features remained strained. “As you dutifully pointed out, the time for that has long passed. However, since we’re getting to know each other, I guess you’ll find I like stories. This seems like a good one.”

“Stories are earned”, Zoya asserted, slitting eyes and matter of factly tone.

“Fine point. You were, though”, Nikolai pressed. Her look never wavered from his. Unconsciously he leaned toward her, rolling his glass between his fingers.

“I was.”

“What changed?”

“Everything.”

Silence stretched on. Nikolai decided he could wait a while, if it meant gaining some other insight. He did know part of the story, the part that was ushered by people when she strode beside them. Stories might need to be earned, but they also needed to be told by the ones who had lived them. Nikolai was not one to listen to gossip anyway. Sure enough, she resumed speaking, catching that he was not going to drop the subject.

“It got personal. I was loyal to him because I craved power, then because I believed he could provide a home for us. Instead, he stripped from me the only one I had and slaughtered my friends. Enough of a reason?”

Zoya proudly lifted her chin even higher, her words back to being stinging as an icy wind, the anger burning in her seeping through the tremor in her hands. She moved closer. A slight breeze swept through the room, rustling the papers, called forth by her emotions in turmoil. He remembered when it happened in the Fold, when her despair had raised the wind around them and a thunder had boomed.

They were no more than two steps apart, now; the gust she summoned carried a scent Nikolai struggled to place as her hair lifted up. It reminded him of the heat of a sunny day, of the field near Dominick's house when spring came, when his little sisters would run back into the kitchen with crowns made of daisies and golden ears of wheat. Was it the pressed corn caught in the evening mist? Was it flowers?

“I won’t beg for trust. Words are empty vessels, actions carry meaning. The choice is yours: either you let me prove myself, or you discard me now.”

She kept her fierce piercing eyes to his, every inch the warrior. Nikolai held her gaze, hazel melting into blue, a small smile tugging at his lips, struck by the force of her nature and her fuming reaction.

“Here I thought I was the dramatic one”, he chuckled, ignoring her scowl and pulling his hands up in surrender. He slipped inside a reassuring attitude. “I was really not questioning you. Alina trusted you, she chose you. You fought for all of us. I’ve seen the way you stood up for your people, I’ve always agreed with Alina. This is your home; you already proved yourself, more than enough.”

The wind ceased to flow; Zoya flexed her fingers, a rage made of guilt and regret still paining her look. Nikolai knew the place from where those feelings came. Maybe picking at that was not a sensible idea after all. He would need to stop outright testing both her patience and his luck like this; the temptation she was brewing of roasting him alive right now was evident. He was still measuring his steps around her, how she seemed to dive into arguments that would make anyone on earth feel at least uncomfortable, or close right off when someone touched seemingly irrelevant nerves.

“Besides”, Nikolai let the smile spread in her direction, “I am in dire need of allies.”

And friends, he thought sourly, yet a king can rarely ask for those.

“Unnerving them sure seems a smart way to ensure your supposed allies’ support”, she clipped out, shaking her cuffs.

“I like to test my chances.” His words were accompanied by a shrug. The urge to take another step toward her pressed in the back of his brain. “You haven’t unleashed a storm on me yet, so I’d say we’re halfway through a steady relationship of trust and mutual forbearance.”

“Mutual, sure.”

Nikolai tapped his finger on the desk. It seemed he could not stay still. “You’ll need to work together”, he advised, “with Genya and David.”

“I do well on my own.”

Like she has not made that abundantly clear in the last couple of months.

“Oh, I have no issue in believing that. Still, it wasn’t a suggestion, I’m afraid.”

Zoya’s mouth curved in an honey smile; she fluttered her lashes, tilting her head in his direction, the dark waves of her hair falling on her shoulders. It could have been an almost convincing smile, if it had reached her eyes. Instead, it stood cold on her face, firm as a statue, a pretense of complacency with the clear intent to taunt. Nikolai had no doubt whatsoever that entire crowds of people had fallen on their knees for that feigned sweetness. To be completely truthful, she did throw him off balance. Now it would surely be a reasonable call to put a bit of distance between them. Not that he resorted to reason that often when making decisions.

“I am well aware kings are not in the habit of making requests, Your Highness.” Her voice rippled like silk, delicate and musing, dripping sarcasm. “I was merely informing you.”

“You’re not particularly easy, are you?”, he asked with a grin, leaning back on the desk and folding his arms. An apparently casual movement meant to regain the use of his lungs. The smile vanished as she adjusted her hair.

“I am not easy, nor kind. And I lack the interest to make people search for these qualities in me.”

Nikolai had begun to understand in these weeks the stories around her, more than he had ever understood them before. He had also begun to nurture a sheer curiosity in her regard, for the complex mind she hid and the way she seemed careless to other people's thoughts on her. He tried not to let himself be distracted now, which always proved to be a strenuous task with this particular girl, when she waved that look at him and played the card of the ridiculously attractive and positively enchanting Grisha summoner she undoubtedly was. He did really need to get a grip, though. If they were to work together as closely as he had his mind set to, he had to find a way to make himself immune to her flair, constructed or natural that it was.

Never seduce anyone prettier than I am, right? Or never even conceive to seduce anyone you’re attracted to if you had planned to offer that specific anyone one of the highest-ranking positions in the whole country. An equally wise rule to live by. If only her look was the only appeal he had found in her. Her edgy personality, which people tended to be almost scared of, had captivated him a great deal more; whatever beauty withered in the face of how capable and strong-spirited she was. Qualities that made her all the more desirable. The privateer in him had screamed at the top of his lungs to take on the improbable quest of conquering someone who seemed impervious to him as she did, someone that out of reach, that captivating. Shameful instinct, to say the least. And leaning on the worst-idea-ever side of things.

Besides, he had a country to take care of now; he was no longer a privateer who could make reckless choices and chase after impossible girls. Nikolai Lantsov was a king, the king of a war-torn, desperate place. The challenge of earning her trust and admiration might turn out to be just as endearing; he could embark on that one, letting her bitter tongue put him back into place.

Resorting to his decision, he got a small box out of a drawer, placing it on the desk beside him.

“There’s something else I mean to offer you.”

Zoya eyed the box, while Nikolai bobbed his chin at it, encouraging her to take it. She stood still, her look shifting back to observe him. Truly exasperating the lack of gratifications she offered.

“Contrary to what you believe, I am no fool.” He decided to dive right into it, pushing through her silence. “As much as I hate to admit it, the Darkling was fairly good at reading people. You rose high in his favour because he considered you extremely resourceful and trustworthy, and valued you as a soldier.” Nikolai unfolded his arms and rested his hands on the wooden brink of the desk, pushing himself to her; he lowered his voice with a smirk. “And I know for a fact the reason for that has nothing to do with your very pleasant appearance, which I have no doubt is another weapon you know how to use.”

He backed up again. Life on the sea had taught him to turn weakness into brass. Thankfully, he had spent years practicing the art of acting. Zoya pursed her lips, biting a comeback and momentarily avoiding his gaze. Not that impervious after all. One had to catch on the details.

“I am not blind. Nor do I have reasons to pretend to be. Still, I’m afraid I am far more interested in your wide arsenal of warfare talents.” He took a sip from his glass and hummed teatrichally, cocking his head to the side to assess her. “I do share the burden of being handsome, though. We can whine together about our fatigues.”

That mocking smile was back on her mouth, sparkling with mischief. She spoke with a casual tone, smoothing her kefta. “As much as you brag about it, your charm seems to fail you. Our Sun Saint did not look particularly impressed by it.”

Ah, clever one. Nikolai mustered his composure to flash another grin at her, thoroughly impressed both by her boldness and by the precision of her strike. All right, that stung. Which to her credit only meant she had no fear to bite people where it hurt and a certain ability to find that spot. Useful skills for a General.

“Luckily for me, she was one of a very few number of exceptions.”

“Charm our way through peace, then.” Zoya cast her eyes heavenward, crossing her arms.

“Can I come back to praise you? I wasn’t finished.”

“By all means, do”, she gestured.

“As I was saying. Sadly for our favorite herald of darkness, he was also a prick. Not to mention manipulator and mass murderer, amongst other remarkable successes. He wholly under-estimated you: you are trustworthy and resourceful, along with a lot of other virtues he did not remotely understand nor properly paid attention to.”

Nikolai paused. He put his glass down, yielding to the temptation at last and letting his feet stride toward her. Had she moved more near too? Now they were definitely closer than needed. He could see the darker slivers in her irises, the curls falling inside the fur collar of her uniform.

The smell in the Grand Palace garden after a rainstorm, he thought of that scent. When he had laid in the grass and soaked his clothes in mud, just for the sake of feeling the earth below him and the water on his skin.

“I’ve watched you, these weeks. You are good. Not just at fighting, I believe that is a given. You are good at leading. Your mind is way sharper than your tongue. I’ve studied you with your Etherealki and the other Grisha, with the First Army representatives.``

He made a show of plucking a peck of invisible dust from his coat. Zoya did not move, keeping her attention on him. A sceptical frown appeared on her face.

“You do love to hear yourself talk.”

“I’ve watched you do that, too. You’re bold, in a good way. You tend to deliver neat blows.”

“Are you in the habit of examining all the people that come to work for you?”

“Just the powerful ones”, he admitted.

She might have looked nothing but unimpressed by the string of praises he had just given, as if they were common known truths, nothing of importance to linger on. Her eyes had grown troubled though, then curious, they had softened in the glowing sunset light. They were assessing him with strong intent now, and Nikolai could only think they held the ocean inside. The ocean he had seen when he had thought he would never be back on the waves again, the one that had felt like hope gained with blood and shattered bones in those grey sands.

“You saved me, in the Fold”, Nikolai abruptly said. The twitch in her breath made him understand just how much his demeanor had changed unconsciously, how much the mask of the ruler had slipped away and his unguarded voice betrayed him.

“Indeed.”

“I haven’t had the occasion to thank you properly.”

“It’s my job”, she briskly answered, almost annoyed. “You’re my king.”

You’re my king. Best to ignore the bolt of confidence and pleasure that spiked through his spine.

“Apart from my gratitude, I kind of had in mind to make it your actual job”, the king considered.

Zoya Nazyalensky. Not kind, and not easy. Zoya shot him a suspicious look, but she held her ground.

“It just so happens that both me and the Second Army are in need of a General”, he declared, never shifting his focus from her face. “Would you care to consider taking the position?”

He caught the box in his hand, opening the lid and extending it to her. A medal was shining in it, the golden Ravka double eagle, wrought in in a pale blue sash. Zoya briefly lowered her gaze to it, turning to look at Nikolai with an intensity that was almost impossible to bear. Her look was unreadable, yet the tension in her stiff muscles unmistakable. Nikolai could hardly hide the painful want for her to accept, the thrill he felt at the chance of having someone to rely on, in time, to share some of the burden with. Someone who was not his father’s advisors, someone he could choose. Someone he felt a strange pull toward, a sort of twisted hidden affinity.

Alina chose you, he had told her. The choice is yours, she had told him.

I made the choice. I am the one choosing you now.

The thumping heart in his chest ached at the possibility of making things right for this cursed country with a person he could trust at his side. To ease the loneliness, even if it had to be a game of pretend to some degree. The moments dripped away, her eyes alight with a flame hard to understand. Nikolai restrained his own will to jump into that blazing chaos, knowing how easily he would have lost himself in it.

“You’re making me your General?”, she said finally. The annoyance had disappeared, replaced with a hesitant falter, something that sounded both like disbelief and a flicker of cautious excitement.

“I’m asking you to be my General, if you wish so. I would not force anything on you. The position comes with a lot of heavy responsibilities and long sleepless nights.” Zoya was still frozen in place. Slowly, her arms uncrossed, coming to rest at her sides. “On the brighter side, you’ll get to enjoy endless hours of my company.”

“I’d say the brighter side is the responsibilities one.”

None of the previous snark was contained in her words. He could see how hard she was trying to keep her attitude on her, her own mask.

“You can decide whether to direct your scowls at me or at people annoying you then.”

“You’re assuming you won’t be among the people annoying me. Bold take.”

“I’d wager that’s what I’m mostly going to do”, Nikolai conceded. Zoya was trying to buy time, to ward off his attention. He just wasn’t sure if she needed it to regain her confident self or if she was considering how to refuse the offer. Nikolai did not like the last option, and it was better to rip the band aid off quickly.

“With the prospect of this gain, would you accept?” She peered at him again. He could not hold back a grin. “Did I just surprise you?”

“Please”, she spat out, but it was a little too marked to not be forced. Nikolai fought the impulse to smile wider. “Who else would you choose? Genya, so she can tailor the enemies away? David, to bore them to death with science talks? I’m the most qualified for the job. It’s reasonable of you to ask me.”

“I am not asking you because it’s reasonable.”

Again, reason was not the prime source fueling his judgment. For Saints sake, would you take this damn medal? Nerve racking girl that she was. It was making him fancy her even more.

“I am asking you because you deserved it. I believe you are the right person for this task, in many different ways.”

The weariness in her was still there; he hoped she could see that was not empty flattery anymore, that he had meant it. Finally, finally Zoya reached for the medal. He heard her draw in a sharp breath, a crease appearing between her brows. Nikolai wondered how it would feel to make it disappear, to see her features smooth down. Zoya moved through the world like a soldier with an armor in place, one she kept up with the pure will of her steel spirit and hardened heart. Despite her stillness, power was radiating off of her, the wind once again carrying that distinctive scent.

That small fishermen port they had docked in when the Volkvolny had arrived on the Wandering Isle, the one that was surrounded by pastures and a wide meadow in which an ocean of colourful wildflowers had just sprouted. Wildflowers.

For once in life, Nikolai had hardly an idea of who the person standing in front of him was. The enigmatic, beautiful, fierce squaller. Was she happy? Excited for this chance to serve her country? Terrified by the prospect of what they still had to face? Considering smacking him for being out of his mind? There was something that lurked inside of her under that armor, something in those blue eyes that seemed too painful to be looked at, too intimate to know. It came in shadows, disappearing, as if she was fighting it to stay down, to get it under control. The same bottomless abyss he had seen when she had saved him.

Nikolai knew what it meant, to lose something, to fight for an ideal and see it broken, to finally have the power in your hands to fix what others had crushed. It felt terrifying and exhilarating, and maybe that was what was running in that head of hers now. Zoya brushed her fingers on the golden pin, pulling it up and wrapping it under her hand. She closed her fist, raising her gaze to him, locking their eyes together. The shadows had gone, replaced by a fearless light.

“I’ll need to meet with the First Army generals”, the tone of a leader. “They won’t like this, and since I am fairly sure you don’t care one bit about it, I’ll need to handle them. And I’ll need that document drafted.”

He nodded, pushing down the towering joy that was flooding his chest. Practical. Ruthless, facing the issues head on, not shying away. He twisted and reached for another glass from the cabinet, turning inside his mind the fact that she had accepted, that he was looking at his General now.

“To a long and fruitful partnership, then”, Nikolai offered her the brandy, “or rather to save this broken country and not getting killed in the meanwhile.”

Zoya gave him a stern look. “I don’t drink on the job.”

Why does that not surprise me? He grinned excitedly and raised the glass to her, downing his drink.

“In time, I may teach you to have a little fun, too.”

Unscathed, she just tossed her hair. “Believe me, Your Highness, I am perfectly able to revel in fun. I am just highly selective of the people I allow to share it with me.”

The seducing part really would never be necessary, after all. He had a hunch they were immensely going to enjoy working together and drive each other crazy. I undoubtedly am.

“You’ll teach me how you select those blessed souls, then.”

Before she could resume their banter, another call at the king’s chambers’ entrance interrupted them, bursting the quiet of this comfortable room. The sound seemed to snap Zoya back to herself, making her realize how close they were standing. Nikolai had already been all too aware of it. She quickly moved away from him, not leaving his eyes. Pride back in her expression, shoulders squared. In her silver threaded kefta, she already appeared like the able respected General she would soon grow into. Her medal was closed in her fist, the knuckles white from the force of the grip.

“I will not fail Ravka”, she said, marking every word. I will not fail you, was the rest of the sentence, the part that hung unspoken between them. “I promise you that.”

Nikolai trusted her, without reservations. The king knew he had made the right choice. Both for the country, and, he selfishly thought, for himself. There was a hidden gratitude in her oath, the emotion she would not speak outright but nevertheless felt.

“Brace yourself, Nazyalensky.” He felt positively giddy and already itching for the challenges that fate would throw their way. “It’s going to be one hell of a ride. Take the rest of the evening for yourself, I’m afraid it’s the last moment of peace you’ll have for a while.”

She exhaled, her eyes moving to the window and Os Alta’s pointed domes in the distance.

“Ravka doesn’t consider rest as possible, that much I know.”

She rang for the servant, ignoring they were in Nikolai’s study and he was the one probably supposed to do that. Already moving like she owned the place, deciding the conversation was over. Zoya gave him a long, deep look.

“Goodnight, Your Highness.”

Nikolai fell back on his chair, watching her go as one of the old king’s advisors was accompanied inside the study. Surely a less pleasurable company for the evening. Both for the eyes and for the soul, he thought, forcing himself to wave a welcoming expression to the white-bearded man and his ridiculously long mustaches.

“Miss Nazyalensky”, the advisor greeted her with a half bow as she passed beside him on her way to the hallway. Zoya simply rolled her eyes, strolling toward the door with a last nod at Nikolai. He was sorry to see her go. Before she got out, Nikolai took the impulse and called to the man before him.

“General”, he corrected him, ignoring his shocked expression, “it’s General Nazyalensky now.”

Nikolai did not miss the slight misstep Zoya took at his words. Her kefta wirled as her gaze snapped to his. A beat passed. Without a sign of acknowledgment, Zoya looked away, that scent he had finally placed disappearing with her. Nikolai thought it best not to tell her that she hadn’t been quick enough to hide; he had seen her lashes lowering as she sighed, a smile tugging at her lips, one that was not feigned neither mocking, one that made her eyes sparkle with delight and was not meant to be noticed. If there was hope to make Zoya Nazyalensky brighten up like that, maybe Nikolai had it in himself to steer this country to safety after all.

Goodnight, General.

***

“I thought we were past these poor attempts at wooing me”, she scoffed, playfully pushing him away. Nikolai chuckled, drawing her back to rest on his chest, circling her in his arms. He rested his chin on her head, listening to the warm huff of her breath on the cotton of his shirt. Deadly Zoya, who let herself curl in his hold almost easily. If someone had told him he would live to the feel of her lashes shutting on his heart, Nikolai would have probably sent the man to get his head checked by a Healer. Or paid him another drink.

“I am positively serious”, Nikolai assured her. Zoya blew a distrustful grunt.

“Nikolai, you do realize you don’t need to flatter me to get me into your bed anymore?”

“I do like you in my bed. Or anywhere else, for that matter”, he considered, humming against her hair. Zoya leaned on his shoulder to prompt herself up, looking him straight in the eyes. He tried to keep a smooth expression.

“So you’re saying I garnered your attention that soon? To me, you seemed a bit - “

She tilted her head to the side, shrugged her shoulders.

“Yes?”

“Distracted”, she pointed out, an overly amused grin perking her lips.

Nikolai knew she was referring both to Alina and to the apparently unscathed attitude he had kept around her in the years they had worked together. No doubt clueless to how quickly other forbidden images had replaced the Sun Summoner’s ones in his dreams or just how much commitment he had been forced to put into appearing unaffected by her presence. He had been distracted, at first, though even in distraction Zoya snatched the attention like a lightning. Then a quake in the ground had struck; Zoya had then made her way into his life like a ferociously fast tidal wave, rippling foam at first, raging and rumbling waters then.

“You distracted me a lot, Zoya. Working with you has been equally comforting and tiring. You distract me even more now”, he leaned closer, sliding one hand on her neck, preventing her from backing away, “that I get to do this”. Nikolai caught her lips with his, kissing away the disbelieving frown from her mouth. When the kiss broke, she looked halfway convinced of his candor.

“You can’t possibly imagine how many dull meetings I have tuned out with you haunting my thoughts. The overactive mind I happen to be cursed with did not help my concentration.”

Zoya rolled her eyes, even though they both knew how truthful the statement was.

“You are diverting.”

“Is it working?”

“A bit”, she casually dismissed, tucking a strand of black curls on her finger. Nikolai sighed happily, slipping away in his thoughts. He wanted to tell her everything, he wanted her to take a stroll right into his mind to see it all. They had so much time now, and he had the constant urge of stocking it without letting a single instant slip, making up for all the years it had taken them to have each other.

“Anyway, it’s nothing special. People are commonly struck by my beauty.”

“I’ll admit you are kind of a breath-taking vision”, he snatched her hand away from her hair to press a kiss on her knuckles. “That’s not what really caught my attention, though.”

Of course he had noticed her. Then again, who did not? The vexing creature was hard not to notice, with dark waves framing a perfect figure, hiding an intricate enigma to solve. Since he was a boy, the prince had loved to unravel the puzzle of a person, he had proud himself of being able to do so with nearly everyone he had encountered. Zoya was another kind of riddle, one that had given him more headaches than victories. She made a point to hide; and Nikolai, well, he had always been an explorer at heart, hadn’t he? So he had noticed, and embarked on the journey drawn by the thrill of adventure. Every bitter word had been a wave to crash, every harsh reply a storm to weather to look under the surface. Every gust of wind, barked command and brisk political comment a sudden turn inside her convoluted mind.

“I’m torn between accusing you of sweet-talking me as usual or just outright lying.”

Nikolai clenched his heart in a mock gesture, and a small laugh bubbled in his chest. Judging from the bright gleam in her eyes and the lightness with which she was messing with him, she had believed him.

“Enough about you then. Am I to truly believe I did not impress you at first sight?”

Zoya glared daggers at him, but did not answer right away, considering his question. He got lucky this evening.

“You did impress me, albeit saying at first sight would be a huge overstatement”, she admitted, then exhaled a long breath and let herself fall on the cushion. “I was so happy when you asked me to be your General”, her eyes were distant, as if she was talking to herself more than him, seeing the rageful and determined girl she had been. “I went back to my room and could not stop smiling. My heart was so full, for the first time since what felt like forever. It never felt like a responsibility, it felt like an opportunity you gave me.”

“Tell me you waltzed alone in your room, please”, he teased, being the one who wanted to improvise a victory dance on the spot.

“I will not.”

“You will not tell me because it did not happen, or just to deprive me of the satisfaction?”

“Your ego does not need more encouragement”, she rested her chin on her hand, forcing her lips to stay pursed and fighting back a smile. So that was a yes, then. Zoya bursting with happiness was a sight he would have probably sold his soul to see, three years ago.

“That was the first time I believed you may not be the overly chatty catastrophe I would have made you out to be.”

“You know, I’m not so sure”, Nikolai grinned at her, beaming with pride. “You were stunned when I shot the Darkling.”

“You remember that?”, she gave him a surprised glance from her place on the cushion. They barely knew each other back then, but he had not forgotten. He pulled her back to him, brushed his mouth on her forehead.

“I paid attention in these years, Zoya. To every inch of you.”

It had taken him a while to notice the other things. The stubborn tilt of her chin when she was being challenged and needed to hold her ground. How she shook the cuffs of her kefta before announcing something, or how it meant the argument was done on her part. The way she marked the first words of a sentence with a harder tone than usual when she was in distress, as if the very fact of lacing a syllable with spite could hold herself together. Her resting her head to the side when she was at ease, narrowing her eyes to the sunlight, allowing herself a surrender. The grief and hurt that peered through only when she was trying too hard to conceal it, only when the exhaustion was overwhelming and keeping this country together too tiring. The gleam she possessed when she was teaching the kids, how her gaze softened with care as soon as they turned their backs on her and she watched them laugh and toss each other around. Her laughter with Genya or Tamar when they had a glass too much in the evening and they gossiped around, basking in the illusion of being normal people with no weight on their shoulders.

Zoya had been a story for Nikolai, one he had wanted to unfold, to slowly walk through the pages of it and discover her mysteries, her secrets, her wants. She had been the puzzle of his lifetime, and he knew he would never stop sorting through it. Whenever he thought he had put some sense in it, she uncovered a dark alley he had brushed past without noticing; her Suli heritage, her family’s past, her garden of sorrows. And then came the agony of sorting her feelings out, a line he had walked balancing his hopeless wishes and the reality of her gestures. Trying to piece together how deliberate or innocent had been the way she kept locking their gazes together through the opposite corner of a room, wondering how carefree when she lingered with her fingers on his skin a moment too long as they brushed their hands. If she was toying with him as he had heard in the stories about her, or if her restraint wavered under a desire he had not known he was hoping for. All the times the inevitable had almost happened, and they had strode past these occurrences with the shared silent pact of not voicing it out loud. Zoya’s look growing calm in the dim light of the countless rooms they had worked in, a warmth they had both longed for.

Nikolai tightened his hold on her. He buried his nose in her hair.

The heat of a sunny day, the spring that came in Dominik’s fields, the crushed daisies under his sisters’ sticky fingers. The Grand Palace garden brought alive by rain around him, droplets running through his golden hair. A meadow near the sea in a foreign magical place where he would take her one day, the marvels he would show her. That damn wildflowers scent he had never been able to carve out of the bottom of his soul.

She had revealed herself in front of him, in irrelevant moments carrying with them a significance he had never been aware of.

“I thought I knew myself”, Zoya started, barely audible over the crackling of the fire, “the rotten parts of me. My strengths.” She paused. “Seeing me through your eyes - you shattered everything I knew and built it back. I did not understand how soon you had started doing that.”

"Soulmates stuff, I guess”, he murmured in a wanton tone, ignoring the prick behind his eyes, startled by the sudden shift in her mood and the heartfelt openness she was displaying.

“I don’t believe in that nonsense”, Zoya huffed dismissively. Nikolai laughed.

“I share your disbelief, actually. Destiny has done nothing but put obstacles in our path, after all. If anything, we have defied it. I believe it’s more a matter of choices”, he said, pensive. Once again, he rested his cheek on her carefully brushed curls, inhaling deeply. “We did not happen to stumble upon each other and miraculously fall in love. We chose each other.”

The choice is yours.

I made the choice. I am the one choosing you now.

I would choose you, Zoya. As my general, as my friend, as my bride.

The first one had gone unbelievably smoothly. The second, it had taken patience and effort and a certain resistance to disappointments. The third one, well - he was working on that. A ring did stand wrapped around her finger. Halfway there.

Zoya must had been thinking of that, too. She seemed to ponder his statement before replying. “You did tell me you would choose me. When I thought no one would.”

“I think I chose you long before I knew I did. Then I hoped against all odds that when you’d make your own choice, you’d choose me in return. That you’d choose to stay.”

Zoya fell silent. He could not see her, but he imagined just as well her biting her lower lip, his words sinking into her heart. With Zoya, the quiet was comfortable, warm as the press of her body on his. The quiet was needed.

“I’m sorry it’s taken me so long”, a whisper at last, as she turned back up to look at him. Nikolai shook his head decisively.

“Don’t be.”

“You have waited for me.” There was just a knowing safety in her tone. It had mattered, for Nikolai, to let her choose. To let her know, and then let her decide. To give her a chance at love and stand by for her to take it, his trust in her never faltering. He gently took her face between his calloused hands, worn by battles and tight salty ropes.

“You were worth every second. Besides, time means nothing for demons and saints, right? We have a lot of it in our hands.”

This time she whole-heartedly smiled, adjusting his perfectly fine collar in that affectionate unaware gesture again.

Being the unsuccessful poet he could have been in another lifetime, sometimes he wondered if the story they had lived would ever go on in ballad and poems, as he had once joked with her. If someone would tell of an open sky split by lightning in which a dragon had spread his wings and roared his heartache, never to be left alone to live in darkness again. If someone would hear of a wayward privateer finding the ocean in a person, tricking fate into conquering everything his battered heart had ever searched for. If there would ever be written the tale of a love waiting on the other side of a door, of the people brave enough to cross it.

He had thought they would have just kept telling that tale to each other, through open mouthed kisses left on bare skin, tangled sheets and hushed confessions traded in the night. Then one day, he had heard the kids play in the Little Palace forest, a girl with golden brown skin splashing water on the others from the lake, calling herself the Suli queen who could turn into a legendary beast. He had seen a Fabrikator in the library draft sketches of pirates and mystical creatures fighting each other on a flying ship. To his amusement, he had watched and eavesdropped as one of his personal guards, a handsome young boy coming from Udova, had tried to woo a noble girl into walking with him to the garden, promising her to tell her the fable of how a king with a demon inside had won the attentions of a beautiful unattainable witch who commanded the storms.

Nikolai liked that. The idea that their struggles might turn into hope. One thing he loved, though, were the details that remained theirs.

Zoya brushed a hand through his golden hair with a yearning look in her eyes, soft as a feather she kissed his jaw, adjusted herself in the space between his arms, played with the ring on her finger as she laced her hand with his. She still called him King wretch at times, he still called her his General. She had still eaten all of his herring that morning, they had still made time to work silently through papers together before dinner. At the end, there had never been a hierarchy between them, swept away in the matter of heartbeats since she had held a broken prince in the safety of her wind and he had given her a medal to cradle in her fingers: they had always fought alongside each other, as they were doing now. These details.

That was the part of their story no one would ever earn to hear. The part they would keep writing in secret.

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sunlitscribe · 2 years

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First Lines Meme

thank you for the tags !! @wordspin-shares @reykenobis

Rules: List the first lines of your last 20 stories. (If you have less than 20, just list them all!) See if there are any patterns. Choose your favourite opening line. Tag some people to play the next round!

She couldn’t speak for the rest of the universe, but she tended to avoid things. — og: the supernova trilogy

Thick smoke trailed up from a dying campfire, disappearing into a beautiful blue sky. — witcher oc fic: chaos becomes us (destiny favors us)

Handfuls of sunlight peeked through the window of the brightly painted wheelhouse. — game of thrones au fic: to all those who dared to hope

Remy looked over at the time, her Mystery Machine alarm clock that told her that it was only 1:25 AM, and her body told her that it was too early to even think about twitching. — teen wolf oc fic: something strange in the neighborhood

People tend to forget that to be reborn, you first have to die. — vampire diaries oc fic: supernova

Today would be the day that everything, including herself, would change. — doctor who oc fic: the abyss

Red. Red was now the color of the grass beneath her boots, the bright color stained her hands, and even her kefta — something that had once brought pride was now quickly becoming an eyesore. — shadow and bone oc fic: let me live (let me die)

There was a stifling quiet as soon as the heavy wooden doors shut behind her. — harry potter oc fic: the masquerade

Spencer learned very early on in life that their parents weren't in love with each other. — the 100 oc fic: still breathing?

Big brown eyes peered out from a car window as trees passed by, chubby fingers pressed against the fogged up window, drawing three stick figures, two big and one little like her, with a square shaped home right next to them. — harry potter oc fic: war wounds

There was something about being out at night that felt different. — mcu oc fic: my tears ricochet

She learns of Sir Reginald Hargreeves’ death like any other person, on the breaking news, still jet lagged from her eight-hour flight back home and already on her fourth espresso despite the time of night. — the umbrella academy oc fic: could you leave the light on?

Dreams weren’t supposed to feel this real. — mcu oc fic: no pain no gain

She breathed in and out harshly, sweat coating her brow as she jogged her way down a crowded street. — jatp oc fic: ethereal harmony

Her hands were cold, and her knees and wrists hurt like hell. — dragon age oc fic: unnamed

Three birds flew above the sleepy neighborhood, their song loud and clear as they chased each other and disappeared into dark skies. — jatp oc fic: invisible strings

She cleaned the last glass until the remnants of the milkshake was gone and it shined under the bright lighting. — teen wolf oc fic: momento mori

She let out a deep exhale as she finished the last of her granola bar off before shoving its empty wrapping inside her pocket. — arrow oc fic: broken promises

i have more but i deleted it for ur safety bc it’s embarrassing 💖💖

my pattern: i obviously like introducing either the main character first through either their surroundings or inner monologue

my favorite: Handfuls of sunlight peeked through the window of the brightly painted wheelhouse. i will always be proud of the pretty image i painted with this opening

i’m tagging: @hughstheforcelou @reggiemantleholdmyhand-tle @darknightfrombeyond @witchofinterest @darth-caillic and anyone else who wants to join in 💖

#you would not belive ur eyes 👁 if i actually finished a chapter 💃🏽#keke talks #fics #wips #tag games

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illyaana · 3 years

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Credits to @breakingpengui1 to the Tendou fanart! Do check them out, I stalked them for almost two hours- ( •̀ ω •́ )✧

Fantasy Collab by @bluebellhairpin

God I'm sorry it took so long TwT I wanted to make this really good so TwT (don't think I did it) Do check out the other works involved!! I am also thinking of making this a three-part series 'cause I have some ideas on this and I took way to long on this, so let me know if you want me to do it!!

⋯⋯ ⫍ Masterlist ◍ Navigation ⫎ ⋯⋯

Like my writing? Do you want a drabble specifically made for you about your love life with a character of your choosing? Check out my 50 followers event over here!

Tags: Fantasy AU, Soulmate AU, Fluff, Angst, Royal! Y/N x Werewolf! Tendou

Word Count: 2611

There was a time when the world of the supernatural was one of peace and harmony.

Magia, the realm of magic and the supernatural being, was one filled with mysteries and beauty.

Plants would dance to the rhythm made by the woodland creatures. Fairies and elves would sing songs in praise of the wondrous views and people who nurtured the lands and made it the beauty it was today.

Mermaids and the life under the wide oceans and seas shared the riches of the water with those on land to make both worlds something to gaze upon.

Yet, it all changed when humans found something within them.

Greed and Pride - the recipe to the fall of Magia.

Now, the land of the supernatural isn’t like the ones stated in fairy tales and stories by the Grimm Brothers of Hans Christen Andersen.

It is one where sins are not shunned but encouraged.

Kings and queens interfere with the peace once built by the people to become one of villainy and devilish intentions - pillaging and conquering lands to become stronger and “better”.

The ones labelled “magical” or “not human” were either killed or hidden far away, never to be seen once again.

You were born into this - this world filled with anguish and pain.

You were born to be on the top of the food chain - to rule a twisted and dark country: Thelphs.

“Y/N, don’t writhe in pain. You are next-in-line for the throne - a simple wound like this should not make you fall.”

“Y/N, a leader never hides away from death - they face it and make it their weapon.”

“Hold your sword higher! You need the correct angle to slice through someone cleanly!”

“Do not taint the name of Thelphs, young one - death is not the thing you should be worried of but me.”

“If you don’t win, you are no longer my kin.”

Your father’s words rang in your head as you reached the land of Aldis - the land that never fell to the wants of humanity and shunned it.

Aldis protected the supernatural world. They were the ones who held onto the desire to make Magia what it was many, many years ago.

It was known for the beauty it held - the flowers were said to sing songs every day and every night and the mountains shook the ground once a month to say thank you to their valiant effort in protecting what the world of Magia should be.

And yet here you are; leading a line of men wielding swords and cannons aplenty to kill the very thing the world should be.

“Onward,” you shouted as you and your man marched down the stone roads of Aldis, “Fight, my people - fight for Thelphs, fight for your King!”

You pulled the sword sheathed in your belt and pointed towards the land before you. Soon, an uproar formed from the men behind you as you all marched towards the lines of houses.

You begged your humanity to hide as you wielded the weapon in your hand and slashed through hundreds of innocent people.

You begged your ears to close just for a few hours so that the screams of children could not enter as you pillaged their homes, reaping all their goods.

You felt the ground shake below you, trying its best to stop you from killing any more living things, yet you couldn’t.

A haze formed in front of your eyes, hiding all of your caring sides. You could only feel bloodlust - the need to slaughter and to feel the blood of others on you.

It was no use. Your feet, despite being on a moving floor, were still holding on to the ground, The grip you hand on your sword didn’t loosen and tightened.

If you were meant to be a machine designed to kill, you needed to carry out your job properly to ensure you aren’t thrown away.

The fairies soon came to attack you and your men, but you couldn’t kill it.

It was the first time you saw one that had magical abilities. The beauty it held entranced you.

Their wings were translucent. The light that hit it would change colour thanks to the dust that left its wings, forming somewhat of a halo around them. Their hair reached the very bottom of their legs. It swished back and forth as they flew towards you.

A pang was felt in your heart when you remembered your father’s words.

He said the fairies were ones who never cared about humans and instead mooch humans to live.

They were pests that needed to be killed, according to him.

But they are fighting alongside humans right now to protect their homes.

It was clear your father’s words were far from the truth, yet you needed to follow his wants, his needs.

You begged your limbs to move on their own so that you didn’t feel the piles of flesh go through your blade.

But you couldn’t.

You had to stay conscious through all the pain and misery you were giving to those who didn’t even deserve it.

The mixture of both human and fairy blood soaked your inner shirt, forever staining it.

The once grey tiles that covered the floor of Aldis now are forever painted red, and it was thanks to your orders.

You walked through the mountains of bodies, the blood streaming from them staining your shoes.

This was your fault.

This was all your fault.

You looked up to the sky, praying for the rain to fall and wash away your sins, but you could only see the clear, blue sky staring back at you. The clouds moved slowly through the pale blue background midst hiding the Sun’s blinding light away from you.

Semi, your commander soon stood beside you.

“My liege-”

“I killed them - I killed angel-like fairies. I killed humans, I made the ground shake - literally - and I killed the first-ever fairy I have seen. How did my father do this and still walk around Thelphs with no regrets?”

“Y/N...” Semi said, trying to console you.

But you could only laugh.

This.

This is what it means to be human- to kill those who don’t deserve to be killed.

“I can’t handle this anymore, Semi. I want to end this - all of this - so badly, yet I can’t even fight my own father.”

You turned your face to look at your childhood friend.

He too felt the same way you did - his eyes said everything.

Behind the coffee-coloured eyes hid guilt, sorrow and pain.

His face filled with the dust and smoke from the bombs that your men slung to this land. Yet, some streaks were starting from his eyes to the ends of his chin that were clean. Blood dripped from the top of his forehead down to his lips, leaving half of his face coloured in crimson.

Your thoughts rang clearly after looking at the man before you.

It was no longer about wanting to end it, you had to.

You placed your hand on his shoulder, “I will end this, Semi - this unneeded suffering and killings - I’ll end it all.”

He gave a teary smile to you. “Please, Y/N. I don’t think I can do this until I die.”

You pulled a handkerchief you kept in your pocket and proceeded to wipe the blood off his face.

“I can’t, too. This guilt,” you shook slightly, tears threatening to fall, “This guilt is too much to bear.”

He raised his hand and wiped off the tears.

“My liege, you need to be strong. We’re going to face the people we’ve committed countless sins against. Impersonate the devil - be the evil person you aren’t to protect the name of Thelphs.”

He took the blood-soaked handkerchief from your hand and threw it to the floor, “After all, what but devils would do what we did?”

Your heart broke at the words muttered by the man before you.

He was the furthest thing from a devil.

He was the man who comforted you when you were crying.

He was the man who took your pain and gave you nothing but light and joy.

Yet he stood in front of you - covered in blood both his and others with a strong resolve.

You stared at him, anger flaring in your orbs.

“You are the furthest thing from a devil, Semi Eita. But, we are controlled by one. Innocent ones like you should have never fallen into his tricks.”

He was taken aback by what you said. Tears soon fell from his eyes, sobs that he hid from you all these years came flowing like an endless howl.

He placed his head against the corner of your neck. Your shirt slowly began taking in his tears as they trickled down your neck.

You wrapped your arms around his figure. It was your time to comfort him.

Once he stopped crying, he wiped his tears and gripped your shoulders. “We need to go to the riverbank now.”

You nodded and let Semi lead you to the body of water.

You saw how the people tried to protect themselves from your men. They formed a circle with the younger ones in the middle. The ones on the circumference of the circle gripped on their small blades as they threatened your armoured soldiers.

They cared for each other.

The strong wanted to protect the weak; they were willing to sacrifice their lives so that the legacy of Aldis lived on through the young.

“Bring out the carriages,” you told your men. They immediately nodded and proceeded to follow the orders issued.

You turned to the people you’ve captured. A smile managed to reach your lips as they looked at your figure with fear.

“I do not wish any harm on you. We’re just going to make all of you line up and bring you to Thelphs - that is it,” you finished.

Most of them nodded in fear, yet there was one who refused to listen.

His hands had burned aplenty, instantly telling you that he was an ironsmith. He wasn’t rich - the clothes he wore were tattered, many of the holes were formed through his hours in iron crafting, presumably. Yet, you didn’t doubt his skill in fighting. The way he held the sword spoke more than words. The way his fingers comfortably wrapped around the leather handle made you feel some sort of pride within.

He was a person of valour and determination.

In almost seconds, he lunged in your direction.

You didn’t want to take out your sword. It felt like the man needed to hurt you in some way to make himself feel relaxed.

You gripped on the handle of your sword but didn’t have the heart to pull it out of your sheath.

You closed your eyes, waiting for the small tip of the blade to pierce through your skin. You wanted to feel your skin tear from the man’s undying resolve.

But it never came.

Instead, you heard the clashing of metal against metal.

Semi had rushed to protect you using his shield.

He stared at you, anger visible in his eyes.

“You made me a promise, Y/N. Don’t you dare take the easy way out.”

You could only smile and nod at the ash grey-haired male in front of you.

You teared your gaze from Semi to the man before you.

The disappointment and vengeance in him began to grow. The flame he once held within grew into a blazing fire.

“Why? Why attack us?” he began.

“We did nothing to you. We protected ourselves and helped others who needed us. We never bothered Thelphs - not even once, so why?”

You couldn’t reply - your morals would’ve gotten the best of you.

“Chain them all to each other - take all their weapons or anything sharp. We’re going back to Thelphs as winners, we don’t need the scars to prove it.”

You heard the roars of the men who stood before you. In their eyes, they believed all they’ve done is for the betterment of the world you all lived in.

But you knew what hid behind the tapestry that was woven by your father - destruction.

You bit your lip, not wanting to ruin the cheerful moment your men were having - all you could do was stare at Semi and let your eyes speak of all the pain you were feeling.

From afar, you heard a howl that woke up your numb senses.

Werewolves.

Joy graced the victims of your purge.

Their saviours came, ready to vanquish you and your men.

“They said the future leader of Thelphs was one ruthless and evil miscreant, yet they seem awfully sad for someone who led their troops to glory,” a werewolf said as he emerged from the bush beside you, “They do have a heart, after all.”

You stopped the minute you saw the male that now stood before you.

His red hair framed his sharp-jawed face. His obsidian eyes stared you down, a passion forming within the two of you. His olive skin gleamed under the soft light of the Sun. As he moved, you saw the scars painted on his skin - slashes made by swords and vicious beasts shifted in variations of his peach skin.

The ends of his lips raised as his eyes raised up and down, taking you in slowly.

“Mine.”

He rushed to you, his hand finding its place around your throat. He gripped softly, but strong enough to keep your soldiers on alert.

“Stand back!” you said, urging them to move back.

“Oh? - So my mate actually does care for me, don’t they?” He said, his mouth reaching the base of your neck, “How sweet of you, my love.”

Mate?

“State your business here, werewolf.”

“Well, in the beginning, it was to help the people you’ve captured,” his hand travelled to your waist, pulling you in, “But I think my prey has changed.”

You tried to pry yourself off of him, but you knew, deep inside, you wanted to pull him closer. You wanted to throw the troubles you had, all the roles you were born to play, to cast away the men who viciously fought under your order - all of that, just for a male you have just gazed upon.

The pull, the connection - it was instant. It was present, unrivalled.

Its wants and needs rang so clearly in your head.

But you had a promise to Semi - to the country you loved.

“Let go of me, wolf.”

“You don’t mean that love,” he said as he placed his head in the crook of your neck, “You want me just as much as I want you.”

He placed his hand on your cheek and you instinctively melted into the soft touch of his.

“Look at that,” he whispered, “You have already felt it, too - you know you can’t look back.”

“I can’t just give it up,” you tear.

“Then change it. I’ll stand behind you - change your homeland to what it was; a beacon of hope and freedom,” he smiled as your eyes softened, “This connection has to be proof that you were meant to be the change Thelphs needs, Y/N.”

You stare at his black eyes - more specifically the brown flecks that danced within them. They sang of nothing but determination and want - he wanted you, but he knew you had a want to change your homeland. He knew it all - just by a few minutes of just glancing at you.

He kissed your cheek, warmth spreading by that small action.

Your thoughts ran clear, the blinds holding back your judgement drawn.

“No.”

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softcallofdutyimagines · 3 years

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Off to the Races | AU: Gangsters/Casino | Russel Adler x fem!reader

Summary: You were born for the stage. A natural dancer with all of your youth used for experience, you now find yourself as a showgirl in one of Vegas' top casinos, the SunDowner. Owned by, Russell Adler, a notorious gangster in the underworld who remains undercover to the public eye, business is booming. Doubly so when a mysterious promotion comes your way, launching you to the top stage...

Just when you thought your life couldn't get more interesting, just how crazy will things get when the old gangster handpicks you from one crazy life to another, to keep for himself?

Tags: Gangster Au, age difference

Warnings: This fic has no explicit smut or anything, but WILL contain some overtly sexual themes and suggestive content, strong language, and age difference bc y'all know me 😪 So reader beware!

Y'all thought I was joking with this post huh lol

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

You’d be surprised how much that little mantra has gotten you through.

Tonight, it comes in handy once more.

You scurry into place on stage, surrounded by an array of women around your age in exactly similar costumes. Glittering, skin tight leotards, sky high heels to pop out some ass, sheer mesh sections to show a little skin, and long, billowing feather accents mounted on your back and head for God knows what.

It’s your first night doing a showgirl routine at the infamous SunDowner casino, right here in shiny, shimmering Sin City itself. You’re one of three acts going on at the same time, all on different floors of the building. Your performance is taking place in the middle floor stage where the least amount of people are likely to see you, just in case you turn out to be a waste of a contract.

You take a look around you. The other women seem so confident… That, or they’re damn good at pretending. Makes sense, you think to yourself, everyone and their mother is a damn actor in this town. It’s all an act... When Shakespeare said “All the world’s a stage”, you doubt this is what he had in mind.

Suddenly, the loudspeaker booms, announcing the start of the show. The lights power on over head, blindingly bright as some oldie style song starts up. Something for the oldsters, no doubt. But then again… aren’t you too?

The curtains shoot to the side on the beat and you can feel yourself pulled into auto pilot. You’ve practiced this dance so many times, it’s like second nature by now. So you dance. You parade around, covered in glitter and somehow managing to not break your neck in these heels while you strut around and roll your hips and shake your ass for some drunk old men with all fourteen of the other women beside you doing exactly the same thing.

And while you preform... Somewhere, way way up on the top floor, Russell Adler, owner of this whole joint and a couple city blocks to boot, returns to his office after taking a walk through the gambling pits. He’s caught two hustlers tonight alone, both of which were dealt with… severely.

The Sundowner doesn’t take kindly to thieves, and neither does he.

He dips into a side room within the office space behind a covertly placed door into a soundproof room. Adler switches on the lights and takes a seat in front of a huge stack of tv monitors. He pours himself a glass of whiskey, and watches the live feed from his many surveillance cameras. These are to keep an eye on his dealers and pit bosses rather than the customers, contrary to what most may think.

Can’t be too careful in this line of business, after all.

The room is silent except for the rhythmic tapping of his fingers on the large oak desk. He’s not one for glitz and garish glamour, but he is never without his four favorite rings.

They adorn his right hand, all made of polished platinum. Three are made in the shape of a thin, wound coil with some decorative knurling along the surface in a trapezoidal pattern, getting slightly thicker in size right up to the crown piece on his index finger. The largest ring features the hissing head of a viper with inset eyes made of two black diamonds.

Each ring is easily worth several thousand dollars, and not even close to the most expensive item on his person tonight, let alone in his wardrobe.

His eyes shift from left to right, scanning each screen quickly and judiciously as he taps and sips. For a moment, he lands on the showgirl performance. The quality of entertainment and the establishment itself is every bit as important as making sure everyone else stays in line and on their side of the house rules.

Adler checks the camera marker and notes that these are the new hires. Whatever he sees, he’ll make sure to cut them some slack.

Some.

One girl stumbles a bit, right there on stage. She’s out. Another girl brushes against the one beside her. Out. Then, towards the finale, two girls jump out of sync with the rest. He shakes his head and sighs. Where the fuck are his people getting these girls from?

He takes note of the ones he wants gone, then manages to swallow his frustration and watch the wrap up. Things end to light applause and before the curtain closes he taps a key on his board of switches to pause the feed. He counts up the dancers and take notes of each girl personally.

You know… Throughout that entire shit show, if memory serves, there was only one girl who hit all the marks.

Adler rewinds the feed and focuses on you in particular. He follows your every step and leap. Watching every move, studying every turn…

He was right. Perfect, throughout the whole routine. He reaches for his red phone and calls up the man in charge of the girl shows.

“Who’s the one in position seven, middle stage show?”

There’s a moment of silence and a rustling of paper before the other man replies with your full name, a little bit of your credentials, and the date of your hiring. “Something wrong sir?”

“Yes, send positions three, ten, eight, and twelve home. We have standards, for God’s sake”

“Of course sir-”

“And as for seven… I want her performing top stage next time”

More silence, and then a tentative, “...Yes sir”

Adler clicks the phone into the receiver and takes the last sip of his drink. Hmp, lucky number seven… His gaze lingers on you and your supple body only a moment longer. He swipes his tongue over his bottom lip... then goes back to the rest of his cameras.

He’ll be interested to see if you can rise to the task he’s gifted to you.

When the last of your shows ends, you and the rest of the girls head back to the dressing room one more time tonight to get changed out of these contraptions they have you wearing. A stern looking man bursts into the room unannounced, he calls out four girls and sends them packing with no explanation given. His beady eyes scan the room and land on you, nearly giving you a heart attack as you brace to be cut as well.

“And you, seven… You’re performing in the VIP lounge next week. Don’t fuck this up”

And just like that, he leaves as quickly as he came, slamming the door behind him. The other girls turn to congratulate you, some bitterly, while you’re left reeling.

Playing the top floor, the “VIP lounge” is… huge.

Some girls perform here their whole lives and never get to see it. You’ve even heard that they hire foreign professionals, just to meet up to their standards. Up there you can make tips on top of your salary. Well, only for... private dances or pole shows, but still…

You go home that night wondering how such a thing is even possible, but soon decide to shake it off. Who cares how, all that matters is that the chance has come.

And you plan to rise to the occasion.

You spend your next two days off practicing and limbering up both with the other VIP dancers and on your own. Most of the women keep to themselves and you can tell they’re a bit resentful of your presence.

There’s no question about it, you’re the youngest one here and by default the least experienced. What gives you the right to be instantly promoted like that? If only you yourself knew.

Regardless, your first performance on the top floor is here before you know it. And things go… Fairly well, to be honest.

The routine is complex, but you can tell it’s been slowed down to give you a chance. The stage is bigger, the makeup more colorful, the costumes more revealing, and the lights brighter, and yet... you feel right at home. The nervousness has worn off by now and you’re a rising star on the stage.

After a few nights of proving yourself, you’re even hired for some private dances and given a chance on the pole.

The cash pool you take home gets bigger and bigger every night, and so does your audience.

But, for all the eyes on you, there’s one strange pair that bothers you the most…

You’re working a routine with the other girls tonight. The leading girl is out with a sprained ankle, so tonight you were given the honor to dance as the Primadona, front and center on the stage. You twirl and strut up to the front, the women behind you backing you up and mirroring your moves. They continue to spin and clear space in a geometric formation to give you room as you perform the finishing stunt.

With a deep breath of air, you perform an impressive high kick on the crescendo beat that transitions into a backwards somersault and ends in a split at center stage.

A roar of applause and whistles comes from the crowd of wealthy men and women watching you.

All except one.

You lock eyes with a lone gentleman sitting front and center at a round booth table in the dimly lit room. He takes a long drag on his cigarette and even behind his dark aviators you can feel his eyes on you. As though to confirm your suspicions, he lowers the glasses to the bridge of his nose, exhaling a plume of smoke as he stares directly into your irises.

He brings his cigarette back for another hit, the small flame highlighting a horrible looking scar that goes the length of his cheek, and as the curtain falls, his creased, glowing blue eyes are the last you see of him.

The truth is… Adler’s had his eyes on you ever since that first night on the cameras. Tonight, he came down just to see your show in person. You’re just as good as you are on camera. Perhaps, even better.

No... definitely better.

He’s been reviewing your track record as of late. You took ballet lessons ever since you were just four years old. Won several awards for dances and even some state level beauty pageants. Joined the dance club at your highschool and got a scholarship from it to put you through college. You’re trained classically, but it would appear the only jobs you’ve ever gotten are clubs, bars, and casinos just like this one.

Adler smirks to himself, thinking of your pretty young face as he takes another drag. Maybe you're not as innocent as you seem.

He can work with that...

#SFJKSJSLJ I CAN'T BELIVE I'M DOING THIS 😭😭#SOMEONE COME GET ME #don't read this y'all lmao #black ops cold war #call of duty #russell adler #russell adler x reader #gangster au

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monaisme · 3 years

Text

The Battle

No one had seen Peter staggering through the portal. For what they were walking into, Peter could only guess that whoever was on the other side of things was focussing more on the masses and not on some kid from Queens in a spider-suit.

His eyes widened as he tried to take in the destruction before him. Dr. Strange had said that it had been five years and that they all had to go fight; that this was a battle for the very universe.

Peter had almost thought he was joking-- and then he saw this.

The sky was grey with smoke and fires still burned in the rubble that had once been the compound. Peter was sure he recognized the Asgardian symbol still etched into the grass next to what was left of the long drive that wound its way up to the now decimated building. The labs, the training rooms—his bedroom for all those weekends with Mr. Stark… everything was gone.

He choked back his panic.

Peter had tried to explain to the wizard what was happening before they’d even left Titan, but the abrupt, “Not now, Peter. We have to go,” followed by their arrival? Yeah, he’d never gotten the chance.

And now?

Now he was going to die. He was certain of it.

A wave of nausea washed over him and Peter tried not to visibly hunch over from the pain of his body cramping. Beads of sweat dotted his brow and he’d only walked a matter of feet-- granted, it was from one planet to another, but those portals were closed now and that wasn’t the point. It was happening to him again, and someone needed to know that he couldn’t use his—

“AVENGERS ASSEMBLE!”

The hush that had fallen upon their arrival was broken by Captain America’s battle cry, and the multitude of people, aliens, and allies were suddenly surging forward in an attack like nothing Peter could ever have imagined.

He did his best to keep up. Peter was an Avenger too, after all, though he wasn’t quite sure how effective he’d be with the asthma that was now acting up with vengeance. Already he was sure it would kill him before any of Thanos’s minions could.

He felt his muscles straining—maybe even rippling as he pushed himself onward, weaving through the clusters of fighting, trying to find some way to help. A tripping up here or the retrieval of a weapon there was all he could manage but he was grateful that he could at least do that.

He paused, doubled over and trying to catch his breath. He tried squinting through the chaos as he gasped-- hoped he’d see Iron Man red through the insanity—and then he did!

Iron Man was there, firing repulsor blast after repulsor blast at the enemy and for a brief second, Peter was reminded of why Mr. Stark was his favourite Avenger. Then a mammoth of an alien came up from behind, throwing his mentor to the ground and preparing to strike him down.

Peter moved without a thought. He ignored the ache in his lungs and the pain that was amplifying through his body again as he threw his arm out and thwipped at the creature’s ankles. Peter jerked at the taut webbing with everything he could muster to no avail. He was too weak. His only hope had been...

It took a step closer, lifting its weapon to aim and then... well, it tried.

Even with the explosions and blasts around them, Peter could feel the earth beneath him shudder at the impact of its body falling to the ground and he struggled to stay upright. It looked at the bindings around its ankles, seemingly confused by what could have confined it... not that it mattered. The big-small guy from Berlin was suddenly stepping over him and crushing their enemy.

If he hadn’t been so shocked by how that had played out, it might have been one of the coolest things Peter had ever seen.

He took a second to take in the scene, the people around him, and then Mr. Stark. Air not moving through lungs right be damned, there he was, and Peter could finally get the help that he needed. “Hey! Holy cow! You will not believe what’s going on,” He paused to try and catch his breath. “You remember when we were in space? And I got all dusty? Well,” he fought to hide the wheeze. “I woke up and you were gone but Dr. Strange was there, right?” Peter’s head was spinning, but he needed to get all of this out so that Mr. Stark understood. “He was like, it’s been five years. C’mon, they need us and he started doing the yellow sparkling thing he does all the time and, oh.” Mr. Stark rushed forward and grasped his shoulders. “What are you doing?” He didn’t understand.

And his mentor, the man he’d secretly thought of as a father-figure for months—or was it really years?—pulled him into a hug.

“Oh, this is nice.” Peter melted in the embrace, feeling safer than he could remember in a long time.

Their reunion didn’t last long enough. Peter pulled back a little and opened his mouth to tell Mr. Stark what was going on when the battle encroached again and the two were separated.

It was a blur. Mr. Stark went left and Peter went right—he’d lost sight of the Iron Man suit within seconds, and still no one knew. And then, if things hadn’t already been crazy enough, the Black Panther and that Squidward guy were in a battle for that damned gauntlet... and Peter was there in the thick of it.

Searing pain shot through his legs and spine so he crouched down, trying to relieve even a fraction of it, then the ground rose up beneath him. He’d barely managed to keep his balance when the Black Panther tossed the gauntlet at Peter directly and continued on with his fight.

He couldn’t hide the shock on his face. He’d caught it and even managed to keep hold of it while the earth below him dropped, leaving him winded and spread eagle on the ground. “Aw, shit,” he coughed out as he tried to catch his breath again. He just couldn’t catch a break.

And then he noticed the silence, again.

Every eye was on him.

In a burst of genius, Peter webbed the gauntlet to his chest and shouted out, “Activate Instant Kill!” Karen complied and within a blink, his red-lensed mask was back in place and six vibranium legs extended from their hiding place. Peter uttered thanks for Mr. Stark and his ability to create something so ridiculously intuitive. The legs brought him back up to standing, but he staggered as he tried to find his footing. The suit had been incredible to use on Titan, but that was before his powers had—

The crowd of enemies swarmed.

He hadn’t moved quickly enough. His reflexes were fighting with his new limitations, leaving him with exactly zero ability to fight back against the dogpile currently punching and kicking on top of him. He felt a couple of his ribs break and he collapsed from the sheer weight on top of him as he curled around their prize. It hurt so much more for his body’s rebellion. His six legs slashed and stabbed at his attackers giving him a hell’s chance of trying to claw his way out. “Help.” Peter choked out, “Somebody help.”

He could barely hear Captain America over his comms, “Hey, Queens! Heads up!” Like a man drowning at sea, he raised his hand up above the fray and webbed hold of Thor’s hammer handle as it flew past.

He couldn’t be sure if he heard or felt the pop of his shoulder dislocating as the hammer’s momentum pulled him from the fray. All he knew was that it hurt like nothing he’d ever experienced in his life. It took everything he had left—and it didn’t feel like much—to not release. Instead, Peter grabbed onto his web with his good hand, brushed against the gauntlet still attached to him, and prayed that his strength would hold long enough to get him far enough away.

A blast from a ship overhead messed that plan up right away as it sliced through the webbing and he plummeted to the ground. He was sure he was going to die in that very moment and closed his eyes, bracing himself for an impact that never came. Someone in an Iron Man-like suit caught him by his dislocated arm and flung Peter back up into the air.

He was sure he’d screamed, even as his vision whited out from the pain, and he was sure he was airborne, even as his head had barely cleared and the wind whipped past him. That he’d landed on something that was rising and dropping in a rhythm unlike anything he could place was confusing, even as his mind began to muddle—though he thought that might be because of the fever.

Dammit! The fever had been the worst last time.

He worked to focus on his surroundings—couldn’t, and then he was falling again.

No one caught him this time.

He came to with a start and a laser focus. The earth around him was exploding and it didn’t matter that he couldn’t breathe and he couldn’t see and that his muscles were screaming out in agony and that his nerves were on fire and that he was so damned hot—all that mattered was that he do his part, ‘cuz Spider-Man was an Avenger. He couldn’t move though, it was too much for all of the weapon fire, save for closing his eyes, curling himself protectively around that damned gauntlet and waiting for the end.

Please, let this end.

And then it did.

If Peter had known to open his eyes, he’d have seen a bright light streaking through the clouds and then cut straight through the ship that had been raining down hellfire, even with his poor vision. He’d have seen the ship darken and then tilt, even as it floated above the battlefield, then crash into the hoards of Thanos’s alien soldiers, decimating their numbers. He’d have seen the streak of light slow, and then descend to exactly where he lay.

But he kept his eyes closed, hoped it would make him invisible...

Someone tapped on his shoulder.

He gasped at the shock of the touch and his eyes flew open, though he had to blink a few times to clear his vision. The dirt and dust were still settling and the grit was irritating his eyes something awful. But then he could see—crouching on the ground before him, a woman, all glow and smile.

He could have wept with relief. An ally.

He staggered as he climbed to his feet. Black spots danced before his eyes, but he fought against them, tried to take a deep breath, and then fought again the pain of his transformation and battle injuries. “Hi,” he rasped out. “Peter Parker.”

Her smile disappeared and her brow furrowed in concern. “Hey, Peter Parker. You got something for me?”

His ears started ringing then, and the earth tipped just a little to the left. He couldn’t understand, “What?”

He thought she was looking at him a little weird, which was okay, ‘cuz Peter was a little weird, but then she stepped towards him, cautious. “Peter? Can I have the gauntlet now?”

His eyelids fluttered and he could see the blackness edging in at the corner of his vision, but he knew he had to fight it. She needed something from him and it was... was...

“Peter?”

He swayed.

“Peter, I’m gonna lay you down, buddy. Okay?”

He nodded dumbly.

She placed a hand on his good shoulder for comfort, he thought, but then she was laying him down in the dirt.”

“Stark!” He heard her bark out to no one. “Something’s wrong with your kid. Get to my position now!”

He closed his eyes as the woman stood up and starting firing at something over wherever because it didn’t matter anymore. He was just gonna rest for a minute and closed his eyes and—his head lolled to the side.

“Peter!” A hand tapped against his cheek. “This is not the time for checkin’ out, kiddo. Wakey, wakey!” The hand tapped again.

“Stark, I need to get the gauntlet over to the quantum tunnel.” Weapons fire blasted over him. “Is there any way you can get that thing off of him for me?” More blasting. “I didn’t want to damage him or the suit anymore, in case...”

The tapping turned to light slaps and Peter tried to swat it away. “Nghhh.” He turned his head away.

“Hey! Peter! C’mon, kid. I need you to listen to me.”

Mr. Stark?

“We need you to switch your web settings to the solvent. I don’t know if it’s your suit or mine, but a suit is damaged and FRIDAY can’t connect to get Karen to make the switch.” He slapped again. “Pete, we need the gauntlet and can’t get it off without burning you. Are you hearing me?”

More shots and then an explosion off in the distance.

Mr. Stark muttered a “shit.” The slaps started to hurt. “We gotta do this now, kiddo. Please wake up.”

It was like he was just waiting for someone to ask nicely. His eyes widened and he gulped in air like he’d been underwater. He looked around, trying to get his bearings. “Wha’s goin’ on?” He asked, using the last of that breath.

“Thank goodness! Pete, your web solvent. Activate it. We need to get the gauntlet off of you and away, okay? Can you do that, buddy?”

Peter looked at Mr. Stark, who’d definitely been hurt since they’d last seen each other, and then at the woman standing as protector over them. He thought he understood, nodded a yes to Mr. Stark, and then whispered, “Karen, web solvent.” He knew that the change had happened. Karen never let him down—and then he moved his arm to spray and release... or tried.

Mr. Stark saw what he was doing and saw what the problem was right away. “Kid, the shooter’s damaged. You’ll need to use your other...” Mr. Stark must’ve finally noticed his other arm—and the obvious malformation at Peter’s still dislocated shoulder. “Oh. Shit.”

Even for the everything going on inside of and around him, Peter’s brain cleared enough to mutter, “Just move it and double tap.”

Another explosion, this one closer than the last one, went off and the woman looked at Mr. Stark, announced that she’d be right back, and flew off into the chaos.

It was just the two of them.

Mr. Stark looked lost as he shook his head. “I don’t want to hurt you, kid, but we don’t have time...” He gripped Peter’s limp arm and closed his eyes, like he was praying. “I’m so sorry for this.”

“I’s okay, Mr. Stark,” he coughed out. “Fix it later, ‘kay?”

Mr. Stark teared up a little, then nodded. “Yeah, kid. We’ll definitely be fixing this.” He lifted Peter’s arm and manoeuvred it so he could access the webshooters. He looked back into Peter’s eyes and said, “I’ll be quick.”

And with a nod from Peter, Mr. Stark pressed down on the webshooter and covered the gauntlet—finally releasing it from its webbed confines.

The world spun as Peter grunted through the pain of having his arm manipulated. The grunting led to coughing and, as Tony lifted the gauntlet off of Peter’s chest, the coughing became uncontrollable and turned into choking.

“Is he okay?”

The woman had returned.

“I’ve got him. Just deal with that,” Mr. Stark commanded as he handed her the gauntlet and the woman flew off.

If Peter never saw it again...

He suddenly gagged as he struggled to find a rhythm, but he couldn’t. The gagging turned to dry heaving and he could barely inhale. Peter started to panic.

Mr. Stark was right beside, but moved—shifting Peter onto his side and ignoring the lighting pain in his arm altogether as he moved him into the recovery position.

His throat tightened and then his body purged. Bile and Titan’s dust filled his throat and mouth as he tried to expel it, but he was so weak and so tired...

A hand slammed against his back, “Get it out, Peter. C’mon! Out!”

It helped, as he tried to empty himself of that other planet, and Peter thought that maybe he’d be okay until—

Muscles rippled once more and his entire body burned from the inside, out. His senses amplified it all as he could hear everything from the cries of people dying on the battlefield to crackling of flames still not burned out. Beyond the vomit and Mr. Stark’s blood, the smell of dust and ash filled his nose and he choked again as the wind sandblasted his face.

He tried to cry out.

Mr. Stark pressed firm against his back, “I’ve got you, Peter. I’m here.” He whispered, and he leaned over the boy to sweep the vomit from his mouth. “We’ll fix this, kid. I promise.”

And Peter was just grateful that he wasn’t going to die alone.

The fight was dizzying in its intensity, so he closed his eyes to the onslaught of visual stimuli. His timing was impeccable, as a flash of light bright enough to burn through Peter’s eyelids burst out from somewhere—Peter couldn’t focus on it for the pain of the overload. He writhed as though tortured.

And then the wind caught again—this time it carried with it a different ash, one he’d smelled on Titan and that he couldn’t bear to smell again. He clawed at the ground, tried to get away from the inevitable... tried to get away from the hurt and darkness and moaning and wailing and emptiness...

And then Peter finally succumbed to the nothing.

* * * * * *

“—eter! Wake up! C’mon, ki—“

* * * * * *

“—incredible! His DNA is literally rewriting its—“

* * * * * *

“The overload must have been just—“

* * * * * *

“Hey, Peter Parker, you’re pretty badass considering—“

* * * * * *

“—on his side! Bruce, grab the compresses again, now! Dammit, he’s seiz—“

* * * * * *

“—May. I know. I wish you could be here, too, but as soon as he wakes up we’ll give you a call and set up a video chat, okay?” A pause. “Yes, May, I’ll tell him that you love him.” A snort laugh. “Yes, May. I’ll give him a big kiss and tell him that he’s grounded.” Another pause. “I know, May. Do you need anything? I can have—“

* * * * * *

“—eter? Hey, kid, are you coming back to us now? I’ve waited a long time to see you, bud, and you’re making me nuts here. I can’t do another five, ‘kay?”

* * * * * *

“—don’t wake him up, Pepper. I’m telling you. Dr. Cho did some tests and it looks like he’s coming back to us. We just need him to—I don’t know? Finish cooking?”

Ms. Potts snorted. “Cute, Tony. I’m just worried that you aren’t getting the rest that you need and with everything going on now—“

“Hey, hey, hey! You know you don’t need to worry about me. I’m fine—and tired is like a perpetual state of being for me—even now that I’ve been domesticated.”

Mr. Stark and Ms. Potts laughed quietly, and then Peter was sure he could hear the sound of kissing. He groaned. Seriously? He was dying and his mentor was making out with his fiancée?

“Peter?”

He inhaled deep, trying to wake up a little more before answering, and noticed the mask on his face. He tried to bring his hand up to remove it but it caught on a—a sling? “Wha-?”

A hand pressed his arm back to his chest and adjusted the mask. “Try to be still. And no touching that, too, Pete. Dr. Cho says you need this for a little bit longer, okay?”

“Mis-er Stark?” He finally managed to open his eyes and tried to understand the monitors and equipment in the low-lit room. “Wha’ happened?” He pushed out.

“We had another go at Thanos, Roo, and this time, we won.” Mr. Stark replied, but he looked so sad—

“Mis-er Stark?” Peter remembered the battle, remembered seeing Mr. Stark bruised and bleeding. “Are you o—“ Peter’s words cut off as a jolt of pain lanced through legs and he almost cried out. He caught himself though, and tried to keep going.

Mr. Stark stopped him. “Hey, I’m okay—just worried about you right now.” He ran his fingers through Peter’s hair, pressed his hand against his still fevered forehead, “I am so sorry that you have to go through this again, Spider-Man.”

Peter didn’t know what to say to that, so he shrugged, wincing as he jostled his still bad shoulder. “It’s okay.” He mumbled. “Couldn’t be helped...”

Mr. Stark’s sadness morphed to tortured. “No, I guess it couldn’t... I’m still so sorry.”

Peter could feel the exhaustion trying to claim him again, but he was missing something. “Uhhh- is somethin’ else goin’ on?” He looked between Mr. Stark and Ms. Potts, who had stepped back a few steps to give the two heroes a moment alone.

“Everything is fine, Peter.” Ms. Potts piped in, looking far less melancholy than Mr. Stark. “Tony is just upset that you’re having such a rough time of it, but all’s right in the end and...” she looked at her watch as she dragged out her answer then looked at Mr. Stark, “I believe we’ve probably delayed telling Dr. Cho that you’re awake long enough, so if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to inform one of the nurses.” She smiled at the boy in the bed, rubbed at his calf affectionately as she walked by the bed, and then stepped out of the room.

It was getting difficult to keep his eyes open. “Mis-er Stark?”

The man leaned forward and pressed a tender, paternal kiss to Peter’s forehead. “Why don’t you rest for now, sweetheart. I’ll tell Dr. Cho that you fell back to sleep and we’ll talk when you’re more awake, okay?”

The smile Peter offered up was kind of goofy. “Okay—but...” Peter looked around the room. “Can you stay with me?”

Mr. Stark knew how much Peter hated the med bay— always stayed, “You know I will, Petey. I’ll always be there for you.”

Peter muttered a quick, “Thanks,” and closed his eyes.

If he’d been more alert, he would have noted the underlying tone that Mr. Stark had used... would have realized that the man was making a promise bigger than an evening.

But he didn’t, and it didn’t take long for the boy to give in to his exhaustion. He’d slept through the last stretch of his transformation the first time—and this time seemed no different, save for the injuries he’d suffered, and even they’d heal soon enough.

And as he slept, he missed the prayer that Mr. Stark offered to whatever deity would listen—that Peter would know just how much he meant it. He would be there for him, no matter what.

#fanfiction #Irondad and Spiderson #Avengers: Endgame #Non-compliant #ao3fic #OBlossom

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