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berryunho · 2 years

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THE ANSWER: XII

Kim Hongjoong doesn’t like the word ‘cult.’ He prefers ‘sect.’ pairing: ateez x fem reader genre: cult au, thriller, angst check warnings on AO3

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Seonghwa’s explanation does nothing to help the anxiety now growing within you. You continue staring at his side profile as he makes his way toward the stairs at the end of the hall.

The first time you had seen Seonghwa, he had honestly been too imposing and intimidating for you to really take in his features. From your angle in his arms, however, there’s not much else to take in. As much as you don’t want to admit it, he’s quite handsome. His side profile is strong in the way he holds his face, but soft in its features. You can almost imagine how beautiful he must look laughing, but your mind stops you. This man wants you dead. Why are you fantasizing about his smile?

You’re happy he doesn’t take his eyes off of his path, because you just know he would make some snide comment if he caught you staring. After your realization, you try and focus your eyes anywhere other than his face. Unfortunately, there isn’t that much to take in.

You are thankful to be out of that stifling room after probably over 12 hours, but, truly, these hallways could do with some decoration. If your boss was here…

The walk through the halls continues in silence. For a moment, you debate trying to get Seonghwa to drop you. You probably could do it, but where would you go after? You couldn’t exactly escape him. He’d simply be able to snatch you again, and probably wouldn’t be as gentle with his grasp.

Plus, do you really want to put this off? You hadn’t really thought about it, but it makes sense that Hongjoong would want to talk to you. Away from everyone, after you’ve caught the drift. That’s not to say that you’re not nervous, because you are. With every step that Seonghwa takes closer to Hongjoong, the anxiety builds in your stomach.

What’s going to happen? Will he only speak to you? Threaten you again? Punish you for trying to run? While he’s not the most physically intimidating man you’ve ever met, you don’t doubt he could do some serious damage with a weapon. You remember the look in his eyes this morning in the chapel and it nearly makes you shudder. Hongjoong could definitely be creepy, and you wouldn’t put physical violence past him.

“Seonghwa,” you start, your voice coming out quieter than you had wanted. “Can I use the bathroom first?”

It was the first thing that came to mind. You might not be able to escape, but at least you’d be able to stall a little bit. Despite just thinking to yourself that it would probably be better to not put it off, the anxiety building in your stomach is starting to tell you otherwise.

Seonghwa stops walking, turning his head to face you in his arms. Oh God, he looks mad. “Are you fucking serious?” His voice is much louder than yours, bouncing off the walls of the silent hallway. He’s staring at you with so much anger you could think you had just personally insulted his mother.

You quickly nod your head, just wanting him to stop looking at you. He rolls his eyes, letting out a sigh before veering down one of the corridors to the nearest bathroom. He sets you down in front of the door, but doesn’t let go of your arm.

“What do you need to do?” Seonghwa holds onto you, preventing you from reaching out for the door.

“Excuse me?” Your eyes go wide at his question. “That’s way too personal.”

He sighs. “You are so sensitive, my God.” He looks around the hallway like he’s expecting a live studio audience to agree with him. Seonghwa plasters a fake smile onto his face, glaring down at you. “Princess, how long is this going to take?”

You shake your arm in his grasp, “I’m not gonna answer that, just let me go.”

Seonghwa’s smile falls, and he rolls his eyes once more. “Fine,” he drops your arm, “don’t keep Hongjoong waiting.”

You barely hear the last part, because you’re opening the bathroom door and shuffling in as soon as he releases you. Quickly shutting and locking the door, the lights automatically turn on. Well what the hell do you do now?

You catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror, and realize how ridiculous you look in your pajamas. God, no wonder Seonghwa was teasing you. You should’ve asked to change. You step closer to the mirror, trying to fix any aspects of your appearance that seem out of place. Thankfully, you actually look pretty decent, considering the circumstances.

Pacing around the small bathroom for another couple minutes, you decide that you’re probably stretching your luck a bit. You quickly use the bathroom, wash your hands, and then open the door back to the hallway.

You do expect Seonghwa when you open the door, but you don’t expect him to be millimeters away from you, which is where he ends up being. He startles you and you stumble backwards into the bathroom, jumping away from him. He lets out a single, dry laugh at your reaction before gesturing you back to him with his fingers.

You oblige, stepping towards him and the door. His hand wraps around your upper arm again, and he pulls you back to the hallway. Thankfully, he doesn’t make any move to pick you up again. You don’t want to risk it, so you keep up his pace as he retains his grip on you.

The two of you remain in silence, making your way down the stairs and through the subsequent halls. Once you’re to the bottom floor, entering the lobby, you wonder where you’ll be meeting Hongjoong. The cafeteria? The chapel? Some sort of spooky torture room you’ve yet to see?

Your question is somewhat answered soon, as Seonghwa yanks you to the front door with him. When he opens the door, his grip becomes even tighter. It’s starting to make your arm throb, but you’d rather not show Seonghwa any signs of weakness.

He pulls you outside, and you quickly try to take in your surroundings. It’s now night time, and you realize how dark it is on the grounds. The only sources of illumination are the couple sconces on the front of each building, but they provide very little light for the rest of the field. The moon is bright enough to keep you from stumbling over uneven ground, and you take a look up to recognize the phase. A waning gibbous.

Looking back around, you recognize that your car is still nowhere to be found. You wonder when they could have possibly moved it without you realizing. During breakfast? That was the only time when you had been entirely distracted, with Mingi’s outburst and all.

… Wait. Was Mingi…?

No. Nope. You cut off the thought before it can even finish itself. There is absolutely no way. Mingi would never. Even if he’s been brainwashed and abused, he would never do something like that. But he had invited you here… Nope! No. You are not going to think about that right now. For now, you are perfectly content with your answer that Mingi would never knowingly put or keep you in danger.

Your question about your destination is answered rather quickly, as Seonghwa makes on the path toward the chapel. Ick. So far, the chapel is definitely the creepiest place you’ve seen, and you are not too keen on returning. The way Hongjoong acted this morning in there… you do not want a repeat of the show. Honestly, he seems almost like a different person when he’s in that building.

Not that he’s not creepy either way, he just gains a different aura.

When you and Seonghwa reach the chapel, you nearly trip over the steps due to how fast Seonghwa is going up them. He clears them in milliseconds, acting like he’s seen water in a desert. You stumble up behind him as he uses his free hand to open one of the doors. He then shoves you in in front of him, finally letting go of you.

You bring your hand up to rub the spot on your arm where he had been gripping. You lift your arm a bit, frowning when you see the red mark left on your skin. Did he really have reason to think you would try and esca- actually, don’t answer that question.

After taking in the damage, you remember where you are. You hear Seonghwa pulling the doors closed behind you as you survey the room again. It looks pretty much the same as this morning, except now there are quite a few candles lit. They reside on each end of every pew, creating a rather nice, soft glow.

Your eyes trail along the aisle of candles, following them to the back of the chapel. Hongjoong actually isn’t the first thing you notice.

Rather, it’s the hourglass. In the candle light, the metal attains a sort of other-worldly glow. Reflections of light dance on its surface, causing sparkles that keep you from staring in one place for too long. It’s mesmerizing.

The only reason you look away is because of Seonghwa. He’s come to stand directly behind you, putting his hand on the small of your back. He not-so-gently pushes you down the aisle, towards where you now notice Hongjoong.

He’s smiling again. Does he ever not have that creepy ass smile on his face? It makes him look so much more deranged, and you wonder if he does it on purpose. Of course, he’s sitting on the same throne from earlier, wearing the same weird matching outfit with Seonghwa. The candle light waving over his face gives him an almost sickly appearance, creating shadows and highlights where they shouldn’t be.

Once Seonghwa has gotten you to the edge of the stage, he moves his hand to your shoulder. “Kneel.”

Your gaze at Hongjoong breaks to look over at Seonghwa. Did he seriously just tell you to kneel? “I’m not kneeling you psych-'' you're cut off by a sharp shove on your shoulders. At the same time, Seonghwa brings his knee up to meet the back of yours, forcing your legs to give out under you.

Your arms instinctively fly out to catch you, stopping the fall from hurting too badly. Now on your knees, you stare up at Seonghwa and vow to yourself that you’ll get him back for this, somehow, someday. You try to shove yourself off of the ground, but Seonghwa’s hands are quick to stop you. He moves behind you and grabs both of your shoulders, locking his arms to keep you down.

On your knees in front of Hongjoong, you finally realize the vulnerability of your situation. Here you are, alone with two men that have individually threatened your life. Two men that have authority positions in a cult. You have no means of protecting yourself, and no one with any capacity to help you in the moment knows where you are. Anything could happen.

With Seonghwa behind you, you have no one to glare at except for Hongjoong himself. He sure seems to be enjoying the show, his cocky little smile having grown wider. His eyes flit up to Seonghwa and they have some sort of exchange outside of your realm of understanding.

“Hi, (Y/n).” When Hongjoong looks back to you, he finally speaks. “Cute pajamas.” He glances over you, and you suddenly feel much too exposed.

You blink up at him. That’s how he’s going to start this? You don’t answer him, opting to continue glaring up at him.

Hongjoong chuckles when he realizes you’re not going to respond and leans forward in his seat. “Well, I’m sure you have questions.” He turns his palms up to the air, waving them around a bit. “Ask away.”

Your plain expression breaks. You stop glaring at him and your confusion grows on your face. What the hell does he want you to ask him and why? About a million questions come to mind. They jumble over themselves, creating one large mess in your brain. You stare up at Hongjoong, your mind trying to grasp onto a single thread. Your biggest question is why, but you can’t very well just say that one word. Instead, you ask the next best thing.

“What do you want with me?”

Hongjoong leans back again, looking away to consider your question. He brings a hand up to rest under his chin, his face scrunching up as he answers. “That’s a pretty broad question.”

“Is Mingi okay?”

Now Hongjoong looks confused. “Why wouldn’t he be?” You honestly don’t know why you asked it either, and Hongjoong gives you no further answer after his follow up question.

For a split second, you try to not ask your next question, but end up spitting it out anyways. “What the hell is going on here?”

“Are you religious, (Y/n)?” Hongjoong raises his eyebrows, knitting his fingers together underneath his chin. His inflection is almost joking, but you can tell that his question is serious.

You think about your answer, trying to decide what will make Hongjoong react with the least hostility. Will he be offended if you say no? Will he be offended if you say yes? Truthfully, you’re not religious. Not that you have anything against sane religion, of course; religion is simply not something that has ever been a big part of your life.

You decide to go with the truth. “I’m not.”

Hongjoong smiles. “I don’t suppose you read any of The Answer?” He looks at you with anticipation, and you have a feeling he’ll like your answer regardless. This must’ve been the question he was waiting to ask.

“Of course not.”

Hongjoong nods, his smile growing. “I figured as much, it normally takes a bit of a push,” he waves a hand, pushing the air in front of him. “Since you seem particularly uninterested, let me give you the gist of it.”

You can’t help your expression as it turns into one of disgust. The last thing on planet earth that you want right now is to have Hongjoong explain his little cult to you. As you’re about to open your mouth to give him a stern ‘no thank you,’ he starts speaking, stunning you into silence with just his first sentence.

“Cutting to the chase, I’m a prophet.” Your jaw goes slack as you stare up at him. No fucking way is he serious right now. “God speaks to me and I pass on his messages here.”

You can’t help it. You start laughing. As your body starts to shake with your laughter, Seonghwa’s grip on your shoulders increases. You hardly notice, however, too caught up in the hilarity of the situation in front of you. You bring a hand up to cover your mouth, trying to stifle the noises. “I’m sorry but,” a fit of giggles cuts you off. “But you’re joking, right?” Obviously, it does make sense to you. Not the prophet part, but Hongjoong claiming to be one. But it’s so funny to hear it said out loud. It almost makes you hysterical.

Instead of Hongjoong answering, Seonghwa does. “Does it look like he’s joking?” He has to raise his voice to be heard over you, and it almost is enough to make you stop laughing entirely. Almost.

A few giggles continue to escape as you have to move your hands to your eyes to swipe tears of laughter away. At this point, they might be tears of hysteria, but you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. You chance a glance up at Hongjoong, who is no longer smiling at you. Rather, he’s staring at you with a look of such plain indifference that you bite your lip to stop any further laughter.

“I don’t care whether you believe me or not,” he says, his expression unchanging, “but you will respect me.” For perhaps the first time, his voice is lacking the lilt of arrogance that you’ve come to associate with him. It’s plain and hard. He doesn’t make an attempt to charm you. “God commands it.”

The tone of his voice stops you from laughing again, though that last sentence nearly gets you. This man is off his rocker.

Despite wanting to give him a piece of your mind, you can’t think of a response. You are simply too dumbfounded by the level of insanity. Instead, you continue staring up at him, waiting for whatever he says next.

“I’ve been through this countless times, (Y/n), and every single one of you has come to praise my name.” Hongjoong continues staring with steely indifference. The tone of his voice growing only harder by the second. “I expect you to be no different. Whether it takes a week or a year, you’ll bend. They always do.”

His newest statement leaves you with even more questions. Is every single person here a kidnapping victim? Did everyone have a similar situation to the one that you are in right now? Christ, did Mingi go through this?

It doesn’t even seem possible. It’s hard to imagine that every person you’ve seen, every person you met, was once a strong-minded, free-thinking individual. There must be personalities that have a predisposition to brainwashing. You refuse to believe that they were all in the same position as you.

You have to decide now if you’re trying to survive, or if you’re trying to be a pain in Hongjoong’s side. If you make some snide comment now, you can’t imagine he will take it lightly. But, if you suddenly start acting entirely different, will he notice? Does he want you to disobey him?

“Let me just get this straight then.” You can’t stop your curiosity. “You, Hongjoong, are a prophet.” You speak slowly and carefully, trying to not sound too offensive. “God speaks to you... and you made a cult out of these messages. You’ve kidnapped, what, forty, fifty people... and forced them to live on a farm and worship you.” So much for that plan. “Is that right?”

Hongjoong’s expression finally cracks. A smile casts along his face, evidently liking your reply. “That’s quite right, with two minor exceptions.” His smile only grows bigger. “We are a sect, not a cult. And we don’t kidnap people, we save them.”

“Plus,” Seonghwa pipes up behind you, “A lot of them come willingly.” His voice is low, but his grip on your shoulders loosens as you feel him bend down behind you. He brings his head down to nearly rest on your right shoulder, his face ghosting along the side of your head. You turn your head slightly toward him, your eyes darting over his face as he starts smiling. “Like our dear Mingi.”

He whispers it, but it’s certainly loud enough to hear. Seonghwa starts laughing as your eyes betray your shock. Hongjoong joins him, clearly enjoying your reaction as much as Seonghwa.

Well, guess that answers that question. But why in the ever loving fuck would Mingi come here willingly? What made him think that dropping everything and joining a cult was the only way to go? If he had gone willingly, why hadn’t he brought you with him?

Maybe he’s lying. No, he has to be lying.

Their laughter dies down as your face becomes resolved. “You’re lying,” you whisper, staring at the ground. Whether you really believe what you’ve said or not, you don’t know. You just know that you can’t deal with Seonghwa and Hongjoong’s laughter ringing in your ears, bouncing off of the walls of the chapel.

“What makes you think that?” Seonghwa asks from beside you, his face still next to yours. You peel your eyes off of the floor to look up at Hongjoong. He’s looking right back at you with exaggerated curiosity. His eyes are wide, his eyebrows raised, with just a hint of a smile.

You don’t know how to answer Seonghwa’s question. You don’t even know if you truly disbelieve him. You quickly try to think of something that would disprove Seonghwa, searching the edges of your mind for something that would mean Mingi had been forced to join. “If Mingi came willingly,” you turn your face back toward Seonghwa, “he would have brought me, too.”

You watch as a smile cracks along Seonghwa’s face once more. “Do we tell her?” He asks, looking up to Hongjoong. Your eyes snap up to Hongjoong, who is now trying to contain his smile for once. He’s not doing a very good job at it, either.

Tell you what? Certainly something you don’t want to hear. What could there be, pertaining to Mingi’s disappearance, that you wouldn’t want to hear? You search for the answer for only a second. Just as your mind makes the deduction on its own, you see Hongjoong nod and hear Seonghwa’s reply.

“He was trying to get away from you.”

You don’t really process the way that Hongjoong and Seonghwa start laughing again. Rather, your mind spins with the revelation. Of course, that would be the only thing that would make sense. If Mingi had come willingly and not brought you with, that must mean that he hadn’t wanted you to come. He didn’t want to have you with him. He didn’t want you.

Why? What had you done? You’ve racked your mind for months, wondering why Mingi had left. Wondering why he hadn’t told you. Wondering what you could have done differently. You hadn’t been able to find a single explanation in the months past, and you can’t imagine that you’ll be able to find one now. You have absolutely no recollection of doing anything to Mingi that could have made him want to leave you.

If Mingi had come here to get away from you, then does that make it your fault that he’s here, in the clutches of a cult? Does it make it your fault that you’re also in this situation? All the more reason you have to get him out of here.

But, then again, that begs the question. Would Mingi even want your help? Why had he invited you if he wanted to stay away from you? Is he actually happy to see you? Had he invited you because he felt ready for you to be in his life again? Or is this just some plot to recruit more members for Hongjoong?

You want to believe that Seonghwa is lying to you, but, for whatever reason, you know that he’s not. That Mingi had some reason, even if it was so insignificant that you couldn’t remember it. There was no other explanation. He would have had no other reason to leave without telling you anything about it.

This realization almost sends you reeling, but the enormity of the situation before you keeps you somewhat in your right mind. You can’t afford to cry now, you can’t afford to lose your cool or even begin to comprehend what has just been revealed. At hand, the most important thing is to get out of this room before Hongjoong or Seonghwa causes you physical harm (or, at least, any more physical harm). The mental wound is enough.

You need to get out of this place.

“Hongjoong,” you whisper, not taking your eyes off of the floor in front of you. You don’t want to see his face as he hears you beg. “Please, just let me go.” You feel wetness appear at your eyes for what feels like the upteenth time today, already knowing what his answer will be. So much for not crying again.

You blink and watch as a tear escapes your eye, falling to the floor. Without looking up, you see Seonghwa rise from your side. He stands before walking behind you, retaking his spot directly behind you. You hear Hongjoong stand, his shoes clicking down the stairs before you. In the silence of the room, the various medals hanging off of his jacket clink together and make sounds that seem impossibly loud.

You don’t look up until his shoes appear in your line of sight, and he stops directly before you. Your angle on the floor makes him tower over you, blocking your entire line of sight until everything is him. The candles glow in your peripheral vision, making it seem like Hongjoong himself has a golden aura. The light reflecting off of the hourglass behind him has the same effect, and Hongjoong gains a halo above you. His face is cast in shadow, but you can still see the sneer plastered on his face.

Hongjoong bends his knees before collapsing onto them in front of you. His face goes slack as he mirrors your position, folding his legs underneath himself before raising his hands up to you.

For a split second, you worry he’s going to grab your neck. Instead, he rests his hands on either side of your face, locking your head into position. His hands are burning hot, so hot you could swear he must have a fever. You instinctively try to jerk your face out of his hands, but he strengthens his grip and is able to keep you in place.

“Don’t cry.” Hongjoong coos to you as he wipes your tears with his thumbs, nearly identically to the way Mingi had only a day earlier. Has it really only been a day? More tears begin to brim over your eyes only to be immediately wiped by Hongjoong’s searing touch. “God is here for you.”

You don’t know if he means metaphorically or literally, if he’s referring to himself or not. You can’t find it in you to formulate a response for him, instead opting to cry harder. Sobs begin to heave out of your chest and, to your horror, Hongjoong pulls your face closer to his.

He angles your head downward, pressing a kiss to your forehead. His lips are just as hot as his hands, if not hotter. The sensation burns, and you’re quickly scrambling to pull away from him once more. He lets you pull away, but he doesn’t let you get far. Wiping your tears one last time, he lets go of your face and wraps his arms around your body, tugging you close to him.

You process his heat before the fact that he’s hugging you. Wrapped in his arms, his warmth is nearly overwhelming. Anywhere he touches, your skin itches to retract away. But he’s hugging you. Hongjoong, a supposed Prophet, is crushing you to his chest. Hongjoong, cult leader extraordinaire, attempting to… comfort you.

You continue to shake in his arms, mentally begging for the moment to be over. He’s so hot. Even in spots where there are layers of clothing, his touch is burning. Your face is pressed uncomfortably into his shoulder, his long hair tickling against your forehead. Your arms hang limp at your sides and Hongjoong squeezes you tighter, and you pray that he drops you soon.

If there is a God, he must hear your prayers. Hongjoong releases his grip on you shortly after, retaking his place on his knees in front of you. He completely lets you go this time, and you revel in the feeling of the air touching your skin where his body had been. Your tears cease almost immediately; you’re not wanting to give Hongjoong another reason to get that close to you ever again.

You paw at your cheeks to wipe away the remainder of any of your tears. Hongjoong grins, watching you intently as he rises back to his feet. You maintain eye contact with him and he resumes his position, until he breaks it to look back at Seonghwa.

After a brief glance, Seonghwa’s hands leave your shoulders for the second time. Hongjoong reconnects your eyes before extending both of his hands to you. You blankly stare at his palms before realizing that he means for you to take them.

As little as you want to touch him again, you decide you’d rather have Hongjoong gently help you up rather than have Seonghwa yank on you again. You lift your arms, placing your hands into his and starting to unfold your legs from beneath you. He gently lifts you, pulling up on your arms until you’re standing before him once more.

He doesn’t let go of your hands. “Is there anything else you would like to discuss?” He’s not smiling, but he sounds genuine enough.

The only question you can think to ask slips out. “What are you going to do to me?” Your voice cracks halfway through the sentence, making you sound more afraid than you feel. Honestly, fear is not the emotion at the forefront of your mind. Its sadness, betrayal.

Hongjoong chuckles. He brings your hands up so that they’re resting between the two of you, at about stomach height. He adjusts his fingers so that he can reach the backs of your hands with his thumbs, and rubs them as he had rubbed your face. “Wouldn’t a surprise be more fun?” His response is nothing you want.

You shake your head, not able to stop yourself. Hongjoong’s smile grows wider as you pull your hands out of his, leaving his hands floating in the air, cradling something that no longer remains. The dancing light of the candles make his hands shrink and grow, and his picture before you is almost grotesque. He almost entirely blocks the hourglass from his position, but he still doesn’t block its reflected light. While he is in shadow, he glows.

“Seonghwa,” Hongjoong nods, using his hands to gesture you away.

Seonghwa’s grip returns on your upper arm, but you don’t look away from Hongjoong. Seonghwa yanks you around, but you turn to keep your eyes on Hongjoong. You feel too vulnerable, too exposed. He watches as Seonghwa pulls you toward the door, bringing a hand up to wave to you.

“Goodnight, (Y/n),” he calls from the end of the room, “sleep well. You have a busy few days ahead of you.”

Seonghwa opens one of the doors as the two of you approach, and the cool night air blasts into the room. He pulls you outside, leaving the door to swing shut on its own behind you. You watch in slow motion as Hongjoong is blocked by the door, inch by inch. The door slams shut, but you can still see his afterimage on the white paint.

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#ateez #ateez ff #ateez angst #ateez series #ateez x reader #kim hongjoong x reader #park seonghwa x reader #jeong yunho x reader #kang yeosang x reader #choi san x reader #song mingi x reader #jung wooyoung x reader #choi jongho x reader #the answer #update

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denimbex1986 · 8 months

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“Genius is no guarantee of wisdom,” says government official Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. It could be the blockbuster’s banner statement. Since the release of Nolan’s thrilling, bombastic film, the culture has been caught in the firestorm about how to explain the personality of the eloquent, esoteric J. Robert Oppenheimer and his creation of the first and only people-destroying atomic weapon to be used against civilians. Where Hollywood traffics in Oppenheimer’s ambiguity as a historical character, two small but potent nonfiction forebears ask a more pointed question: what is the responsibility of scientists to their societies?

The Day After Trinity (1981) and The Strangest Dream (2008) evacuate the mythical tropes of the tortured genius biopic that Hollywood loves to rehearse in films like The Imitation Game, Hawking, and A Beautiful Mind. Now enjoying a renaissance, the films are neither unforgiving nor hardline, but offer sharper moral clarity to the Oppenheimer dilemma, presenting a more complex (and condemning) portrait of the father of the atomic bomb: a patriot, philosopher-king, skilled public administrator, scientific collaborator with military and government, emotional naif, egotist, and polyglot.

Nolan’s story arcs towards Oppenheimer losing his naivete upon realizing that he has given humanity the power to destroy itself. Designed to wrap around each filmgoer’s own worldview and politics, the film is as politically open-ended as you might expect from a major blockbuster. In his press tour, Nolan articulated a more explicitly conservative stance that chimes both with the Great Man theory of history (another biopic favorite) and the Cold War military doctrine that justified the development and use of atomic arsenals against civilians.

“Is there a parallel universe in which it wasn’t him, but it was somebody else and that would’ve happened?” Nolan said in the New York Times. “Quite possibly. That’s the argument for diminishing his importance in history. But that’s an assumption that history is made simply by movements of society and not by individuals. It’s a very philosophical debate…. he’s still the most important man because the bomb would’ve stopped war forever. We haven’t had a world war since 1945 based on the threat of mutual assured destruction.”

That’s also the idea behind the official policy of the nuclear superpowers: deterrence. Horror, in other words, was necessary to prevent even greater horror. The very same doublethink led to Harry Truman’s honorary degree, conferred for ending the war.

How reluctant was Oppie? In Jon Else’s The Day After Trinity, a documentary originally made for public television in 1980, Oppenheimer’s collaborators deliver ambivalent, guilty testimony to a static, non-judgmental camera. Screening on the Criterion Channel, Else’s doc points to the great pleasure its subject took in being appointed the leader of the grandiose bomb project, with the cosmic job title of “Coordinator of Rapid Rupture.” The lens pans patiently across grainy, grayscale photographs that have the natural air of science fiction; the film feels more of a piece with Chris Marker’s La Jetee (1962) than a typical historical documentary. After all, Oppenheimer was not just the enabler of the weapons that could annihilate us all, but of the high-stakes hallmarks of modern spectacle itself. The awe-inspiring images of mushroom clouds over Trinity, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki are now instantly recognizable in the core visual grammar of contemporary entertainment and media. It’s hard to imagine an idea better suited to Nolan’s exalted, maximalist esthetic and his stories of obsessive male protagonists pressurized within towering patriarchal systems of power.

Oppenheimer positions the atomic bomb as the creation of a brilliant, creative personality. But The Day After Trinity revels in the administrative scale of the Los Alamos project necessary to make a mechanism to trigger, in a millionth of a second, a violent chain reaction with a flare brighter than a hundred suns. A walled city of six thousand staff, at a cost of $56 million. Seven scientific divisions: theoretical physics, experimental physics, ordinance, explosives, bomb physics, chemistry, and metallurgy. All of America’s industrial might and scientific innovation connected in this secret lab with its billions of dollars of military investment.

“Somehow Oppenheimer put this thing together. He was the conductor of this orchestra. Somehow he created this fantastic esprit. It was just the most marvelous time of their lives,” says Freeman Dyson, a rather eccentric theoretical physicist who became Oppie’s colleague at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. “That was the time when the big change in his life occurred. It must have been during that time that the dream somehow got hold of him, of really producing a nuclear weapon.”

In this vision of the A-bomb narrative, Dyson posits that Oppie’s aims switched from finding out “the deep secrets of nature” to producing “a mechanism that works. It was a different problem, and he completely changed to fit the new role.” We begin to see more clearly a portrait of an outsider with a wild desire to be at the center. All the work the whiz kids were doing over the years was always designed to contribute to the war. (All the films remove Oppie’s more demonstrably radical tendencies, his belief in a world government, for instance, which he mentioned offhandedly in the New York Review of Books in 1966.)

The closest we get to Oppenheimer himself is his pale-eyed, doppelganger brother, Frank, who gives the impression of a visionary living in a purely abstract realm. He stammers a little when he speaks of the moment when he and Oppie heard on the radio of their great bomb in action. “Thank God it wasn’t a dud… thank God it worked… Up to then, I don’t think we’d really, I’d really, thought about all those flattened people.” He still seems stunned. If nothing else, Frank gives weight to the storytelling trope of scientists as hyperintelligent but flakey space cadets at a remove from the humanity of it all. “Treating humans as matter,” as Los Alamos collaborator Hans Bethe puts it appallingly. Another contributing scientist says he vomited and lay down in depression. “I remember being just ill,” he says. “Just sick.”

The doc swirls with clips accumulated from Los Alamos Scientific Laboratories, National Atomic Museum, American Institute of Physics, and Fox and NBC newsreels, while Paul Free’s authoritative narration hovers like an omniscient voice from the depths of the Cold War itself. Then, there is Oppie: a figure of stricken elegance in his rakish pork pie hat. Typical of documentaries constructed in a postmodern style, what it all means is never explicated. Ambiguity presides over clarity.

Most directive is Dyson’s testimony. “He made this alliance with the United States Army and the person of General Groves who gave him undreamed-of resources, huge armies of people, and as much money as he could possibly spend in order to do physics on the grand scale,” Dyson says with his flashlight perceptiveness. “We are still living with it. Once you sell your soul to the devil, there’s no going back on it.” Los Alamos, in this counternarrative, was not just an ivory tower but an irresistible paradise for genius-level scientists simply interested in new discoveries and mega-gadgets.

Dyson is a dubious fellow to emerge as the truthteller, given the inconsistency of his own legacy. His unorthodox theories are worthy of their own Nolan-esque treatment. He advocated growing genetically modified trees on comets, so that they might land on other planets and create human-supporting atmospheres, and eventually became a climate change denier based on his distrust of mathematical models. But his intelligence is irrefutable, and his distance from the Manhattan Project gives him a guiltless perspective and authority absent in Oppie’s other colleagues. Dyson, a greater antagonist than can be found in any mere Marvel movie, diagnoses Oppie as the self-induced victim of a “Faustian bargain.”

“Why did the bomb get dropped?” Dyson asks, his tie a little too big, his combover a little too combed over. “It was almost inevitable. Simply because all the bureaucratic apparatus existed at that time to do it. The Air Force was ready and waiting… The whole machinery was ready.”

Dyson also refutes the refrain of Oppenheimer’s responsibility for the catastrophe. “It was no one’s fault that the bomb was dropped. As usual, the reason it was dropped was that nobody had the courage or the foresight to say no.” Dyson pauses to let this sink in, then looks down and wobbles his head tragically. “Certainly not Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer gave his consent in a certain sense. He was on a committee that advised the Secretary of War, and that committee did not take any kind of a stand against dropping the bomb.” This measured oral history is fatal to the view of Oppie as a gentle humanist.

Dorothy McKibben, who ran the Manhattan Project’s office, chimes in with crystal clarity: “I don’t think they would have developed that [bomb] to show at a garden party. I think they were going to do it.” In archival footage, General Leslie Groves plays the role of plainspoken pragmatist: “It would have come out, sooner or later, at a Congressional hearing, if nowhere else, just when we could’ve dropped the bomb if we didn’t use it. And then knowing American politics, you know as well as I do, if there had been an election fought on the basis of every mother whose son was killed after such-and-such a date, the blood is on the hands of the President.”

Through these testimonies, the convention of the conflicted scientist and the myth of an A-bomb created in self-defense give way to a mantra of winning the war, and winning quickly. Valuing American lives over other lives. Avoiding a bloody invasion of the Japanese mainland. Months before Hiroshima, orders had been given to leave several Japanese cities untouched, to provide virgin targets where the impact of the new bomb could be clearly seen. Afterwards, a scientific team from the US was sent to Japan to study the effects. Footage rolls, in The Day After Trinity, of news clips of hospitalized burn victims.

In films on the Manhattan Project, questions of conscience are commonly seen through the assenting viewpoint—that of the scientists who continued to work on the bomb, even after Hitler’s defeat. One essential perspective is obscured, black-holed in subterfuge, even. Physicist and European refugee Joseph Rotblat made crucial discoveries in the fission process, and went on to specialize in nuclear fallout. He moved to Los Alamos in 1944 but defected from the project on grounds of conscience upon learning that the Nazis could not build such a bomb. He was the only scientist to turn his back.

“If my work is going to be applied, I would like myself to decide how it is applied,” Rotblat says in the 2008 Canadian documentary The Strangest Dream. Streaming on the National Film Board of Canada’s platform, the film traces his renunciation of A-bomb development and his role in the Pugwash Conferences, where scientists and statesmen gathered to discuss the reversal of nuclear proliferation. The film renders a fairly straight treatment of its quiet subject, with the visually rich backing of a vertiginous collage of disparate forms, including spooky Cold-War era footage and clips of the Trinity mushroom cloud. Oppie is not in the film, but the narrative takes place in the fissures he helped wrench open; he lurks like an ever-present ghost behind the character of Rotblat, who stands as his angelic nemesis as he tries to transform physics into a humanitarian project. Like Oppenheimer, Rotblat was also accused of espionage, but he was eventually awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for his contributions to the disarmament campaign.

Notably, Rotblat is entirely absent from Oppenheimer, despite being described as a brilliantly offbeat individual—a “mad Polish scientist”—by a former student in The Strangest Dream. It’s a curious historical erasure and a missed chance for a dramatic clash. Then again, perhaps Rotblat is too steady and untragic, incorruptible and unmemeable for his own big moment, let alone the blockbuster treatment. Oppie’s genius wasn’t just in his Faustian bargain but in the way that he spoke and the way he held himself, quoting Hindu philosophy and smoking till the end of time. I suppose film culture is more interested in the flawed, tortured luminary than the staunch, principled dissenter or the morally engaged scientist.

Prosecuting the melancholic drama of the ingenuous mastermind requires substantial historical selectivity. Most cinema narratives hew to the oft-cited rationale for the A-bomb’s development: its function as a deterrent to a Nazi explosive. But in his essay “Leaving the Bomb Project,” Rotblat wrote, “Groves said that, of course, the real purpose in making the bomb was to subdue the Soviets… Until then I had thought that our work was to prevent a Nazi victory, and now I was told that the weapon we were preparing was intended for use against the people who were making extreme sacrifices for that very aim.” With more than a dash of elegiac melancholy, the working thesis of The Strangest Dream is that Rotblat’s moral strength insulated him against Oppie-style tragedy.

Insofar as the The Strangest Dream and The Day After Trinity position the Manhattan Project as an unholy alliance of physics and the openly violent arm of the state, they do so via the absent presence of Oppenheimer, who, flush with government cash, personifies the uneasy collision of science and military. Today’s ventures in AI offer the same science-ethics conundrum, and we don’t seem to be any closer to resolving it than at the moment of Oppenheimer’s mythic quandary. Looking at the images of the Los Alamos exertions, you can almost faintly hear the words of today’s STEM bros: disruption, innovation, brilliance. Wondrous and diabolical, the A-bomb is presented in these documentaries as the freakish outcome of public-bureaucratic entrepreneurialism. (They are weaker on the tangled history of superpower competition and atomic technology.) It all depends, of course, on what humans do with the technology we develop.

Given what we know about capitalist society at present, things aren’t exactly looking up. Just a decade after The Day After Trinity, the Cold War victory lap was being run at the box office. A new, end-of-history generation of studio filmmakers was writing a euphoric, Fukuyama-esque version of reality into pop-culture lore: in blockbusters like Independence Day (1996), The Core (2003), and Armageddon (1998), American pluck saves humanity from wholesale destruction; anxiety surrounding US dominance over the international order is undetectable, and the US military is either prominent or necessary. Before them all, The Day After Trinity suggested that technology’s triumph is the very crux of the problem.

Today, Oppenheimer reifies a political crisis—superpower competition for atomic arsenal—as a conundrum of personality, tech, and naive genius, even as it centers the wild fraternity of science, military, and government vital to create the A-bomb. But the political arrangement of power and resources seems like more of an objective, inevitable fact about the world in The Day After Trinity and The Strangest Dream. If there’s such a thing as sober, mournful spectacle, these films manifest it.

Oppenheimer is long gone, but his legacy—the capacity of a self-destroying humanity, and the late-capitalist spectacle of that mushroom cloud’s bright flash of light—lingers. He did not sign the Einstein-Russell Manifesto against nuclear war. He never apologized for his role in bringing the bomb to life. Atomic technology is now standard. The world’s nuclear powers currently possess an estimated 12,512 active warheads. More than enough to wipe out the planet.'

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sebstan2020 · 2 years

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The Rise of Hydra

Chapter 15

Pairings: Bucky Barnes X Original Female Character

Warnings: Violence, Dom/Sub, Kidnapping, Hostage, Gun Violence, Corruption Kink, Forced Behaviour, Manipulation, Light Bondage, Captive

Summary: Being the President’s daughter hasn’t always been easy. Constantly having someone over your shoulder, rarely getting a minutes privacy except for being in bedroom and it wasn’t any different for Violet. Not to mention working as a junior doctor which was stressful enough. But things were about to turn more difficult for her. With Hydra rising once again, planning to take over the country and rule it the way they wanted it to be, Violet finds herself caught between the war and a hostage to their secret weapon, the Winter Soldier.

Violet woke the following morning, her eyes tired and puffy from crying all night. She had cried herself to sleep, non-stop thinking about her family. Would she ever see them again? She hadn’t even seen her father before she was taken and now, she might not ever see him again. It was scary how real this was getting, how Hydra well and truly would be in control of the country, running it, their way and she couldn’t imagine what they had planned. But she knew that innocent people’s lives were on the line, people that probably weren’t even a threat to Hydra, but they couldn’t take chances, they needed everyone eliminated to prevent any revolutions.

The moment Violet woke up, she was dreading today. Bucky had said they were going to be moving somewhere else but wouldn’t tell her the details. It could only mean something bad was going to happen. He was being very secretive with her and keeping her out of the loop. Violet sat up in bed, groaning at the kink in her back from the uncomfortable sleep she had endured every night even though the bed wasn’t that uncomfortable. But sleeping in an unfamiliar place and being held captive was going to give anyone a bad sleep.

Seconds later, the scuff of boots outside the room made her head look up and the door opening made her flinch. Bucky stood, dressed in his gear like always and stepped inside. Violet found herself scooting back into the bars of the headboard and the duvet scrunching into her lap. She noticed he was carrying a bowl and spoon and as he made eye contact with her, he smirked.

“Good morning” he said, and Violet swallowed.

“Morning” she murmured back, and he proceeded to the desk, placing the bowl down.

“Brought you some breakfast, you’re going to need it” he said, and Violet felt her stomach flip.

“Why” she asked with fear in her voice. What was so important about having breakfast today.

“Well, we have a long journey ahead of us and with what’s to come next you need a full stomach” he strolled forwards to her, and Violet blinked in silence. What was to come? He still wasn’t giving away any answers and it scared Violet. Before she could ask any other questions, he turned to talk out the room, calling back to her.

“Eat up, we leave in 15” and with that he shut the door. Violet sighed and rubbed her face with her hands, taking a calming breath.

Violet had debated whether to put a stand to this. She thought about not even leaving the bed and refusing to do as he asked her. But twice now she had been disarmed and beaten by him, thrown to the floor like a doll and lost the fight. The breakfast was calling her name and she imagined if she didn’t eat it, whatever was coming for her later would be much worse if she hadn’t eaten. She didn’t want to be manipulated by this man’s words, but it seemed to be working. So, like a good girl, she obeyed.

She ate her breakfast, weary of how much time she had until they made their move. She changed into some comfy clothes, a pair of black leggings, a white top, and a hoodie she found in the draws along with the trainers. Having no idea what was meeting her today, she wanted clothes that could mean she was comfortable as possible and could run if if she had the chance to escape which she was praying she did. The porridge she had been given was bland and she worried it wasn’t going to fill her up but at least she had done as he had asked. The last thing she needed was him forcing it down her throat.

It must have been exactly fifteen minutes when Bucky came back in. She was stood beside the bed, having been pacing and panicking, when he came over. he noticed the empty bowl of porridge on the desk, and he smiled.

“Good girl looks like you can follow orders” he laughed softly under his breath and Violet glared at him.

“Not like I have much of a choice” she gritted back, and Bucky wrapped his hand around the middle of the chain securing her wrists together, yanking it back so he pulled Violet into him, her chest hitting his and she gasped as she stared up at him.

“No, you don’t” he whispered and without taking his eyes off her, he unlocked the cuffs. Her wrists felt cold as they dropped to the floor with a clunk, finally able to move her arms about and ease the cramps in her upper arms. She rubbed her raw skin, her thumb skimming over the bumps and scratches from where the leather had been rubbing. Suddenly her arm was seized in his metal hand, his grip so tight it could nearly break her arm and he tugged her along like a rag doll.

Violet stumbled along the way, trying to keep up with his big strides and they reached the main part of the house. It was familiar to her from when she escaped but instead of going to the front door like she thought, he tugged her to the back door which led out from the side of the house. The fresh air of the early morning was cold and sent a shiver down her spine. The birds in the trees tweeted, the sound squeaking in her ear drums and the grass crunched under their footsteps.

As Bucky pulled her into the garden of the back of the safe house, her eyes widened at what was in front. A helicopter sat in the middle of the grass, large and black with long blades that could slice you in half if you got too near. She seemed to slow down her steps as she shock flushed through her.

‘Well, that would have been useful for my escape’ she thought to herself. If only she had gone this way she could have been out of here by now. Well not really, she didn’t even know how to fly a helicopter and the chances of her surviving doing that were slim so perhaps it would be the best idea.

Bucky pulled her over to the helicopter, flinging the door open and shoving her inside. There were two seats and she stumbled into one of them, tripping over the step and falling into the leather.

“Put this on” he handed her the seatbelts that were coming from all angles. She looked up with hesitation but obeyed quickly, bringing one strap over one shoulder, and clicking it in and then the other, finishing with the two straps across her waist. The moment the buckle clicked holding all the belts in place, her wrists were snagged by him. She yelled out in surprise and watched as he secured her wrists in a pair of handcuffs, thicker than normal and heavy. The click of the lock sent a chill through her body, and he dropped her hands on her lap.

“Just encase you get any ideas” he threatened but she could see the smile in his lips as he said it. Violet huffed and Bucky climbed out of the helicopter, storming his way back to the house. Violet sighed loudly, slamming her head in the back of the leather seat, it slightly moving as she did, and she stared down at her hands. Would she ever not be handcuffed or was this going to be a permanent thing.

The handcuffs didn’t look like any normal ones like the police use. They were a thick metal, wrapping snuggly around her thin wrists and a thick bar in between them keeping them at a strict length. There was no way she’d be getting out of these and no way she’d be able to cause a disruption. She looked around the helicopter, taking in the interior and scanned to see anything of use to her but there wasn’t much. She was regretting not shooting him from before and making a run for it again.

Bucky came back a moment later, a bag thrown over his shoulder and he threw it into the helicopter and slumped down in his seat. He secured his door, pulling up the latch and then reached over Violet, his arm brushing her and his body leaning over hers as he secured her door. Violet sucked in a breath as he did and when he moved back, he looked her in the eyes, his icy blue orbs intimidating her, that smirk still written on his lips.

Bucky had to admit he enjoyed seeing her like this, handcuffed and at his disposal, completely under his control. she had nowhere to run and now she had to endure sitting next to him. He switched on the helicopter, the blades whirring above and whipping through the air, a thud with every turn. He flipped some switches, a high-powered noise tuning up and he grabbed a hold of the console, slowly pulling them to lift the helicopter up.

Only when the helicopter left the ground did Violet being to realise this was happening. She had no way of escaping now and she stared down at the safe house, realisation that she truly had no way of getting home. The chances of someone finding her now were nearly impossible she thought, and she stared down sadly into her lap as the helicopter took off, flying above the forest and the safehouse disappearing in sight.

Chapter 16

Hey so I hope you liked this chapter, where do you think Bucky is taking her and what is he going to do, let me know in the comments and don’t forget to leave a like and reblog

#sebastian stan #sebastian stan fanfiction #bucky barnes #Bucky Barnes dom #Bucky Barnes fanficiton #Bucky Barnes x female character #james bucky barnes #james buchanan barnes #the winter soldier #winter soldier

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thefrankensteinianreview · 2 years

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Bioethics

“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

- Dr. Ian Malcolm. Jurassic Park, 1993.

Ethics – the moral principles and philosophies that guide us through our life – are core sets of rules and ideals that allow us as humans to exist in a society. Without them, we would be nothing more than base animals living off of instinct and impulse, committing despicable acts like murder without a second thought. Just as important as ethics' role in our day to day lives is their role in science. Ethical principles prevent scientists from conducting research, and performing experiments, that are negligent, harmful, or malicious. In other words, one main purpose of ethical principles is to keep people safe.

Unfortunately, many times throughout history, scientists have forgotten, overlooked, or even flat-out ignored ethics in favor of satiating their curiosity. Whenever this happens, and morals are disregarded, you get catastrophes like that of the Stanford prison experiment, an experiment conducted in 1971 about the psychology of prison life. The experimenters brought in a large group of volunteers and split them into two groups: guards and prisoners. The guards (which had been let into the experiment despite psychological screenings showing high amounts of abusive and aggressive qualities and behavior) began treating the prisoners more and more brutally. The head proctor, Phillip Zimbardo, let this go on for nearly a week before a psychologist evaluating the conditions of the prisoners raised ethical concerns and the experiment was shut down.

Incidents like the Stanford prison experiment demonstrate the necessity for ethics to be taken seriously in science and how dangerous ambition can be in these fields. Many men, just like Phillip, have pushed beyond the boundaries of what is safe or acceptable in the pursuit of knowledge. In fact, ambition and ethics are often at odds with each other, as ambition tries to escape the restrictions of ethics, while ethical principles keep ambition in check and prevent disaster. Thus, it is even more imperative that ethics be treasured highly in a place that is filled with the most ambitious people on the planet, to keep them from doing things that might violate every natural right and law we hold dear.

In the quote above, taken from Jurassic Park, character Dr. Ian Malcolm criticizes John Hammond for bending the natural order of the world (bringing back the dinosaurs) and pursuing a dangerous technology so that he could satisfy his greed and ambition. Similar worries are shared by many in the modern age, with concerns arising from the rapid unchecked growth and advancement in technology, causing many to wonder whether all technology is really worth pursuing. It is true that this is not a new topic of debate, and discussions have spanned over a hundred years about issues like the potential effects of biological weapons, nuclear bombs, and even less harmful technologies like automobiles. However, concerns about technology have been rapidly gaining more traction recently with many new hot-topic debates springing up. One of the primary topics these days is AI (artificial intelligence), but there are many others that get similar attention such as abortion, genetic editing, and alternative forms of energy. Ethics is often at the center of many of these debates, with ideologies and beliefs being argued and examined all the time.

WC:556

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grieverled-moved · 1 year

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[ DEBATE ] our muses are arguing because sender is worried and overprotective of receiver, but when they get up in each other’s faces they end kissing and groping at each other.

He's made his decision.

He knows it's not one everyone will stand behind, even though he knows they'd understand, would support him sooner or later - but it's one he's spent many years thinking on. The final push to take the plunge, to wander over the edge he'd been eyeing for so long to finally dive over the edge . . . he feels he's ready to leave the safe comfort of Radiant Gardens. With their world restored . . . with everything repaired, fixed up & no longer in need of being cared for, with the people finally safe & well protected within their walls with the threat of Heartless much more manageable a task, hardly an issue these days - what else did he have as far as his purpose went?

Just sitting around, waiting for Cloud & his other friends to return from whatever adventures lured them back off World time & time again?

He was always a warrior at heart, someone who craved the fresh sting of battle, the clash of steel & the scent of freshly cast magic. He was raised to fight, been forced to adapt to survive, & though he was content with the peace he'd found & had a hand in helping cultivate, he was starting to grow far too restless, too antsy in his idle waiting.

He just couldn't do it any longer. If the others were out there proving they could find those from their own lost World's, their own pasts, why couldn't he go give it a shot with a search of his own?

Word seems to have travel fast, the sight of the man stocking up on supplies, on weapons, curatives, as many maps as he could purchase as he gathered what logs he still kept from his own personal Gummi-ship travels. He has a few ideas on the places he wants to search first. What once starts as dread quickly begins to blossom into excitement, anticipation. He's excited at the chance to spread his wings & be productive again. Hope kindles within his chest, & as he finishes the last of his preparations, all that's left to do is pack his own personal belongings.

He doesn't need much, just clothing, spare armour & boots, bags for carrying the items he'd be taking off in his on world explorations - & as he sits on the bed in his room, holding his old jacket in his hands, thumbing along the aged, yellowed fur from his short jacket . . . he feels the first pang of something sad echoing about.

But he doesn't have time to process it much more than that as Cloud storms in, door swinging open, a shout of his name preceding it as wild teal quickly find his own. He moves fast, crowding in, though his eyes do eventually break the emotionally brimmed stare to look over the room & all it's scattered contents. They linger on the travel case for Lionheart, an old blade he hadn't used in years, before they finally drift back over to snag on his own sights. There's so many emotions simmering in brightly flaring depths. Panic is among the strongest, worry not far behind followed by pained confusion.

Leon expects it. He knows he's the last person people would think would leave 'home' once it's been found again. Fixed up & made safe.

It doesn't take long for an argument to break loose, any attempts made to keep it civil, composed & steady failing as it seems Cloud's all too focused on the fact Leon's leaving, the fear smothering any other attempts to be logical, to explain it wasn't for forever being utterly lost on him. He loses his temper, he narrows his eyes in a warning glare, breathing in through his nose with a scowl in place when the back & forth suddenly takes a turn into it being too dangerous out there. Indignation rises, bubbling free as he moves to shoulder past the former mercenary, that need for space, for fresh air urgent. But even that's not an option when he feels himself stop at the hands suddenly reaching his way, holding him steady & preventing him from leaving.

When he gives a jerking tug to try free himself with an irritated growl, Cloud's fingers curl tighter, refusing to stubbornly budge & let him storm off. The gun-blader goes to swivel, to tell the frustrating blonde off & demand he let him go, but finds his bared snarl quickly caught once he turns. Like a switch that's been flipped, he lets out another low grumble, that earlier annoyance still present, but altogether quick to soothe as he melts into the other's hold. He wants to stay angry with the other, but he can't bring himself to be once he realizes just why Cloud'd been so on edge.

They really were too similar at times . . .

At Cloud’s core, he was protective of those he grew to care for. A sentiment he mirrors completely, understands better than anyone else. It takes him a moment, but he moves to return the touches, drawing back from the swordsman, pressing a kiss just along the corner of his mouth before moving to rest his forehead against his. Weaving his hands beneath Cloud's arms, they come to a curled rest along the curve of his lower back, nails scratching lightly along the material of Cloud's shirt as he huffs softly.

Arching a brow at the man, he wills a faint smile to his lips, an attempt to reassure the other as he peers into mako pools.

“You know I’ll always come back right? That it won’t be for forever?”

➤ @defiant-ex-soldiers [ ; ] SOME MORE SMUTTY MEMES .

#╰┈➤ IN CHARACTER.#DEFIANTEXSOLDIERS #❏ 〔 DEFIANTEXSOLDIERS 〕 : Got a long way to go & a long memory. Been searching for an answer always just so out of reach.#➤ 𝐆𝐔𝐀𝐑𝐃𝐄𝐃 𝐇𝐄𝐀𝐑𝐓𝐒. ◆ KINGDOM HEARTS VERSE #Love in my arms & the sun in my eyes. You carry my fears as the heavens set fire. [ ; ] LEON / CLOUD ➤〔 DEFIANTEXSOLDIERS 〕#╰┈➤ CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS. / NOT SO SAFE DESIRES.#( … ) // moved this over but nothing happens yet sinceeee I wanted to set the plot a bit more ><

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pix-writes · 2 years

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Knowing The Rules: 1. Don’t wander off alone

Din Djarin x F!Reader

Rating: E (explicit, 18+ | MDNI)

Summary: Din and the reader stop on a remote jungle moon to capture a difficult bounty before returning to the ring world of Glavis, but end up having to suspend their mission when the reader comes across strange and potentially dangerous plants. (before the events of ep5 of TBOBF, no spoilers; this will be part of a series, but can be read as a stand-alone)

AO3 LINK

Words: 4.4k

Warnings & tags: sex pollen, and therefore dubcon (consent is given & the pollen doesn’t affect judgement that much, but if not you’re thing, scroll on!), smut, oral, overstimulation, aftercare, no use of y/n

A/N: this fic is just shameless smut, which turned out a lot more romantic than my first draft notes for it, so, enjoy!

Whilst you knew the mandalorian more closely than anyone else, it didn’t take a genius to know that he was heartbroken, not over his creed so much as by leaving his foundling. At that point you had been friends (though, wishing to be regarded more than that as the three of you had travelled across the galaxy together for so long), since Din had taken you in and saved you from the mundanity of your old job.

Now in Grogu’s absence, your burgeoning relationship with Din had time to flourish, once you had both realised that neither of you wanted another separation, it had only brought you together more strongly. The sadness of his absence was still there, though, bringing tears up into your eyes and you had resolved to make up for it in any small way, as Din had landed you on this remote jungle moon. He had come back with wildflowers for you once, after a long hunt, and you had gotten the idea to reciprocate, since there must be flowers among all this green, right?

And now you are here. Swinging by a foot, top folding over your waist. You had reached for a brilliant looking plant when you had stumbled over a root, rolling down the steep decline in the path you had seen Din descend earlier that day. Your body being -luckily- caught by the loops of vines prevented you from hitting the matted jungle floor. Your hands being ready to break your fall, had merely brushed the strange, bright flowering plants beneath causing their flowery heads to burst with spores. You sighed, hoping whatever it was, it didn’t stain.

Just as you awkwardly raised up your arms to your waist to feel for the vibroblade attached to your belt and release yourself, you heard familiar footsteps approach and flopped back down again with a groan.

You heard the soft call of your name, a question in the tone.

Glancing over from your upside-down vantage point you saw the shining armour of your mandalorian, a hand on his cocked hip as he looked down at you. “I see staying on the ship went well.”

“I never said I would stay on the ship.” You replied tactfully, feeling the blood rushing to your hands and head as you struggled to lean up once more.

“Need any help with that?”

“I just need my-”

“Oh, this?” Said Mando, brandishing your weapon, which had been discarded on the ground near his boot.

“Yes, you’ve had your fun!” He chuckled. “Get me down – please?”

“Since you ask so nicely-” Cutting carefully and with quick reflexes he was able to catch you, setting you on your feet within mere seconds. Dusting yourself of the forest debris, although some of the pollen seemed to be sticking to you. Time to see if your hired ship’s ‘fresher was any good, you supposed.

“I wanted to collect some flowers for you and lost my footing.” You pouted as you picked up the datapad that had crushed the bunch of flowers that you’d been collecting.

His hand squeezed your shoulder thumb rubbing over the fabric there. “Sweet girl” was all he said, the inflection giving you butterflies. You smiled inwardly as you realised you might’ve reduced him to speechlessness (once again). It was a sort-of running ‘game’ for you both, though Din constantly debated on the rules and what ‘counted’. (You still asserted you were in the lead.)

But then, Din uttered your name. “-I appreciate it, but this jungle is said to be dangerous, we don’t know what’s out here…” Nodding as you walked side by side, it was a minute or two before he spoke again.

“…Are you sure you’re alright?”

“Yeah – why wouldn’t I be?”

“You’re covered in all this plant, uh, stuff, and your heat signature is higher.”

“Am I?” Looking down, though, you saw the pollen, so fine that it wouldn’t come off, which in the light had a dazzling shimmer to it. You waved Din’s concern off. “It’s just hot in this place, tin can – I’m sure it's nothing.”

Din shook his head, halting you on your way back to the ship by stepping in front of you. “No, mesh’la. It’s high – you’re burning up.”

As he said it, pressing a gloved hand to your forehead you took notice of the sweat rolling down your back and arms and frowned. You didn’t feel too different than before.

“Do you think it could be a - an allergy? To the flowers, or something?” You wondered out loud, unsure of what he was anxious about.

“I… I just think I might have seen something like this before-” He said hesitatingly, already searching on your datapad for something. “-but I’m not sure…”

“Stars above, Din! Just tell me what you think it is!”

“It’s a sex drug.” Here he paused and you gulped. You supposed a bounty hunter lead you to knowing a lot about the criminal underground and its trades; but your thoughts lead down dirtier paths, and you felt the almost irrepressible urge to ask him whether he had ever taken it himself…

Din kept pressing on the datapad, pulling up more information. “It’s a plant substance, rare, but it causes the user to become… aroused in very small doses… I-I don’t know what the pollen –in its pure form- might do.”

Oh.

“Oh.” You stated simply. “…T-then, we should get back to the ship. Quickly.”

Once you returned Din rushed you into the small ‘fresher on the ship, turning the lever for the water on as soon as you stepped into the space. You were sure it was probably a comical sight to see you there dripping, fully clothed. Feeling a little self-conscious at the situation, you made a remark about looking like a drowned womp rat, to which there was no response. Instead, the mandalorian helped you to strip off your now damp clothes, the less-than-tepid water giving faint relief to your hot, feverish skin.

“Washing the stuff off should help right?” He said, the stressed rasp of his voice making you moan, the sound half escaping through your lips as you tried to stifle it.

“It feels a bit too late for that, Din.”

The heat underneath your skin made you feel awful. You swayed under the stream of water and he steadied you with a grip of his hand, which was bare and warm against your upper arm, your eyes dragged upwards and you could see even more skin, the rolled-up sleeve of his flight suit, the pauldron-less shoulder – when had he done that? You hadn’t heard him take it off, had you?

Your mind felt like it was falling through a jar of honey, in a way not too dissimilar to the feeling of being tipsy; still aware of what was happening though with a pleasant buzz of pleasure, which softened the edges of your anxiety.

“You ok?” Ever perceptive, your Mando, you thought, your heart picking up pace at his concern - making him even stiller than before at the change he had noticed in you.

“Um, a bit better.” I think you added to yourself, chuckling weakly at the absurdity of it all. “L-listen, Din, it’s too late to reverse this, but I’m lucid right now, just feel a little weird – so if, if this gets worse, you have my permission to-”

“-No.” He cut you off in his firm tone: the one that he used in deals, the one he used when he told you to stay in his sight.

“But if I can’t-” You tried to plead, stepping out of the ‘fresher unaided now, though hardly able to rip your gaze away from the muscles flexing in the arm that had left your side.

“That pollen has had an effect on you,” he said, still firm, final. “Like you just drank a whole jug of spotchka – I can’t trust you’re sober.”

You sighed at that, straightening your back as you hugged a towel round you. “I just feel like I’m tipsy, Din. Honest.”

You met where you thought his eyes were under the visor. “It’ll be ok if you do - if I can’t do it by myself - is what I wanted to say.”

Din paused, shoulders going down as he sighed, one hand reaching for your chin. He hummed, seeming to assent to your judgement after looking at you closely through his tilted helmet, though still uttered – “I don’t want to do anything to you whilst you’re in an altered state.”

“I know.” You said, heat returning to your face. Though, you weren’t quite sure if it was from the effects of the drug or from your own arousal-tinged bashfulness. “I trust you, though.”

He nodded stiffly. “I’ll be outside.”

You assented, though your heart plummeted at him leaving your space and locking the bedroom door behind him.

He felt awful and out of place resuming his usual tasks whilst the knowledge of what was happening behind the metal door to their sleeping quarters brought images into his mind, he couldn’t seem to shake off…

Relationships were a new thing to him entirely and whilst he wasn’t wholly inexperienced, he had never shared his life with someone like this before. Practical and caring as you always were, he knew that you understood why he still did not remove his helmet, knew why you had set a slow pace with becoming intimate with each other. He was still unable to recall you riding him on the pilot’s chair without blushing, or a fresh renewal of the spark he felt within him since he had met you on his strange quest.

He couldn’t help but think of what you must be doing, how he longed to see every part of you, leave his helmet off and taste you, kiss you like he knew you deserved and so desperately wished to do for you, to let go of any restraint he had on himself, to let go and lose himself in pleasure... But he couldn’t risk it, he reiterated to himself, however hollow and futile the mantra sounded to him now. There was no doubt that you had seen his face, when he had said goodbye to Grogu. His foundling. His family. Though he hadn’t dared to name it as that, that’s what he hopes you are…

He went through the monotonous actions of checking his bounty pucks, debated on whether to clean his already pristine blaster, did laundry and checked his calculations for hyperspace. Failing in distracting his mind and flustered by the day and his thoughts he removed the rest of his armour, deliberately taking his time to place them down carefully in a neat pile.

Upon finishing his checks in the cockpit, a shimmering caught his eye, looking down to where he had pulled up his sleeves, he saw faint streaks of the same pollen across his arms.

Feeling a jolt to his gut, he attempted to rub at one of the stains and felt the heat start to creep along his skin. “Fuck.”

His cock already half hard from his previous thoughts, rapidly started to strain against the fabric of his flight suit. He keened at the unwelcome stimulation it gave as he leant back against the pilot’s chair. It was then that he heard unmistakable sobs coming from below, causing a pit to form in his stomach. He didn’t want you to be in pain. Hearing you cry out again, he was on his feet without a moment to spare.

All you could focus on was the almost-painful sensation of arousal that zipped through your body, the feel of every nerve thrumming with need, adding to the frustration that your frantic fingers had done nothing to alleviate the feeling, before the door slid open.

The sight the bounty hunter was met with was almost too much to bear. Thighs slick with your own arousal, body flushed, writhing and panting on the bed, your blown pupils met that visor, looking directly into his eyes you called out his name plaintively.

“Mesh’la.” He breathed. “Do you want me to help you?”

“Yes!” You gasped, legs clenching around the hand trapped between them. “P-please, I can’t- it’s still- it hurts!”

He leant over you, one hand resting against your cheek and the other smoothing your hair back from your face.

“Ok – it’s alright, breathe mesh’la.” He soothed, already reaching down to press his palm where you wanted him most. “Relax for me.”

Parting your thighs for him he settled in-between, relishing every moan, groan and whimper you gave out as his fingers glided across your mound, brushing up against your clit. Reaching for him in desperation you guided his hand down to your entrance. "Please, Din - I'm ready - please-" Din plunged two of his fingers into your cunt with ease, the lewd sounds of it making you moan in chorus.

The sensations coursing through your body building at Din's touches, his fingers curling up to hit that spot within you. Your orgasm hit you quickly, coming with a gasp at the relief you found, both pleasurable and not nearly enough… Riding it out, you heard him ask you if it was better and you nodded. "Keep going, don't stop."

Though, you needn't have worried about him relenting, as Din didn't slow on stretching your weeping pussy with his fingers, leaning down to grab hold of you with his free hand, circling and pinching a nipple, making you whine and grab onto the front of his flight suit.

"Got affected by the pollen too…" he guided your hand down to his clothed erection. He moaned, a beautiful sound to your ears, as you ran your hand over it.

Din’s panting breaths and gasps were accentuated by the helmet, uttering your name reverently. “-Maker, you’re so hot, couldn't stop thinking what you must've been doing, to see you like this- can I?" He swore under his breath before continuing. “If we’re gonna do this, I need to turn off the lights – do you trust me?”

"Yes." You said, arching your hips into his touch before he pulled away. Plunged into darkness you could only make out his outline, seeing him reach his hands up you heard the rush of air as he lifted off his helmet and your breath was caught in your throat. Even with the pollen coursing through you, it was forgotten within that moment in your surprise. You tried to picture the brief glimpse you had gotten of his face before, trying to imagine what it must look like now as he returned to the bed.

Before you could say anything, his head dipped, tasting you with laps of his tongue and you keened when his mouth closed around your clit.

At first, he went still when your hand found his hair, before relaxing into the touch. You brushed his hair soothingly before lightly tugging at it and smiling at his reaction. The smirk was wiped off of your face as quickly as it arrived though, feeling his grunt of approval run through you and you returned to that consuming, focused desire to come, come, come…

Din was confident in what he could do and prided himself in being able to learn what you needed - but this was completely different. He was reserved, practically shy when things started getting heated between you. But that side of Din didn’t seem to exist now, and his loosening tongue was something conjured out of your fantasies.

“You taste good. So good.” His hands came to hold your thighs open, pushing them up higher before practically burying his face in your wet pussy. You couldn’t help but wail at the pleasure of your second release, coming without much warning, babbling as Din spread his tongue over you, savouring the taste that he had long been deprived of.

The heat was still intense, you sat up tugging at his sleeve. “Off, please.”

Your eyes were now focusing in the dark, a crack of light coming from around the door and you could see Din's face shiny with your release and shivered. The flight suit was finally discarded, and you crawled over him placing your hips over his as he bucked up into you. He had been holding back a little bit you supposed you thought faintly; his skin was hot to the touch as well, affected similarly as you were. Free of barriers, you grinded against him, knees threatening to buckle as you succumbed to your desires. Again, Din was there to anchor you, helping you to rock against him.

“Tell me what you need, d’you need me to fuck you?” You could only whimper in response, and he let out a breathless chuckle. “Left you speechless, huh, how many points is that to me?”

“I- I’m s-still in the lead!” You said weakly, a smile twitching the corner of your mouth, as you knew that this response would egg on his competitive side and Maker, did you want to see more of it.

He grunted, hands digging a little harder into your hips looking like a vision underneath you, a sheen of sweat over his torso, hair falling back from his face and pupils blown. “Need you to use your words, pretty girl.”

“Yes! I want you to.” You cried and Din rolled you over onto your back, sliding his thick length into you. Soon the slapping of skin on skin fills your ears and you feel the heat rise to your face again, meeting his strong pace with thrusts of your own as he hits deeper and deeper…

You feel another orgasm approaching and you reflexively put a hand to your mouth, biting down on it to muffle how loud you’ve gotten, when it is roughly snatched away from its place. Din’s body blocks out the light coming from the door as his arms frame your sides, pinning down both of your wrists. His eyes meet yours and it is clear - even in this dark space - the intensity of his gaze.

“No, no - I want to hear all those pretty sounds.” Din grunts, his frame shuddering. “So close, mesh’la!”

Your hands grip his back, pulling him down enough so you could kiss down the length of his neck. “Need you, Cyare. Come for me.”

There’s no way of knowing how long it's been since you returned, nor how long you have been affected by the drug in your current state. There is only the two of you and your sweaty bodies pressed together. Finally, you are able to pull Din down pressing your lips to his, slowly, as he learns to copy your movements or to push his tongue into your mouth to slide across your own, before you hunger for that too and barely separate for breath as you indulge Din in the experience of kissing.

All the while he praised you, “So good for me… taking me so well…”

Tears start to form at the corners of your eyes, his cock twitching inside you again. You groaned at the tug of arousal the sensation brought, reaching out to hold onto anything and finding his arm. “Din, Din - it’s too much!”

He tensed. “Do you want me to-?”

You shook your head frantically, lacing your fingers with his. “I can’t, I can’t…” You don’t even know what you couldn't, at this point...

Din leaned his forehead to yours and cooed your name. “You can! I know you can, just one more - come for me again.”

He moved slowly as you writhed underneath him, moaning, mouth open and he felt you flutter around him. “There we go, sweet girl. Come on my cock mesh’la, let me-” Din swore again, voice hoarse as his hips stuttered, “let me fill you up!”

You came twice more, each release quickly succeeding the other, legs trembling and tightening around Din’s hips as he filled you, panting and whining into your neck.

Din gently rested against you; utterly spent you could feel the burning heat of the pollen no longer.

A minute might have passed before you rose to clean yourself up, with Din’s assistance. Both feeling the heady drug dissipating from your system as exhaustion was left in its wake, you flopped bonelessly back onto the bed.

A blanket was gently pulled up over you and you sighed a last breath in consciousness, Din rested next to you, an arm slung around your waist.

“Sleep ner kar’ta.”

—

The whirring of the ship is what broke your sleep, body aching as you rose sleepily, finding no-one beside you. The sounds were familiar, the humming suggesting that the hyperdrive had been engaged and you realised that you hadn’t asked Din about his bounty yesterday… well… you had had more pressing matters at hand…

Swinging your legs out of the bed with a groan, you figured now was as good a time as any to get up, you were awake, whatever time it was.

Padding into the ‘living space’ of the hull, you noticed the crate you used as a table held a bottle of water and some food bars, only slightly jostled from their original position by the jump into hyperspace. Din must have set these out some time ago, heart warming at the thought, though, you felt a little sad that he hadn’t woken you. Making quick work of the rations, you hunted down your supplies to make caff, which was made a little difficult when your fingers were shaking. Dammit!

It was at this moment that Din made his presence known, clearing his throat. In the past, you may have dropped the mug in your hands, but at this point you were used to it, even if it was still alarming he could move in that armour so silently. You greeted him, bashful as you replayed the events of the other night, not looking round from what you were doing, though Din didn’t miss a thing and could see your hands trembling.

“Are you alright, are you feeling some after effects from the pollen?”

You huffed in amusement, taking a sip of too hot caff. “I think it’s not so much the pollen and more because you railed me so hard yesterday, tin can.”

Out of the corner of your eye you could see Din duck his head, if you could see inside that big helmet of his, you had a suspicion that you might’ve been able to see him blush.

“Anyway, how come we’re in hyperspace? What happened to the bounty?”

“I captured the quarry whilst you were asleep.” Din saw the shock on your face. Turning on your chronometer, you realised it was mid-afternoon. “You were pretty out of it this morning, and you needed your rest.”

You nodded in assent, face turning up to look at him as he hesitantly rested his gloved hands on your shoulders. “How are you feeling?”

“My muscles ache, but other than that I have no complaints.”

“You… I didn’t go too far last night?”

“No! Of course not, Din. I know it wasn’t the best of circumstances,” That was an understatement, “but don’t worry, I enjoyed it.”

His voice was doubtful, strained. “You’re sure? I felt like I couldn’t stop and I-”

“-I’m okay, Din, you didn’t hurt me - look at me.” Anticipating his thought process, you brought your hands to the sides of his helmet and looked into the visor intently. “I enjoyed myself, kriff, I’d even do something similar again sometime- though, I’d never want to come into contact with that stuff again - if I can help it!” You added, wrinkling your nose.

“But… you enjoyed it?”

“Yes, Cyare, even with the flower pollen, I definitely do not regret it so - so I hope you don’t either?” You asked, swallowing hard.

He let out his breath, shoulders sagging. “I just worried about you, Cyare…” Before adding in a weightier tone that vibrated through you. “...But, no. I don’t.”

You rested your head into the crook of his neck and he hugged you to him. Pulling on the edge of his shirt to place a kiss to his neck your eyes widened at the dark bruise you found there. “Kriff! Did I do that?”

You felt Din nod. “Oh, I’m sorry!”

He chuckled at that. “I didn’t hate it, though, you do bite hard, mesh’la. I’ll have to be careful around you.”

He was teasing, but you still felt like sinking into the floor.

“I guess this is a good lesson, not to wander off on your own.”

You pouted. “I was trying to give you a romantic gesture!”

“You still went off the ship and got into trouble.” Though he said it with no malice, you had to concede he had a point.

You sighed. “Okay, fine. No wandering alone in strange, unknown places.”

“C’mon, we should land in a little while.” He said, taking your hand to lead you to the cockpit.

Sitting down in the pilot’s chair, you were about to sit in your own seat when Din brought both hands to his helmet. As soon as the helmet hissed you brought your hands up to your face.

He said your name softly. “It’s fine, you can see.”

“But - your creed!”

“I know you already saw my face yesterday, ner kar’ta, and I want you to see.” You let your hands drop and your eyes flutter open.

In the light of the cockpit you could see the emotions more clearly on his face, than you ever could before, he was clearly nervous, but he met your gaze and your mind found relief in seeing him. This meant he didn’t regret what had happened, either, that he wanted this.

Din pulled you down to his lap, hands reaching around your thighs to scoot you closer and hold you there.

“The bounty can wait a little. Right now, I want to kiss you again.” He said in the deep, husky tone of his unmodulated voice.

You placed your hands back onto either side of his jaw, smiling. “Then do.”

________

#din djarin x reader #din djarin x you #the mandalorian smut #din djarin smut #pedro pascal fanfiction #pedro pascal characters #the mandalorian fanfiction #pixwriting #pixwritesstuff

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news4dzhozhar · 3 days

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You can watch the full lecture (about 2 hours long) here if interested. The YouTube account is German but the lecture is in English.

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genshinlover101 · 2 years

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HIII what if.. Ningguang, Ganyu and Eula with a Blind but can fight GN!Reader?

Her Reaction to a Blind S/O who can Fight

Characters: Ningguang, Ganyu, Eula x gn!reader

Warnings: none

A/n: Ah there was so much creative freedom I had with the request so I hope I wrote it to your liking <3

• Ningguang was known to have her way with words, especially because of her business deals. But with children, the elderly, and the handicapped she had a soft spot. That included you, she specifically adored you because of your ability to listen.

• Ningguang being as rich as she is, would’ve hired a guide for you to help you in times that she was not available. If she could, she would have you trail her around everywhere in order to prevent you from stumbling or hurting yourself.

• Ningguang wasn’t any surprised at your ability to fight, the Tianquan knew everything. That included your secret of pretending to be feeble on an average basis and then destroying on the battlefield when given the chance.

You hadn’t wielded a weapon in what felt like forever. Although you were trained to fight even without sight, you didn’t particularly enjoy it. The feeling of adrenaline and the fear of not being able to see anything struck you to the core. However, you knew what you had to do. You heard the commotion of a woman’s purse being robbed by a thief who had clumsily run into you.

The thief knew who you were, the blind mole that everyone in Liyue rumored about. “Get out of my way!” The thief spat in your face, you felt a vein pop from your forehead. Ningguang stood a step behind you, observing, she knew your inner capabilities. She knew everything, so she didn’t stop it knowing that she didn’t need to.

You apprehended the man easily with pure skill and martial arts, threatening to break his arm with hyperextension. When the man tapped out, the lady thanked you for your efforts, and the millelith contained him for further questioning. You couldn’t see Ningguang, but you could sense her behind you still, her arms folded. She hadn’t spoken a word. She tended to do that whenever she witnessed something particularly fascinating.

“So how long did you plan to hide the fact you can fight from me?” she asked you. You instinctively curled up a little on the inside, why did you hide it? Lost in a debate on what to tell her you hadn’t given her a response in what felt like forever in your mind. She probably sensed it.

“I’m just kidding with you, I’ve known you can fight for a while now, relax a little,” she nuzzled your hair with her knuckles. “Now let’s go shall we? We’ll be horribly late for our reservations at this rate.”

• Ganyu took pity on you, so she approached you first. When she realized you were the missing piece in her life, she quickly kinned you. You didn’t have the sight to judge her based off on her biggest insecurities. You didn’t even know she had horns until she told you. Additionally, she felt didn’t have to watch her diet around you.

• Ganyu would guide you around like an elderly parent. If you mentioned using the restroom she would still guide you even if you were in your own home. Not to mention if you suggested anything that was heavily reliant on sight she would be the first to jump in and help you.

• When Ganyu saw you fight for the first time she’d be impressed. For the decades she’s traveled Liyue, she’s seen much happen. Talking birds, giant sea monsters, even ghosts. But a blind person’s capability to fight even better than those with sight was a sight she had not seen before.

Ganyu gasped as a man clutching a woman’s purse darted past her in the opposite direction, you could tell the clumsy qilin was almost knocked to her feet by the wind. You had to hold onto her, reaffirming her posture. “Are you okay?” you asked Ganyu. She sighed and put her hand to her forehead, shaking her head in disapproval at her actions.

“I apologize, I’m the one who should be watching out for you,” before she could finish her thought, You chased after the man. Ganyu tried to reach for you, this isn’t a job for any blind person to take. It didn’t take long for you to catch up, he was quite slow for a robber but fast enough to outrun the Millelith’s awareness.

Using Martial Arts, you tripped the man, causing him to face plant in front of the crowds of cowering citizens. Using the sole of your shoe, you kept him at bay. “Someone get the Millelith,” you spat orders. The man recognizing your blindness, tried to escape, scoffing at your feeble attempt as he peeled on your foot. However, it didn’t take him long to realize that your foot’s hold on him was stronger than he had expected.

After a good solid five minutes, the woman had retrieved her purse, Ganyu had caught up to you, and the crook had been arrested. When you turned to face Ganyu you put a comforting hand on her shoulder. She grabbed it with both of hers, putting them up to her cheek. You felt her smooth facial expressions of worry and discomfort like braille. “That was quite a scene,” she explained.

She nuzzled up to your hand, even though Ganyu was an adepti, she was clumsy and often slow to react. Even she herself didn’t fail to recognize this fact about herself. “Thank you for protecting me today. Maybe next time I can handle it, I worry about you. Especially after today,” she muttered.

• Being of the Lawrence clan, Eula was accustomed to people discriminating against her. Most people didn’t know how she looked, but after word got out she was famous for being hated. So when she met you, who had no sight or indication of her family’s past, she was immediately infatuated with you.

• Eventually you’d find out about her past, however, you never cared about all that political nonsense. This made Eula value you more, protecting you from everything and anything. If there was a stick in the road to trip on? She’d obliterate it. A person making fun of you? She’d strike vengeance on them.

• When Eula found you weren’t as soft as you looked, she’d be dumbfounded. She swore to get revenge on you for deceiving her. All jokes aside, she’d be genuinely curious about how you learned to move like that.

When Eula saw a man holding a woman’s purse she didn’t feel obligated to help anyone. Her loyalty wasn’t exactly in line with Mondstadt as much as her peers like the Acting Grand Master Jean, Kaeya, or even Diluc. Her goal however was to protect you. As the man whizzed past she covered you with her own body, clutching onto your foundation as tightly as possible. “What a fool,” she mumbled to you.

That was until you held onto her hand, peeling them from your arms as you gave her a reassuring look. “I’m going to help that lady,” you announced. You couldn’t see, but you imagined Eula had a twisted look on her face of curiosity. As you freed yourself you ran after the man, it didn’t take long as he was relatively slow and the streets were straight and narrow with no place to run and hide.

You used your speed to overwhelm him, wrapping his arms behind his back to render him useless as your knee forced his back painfully to the concrete ground. It wasn’t long till the Knights of Favonius stepped in to arrest the man and reimburse you.

Once everything was settled Eula apprehended you in her grasp once more. “Why were you so reckless?” she interrogated. “That was a poor move on your part,” although she was lecturing you like a mother, you knew she only said it because she cared for you. In response to your silence, she let you go with a groan.

“Next time let me handle hooligans like that...” she mumbled in shame that she hadn’t done anything. “I don’t want you to get hurt even if I know you can fight now- promise me that?” she asked. You could tell her pinky was extended for a promise.

#ningguang x reader #ganyu x reader #eula x reader #genshin impact #genshin impact x reader #genshin x reader #ningguang #ganyu #eula lawrence

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violettelueur · 3 years

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— JUJUTSU KAISEN EPISODE FIVE || CURSE WOMB MUST DIE II

↳ featuring : itadori yuji + fushiguro megumi + kugisaki nobara + gojo satoru + ryomen sukuna + zenin maki + inumaki toge + panda from jujutsu kaisen

↳ warnings : swearing + violence + mention of blood + mention of organ + mention of death + EXTREME grammar issues

↳ form : story

↳ published : 24 february

↳ pronouns : she/her

↳ word count : 4.8k

↳ synopsis : within the jujutsu world, there were three famous clans to be aware of, the Kamo clan, Zenin clan and the Gojo clan. However, unknown to many sorcerers there was one last family that was known to be apart of the three, only for them to disappear after the golden era leading some to speculate that they had died in battle after the sealing of ryomen sukuna, but....

↳ previous episode : curse womb must die I

↳ next episode : after rain

↳ barista’s notes : back again with another episode of jujutsu kaisen everyone ╲ʕ·ᴥ·　╲ʔ and we have ended the detention centre arc and now will be moving on to the training arc! isn’t that crazy, you have finished episode five ʕ ᵒ ᴥ ᵒʔ i’m not really good with fight scenes, so if you care confused, don’t hesitant to ask me anything to clarify! WE ALSO FINALLY MEET THE SECOND-YEARS!

BEFORE READING, I NEED YOU TO BE AWARE OF THIS:

1. the whole story belongs to Gege Akutami and the credits go to them and them only

2. the spell curses used belong to Tite Kubo due to them being the ‘Kidos’ being used on the manga and anime ‘Bleach’ - but none is mentioned in this chapter

2.5 for the ‘cursed spells’/kidos (bleach) i will link this video here and tell you the time stamp to check out what i am intending to show - remember i add a few twist here and there by adding the katana to link with Y/N’s cursed technique

Destructive Curse Spell number four: Byakurai : 3:35-3:40

Sentan Hakuja : Wiki Page

‘Cursed Energy Web Technique’ : video (4:23-5:27)

3. if you are confused on anything, please don’t hesitate to message me since i know this whole thing is so confusing

“If you can, please send a grade one sorcerer or higher but that won’t be necessary if I don't die,” you sternly commented, leading both Fushiguro and Ijichi to shiver at the statement you just announced.

Still shaken at what you had just said, Ijichi sent himself off before closing the window to prevent any cold raindrops from coming at him as he drove away from the area you and Fushiguro were standing in right now.

“If you don’t want to listen to me, I ain’t going to listen to you at all then Fushiguro,” you stated with a frown painted on your face before looking back at the building behind his body.

Taking your katana, you looked at the bottom of the handle to find a metal loop at the bottom with a red charm tied before it was simply slowly unwinded by you as you prepared for the worst that was about to come.

“What are you doing L/N?” Fushiguro asked in a worried tone, causing you to turn to look at him with a deadpan expression.

“Just preparing for the worst Fushiguro”

ꕥ

The rain was still unsettled as you stared at the building of the detention centre that was in front of you with a nonchalant look present on your face. Carefully, you hook your katana on the side of your left hip rather than the usual spot of your back since you knew you were going to need extremely quick access to your weapon if your prediction of what was going to happen was going to become a reality.

Suddenly, there was a swift but noticeable change in the air causing you to grab Fushiguro’s sleeve to pull him closer to you in case of any attacks that would happen since he was standing behind you, out of your central view.

“The Innate Domain’s closed off, the special-grade is dead!” Fushiguro stated to you in a shocked but quiet tone, causing the grip you had on his sleeve to tighten since the feeling in the pit of your stomach was becoming agonising to the point where you wanted to vomit it out.

Yet, you weren’t fearful for yourself but rather the wellbeing of the shikigami user behind you and the classmate, who was still inside the building at this current moment in time.

“We just need Itadori to return safely now,” Fushiguro hopefully whispered, yet you had given no response since you knew that the chance of the mentioned classmate coming back with himself out rather than Sukuna was extremely low.

“That’s almost impossible, from what I can recall, him and Sukuna haven’t even agreed to a bi-” you began to explain, only for a sudden aggressive presence to stop you in your tracks to which Fushiguro also felt as you both froze on the stop you both were standing in right now.

“Sorry, but he’s not coming back”

A familiar voice from behind you spoke leading to both of you and Fushiguro to freeze on the stop before you came to the sense that what you had predicted was proven right. However, you didn’t foresee that he was coming straight to the both of you, even when he had threatened it clearly before Fushiguro dragged you away to search for Kugisaki.

“Don’t be so frightened, I’m in a good mood right now, let’s chat for a bit,” Sukuna calmly mentioned as he processed to make his appearance in front of you both since you refused to look in the opposite direction.

“This is what he gets for trying to use me without any kind of pact, feels like he’s having some trouble switching back,” Sukuna pronounced as he turned to the side.

‘To be honest, it was surprising for him to switch back after eating the finger without the pact’ you thought before letting out of Fushiguro’s sleeve once you was comfortable that he was out of harm's way, ‘besides that should be enough cursed energy for now,’ you internally spoke before taking a quick glance on the same area where you hand was as you processed to place the same hand on the handle of your katana.

“Still, though it’s only a matter of time,” Sukuna stated, as he gripped onto Itadori’s school jacket before unexpectantly ripping into shreds to showcase his muscular upper body, revealing the strange back marking he adorned on his chest.

“So, I thought about what I can do right now,” the King of Curses uttered before raising his hand to suddenly puncture a hole within the middle of his check, shocking both you and Fushiguro from his gruesome action as hints of blood started to pour from the corner of his lips.

‘Shit! I haven’t finished preparing,’ you pondered in a panic manner, as your hand was still on your weapon’s handle, transferring some of your cursed energy to your katana, making sure it had reached to the tip of the blade within the wooden casing for what you were planning to execute.

“Wh-what are you..” Fushiguro stuttered as he looked at the scene in complete horror, only for a massive pool of blood to pour in the middle between Sukuna’s legs before forcibly ripping out the most vital organ needed for Itadori to come back alive.

“I’m taking this brat hostage,” Sukuna declared, as he proudly and sadistically presented the heart he had taken out to you and Fushiguro, causing you to internally become repulsed at the scene since you still needed to concentrate shifting a tiny amount of cursed energy needed to your katana.

“Hostage?!” Fushiguro snarled as he shifted back slightly.

“Yeah, I can live without this, but that ain’t true for the brat,” Sukuna informed you and Fushiguro, as he then tossed the heart to the side like it was a piece of trash he needed to get rid of quickly.

“Switching out with me means he dies. Also, for good measure,” Sukuna mentioned before revealing a finger in his hand causing you to look at the cursed object he had just now swallowed with widened eyes.

‘I thought it wasn’t his finger that the special-grade curse consumed! Fuck!’

“With that, I'm free as a bird, you can be frightened now, I’ll kill you both for no particular reason,” Sukuna declared as he flexed his hand leading you to rapidly unleash your blade from its black wooden casing for the first time since the unfortunate day as you were now prepared to fight against the King of Curses.

“Our positions are reversed now,” Fushiguro muttered under his breath (to which you heard) before he determinedly looked at the curse right in front of him as he positioned himself in a fighting stance causing a wave of anxiety to consume you.

‘One of his divine dogs are already down, if he risks another shikigami, that possibly will also get destroyed in the process’

“You just don’t get it, he’s..Itadori’s coming back even if that means he’ll die, that’s just who he is,” Fushiguro determinedly stated while staring down at Sukuna.

“You give him too much credit, this guy’s just a little tougher and denser than other humans” Sukuna countered back with a smirk on his face before processing to wipe off the blood staining his lip with the back of his hand.

“Just a moment ago, he was scared out of his mind, on the verge of death and prattling on about his regrets and all that nonsense, I know for a fact he doesn’t have the guts to kill himself,” Sukuna taunted as he smiles smugly at both of you.

‘A special-grade has the ability to used Reserve Cursed Techniques, so it wouldn’t be hard for him to use it on his heart, I just need to slide down somewhere around his chest area to force him to do that’

Shifting your eyes to the side, you noticed Fushiguro’s hands were shaking leading you to internally sigh since you knew he was thinking the same idea as you, while probably debating the fact on how he could make Sukuna revive his heart before Itadori switches back as well as how he was going to battle against a special-grade.

“Should I make the first move then?” you rhetorically asked, before swiftly throwing your katana towards Sukuna like it was a spear, only for him to dough the weapon even at its immense speed.

“You think that was going to hit me?! Maybe you ain’t the fighting type as I suggested!” Sukuna roared in amusement, not noticing how you seemingly suddenly grabbed onto thin air (like you were holding onto a hanging support handle on a bus) before pulling your arm back in a fast motion, resulting in the attacking blade unexpectedly return back to you as quick as it was thrown, for it to then slash a massive slit on Sukuna’s cheek causing the curse to look at you in complete surprised before you swiftly moved forwards towards him, grabbing the handle of the travelling blade to attempt to slash down on your targeted area, only for Sukuna to dodge as quickly as he could.

‘Damn, but that should be fine for now’

However, before you could even attempt to get another chance of getting a slit around his check area, you heard incoming footsteps from your side leading you to deck down as you suddenly saw a leg swing above your head, indicating to you that Fushiguro had made a move to attack the cursed vessel, yet once again Sukuna managed to dodge against as well as the incoming punches that came along with Fushiguro’s attempts.

“Interesting, not only the girl managed to injure me but you use shikigami, but you’ll still come at me yourself?” Sukuna questioned, as he seemed amused at both of you and Fushiguro.

However, before he could mention another word there was a light pressure placed on his right shoulder causing him to turn back, only to find you in a lower stance with your index and middle finger to be pressed upon his shoulder blade.

“Destructive Curse Spell number four: Byakurai,” you chanted, before a high-density of cursed energy was discharged from the tip of your index finger to form a concentrated bolt of lighting leading it to pierce a noticeable hole on Sukuna’s shoulder surprising him as well as Fushiguro, since you angled it well away from him getting hit before you once again attempted to swing your katana down upon his back to execute your plan only for him to dodge it come again.

‘Fuck sake! You make it so easy to hit you the first time but when I want to slice you down, you suddenly dodge it!’

However, before you could use another cursed spell, a shikigami made its way to attack Sukuna leading you to discover it was Nue only for Sukuna to once again avoid the strike of its sharp talons before Fushiguro aims to get a hit at Sukuna, only for the King of Curses to block them with his arms. Yet you couldn’t help but internally smile the second you saw the wrist that you were holding onto earlier had made contact with Sukuan’s arms.

‘If plan A doesn’t work out, B will do just fine for now’

However, your hint of internal happiness quickly ended once you saw Fushiguro take a hit from Sukuna’s fist causing hints of blood to escape from his mouth leading you to quickly stand up straight as you rushed over to the scene. Yet, before you could even attempt to attack the curse again, you felt a presence underneath you causing your body to instinctively move again before a large snake appeared from the ground catching Sukuna within its mouth lifting him in the air as he was stunned with surprise at the fact of his sneak attack.

“Gang up on him!” Fushiguro yelled out to his shikigami, leading Nue’s wings to surround itself with purple lightning as it attempted to land a hit on Sukuna, only for him to duck at the right moment before it tried again, only for it to have the same result.

“Fushiguro, deactivate the snake now before it’s destroyed!” you screamed at your fighting partner. However, before he even got the message you suddenly saw fragments of what seemed to be the snake’s skin falling down in front of you before noticing Sukuna was already behind Fushiguro, tightly gripping onto the back of his dark blue sorcerer jacket.

“Hey, what did I just say? Let’s use the open space!” Sukuna shouted, before aggressively flinging Fushiguro up in the air before following the sorcerer himself, leaving you behind to witness his inhuman strength.

‘Shit, they’re going to get to the edge of the evacuation area!’

Reaching into the depths of your skirt pocket, you quickly pulled out a long, white cloth before letting it spin around you at a large radius as it slowly began to enclose the gaps that were making you visible to the world.

‘Sentan Hakuja,’ you internally chanted before the cloth coiled you complete before speedily teleporting you in front to what seemed to be like a construction site or an abandoning building, you weren’t quite sure. However, what you were sure of was that Fushiguro and Sukuna hadn’t noticed that you had arrived despite the vast entrance you had made from your cursed technique - but what you were most afraid of was the fact the Nue was gone, causing you to worry at the fact that now that shikigami was destroyed.

“What a waste of talent, but the girl back at that place, she knows how to use her technique extremely well,” Sukuna announced, causing Fushiguro to look at the King of Curses in both confusion as well as frustration at the fact he had mentioned you, worried if he was about to get killed, Sukuna would hunt you down next.

“Whatever, either way, that won’t be enough to fix this, you’re risking your life over stupid shit,” Sukuna stated as he pointed the hole on his chest. However, it seemed like you had enough of the conversation.

“Activate!” you yelled out before stabbing your katana to the ground, causing both males to turn around to finally notice you. However, it was too late for Sukuna to have the opportunity to counter what you were doing as he felt something restraining his arm’s movement before noticing what seemed to be a blue web-like strand attached to both his shoulders, yet when he turned to you, you seemed to be in the same situation but with one arm free.

“L/N!” Fushiguro yelled out in a panic before noticing that you were not at all afraid but rather calm despite the situation that you both were in now.

“What is this?” Sukuna questioned, as he observed the web-like structure you had created only for you to glance at him with a deadpan expression on your face.

“It’s just a simple web I created from pure cursed energy that is retaining the both of us right now,” you answered as you continued to peer at the confused King of Curses, who was trying to rip away from the strand-like he had with the shikigami snake, only to no avail as he struggled to move his whole upper body in general.

“How come? You didn’t touch me except for the cursed technique you used?!” Sukuna roared as he glared at you only for you to then let out a sigh of frustration.

‘It’s such a drag to explain…’

“I transferred some of my cursed energy to Fushiguro’s wrist as well as to my katana, so when they made contact with you, it allowed me to connect the strands of the web to those areas where you had been hit, also the protective spell I placed on the back of Itadori’s neck before we went in the detention centre was surprisingly still intact, allowing me to track you and the chain at the end of my katana to restain you further,” you thoroughly explained, before clicking your fingers causing the sudden but slow reveal of the long black chain (attached at the end of your handle - on the metal loop where the red charm was) that you had concealed with your cursed energy to appear surrounding you and Sukuna at a large radius while the extra length was tightly wrapped around his upper body.

“That was how I pulled my katana back at the beginning of the fight if that’s what you were also wondering,” you commented, leading Sukuna to look at you with a larger smirk than what you thought his reaction would have been.

“You possess such intellect, such skill, such power and such talent and yet you refuse to go against me with your full potential, are you mocking me?” Sukuna asked, before laughing causing you to look at him suspiciously, yet you couldn’t let that bother you at all, right now all you needed was for Itadori to switch back even if he was going to die.

“Even though I technically didn’t save you, Fushiguro did but I would like to give my answer I guess,” you commented before running your hands through your wet hair trying to push away the strands that were concealing your vision slightly.

“I should have exorcised you back then, in fact it’s my duty as part of the L/N Clan to, but I know you’re a good person at heart Itadori, I knew that since the day I saw you back at school and probably Fushiguro saw that as well when he decided to save you,” you explained with a smile, as you began to notice the markings gradually disappear from his face and body causing you to slowly deactivate the cursed energy web that was immobilising you and Itadori while the chain that was coiled around him slowly began to loosen its grip on him.

“It was for selfish and emotional reasons but that’s fine though,” Fushiguro stated as his posture relaxed once he noticed that you were slowly lowering your guard, “I’m not a hero, I’m a jujutsu sorcerer, so I’ve never once regretted saving you,” he then announced with a smile on his face.

Suddenly, itadori looked at you with a smile on his face before turning to look at Fushiguro, who was behind him. “I see, you really are smart, Fushiguro, Gojo, you’ve put more thought into this than I have,” Itadori mentioned with a smile, as he pushed his hair back, “I think your conviction’s a proper one, but I don’t think mine is wrong, either,”.

Suddenly, more blood started to drip down from his wound causing you to move forwards to make sure that Itadori didn’t fall down completely. “Oh, sorry, I’m almost done for, guess I won’t have to worry you guys, Kugisaki, or Gojo-sensei, live a long life,” Itadori faintly stated to you both before falling straight into your arms causing you to fall to your knees due to his heavyweight causing your skirt and high-knee socks to become soaked in the rain that already bathed your hair and face.

The rain only grew heavily as seconds went by, only reflecting on the disappointment and devastation that was coming from both you and Fushiguro, as you both stayed silent letting the rain consume you both for the time being.

Maybe after the rain, he might come back.

‘Please come back’

ꕥ

“So you had your suspicions?” you questioned your adopted father, as you leaned against the railing of the balcony, while he stood next to you leaning against the same railing.

“There was a special grade there, sending the first-years to rescue five who may or may not be alive is out of order, even if you are capable of exorcising it Y/N,” Gojo explained causing you to realise where this was going.

“So what you are saying is, since you indefinitely suspended Itadori’s execution, that got some higher-ups upset, leading us to go do that mission, in order for Itadori to be killed?” you suggested, leading Gojo to turn silent at your comment, leading you to get the answer you were expecting even if no words were exchanged.

“You’re strong though Y/N, you effortlessly fought like Sukuna was just a normal curse,” Gojo complimented you, only for you to give him no response since it was not a good time for you to be praised.

You failed at saving Itadori.

“As a special grade like your father, I need you to look out for Megumi and Nobara for a while, train them to the best of your abilities since we got an event coming up!” Gojo cheered, leading you to present him with a glare.

‘What a drag...I really can’t be bothered to be in an event’

“I’m going to check on the others Gojo-sensei, I’ll see you later,” you stated before standing on the feet as you than processed to walk away with your hand up, as a way to wave him ‘goodbye’.

“Call me dad for once Y/N~” Gojo shouted, leading you to groan in annoyance before making your way to the entrance, where you knew Fushiguro and Kugisaki were since Gojo did take you away from them when he found you sitting with them on the stone steps near the entrance of the school.

After some time, you finally managed to reach your destination as you found yourself standing at the top of the extra steps above your classmates, before noticing a few new faces further below, leading you to become perplexed since you weren’t expecting any other sorcerers to come by today - well...that’s what Gojo said.

“Don’t tell me the other student died as well?” the female sorcerer question, leading you to look in her direction in confusion since she seemed a little familiar to you for some reason.

‘Ah, she was the person I saw when I moved into the dorm, but she didn’t really see me’

“I’m right here,” you commented, leading to everyone that was in your view to look up at your direction to find you standing with your arms crossed before you steadily made your way down the steps as you processed to stand a step above between Fushiguro and Kugisaki, who were still seated on the same spot they were in when you had left them for a few minutes.

“You don’t even have a scratch on you,” the female sorcerer commented, as she noticed you didn’t have any patches or bandages like the other two first-years had once you observed you.

“She’s a strong sorcerer,” Fushiguro commented, leading you to kick his back before commenting that he was a strong sorcerer as well.

“Ah! Are you the special grade, Gojo was mentioning about?” the large Panda asked, causing you to give him a glance before answering, “I don’t believe I’m a special-grade sorcerer but if that what my drag ass of an adoptive dad ranked me, then I guess I am,”.

“Who are you guys?” you then asked since it seemed like they had already done their introductions for Kugisaki. Although, it seemed like your female classmate was in the same sort of confusion as you since she noted to you that she had no idea who the fellow sorcerers were.

“Our second-year upperclassmen,” Fushiguro nonchalantly answered before he continued by introducing them to you and Kugisaki.

“Zenin-senpai is the best of all the students at wielding cursed tools, that’s the Cursed Speech user, Inumaki-senpai, he can only speak in ingredients of onigiri and that’s panda senpai,” Fushiguro introduced everyone causing some questions to manifest in your head.

‘Zenin ha?..she doesn’t seem like the one that my mum was talking about, so I don’t have to suspect her but is there anything else to add for Panda-senpai?’

“There’s one more, Okkotsu-senpai, who is the only one I can openly respect, but he’s overseas right now,” Fushiguro added, before slowly standing on his two feet.

“You’re not adding more about the panda named Panda?” Kugisaki asked as she looked up at the shikigami user to gain some information, only to be ignored.

“Man, sorry about this and when you’re in mourning...please forgive us for that,” Panda apologised before placing his hands together as a sign to be forgiven, even though that sign reminded you about something else.

‘Ah...that’s the same hand gesture for one of my cursed spells’

“The truth is, we’d like you to participate in the Kyoto Sister School Exchange Event,” Panda explained, causing you to recall about an ‘event’ Gojo had mentioned to you.

“Oh, that’s what he meant,” you whispered before Kugisaki interrupted you by repeating the event’s name in confusion.

“What’s that?” Kugisaki asked as she turned to Fushiguro looking for the answer.

“It’s a get-together with the other Tech school in Kyoto, though isn’t that event mainly second and third-years?” the erratic-haired sorcerer answered your classmate before questioning the invitation since all of you were first-years.

“And those stupid third-years are suspended right now, so you need to participate,” Zenin explained, causing you to look to the side with an annoyed expression on your face since you realised that this meant you had to cover up your tracks more than you were bothered to do.

“What do you do at this event? Smash Bros? I won’t lose if it’s the Wii version, I’ll Meteor Smash so you can’t come back” Kugisaki randomly mentioned with a determined look on her face as she formed a fist, causing you to look in her direction with a confused face since you didn’t know how she came to that conclusion in the first place.

“Then let’s make a 3-man team, the exchange event has the principals of the Tokyo and Kyoto schools each propose a form of competition to be held for an entire day over the course of two days, though that’s how it is on paper,” Panda informed you and Kugasaki, who were oblivious to what this event was in general.

“Every year, the first day is a team battle, and the second day is individual battles,” Panda explained, leading Inumaki to agree with him by saying ‘salmon’ as his confirmation to his classmates' explanation.

“Individual and team battles? We fight?! Against other jujutsu sorcerers?!” Kugisaki shouted after realising what the event really entailed, causing you to look at her before lightly smacking the back of her head.

“You just realised that?” you asked in a dumbfounded tone.

“Yeah, it’s a jujutsu battle where anything but killing goes,” Zenin confirmed with a huge grin causing you internal sigh at the fact that you had to hide the use of your cursed technique since that would blow your cover entirely.

“We’ll train you up well so you won’t get killed. Yeah, yeah, yeah!” Panda declared before he started to throw some air punched after every ‘yeah’ he said.

“Wait, do you have time for that? I thought we were short on jujutsu sorcerers,” Kugisaki asked since she concluded that there were only six of you right now.

“That’s a good question, For now, we are. The glim emotions people harbour from late winter through spring cause an outburst of curses in the early summer, so that’s our busy season,” Panda explained as Zenin then explained that some sorcerers are busy all year long, but since things are settling down soon, it should be fine.

“So, you’ll do it, right? You just had a partner die on you, after all,” Zenin asked, as she was waiting for all your responses.

“We’re in!” Fushiguro and Kugisaki simultaneously answered with determined looks on their faces before turning back to look at you, waiting for your answer.

Letting out a sigh of frustration, you knew that you had no way out of this since they looked so motivated for you to join, even if you disagreed with them.

“This is such a drag, but fine, I’ll join in too,” you replied with a small smile on your face leading them to nod at you before turning back to your seniors.

“But if I decided this training and exchange event is pointless, I’m quitting instantly,” Kugisaki mentioned.

“Same here,” Fushiguro commented, causing you to kick both of them on the back much to their surprise.

“So you drags make me do this event, only for you to dip when it’s pointless for you, besides I heard there are some interesting sorcerers in the Kyoto side, so prepare yourselves,” you stated before stepping down the few steps you were in front of before standing between them.

“Well, people this cocky are all more worthwhile to train,” Panda mentioned with his arms folded with a determined look on his face.

“Bonito flakes,” Inumaki said in a softer tone.

Looking up to the sky, you couldn’t help but brisk in the sunlight that was shining lightly down upon you, leading you to raise your hand over your face in order to not be blinded.

‘I wonder how I’m going to hide from this one now?’

822 notes · View notes

teletraan-meets-jarvis · 3 years

Text

Darkest Part

AO3 Link

Pairing: Crosshair x fem!Jedi Reader

Summary: The war was drawing to a close as you and The Bad Batch provided reinforcements on Kaller. However, the end of the war came in a way none of you could've predicted, as Order 66 is executed. Set during the episode Aftermath.

Warnings: 12+, Character death, slight violence, it's an angsty one peeps

Word Count: 1.5k

Author’s Notes: As always, feedback is really appreciated, along with reblogs! Thanks so much for taking the time to read, have a lovely day!

Depa’s screams echoed across the open plane, causing the group to stop in their tracks. You couldn’t believe your eyes, sure that this must be some kind of Force trick as you all witnessed Commander Grey and his troops firing on Master Billaba, her Lightsaber protecting her with everything she had. You hadn’t realised you were already running until you overtook Caleb, desperate to try and help. Both you and the Padawan had your Lightsabers drawn as you raced to the General’s aid.

With her last bit of strength, Depa Force pushed you both back and screamed for you to run, for you to get Caleb away from the Clones before one final shot sang through her chest. In her last moments, Depa’s beautiful face was tainted with the agony of betrayal from her closest allies.

An overwhelming pain suddenly smacked you in the chest. You didn’t realise pain could be blinding, but it took over every sense in your body until there was only a bright light. Screams could be heard, Lightsabers swinging for one final time, ships being shot down. It was the Jedi. They were dying. The Council. The Knights. The younglings. All of them. And just like that it was over. You were back, Caleb pulling on your sleeve as the Bad Batch caught up with you both. You’d fallen to your knees from the impact of the deaths of your kind.

You looked at the Bad Batch and your already emotionally battered chest tightened like a vice. Would they turn on you as well? After everything. Would Crosshair turn on you? You’d seen it, you’d felt it. You’d felt Master Plo’s despair as the Wolfpack shot him from the sky, you felt Obi-Wan’s disbelief as Cody ordered his execution, Aayla’s heartbreak as the man she loved gunned her down.

Your eyes stung with unshed tears as you met Crosshair’s visor. Could he hurt you? Love hadn’t saved Aayla, it hadn’t prevented Commander Bly from executing her with no remorse. What would stop Crosshair?

“Stay back” Caleb shouted at them, holding his weapon in a defensive position in front of you. Finally coming back to yourself, you grabbed his wrist and took off running. Hunter’s voice following after you, trying to reason with you.

Tears finally fell down your face as you focused everything you had on running. Focused on keeping the Padawan safe from certain death. There was nothing else that mattered now, this kid had to live. You couldn’t lose anyone else. You just couldn’t.

You struggled to keep up with what had just transpired, your conscious mind not processing the events as your body went into survival mode. Keeping Caleb safe was all that mattered, and you clutched to the one sane thought with everything you could muster otherwise you’d crumble.

With an initiative beyond his years, the young Padawan started climbing the trees to remain off the path where Hunter could track them. The child’s tactical mind caused the sobering realisation in your mind that, of his short life so far, most of Caleb’s years of innocence and learning had been tainted by war, forcing him to grow up beyond his years.

You followed his lead and supported yourself in an adjacent tree, out of sight from the ground. Your eyes were locked onto Caleb as he steadied himself on his snow dusted tree, you pushed a wave of support over the Force to wash over him, hoping it would calm his nerves.

In the distance, two sets of footfalls crunched against the white blanket of the forest floor. As quickly as it came into range, the sound suddenly stopped below your trees and Caleb’s wild eyes found yours. His fear was evident and bone deep. It was breaking your heart. He was just a kid; he didn’t deserve this.

Hunter and Crosshair’s modulated voices broke the silence in the air as they debated the way you’d both went. Hunter sounded distressed while Crosshair sounded determined, the same way he sounded when hunting a target. Your body shivered at the thought that you had suddenly become the enemy in his eyes.

The sound of a blaster bolt snapped your attention to Caleb. The branch he’d been perched on shattered beneath him and he fell very ungracefully at the base of the tree, with Hunter and Crosshair staring straight at him.

Without thought, you leaped down in front of the young Padawan, your brown cloak trailing behind you as you descended. You landed on one knee, a hand out to your side with you Lightsaber lit and at the ready.

Bringing yourself to your feet, you peered at your men from beneath the darkness of your hood. Hunter was stood in a defensive stance, hands out and unarmed. Crosshair however was aiming his deadly sniper directly at Caleb behind you. He was ready to take the shot, every inch of his body screamed his intent to kill.

“Caleb run” Your words were strong. Stronger than you felt.

“But-”

“GO!” You demanded the young child, if you could just buy him some time, there’s a chance he could get out of this.

Crosshair’s rifle was still pointed in the direction of the young Padawan. You stepped forward into the firing line and disabled your weapon, meeting the soldier’s gaze through his visor. You listened out as Caleb’s running feet sounded further and further away. Good.

“Crosshair, this isn’t you. Don’t hurt the kid.” you spoke with a calm you didn’t feel, like you were trying to soothe a feral creature.

“Good soldiers, follow orders” his hands were shaking as he bit out the words. That strange certainty he had while aiming at the young Jedi, now wavering while his weapon was trained on you.

“Well, if that’s the case.” You walked forward until the barrel of his rifle was aligned with the centre of your chest. “Take the shot, Crosshair.” your voice was void of emotion. You’re sure you heard Hunter screaming at you two in the background. Not even commanding as Sergeant, but as a brother, begging Crosshair to stop this.

A shot rang out.

You’d visibly flinched at the sound, such a contrast to the eery silence that fell over you all in the forests of Kaller. You opened your eyes, unsure as to when you’d closed them. You were met with the sight of the Sniper’s barrel smoking. Hunter’s arm beneath the weapon, having pushed the shot up over your shoulder. You met Crosshair’s visor again and your heart finally shattered.

Crosshair’s shaking hands threw his weapon onto the ground, almost in disbelief, moving to clutch the side of his helmet in pain. Despite the bucket covering his face, you could read every emotion he went through like a book.

More tears made their way down your face as you used the Force to launch the man you loved into a tree, effectively knocking him out for a short period. Hunter tore off his helmet and grabbed you by the shoulders as you sank to your knees. You were sure your face mirrored Depa’s as she died. After all these years, how could the Clones do this to the Jedi? How could Crosshair do this to you?

“General, I’m here. Whatever’s going on, I don’t understand it, but I won’t hurt you. I swear.” You studied his features, the equal amount of confusion and despair in his gaze. You believed him.

“Hunter, you’ve got regs incoming” Wrecker’s voice sounded from the Sergeant’s helmet. The Clone wasted no time pulling a spare comm from the back of his armour, one Tech had tampered with it seemed. He pressed it into your hands and looked you dead in the eye.

“Go, get the kid to safety. We’ll contact you when we figure out what this order sixty-six is, and what’s happened to Crosshair. We’ll rendezvous somewhere safe.”

“Hunter I-”

“You have to do this, and we can’t lose you, General. Go, I’ll look after the boys. I promise to keep them safe” I promise to keep Crosshair safe.

With a nod, you scrounged up one final bout of resolve before getting to your feet, ready to take off in search of Caleb.

Before you left, you spared another look at the man you loved, still sitting unconscious below a tree. His body was limp as the chin of his helmet sat against his chest. You hated that it had come to this. That you had actually hurt him in some way.

Putting all your trust in Hunter, you mentally said goodbye to Crosshair and the rest of the Batch before you finally departed among the trees. Unsure as to when you’d next hear Wrecker’s boisterous laugh, Echo’s kind words, Tech’s rambling, or Hunter’s terrible jokes. Not knowing when you’d next feel Crosshair’s soft breathes against your neck as you slept surrounded by everything that he was. Uncertain for your future and with a shattered heart, you kept running.

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lemonjoonah · 4 years

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Blood Bounty - Part 1 (M)

Pairings: Yoongi x Reader, Taehyung x Reader Word Count: 10K Rating: M Genre: Historical fantasy AU, Vampire AU, Thriller, Drama, Smut Warnings: Non-consensual vampire feeding (graphic, provocative, sexual, blood play, and twisted as fuck), captivation/enslavement, blood, drugging (force feeding vampire blood), obsession, violence, PTSD, at one point the OC pleads for death, it’s dark guys you’ve been warned. While the vampire feeding in this part is highly sexualized, I do have somewhat more “traditional” smut scenes planned for part 2 and 3.

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Summary: He’s taken everything from you, your blood, your memories, your life, and after months spent as Taehyung’s own personal feast, you eagerly take your chance to flee. Unfortunately your escape doesn’t go as well as you had hoped, as you are soon caught by another blood thirsty beast. The vampire Yoongi claims to know you, and that he wishes to return you home. But when you can only remember the pain caused by his kind, you find it difficult to trust him, since he too could just be another monster waiting to feed.

A/N: This mini-series is a loose retelling of Anastasia, you’ll find it to be very different from the animated film. I attempted to blend both the history and the story together in a new historical fantasy world that is not our own. Anyway I hope you enjoy the start to my three part twisted tale, and if you have any questions at the end please feel free to send them my way! Also a big thank you to my beta readers @m00nchild-shi and @ladyartemesia. This story wouldn’t have made it this far without you!

This story is dedicated to all of those who have lost themselves to a monster (of any form) at some point in their life. I know the journey back to yourself can be hard, but trust me, you are worth every effort.

...

From the break of dawn you’ve crossed miles of ground, traversing through grassy fields and deep rivers. Accompanied only by the clothes on your back, a stake in your hand, and a pair of boots far too big for your feet, all stolen during your hastened departure.

You consider yourself lucky after making it out unseen. Lucky that Taehyung had left his fortress of a castle, lucky that he took most of his capable progenies with him, lucky that the underling who tended to your room left the fire iron within your reach, and lucky that it was able to break the chain of the shackle fastened around your wrist. You left as soon as daylight broke. With everything working in your favour for your escape, even acquiring your captor’s clothes and cap to pass off as a young man. For sightings of a woman travelling alone might tip off those you would rather avoid.

But now, with your heels raw and bloody, it would seem that your good fortune has finally run out, as the smell will no doubt attract his hunters. You curse your carelessness, for the number of times Taehyung has complimented you for your most potent scent. You’ve witnessed it yourself, a single whiff of your blood during his feedings having sent several of his men into a frenzy. This unfortunate blessing left you to be seen as a bounty, condemning you to his captivity, and now the struggle as you flee for your life.

You attempt to clean the broken skin and stem the flow with strips torn from your tunic. The fine piece of clothing is barely recognizable after the paces you’ve put it through today. With the extra fabric now wedged into your boots you can only hope that it’ll make your journey tomorrow easier, and detain much of the scent that would allow them to track you.

You wish that you could continue on tonight, but the darkness of the wood, your sores, and your fatigue impede your plans. You’ve gained ground but the lack of settlements must mean that you still lie within his realm. With your memories stolen in an effort to keep you at his side you have little to go on but a tapestry that hung in his den. It showed a city to the east, beyond the boundary of his land, and what is hopefully your home. But with the woven display having no proper scale you have no idea how long it will take to actually leave his territory. Freedom could be hours or days away. You can only hope that the rivers you’ve traversed will keep them at bay until you can find a safer place to stay. Their weaknesses are all you have to lean on to prevent recapture, but will it be enough?

After tending to your feet you settle in the nook of a tree, leaning your head against the mossy trunk. Your stomach growls but you have no food to feed it, nor a blanket to dismiss the chilling wind which forces a shiver from you. Your deflated spirit is made even worse when a raven takes notice of your poor state. It circles overhead, undoubtedly looming with the hopes that you have given in, and that he too can feast on you.

Ignoring the omen, you close your eyes, directing your focus instead on the surrounding sounds of the forest, listening for anything that might be a predator making an approach. Despite an exhausting day you still are wary of sleep, knowing what will greet you as you drift off, and concern of someone, or something catching up to you once you do. You rest there for what must be an hour, debating with yourself the advantages slumber, before you hear the snap of a nearby twig. Your fingers drift to the wooden stake on the ground next to you, your movement is slow hoping to escape the notice of whatever might be drawing closer. The footsteps which crunch on the leaves continue to advance on your position. There’s no running now, all you can do is play ignorance until they are in range for you to act.

When a hand reaches down and tilts the brim of your hat, you open your eyes, driving your weapon up in an aim to strike, but your assailant is too quick for you. He catches your arm in an iron grip, much like the remains of the manacle that still holds your other wrist. Though his face is hidden by the dark of night and his frame draped in a long coat, there is no doubt about what he is, and what he’s come for, his speed in stopping you was far too fast to be human.

“Be still,” the monster growls. “It’s me, Yoongi. Are you hurt?”

His concern is almost laughable. His implication of a connection likely a trap, one intent on luring you in, with a motive to end the hunt. “Not if you leave me be.” You attempt to press the stake towards him still, but he barely even registers your efforts.

“Have you forgotten me?” The beast’s grip tightens on your arm as he dismisses your threat, taking the stake in his own hand before he pulls you up while he continues his deception, “I know that to be what I asked for, but I didn’t think... no, it matters not. ” He shakes his head as his words trail off. His voice then returns resolute and firm once he changes thoughts. “Come, we must get you somewhere safe.”

You dig your heels into the ground as he attempts to pull you along, clawing at his fingers until they release you. “I’m not going anywhere with you vampire. You will not take me back to him, anywhere is safer than there.”

“I am not taking you back, but we must leave. They’ve already placed a large bounty on you and these parts will be flooded with hunters soon.”

“How can I be sure you’re not one of those hunters?” You make an attempt to retake the stake, showing you have no intention of complying with him. But he pulls it back, holding it just out of your grasp.

“You will have to take me at my word, I am not of Taehyung’s kin and I have no plans on handing you back over to him. Now if you please, I can either escort you to safety, or take you there by force.”

“I don’t trust you.” You glare back at him.

“Very well,” the vampire sighs, tossing your wooden weapon aside, putting it far beyond your reach. He then bends down, throwing you easily over his shoulder, and thereby ending the argument over your fate. Your fists collide with his back several times in an effort to make him release you, but he doesn’t appear bothered by the attack. You draw breath ready to call out when he stops you with a quick jostle. His shoulder lays into your abdomen knocking the wind from your lungs. “You may hit me all you want, but do not scream. I would rather not alert others to our location.”

Could he really not be someone sent by Taehyung’s underlings? Regardless, even if he is, you don’t have the strength to over power him. There’s little you can do but lay like a rag doll propped over his shoulder, with his arm hooked on the back of your knees.

He hauls you over to a break in the trees, one which leads out to the road where a horse waits patiently for him. You’re thankful when he seats you on the saddle rather than throwing you on your stomach once again. With the full light of the moon on the open dirt road, you’re finally able to see his face properly. His soft and sombre expression is a drastic difference compared to Taehyung’s sharp features and cruel grin.

“Are you going to behave now princess?”

Your eyes widen with terror in response to his last word uttered. You immediately try to pull away to put as much distance as you can between you and him, but he holds you firm in the saddle. The confining grip matching the memories of the name he has just called you all too well. Your breathing comes in short panicked waves as your hand moves to conceal the scar on your neck. You can’t go back, you won’t go back, you refuse to endure that supposed term of endearment anymore.

“Prin-” The vampire tries again to elicit a response from you, only this time you cut him off. Your fear turning to anger unwilling to tolerate another lie from his lips.

“If you are not one of Taehyung’s clan then tell me, why do you address me in that manner?”

“You don’t know why I call you princess?” He gazes upon you, his eyes narrowed in confusion as you recoil once again. This time he takes your hand, which bears the weight of both the iron shackle and bitten brand, to hold you still. When you wince from the pressure of his touch, he looks down to examine the sensitive spot. His jaw stiffens as he finds the source of the pain. “What has he done to you?” He whispers softly as his fingers trail over the wound on your palm.

...

“Open up princess, I have a gift for you,” Taehyung orders, standing over you as you sit on his desk. Gripping your jaw, while your lips remain sealed in defiance. “I said open.” His hand tightens, forcing your mouth to unfasten and expel a cry of pain. He presses the bloody tip of his finger to your tongue, dragging his index from the back to the front coating it with the thick fluid. “Now swallow.”

Your mouth begins to salivate with the intrusion of his blood. You know if you take it in you will lose everything once again, you’ll lose the will you’ve been building back up to defy him. He is never truly out of your system, you still have gaps in yourself, but the need to disobey always has its way of creeping back to you first. To be forced back into obedience within your own body and mind is nothing short of torture.

You refuse to allow him to drag you back to the dark willingly, spitting your saliva along with his blood into his smug expression.

Taehyung chuckles darkly as he wipes his face with the back of his hand. “You’re right my princess. How could I think that only a drop would be enough to dispel your greed? You deserve more.”

This time he bites into his hand allowing the blood to pool, while the other takes hold of your neck. The dripping flesh of his palm covers your gasping mouth. Your head is tilted back by his grasp as the blood drains down the back of your throat.

“You will keep this down. You will accept my control. Every time you look at yourself you will think of me. When you close your eyes you will dream of me, for you can not run away only toward. You will remember nothing before me, and nothing before the night I bestow you with this.” His thumb passes over a three month old scar on your neck, continuing to mark it as the cornerstone of the earliest memory you possess.

Every week without fail he reweaves his bonds inside you, tending to them as a doting hunter with a valued prey. He takes his fill of you in between, sometimes it’s only a taste and others a full meal. Treating his desk as a dining table and you the feast, placing you down upon it for his consumption.

“I will have to leave you weak in the knees today princess if I must go without you for a fortnight.” His finger catches a drop of blood that escapes your mouth running it back along your lips before his hand moves away and down, trailing deep red lines down the skin of your jaw and neck. “I’m sorry to leave, but there are some pressing matters which I must attend to.” He portrays a look of sorrow, but you know better than to believe that he can possess a single human emotion. “You’ll be good while I’m gone won’t you? Shall I give you something to remember me by? Another mark unhealed for you to see? You can watch as it slowly means, knowing that I’ll be back to tear you open again.”

He lifts your hand to his face with his own bloody fingers. How you wish you could slap him away, but your body refuses to move on your behalf, after consuming his blood it yields only to him.

He does not hesitate before sinking his teeth into the base of your palm. Matching his own wound that he inflicted on himself, but as yours grows deeper, his begins to heal. He takes a long draft before releasing in a pant. Your blood acts like a drug to his system, making him as he so often puts it, ‘Feel alive again.’

He wipes his palm on yours allowing the breach to clot, he doesn’t mend it completely, instead leaving the painful imprint of his teeth, branding you anew, just as promised. “Appetizer, now entree Princess,” he mutters as he moves on, shifting to cradle your head and neck in his arms. You attempt to pull away, but that only forces him to issue the command, “Stay still.”

His face hovers over the pulse of your neck, with you now frozen beneath. His fangs are careful not to dive too deep, retracting just as the blood begins to trickle from your throat. It collects in the well of your collar and trails down your chest, seeping beneath the bodice of your dress. The white fabric of your garment starts to bloom with scarlet. He could have chosen a gown of darker cloth for your personal wear, one that would be less prone to display the gruesome patterns of his actions, but he prefers to see the art of your suffering, your clothes and body becoming a canvas for his great masterpiece. He mutters how beautiful it looks while his fingers add to the display, painting a ruby-red choker around your neck using the blood as a stain.

His eyes linger taking in the sight before he moves in again to collect the flow, lapping it off your skin like a beast amidst a drought. You cringe as his tongue crosses your flesh, relentless in its desire to gather every drop it can. And just when you think he’s finished it makes another pass, accompanied by a growl and another sharp nip.

Unlike your hand, he completely remedies the gash on your neck, leaving only the one scar upon your throat from his first feeding. The loss starts to hit you, your skin turning cold like his, your breathing shallow, and your pulse quick. You hope that might be the end, that he has had his fill and needs no more, but his hand then fastens on your leg having pushed up the hem of your skirt and thin petticoat. “Let me in princess, I still have room left for dessert.” His teeth skim across the sensitive flesh of your inner thigh mapping his preferred spot from your pained twitches.

You whimper as he clamps down for his last bite. The only solace you can take is that he will not be here for two weeks. You have more time without him feeding, time to gain back control, and time to escape. You stare off to the woven tapestry map behind him, not knowing where to go but longing to be anywhere but here.

...

“D-don’t call me that.” Your demand catches and cracks at the back of your throat.

“But it’s what you are-”

“I am not his dinner, I am not his slave, and I am most certainly not his princess! I will not go back. If you have any mercy, please... drain me here. For I am far more willing to meet death, than I am to see him again. ”

To your confusion he looks shocked that you would even suggest such an act. He takes a moment before looking into your eyes with a narrowed gaze, “You don’t remember anything do you? It’s not just me you’ve forgotten.”

You shake your head, unable to meet his eyes, “I remember nothing before him.”

The vampire holds what’s left of the iron shackle in his hands, bending it apart with only his grip, freeing you from it’s clutches.

There's another sigh from him as he takes the space on the saddle behind you. His body is uncomfortably close to yours, with his breath on your neck, and arms wrapped on either side to take the reins. “And I thought he could sink no lower...” He urges the horse forward with a nudge and a few mumbled words far too low for you to hear. “You are right, you are not his meal, nor his property, but it is not simply a given moniker to which I am referring, it’s what you are. You are the only living heir of a human kingdom just east of here.”

“You lie, there is no way I could be,” This is just another game of his. It has to be. “If I am what you say, how could I have ended up where I was?”

“You went missing, disappearing from your bed in the night. Your people assume that you were kidnapped, that you were taken by a monster, not knowing what we are. But I assure you, you are the lost pr-” He stops as you stiffen once again. “I can take you home, back to your family, back to your people, if that’s what you wish.”

“And why would you do that?”

“I broke a promise long ago, I plan to remedy that mistake.”

“I fail to see how that applies to me.” You mutter as you slump down in the saddle, no longer fighting your current fate. This vampire too can easily overpower you, he can take you wherever he desires to go, but as long as it’s away from Taehyung you have no wishes to slow him down.

He pulls a skin of water from his horse’s pack offering it to you. Your dry mouth wants to empty it in one swig, but the possibility of what else it could contain holds you back. You turn your nose up instead fearing that he’s drugged it with his own blood.

“I have not tampered with it if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“You keep assuming your words carry weight with me. I will need more than that if I am to drink this.”

“If I intended to manipulate you with blood I would have done so already instead of fighting to get you on the horse.”

He’s right, it would have been far easier. You take a careful sip rolling over your tongue, trying to detect even the slightest taste of iron before your swallow.

He holds out food too, in the form of a few pieces of dried meat. Your mouth waters at the sight. The unaltered drink gives you the confidence to abandon your worries and take it, asking more questions while you eat. “You said I forgot you, but how was it that I knew you Yoo-” You pause trying to recall the name he led with when he found you.

“Yoongi.”

You wait for more but he doesn’t continue, after swallowing your current mouthful you press further. “Are you not going to tell me?”

“It would be better if you remembered.”

“You expect me to trust you, but then you hide truths?”

“I expect you to trust me because I want you to recall your truth of our encounters, not mine. When you do I will gladly discuss it with you, but not until then.” His tone is stern, boasting an air of finality to his argument.

You huff back in frustration. “Can you at least tell me how long you’ve known me?”

“More than ten years now, you were a child of fourteen when we first met.”

“So you must know my name? My real name?” You ask with near excitement, hoping it might stir up some of your past within you.

“I do.” But as he recalls it, whispering the name for you to hear, nothing happens. You thought when you heard it again that everything would come back all at once like a spell broken by one magical word. But the name that comes from Yoongi’s lips has no meaning to you, no memory, no warmth. It bestows only a cold emptiness, a fear that you’ll never quite be able to bind yourself together with the person who bore that name before.

...

Hours later Yoongi pulls his horse off the path and into the woods, trotting down what looks to be an overgrown trail. You finally come to a stop in front of a mound, backed by an elevation of stone and earth, bearing a small cave-like entrance.

“What is this?”

“An old mining site. We’ll have to stop here for now.” Yoongi helps you down off the horse before removing the tackle and taking the large pack, he ties his steed up with a long lead on a grassy patch. Once finished you follow him through the dark and into the cavern, lagging a few paces behind with your legs stiff and sore from the night’s travel.

“But there’s still another hour or two until the sunrise. Why stop here?”

“Because this is the last dark space that’s marked for the next fifteen miles.” He opens one of the bags pulling out a lantern, he lights it, dousing the cold and damp walls of the cave in a warm glow. Taking out a thick piece of paper next, he unfolds it with careful precision, laying it gently across a leather pack. He acts as though it’s a precious heirloom passed on to him from a loved one long gone. Your heart starts to race upon realization that it’s a map, and how with it’s aid you’d be able to find your own way home.

Dark circles on the heavy parchment denote what according to the key is a resting spot. He opens it further pointing to both your current position and destination, your fingers tracing over a kingdom which he says is yours. With still three times the distance you’ve travelled yet to traverse, much of your contentment fades.

Despite the blow to your morale, you continue your examination of the map, hoping to learn as much from it as you can. It’s beautifully intricate and precisely made, the only flaw is an ink smudge in the lower left hand corner, which appears to be a faint mirror image of the compass rose on the right. Likely the result of the map being folded before the ink had completely dried. You run your index over the blot feeling much the same. A partial imprint of your past life, and a great distance away from what you must have been.

Yoongi watches you with a keen eye as you attempt to commit your future route to memory. “Does it look at all familiar to you?”

“No, I remember nothing of this land.” Not the names of rivers or cities return to you. How can you call a place home if you know nothing of it? “Thank you for your assistance. I know you have to stop, but after seeing this I feel that I should keep going.” You offer cordially, praying that he’ll agree to parting ways here.

“Oh no you don’t. You’ll stay here until the sun sets, and we’ll continue together.”

“Why should I? If the sun is out I’m not at risk from vampires.”

“It is still a while before we reach your kingdom. You can see that can’t you? At least two more nights where you would be alone if I let you leave. Not to mention the risk from your own brethren. You haven’t been among other humans enough to know that they can be just as malicious.”

“Then give me your horse and I’ll out ride them.”

“When was the last time you rode a horse on your own?” He asks lowering his brow, scoffing as his tongue pokes at the side of his cheek.

“I-I...” Naturally you can’t remember, and he knows it. “I’ll be fine.”

“Yes of course you’ll be fine, it’s not like there will be vampires nipping at your heels the whole way home. Do you know I could smell the blood trailing from your feet a mile away? I can’t imagine they are in a good state. If the horse were to unseat you and run off, would you even be able to continue?”

You wince at the thought of treading forward on foot. The blisters are already a source of great agony, it’s painful to think what they would be like after another mile or two.

Yoongi notices the show of discomfort in your face, “Looks like you’ll be staying with me then your highness.”

“I’d rather not...” You're grateful he’s stopped calling you by the other title, but that still doesn’t prove his loyalty. “Why are you so insistent on taking me home? What’s in this for you?”

“Your company.”

“I am serious,” you groan, casting a dark glare back at him over the candle light.

“So am I.” He mutters his response, it’s so quiet you almost miss it.

“You are insufferable! I should be taking advantage of the daylight, I should be putting more distance between myself and his prison. You should have left me there in the forest so I wouldn’t have to deal with your so-called assistance.”

“Forgive me for wanting to keep you alive and safe. It must be truly awful to have someone come to your aid.”

“You are not someone, you’re a vampire,” you bite back against his sarcasm. “I take no pleasure in being in the company of your kind.”

Yoongi sighs looking defeated, following it with an odd request. “Give me your hand, the one with the wound.”

“Why?” You clutch your palm to your chest in defence.

“I’ll mend it properly for you, your heels too if you’d like. I want to help undo the damage that my kind has done to you. He should never have left you scarred like that.”

“He shouldn’t have fed off me in the first place!” You shout back your voice echoing off the walls.

“You’re right,” Yoongi levels with you. “But I can’t imagine you want to keep it.”

“I don’t, but I also don’t want help from you! I would rather carry this than any more of your poison. So you can keep your blood to yourself.”

“As you wish,” Yoongi responds, yet he still shifts towards you, encouraging you to back away and keep the space between you.

“I’m not going to...” His tone sounds exasperated but soon changes to a softer register as he looks at your terror ladened face. “Just, take this.” Yoongi passes over a bed roll before pulling one out for himself from the woven pack.

You stare at the bedding, questioning it, the convenience of such an item along with supplies all seem too good to be true. “Why would someone who travels alone have a second? Why would a vampire have a stash of water he can’t drink, and food he can’t eat?”

“I brought them for you. I knew you would need them on the journey.” His answer comes off as thoughtful, but the explanation still doesn’t sit right with you, surely there can be no rational reason as to why he was so ready for your escape.

“You expect me to swallow your perfect timing? That you just happened to be in the right place at the right time, ready to play the role of saviour-”

“Who said the timing was perfect? It has been anything but ideal,” Yoongi growls cutting you off. “I have been trying to get you back ever since I learned that you were taken. But we have limitations that prevented me from just storming his castle. A vampire can not enter the home of another without permission. I tried to get you, believe me I did. While you were trapped inside for five years, I was kept outside for just as long. But I have always been prepared to leave with you at a moment's notice.”

You were ready to continue your argument again just as he was to finish, but one of his last reveals disarms you with an all too unpleasant fact. “H-how long did you just say?”

“Five years?”

“No... that’s not possible, I can’t remember more than a few months.”

“Prin- your highness.” Yoongi catches himself as you turn to panic.

“Please don’t tell me that he held me for years.” You panicked whispers become sobbing pleas, you would gladly take the lie now. The thought of more tortures of imprisonment lying just below the surface of your memory is enough to make you want to do away with your entire past. Blindly tossing it all away and building it all anew, if only it worked that way.

“It’s been years, I’m so sorry, but you’ve been with- you’ve been missing for half a decade.”

“Why? Why would he take that too?” You whisper stand up clutching the scar on your neck, the mark you thought to be the first was likely a only a sequel to many. How many more lie hidden in your skin, healed and masked his blood? Feeling a pull to leave, you stumble towards the mining shaft’s entrance, unable to take another minute beside a monster who could do the same. Yoongi grabs you from behind, wrapping his hands around your waist to prevent you from progressing any further outside. You strain against him determined to go back out into the open air. “No, let me go.”

“I can’t do that, your highness.”

You turn into him pushing against his chest as you shout. “Let me go Yoongi.” He doesn’t stop you from shoving, or cursing him out. He just stands there holding tight as you take out your loss on him.

“If I were to do that his hunters would find you,” Yoongi warns. “Is that what you want? Because I’m not ready to lose you to him again...” The last of his sentiment drifts off as if he’s said too much. His grip loosens to the point where you can slip away. As much as you want to turn out and run towards the sun he’s right, you can't risk losing another five years or maybe more. He nods down to the bed roll abandoned on the ground. “You should get some rest, you’ll need it for the journey tomorrow.”

You obey, taking the bedding and lantern, wandering back farther into the cave and further away from the vampire. Slipping off your boots you find the cloth you had wedged in earlier caked with blood. You glance over to your nocturnal companion seeing if the reveal had any effect on him, but he’s already lying down, his back towards you, paying no attention. Desperate to dispose of the temptation you hold the two strips of fabric above the lantern flame. Fortunately they are dry enough to burn, leaving only ashen traces of the linen scraps. You redress your wounds with more fabric from your garment, but before curling under the blankets for the day you take one last precaution. With numerous broken branches littering the floor of the cave, you take the most jagged and sturdy, tucking in by your side. The sharp twig is not quite a stake, but a better defence than nothing at all.

...

Even after travelling all day and night with little rest it takes an age for you to fall asleep, not because of the hard ground, not due to the pain in your legs, nor the questionable motives of your new guard, but the knowledge of who you’ll see once you do. Although Taehyung’s blood has lost control of your physical movements, his hold on your mind is still tight. You know you’ll see him when you drift off, but your exhaustion is unwavering and your need of rest undeniable.

It seems like only moments after you close your eyes that you’re reunited. He lies there beside you back in his castle, with his own eyes closed, his face content with a small smile as though he’s just fed. But on this night, something’s different. You finally feel as though you have the power to fight back against him. The stake you had stolen from his collection, and promptly lost to the forest, found again by your side. You’ve always wanted this moment, taking vengeance on the one who put you through hell. Even if it is only a dream you’ll embrace it though reality.

Mere inches away from his chest your hand is stopped by his. His eyes fly open and he tackles you back. “Killing me won’t grant you freedom, it won’t stop others from coming for you.”

“Then let them come,” you sneer back at him. “For any life without you Taehyung will be a vast improvement, no matter how short or perilous.”

There’s a quizzical look on his face, his thumb pushing into your palm trying to get you to realise the stake, “Wake up your highness, it’s not what you think.”

You are pulled from the dream to find yourself with your pitiful excuse for a weapon in hand. Pointing it at Yoongi’s heart as he hovers over you. You drop it quickly, and attempt to slide out from beneath him out of fear of retaliation. “I thought you were him.”

He places a heavy hand on your shoulder preventing any further retreat on your part. “I figured that to be the case. Do you have these dreams often?” His tone is not angry, but concerned.

You relax with his understanding, “Every night, he made sure it was so.”

“I know it won’t mend the past, but I’m sorry... for what he’s done to you.”

“I’m sorry I attacked you...”

“I can’t blame you for that,” Yoongi admits with a curling smile on his lips. “If I looked at myself and saw Taehyung I would respond in the same manner.”

You let out a small chuckle, leading to a surprised expression on Yoongi’s face. His smirk soon turns into a sad smile. “I want you to know, when you are with me, you are safe. No one will feed from you, no one will touch you, myself included.”

...

You wake to the sound of a raven in the early evening, the deep croaks of the bird carrying through the mine. Keeping your head down you glance with narrowed eyes to spy on the vampire who currently ties a small roll of parchment to the leg of the dark creature. It waits patiently on his knee until the knot is firmly in place, letting out another loud cry once Yoongi’s hand retreats.

“I suppose you’ll be wanting more then?” Yoongi takes his index, and presses it down onto one of his sharp teeth, allowing a bead of blood to form on the tip. The raven then takes his finger into his beak and tilts his head back as it feeds on the red droplets. You start to gag at the sight, alerting Yoongi to your awakened state. The bird takes flight as your escort gets up to check on you, but as he comes closer you draw back. He pauses after his first couple steps, and asks from a distance instead. “Are you alright?”

“Why did you feed it your blood?” You heave again at the thought, but with little in your stomach there is nothing to come up.

“He’s delivering a letter for me. The blood is his reward; it keeps him healthy, but it also allows me to convey where he needs to go and who he needs to find.”

“It’s disgusting.”

“The raven is more than happy to take it as payment for his service. But I know of what you mean, when the exchange is done improperly...” Yoongi pauses as another wave of nausea overwhelms you again, “Forgive me, I thought you were asleep, I didn’t know you would be watching.”

“What were you sending?”

“Notice to my clan. I left my surveillance post, they will wish to know why.”

“Will that be a problem?” You hadn’t considered groups other than Taehyung’s, but if you can avoid interaction with them all the better.

“No, returning you home will be a greater blow to Taehyung. He has likely built a dependence on your blood and without you he’ll be left in a far weaker state. We might finally have a chance to diminish his hold on the region.” Yoongi takes a brief glance to the entrance and starts to pack away his supplies. “You should ready yourself to leave. The sun is almost down.”

You climb out from your bed roll to find that in the night the blood had seeped through the new makeshift bandage. Yoongi clenches his teeth, and makes another offer. “Please just let me heal them, you'll only need a drop.”

“That’s one drop too much.” You move back unsure if you should be more worried about Taehyung’s men tracking you down, or the more current and looming threat of the vampire in front of you. “Is this going to be a problem for you?” “No,” he confirms, however there’s a slight hesitation in his answer. “But you should go wash up before you lose all daylight, there’s a river just down hill.” He takes a kerchief from his pocket and places it on a rock between you. “You can have this if you’d like. I don’t have any bandages to offer, other than the treatment you find so distasteful.”

You reach out and grab it. “You won’t be getting this back.” You eye him darkly.

“That’s fine, just go clean them off before others who may be nearby take note of your aroma.” You observe him with caution, hesitating to pass by his threatening mouth to get to that of the cave’s. “Unless you want to stay and watch me eat.” He comments as he pulls out another soft flask which he carries in his jacket. You cringe as he holds in what is likely a stolen meal.

“What?” He fires back at your critical glare.

“Do you drain all your victims into wine skins, or just those you wish to save for later?”

“The one who gave me this was not my victim. They were willing to part with it.”

“Willing?” You scoff. “I find that hard to believe. Are you sure you did not slip them some of your own blood first?”

“No I did not, but if you have a problem with how I conduct my feedings you only have yourself to blame.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means, you shouldn’t be so quick to judge. Now hurry, so we can make use of this night.”

You do just that, darting past him you leave the mine heading down to the river in the fading sunlight.

...

As you return Yoongi is already outside and packing the horse. With his back to you he pulls an apple from the saddle bag, and the horse turns his head towards the treat with it’s mouth open and reaching. He pulls it back and away from the creature, “I know, I know this should have been yours, but you’ve had enough grass and she needs food. Do you mind sharing?” You watch as he rubs his steed behind the ear and it gives up on it’s want for the fruit. “Thanks, next one is yours, I promise.”

“Am I to thank you or the horse for my meal?” You call out to the vampire.

“You may thank him if you like.” Yoongi hands off the apple to you as you approach.

You can’t help smile as you stand in front of the massive and beautiful stallion letting him smell the back of your hand before you reach you pet the star on his forehead. “What is his name?”

“Horse...” Yoongi admits.

“Horse? Surely you jest. Why would you not give him a proper name?”

“He went for so long without one it just stuck.” Yoongi responds as he tightens the girth of the saddle. “What would you have named him?”

“I’m not sure, but certainly not horse. You poor beast, first he deprives you of a suitable name, then an apple.” You take a few bites but with your stomach still queasy and unable to take anymore, you give the rest to the poorly named steed. Once the bridle and tackle are secure you mount up despite the instant outcry from your legs. You find Yoongi watching you, taking notice but remaining silent. You’re grateful for his lack of discourse, not wanting to have to explain the tenderness of your ass and thighs owing to yesterday’s travel.

Regrettably, the aches become worse, and after only a couple hours of riding you’re barely able to stay upright. If Yoongi’s arms weren’t circling around you to keep hold of the reins you would have slid to the ground long ago. It seems that he’s no longer able to disregard your comfort though. “Are you well?”

“Relatively speaking, yes.” You whisper holding in a groan.

“Relative to what?”

“Relative to a week ago.” To your time with Taehyung. You grimace further with each mounted stride.

“I think your scale is skewed. We’ll slow for a bit. Though you might think differently, I have no desire to see you in pain.” He slows his steed to a walk and dismounts, letting you lean back as he leads the horse forward.

“This is nothing I promise. We should keep the pace up.”

“You wish to be rid of me so soon? Even if it causes you agony?”

“Yes.” Your short reply is enough to make him pause for a second, his face splitting into an open smirk before he continues again.

“Though I appreciate your honesty, the horse could use a break too.” Yoongi chuckles darkly. “You’ll have to learn how to hold that tongue of yours again once you return to court.”

You take in a sharp breath as a chill runs down your spine. You’ve been so focused on what you are running from you haven’t given thought as what you are running too. “Do you know much about my family, about my life back home?”

“Some.”

“You said I was the last remaining heir. There must have been a time when that wasn’t the case.”

“Your brother...” Yoongi explains, his gaze fixed on the road. “He passed away a few weeks ago. He was very ill, had been all his life.”

You take a deep breath as you register the news, but it’s hard to properly grieve when you can’t recall what you lost. “I wish I could remember-”

Yoongi must be taking pity on you as he delves further without your prompting. “You loved him very much, but you weren’t as close as you would have liked to have been. His ailment was unknown to many and it prevented him from spending much time with you.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because you told me.” He whispers, finally meeting your eyes again.

“Wh-what else do you know? Will you tell me?”

Yoongi shakes his head, “Give it time and you’ll remember on your own. His hold won’t last forever.”

“I still don’t understand why you won’t say more.”

“Because I don’t want to give you a false sense of your past, only to find out later that it was different than I thought, than I hoped. Your affection for your brother was obvious, but with other focuses of your adoration I cannot be sure. So please do not ask much of me. You’ve gone through enough, I have no wish to plant false regard for things you did not actually love.” While Yoongi continues to look up to you his expression takes a sudden shift. His nose lifts into the air and takes a deep breath, before his head snaps back at the road ahead. “Humans... four of them.”

Your heart leaps at the prospect, but Yoongi cuts your anticipation short. “Don’t get too hopeful. They are currently trying to conceal themselves on the path ahead. I doubt their motives are well intended.” He reaches up to tuck a lock of hair that had fallen out from your cap. “Stay on the horse and keep quiet. I’ll deal with them.”

“But-”

“For your own safety, please do what I ask.”

The trees growing around the road are thick and dense, your eyes dart between the trunks in hopes to catch movement, but with the forest cloaked in darkness you have little ability to find anything. Minutes pass and just as you are about to question Yoongi, you spot a man with tattered clothes lying in the middle of the dirt road ahead. Thinking he might be a victim of the others mentioned, you make an attempt to dismount. But Yoongi holds your hand firmly on the reins, while he calls out to the casualty. “The wounded traveller? Do people still fall for that?”

There’s a moment of silence before a man emerges from the forest to the left. “You’d be surprised,” he responds, while two more appear on the right.

The destitute wayfarer on the road gets up and dusts himself off. “It’s a shame you didn’t fall for our ploy, it’s much easier both for us and those who do, so much less blood. You look to be worth the effort though. I’m sure we could fetch a pretty penny for a steed like that.”

The four close in ranks and advance. Yoongi stays by your side, eyeing their approach, he gives a warning. “For your sake, I hope there will be no blood involved.”

“Is that a threat?” One of the highwaymen asks. “I should like to see how you plan on besting us without a blade.

The man closest to you, with a dagger drawn, reaches out to grab hold of your leg. “Come down off the horse lad. There's no point in putting off the inevitable, it’s ours now.” In spite of his weapon you ready to kick the man off, but before your foot can lay into him his grip is torn away. In the blink of an eye Yoongi is on the other side of the horse forcing the assailant to his knees with an arm behind his back. There’s a loud pop from the thief’s shoulder, resulting in a cry of pain. One of the other bandits charges to free his ally, his sword ready. Yoongi succeeds in dodging the initial thrust of the steel, and with one hand takes the saber, turning it instead on it’s owner. Your vampire escort issues another caution with the point at man’s throat.

“If you would like your friend to keep use of his arm then I suggest you all back away.” While the disarmed thief retreats backward with his hands in the air, the rest are frozen in place refusing to move. “You think I jest?” Yoongi’s grip tightens while his captive lets out a shout. The little effort used on the vampires part to make the man submit finally prompts his fellows to take two steps back. “I swore to my companion that no one would touch them on this journey. You’ve made me break that promise, and I am not pleased.” There’s a deep growl to his voice that sends chills through even you. “I should take this limb in payment, and maybe one from each in your party too.”

“Yoongi....” You whisper in a low tone.

He turns back to you with a slight smirk. “But you are lucky, my friend prefers mercy. It’s far more than you deserve.” Yoongi lowers his head muttering into the bandits ear. “I’ll tell you what. You may keep your arm, but you and your men will abandon your camp, head south and keep walking. You will tell no one of us, and if I ever come across your path again I will not hesitate to act on my threats.”

Yoongi releases the man allowing him to scramble away as he clutches his shoulder. The other three support their injured cohort as they run off.

Yoongi takes hold of the horse from the ground once again, leading you off the road. “Their camp it’s just this way. They might have had some supplies which will be of use to us.”

You only nod in response unsure of what to say, after what you just witnessed. The first humans you had interacted with in years, and here they intended to rob you.

The smoke of their smouldering fire draws you in. Yoongi’s hunch was right, they had a good deal of useful items. Rations for you, along with spare changes of clothes. He fills a bag and ties it on the saddle, leaving their stolen riches along with the blade behind for someone else to find.

He mounts up behind you again, carrying on forward for some time before speaking again. “Are you well your highness? You’ve been very quiet.”

You give him another nod, while chewing on your lip. “Why south?”

“That’s where my own clan’s territory lies. If they try to pull something like that again they’ll regret it.” He shifts in the saddle behind you, “Back there, I-I didn't scare you did I?”

You fall silent again, unable to confess he somewhat had, but also that the terror of your fellow mankind outweighed his by far. You fear the idea of having crossed them alone. They would have taken advantage of your mercy, who knows where you would be now if it weren’t for the self-proclaimed guard at your side.

Yoongi seems to take your lack of answer as confirmation of his worry. “I needed them to see me as a vicious monster, had they not backed off I would have had to become one. I’m sorry you had to witness the threat but it was necessary. I needed to terrify them for their sake and yours. I promise didn’t intend to frighten you, only to keep you safe. ”

...

Coming close to the break of day you find rest this time in a small abandoned house. The windows shuttered completely to prevent even the smallest stream of light from entering. Unlike the night before Yoongi doesn’t light the lantern. It’s so dark inside that he has to lead you to an empty space of floor for you to rest on. He takes a couple steps away, giving you some space before settling down himself once again between you and the door.

“I’m not going to run, you’ve made your point, or I should say the thieves did.”

“I don’t rest between you and the exit to keep you here, but to stop others from entering,” Yoongi explains. “These spots I’ve scoped out, I am not alone in using them. They are how my kind travels, some might have found different places to rest away from the sun, but I can tell that others have used this location. Don’t go examining your surroundings too closely, you might not like what you find.”

Now thankful for the darkness, you take your bed roll from Yoongi. “Rest easy,” he mutters as you climb in between in the blankets.

“Not likely,” you whisper back. “But thank you.”

Unfortunately you are correct, your sleep is once again disturbed by Taehyung. You catch a glimpse of his face before you're surrounded by him. The darkness holds you in a suffocating grip, your mouth slowly filling with blood. You struggle trying to breath reaching out to take a hold of anything that would pull you out.

A hand grabs on to the side of your face, another on to your arm. Finding the shine of Yoongi’s eyes once you're able to open your own, you gasp out to him begging for some sort of relief. “Can’t see... can’t breath...”

He picks you up only to set you back down on the floor a second later. There's a click and the front door opens to reveal a narrow shaft of sunlight. A single beam a couple inches wide, but it’s enough to dispel the darkness inside. Your eyes start to water, blinded by the light, but it’s far too warm and comforting to deny yourself the sight.

To your disgust there’s a lingering taste of blood in your mouth. Reminding you of the shackles that still bind you to Taehyung as it continues to overwhelm your senses. Yoongi’s voice flows from the darkness just to the side of the door, his eyes glowing like that of a predator’s. “I think you might have bitten your tongue in your sleep, your highness.”

He’s right, you find a sore spot as you press it to the roof of your mouth. You make an attempt to focus back on the sun. You sit there in silence letting your breath and heart return to a normal rate. All while Yoongi’s eyes continue to watch you, burning in the darkness. He apologizes for his gaze, but does not withdraw his attention, “Sorry but it’s been so long since I’ve seen someone bask in the sun. I’ve forgotten what it feels like myself...”

“How long?”

“I lost count around the century mark, but it’s likely been double that.”

“Do you miss it?”

“Yes, but I understand. Immortality is a large price to pay, and every monster must have an equal weakness.”

“But I suppose, not everything it repels is a monster.”

Yoongi’s eyes narrow as if he’s hiding a small smile in the darkness. “Dare I say, that sounds almost like a compliment?”

“Merely an observation,” you whisper, but your words trigger something inside you, a pain and longing which you can’t explain. “Yoongi, what were we to one another before...” Before Taehyung interrupted your life. “Please I know you don’t wish to speak for me, but I need to know your view of what we were.”

“We were friends, just friends.” He responds but you're not convinced, just friends do not wait outside the home of their enemy for five years. Just friends don’t put their entire life on hold for another. Just friends aren’t overwhelmed with the desires that seem to be returning to you now.

You’ve seen this expression on him before, you know you have. On the edge of your memories lies a dark cavernous stone built hall, one in which only you and him resided. You find him crumbling under the weight of what he is and what he’s lost because of that. Fragments of your words and his surface in your mind.

“You are not a monster Yoongi, I do not need saving from you!”

“If not from me, then at least from my kind. I cannot give you the life nor the safety which lies here... You would be better off if you forgot me entirely.”

You remember your wish to comfort him, to embrace him and prove that he has not lost everything because of what he is. With the recollection fading, falling from your grasp, you panic out of fear of losing the brief moment of memory. Closing the door you move towards Yoongi, the only focus you have of your previous life, hoping the scene in your mind might continue.

“I don’t need saving from you,” you mutter, blinded by the rapid loss of light, reaching out in an attempt to find him again.

He takes your hand and holds it, his cool fingers trailing soothing lines over the mark on your palm. “If not from me, then at least from my kind,” he responds, following the path of your dialogue from long before. “You remember our last meeting?”

“Only a fraction of it. I remember wanting to...” To confess to him, to kiss him, that was your past self was leaning towards. You thought well enough of him to desire an intimacy with one who feeds on others... that can’t be right. But even now you can start to see the appeal your younger self cared for. His soft touch on your hand, his calming presence, and protection, those are not qualities of a monster. And in the memory you were worried that he would reject your affection, that he would be the one to pull away, not you. “Did you ever desire to be more than friends?”

His eyes grow wide at your question, but his stance remains the same. “You know I will not answer that.”

“But this is regarding your feelings, not my own!”

“I will say no more of us. I’ve told you far too much already.” He leaves the topic at that, directing you to your present state instead. ”There’s a few more hours before sunset... do you think you’ll be able to sleep?”

You shake your head and move to sit with your back against the boards of the wall. Your reply is slow to come, and muddled with the first gasp of tears. “I can’t...” The prospect of closing your eyes again is too terrifying.

Yoongi comes to sit beside you, as he continues to hold your hand, his other arm wraps your shoulders as you let out the pain. A couple of hours ago you would have pushed him away out of fear, but with the spark of your past self craving his presence, who are you to deny the support it needs. “I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I’m sorry I have to keep my view from you. I don’t want to add to the damage that has been done.”

“There is not more damage that could be done. All I have to remember is a few months spent in agony and terror. How can I find comfort or rest when that is all I have? I have no knowledge of who or what made me happy, or of what dreams chased away the nightmares.”

“An adventure,” Yoongi mutters, his head bowed to the floor as he concedes with another part of your past. “You always dreamed of having an adventure.”

You let out a broken and weeping scoff, crestfallen that your ambitions to learn more only exposed a further divide. “I find that hard to believe.”

“Your parents were overprotective, because of your brother's condition. You were forced to keep to the castle, you just longed for something different.” His thumb rubs along the back of your hand as he holds it.

“But I don’t feel like one to see the risk of adventures as desirable.”

“You’ve been through much since then, fear has a way of changing what we want. I will admit I wished for you to be more careful back then, but never at a cost like this.”

“I don’t know if I will ever be that person again...” You draw your knees to your chest letting your head lull to the side and onto him.

“That’s okay,” His arm grips you tighter, as his face lowers to the top of your head. His lips briefly brush against your hair, before his cheek comes down to rest, taking their place. “That’s why I’m taking you home.”

...

#bts smut #yandere bts #yoongi x reader #taehyung x reader #bts x reader #bts fanfic #bts fanfiction #bts reader insert #bts thriller au #bts vampire au #yandere taehyung #min yoongi #kim taehyung #min yoongi x reader #kim taehyung x reader #suga x reader #v x reader #bts blood bounty

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years

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Podcasting "When Automation Becomes Enforcement"

This week on my podcast, I read my recent Medium column, “When Automation Becomes Enforcement,” about the debate of interoperability and end-to-end encryption in the EU’s Digital Markets Act, and how that relates to the long-running battle over who’s in charge: you, or your computer?

https://onezero.medium.com/when-automation-becomes-enforcement-677461a78e62

When I first encountered the idea of disappearing messages, I thought they were stupid, but I was wrong. I thought that the point of disappearing messages was to let you send secrets to someone you didn’t trust, because the message would disappear and thus be safe.

Obviously, this is stupid. If you send a secret to someone you don’t trust, that untrustworthy person can take a screenshot, or use another device to photograph their screen. Or, you know, they can just remember the secret and blab it. Technology can’t make untrustworthy people trustworthy.

But then I had the other use-case for disappearing messages explained to me: not enforcing agreements about data-handling, but rather, automating them. You and I might trust each other not to blab our mutual secrets, but we might also agree that the best way to keep those secrets from leaking is to delete the record of our conversation.

We understand that we’re both fallible. We know that even with the best of intentions, we might forget to delete our chat logs, and that exposes them to being leaked, or coerced from us. A disappearing messages tool hands “remembering to delete files on a regular basis” — something humans are bad at doing — to a computer, which is very good at this.

The reason I assumed that disappearing messages were designed for the stupid fantasy of trusting untrustworthy people is that there’s a long history of this. Microsoft tried (unsuccessfully) to snuff out rivals to Microsoft Office in the mid-2000s with a product called “Information Rights Management” (IRM).

IRM was DRM for Office files, whose pitch was that you could send a Word doc or an Excel sheet to someone you didn’t trust, and IRM would stop them from leaking or printing or forwarding those docs.

IRM could be defeated by all the same measures as disappearing messages, but Microsoft claimed it could mitigate these with Trusted Computing — which would prevent you from installing non-Microsoft operating systems and software on your computer.

Microsoft used the unreliability of IRM to insist that all our computers be designed to disobey us, and take orders from Microsoft instead. If Microsoft said you couldn’t install an OS, or an app, or take a screenshot, your computer would listen to Microsoft — not you. In the process, Microsoft would become tech’s gatekeeper, with the power to approve or deny all new services and products.

Since then, this idea has spread to other companies, especially (and ironically), Apple — the company whose interoperable Office programs (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) Microsoft wanted to extinguish with IRM and Trusted Computing.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

Today, Apple is one of the Big Tech companies targeted by the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), which will require the largest tech companies to connect their messenging platforms to small companies systems on request.

This has the potential to do great good — and also great harm. On the positive side, forcing interop on tech giants will allow users who stick with them to leave for better rivals, without having to abandon their connections to customers, community and family. That will create space for co-ops, nonprofits and startups with better privacy policies and firmer commitments to user rights (for example, companies that, unlike Apple, would exit the Chinese market rather than allowing the Chinese state to backdoor its encryption).

On the negative side, the additional complexity of interop could lead to errors in the end-to-end encryption (E2EE) of instant message systems, which could expose users to terrible risks that the digital rights community has warned us about for 30+ years.

The DMA does include language requiring that interop embrace and uphold E2EE, but it also sets deadlines for the integration of interop with E2EE, and it’s entirely conceivable that these deadlines will arrive before a satisfactory, secure technical solution is in place. That has digital rights activists (including me) worried.

But within the debate over DMA and E2EE is a latent, unarticulated disagreement about measures like disappearing messages — ambiguous security measures that some users treat as agreement automation tools and others as enforcement tools. If disappearing messages are enforcement tools, then interop is in big trouble — because that enforcement requires that every chat client treat its owner as an attacker, and override their judgment when senders demand it.

That’s antithetical to the mission of DMA: to allow users to decide how their devices operate. I want there to be disappearing messages with “override” buttons — that would let you decide to retain your boss’s harassing messages, say, so you could show them to your lawyer.

For many years, disappearing message vendors were able to avoid speaking clearly about their products’ use-case, benefiting from the enforcement/automation ambiguity. Some users naively assumed they were getting enforcement, while others understood that automation was all they could hope for.

Now, though, interop is forcing the question — and that’s a good thing. The users who thought they were getting enforcement from disappearing messages were living in a fool’s paradise, after all!

We definitely need to ensure that the DMA doesn’t weaken E2EE — but that doesn’t have anything to do with ensuring that the DMA turns disappearing messages into an enforcement tool. Not only is that impossible — merely attempting it will give more market-structuring power to monopolists.

Here’s a link to the podcast episode:

https://craphound.com/news/2022/04/10/when-automation-becomes-enforcement/

And here’s a direct link to the MP3 (hosting courtesy of the Internet Archive; they’ll host your stuff for free, forever):

https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_422/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_422_-_When_Automation_Becomes_Enforcement.mp3

And here’s the RSS for my podcast:

https://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

#pluralistic

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ithebookhoarder · 3 years

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Nightmares (Javier Peña x GN!Reader)

Description: You knew you were lucky to still be alive after a near death experience at work, but you never predicted the affect it would have on your partner, Javi.

Warnings: Smoking, references to violence, death, swearing, mentions of alcohol, minor injuries, nightmares / panic attack. (Let me know if I missed anything)

Masterlist:

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There are some thing you never get used to, no matter how long you’d been walking the beat.

Even after spending five years down here in Colombia, there was some things you still couldn’t get used to: crime scenes where one of them. Bodies were another, especially bodies of innocent civilians.

A sigh escaped your lips as you leant against the wall, cigarette perched between your teeth. It was a horrid habit and one you’d yelled endlessly at Javier for, but there were times you chose to indulge your previous habit. Times like this.

It calmed you down, not as well as a drink would mind you, but until you could get yourself to a bar or back to the rum in your apartment this was your only option. So, you’d bummed a smoke off of a passing officer as he patrolled the scene, thanking him for lighting it too as you breathed in and out, over and over until you could think straight.

“Shit.”

“Y/N? Y/N?”

Javi’s voice was panicked as he hurried across the road towards you, his footsteps echoing off of the sidewalk. You could tell without looking he had been panicking the entire car ride over here. Probably since he’d heard the news, to be honest.

He known you’d been here, meeting with your informant at your usual arranged location. Every Wednesday, without fail, the two of you met to grab lunch at the local restaurant on the corner. It just so happened that, this week? It was the week that your meeting coincided with Escobar’s decision to take out a hit… on your informant, and by extension, you.

A car had driven past, lost in the sea of passing afternoon traffic. You would never have looked at it twice had it not stopped directly outside of the restaurant and rolled the windows down.

The sicarios and the guns in their hands had got your attention quick enough, as had the bullets they fired, forcing you to drop to the floor, yelling at everyone around you to ‘GET DOWN!’.

It probably only lasted two minutes. An endless rain of hell fire, with bullets and blood and screaming as people fell all around you, too slow to get out of the way of the real target.

You screamed, covering your head as you tried to grab your weapon and return fire but it was no use. They’d got what they came for and left just as quickly as they’d come.

So, you watched, helplessly, as police arrived and wheeled your informant away in a body bag. A body bag you’d as good as put them in. You should have known better. You should have been more careful… more prepared… now their blood and the blood of everyone else who had got caught in the crossfire was on your hands.

“Y/N? Fuck! Are you alright?”

Javi’s voice broke you from your stupor, forcing you to look up at your partner as he reached for you. His eyes were wide and his hands shook as they cupped your face, checking for injuries.

“I’m fine, Javi. I’m fine. Just a little bruised.”

“Thank god.”

“Hardly. I don’t think God had anything to do with this carnage, Javi,” you scoffed bitterly, throwing your cigarette butt to the floor and grounding it under your heel. You could only pretend it was Escobar’s face instead. “Why else would he let all these people get hurt? Innocent people.”

“Hey, look at me, hermosa. This is on Escobar. Not you, you hear me?” Javi ordered firmly, leaving no room for debate. “He did this. There was no way you could have known this was gonna happen.”

You tried not to laugh at the irony. That was the point. You were supposed to be one of the people who predicted this kind of shit happening. Who prevented it from happening.

“Yeah, well, he did. He took out my informant and half a dozen people in the process.”

“Mierda.”

“That’s one word for it.”

Javi sighed.

You hated how upset he looked, worried and relieved all at once as he finally realised you were ok. This wasn’t the first close call either of you had had since coming down here, but it never got any easier to handle. You knew firsthand the kind of terror that sat in your gut when you heard Javi had been in some kind of trouble or been hurt. Your partnership had evolved into something way stronger than merely professional years ago.

Hence, your recent move into Javi’s apartment. You two shared everything now, from cases to a bed. It was how you knew him so well. Well enough to read him, and his fraying nerves, like an open book.

It was why you didn’t protest when he took your hand and decided it was time to take you home. You were just as desperate to leave this horror behind as he was.

“Come on, querida. Let’s get you home. Steve’s back over at the Embassy finishing up the briefing with Cãrillo. I said I’d call when we got back to our place and let him know you’re ok.”

That sounded heavenly right about then. “Alright.”

He took your agreement with a small smile and a kiss against your hairline, careful to avoid the dressing that had been placed there over the worst of your injuries. Damn glass had got everywhere when the window had exploded, a wall of bullets firing through it.

That didn’t matter now, though. What mattered was that you were safe and going home.

So, you took Javi’s hand and followed him to the familiar Jeep parked across the street. You eased yourself into the passenger seat and let him drive you away from it all, the scene shrinking in the rearview mirror with every second that passed until it was gone completely.

——

Javi was not the most domestic of beings. That was one of the first things you’d learned about him once you’d started dating.

He barely knew what a launderette was. He also knew the local takeout place phone numbers better than he did Steve’s, and he had that scribbled on a post-it on the fridge.

However, you’d learned that Javi only acted that way when it came to taking care of himself. For some reason, he never saw why it was worth making an effort when it was just him it affected. But you? For you he would make sure there were fresh bedsheets on weekends. For you, he would do anything and everything to take care of you in every way possible.

Today was no exception.

Javi had helped you inside the apartment, insisting Connie came to give you another medical once over when she got back from work. Despite your protests otherwise, you indulged him and thanked Connie when she left a half hour later, declaring you a little battered but otherwise in tact.

He’d also insisted on cooking for you. That in itself was a rare treat.

After all, Javi wasn’t a bad cook by any means. He knew how to make several staple dishes from his childhood and he made them well. However, his normally hectic life and lack of motivation often resulted in his seemingly endless supply of take out. He only ever broke out the saucepan on extraordinary occasions.

This definitely counted as that.

Besides, it allowed him to keep you both occupied, what with him cooking and you watching him with impressed curiosity. The sound of ingredients frying, the smell of sauces boiling, and the steady story behind his father’s Carbonada was enough to distract you both from the horrors of the day.

You simply smiled, watched, and eventually ate every last scrap of food in your bowl. You then offered to wash up as a thank you, with him taking the prestigious role of dryer.

Between the two of you, it didn’t take long to clear up. However, it would have been even quicker had Javi not repeatedly kept splashing you ‘accidentally’ with dishwater, or somehow getting dish soap on your nose.

You knew what he was up to - the lust in his brown eyes made that clear enough. It was all just one more distraction, one you were more than willing to indulge in as you returned the favour.

Needless to say, you were both soaked by the time you were finished. Soaked, and desperate to rip the wet clothes off of one another so that you could finish what you’d both started.

However, even if the multiple rounds of sex you’d had had been enough to leave you seeing stars, it still wasn’t enough to erase the day entirely. Not for Javi anyway, as you discovered some time past midnight.

You’d only been asleep an hour or so max, having dropped off wrapped in Javi’s arms. Yet, you were woken abruptly by a sound you’d never thought you’d hear: Javi whimpering.

“Javi?” you mumbled blearily, eyes opening at the noise and motion coming from behind you. With Javi’s body pressed so tightly to your own it was impossible to miss the way he was shaking, twitching against you as if in some kind of trance. “Javi, honey?”

You sat upright, turning and staring down at your lover in concern as you realised what was happening; he was having a nightmare. A bad one, if the tears on his cheeks were anything to go by.

Even in the dim light of the lamp you’d both forgotten to turn off, you could see the pain on his face. You also heard the sound of your name being uttered in between sobs.

That was enough to wake you up.

“Javi!” you pleaded again, reaching down and trying to rouse him. It took a couple goes before you gave in and raised your voice, shaking him slightly. “Javier Peña! Wake up!”

Javi gasped, his eyes opening wide as his consciousness returned to him.

It was like he’d been under water, the way he gasped for air, bolting upright and struggling to breathe as he realised where he was. You were almost too scared to touch him, worried you’d make it worse as he tried to calm down, his hands clenched in his hair.

Sometimes, when he got like this, it took a while for him to remember where he was. That he was safe and that you weren’t some remnant of whatever invisible horror had been pursuing him.

For a man who had an exterior of steel, he sure as hell had one of the biggest hearts you’d ever known. It was why he always took losses so personally. Why he felt every mistake or defeat as painfully as if a bullet had been planted in his chest.

It was one of the things you loved most about him.

“Javi?” you whispered. To your relief, he seemed to hear you as several minutes passed. It appeared as if the worst was over for now. “It’s alright. I’m here. You’re at home. You’re safe.”

“Y/N?”

“That’s me.”

“Y/N,” he croaked, daring to turn and look back at you properly. “I… I’m so sorry.”

Your face fell in pity. “No, Javi. Don’t be. You did nothing wrong, you were just having a nightmare. A pretty bad one too.”

“I know. I didn’t … I didn’t mean to wake you.”

You hated how pained he looked, even now, wild and frantic as he reached for you, inviting you in to his arms. He almost sounded guilty.

So you did what you could. You folded yourself around him, placing your head against his chest and rubbing your hands up and down his back in a slow, soothing motion. “Do you want to talk about it?”

He shook his head, choosing instead to kiss yours over and over again as if trying to commit it to memory through touch alone. “I… I thought I lost you… you were lying there… on the restaurant floor… I - I -“

“Oh, mi amor,” you winced, it all finally making sense. “I’m alright. Remember? Escobar didn’t get me. He got my informant but his men didn’t get me. He failed.”

“But he got close… he got close enough to hurt you and I… if anything happened to you-“

“I know, Javi,” you cooed, pressing a kiss to his chest. “I know. You don’t need to explain. I get it. This job is terrifying, it’s dangerous, but it’s also important. That’s why we came down here in first place, remember?”

He nodded.

“We knew what we were getting in to, and I know neither of us thought we’d end up throwing a relationship into the mix, but I’m glad. Ok? You hear me, Javi? I’m glad I got to meet you and have someone as wonderful as you in my life.” Tears of your own pricked at the corners of your eyes as you poured your heart out to the man you loved most in the world. “I’m not going anywhere, not if I have anything to say about it. We have to hold on to that and think about what a perfect life we’re going to have once we catch this bastard. He’ll spend the remainder of his life rotting behind bars, and we’ll be sipping beers on the front porch with your father, remember? That’s what you said. That’s the goal here.”

Maybe it was your use of his own words against him, or your determined tone, but Javi seemed to hear and absorb every word. You could feel him calming down, his mind drifting out of the darkness he’d been caught in, heading instead to the bright future you’d both envisioned time and time again.

You even felt his lips twitch upwards into the early stages of a smile as he listened.

“He… he’s going to love you, hermosa. Almost as much as I do. I know it.”

“I’m glad you do,” you chuckled, “I still think Papa Peña might kick me off his ranch with a shotgun if he thinks I’m not worthy of his brilliant son.”

Javi laughed. A deep, guttural, joyous laugh. “Not a chance. He’ll love you and you’ll be his favourite in no time. If anyone’s getting kicked out it’ll be me when I fix a fence wrong or burn the enchiladas.”

“Maybe you’ll have to get some more culinary practise in then, before we head home.”

“Maybe I will,” he grinned, “although I know you’re not with me for my skills in the kitchen.”

“It’s one of the reasons I love you.”

“One?”

“Oh, there’s lots and lots.”

“Such as?”

You lifted your head so that you could smile up at him as you stole a brief kiss from his lips, chuckling at the way his moustache tickled you. “Well, if I tell you, you’ll just get all big headed on me. So I think I’ll keep them to myself thank you very much.”

Before you’d even finished talking, Javi had you rolled over on the mattress, buried beneath him as he began to pepper kisses on every inch of skin he could get his hands on.

Your laughs and protests fell on deaf ears as you tried to wriggle free. He had you well and truly stuck, just as he had planned; if you wanted your freedom you’d have to pay for it, surrendering to him and his merciless hands.

You hated that he’d found out you were ticklish. It wasn’t fair. Not when he repeatedly used it to his advantage, just like now. Yet, you were too damn happy to really care. You’d do anything to keep that happy fragile smile fixed on his face for as long as possible. Life was all too short and hard, sometimes. Moments like these were all that sustained you on days like those.

What were a few reassurances of your love? They didn’t cost you anything, other than a little of your pride considering the smug grin Javi wore whenever you said anything nice about him. Yet, they were worth everything as was the brightness it re-ignited within Javi’s eyes.

So, you kept talking. You kept listing all the things about Javier Peña that you loved so much, the things that made your heart skip a beat day after day. You told him about the adorable way he smirked whenever he was thinking too hard. You told him about the way his eyes followed you whenever you entered a room, gazing at you like you were the most precious thing he’d ever seen. You told him about how good a person he was and how loving. You also told him how you never slept better than when you were in his arms.

As if to prove the point, you felt your eyelids drooping with every minute you two spent talking. Thankfully, it wasn’t long before Javi followed, softly lulled back to a more peaceful sleep, a smile on his lips, and you in his arms. That was all he needed to be happy. To be able to face the following day and the one after that. To make it to the end of this mad crusade and make the world a better place for you two to live in, together, until the end of your days.

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