#they are supposed to be leaning on a railing/wall on the roof (did not want to draw a background)

[crunchy-rocc]

#my art #aftg #all for the game #neil josten #andrew minyard #andriel #they are supposed to be leaning on a railing/wall on the roof (did not want to draw a background) #neil took andrews cigarette so andrew took neils out of his mouth #return of my cat neil josten #and also andrew w bruised knuckles and moles

[lumiolivier]

So is the Life of a Pirate (3/?)

Series: One Piece

Chapter: 3/?

Word Count: 4738

Rating: T

Pairing(s): Sanji x OC (Reader)

A dalliance six years ago has a funny way of catching up to Sanji when the Straw Hats stop to restock the ship.

a/n: Thank you, friends! I'm so glad this is getting more than just likes. I put a lot of love into this. So here. Have a new, shiny chapter. Just for you. <3

[1] [2]

Sanji and Cordelia ran back to her house, just hoping that it still stood.  All four walls were still intact.  The roof was right where they left it.  The front door still swung on the hinges.  Everything was exactly where it was supposed to be.  Cordelia let out a little sigh of relief.  That’s why I leave Zoro and Nami in charge.  If dinner’s still on the table and Ash doesn’t have any new bumps, bruises, scratches, or tattoos on his body, I’ll be happy.

“Cordelia!” Nora waved her down from her porch.

“Shit…” Cordelia mumbled to herself, “Sanji, go inside.”

“Cordelia…!”

“Just…” Cordelia hushed him, “Please.  I don’t need to play twenty questions with my boss.  Go inside.”

“Alright,” Sanji nodded, “But can I ask a little favor?”

“What?” Cordelia bit the inside of her cheek.  Come on, Sanji.  I know I’m about to get grilled here.  What could you possibly want?

“When we get to the Baratie again…” Sanji kept his voice down, “I want us to tell Ash.  I haven’t been able to make a single decision about my son’s life.  Let me at least have that one.”

“Ok,” Cordelia nodded, “But not a word about the Baratie trip until I get in the house.  Deal?”

“Deal,” Sanji snuck a quick kiss to her forehead, “Don’t take forever.  We can only hold Luffy back for so long.”

“I’ll try not to,” Cordelia let Sanji in the house while she hung over the railing on her front porch, “Hi, Nora!”

“I didn’t know you’d be having company tonight,” Nora pointed out, “I could’ve sworn I counted five going into your house.”

“You counted right,” Cordelia confirmed, “Now, if you don’t mind, I’d really like to get back to them.  I got food on the table and I’m starving.”

“Hold on, honey,” Nora started walking over and leaned against Cordelia’s fence, “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think I just watched the man of your dreams walk into your house.”

“Well,” Cordelia bit her lip, doing her best to hold back a smile, “If he is, in fact, the man of my dreams like you said, you wouldn’t want to hold me back from him, would you?”

“Of course not,” Nora peeked in the window where Sanji was already putting everything on the table, “But I think I’m just now realizing how much Ash looks like his father.”

“Good talking to you, Nora,” Cordelia started heading inside, “And tomorrow, I need to drop by the tavern about my sabbatical.”

“Taking the yearly trip again, are you?” Nora assumed.

“Mmhm,” Cordelia nodded, “But we’ll talk tomorrow.  Ok?”

“Fine,” Nora let her go, “But I just need to know one more thing.”

“What?” Please don’t ask about Sanji.  Please don’t ask about Sanji.  Please don’t ask about Sanji.  Please don’t ask about Sanji.

A little smile crept across Nora’s face, “Do I need to put padlocks on the fridge at the tavern?”

Cordelia let out a little giggle, “Did you see the jolly roger in the harbor?”

“Of course, I did,” Nora started heading back to her own house, “Send Luffy my best.  And let him know the tavern is heavily reinforced.”

“I will,” Cordelia grabbed the door and walked inside, closing that same door behind her, “Sanji, I’m screwed.”

“What do you mean?” Sanji worried, “Cordelia, what’s wrong?”

“It’s not that there’s anything wrong,” she explained, “It’s just…I need to go see Nora tomorrow morning and I know she’s going to ask about you and I know she’s about to give me shit about how I’ve looked out at the sea from the cliffs for the last few years waiting for you to come back and it’s going to be the absolute worst.”

“Hold on,” Sanji settled her, “You’ve…been waiting for me to come back?”

“I…” Cordelia felt an instant heat rush in her cheeks, “I always just…kind of had a feeling you’d come back.  Listen, that’s not the point.  I’m going to the tavern to discuss my sabbatical, not my potential love life.  This is going to be a disaster!”

“Then, why don’t I come with you?” Sanji suggested, “Clear everything up?”

“That’s digging us into an even deeper hole, Sanji,” Cordelia groaned, her face buried in the tabletop, “I’m so screwed.”

“Cordelia?” Zoro stuck his head in the back door.  Only to find her face down at the table and Sanji back in the kitchen, “What the hell did you do to her?”

“Me?” Sanji squealed, “I didn’t do anything!  Why is it you immediately think I did something?!”

“Because the last time she was crying in this kitchen, it was your fault, you dumbass!”

“Boys,” Cordelia stopped them before they could get started, “No.  Please.  Zoro, this isn’t Sanji’s fault.  It’s Nora’s.  Although, it’s kind of Sanji’s fault by proxy.  But this isn’t something we’re blaming on him.”

“Alright,” Zoro took a seat at the table next to her, “Are you sure?  Is everything good again?”

“Yeah,” Cordelia nodded, “Everything’s fine.  We can all just sit through dinner and enjoy the night like we intended to.”

“Did I hear that right?” Luffy popped up seemingly out of nowhere, “Is dinner done?”

“Yes, Luffy,” Cordelia assured him, “Dinner’s done and on the table.  If you could-”

“Cordelia,” Sanji pointed at the table where Luffy had already sat down with the rigidity of a pointer dog and the patience of one with a T-bone steak on its nose.

“Dear god,” Cordelia giggled, “Never change, Luffy.  Never change.”

“Dinner’s ready!” Sanji called out the back door.

“Yay!” Ash came running in, “I’m starved!”

“You’re not starved,” Cordelia shook her head, “You’re just hungry, Ash.  And how could you possibly be hungry?  You’ve been snacking on everything while we’ve been cooking all day.”

“But I’m still hungry,” Ash whined.

“I know you are, baby,” Cordelia was already putting a plate together for him and slid it down the table, “Go on.  Eat.”

“Yay!”

“What about me?” Luffy pouted, “Don’t I get any?”

“I’ve learned with you,” Cordelia scolded him, “You get food after everyone else does or there will be none left for anyone else.”

“I’m not that bad!”

“Yes, you are,” Cordelia stared blankly.

“Yes, you are.” With Sanji following suit.

“Yes, you are.” And Nami…

“Yes, you are.” And Zoro…

“Yes, you are.” And Usopp.

“Well,” Luffy threw an arm around Ash’s shoulders, “At least I got my new first mate to have my back, right, Ash?”

“Asher Grey, don’t you even think it,” Cordelia put her foot down, “You are not joining up with the Straw Hats.”

“Come on, Mama!” Ash whined, “Please?”

“Luffy,” Cordelia glared a hole through him, “What have you been telling my son?”

“That there was always an open spot on the crew for him,” Luffy shrugged, “I didn’t think that’d be a problem.”

“You didn’t think letting a four year old join a pirate crew, not to mention, the most notorious pirate crew in the East Blue, was a bad idea?” Sanji scolded him, “Luffy, I’ve known you for a long time and I’ve never heard something so insane come out of your mouth.”

“I guess you’re right…” Luffy backed off, “But I’m just saying.”

“Luffy,” Cordelia held her face in her hands, “Have you ever met anyone that you haven’t immediately signed up to be part of your crew?”

“There was my first ever crew member!” Luffy thought, “But he had to leave.  He had his own dreams to chase after.”

“What happened to him, Luffy?” Ash wondered.

“He joined the Marines,” Luffy told him, “He ended up becoming my grandpa’s favorite!  If only I could’ve been his favorite…”

“Ok…” Nami settled him, “Luffy, we love you.  Truly.  But this may not be the place to unpack those issues.”

“Do I get to eat yet, Cordelia?” Luffy asked, his eyes full of hope and wonder and strong desire to tear some meat apart.

“Hold on…” Cordelia did a quick assessment of the table.  And by the looks of things, everyone had food except Luffy, “Alright, Luffy.  It’s all yours.”

“Yay!” And Luffy sucked it all down like a vacuum.  All of a sudden, a few appetites were lost.  No one knew why, but deep down, there was a great understanding.

“Actually,” Cordelia smiled a bit, “Ash…I’ve been wanting to ask you something.  And since we have everyone else here, I’m sure this would be a good thing to run by them, too.”

“What is it, Mama?” Ash shoved a piece of bread in his mouth.

“Well,” Cordelia looked over to Sanji for a little reassurance, “I was thinking that since your birthday’s coming up, it’s time we make our annual trip to the East Blue.”

“We’re going to the East Blue?” Ash gasped, “Does that mean we get to go out on the boat?”

“That was the thing,” Cordelia went on, “I was thinking…If they didn’t mind…and I’m sure they won’t…You wouldn’t want to make that trip to the East Blue on a real pirate ship, would you?”

“We do every year, though,” Ash pointed out, “Your ship is a pirate ship.”

“I was thinking a different one,” Cordelia’s smile only grew bigger, “With a real crew instead of just the two of us.”

“You have a crew, too, Cordelia?” Usopp perked up.

“Not for my ship,” Cordelia shook her head, “But you do.”

“You’re wanting to hitch a ride to the East Blue?” Zoro gave her an odd look.  For a brief moment, his eyes flashed over to Sanji, who couldn’t wipe the smile off his face if he wanted to.  Oh…I see.  That’s what this is about.  Someone’s looking to make up for lost time with his son. 

“ON A REAL PIRATE SHIP?!” Ash freaked.

“Complete with a real pirate crew,” Cordelia nodded, “That is, if it’s alright with the captain.”

“Please, Luffy?” Ash tugged on Luffy’s arm, his energy absolutely boundless, “Please, please, please?  Come with us to see Grandpa!”

“Grandpa?” Luffy asked, “Who’s Grandpa?”

“Grandpa runs a restaurant in the East Blue,” Ash told him.

“And we get to eat for free,” Cordelia sweetened the pot a little, “I’m sure he wouldn’t mind.”

“It can get awfully dangerous out there on the open sea, Ash,” Luffy licked the last bit of food off his plate, “Are you sure you’re up for it?”

“Yeah!” Ash nodded furiously, “I’ll be the best cabin boy you’ll ever have!”

“I didn’t say you were joining the crew, Ash,” Cordelia stopped him, “But I wouldn’t say no if you were up for giving a girl and her baby a ride to the East Blue.  That is, if you don’t have anything else going on.  If you do, I totally understand and we can just take my ship instead.”

“No,” Luffy shook his head, “You two are more than welcome on our ship!  It’s fine with me.  Especially since there are promises of free food attached to it.”

“Hold on,” Nami thought back, “Don’t we know someone who owns a restaurant in the East Blue?”

“You’re awfully quiet, curly brows,” Zoro nudged Sanji under the table, “Cat got your tongue?”

“No,” Sanji glared at Zoro from across the table, “I was just thinking about this trip.”

“When are we leaving, Cordelia?” Luffy asked, “Since we are the ones taking you, I’ll let you call the shots.”

“In a couple days,” Cordelia kicked Zoro under the table.  Not enough to cause any alarm, but enough to send a message, “I need to get my time off from the tavern and-”

“You’re still working at the tavern?” Zoro nursed his shin.

“Yep,” Cordelia nodded, “And I’m sure Nora would love to see you in there, Zoro.”

“And Zoro would love to see Nora, too,” Zoro excused himself from the table.  Only to get down in Cordelia’s ear, “Is everything going to be ok here?”

“We talked, Zoro,” Cordelia reported, “We’ll be fine.”

“Ok,” Zoro gave her a nod and started heading out the door.

“Where are you going. Zoro?” Luffy cocked his head, “We just got the first course.”

“The first what?” Cordelia’s heart sank into her stomach.

“A little presumptuous of you,” Sanji pointed out, “Don’t you think, Luffy?”

“Was…” Luffy wondered, his eyes losing some of their luster, “Was that it?”

“She had the decency to make you a meal,” Sanji got defensive, “The least you could do is thank her and show a little gratitude.”

“I am grateful,” Luffy assured her, “It’s been a long time since we’ve had Cordelia’s cooking and I forgot how good it was.”

“I’m going to get a drink,” Zoro decided, “I’ll be at the tavern if you need me.”

“Wait, Zoro!” Nami got up from the table, “Don’t go alone!  Someone’s going to…And he’s gone.”

“Zoro!” Cordelia called after him.

“What?” Zoro popped his head back through the door.

“Sanji, cover Ash’s ears please,” Cordelia ordered, “Because I’m going to need to say some words in order for this to fully sink in.”

“Got it,” Sanji’s hands immediately went over Ash’s ears, “Fire at will, Cordelia.”

“If you think you’re going to bring your drunk ass back here,” Cordelia growled, “You’re sorely fucking mistaken.  If you’re going to get shitfaced at the tavern tonight, someone’s dragging you back to the ship.  Do you understand?”

Zoro knew better than to argue with someone like Cordelia.  Cordelia, who was not afraid to get in his face.  Cordelia, who had overthrown a ship before and was not afraid to spit on the shoes of Marines.  Cordelia…The little sister he never had, “Yes, ma’am.”

“Alright.  Good talk.” Cordelia got up from the table and started taking plates.  Along with Sanji’s hands off Ash’s ears, “Alright, sweetheart.  You’re still innocent.”

“Yay!” Ash smiled, albeit a touch confused, “Wait, why am I still innocent?  And why did I have hands over my ears?”

“Because you don’t need to hear when Mama gets a little angry,” Cordelia kissed the top of his head, “Anyone else while I’m up?”

“I think I’ll go to the tavern, too,” Luffy got up, “Just to keep Zoro in line.”

“That’s fine,” Cordelia allowed, “And by the way, Luffy, I have a message from Nora for you.  She wants you to know she knows you’re here and she’s already got the walk-in fridge padlocked.”

“Aww…” Luffy gushed, “It’s nice to know she still remembers me.”

“You’re a hard one to forget.”

“If I don’t see you tonight, Cordelia,” Luffy waved behind him, “I’ll see you tomorrow!  Usopp, you coming?”

“Yeah!” Usopp got up from the table, “See you later, Cordelia!”

“See you tomorrow!” Cordelia grabbed the last of the plates and dropped them in the kitchen sink, “Well…That leaves the four of us.”

“That it does,” Sanji nodded.

“Yep,” Nami sighed out, kicking her feet up on what was Luffy’s chair.

“So…” Cordelia smirked, “I did make chocolate éclairs, but the boys left before I could say anything.”

“Yes, please,” Nami perked up.

“You made chocolate éclairs?” Sanji gasped.

“Of course, I did,” Cordelia reached into her fridge, “I knew I’d be having company.  I had to make something.”

“And I helped!” Ash chimed in.

“You did?” Sanji melted inside.  The kid’s not even five and he can already make an éclair?  Color me impressed.

“Yeah,” Cordelia chirped, “The kid piped in the filling.  Getting the pastry right was my job.”

“Pastry’s too hard,” Ash gladly helped himself to one of the éclairs.

“You’ll figure it out,” Cordelia assured him.

“Pastry gets finicky,” Sanji agreed, “But your mother’s right.  You’ll get the hang of it someday.”

“Really?” Ash’s eyes sparkled in a way that Cordelia had never seen before.  And for Sanji to be the cause of it…She teared up a little.

“I think so.” I didn’t get pastry right until I was fifteen.  You got plenty of time.

And those tears caught Nami’s attention, “Cordelia?  You ok?”

“Yeah,” Cordelia quickly cleared her throat and threw those tears back, “Aces.  Why?”

“Just curious.” Because the second Sanji gives the baby a little encouragement, you buckle at the knees.

“My god…” Sanji swooned, his teeth sunk into an éclair, “Cordelia, these are wonderful.”

“Have I ever fed you bad food?” Cordelia giggled, taking a little pride in her work, “But thank you.”

“So,” Nami wondered, “Are we just…going to ignore the elephant in the room or are we going to talk like grown ups?”

“You guys brought an elephant?!” Ash gasped, frantically looking around.

“Oh, Ash…” Nami awed, “Hard to see who you take after.”

“Nami,” Cordelia stopped her before anything could be said, “No.  We’re not talking about it.  You see it, too.  I get it.  But that’s not something we’re talking about quite yet.  There is no elephant, Ash.”

“Aww…”

“Wait,” Sanji perked up, “Nami knows?”

“Asher, go to your room,” Cordelia ordered, “No, you’re not in trouble.  Yes, everything’s fine.  Go find your jammies, put them on, and I’ll be in to say good night in a minute.”

“Ok, Mama,” Ash got down from the table and made his way into his bedroom.  The second the door closed, Cordelia’s body slumped over the table.

“So, back to what we were talking about before,” Sanji went on, “Nami knows?”

“Nami isn’t blind,” Nami scoffed, “Look at him, Sanji.  I’m surprised it took you as long as it did to figure it out.  You’re one of the vainest people I know. His hair moved slightly, I noticed the uptick in his left eyebrow, and only one other person I know has something like that.”

“That’s because he’s me from his nose down and Sanji from his eyes up,” Cordelia mumbled into the table, “Nami knew about Ash before you did because Nami met Ash before you did.”

“Who else knows, Cordelia?” Sanji quietly panicked.

“As far as I know,” Nami looked toward Cordelia, “I’m the only one.  And you now, Sanji.”

“And Zoro,” Cordelia bit her lip, knowing the lashing that would follow.

“You told Zoro?!” Sanij freaked, “Zoro knows?!”

“Zoro can keep a secret, too,” Cordelia swore, “And if it weren’t for Zoro, I wouldn’t have gone looking for you with as level of a head as I had.  Or with a little backstory…”

“Great,” Sanji scoffed, “I have to go back to the ship with that on my mind.”

“Because you don’t have bigger things to worry about?” Cordelia pointed out.

“Yeah,” Nami agreed, “I’d think what Zoro knows about would matter a little more than Zoro actually knowing about it in the first place.”

“Well, yeah,” Sanji brushed her off, “But that’s beside the point…Why did you go to Zoro?”

“Zoro asked,” Cordelia smiled a bit, “Come on, Sanji.  You can’t tell me you don’t see it.  Zoro treats me like a little sister.  He always has.”

“Well, I’m glad, sweetheart,” Sanji applauded, “Because your big brother is likely going to kick my ass when I get back to the ship.”

“He’ll be too trashed to do anything and you know it,” Nami settled him, “I really don’t think you have anything to worry about, Sanji.”

“Just one thing,” Sanji didn’t mind going back to the Baratie.  However, now that Ash was in the picture…

“Sanji…” Cordelia took his hand, “You can’t tell me you’re still worried about Zeff.”

“I’m a little worried about Zeff,” Sanji admitted, “You’ve never seen Zeff good and pissed, Cordelia.  He’s a different monster.  That’s when the pirate in him comes back out.  And it’s truly frightening.”

“I don’t think he’ll do anything drastic,” Cordelia laced her fingers between Sanji’s, “And do you know why?”

“Because he can’t do anything when I’m already a dead man walking?”

“Because, you drama queen,” Cordelia rolled her eyes, “Just as much as how I’ve never seen him good and pissed, you’ve never seen him with Ash.”

“I saw him with me when I was a kid,” Sanji grumbled, “That wasn’t always sunshine and roses either.”

“Just trust me,” Cordelia promised, “Zeff won’t kill you because of Ash.  Now, as much as I don’t want to kick you out…”

“Got it,” Nami nodded, getting up from the table, “Don’t overstay our welcome.  You don’t mind if I take some of those éclairs back to the ship, do you?”

“Not at all,” Cordelia insisted, “Take as many as you’d like.”

“I should probably bring a few back for the boys,” Nami started stuffing her bag, “And maybe a few for me later…Something for breakfast…”

“It’s good to know Luffy’s still here,” Cordelia teased her.

“I’m a simple girl,” Nami finished off the plate, “Sometimes, those late night sugar cravings hit and nothing else will do.  And good pastry always hits the spot.”

“It sure does,” Sanji agreed, “Really, Cordelia, those were amazing.”

“I try my best,” Cordelia got up from the table and brought the plate to the sink.  Those can get done tomorrow.  There is no way in hell I’m doing dishes tonight.

“Well,” Nami rocked back on her heels, “We should be going, Sanji.”

“Yeah,” Sanji snapped out of his headspace.  Should we?  Should we really? “You’re right.”

“We’ll see you tomorrow, Cordelia,” Nami waved behind her, “Come on, Sanji.”

“I’ll be there in a minute,” Sanji shook her off, “Just…Hold on.”

“Fine,” Nami waited outside leaned against the house.  You’re not coming with me, are you, Sanji?

“Cordelia…” Sanji kept his voice down, “Do…you think I could…”

“Sanji,” Cordelia draped her arms over his shoulders, “Don’t.”

“Alright, I understand,” Sanji let it go.  Despite the tear it left in his heart.  He pressed a kiss to Cordelia’s forehead, “Good night, sweetheart.  I’ll see you in the-”

“What the hell are you doing?” Cordelia refused to let him go, “Sanji, I don’t see you for almost six years and you think you can just leave?  No, no, no, baby.  You’re not going anywhere.  You’re more than welcome in my bed.”

“Really?” Sanji asked, “You’d…be ok with that?”

“You have to be the one to tell Nami.”

“I can tell Nami,” Sanji was already at the door.  However, Nami wasn’t, “She already left me.”

“She already knew,” Cordelia giggled, “Come on, Sanji.  You can’t tell me Nami didn’t already figure out you were going to stay here instead of going back to the ship.”

“Valid point,” Sanji pulled Cordelia back into his arms, “Believe it or not, that’s not what I was going to ask you.”

“Oh,” Cordelia looked at him strangely, “Then, what were you going to ask me?”

Sanji did his best to hide the red in his cheeks, but there was no hiding it, “I was wondering if I could say good night to Ash before we left.  But it seems I’m not leaving.”

“And?” Cordelia bit the inside of her cheek, “That doesn’t mean you can’t still say good night to him, Sanji.  I’ve kept him from you for long enough.  Go ahead.  If you want to, go say good night.”

“Thank you,” Sanji started walking up toward Ash’s bedroom door.  Only to freeze at the doorknob, “Why is this making me nervous?”

“Because you’re not used to it yet,” Cordelia took his hand, “I’ve had his whole life to practice riding this dragon.  If you want, you can just hang back.  Watch a little.  See how it works.  Have you never been around little kids, Sanji?”

“Can’t say I have,” Sanji thought back, “I was kind of hoping if I ever had kids of my own, it’d just click, but…”

“Don’t worry,” Cordelia assured him, “It will.  Just…Give it a minute.  Ok?”

Cordelia’s words brought Sanji little comfort.  But a little was still better than none, “Thank you.”

“Of course,” Cordelia stood on her toes and kissed his cheek, “Watch.”

“Watching.”

“Ash?” Cordelia knocked on his bedroom door before slowly opening it, “Can I come in?”

“Yeah,” Ash allowed, jumping into his bed already.

“You got your jammies on?”

“Mmhm.”

“And…” Cordelia noticed the tag on the back of his shirt sticking out proudly from the front.  Along with the seam, “Did you get them on right?”

“Mmhm.”

“You sure about that?” Cordelia tickled his nose with the tag, getting a couple giggles out of him, “You sure you didn’t find it in your drawer inside out and maybe, just maybe, put it on backwards?”

“Aww!” Ash whined, “I thought I got it right!”

“Noble effort, honey,” Cordelia peeled his shirt off and put it back on him the right way, “Hey, you got your pants on right.  That’s a win in itself, isn’t it?”

“I guess so,” Ash perked up a little.

“Alright,” Cordelia went back to the list, “You got your jammies on.”

“Yep!”

“You got Omar?”

“I got Omar!”

“Who’s Omar?” Sanji wondered, growing more and more curious about the display in front of him.

“This is Omar,” Ash showed off a blue teddy bear in desperate need of restuffing and possibly in need of a new button eye.

“We don’t go to bed without Omar,” Cordelia told him, “That’s very important.”

“Super important,” Ash squeezed the life out of Omar, “Keep going, Mama.”

“Alright, alright,” Cordelia went on, “Do you have your blankets?”

“Mmhm,” Ash wiggled himself down into a thick quilt Cordelia had made while she was bedridden and seven months pregnant.  A patchwork of any scrap fabric she could find around the house.  A collection of old pillowcases, bedsheets, even a tablecloth or two.  And it kept Ash warm every night.

“A good pillow?”

“The best pillow!”

“Alright, alright,” Cordelia gave him one last kiss, “Good night, Ash.

“Good night, Mama,” Ash hugged her tight.

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

“Good night, Ash,” Sanji gave him a little wave, “It was wonderful meeting you today.”

“Good night, Sanji,” Ash let out a little yawn and a halfhearted wave. 

Although, it was strangest thing.  Sanji wanted so desperately to know what it felt like to be called Dad.  He wanted to say it so badly.  It’s me, Ash.  It’s me.  You don’t ever have to worry about your dad ever again.  I’m right here.  But he kept quiet.  And he went straight to Cordelia’s bedroom just next door.

And Cordelia couldn’t help but worry, “Sanji…?  You ok?”

“Yeah,” Sanji’s voice broke, “I’m…Oddly good.”

“Are you sure about that?” Cordelia asked, sitting next to him on the bed.

“Cordelia,” Sanji fell back, “I just put my son to bed for the first time.  There was no vital check.  There was no blood drawn.  There was no screaming, no crying…It was amazing.”

“Of course, there wasn’t,” Cordelia looked on in absolute horror, “What the fuck happened to you?”

“More than I ever want to talk about,” Sanji brushed her off, “Trust me, Cordelia.  That’s not somewhere we need to go right now.  Right now, I just want a little quiet with a beautiful young lady that I have far too much time to make up with.”

“Hey, hey,” Cordelia stopped Sanji’s wandering hands, “Don’t get me wrong, Sanji.  I’d love for us to have a little fun, but our almost five year old son is sleeping in the room next door.  And if the last time we did anything was any indication, neither one of us can be quiet.”

“So…” Sanji winced, “Not tonight?”

“Not tonight,” Cordelia got up and dug around in her dresser.

“That’s fine,” Sanji let it go, watching as Cordelia changed into her pajamas, “Cordelia…”

“Hmm?”

“When did you get a tattoo?” Sanji wondered, appreciating the little koi fish on the left side of her lower back.

“Shortly after Ash turned one,” Cordelia smiled, “I don’t remember saying you could look.”

“Sorry,” Sanji squeezed his eyes shut, “It’s not like I’ve never seen you naked before, sweetheart.  Obviously.”

“Sanji…”

“Alright, alright,” Sanji kept his mouth shut, “Not another word out of me.”

“No,” Cordelia crawled into her bed and got comfortable, “Please.  Keep talking.”

“Cordelia…”

“Hmm…?” Cordelia laid her head in Sanji’s warm, bare chest, listening to the gentle rhythm of his heartbeat. 

Sanji hardly spoke above a whisper, “I love you.”

“I love you,” Cordelia shut her eyes as Sanji’s arm draped around her back.

“And…” Sanji held her tight, “I’m so sorry for what I did.  What I said.  It was wrong of me.”

“It was just the shock talking,” Cordelia hushed him, “I understand.  I’ll forgive you if you forgive me.”

Sanji gave her one last kiss before Cordelia had fully succumbed to sleep, “Deal…”

#one piece #one piece fan fiction #one piece x reader #sanji x reader #one piece x you #sanji x you #sanji x y/n #one piece brainrot #accidental pregnancy

[shivunin]

Maybe 3. Hiding face in neck for Arianwen and Zevran?

Thank you so much for the prompt!! (list here) Zevran and Arianwen, as requested c:

Have This Dance

The roof of the palace complex in Denerim was fairly nice as such things went. Even, sturdy, with the occasional crenel and railing to wander. It was certainly preferable to the din of the festivities below, though Alistair had given her a somewhat helpless look when she’d disappeared up the wall and left him behind. 

Wynne was with him, at least. He wouldn’t be entirely by himself. 

The city seemed peaceful enough, at least from this vantage. She could spot the bridge to the alienage from here, though the mist rising from the river made it difficult to see properly. She could only hope that all was well there tonight; she’d spent the last several days trying to set her home back in order. It would be pleasant if it did her the courtesy of staying in order for one night. 

“Feeling pensive, my dear Warden?” 

Arianwen didn’t turn to face Zevran, but she felt his touch at her elbow before he draped himself over the wall at her side. 

“I suppose.”

“You aren’t happy for our delighted friend?”

Wen scoffed and looked at him from the corner of her eye. 

“About as delighted as he is, I’m sure. He didn’t deserve this.”

“You do not think he will be capable as king?”

“No, no,” she waved a hand and straightened from the wall, “The other way around. I mean—”

“You did not do the wrong thing,” Zevran said, and stepped closer to lean his shoulder against hers, “He will be well enough. They will throw their daughters at him to wed and he will have all the gold and fine food he needs. What more could a man want?”

“Ali doesn’t want those things,” Wen said, and tapped the stone of the crenel, “But you know that, of course.”

“Of course,” Zevran said. 

After a moment, he reached for her hand and pulled her toward him. 

“I did not much like watching you fight the man alone,” he said, “Much as I enjoy watching you fight in general.”

“No?” she tilted her face up, “Why? He was old and slow. Fell prey to his own legend.”

“I…” Zevran grimaced, “Nevermind. Of course you are perfectly capable of handling yourself.”

“Hmm,” she peered up at him. They stood above a ballroom now, and faint strains of music rose from below—a song she recalled from long ago, listening at the windows of the humans while her mother hurried her home at the end of the day. 

“Do you dance?” Zevran asked, reaching for a loose strand of hair near her ear and twirling it around his finger. 

“You tell me. Do I?”

He chuckled and reached for her waist. 

“I think we both know you dance that way,” he said, “And so skillfully, too.”

Wen rolled her eyes, but allowed herself to be pulled closer. 

“Do you dance?” she asked, resting a hand on his shoulder and feeling the sturdiness of it beneath the armor. 

“I am afraid not,” he said, and she stepped with him when he turned, “I never had cause to learn, you see. But on occasion, I did watch the ladies in the house where I grew up.”

“Oh?” Arianwen turned with him, moving her feet as he did. 

They sparred together on occasion; he’d taught her what she could learn of being an assassin. They moved in time easily, and the music seemed to match their motion well enough. If that wasn’t dancing, she didn’t know what was.

“Did they dance like this?” she went on. Zevran pulled her closer, settling more of his arm around her back. 

“They did not,” he confessed, “I could show you how they danced, but I did not think you would want to see such a thing here and now.”

“No,” she agreed, and rested her head on his shoulder, “I think I’d want to watch that alone. Not in a tent. In a room somewhere, where everyone will leave us alone for once, with a door that locks.”

He rested a kiss on her hair and wrapped his arms together around her back. For a time, they were silent, listening to the distant strains of violins and the wind off the river. 

“It will end soon,” she said quietly, “Badly. I can feel it.”

Zevran took a slow breath. 

“You cannot know that.”

Wen tucked her face more firmly into the crook of his neck, which was softer than she might have thought. 

“I do, though,” she said, “It’s…I…may not…”

She bit her lip hard and stopped when she tasted copper and salt on her tongue. 

“I just want to say thank you. That’s all. And—I wish we could go on like this forever.”

“Wandering the countryside?” he asked, smoothing a hand over her back before tightening his grip, “Trying not to scandalize the others each night and running errands for every other person you meet on the road?”

Wen snorted and closed her eyes. He smelled pleasant here, like leather and soap, and the thought of lifting her head and facing what was to come was, briefly, too painful to consider. 

“Yes,” she said, “Obviously, that’s what I meant.”

“Ah,” he said, and rested his head against hers, “I’d thought so. I knew you were an exhibitionist.”

“Flames, don’t you ever shut up?” Arianwen groaned into his neck, but wrapped her arms around him in turn. Zevran laughed again, but didn’t say anything more. 

The two of them swayed together, spinning around and around, until the music stopped at last and it was time to face the dawn.

#arianwen tabris #zevran arainai #zevran x warden #zevran x tabris #dragon age origins #dao #my writing #zevwen #'don't you ever shut up' babygirl you know the answer to that by now #shivunin scrivening

[sabineelectricheart]

Shootout at Candee

Summary: Tati and Pierce are on a night out. Something terrible happens.

Rating: M - Not suitable for children or teens below the age of 16 with non-explicit suggestive adult themes, references to some violence, or coarse language.

Non-explicit depictions of violence. Reader discretion is advised.

Words: 1000

Notes: So, v6 is out... Not for me, though.

It is utter chaos.

I cannot distinguish a single sound in the cacophony that Candee had become, just as a firepower blast is heard over the music and the dramatic shout of a young man from the front door of the club.

“Someone got shot outside! He’s dead! He’s fucking dead!”

The only thing I can think about in the moment is, Shit. I really should have peed earlier.

Sirens are screeching in the street and the blue lights from the police cars are blinding. Security is pushing someone to the floor and people are screaming. A mass of bodies seems to be moving without sense or direction, roaring against reinforced walls like a beast stuck in a cage. It is a stampede towards any open doors and mass of bodies pile, all trying to leave at once.

Pierce grabs my wrist and pulls me to the side so hard, with such force, that I fear my arm has come out of the socket. His arm snakes around my waist and pulls me close to him, his hand grips my hair comfortingly and he tucks my head beneath his chin as he towers over me protectively.

“What’s happening? I can’t see.” I cry out, not really knowing what to do.

My eyes are everywhere, trying to take in the scene that is unfolding, as I’m sure he is too. One moment everyone was drinking, dancing, laughing and having a good time. The next, two guys were throwing punches and smashing pint glasses on the table next to us. Shards had flown in every direction, insults had been thrown. Pierce had momentarily lost me when the two of them had knocked into our table and slammed into me.

“I don’t know.” My boyfriend replies.

I can feel his body shifting as he tries to get a better view. We stop running and he begins to think, but I immediately panic. I have never been in an active shooter situation, but I went to public school. I had deep-seeded trauma of the many, many drills they did with us and all the survival tactics they wanted us to remember.

Mighty good it did me. I have no clue what I am supposed to do.

“Let’s get out of here!” I shout, pulling him along.

We race up a set of stairs through an emergency door. It was hidden behind a curtain at the VIP lounge, so it was the least busy option available, even though we would be just cornering ourselves, if it so happened that the shooter entered the club.

It led us to the roof. It was raining and there was nowhere to take cover. I only stop running when I get to the fire exit. I motion to use it, but Pierce stops me with a rather rough pull to my wrist.

“No. Let’s stay here, Tati. The dude is probably hiding down there.” He says, in a low voice.

I nod, tersely and sit down, leaning over the brick railing off the old building. I wonder how this death trap ever managed to get approved in the first place

A tense silence hangs between us, as we probably should try to be silent and not attract attention. If the guy is in the alley beneath us and we could, theoretically, get down there, he could also use the fire escape and come to us. It is getting harder, though. Tears gather in my eyes and panic grips on my throat. I wanted to scream, make a scene, just so I could breathe again.

Pierce notices I am growing panicked, so he wraps his arm around my shoulder and pulls me to his chest. He does not say anything for a moment, he just rubs circles on my back, keeping his breath even.

“How long until the press comes out? I think my ass is going to be handed to me tomorrow though when this gets out.” He tries to make a joke but the reality was exactly that. “Mom’s going to be pissed with me. The house’s going to get shit online.”

“You didn’t know this was going to happen. It’s not your fault. If anything, you’re the victim here.” I try to offer a more positive outlook on the situation.

I mean what I said, but I also know that he is probably right. His situation is not looking too good, in an economic point of view.

He was just internet famous enough to be actually famous, at least around New Hampshire, and he had an image of a party animal. It was part of the whole VidTok persona, even if it is relatively rare that he went out clubbing and actually did that. Alas, the one time he does, there is an open shooter situation, police in attendance and naturally the press are there after catching the news that he was out with his not too known girlfriend.

This was going to make one hot story, and brands do not like to associate themselves with these sorts of events. It feels something so shallow to be concerned about, but I am thankful that he came up with this. I could use some petty grievances to worry right about now, instead of my own survival.

I hold onto him whilst snuggling into his chest and breathe in his aftershave.

“Thank you.” I say, tilting my head upwards, kissing his jaw.

He peers down at me with a smile. “You? Thankful? That’s rare. What for?”

I elbow him lightly. “Don’t be an ass, Pierce. I’m trying to be nice. Thank you for bringing me over tonight, even if it didn’t pan out all that well, and thanks for looking out for me. I don’t know what I would do without you.”

He beamed like a billboard. “I’m your boyfriend, Tati. It’s what I do. I’m going to keep you safe. Always.”

Pierce rubs his nose on my neck and we stay there, huddled together, until the police come.

*_*_*_*_*

College Craze Masterlist

#college craze #Pierce Sutton

[elliot-needs-sleep]

Tommyinnit: Vigilante extraordinaire

Chapter 1: First Meetings

Chapter 2 ->

Fandom: DSMP (but also technically not, it's a vigilante au)

Fic type: Long Form

Characters: Tommy, Technoblade

Word count: 1,037

----

Tommy was NOT scared. Well, maybe he was a bit scared, not that he'd ever tell anybody that.

However, being hunted down by one of the top heroes in Europe was a tad bit terrifying, even if he knew for a fact he was going to get away.

Or, at least he hoped he was going to get away. A jail cell was not exactly where he wanted to spend his night.

He jumped to another roof, rolling and popping back up to continue running, pushing himself as fast as he could.

He didn't know that much of the hero following him, other then his hero name was 'The Blade'. He knew that his power was similar to a villain he'd once heard of, but he didn't know the specifics. He only knew that anybody who got cut by his sword ended up paralyzed for a bit. And that was NOT a fate that was gonna befall THE Tommyinnit, vigilante extraordinaire.

Or again, at least that's what he hoped.

He caught a glimpse of pink and black as he turned his head, and definitely did NOT shriek when he realized that the hero was still on his tail.

He readjusted his mask, looking desperately for another route. At this rate, if he couldn't find another way out, he WOULD be caught. And nobody wants that.

He spots a taller building not far from where he's currently running, and changes course to make the jump for it. He launches himself off the edge, hands reaching for the railing he was trying to grab. He cheers as his hands grip onto it, and doesn't notice that the railing is rolling, the loose piece of metal tilting. Tommy's grip slips.

And next thing Tommy knew, he was falling through the air, hurtling towards the ground that was previously so far away from him. So this was the end of Tommyinnit, charming and manly vigilante extraordinaire?

"Gotcha, kid." Next thing he knew, he got caught before he could hit the ground.

"Wha?" He peered up at the person who caught him, and immediately tried to struggle out of the man's grip. Out of The Blade's grip.

"Calm down, calm down, Im not taking you in. Thats too much work." The Blade chuckled, and let's Tommy down, who immediately rushes as far away from him as he can. So, to the other side of the alley, grabbing the collapsible staff that Tubbo had designed for him from his pants pocket, having lost his sweater on the run. He needed a new one anyways, but it was still a pain.

"Then... then why did you catch me?" Tommy was a little bit shaken from the fall, hands holding the staff he had in front of him for protection. He tried to pretend that his hands weren't shaking.

"Because you were gonna die or end up hurt. And that's just not fun." The Blade shrugs, leaning up against the wall of the building behind him, and Tommy just stares at him.

"Aren't you a hero? Aren't you.. ya know... supposed to arrest me?" Tommy narrows his eyes suspiciously at the man in front of him, who just shrugs again.

"Eh. Technically, yeah. But also, whats the point? You're harmless, anyways." Tommy sqwaks in indignation.

"I am not harmless! I am Tommyinnit, vigilante extraordinaire and certified crime stopper!" The Blade snorts, arms crossed over his chest as he raises an eyebrow at the teenager in front of him.

"Mhm, except for the part that you're not certified. Thats why you're a vigilante." Tommy glares at him, and wonders if he could land a hit on the man with his staff before The Blade could react.

Probably not.

"Well then am I free to go?" The Blade tilts his head to the side, seemingly pondering for a second.

"First you're gonna answer some questions. Then sure, you're free to do whatever you feel like." Tommy's eyes narrow further, studying the man in front of him. He wore a mask that only covered up to the brdige of his nose, pink hair pulled back out of his face in a ponytail, bangs almost covering his eyes. He wore all black, and his sword remained in its sheath on his hip. He sighed before collapsing the staff and putting it back into his pocket, arms crossed over his chest.

"Fine." The Blade chuckles a bit before starting his questioning.

"What's your name?" The Blade asks, and Tommy pauses, considering his options. He could give him his real name or...

"Tommyinnit." Vigilante name it is then. The Blade doesn't seem to question it, meaning that he probably expected Tommy to give him his vigilante name and not his real one.

"Why does a vigilante wear sweats and a Philza t-shirt?" Tommy scoffed, trying to ignore the flush of embarresment thats creeping up his neck.

"Well I DID have my hoodie, but unfortunately I had to ditch it when you pinned me to a wall with a knife!" He huffed, glaring at the hero who snorts at him again.

"It was a dagger, and that hoodie was garbage anyways." Tommy pauses, staring at him with a bunch of complex emotions.

"My friend made it for me! Or well, he bought it and then customized it for me!" The Blade shrugs, before asking another question.

"What's your power?" Tommy froze for a second, scared to answer. Not many people were that accepting to those who didn't have a power, especially some heroes. Tommy had his own experiences with those types of heroes, but he didn't think that The Blade was one of them.

"Don't have one." He shrugged, playing off his hesitation like he was just considering his options, and The Blade hummed, tilting his head.

"That's why you're a vigilante, then?" Tommy nods, and The Blade hums again in response.

"Well, you're free then. See you around, kid." The Blade salutes with two fingers, and in the blink of an eye, he's gone.

Tommy stares at the spot where the hero once stood, before sighing and starting the walk back to his apartment.

He had a LOT of research to do. And he needed to talk to Tubbo about this.

#elliotiswriting #dsmp au #dsmp tommy #dsmp techno #tommy is a vigilante #technos a hero #cross posted on ao3 #im just vibing #dream smp au #dream smp tommy #dream smp techno

[splendidissimus]

31 August 1998 - Nott House

((Content warning: minor heart condition, neglected teen))

Genre: general

Romance level: minor

Angst level: 1/5

Draco's headspace: normal

((The last day before Theo goes back for an extra year at Hogwarts to get his N.E.W.T.s...... Mostly I just wanted to show off a description of his home / psychology.))

((words: ~1900))

------------------------------------

The Notts had, at one time, been a family of means and influence. Their ancestral home was on the far end of Knockturn Alley, one of the very few residences on the wizarding high streets, and perhaps the last one that actually was still a residence instead of having been turned into shops or workshops over the centuries. 

Now all they really had left was their name and their pride. The house was as thin and stooping as its masters, a four-storey grey brick with a narrow profile that seemed to be sagging wherever it could find space to. The roof seemed to have all of its shingles but they weren't all sitting at the right angles, and it bowed in the middle, leaving the blackened chimney slanted precariously inward. It was wedged between an old home that was now a potion workshop letting off faint fumes, and a boarding house that had a very distinctive air of discretion and cheapness competing for highest priority. 

Theo led him up the two stairs to the cracked black door. The knocker was in the shape of a dragon so stylized it could almost have been anything, and the hardware was so darkly tarnished it was impossible to tell what metal it was supposed to have been. The door unlocked under his wand, and creaked loudly as it opened. 

"Welcome to the Nott Manor," he said with faux grandiosity, lighting a series of candelabras on the walls with his wand. 

The light revealed a cramped hall with peeling yellowish wallpaper above worn wainscotting and a low ceiling. There was a single door to the right, which did not fit properly in its frame, and the hall ran straight back to what he could see was a kitchen at the back of the house. The narrow hall was made narrower by the dark, heavy frames of ancient portraits projecting from the wall, and small tables of dusty displays - a vase, a bust, one ancient cracked wand in a stand. A threadbare carpet of tiny vines on a red background ran the length of it.

"Your house elf is terrible," Draco noted as he stepped inside. 

"Yeah, terribly unemployed." Theo led the way down the hall. Draco curiously prodded the door open on the way past and found a stuffed sitting room with sagging sofas arranged around the fireplace that was presumably on the floo network. "I haven't had one since dad was arrested in year five." 

He looked up at Theo and joined him at a steep staircase hidden on the right, just before the kitchen door. "Why?"

"He didn't leave a lot of money when he went away, and the house has basically been empty since then, so it seemed like a waste." 

"House elves work for free," Draco pointed out. Everyone knew that.

"Yeah, but the Ministry doesn't. They're the ones that hand out house elves, and then you have to pay the tax." He climbed the first few stairs easily. They creaked loudly and out of time with each other.

"Oh." He looked at the layer of dust on the hand rail he knew he was going to have to use, with distaste. "I will seriously pay that for you." He took out his wand and prodded the dust to vanish it. 

"Maybe it'll matter after the school year is over. It's fine for now." He looked back down when he noticed Draco wasn't following him. "Are you going to have a problem with these?" he realised.

"How far up are we going?"

"Third floor."

"Maybe," Draco admitted reluctantly. 

Theo dropped back down a couple steps and offered Draco his hand to help him. 

After the walk around Diagon and Knockturn allies, the stairs were exhausting. He might have been able to do one flight on his own. It was fiercely embarrassing to have to lean on Theo as much as he did, but with that help he managed to drag himself up them. 

The top floor of the house was a single room that would have been fairly large if it weren't cramped by the slope of the roof right overhead, leaving barely the central half of the space where they could stand up straight. Trunks and boxes of junk crammed the edges of the room under the roof, half-hidden behind a few freestanding and overfilled bookshelves that tried to act like walls in the space, making it feel smaller. A round window at the front of the house let in grimy sunlight through a thick layer of dust; the matching one at the back of the house, over the bed, was already dark. 

Theo lit the fireplace with his wand for light even though it was already almost unbearably stuffy, and as he did Draco dropped into an ancient chair that let out a wheeze of dust, which mixed poorly with his harsh breathing and made him cough badly.

He heard Theo say Aguamenti, and then he was handed a glass of water; the glass was so clean it had to have been Conjured, in this place. 

While he got his breathing back under control and his throat cleared, Theo was casting some basic cleaning spells to get the dust out of the bed and Draco's chair, at least. The bed had been so dusty he hadn't even realised the blankets were supposed to be black. He noticed that he missed the cobwebs huddled in the rafters, and Draco could feel them waiting to shed dust and grime on the unsuspecting bedroom below. 

The metal bedframe squealed when Theo dropped onto it, and the springs sounded like they hit the floor. He held onto one of his legs while the other dangled, and he was watching him attentively. It was really painfully obvious he wanted to fool around. "Whatever you're thinking, I don't have the energy," he told him firmly. Aside from that, this filthy house also did not do much to set a kissing mood. Nor did having to scale three flights of impassable stairs. 

"That's fine," Theo assured him. 

Draco had the sudden weird surety he was just happy he'd gotten to hold his hand on the way up the stairs, and he looked around while he finished the water to spare himself that embarrassment. The newest-looking thing in the room was a creased Holyhead Harpies poster that had been tacked up by the bed, currently over Theo's left shoulder, and he looked at that instead. "Harpies?" He tried to remember if Theo'd ever had any of their posters or anything at school, and he didn't think so, at least not in years. 

Theo looked back at the poster. "Oh, yeah. I always figured, why watch a bunch of guys doing Quidditch, when I could be watching a bunch of fit girls instead?" Then he grinned, glanced at Draco, and poked the poster with his wand. The trick picture changed, and all the players were now wearing swimsuits instead of their uniforms. 

Well, he didn't have to wonder why it was above the bed for. "Really." 

"Come on, that's nice." He prodded it to turn the picture back to normal, and leaned back on his hands. 

Draco looked around the room once more, and finally realised what had been bothering him. "Why does your room seem abandoned?" A carpet of dust on a bed was telling. 

"I mostly crash on the couch on the first floor," he said casually.

Unless Theo was more disgusting than he gave him credit for, that 'mostly' had to mean 'always'. "I suppose if you have the house to yourself, why climb to the top of it." 

"You get it. I guess I should get my shit, huh." He slid back off the bed and Wingardium Leviosa'd a trunk into the middle of the floor, then started floating his clothes into it. 

Draco watched him distantly, judging his inefficiency in packing technique without offering unsolicited advice, even when he was trying to work out how to fit in two different sets of cauldrons and measures into one trunk. "Do you actually want to sleep on a decrepit sofa and go straight to the station?"

Theo shrugged philosophically. "It's what it is, innit." 

That was pathetic in a way Draco didn't even want to make fun of. It was just sad and lonely. "You can stay over and leave from mine in the morning." 

Theo looked up with his expression brighter than he probably intended to reveal. "Really?" He nodded. "All right, yeah, that sounds good. I'll make sure to lock up before we leave." 

In a few more minutes, he stuffed a house scarf into the last square inch of trunk space and shoved it closed. "Ready. Can you get the lights?" He floated the trunk with a wave of his wand.

"You're making it harder than it needs to be." Draco took out his wand and paused. "There's nothing shrunk in there, right?" 

"No, go ahead." 

Not that Theo was incapable of shrinking things, even filled containers, but with his daily use of his potion case, Draco had a lot more practice at it. He cast Reducio on the whole trunk so it could fit almost into Theo's palm and pushed himself up from the chair with more effort than he wanted it to take. 

Trunk in one hand, Theo offered him the other at the top of the stairs. This time, Draco declined and braced himself on the wall and the bannister. Going down was easier than going up, but it was still a lot of stairs and he did not enjoy it; it took him three times as long as it should have and he had to stop halfway down. He was just as happy to have Theo walking in front of him because they were so steep and unsteady he had serious concerns about falling as the exertion made him dizzy. Plus just sliding his hand along the wall made it feel grimy. "You could fix so much about this stupid house," he said irritably on the last few stairs.

"Yeah, I guess." Theo tossed his trunk back and forth between both hands and looked at the hall. "I just don't really see a point." 

He really didn't give the smallest damn about anything his father left him. "Floo?" He looked toward the door down the hall.

"I thought you wanted to Apparate?" 

"I changed my mind." He didn't want the long walk up to the house, honestly.

Theo didn't make a fuss over that, either, and that was a relief. "Yeah, it's in the living room. Go ahead, I have to close up." He went down the hall toward the front door.

Draco had to take a winding path around all the furniture to the fireplace in the parlour. The pale wear pattern in the rug showed that people had been taking that path for decades — maybe centuries. Most of the furniture looked threadbare, worn out, not the well-preserved antiques they were trying for. He even had to tap the floo box to get enough powder in the corner to travel with, and that made him vaguely annoyed with Theo — that wasn't even a lack of money, that was just sheer negligence. It was like he was intentionally watching his house crumble. 

He lit the fire with a flick of his wand and flooed back to his house, with a renewed appreciation for the house elf.

#draco x theo #draco malfoy #theo nott #splendidissimus writing #hp fanfic

[rodyisteria]

In the dungeons

Bohameah Great Arcanist and High Enchanter

The Great Library of Gydorrhea remains for me one of the most beautiful buildings in the city. Five stories high and, like most large buildings here, built entirely of white Lerm rock with turquoise-colored roofs that often leaned on thick, meter-high columns. In the large hall at the entrance, dozens of librerians stand behind a round counter that fills the hall. Here you can pick up books, return them or simply ask for information. Behind this hall you will find another one in which there is a table with a huge model of the building, which serves as a floor plan. A floor plan that continues on the walls and ceiling. It's almost like there's a copy of everything ever written in this building. Writings are arranged by subject, to which an entire wing is devoted. There is a wing for History, Agriculture, Art, Geography, you name it. Each wing is divided into different rooms, where writings are sorted by sub-topics within the main topic. The wing at the back of the building, where everything about magic can still be found today, had become my second home. My other home was a small room above the candy shop. I had left the Inn under pressure from Edith and Hedon. I had found a small job as a candy salesman. I didn't need food, but I did need a place to sleep. So I was assigned the smallest room. Until one day they came to get me. Then I was allowed to stay in the damp dungeons for a while.

I was caught taking books from the Great Library to my small room. One of the librarians had been watching me after missing books from the magic wing. I didn't have the money to raise the authorization to the level where it was allowed to take books with me. Stupid of me, I had been caught hiding a book in my bag before. Then I just got a warning. I will never forget the expression on the face of Mr. Dariov, the owner of the shop. There were customers waiting to pay when the city guard suddenly burst in. It was impossible to talk to those people, I found out. They received an order from their superiors and blindly carried it out. Mr. Dariov called after me that I was fired and never had to come back.

From the most beautiful building of Gydorrhea, to the most ugly and remote. The dungeons were dark and wet. It smelled musty and there was always the shuffling and squeaking of rats and other vermin. Escape was virtually impossible. Not only was the dungeon set up to run like a large maze, it was also located in the Military District where the City Guards and Imperial Garrisons were trained. I didn't get many visitors. Edith, the innkeepers wife, had visited once with a basket of bread, expecting me not to get good food. She was right about that, but food… I've never really been interested in that. After pleading how sorry she felt and how she hadn't expected me to end up in the dungeons, she left. She probably found it hard to see me like this. It was a pity that it had turned out this way, but I was actually glad to have a larger space than the room above the candy shop. There was a bed, or rather a mountain of straw on the floor and a small table. It was quiet here. Way better than the noise in the city streets. A window let a little light through the iron railing that was supposed to keep me in the cell, so what more could I want? I pushed the table toward the light and took a piece of parchment from one of my pockets. That piece of paper was my first enchanted object. I still have it, safely tucked away in my personal safe. After months of experimenting, I finally managed to create a knowledge scroll, a blank document that can show texts I've already read myself. Definitely not ideal. A book is much easier to read and also contains new knowledge. I think a knowledge scroll is also meant to be given to someone else so that you don't have to give a whole explanation about how something should be done, or what the intention is. For the two months I would be stuck in here it was a good alternative to the Great Library.

After a week or two my rest was seriously disturbed when I suddenly got a cellmate. I immediately protested, but of course no one listened. City guards and guards in general are the most stubborn people in town. His name was Deshan, that boy who was thrown into my cell. He kind of reminded me of Mark, that missing guy I'd come into this world with. He too was fully dressed in black and had a pale complexion. His face didn't seem very friendly and silently he immediately crept away into the shadows. I turned back to the table and continued reading. That day Deshan didn't bother me at all. He was not a big eater either, for he left the nasty-looking porridge that was served again for the evening. Suddenly he started talking. He wanted to know why I was here. He himself was arrested for the attempted murder of a member of a noble family. Wealth was unfairly distributed in the city and to survive you had to take what you could get. How nice, such a story just before going to sleep. I share my cell with a murderer. Too bad I never really got the hang of the Enirvum Magina. An invisible shield would come in handy now. However, I understood him. You had to take what you could get here to survive. After all, I had stolen books myself. Deshan kept talking. He must have been one of those types who didn't wake up until nightfall. His voice was pleasant. He indicated that he had been arrested more often, but always managed to escape. Even now he had a plan to get out of here. I thought he was just fantasizing and fell asleep.

If you like this story, don’t forget to share. Stay tuned and follow me on twitter.

#magic #writerscommunity #creative writing #short story #fantasy #arcane

[buckys-black-dress]

Hey! Could you use either prompt 2, 19, 30 or 32 for any Bucky?? Love your writing!

blazing sun

a/n: thank you for this lovely request! i chose prompt 30 from this list, which is "I could just pull your bikini bottoms to the side, no one would even notice." i loved writing this! plz send any and all requests you have <3 hope you enjoy! xoxo, ali :)

warnings: penetrative sex, unprotected sex, sex in public. if you are under 18, SWIPE OFF.

wc: 1.4k

[ bucky barnes x fem!reader ]

-

This vacation was supposed to be relaxing. A break from all the hard work you do as Avengers, and all that.

But what you didn't realize when you booked a one-week trip to California with you super beefy super soldier boyfriend, was that he was absolutely insatiable.

He wanted it all. The. Time.

And no, you would never be upset with Bucky for wanting to have sex, because he was very, very well-endowed and he always made sure your pleasure was a priority.

But there were times where you felt like it was getting to a bit... too much?

First, it was the small room in the quaint beachside house you had rented. You reckon Bucky had fucked you senseless on every single surface in the house.

"C'mon, doll. You know how I get, and on that long flight all I could think about fuckin' you in the bathroom. But there were kids right by there, and I didn't know if I could be quiet while I was balls-deep in that tight pussy of yours." He smirked, a hand tracing up your thigh while you placed your bag down on the floor.

"How about we head to our room first and get started there, yeah?" You had suggested while you gently walked out of his grasp, waiting for him to follow you into the bedroom.

"Oh, baby, you have no idea how bad I'm gonna wreck ya. Gonna have you screamin' on my cock for the next seven days, sweetheart."

And that was the start of it. And once Bucky started, he did not stop.

You were laid on a towel while trying to get a bit of a tan, letting the sound of the ocean relax you.

Behind you was the set-up of the chairs and umbrella you two had brought with you. Bucky was perched on his chair, watching you read the book you'd also brought along.

"Baby, c'mere for a sec?" His rough voice broke you out of the trance from your reading, snapping your head towards him.

"Something wrong, honey?" You inquire, sitting up in your spot.

"Oh, yeah, just need help with somethin' for a minute over here." Bucky responds. While you brush off the sand while standing up, you miss the smirk that paints his face.

"What's up?" You ask while standing in front of him.

All of a sudden, you feel two hands grasping your hips, pulling you down onto his lap.

"Bucky, what are you doing?" You grit out, wondering what the hell was going on with this man?

"I need you, sweetheart." He simply murmurs, his mouth already making headway up the expanse of your neck.

"We- we're on the beach? In public?" You say, more like ask because you're so confused about the way he's acting right now.

"Baby, I can speak at least six languages, but I don't know how else to tell you that I wanna fuck you, right here, right now." His tone becomes even darker and gravelly, making a shiver run up your spine and your thighs clench together.

And of course, Bucky notices. Because Bucky Barnes doesn't let anything slip through the cracks.

"I've never done anything like... that in public before, baby." You tell him in a hushed tone. Sometimes Bucky loved the way you got shy and demure, only for him to fuck the absolute daylights out of you.

"I could just pull your bikini bottoms to the side, no one would even notice." He whispers with another devious smirk that means nothing but trouble.

"I- Are you sure?"

"Yes, honey. Trust me, I've got ya. When have I ever let you down?" He asks, already adjusting you on his lap into an appropriate position.

You had both legs on either side of him, and while you had minor things obstructing the view of your lower halves on the (thankfully) not crowded beach, your heart rate was through the roof.

Both in arousal and fear of getting caught.

"Well, there was that one time..." You joke, abruptly stopping when you feel his cool, metal fingers run through your folds.

You let out a shaky breath, waiting to feel the way his fingers fill you up, but instead you just shift upwards and feel his thickness fill you right away.

"Oh- Oh my god, Bucky." Your grip on his shoulders was straining, feeling him fill you to the brim.

"Thas' it, take it all, baby." He returns, leaving marks along your chest right in front of him.

You let out another shaky, quiet moan while you feel him thrust upwards just the slightest bit, but it was enough to make your eyes roll back.

"Know just how ya like it, don't I, angel?" Bucky hums in your ear, moving at a slow but consistent pace inside you.

You give him an almost imperceptible nod, your eyes fluttering closed at the feeling of his cock brushing up against your g-spot.

"Fuck, look at me, baby. Look into my eyes when I make you come." He demands, and who are you to deny him?

Your eyes somehow remain open, and through the fog of having him so deep inside you, you feel the coil building up inside of you quickly.

"H-Honey, I'm gonna come." You breathe out between your quivering breaths, feeling how Bucky's pace becomes a touch quicker, and seeing his jaw set as he makes you his mission.

Making you come, that is.

"C'mon, baby, give it t'me," he gives you a few more thrusts while you bounce on him, all the while keeping eye contact with him.

He knows you've finally snapped when you still on top of him, trying to close your legs around his hips. You're holding onto him for dear life, biting your lip to avoid making any noise.

"Fuck, angel, squeezin' me so damn tight," Bucky's words echo through your empty mind while you feel him stop his movements, and his white seed painting your walls.

While you move your face into the crook of his neck, his arms wrap around you, holding you tight against his warm body.

"God, ain't nobody like you, doll." He laughs, placing a kiss at the top of your head while you nuzzle further into his neck.

"Well, I never thought I'd get railed in broad daylight on the beach by my super soldier boyfriend, but I guess lots of things change over the years." You coyly reply, hearing Bucky's chest vibrate underneath you while he laughs.

"Well, there's no one else I'd rather fuck on the beach than you, doll."

"I don't think you care where you fuck me, as long as you get your dick inside me at some point or another." You giggle while moving up to meet his eyes again.

Bucky slowly lifts you up to pull his softening cock out of you, gently tucking himself back into his swim trunks.

He watches intently while his cum leaks out of you, slowly dripping down your thighs.

You catch what he's watching so carefully, face burning in embarrassment.

"Bucky, you made such a mess." You whine, but your sentence trails off when you see his fingers move down to your core. Bucky uses his flesh hand to scoop some of his seed onto his fingers, and brings them to your mouth.

As the words die on your tongue, you taste his salty cum instead.

"Mmm. Taste good, angel?" He hums with a dirty smile.

"Why don't you find out yourself?" You tease, feeling a bit bold.

While one of Bucky's eyebrows shoots up at your words, he doesn't take much time to think before he leans in and captures your lips in his.

His tongue prods into your mouth, exploring it and tasting every inch of what you had to offer.

"I was right. We taste delicious." Bucky winks, and you lean in once more for a sweet peck.

"I love you so much, Bucky. There's no one else I could ever do any of... this with other than you." You brush your fingers through his sandy hair, admiring the man under you with a soft smile.

"God, doll, ain't nobody that could ever have me wrapped around their little finger like you do." He tells you sincerely, gazing into your soul. He punctuates the sweet words with a kiss on your nose, making you scrunch it up.

And this moment was when you realized, this was paradise. This is the man you wanted to spend the rest of your life with.

Right here, under the California sun, you finally felt... whole.

#bucky barnes one shot #request #bucky barnes fic #bucky barnes smut #bucky imagine #bucky x reader #bucky barnes x reader #bucky fic #bucky barnes fanfiction #bucky barnes fluff #bucky barnes imagine #bucky barnes x female reader #bucky barnes reader insert

[pitterpatterpot]

Can you please write a prompt when Aedion and Fenrys do something stupid but Gavriel and Vaughan catch them doing it, or shortly after with 114, 115, 116, 148 and 152?

Ah. When a family has the reckless members and the tired members.

114. “Is there something you want to tell me?”

115. “I mean, it could be worse.”

116. “This wasn’t supposed to happen like this.”

148. “Things don’t always turn out the way we want them to.”

152. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

From a similar ask:

214. “Don’t you ever do that again.”

217. “H-How long have you been standing there?”

~~~

“This is, by far, the best and worse idea you’ve ever had,” Fenrys grumbles, looking down from their perch on the snow-slicked roof of Vaughan’s mountain holiday home.

“I’m a general, I’ve commanded an army,” Aedion reminds him, calculating the distance between them and the ground. “I think some of those decisions were pretty good and bad.”

“If Gavriel finds out about this, we’re dead.”

“Gavriel worries too much.”

“About you? Yes. About me? Only how he’ll kill me when he finds out I went along with this.”

“You bought the sled!”

“For the mountain! To go sledding down the mountain! Not the damn roof!”

And there they are, perched right before the slope of Aelin’s roof, Aedion on the from of the sled with Fenrys on the back. Fresh snow from the night before layers the roof and the ground below.

“I’m telling you, Aelin and I did this as kids. We were always fine. Her father would cheer.”

“I’m taking your word for it.” Fenrys huffs. “We have until the others get back from their hike.”

“You can pretend you’re against this all you want,” Aedion shuffles the sled closer to the slope, “but you were still the one who spent an hour looking for a way to fit the sled through the manhole.”

“I have to at least pretend to be against this,” Fenrys grumbles as a smile tries to fight it’s way through. “I’m supposed to be the elder here. Did you shovel extra snow at the bottom?”

“No, I’m an idiot who wants our bones to break,” Aedion huffs. “Yes, there’s extra snow at the bottom.”

They shuffle close together on the sled, a smaller model meant for winter fun. They stare down at the end of the roof, both grinning maniacally as they contemplate the small drop. Nothing compared to facing an army. Fenrys wraps his arms around Aedion, the younger of the two braced at the front. With one precarious movement the front of the sled is tipping forward.

And they’re off.

They both release a cheer as they fly over the icy surface of the roof, Aedion pulling up on the reins when they reach the edge as to avoid a complete nose dive. Yet the back of the sled catches on gutter, causing both of them to yelp as they fly off the sled in different directions. Both bodies land in the snow, a deafening crack sounding out.

“Aedion?” Fenrys gasps as he hauls himself up, looking in the direction of the sound.

He unwinds at the view of Aedion groaning just next to him. Then he freezes, eyes fixating on where the porch guardrail is cracked and ripped apart. And even worse, the scent of blood perpetuates the air.

“I mean,” Aedion mumbles from beside him, “this could be worse.”

Fenrys says nothing.

“Things don’t always turn out the way you want them to,” Aedion groans, rolling onto his back. “At least, not the first time. We can try again later.”

“Aedion-“

“What?”

“You have a shard of wood sticking out of your leg.”

Aedion looks down where he, indeed, has a wedge of the rail pierced through his calf muscle. He hums.

“Well,” Aedion sits up, “this wasn’t supposed to happen like this.”

“Gavriel is going to kill me,” Fenrys hisses, shifting to his knees and immedtaleaning over the injured leg. “Fucking hell, he is going to slaughter me. I can’t heal this! I’m not as good at healing as he is!”

“Just try and we won’t have to tell Gavriel!”

Without warning Fenrys grabs a pile of snow and shives it on top of Aedion’s leg, causing him to hiss and jerk in irritation. Fenrys ensures the small puddle of blood is covered in record time, grateful that the snow helps muffle the scent. Aedion stares at Fenrys in disbelief, annoyance dripping off him in waves.

“What the hell-“

“Aedion! Fenrys!”

Aedion stiffens, turning to see Gavriel and Vaughanwalk towards them from the forest clearing.

“Gavriel! Vaughan,” Aedion clears his throat. “H-How long have you been standing there?”

“We headed back early from the hike,” his father explains, making his way over to them. “By the way, I thought I heard you say you had something to tell me? I heard you as I was arriving.”

“Fae hearing!” Fenrys declares loudly, laughing and sending Aedion a warning glance. “We sure can hear from far away!”

Vaughan and Gavriel share a befuddled look.

“I know? Fenrys, what’s going on, are you- my gods!” Gavriel’s expression turns to one of shock. “The railing! What did-“ he glances at the sleigh, then the roof, his expression turning thunderous.

Both Aedion and Fenrys shrink under his gaze as he turns back to them, golden eyes on fire.

“Is there something you want to tell me?” Gavriel asks, voice low and slow.

“Shit,” Vaughan mutters, wincing at Gavriel’s growl, turning away examine the broken rail.

Both males swallow at the gaze and tone. They share a look, silently fighting between themselves as to who will speak.

“Please, don’t rush,” Gavriel crosses his arms. “After all, we can just stay here until someone confesses.”

Fenrys winces and his eyes twitch towards Aedion’s leg. Gavriel catches the action.

“Aedion,” Gavriel says, “stand up.”

“Ah,” Aedion pats his thighs. “I would, but I’m quite comfortable.”

“Really? You’re comfortable?”

“That’s right.”

“Sitting in the snow?”

“Reminds me of my childhood.”

Gavriel inhales a large breath, closing his eyes to steady and calm himself. After counting to three he turns to Fenrys, pinning the younger male with a look. Fenrys begins to squirm. Aedion grits his teeth and sends him a warning glare. Gavriel narrows his eyes. Aedion does the same. Fenrys avoids looking them both in the eye the best he can, sweat gathering on the back of his neck and father and son both send him equally threatening looks.

“Why is Aedion pale?” Gavriel questions Fenrys.

“I’m cold,” Aedion interjects.

“Lies. You were raised in this climate,” Gavriel barks, then turns back to Fenrys. “I want an answer from you.”

Fenrys bites his lip.

“I will call Aelin back,” Gavriel lowers his voice further, “and she will wonder what happened to Aedion. Are you willing to withhold that information from her?”

Fenrys swallows.

“Just tell him,” Vaughan advices from the porch, looking up to where the gutter is cracked.

“And what about me?” Gavriel continues. “I trained you. Will you deny me information of my only precious child?”

“Oh, gods above!” Aedion chokes, reaching out to grasp Fenrys’s shoulder. “We’re fine! There’s a reasonable explanation for all of this! You can stop with the guilt tripping crap.”

Gavriel ignores his son. Instead, he continues to focus on Fenrys.

“Seriously, Gavriel, we’re fi-“

“Aedion and I sled off the roof but tipped forward too much and broke the railing and Aedion has a piece of wood stabbed through his leg!” Fenrys pauses and heaves in a deep breath, finally relaxing from the strain.

“You what?!”

“Well, fuck.”

“You bastard.”

Gavriel whirls on Aedion, immediately crouching and removing the snow on his leg. Aedion grunts as his father accidentally nudges the shard in his leg. Gavriel swears when he sees it.

“I’m fine,” Aedion drawls as Gavriel examines the wound. “If I can handle being stabbed I can handle a bit of wood.”

“You’re lucky this was so thoroughly polished and varnished,” Gavriel braces Aedion leg with a hand on his knee. “Otherwise you’d have to worry about splinters. Take a breath.”

In a swift movement Gavriel yanks the wood free of Aedion’s flesh, his son barking a curse at the splitting pain before Gavriel’s warm magic seeps through him, his father’s cedar and sage scent potent with anger. Aedion goes to thank him but freezes with the way Gavriel’s eyes are already pinned on him, dark with anger and his jaw twitching.

“You’re pissed,” Aedion sighs. “I’m sorry.”

Gavriel says nothing, focusing on the leg. Aedion squirms at the lack of response, Fenrys looking away and choosing to walk up to Vaughan, the two of them awkwardly standing to the side. The last of Aedion’s skin stitches together and Gavriel turns away, picking up the largest section of broken railing and setting it against the wall of the holiday house. He then commences in picking up smaller shards, ensuring they’re all out of the snow and settled on the porch. Fenrys and Aedion watch him do this, the earlier helping the later to his feet.

“Inside,” Gavriel says, not looking at them as he enters the cabin.

They follow after him, standing awkwardly to the side as Gavriel fills the main fireplace with wood and begins striking the flints. Vaughan drags in the sled behind them, scowling as he does so.He jerks his head towards the couch, clearly indicating for Fenrys and Aedion to sit. They both do so.

Once the fire seems steady Gavriel makes his way over to them. He sits on the low table in front of the couch, examining the two of them. Vaughan leans against the fireplace, dark eyes simmering as he takes everything in.

“So,” Gavriel begins, anger still thick, “who wants to explain what happened?”

“It was my idea,” Aedion immediately interjects, ignoring Fenrys’s frantic look. “Aelin and I used to sled off the roof of her old holiday house as kids. I didn’t factor in the issue that this house has a guardrail to avoid or that Fenrys and I would be heavy.”

Silence stretches between them. Fenrys cringes at the way Gavriel pins them both under his stare. Aedion shifts at the silence.

“What I’m thinking,” Gavriel begins slowly, “is that you two must have the combined maturity of two children to have ever thought sledding off the roof would be a good idea.”

Aedion and Fenrys share a concerned look. Gavriel narrows his eyes as they look away.

“Do not,” he growls lowly, “look away from me as I am speaking to you.”

Aedion’s eyes widen, turning back to his father. Fenrys seems less shocked at the severity of the anger and more apprehensive of it.

“Not only did you engage in a completely ridiculous and childish task,” Gavriel begins, “but you damaged the house and Aedion injured himself in the process.”

“I’m fine,” Aedion scowls. “You healed me and there isn’t even a scar.”

Gavriel narrows his eyes. Fenrys winces.

“That is not the point,” Gavriel begins. “And the fact that you don’t realise that isn’t the point is even worse. You shouldn’t put your own health and safety at risk and you, Fenrys, should be mature enough after all these centuries to automatically know that sledding off a roof is a bad idea!”

“You’re right,” Fenrys agrees, sitting straight. “I apologise for indulging in such an immature act.”

Satisfied, Gavriel turns to Aedion.

“I’m sorry for endangering myself,” Aedion admits. “Especially over something so stupid.”

“Good,” Gavriel huffs. “Don’t ever do that again.”

“Trust me, it’s not on the list,” Aedion promises.

Gavriel nods. “While you two may be grown males and I can’t ground you, I candemand that you help me with cutting and moving more lumber tomorrow.”

With that Gavriel stands and stalks his way to his room, the door closing decisively behind him. Both males relax at the sound of the click, Fenrys releasing an audible breath.

“My gods,” Fenrys groans, sliding down the couch and rubbing at his face, “I thought for sure he was going to kill us. Cutting up timber is nothing, becoming a father must have softened him.”

Aedion nods. But they both stiffen at a barked laugh, snapping to attention as Vaughan stalks toward them. The look on his face suggests he knows they forgot about him and will regret it.

“He’s not giving you a harsher punishment because he knows you’re going to be working your asses off all night helping me fix this railing,” Vaughan narrows his eyes, jerking a hand towards the door. “I worked hard on this house. Now get off your asses and get ready for some woodwork. Be outside in five minutes.”

Vaughan slams the front door behind him as he exits the house, Aedion and Fenrys still able to hear him grumbling as he trudges his way through the snow to a shed with supplies. They turn at the squeaking of hinges, Gavriel sticking his head out of his bedroom.

“He’s a perfectionist,” Gavriel dryly informs them. “Get ready to redo the whole porch railing.”

With that he closes the door once again, leaving the two males to wince and wilt, dreading the night of work ahead of them.

#tog fic #cadre #family feels #aedion #tog #fenrys moonbeam #vaughan #gavriel

[downwiththemutantnjnjaturtles]

We Met Within This Screen [chapt. 6]

[Donnie x reader]

sfw, chapter 5 here

Come on, save it, save it, Donnie chanted to himself later that night, at home and tucked away in his room trying to figure out how to neutralize the situation. He paced along his bed back and forth, phone in hand as he wracked his brain thinking about how he'd get her to let it go. He could tell her that she was...overtired? Go the stereotypical route and say it was just her eyes playing tricks on her? Try to play it off as human teenagers messing around on the roof?

She'd gone to bed already. He hated that he couldn't pursue the subject until morning, her morning, but by then, he'd be tired. When she woke, he slept. But he needed to get it resolved as quickly as possible, so he reckoned it was time to pull an all nighter. Luckily, that wasn't anything he wasn't used to.

He figured he'd get the preliminaries out of the way so he could get right to it when she eventually texted back.

"Good morning

I know you're not awake yet but I figured I'd get an early start today.

I want to know, what exactly did you see last night?"

He shut his phone off and set it down on the bed, fingers rubbing his temples. Depending on her answer, this would either be difficult, or near impossible.

The rest of his time was spent just waiting around for her to finally wake up, dodging all his brothers and trying to occupy himself with something. He was fiddling with the radio he kept on the floor next to his bed when his phone notified him of a message. Turning the volume up, some old-school rock played softly. He didn't always keep music on when he worked, which was what he was doing felt like, but something needed to fill the silence. It also made it feel more casual to have the radio on, for both himself and for whoever might stop by his room.

"Good morning to you too

That was...sudden??"

How nice it was to read those words coming from someone who wasn't his family. Not that they said it like that often anyway, but the small gesture hit differently.

"I'm just really curious about what you said you saw."

Curious? Not quite. More like dying to know, and not because he fancied himself some cryptid hunting.

"That's fair I guess

But don't laugh, ok?"

"I'd never, [y/n]"

"Well

Okay

They were big

But no like not the overweight kinf, not even just 'tall guy' kind of big

kind*

You know?"

Yeah, I aware. I'm 6'8" and have a giant shell on my back.

"They?"

He was hoping she'd only seen one of them. Maybe it would have been easier, but, of course, that wasn't the case.

"I think there were two

Idk it just looked really weird, it was dark but the silhouette from the light made them look bulky, I don't know what it was"

Lips pursed tight, he looked up from his phone, and all of a sudden that music in the background was suffocating. He quickly reached over and shut it off. He needed to be able to divert all of his attention to one thing. Except, even though he should have been spazzing over her spotting them (even if just for a split second), a concern crept up in the back of his mind that made him scoff at himself. The need to know was too great.

His eyes fell on his scaled, three-fingered hand as he typed.

"Did it scare you?"

Perhaps it wasn't what he should have been focusing on. But he was. He knew she hadn't seen much, but what if she quipped that it was frightening, or gross, or…?

"I don't know, Bo

I guess it was kind of freaky

Uh, do you actually believe me? That I saw something?"

"'Freaky?'" he repeated to himself in a whisper, brow ridge furrowed. What was I expecting?

He had to shake himself of whatever was going on in his head at the moment, because there were more pressing matters at hand. Like what he was going to answer her question with. Theoretically, he could go two routes; one, invalidate the experience and try to walk on the line of telling her that it was not real without making her feel crazy. And then probably get mad at him. Or two, go along with it, if he didn't have the heart to do that to her. The answer was already here; he let out a deep sigh. Two, it is.

Nothing could make him want to make her feel that way, even if it meant he'd have to put in a little extra effort in fixing his mistake.

"I wouldn't doubt your judgement, [y/n]."

"Thanks

That makes me feel a lot better

You're a really good guy, Bo :)"

Freezing, he sat and stared at the screen before slowly taking the phone away from his face, lips moving, but no sound coming out. He had no idea what to say; all he could focus on was the fact that the girl he undeniably liked thought he was a good guy. And that, presumably, it meant she might have liked him as well. Big on the "might", he realized as the logical part of his mind took over once again. Regardless, he licked his lips and got to preparing a worthy response. He didn't want to come off as flustered as he felt. Donnie was aware he was not particularly suave—he took solace in the fact that she couldn't see his face or hear his voice. He contemplated on acting a bit more "cool guy" than he actually was, but wanted her to like him for him, not a facade. Which was a major contradiction to all that he had done up to that point, but the least he could do was be the person he was on the inside!

"You there?"

"Sorry, I got distracted…

You really think so?"

"That I think you're a great guy?"

"Well...yes."

"Totally. 100%"

His heart was going, he was stammering to himself, and a new feeling enveloped him. He was no stranger to the different emotions; he'd gotten familiar with many of them. Because though he didn't always show it, he had a lot of feelings. These, he felt most viscerally. But he had to get back on track. If he could push last night's incident under the rug, all would be well. More well than it already was, considering.

"Thank you, [y/n]

To be honest, I've never had a friend like you

So, do you want to talk more about what you saw? I know I'm switching tracks quickly, it's just very….interesting."

It was a jarring and awkward subject change, he knew that, but he desperately wanted to get it out of the way. The sooner, the better.

"I suppose

You seem pretty interested in it"

Maybe she wasn't hanging onto the experience like he'd thought she would. There were so many tales of people seeing inexplicable things and becoming enraptured by the experience that he guessed he should only expect the worst, but it appeared that she was not so obsessed. Crisis averted?

"Not too much, I was just wondering

We can forget about it."

"Oh, I'm not going to forget about it, Bo"

There it is, he thought, not surprised.

After thirty minutes of attempting to throw her off without coming off as suspicious himself, he had to take a breather, reorganize his mind. Only to come back and find that she had to go take care of things, and that she'd talk to him later. He'd done as much fixing as he could; at that point, it was as good as it was going to get. The thought of being looked for by his unknowing friend loomed about in the coming weeks as they did their patrols, when they would pass by her residence, and the times that he snuck off to stop by himself. Sometimes accompanied by Mikey, but he tried to keep it as solitary as possible. Soon, watching her on her balcony from that roof became part of his routine. He vaguely thought sometimes that watching her like that could be considered creepy, but that ship had already sailed.

For the third time in the last month he was there yet again, on the same roof, watching the same balcony, watching the same girl. Sometimes they texted, sometimes they didn't. The times he wasn't talking to her as he sat there were the times he daringly crossed the threshold onto the fire escape. There were only a few instances of that. But did he still feel out of his mind doing so? Yes. The window only looked into part of the living room and kitchen, but he felt scandalous to do it. Most of his time there was spent only with his shell against the wall next to the window, just out of sight. He could always hear her faint but noticeable footsteps coming and could easily vault the railing and climb up or drop down. She couldn't get past his keen hearing unless she knew to tread lightly.

Mikey was with him once again, this time out to look for scrap rather than patrol. He'd been buddied up with his younger brother more often ever since their talk that night in Donnie's room. They only stopped by because they were already out and had a viable excuse.

"Does she know about us? Like, me, Leo, Raph..." rambled Mikey, curious, as he practiced one of his new moves with his skateboard. He kicked up onto the ledge of the roof and skidded before hopping off, tucking the board under his arm. "You guys have been together like, what, two months? And she doesn't even know your name."

Fiddling with the strap reaching around his shoulder, Donnie replied matter-of-factly to hide the embarrassment that was ailing him at the thought, "Okay, for starters, we're not 'together'. And secondly, she hasn't mentioned voice chatting in a while."

"And?" He got back on his board, zooming by Donnie.

"My name? It just hasn't come up," Donnie shrugged.

"Call her, then!" Mikey smiled, still preoccupied with his board and trying out his new tricks. Donnie gave a light scoff and shook his head. His brother passed behind him where he sat leaned against the water tower.

"I don't want to just call her out of nowhere, Mikey, she might be asleep."

He also didn't want his brother there when he did.

"You gotta not be so shy!...oh, look, in the window. Right there. See? She's up," he quipped with a small smirk. The curtain was drawn, but the light had turned on at some point, and they could see her silhouette moving past. Donnie looked over his shoulder to say something but felt a hand slip into his pocket on the other side, stealing his phone right off of him. He was fast, but Mikey was faster in jumping into his board and gliding all the way to the other side of the roof with the fussy turtle hot on his trail.

"Mikey, quit it!" Donnie barked, lunging toward him for the phone.

"You'll thank me later!"

The two wrestled for the phone, Mikey holding it just out of reach as he tried to navigate the screen without dropping it.

"Come on," grunted Donnie as the tussle led them near the edge, where Mikey held it precariously over the alley below. His glasses were jostled off his face when a stray hand bumped them, causing them to fall amongst their feet. Squinting, he partially knelt down and searched for the pair while still looking at his brother and his phone, trying to stretch his arm long enough to snatch it. "Really?" he groaned, "just give me the phone!"

Donnie slung out his staff and used the other end to whack his wrist from underneath just as he pulled away from the edge, losing his grip on the phone. Mikey tried to catch it but it bounced off his hand, going right over the side of the roof and plummeting down into the alley.

Mikey froze. Donnie finally found his glasses.

Laughing nervously, Mikey turned back to him, "Whoops…"

When he didn't immediately find the phone on the ground, Donnie knew what happened. He looked over the edge, and there it was, sitting on the pavement in the alleyway. The building wasn't incredibly tall, but enough to do some major damage. He'd have to switch for one of his spares if he didn't want to deal with a busted-up screen.

"I don't need your 'help', Mikey, so leave it alone next time," Donnie said and gave him a narrow-eyed look, huffing as he leaped down to retrieve it.

Mikey may have been insistent, but he knew then it was time to stop. All he wanted to do was help. For his shy, flakey brother to come out of his shell (no pun intended). Donnie, at that time, had the biggest shot out of all of them for something unique and good. He hadn't yet worked out the logistics of how to bridge the gap between the two, but it was a calling of his to help him along.

Donnie watched for people from behind a corner before creeping out to get the phone, which was face down on the concrete. No doubt cracked to all hell if not completely shattered, though it did have a case.

But as he got closer, he heard a voice. From the phone.

He picked up the phone timidly and shot a glance up at the roof, where Mikey was peeking over the edge in apprehension. Without a word, Donnie activated the taser in his staff, pointing it at his brother and zapping it briefly. He flinched and retreated out of sight.

"Hello?"

"Hello? Bo?" she asked again, tone riddled with confusion. "What was that?"

"Uh, yes—hol—hold on, please," stammered out donnie, flying around the corner and pressing flat against the wall as a group of laughing people passed by the alley. "Just one second," he said nervously. Above him, Mikey was rapidly motioning for him to get up there, eyes wide and body trying to stay low. Baffled, Donnie gestured back at him, mouthing at him to keep his pants on for one more minute while he made his way up.

"Hey, what's going on there?" she inquired, concerned.

A street cat abruptly skittered out from between his legs from the dumpster he stood next to, and he had to stifle a startled yelp. He hopped up onto the nearest fire escape, trying to control his breathing. "Hey, hello…[y/n]," he half-chuckled, distracted by working up the building one-armed as he kept as quiet as possible.

"What was all that? And who's 'Mikey'?"

There was suddenly a shout—Mikey's shout—and his stomach did a jump. He sputtered as fast as he could, "I'm sorry [y/n] but this really isn't a good time, and I mean it really isn't," he pulled himself up onto the roof, and there was Mikey, fending off men clad in black, "so I have to go, but—"

"Don, dude! I need help over here!" cried his brother, sliding out of the way as a sword was jabbed towards him. He countered with a harsh uppercut to the man's chin, sending him stumbling backwards. The blade fell to the concrete with a clank.

"'Don'? Bo, what the hell?! Who is with you? And—"

Donnie jumped into the battle, a mix of nine or ten armed men with swords other weapons, and Mikey trying to stave them off, swinging his chucks with nothing short of reckless abandon. But he still didn't hit himself with them.

Ending the call, he secured the phone in his pocket. He wailed the guy closest to him in the side of the head with the heavy staff, then kicked him in the chest. The man fell to the blow, and Mikey ducked underneath the length of Donnie's weapon just in time as the two came together. Stray bullets flew past them, some colliding with their shells as they spun around for protection.

"How was it?!" Mikey yelled over the clamor, breathless. Donnie sidestepped from the rapid hit he sent towards the human to his left.

"What are you talking about?!" Donnie loudly questioned, flummoxed of what could have been going on in his brain during a fight. "We're kind of in the middle of something here!"

"Your phone call!"

"Yeah, the hell's the talkin' about, Don?" a gruff voice cut through the jumble.

Both of the boys whirled around to see their older brothers there, weapons drawn.

"Oh, right. As soon as I saw those bad guys coming, I let them know," said Mikey casually to Donnie, throwing his fist into the face of the man coming up behind him. "You know, standard biz."

With the rest of the team there, the fight was over twice as fast. Some groaning in pain and some unconscious bodies littering the area, along with their weapons. Leo finished the last one and sheathed his swords, eyes on their tallest brother while Raph kept watch around them. Donnie swallowed as Leo approached him.

"Don, you said you were going out for scrap metal," Leo stated.

In the background, Mikey grabbed his skateboard and was going to try to kickflip over one of the knocked out guys, but Raph yanked the board from him, growling. He checked all of the men to make sure they were down and would stay down.

"We were...just on our way back?" Donnie answered. Nearby, there was a small pile of scrap he'd collected, though definitely not enough to justify being out that long.

"So you stopped at your friend's place?" Leo deadpanned, crossing his arms. "Didn't you think that this could get her in trouble, too? Her apartment's right there, dude!"

Mikey budded in and corrected him, "Ah, we stopped by [y/n]'s. And nah! It's all good."

Donnie's face twitched. "Of course I thought about it! That's why I've only come here three times since, and only thirty minute intervals!" he bit back, throwing his hands up. The rest of his brothers all looked at him and his specificity. "I'm not naive, Leo."

The leader pushed past the both of them, signalling that it was time to leave, and they followed. Not before Donnie got what little metal he had collected and put away his staff, tucking the stuff under his arm. Raph joined alongside Donnie as they ran. "What's with all the secret' stuff, Don? First, ya hide it to begin with, then, ya make out like you were done, and now you get jumped by Foot guys by her place when you shoulda been gettin' scrap!" he said. "How were we supposed to cover for ya if you're lyin' even after we let you off?"

"Technically, I did get some!" Donnie remarked. He held up a piece of the scrap for him to see, and Raph snorted. "But..."

Well, his question would be a little harder to answer.

Next block was the nearest manhole, where each turtle swiftly jumped in, knowing by heart (and years of wandering) most of the sewers and the way back home. In some tunnels was Mikey's telltale graffiti, but it was scattered throughout the place enough to not be a giant arrow to their hideout. In the last portion of the run was the tunnel they always slid down, and once they were actually home, Donnie knew what was coming. Master Splinter was already waiting for them by the time they arrived.

"Uh-oh," Mikey said upon seeing him, sinking behind his brothers. Raph pushed him back up front.

Dropping the scrap in his arms, Donnie squeaked, "That's not good." He quietly cursed how high pitched his voice became when he was nervous.

"Yeah…" Leo cleared his throat, looking down at his hands clasped in front of him. The situation had an awkward tension for everyone in it, save for Raph, who was immune to it by then and Splinter himself. "We took care of the soldiers," he added more seriously. "Got out of there before too much attention was drawn.

"The police may be able to handle them from here, but it will not make a dent in the Shredder's forces," explained Splinter, grave as he paced along the line of brothers. "He owns the city. Until I say so, there will be no venturing to the surface. You are all lucky to be unharmed."

"That ain't it," Raph piped up. "But they'll be bringin' the big guns, next time."

"Oh, I am well aware."

"Um...of which thing?" the nervous turtle questioned, exchanging glances to Raph and then Mikey.

Splinter raised his brows knowingly, and that was all it took for Donnie. The floodgates of his signature anxious chatter opened. He grabbed the edge of Mikey's shell and pulled him over into the spotlight with him, "I met someone over an online game and we started texting after a few weeks, and—and Leo found out and I said I would stop, but we never told you," he gestured toward their brother in blue, who refused to make eye contact, "so I told her that it was through and then Mikey somehow convinced me to go back on it," he sucked in a breath, and Mikey grinned uncomfortably, "and then we started talking again and I don't know why, but I went back there to her apartment building and it was just…stupid."

There was a cumbrous pause. Donnie was stiff as a board, Mikey couldn't look at any one thing too long, Leo stood in his polite but awkward stance, and Raph started to whistle.

As poised as ever, Splinter spoke. "I know."

All four pairs of eyes shot to their father.

"What?"

"Uh..."

"Huh?"

"Wait."

They expressed their collective confusion at the same time, and Splinter chuckled. Donnie wanted nothing more than to be able to retreat into his shell, but that was physically impossible. "Nothing gets past me, especially not you and your nervous habits, Donatello. You are scratching that spot on your neck again, son."

Flinching, Donnie pulled his hand away. He'd be damned; Splinter was right.

But unbeknownst to them, there had been spectator of their fight on the roof that night.

————————————————————————————————

shh do not think too deeply about this my children

a/n: haha plot device go brrrr

i need to finish this cursed fanfiction

#tmnt #tmnt donnie x reader #tmnt Donatello #teenage mutant ninja turtles #tmnt 2016 #tmnt 2014 #tmnt bayverse #tmnt x reader #tmnt donnie #donatello #donatello x reader #tmnt donatello #tmnt leonardo #tmnt raphael #tmnt michaelangelo #fanfiction #tmnt fanfiction #writing #tmnt leo #tmnt raph #tmnt mikey

[akawrites000]

Stupid but feels so right

Villain is just having a nice time, leaning on a railing and staring up at the stars when he sees a silhouette blur past him and land on a rooftop about three buildings away from him. Instinct kicks in and he immediately hides behind the wall, because getting into some scuffle with another Villain would do him no good.

He hears no noises that sounds like a brawl, so he peeks out slowly from his spot behind the wall and catches sight of a blue costume that looks pale in the moonlight. He squints his eyes, trying to discern the figure further. The silhouette moves a little bit into the moonlight and Villain's eyes widen like baseballs.

Hero?! What the hell is he doing here, at this time of the night? Villain whisks his head back to hide away behind the wall, his brain running a mile per minute. Did he perhaps somehow figure out that I'm here? Am I being tracked? But wait, I'm not doing anything today so there's no reason to track me- Villain spends a good fifteen minutes racking his brain up but no matter what, he can't seem to arrive at an answer for the Hero's appearance. He peeks out again- and he’s still here, great. Furthermore, Hero had settled down nicely on that roof , pulling his blue cape further on himself.

Villain lets out a distressed sigh. He doesn't look like he's here to fight. Villain spends a few more minutes looking at Hero, and for some reason the longer he looks at Hero, the more he realises that Hero just looks incredibly lonely, sitting there all alone, curled up on himself, the pale moonlight making him look paler than usual. And Villain immediately makes a decision- he decides to go and give Hero some company, ignoring the warning bells going off in his head.

-

Hero jumps at the sound of footsteps behind him and looks just about ready to bolt after recognizing Villain's form behind him. Villain can literally see Hero's brain working, and so he stops, raising his hands up in a peaceful motion, hoping that the stubborn Hero understands that he’s not here to fight.

Hero's tense muscles calm down at the sight of Villain's hands raised up, and he sits back down, abandoning his instinct to flee. Villain plops down next to him, not making any other movement. Hero gives him a sideways glance, only to look back at the sky after.

"What are you doing here? Did you track me down?"

Villain tries to answer the question with a level voice, his internal self currently in chaos because that was exactly what he had thought around twenty minutes ago.

We're just so stupid aren't we?

"Don't flatter yourself Hero, I have other things to do."

"Like?"

Villain thinks for a moment and then answers, "like stargazing."

Hero whisks his head sideways so fast, Villain momentarily worries if his neck is okay.

"What?"

"You heard me, stargazing. And rooftops are the best spots for that."

Hero wants to laugh but something in Villain's voice tells him that he's not joking.

"Yeah, the stars look beautiful tonight."

It's silent again for a few minutes before Villain decides to speak up.

"So what is the Hero of justice doing here? Don't you guys have like a strict schedule to stick to? Wake up at 6 am and sleep by 9 pm-

He's cut off by Hero's chuckling. Villain just shrugs his shoulders, waiting for him to finish and give him an answer.

"We do have schedules, the waking up part at least. The sleeping part, not so much."

Villain turns to look at Hero and notices dark bags under his eyes. He turns back and stares at the sky.

" Are you on night duty or something?"

Hero chuckles again and Villain finds himself becoming slightly self conscious. What the hell's so funny?! , he screams internally.

"No, it's just that I can't sleep."

"Insomnia?"

"That too, but mostly nightmares."

Villain's heart tugs with a feeling of familiarity. Nightmares was definitely something that he could relate to. But he never imagined that Hero, the person who was the reason for peace existing in this town would get nightmares, and even more so, stay awake at night because of them. He had just assumed that the very fact that the Hero was fighting for all the good things would let him sleep easily at night. So he was wrong.

"And you're not able to sleep because you're scared of them?"

Hero turns to face Villain, giving him a look as if saying "duh."

Villain stammers, throat clammy and heart thundering in his chest. It had been a while since he had a normal conversation with anyone so he really wasn't sure if he was doing a good job. And for some weird reason, he cared.

But Hero understands and qualms his fears with just a few words, " It's fine, I'm not really offended, just confused." He says, and Villain stares at him, jaw dropping in amazement.

And Hero just smiles, and Villain is reminded of the honey words and sunny smiles that Hero showcases on his patrols every day. He suddenly feels sad? He wants Hero to smile only for him, if that even makes sense- and the words leave Villain's mouth before he can stop them,

"Don't smile like that. I'm not one of your precious civilians."

Hero stares back at him, horror and shock written plainly on his face.

(Oh, jealousy was such a dangerous thing. And if Villain was actually jealous, he's screwed, because Hero has thousands of people who love him. And whom does Villain have? None.)

Hero then chuckles once again, but this time it sounds lifeless and dry and Villain hates it.

"Sorry, I got lost in the moment. It has been a while since I smiled for real, I didn't even realize I was doing it."

Now it's Villain's turn to stare at Hero, all shocked and tongue tied.

It seems like Hero understood again, because he answered to the question that Villain wanted to scream out. " Well, it's kinda an embarrassing thing really," Hero mutters, " I smile at citizens because I have to, it's part of my job, not really because I want to."

Villain still seems to be in shock, so Hero just continues, " I- I mean, not all of my smiles are fake you know, I'm not heartless," Hero counters, " it's just that I have to smile even if I don't feel like smiling sometimes and I hate that, because who would want to see a Hero who's just about done with this society right?"

Hero turns to look at Villain and for the second time that night Villain wants to run, not because he's scared but because he's feeling so many emotions that he's never felt before and he doesn't know what to do with them- he feels like he’s going to be swallowed whole.

And more importantly, he can't hide away from Hero's gaze and it looks so heartbreaking. Villain would have cried, if he didn't have a reputation to maintain.

"So, what about the honey words?"

Hero looks at him like he's pleasantly surprised that that's the impression Villain has of him.

"Oh, those are just formalities again, you know, to gain public favour."

Just the thought makes Villain cringe. He definitely can't see himself telling people things that he doesn't mean.

"Then what about fear?" Villain begins, hesitant, " you do get scared right?"

"Of course I do!" Hero laughs, so tender and Villain is left to figure out whether it's real or fake.

Hero understands again, "it's real this time."

Villain is just baffled by this point, " are you psychic or something?!"

And Hero has the time of his life, alternating between chuckling and full blown laughing, clutching his stomach because he's been laughing too much and Villain just wants to disappear into the ground.

"Like I said, it's all a part of the profession. When you're on rescue missions, you have to judge people's mindsets so that you know what to say to them. Otherwise there'll be full blown panic everytime. "

Villain listens intently, finding every word that falls out of Hero's lips incredibly interesting and thought provoking. He had never imagined that being a Hero was such an intricate and delicate job.

"It's just that I've never seen you look scared before," Villain begins, "and all these things that you're telling me, it's all so new..."

Hero smiles and after listening to him, Villain can see the tiny difference. The 'sunny smiles' are usually stiff, where the Hero's lips just form a thin line. This one is more free and natural, making his cheeks pull just right and what the hell am I thinking-

"Well I've never really shared this with anyone." Hero says. " I guess it's more exact if I say that no one has really bothered to ask me about all this, so I never told anyone."

Villain feels his chest constrict because the more he listens to Hero, he feels like his own life is being told back to him, in another voice, and it's not just him talking in his own head, for once.

"You can share anything you want to, if you're okay with me."

A villain trying to offer a hero some solace, how ironic- Villain's mind sings to him.

But the grateful look that crosses Hero's face clears Villain's mind of any previous doubt, if only just for a moment.

"You know, heroes are never allowed to show fear on their faces. It's one of the things that I find hardest to do."

Villain tips his head sideways, as if pondering, "But why? Every human feels fear right? It's a pretty common emotion. Why hide that?"

Hero laughs but it sounds more like a wheeze, "Because according to my superiors, heroes are the symbol of peace. And a symbol of peace is not supposed to show raw despair on his face."

At that moment, Villain desperately wanted to whack Hero's superior hard on their head- whoever they were.

" The other day I was fighting downtown, there was this Villain who could control fire, and it was right in the middle of a pedestrian street."

Villain noticed that Hero's hands began to twitch slightly. It's not because it's cold right?

"I tried my best but I couldn't stop the Villain in time before the fires reached an elementary school right across the street, and there were children still inside the building...

Villain stares at Hero, his heart twisting and clenching in weird places as he sees him breaking down in front of him, his 'hero' mask crumbling.

He looked so much like a normal civilian now, crying for the lives that he couldn't save- except that no normal civilian would have to bear such a heavy burden.

"Even now, i- I can hear-

Hero doesn't speak after that, the sobs that wreck his frame don't let him speak. Villain inches closer to him- slowly, patiently, putting his hands on Hero's trembling ones and looks into his tear stained eyes, as if asking for permission-

"Can I hold you?"

Hero nods and it takes barely an instant for Villain's arms to engulf Hero's trembling figure, picking him up and cradling him close to his chest.

Hero chants, "I'm sorry, please forgive me, I'm so sorry," hands tightly clutching Villain's inky black shirt. Villain rocks back and forth gently, remembering that that's what his mother used to do for him when he was still a child.

Looking at Hero, Villain finally understands how vulnerable a human can be, it doesn't matter what they are, a hero or a villain. At the end of the day, they feel the same things. Loss. Pain. Guilt.

It's okay Hero, you've done enough.

Let me protect you from now on.

And throughout the whole conversation, Villain's mind was berating him, telling him that this was such a stupid decision.

And Villain knows that this may be stupid, that his intervention alone cannot protect the Hero from all the despair and fear that he has to face.

But it doesn't change the fact that it feels right.

And for once, Villain wants to do the right thing.

Lol I really can't write short stuff / I tried to make this more conversational /hope it makes sense/ villain definitely doesn't keep track of the hero's schedule nope / who am I kidding / he probably knows the best spot to watch hero's patrols from/ heroes have to handle so much mental baggage it's sad/ villain finally realizes that they're not so different at the core after all / this villain is not evil btw, doesn't kill people or anything /my writing tends to get so introspective xD

#heroes and villains #hero/villain #villain/hero #prose #writing snippet #snippet #writeblr #writer #writers on tumblr #villain x hero #hero x villain #hero #villain #hero with mental baggage #empathetic villain #my writing

[confused-stars]

For the sign au Aizawa has a clue connecting Oboro to Kurogiri but it will probably confuse him more than anything. Since Oboro is supposed to be dead??? He'll probably discuss this with Present Mic then try to investigate. Maybe he'll try capturing Kurogiri for answers though that'll be hard. Or maybe he'll search for info on Kurogiri, his history and such. He won't find much unless he manages to break into one of the Doctors labs, but those are hard to find. Or are they???

fear not, for i come bearing answers

this is a bit of a timeline hopping thing since the first part is after Shigaraki was captured and the second is after the Eri rescue!!

ko-fi link (✿◡‿◡)

He finds Hizashi on the roof. That’s the first surprise.  Shouta comes up here sometimes, because he has the destructive habit of picking at old wounds until they’re bleeding and raw again, but Hizashi has always been the opposite of that. It’s not that he ever tried to pretend Oboro hadn’t existed, but he did use to pretend his loss didn’t affect him nearly as much as it actually did. Hizashi was always pushing forward where Shouta lingered on the past. Maybe that makes him a healthier person.

Shouta clears his throat as he approaches, but Hizashi gives no indication of having heard him. He’s sitting at the edge of the roof, legs dangling and arms resting on the railing as he looks out over the UA campus. The view has changed so much since they were teenagers. Since Oboro was up here with them.

There’s about a million places Shouta would rather be at the moment, but this is a conversation that needs to happen. They haven’t talked since Shouta had All Might call up his detective friend and demanded he use his quirk on Hizashi so they could be assured he wasn’t the traitor. The vindication followed by pure hollowness of Hizashi’s gaze after Tsukauchi’s nod has been haunting Shouta for weeks now. There were no words that would have repaired the broken bridge between them, so Shouta decided to give it some time. That might have been a mistake, too. Them drifting apart has always been something that hurt both of them in the process. Hizashi would have likely much rather had a big yelling match and then hugged it out. But Shouta couldn’t do that. He’s been... punishing himself, staying away from his best friend. His ‘something’. His ‘maybe’.  Because it’s Shouta’s fault that he’s hurting in the first place. Shouta’s stupid lack of trust and paranoia. He should have never, ever doubted him, even for a second. There’s a ton of excuses there. How he was injured, how he’s traumatized, how he was always only trying to protect the students. How being cautious was the logical choice. The professional choice for a hero. But none of that actually matters, does it? Hizashi is Hizashi. That should have been enough.

Either way, that’s a problem for later. He has to prioritize right now. There’s something much more pressing, and that’s forcing him to speak with Hizashi even though he still doesn’t know how to even begin repairing their relationship. Shouta has always had this tendency of ducking away from personal conflict like this. It’s much along the same vein as leaving a cat behind in the rain. It’s the easier way, when he gets overwhelmed and doesn’t know what to do. He despises that cowardly part of himself. Usually, he can push it away alright nowadays. But that’s only because he has Hizashi and Nemuri right with him.

Nemuri has firmly taken Hizashi’s side this time, though it’s not like she’s showing Shouta the cold shoulder, either. She’s just fussing over Hizashi more. Which is fine. Shouta is the one who caused the hurt, and it’s not like he enjoys her fussing. It’s probably good that they’re not talking much right now, because Nemuri... that’s going to be another painful conversation.

Shouta sits at the edge of the roof beside Hizashi and gazes out over their school grounds. It still makes him feel nostalgic to be up here. He breathes.

“How was your talk with Shigaraki?” Hizashi speaks first. Of course he does. Even if his voice is carefully blank, void of the usual emotion.

Shouta grimaces and flexes his freshly healed arm. The burns weren’t deep, but they were still painful. “... enlightening.”

Hizashi glances at him over his sunglasses. “So you found out who the traitor is?”

That was one of the questions Shouta knows All Might and Tsukauchi asked and got no answer to. He shakes his head. “But I did find out where he learned my name.”

Hizashi says nothing, waits with a raised eyebrow.

Shouta has no fucking idea how to do this. It feels like there’s a lead weight stuck in his chest. He breathes. Almost wants a cigarette even though he hasn’t smoked in nearly a decade.

He looks over towards the dorms instead of facing Hizashi any longer. “He told me Kurogiri taught him. Apparently they’ve been together for a while.”

“Kurogiri?” Hizashi repeats, “But... then we’re back to square one, aren’t we? How does he know?”

It’s nice, to hear him say ‘we’, even though of course they’re still in this together, as heroes. As teachers at this school. But ‘we’ has always meant something different to them.

‘We’ used to be a team of three or, occasionally, four.

“Shigaraki went nonverbal because of the stress of the interrogation, I think.” Shouta has never been one to dance around the point, he’s more known for being brutally honest, but this might be his limit right here. It’s like stumbling through the dark and knowing there’s a fall coming up ahead. “So... he signed.” Hizashi says nothing, allowing him to sort out his thoughts, but Shouta can feel his eyes boring into the side of his head. Is Hizashi concerned because all this hesitating isn’t like him? He should be. That still would in no way be enough to prepare him for what Shouta’s about to say.

“He spelled it out for me first. Kurogiri. But then, when he wasn’t thinking about it, he used his sign name instead.” Shouta turns to face Hizashi, slowly moving his hands in front of him. He signs, very slowly and deliberately.

Hizashi stares for a second. Then he huffs out a laugh. “That’s ridiculous, Shouta.”

Shouta raises a brow. “Is it?”

The reaction was a predictable one, of course, but Shigaraki wasn’t lying. And how else would he have known?

“He’s dead,” Hizashi insists, shaking his head again, “There’s just... no way. His quirk wasn’t even close to Kurogiri’s!”

“Wasn’t it, though?” Shouta asks quietly, tiredly. “Clouds, mist, it’s all humidity.”

“Teleportation isn’t.” Hizashi takes off his sunglasses, rubs at his eyes. “Are you hearing yourself talk? You seriously believe this?”

Shouta knows that he’s bringing his walls up because denying the possibility hurts less. It’s an old pain brought back up that they both only just started to heal from. But they need to be facing this together. If they’re still afforded that.

“Noumu are creatures created by combining multiple quirks inside a dead body and reviving them.” At least those are the bare bones of the process that Shouta understands. A lot of it is confidential. Need to know basis only. He doesn’t want the details... except now, maybe he does.

“They can’t speak or think!” Hizashi throws up his hands. “And they don’t look like that.”

Shouta’s jaw works for a moment. He looks back out over UA. “Who knows what Kurogiri looks like underneath all that mist?”

Hizashi has no answer for that, apparently, because he just pushes himself to his feet. “This is... I... I need to go. Somewhere else. Work. I have patrol. Yeah, that.”

He’s shaken enough that Shouta knows he’s not completely rejecting the possibility anymore. It’s about as much as he could have hoped for.

Shouta leans his chin on the railing and closes his eyes. “Be careful out there.” He pauses. “... and I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have ever doubted you.”

Hizashi laughs, and it’s a bit bitter, but not as biting as it could have been. “At this rate, me being a traitor would have been a better outcome.”

___

Their conversation bears heavily on Shouta’s mind, even two weeks later when he’s doing his usual patrol across the rooftops. It’s dangerous to let himself get distracted like this. Not his style at all.

Shirakumo does that to him.

And Hizashi, too.

He has no idea if things will get better now or not. It would be... helpful to have Hizashi at his side for this. And he knows that, as a hero, he won’t abandon Shouta when it comes to capturing a villain. But as a friend? As... someone Shouta has hurt, deeply and recently? Maybe not.

To be fair though, Shouta was always the one pushing him away before. If this is what his own medicine tastes like, then he’s surprised Hizashi stuck around this long.

“Eraserhead.” 

His capture cloth is hovering around his head even before the voice speaks up, his body tense and his mind... not as clear as he’d like it to be. But he knows the sound of these portals by now. He knows.

With one quick movement, he’s up from his perch on the corner of the roof and facing the shadowy figure that wasn’t there a moment earlier.

‘Oboro?’ he signs.

Kurogiri’s eyes flicker and narrow. “I didn’t come here for conversation.” He’s not signing, one of his hands behind his back.

Shouta doesn’t blink. He didn’t deny it, did he? Does he know? Shigaraki didn’t. Is Kurogiri able to keep secrets from him? “... but I need to talk to you.”

Against the backdrop of the night sky, it’s difficult to tell where Kurogiri starts and stops. It’s like he’s a part of the night itself.

Oboro liked the stars well enough, but he always preferred lazy afternoons in the sun. Shouta was the nocturnal one.

It’s all wrong.

There’s something that’s not even entirely human in the way Kurogiri tilts his head... if he even has a physical one underneath the mist. “There’s more pressing matters than the... tragedy of Shirakumo Oboro.” There’s a shudder going through him when he says the name, and part of Shouta wants to pounce on that.

If he’s still reacting to the name... then he must remember. And if he does... then he must be forced to help Shigaraki in some way. They already suspected something like that from his demeanor, but without being able to pin Kurogiri down for an interrogation, no one could be sure.

Shouta is, though. The most heroic boy he ever knew would never willingly become a villain.

He opens his mouth, but then Kurogiri is stepping aside, and revealing, behind him... Shouta freezes.

The child can’t be older than six, maybe seven years old. She’s wearing an adult size sweater that reaches past her knees, and her feet are bare. She’s trembling, her eyes big and red and filled with unshed tears that shine in the faint lights of the city below.

“This is Eri,” Kurogiri says.

Shouta knows. He’s been told about her, after all. He was part of an entire rescue operation that culminated in finding Chisaki near bleeding out in a room locked from the inside, and a missing girl. Now that part at least makes sense.

She was an asset. Did the League...? Would they? They’re not above kidnapping teenagers, but small children?

“We did not hurt her,” Kurogiri assures, and somehow he sounds almost affronted at the accusation that Shouta is sure doesn’t even show through the goggles hiding his eyes. “Chisaki took one of our own, so we decided it was time for his downfall. When I saw Eri...”

“You couldn’t just leave her behind,” Shouta concludes the thought. His chest hurts. If there needed to be any more proof, there it is.

Kurogiri makes a noise of affirmation. “I am a caretaker. I am not the kind of person who can leave someone in need.”

“An odd trait for a villain,” Shouta manages, then shakes himself out of it. Because he’s a hero and there’s a scared child.

Kurogiri pats Eri on the head gently and she seems to calm a bit.

Shouta takes a slow step closer, then crouches down, reaching out a hand. “Hello, Eri. My name is Eraserhead. I’m a pro hero.”

Eri looks up at Kurogiri. “... what does that mean?”

“It means -” Kurogiri’s voice is so, so gentle with her. “- that he’s going to help you and keep you safe. We’re unable to provide that kind of safety.”

“Oh.” Eri looks to the ground. “ ‘cause of what I did to the man with the burns.”

Kurogiri crouches now, too. “No. No, that was not your fault. I want you to remember that. And I do believe he will be fine, once he has calmed down a little. You did not hurt him. If anything... you may have healed him.”

Eri raises her gaze, eyes wide. “I... did? I didn’t hurt him?”

Kurogiri shakes his head. “He will be fine,” he repeats, “But your quirk is very powerful and we only managed to break the connection by using my portals in time, to create physical distance.” He stops himself, as if remembering he’s talking to a child. “... what that means is, you need to learn how to control your quirk, and with how powerful it is, Eraserhead is the only one I would trust with that.”

Ah.

Shouta feels a little dazed. This is nothing like what he experienced from Kurogiri so far, but to be fair, he only ever experienced him on a battlefield beside Shigaraki. Is Shigaraki behind this, too? Is Shigaraki giving up on such a powerful asset out of... kindness? Human decency? Or does he simply not know how deep Eri’s powers supposedly go?

“I can stop your quirk if you ever feel like it’s getting out of control,” he promises, then looks to Kurogiri. A silent question, signed slowly in the dark of night.

Kurogiri signs back after a moment. ‘No repayment needed. This is for her.’

He hesitates. ‘Children like T-O-M-U-R-A should be safe.”

Shouta takes in Eri again. Big, red eyes. Blueish white hair. A powerful quirk. Was Shigaraki to All for One what Eri was to Chisaki? It’s possible. Even if Shigaraki doesn’t seem to see it that way.

‘Understood,’ Shouta signs, ‘I’ll protect her.’

Kurogiri nods and gives Eri a little nudge. “I suppose this is goodbye, then, little bunny.”

Eri swallows and bows her head politely. “I... will you tell them all thank you?” she asks very quietly.

Kurogiri seems to smile, in a way that’s more felt than seen. “I will. Perhaps you will see us again eventually.”

Not if Shouta has anything to say about it. But Eri nods and bravely closes the distance between her and him. Shouta pushes his goggles up so she can see his eyes, and smiles at her.

Eri clutches at her sweater and does not meet his eyes. He didn’t expect her to.

Another portal appears, and Shouta lifts his head. “... Kurogiri.” The villain pauses. “Contact me if you need to talk. It... can be on neutral grounds. Just a conversation.” It aches, to allow him to leave, but he has Eri to think of right now. And somehow, it would feel wrong to try to arrest him after all of this. After seeing him so gentle and caring with this traumatized child. Oboro always was good with children.

Kurogiri watches him for a long moment. Then he nods. “Take care, Shouta.” And he’s gone.

Shouta exhaled forcefully, feeling the tension seep from his body. “... come on, Eri. Let’s get you out of this cold.”

#*drops this entirely without warning* #sign au #j writes #i added another pov rip me #also arbitrarily switching between first name last name and last name first name because im terrible at consistency #the erasermic angst is still real in this au #anyway to actually answer this ask shouta is now 100% sure that kurogiri is oboro #kurogiri himself is on the fence #future research will probably come but this needed to happen first so there ya go

[dontjudgemeimawriter]

Excerpt-- Martel Bridge

Wanted to share another excerpt. I’ve shared lines from this before, but it’s a sweet scene so I thought I’d share the rest of it. I think at some point I shared an excerpt where Raymond & Terran were playing two truths & a lie? This takes place directly after that if I did.

--

“Want to go up the bridge?” Raymond asked, interrupting my thoughts. He gestured ahead of us, where the Martel Bridge had come into view. 

Martel Bridge was a huge bridge that crossed the Sarala [River]. I’d been so occupied looking around that I hadn’t noticed it, and for a moment I paused. I’d never seen it from this angle before. Usually if I came close to it, I’d walked through Violet, where the slight incline was hardly no--ticeable. But the path we were on stayed close to the shoreline, and far ahead I could see that we’d end up passing under it.

“Go up it?”

“Yeah, there’s a passenger walkway and you can climb up the tower,” he gestured along the bridge, though I couldn’t tell exactly what he was pointing at. 

He went ahead, starting to jog while still looking back at me, flashing me a daring smile and I forgot about looking around for spies but just focused on catching up to him. I broke into a run, and it’d been a long time since running was thrilling. When he saw me catching up he ran faster, and I sped up, catching up to him but still a bit behind him when he slowed to a stop as the shadow of the bridge came over us. 

“Why are you running?” I asked when I’d caught up close for him to hear, but rather than answering, he laughed and went over to the door that was partially propped open, with a label that informatively read “Martel.” The door bounced off of him, close enough for me to catch, and he’d slowed down but was still ahead of me, leading me into the dimly lit metal stairway that led up a flight before opening onto another door. 

This time when it opened there was a howl of engines, and I paused for a second to look at where we were— a walkway set slightly lower than the road, with metal floors and a grate on one side to keep us from falling to to beach below. A railing and half wall kept us from being directly next to the cars racing by, but for a second when one raced by and I felt the air hit me, I tensed up for a moment.

“Come on!” Raymond called, and he kept moving, still itching to run, and his footsteps made the metal floor clang, and I took a step and placed a hand on the grate that kept me from falling, looking through the spaces in the metal to see the river. “Terran!” He’d stopped moving, still a good ten feet ahead of me. This time, he waited for me to catch up, saying something I didn’t catch as another car raced past us.

“What?” I said when I’d caught up to him.

“Scared of the bridge, assassin?”

I shook my head, and it was too hard to really reply, but it wasn’t the bridge that slowed me down. It wasn’t even really the cars a few feet away on one side or the fall the grate protected me from. I’d climbed rooftops, after all.

“Where are we going?” I asked, and he turned around and pointed at the first tower that rose above us, with a part that reached out and connected to the second tower. I knew that the road part that we were approaching could be raised if tall boats needed to pass through. I’d never thought much about the top of the towers.

“The pedestrian bridge,” he called, and then kept moving, not running but not waiting for me, and then there was another door where the tower connected and inside it it was dark and quiet again and more mental stairs led up, and I could tilt my head back and see that they circled the edges for five rounds up.

“This is more stairs than I expected to climb today,” I said, and Raymond was already halfway around, and he paused to let me catch up.

“How many stairs did you expect to climb today?” he asked with a grin.

“I wasn't even going to leave the room this morning,” I responded.

“Still think it’s too dangerous?” he was grinning, his hand resting on the railing one foot on a higher step than the other, but now that I was within a few feet of him again and he wasn't running away, I could hear how fast he was breathing.

That made me smile a bit, because yes I’d slowed down a bit, but despite him staying ahead of me and my comment about the stairs, it’d hardly winded me. “Well, I guess no one’s going to catch us together here,” I said, looking at the walls surrounding us, thinking about how loud of a clang the steps made that would tell us quickly if anyone was coming. 

I felt his hand touch my arm and turned back to him, and for a second he looked like he wanted to say something. He was a step taller than me, and I didn't usually have to look up towards him but I was, and I saw when he decided against whatever he’d wanted to say and withdrew his hand from my arm, and he shifted his weight to the foot on the higher step and he was farther away from me.

“What?” I asked, and couldn't help but feel like I had once again ruined his happy moment, somehow.

He smiled. “I like you better. Unfocused. That’s all.”

And now I had to pay attention to it again, to how I was acting and if I might be missing something, and what about my comment made him say that because honestly it sounded to me like the same type of paranoid comment he hated. “Why?”

He grinned, his eyes crinkling up in almost-laughter. “Because of this, because it’s more fun, because we aren’t fighting or even worrying about everything.”

He was still happy but the comment seemed to twist something, to pull at my own having-fun. “Focusing isn’t why I worry about things,” and I was obviously still worried about things, anyway, so what did he mean? “Do you just not like me telling you what to do?” 

It had come out before I could stop myself, and I could feel it, the snapping, the arguing, the fighting back, and then Raymond reached a hand toward me again— my face, my shoulder, I wasn’t sure— but I jerked away from it on instinct. His face flashed in hurt, and I’d messed up again. He’d reached toward me for comfort, of course he had. 

“Sorry,” I took a deep breath. 

He nodded. “Thanks.” he didn’t meet my eye for a moment, then asked, “Should I not try to touch you?”

My wincing had been my fault, not his.  “It’s fine.”

“Is it actually?” he asked, concern in his voice.

I paused. I owed it to him to answer it honestly, and why had I winced? “I don’t know why I reacted like that,” I said after a moment. “But you can.”

He nodded and gave me a smile, but it was less genuine than it had been a minute ago. “I don’t like when you tell me what to do,” he said thoughtfully. “But even if you are, I prefer it to come from this Terran. The one that isn’t just thinking about survival, but… I think… might want to be happy.”

How was I supposed to respond to that? When had wanting to be happy come into the equation? 

I tried to figure out something to say for a minute, but Raymond broke the silence. “Let’s keep going,” he said, and started climbing, not running this time. I kept pace with him, climbing the winding stairs until we came to a doorway that led out onto the open bridge.

It was empty and the wind was louder here, rushing around us and chilly. A wide stone walkway with brick half-walls that Raymond walk over to and leaned on, and I joined him, leaning on it next to him. Looking out was the river, far below us now, stretching out back along the way we’d walked until it curved in the distance,

I looked down for the bridge below us, but could hardly see the edge of it— the angle we were looking was too steep, the bridge we stood on blocking the view down and the tower we’d climbed blocking the view back, cutting off our view of any connection to the land.

The city was visible though, and I was so used to being in it that for a moment it looked foreign. The stone beaches and boardwalk, the docks with various boats. Inland the buildings began to pile up, getting taller and becoming more box-like. From here I could see an expanse of roofs I’m sure I’d traversed at some point.

“Nice, huh?” Raymond said as I took it in.

“It actually looks pretty,” I said, not sure why I was surprised until Raymond voiced my exact feelings:

“Can’t see the corruption from here, huh?”

I nodded, looking around again, once again trying to get an angle where I could see the part of the bridge that would bring us back to the land. “It’s like we’re cut off from it.”

Raymond took a deep breath, one that I knew how it felt just by how deep it was, and he closed his eyes for a moment in relaxation. I took a moment to breathe in myself, taking in the faintly water-scented air and letting it settle deep within me. 

And for a moment I let myself imagine it. Leaving Calson. Leaving the syndicate, leaving Zachary. As if the syndicate really was confined to that city. As if I were really on an island floating over the ocean, that there wasn’t actually a bridge between us anyone could cross. 

I looked over at Raymond. If only we could leave. 

His eyes were still closed, but his relaxation hadn’t seemed to stick. His breathing was shallower now, and his hands gripped the edge of the brick wall tightly. 

Was something wrong, or was he just tense? Might just be everything that had been going on— maybe he was still hurt I’d snapped at him, maybe he was still unsure about trusting me, maybe it was because he hadn’t slept, maybe it was because Jodi was still missing. 

I reached to him, placed an arm on his shoulders the way he might, moving closer to him in a sideways half-hug. His arms relaxed as I gave him a squeeze, and he leaned into me, leaving his head on my shoulder, and I’d successfully offered comfort.

I couldn’t think of what to say, though— I still wasn’t good at this— so instead I went with something that I hoped would distract him a bit. “I don’t like the taste of walnuts, strawberries, or cilantro. Which is the lie?”

He took a breath before answering, a slight laugh. “I guess it is your turn. Do you have the it-tastes-like-soap thing?”

I didn’t answer, but he didn’t expect me to. While he thought, making a low “hmmm” sound, I gently patted my hand against his shoulder. Had he ever been this close to me, this much physical contact? I’d initiated it this time, and he’d leaned into it, and I thought about his question earlier about touch and how much I’d used to see him and Mika hugging and wondered if it was different because it was his sister or different because it was me. 

“Strawberries,” he said, leaning his head to look at me.

I smiled, feeling like I’d won. “Nope. I like walnuts. Only if they’re roasted, though.”

“And you don’t like strawberries?” He grinned. I shook my head and he accepted it. “Should’ve known you like walnuts. You love coffee.”

“Why is that related?” I asked, moving my hand up from his shoulder to the side of his head, cautiously, ready to stop if he didn’t want me to, but he seemed to accept it and I touched his hair, the side of his face— soft, warm, comfortable.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Aren’t nuts and coffee related? Are nuts put in coffee?”

I thought it over, remembering the labels in Zachary’s cupboard. I didn’t usually pay much attention to which one it was, Zachary usually made enough for me to have in the morning. “I don’t think so, just flavors.”

He grinned and took a deep breath, gazing out at the cityscape. I lifted my arm to check my watch— 4:52. Only about an hour left of the 24 hour agreement, and I wanted it to last another day, another week. To stay here, where it at least felt like no one could find us. 

“Terran?” his voice was quiet, hardly audible over the sound of the wind, and I may not have heard it if his head wasn’t still so close to me.

“What?”

He’d tensed up again, I could feel it. He took a deep breath before speaking, and when he did I could hear that he was afraid. “I think they know I’m alive.”

--

Taglist: @puzzleddragon02 @sleepy-night-child @drippingmoon @thegreatobsesso @thelaughingstag

#syndicate #excerpt #terran #raymond #bridge #rayran

[slutsofren]

Danger Days Chapter 5: Skylines and Turnstiles

summary:  arriving at the University of Eastern Colorado, things start pointing to an unwanted direction

warnings: little allusions to anxiety and awkardness, everybody is finally getting along (kinda), mild sexual tension,  reader is fucking horny

word count: 3,116

read on ao3 here / danger days masterlist

You had been zoning out for about the last hour, only starting to pay attention as you saw the familiar red brick walls of the university. Joel had been droning on and on and on about football and the rules of the game, teaching it to Ellie and she lapped it all up excitedly. If there was one thing you had grown to love about the girl, it was her passion for knowledge, especially of the old world.

As they talked, you recalled your adventures the past month, thanking the stars it was a rather smooth journey to get here. The three of you only encountered one group of hunters that weren’t much trouble and they were rather well stocked on supplies and food, keeping you all fed for a few days longer.

The two horses were doing well too, the long trek didn’t seem to bother them as much as you originally worried. Made the journey much smoother and shorter than you accounted for. When you all left Jackson, it was only October, now it was maybe halfway through November. You were making pretty good time on your schedule. 

“I don’t see a glass building,” Ellie told you, pulling you out of your thoughts.

“We’ll need to get to the center courtyard of the campus. You’ll see it from there, it’ll look like a mirror made of glass.” You raised a hand and pointed through some buildings, vaguely gesturing the way.

You led them into an area of the campus that led to the science center. But Joel stopped you and dismounted, giving Ellie the reins, “Stay, Callus.” After a couple feet of walking away Joel asked her, “What kind of a name is Callus, anyways?”

He goes around, searching the area for either troubles or supplies, grumbling about the name Ellie gave the horse.

“Not my fault you forgot to ask Tommy his name,” Ellie jokes and jerks her thumb at you, “Or that she didn’t know it either.”

“Hey, don’t bring me into this, kiddo. I’m just buddies with my dear Whiskey here,” you pat the neck of the black horse. He gave a little huff beneath your fingers and shook his head, enjoying the attention. “Besides, Cherry is the only one able to tell the difference between all of them.”

Joel gives you a faint smile as he reaches for the bit on Callus, guiding him through a gate into the middle of the campus that you waited by.

After being in such close proximity to each other, the two of you began warming up to the other. Of course, you still chucked snide comments at him, often calling him an old bastard when he’d piss you off or do something snide. He would reply in kind, calling you a brat and threatening you to behave.

Needless to say, that awakened a little fantasy you totally didn’t need of the man, eliciting some rather vivid dreams when you slept. Hinting that maybe you were unfortunately in need of a good orgasm to get it all out of your system once and for all. Being out in the middle of fuck-all nowhere made that kind of difficult.The mental imagery alone kept you up most nights on your watch while you kept an eye out as the two rested. Regardless, Joel had been a gentleman towards you, apparently all that southern charm was genuine but he was still a broody asshole most days, never once hinting he saw you in such a way despite how often you’d catch him staring.

Ellie on the other hand, took to you rather quickly. She would ask you question after question about California, FEDRA, what to expect with the Fireflies at the lab, what you were like before the outbreak. She was intrigued about life pre-cordyceps virus, it was as if it was a fantasy to her.

Well, you admit, you supposed it was. She was born after the virus took hold, she never got to experience the things you and Joel did in the world before.To go to a zoo, a concert, gossip with friends about who likes who in school. The only thing she knew was to keep fighting, surviving, and running. Despite how cheerful and passionate she could be about her comic books or absorbing as much knowledge as she could, you were saddened that she never got the chance to be normal.

As much as you tried to keep some things private during her lengthy questionings, you knew her curiosity was blinding. She meant no harm, likely going to you for these questions seeing as Joel was completely shut off from his past, not that you blame him. You couldn’t imagine what he experienced from what Tommy had told you before.

Ellie looked around on the horse, “So, these places… people would live here and just study? Even though they were all grown up?”

“Yeah, study, party, and find themselves. Figure out what they wanted to do with their lives,” Joel replied. He let go of the leather strap and motioned for you and Ellie to stay where you were as he walked towards what looked to be like a loading dock and began searching.

She repeated Joel’s last sentence about finding themselves, possibly turning over the idea in her mind, after a few moments of silence of both of you watching Joel she turned to you, “Did you ever go to college?”

You shook your head, silently telling her no. “I was too young when shit hit the fan, but I would explore these buildings and take the books that were salvageable. Read them when I had the time. Tried to educate myself however I could.”

“What would you have studied if you went?”

“I don’t know,” you think. Suddenly you remembered some of your favorite books that you had stolen from these very buildings. “I really liked reading the history books that I found here. Maybe I would have done something with that. Or maybe,” you ponder, “maybe I wouldn’t have liked history if not for the whole world fucking ending.”

Ellie considers this for a moment. Then, from the corner of your eye, you watch Joel disappear behind a corner and you turn towards her, “What about you?”

Ellie scrunches her face in thought. “Art. Or maybe music. I like being creative.”

You smiled at the idea, “Ellie Williams: Comedian, Artist, Rock Star.”

Ellie smiles widely and the moment is cut short by Joel announcing somewhere above you. “There was a look-out here,” his voice calls down.

Both of you look up and see Joel leaning over a concrete railing on the second floor. “That’s a good sign,” Ellie says to him, then she looks at you and asks quietly, “Right?”

“I don’t know,” you answer honestly. You furrow your brows and begin to bite on your bottom lip, unsure of what to make of things. It’s unlike them to leave a look-out abandoned. Now that you’re thinking about it, you’re pretty damn positive you’d have come across somebody by now.

You try to get your facial expressions back in check, not wanting to worry Ellie or even Joel by making them feel like something is vastly wrong with how this looks. Before, when you were with the militia group, there were armed guards practically on every roof of this campus. They were always checking in with each other, making sure none of the infected or even hunters penetrated the walls. It wasn’t always secure or even practical, more lives were lost that way but it helped protect the lab.

You’re pulled away from your anxious thoughts as you spot Joel. He takes one last look around then comes down from the loading dock and gets back on the horse he’s sharing with Ellie and looks to you, gesturing his hand out in front of him. “Lead the way.”

You give Whiskey a little kick and he takes off, jumping over a concrete barricade then leading them up some stairs and under some ornate arches and pulling the reins to the left. With a motion of your hand you point to the science building in the distance, “There it is. The one with glass walls.”

Ellie looks over his shoulder and huffs a surprise, “It really does look like a glass mirror.”

Unfortunately there was a locked gate between the group and your destination. “Question is, how are we gonna get through here,” Joel thinks out loud.

After looking around it seems the only way forward is through the crumbling buildings. Joel dismounts from Callus once again and led you both through a broken wall on the left that led to the inside of the old library.

“How many people you think are there? Fireflies, I mean,” Ellie wondered.

“Reckon it takes quite a crew to run that operation,” Joel looks at you.

You nodded at both of them idly, “Yeah, when I was here we had at least a few dozen, maybe more. I kind of kept to myself.” 

“You think there’ll be other people my age,” she asked, not letting her eyes look up towards you.

“I do.”

The three of you approached another locked gate inside the building, essentially cutting off both the library and the rest of the hall you were in from each other. Joel pulled on the handle and it creaked open, Callus and Whiskey both shuffled and whined, making you and Ellie shift on them.

“Woah, woah, woah, what is it boys,” Joel tried to calm down the horses.

Your attention got pulled away when you heard a shriek and Ellie said, “Sounds like runners.”

Joel looked back behind him then forward at you, “Stay together. I’ll go check it out.”

“Joel, no wait,” you try to argue as you dismount but he closes the gate behind him.

“Stay with her,” he tells you. “I don’t want the horses or her runnin’ off again.”

You give him a hard look that he mirrors, neither one of you wants to budge but the look in his brown eyes make you waver, finally caving into his demand. “Stay alive, you stubborn old bastard.”

His lips twitch, hints of a tense smile wishing to creep on his face. He puts his hands up on a calm gesture as he removes his backpack, removing the shotgun from it and pocketing a couple extra rounds as he stands back up. “I’ll be right back,” he says your name softly, his voice deep and rich, “I promise.”

As he walks away, you inhale a deep breath and your heart is beating. You’ve come to hate it when this happens, not that it did much. Whenever the three of you found yourselves in a tight situation with the infected, you each carried on with taking them down. You hated this, hated that he felt the need to do this on his own.

It fuckin’ sucked waiting.

Just as you were working yourself up more, you heard five consecutive shotgun blasts. Then silence. Ellie must have noticed your worry because she announced loud enough for Joel to hear, “Hey, I was thinking… I would’ve wanted to be an astronaut.”

“That a fact,” his voice rang out in the distance, echoing off the library walls.

“Yeah, can you imagine being up there all by yourself? Would’ve been cool. I’m just sayin’.”

You opened up the gate, leading Whiskey inside the library, still simmering with whatever the hell you were feeling. Ellie trotted her horse past you to another gate, this one opening with a panel and leading back outside to the courtyard on the right.

Faintly you could hear presumably Joel starting up a generator three times and then panel next to the gate lit up. You pressed the button, opening it up then went back to Whiskey, jumping up into his saddle.

Joel came back down the steps and grabbed the reins to Callus and his eyes fell on you, “Told you I’d be right back.”

“What about you? What’d you want to be,” Ellie asked him.

Joel looked away, focusing on something in the distance as you all walked out the opened gate. He scratched at his beard and admitted, “Oh… well, when I was a kid I used to want to be a… a singer.”

You raised your eyebrows and gave a small laugh, Ellie did too. “Shut up,” she said jokingly.

“I’m serious.”

“Sing something”

“Ah, no.”

“Come on, I won’t laugh,” she begged.

“I don’t think so.”

You watched as they both bickered over this, Ellie even tried to pull you into the conversation, saying your name, “Come on, tell him we won’t laugh!”

“Maybe he can treat us after a successful creation of the cure,” you compromise. Joel turns to you and ponders.

“We’ll see.”

The three of you make your way down the steps, then turning to the left, continuing your trek to the science center. Ellie gets Joel's attention, “She said she wasn’t sure what she would have done.”

“Is that so?”

You shift your weight on Whiskey, “Yeah. I mean, I like history now but back then? I didn’t really have a plan after graduating high school. I didn’t really click with anything, y’know?”

He absorbs that information and ponders. “Yeah, I get it.”

The silence took over and whatever anxiety you had was lessening yet amplifying the closer you got to the building, still wary of the fact you hadn’t seen any sign of the Fireflies aside from the abandoned look-out. Joel got back up on Callus as you approached the center of the school and together with Whiskey, jumped over another barricade.

The view in front of you was a much larger campus courtyard, with a giant fountain in the center decorated with a statue in the middle of it. Ellie was the first to notice a small group of bright orange monkeys and cooed at them as they chattered and swung around the clearing.

“That was kinda awesome,” she said as they swung away into a nearby building.

You smiled at her reaction and asked, “First time seeing a monkey?”

She nodded and repeated, “First time seeing a monkey!”

Atop the two horses, you all keep looking around searching for a sign of life but finding nothing. Leading you all down another outside corridor. Joel offers, “Maybe these guys like to keep a low profile.”

Ellie, now sounding less energetic, half-heartedly agrees.You bank right, vaguely remembering where to go when she points to a wall to the left. “Hey, look. Fireflies.” When you turned to look, you noticed the old wall tag.

“Yeah, it was to help point the way to the building we were in, in case new recruits got lost or something like that,” you tell her.

You pull into another corridor that is also blocked with a gate. To the right of the wall is a painted sign, saying ‘disconnect generator when not on duty’ in bold white letters.

Together, each of you gets off Whiskey and Callus and attempts to lift the gate to find it won’t work. The damned thing wouldn’t budge. Joel grumbles, “Probably have to find the generator.” He walks to a barricaded doorway to the right and peers around it then kneels. “It’s gotta be through here.”

“Joel, you are not going by yourself again,” you tell him.

He looks over his shoulder at you and cocks an eyebrow at you. The two of you, once again, locked in this damned game. He sizes you up with an intense stare and he already knows he’s won. You groan loudly, “If you die in there, just remember I told you so, old man.”

“Watch Ellie, you damned brat.”

He turns and crawls under the barricade, giving you a bit of a nice show of his ass before entirely disappearing. You roll your eyes to yourself as you turn back around, standing near Ellie and the two horses.

“So,” she starts.

“So?”

“What’s going on between you and Joel?”

It was so unbelievably hard to keep your face in check, to keep your internal screaming from etching your facial expression. “I don’t know what you’re talking about Ellie.”

“You both look like you want to fucking kill the other in their sleep.”

“That’s because I do.” Amongst other things.

You cross your arms in front of you, mindlessly showing your defensiveness on the topic and definitely not trying to tell the obviously fourteen-year-old who has never had the sex talk about how your body is screaming with alarms to get dicked down by the first person you see. Mentally scolding yourself for your predicament. How dare he.

“That’s just Joel,” she says. “He’s always like that.”

“He needs to learn how to work as a team or else we’re all going to end up dead, or worse.”

Gunshots cut the conversation short, the two of you ducking close to the ground, both pulling out weapons. It was difficult to tell where the shots came from because the two of you were still in a tunnel but you whisper-shouted, “Joel!”

Nothing but eerie silence responded to your call, settling in your bones. It took everything you had in you to not bolt and look for the man but both you and Ellie looking around for any sign of him. “Son of a bitch, this is exactly what I was talking about,” you groan frustrated.

Seconds ticked by that dragged into forever-long minutes. You weren’t a nervous person on missions, always trying to stay hyper-focused but truthfully, you don’t know how you’d handle the return journey with just Ellie.

Before you could work the nerve to go search through the maze of dorms, Ellie notices him before you, “Joel! Are you okay? What happened in there?”

“More infected, I’m fine,” he shouts, exiting a door from the far left, as he runs over to where you and Ellie were standing still, waiting for him.

“Here - come open the gate!”

As Joel pulls the generator to the wall to plug it in, Ellie tells him, “Holy shit you’re lucky you came out of there alive. She almost ran in after you.”

Suddenly you felt like you couldn’t breath under your coat as you gave Joel a sheepish look. “I didn’t want to have to explain to Tommy that I got his brother killed, alright? Don’t let it get to your big head, cowboy.”

Joel raised a brow at you then grunted, resuming to kickstart the generator to power the gate. It came alive kind of loudly but you resigned, only to mount your horse again choosing to ignore whatever Joel or Ellie could be thinking.

#joel miller #Pedro Pascal #joel (the last of us) #joel miller x reader #joel miller x you #joel miller / reader #pedro pascal x reader #pedro pascal fanfiction #joel the last of us #joel tlou #joel tlou x reader insert #joel tlou x reader #the last of us #the last of us fanfic #the last of us fanfiction #tlou #tlou fanfic #pedro pascal x y/n #asher's writing #danger days fic

[hongism]

naughty; xiaojun - 18+

➻ pairing: xiaojun x fem reader ➻ wc: 2.0k ➻ genre: pwp, smut ➻ rating: 18+ ➻ summary: in short, your roommate is a hard man to resist.  ➻ warnings: degradation, fingering, explicit smut, unprotected sex, semi-public sex, exhibitionism, master kink, dirty talk, pain kink, slight size kink, crying, sadist xiaojun, talk about your limits/kinks beforehand!!! do not do this!!! pls!!!

​​​

“Watch that pretty little mouth of yours, princess. Such dirty words shouldn’t be coming out of it.”

You resist the urge to roll your eyes as Xiaojun thumbs over your chin. His fingers tickle your skin, the faint touch lingering only for a second before he drops his arm to his side. You aren’t even sure what spurred the argument with your roommate; all you know is that he did yet another thing that annoyed the shit out of you. A common trend with the man truly, but he always pulls this shit on you when you get angry with him. A slightly flirty tone and fluttering lashes, adding a smirk that turns your legs into jello when you see it. You pride yourself on being able to resist his sex appeal.

Right now though? You want him to bend you over the armrest and fuck you in front of the window.

You blame the fact that your neighbors across from you are currently having an obnoxiously loud party and you just want some way to shut them up, but you can’t deny that you are entertaining the idea of your roommate fucking you for them to see a little too much.

Perhaps that’s the reason why you lean a bit into his touch. Xiaojun lifts a brow at you, smirk stretching a little wider, and you feel your cheeks heating up a tad as his gaze rakes over your body.

“That’s a new expression,” he comments. You meet his intense gaze and tilt your chin up a bit more. It’s an invitation, your lips slightly parted for him, and Xiaojun doesn’t wait for you to change your mind. He closes the distance between your lips. When he finally makes contact, you release a small sigh of satisfaction. His lips are soft as silk, and you can taste a bit of red wine on them. You don’t get to dwindle on the taste for long though, because Xiaojun hurries to deepen the kiss and press his tongue against your lower lip. You grant him access to your mouth in an instant. The drag of his wet muscle over yours is pleasant, and arousal bubbles in your gut as he pushes his tongue up against yours in a fight for dominance.

You can’t find a good resting place for your hands, and all you can do is let them move from his shoulders to his hair to his neck in repeated motions. Xiaojun, on the other hand, keeps his fingers wrapped tightly around your hips. He pushes you back bit by bit, edging you closer to the wall. You break the kiss in a rush, hand still clasped around the back of his neck as you whisper your next words against his mouth.

“I want y-you to take me against the window,” you huff out. Xiaojun pulls back a little and shifts to look at the aforementioned window. There’s an unreadable glint in his eyes, one you can’t place, but when he turns back to you, it’s gone.

“You naughty girl. The neighbors are watching.”

“Your point?”

“Exhibitionist, huh? Well then, let’s give them a good view, at least.” Xiaojun hooks his hands around the back of your thighs, cupping your ass as he lifts you up onto his waist, and you sling your legs around him to keep from falling. The new position makes it seem like you’re taller than the man. That gives you an undeniable power rush, and you drag your fingers through his pale locks to give a sharp tug. A small moan leaves Xiaojun’s lips at the contact. “You’re just asking to be put in place, you brat.”

A smile stretches over your lips. “I just want you to fuck me, baby.” Xiaojun laughs through his nose as he presses you hard against the cool touch of the window.

“I suppose I can manage that just fine,” he murmurs before reconnecting your lips. The warm touch of his fingers travels higher, ghosting over your thin shirt and brushing the erect buds of your nipples before dipping back down to the drawstring of your sweatpants. You have to untangle your legs from around his waist to let him pull the material down. As soon as it’s gone, Xiaojun clicks his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “No underwear? Who knew you were such a dirty little slut?”

“Only for you,” you tease. Xiaojun slaps his palm against the bare skin of your ass, eliciting a quiet gasp from you.

“Let’s make sure it stays that way because I’m not a fan of sharing, okay?”

You fail to respond for several seconds, and Xiaojun must not like that because he brings the flat of his hand down on your ass a second time.

“Y-Yes, yes. Okay, Jun,” you stammer out, bringing a grin to Xiaojun’s lips. He presses harder against you, and one of his thighs slots between your legs. He hits your clit harshly, and you can only let out a strangled moan when he flexes the muscle of his leg.

“That’s master to you, slut.” You release a small whimper, the words affecting you more than you would like to admit, and Xiaojun pulls his leg out from between yours. He replaces the muscle with two fingers and slides them through your wet folds. “Turn around.”

You follow the order without any hesitation, quickly shifting in Xiaojun’s grasp so that you’re now facing the window head-on, and it seems like that’s precisely what Xiaojun wants you to do. He pushes you further into the glass. If not for your shirt and bra, you would be completely exposed to the neighbors across the way, but your shirt is short enough to reveal your unclothed folds and Xiaojun’s fingers between your legs. He thrusts two fingers into your needy cunt, not wasting any more time in getting to business.

“X-Xiao – master. Master, please,” you beg, unsure of what you’re even begging for at this point. His fingers make obscene noises in your folds, a wet squelch resounding with each thrust of his fingers. He tactfully avoids brushing over your sweet spot; each time he nears it, his fingers curl away and leave you whining for more that never comes.

“Aw, are you gonna beg for me, princess? I don’t wanna hear it until there are tears in your eyes.”

A choked sob leaves your lips when Xiaojun yanks his fingers out of you. You drop your forehead against the cool glass of the window, and you can’t even find the energy to look out to see if your neighbors are watching. A hand drags over your hip. Before you know it, you hear Xiaojun spit, then the slick sound of his hand dragging over what must be his cock. You push your ass further back in attempts to find his member, but the hand on your hip keeps you still.

“Do you want me to fuck you now, slut? Ruin you for everyone to see?”

“Please, pl-please, master! Please, I need your cock. I need it so bad.”

“I’m sure you do,” Xiaojun teases, bringing the head of his cock to your folds. He teases your hole just enough to draw another strangled sob out of you, but no tears fall from your eyes quite yet. “You’ll have to try harder than that if you want me to fuck your dirty little cunt.”

Xiaojun’s resolve is impressive but infuriating. You try to buck your hips back again, but his grip is too secure for you to even move an inch. You aren’t one to be desperate, yet Xiaojun is pushing you closer and closer to the edge. If he doesn’t fuck you, you’ll lose your mind. You frantically reach around your back to grab Xiaojun and pull him into you, but he snatches your wrist before you can touch him. He traps your hand between your shoulder blades, a small hiss of disapproval whistles through his teeth. He doesn’t say anything, though he doesn’t need to. The minute action is enough to make you sob, and tears finally fall from your eyes.

“P-Please, master, I ne-eed you. I need you, f-fuck, I need you. Please, master, fuck me,” you cry, turning your head to look back at Xiaojun.

“So you can be a good slut after all,” he coos. Less than a second later, his hips snap against yours. Your cries turn to wet moans and whines as he finds a brutal pace. Each thrust has a bruising impact, the head of his cock pounding your cervix without relief. You don’t think you’ve ever been fucked this good or hard in your life. Drool pools at the edge of your mouth, and you can’t swallow it back or close your mouth because of the intensity of Xiaojun’s thrusts. “Look how fucking pathetic you are. Such a cock slut that you can’t even close your mouth while I’m railing you?”

You whine in response, velvet walls squeezing hard around his cock as a wave of arousal hits you. It’s almost shameful how turned on you are by his filthy words, a side of yourself you weren’t even aware of. Xiaojun slides a hand up your back and hooks two fingers in the inside of your cheek. You bite down on the digits, and it’s the only thing that grounds you as he fucks into you over and over.

“Go ahead and cum, princess. Let me feel your tight little walls clench around me as you cum. See your tiny little body shake and tremble as I fuck you through it.” Xiaojun pulls your cheek towards him, and your back arches at a harsh angle that has his cock hitting you in a whole different way. You scream around his fingers, barely able to think about anything other than his cock. “Don’t make me tell you twice.”

The venom in his tone is what sends you over the edge, but you will never admit how much it arouses you. Your cunt clenches hard around Xiaojun’s member again; this time it persists, and Xiaojun grunts as his thrusts slow a bit thanks to the increased friction. Your lips are parted in a silent scream, and it feels like your whole body is alight. The continuous drags of his dick make your legs shake. If he wasn’t holding your hip, you’re sure you would collapse under him. His orgasm is fast approaching as well, which you are more than grateful for because you aren’t sure how long you can keep this up.

“Want me to fill – fuck, fill up your little pussy?”

“Y-Yes, yes, yes. Fill me up, master, pl-please,” you babble, words nearly incoherent. Xiaojun understands them regardless.

“Of course you do, you fucking slut.” Xiaojun thrusts into your heat two more times before a strong wave of warmth fills you. He groans through the orgasm, a soft sound that makes your insides feel like jelly. You try not to think about how much you want to hear it over and over again. You pull your hips away from Xiaojun’s, but he recovers quickly and snaps back into you, pinning you to the window. Some sound leaves you, but you couldn’t describe it if you tried – something between a startled gasp and a guttural moan, but even that description isn’t sufficient. “Did you think I was done with you?”

“I-I – are you – are you gonna fuck me again?” You ask, a bit of anticipation creeping into your tone. The thought excites you more than it should, and the muscles of your walls twitch a little around Xiaojun’s softening member.

“Oh, don’t worry, princess. I’ll fuck you again. I’ll have you on your knees before midnight before that though.”

​​​☽     ☾

➻ requested by: @baekhyyun​ ➻ prompts:

“I’ll have you on your knees before midnight.”

“The neighbors are watching.”

#nct smut #nct x reader #wayv smut #wayv x reader #wayv imagines #wayv drabbles #kpopuniversenet #ultkpopnetwork #thekpopnetwork #kwritersworldnet #nct imagines #nct drabbles #nct scenarios #nct oneshot #wayv scenarios #wayv oneshot #xiaojun #xiaojun x reader #xiaojun smut #xiaojun imagines #xiaojun drabbles #xiaojun scenarios #xiaojun oneshot #nct pwp #wayv pwp #god this is filth

[amillionsmiles]

in your bedroom after the war (Dick/Artemis)

Title: in your bedroom after the war Summary: As far as coping mechanisms go, Artemis could be doing worse. At least her method has a gymnast’s ass. / Post-Invasion, pre-Outsiders. Rated M.  A/N: I have one (1) agenda and that is messy grieving fuck buddies who are each other’s ride-or-dies. if you are not into fic that sits squarely in sad feral horny territory, then this is probably not your speed.

[Read and review here] or continue under the cut.  

| GOTHAM

| JANUARY 14, 2017; 12:05 AM EST

Artemis is a bit heavier than she was in her teenage years, but her feet land lightly on the fire escape by the window. An hour ago, she’d called her mom from Metropolis, promising she’d be home by midnight. Ever since her daughter faked her death a year ago, Paula Nguyen has become even more of a worrywart, and Artemis knows that the five minutes she’s running late are going to cause her to receive an earful.

“Didn’t think I’d see you back in this neck of the woods.” A familiar figure drops from the roof above onto the rung below her.

“Nightwing.”

She’s not surprised that he’s been keeping tabs. Officially, he’s been on a leave of absence for the past six months, but Dick, like her, is vigilant in his grief.

She’d come back to Gotham because it put her closer to Metropolis and Beta Squad’s continued investigation of LexCorp, but the truth is that she could have Zeta-tubed from Palo Alto easily. Their—her—apartment had been no good though, not without Wally. So she’d left most of her things in storage to figure out later and moved back in with her mom. On days when Artemis can’t muster the energy to get out of bed, Paula wheels determinedly around the kitchen, ready to whip up some mì xào  or a warm bowl of  mì gói.  They play card games and laugh about how bad Wally was at tiến lên the first time Paula tried to teach him. Your boy has no patience, he always wants to play his strongest cards right away, her mom had teased, and Wally had protested, I make it a rule to always put my best foot forward! and Artemis had loved him even more then.

Loved. Loves. She hates the past tense.

“I mean, were you ever going to ask me to grab coffee?”

She can see the bits of Wally in his cracks. In a room together, it was always easy to tell they were best friends from the way they riffed off each other. The acrobat and the speedster: all verbal gymnastics and fast-moving quips. But unlike Wally, who liked poking fun because he liked getting attention, Dick is at his wittiest when trying to avoid talking about himself.

Artemis reaches out and pulls him to sit down beside her. She makes a show of looking at her watch.

“How’s… 12:15 AM this Saturday?”

Dick pretends to check it against his mental schedule. If his is anything like hers, it probably goes: Wake up. Exercise (beating up bad guys counts). Mourn.

“Yeah, seems like I can swing it.”

“Perfect,” says Artemis, sliding up the glass panes to let them into her childhood bedroom. “I’ve got just the stuff.” 

*

In the kitchen, Brucely stirs briefly from his dog bed to sniff the air and  yip, then curls back asleep. Paula hands Dick a mug, waiting for him to take a sip before saying, “So you were the one who had the brilliant plan to have my daughter fake her death.” 

Dick splutters; from the table, Artemis rises to his defense. “Mom,” she says. “Leave him be.”

Setting his cup down, Dick leans against the cabinets, bending his head slightly and rubbing the back of his neck. He does a good job of appearing chastised, and Artemis wants to roll her eyes, if only because she’s heard from Bette and Raquel that this pose is far too effective at convincing women to want to forgive him or try again.

“I’m not leading much of anything these days, if that’s at all a comfort to you.”

“Hmph.” Paula sniffs. “You live alone?”

“Yeah.” Dick shoots Artemis a questioning look over her mom’s head. Artemis shrugs.

“What do you do to fill the time?”

“A lot of reading. Gotham’s library system actually has a pretty good selection, believe it or not. I’ve also gotten really into meditating.”

“And you don’t sleep.”

Dick stiffens. For the first time, he looks exposed, a boy with too much guilt and too much time on his hands.

“I do. Tonight I was just… restless.”

Paula nods and backs up her wheelchair so she can sit by Artemis, curling her fingers over Artemis’s hand and squeezing. She raises her drink, Artemis and Dick following suit, the three of them toasting to invisible losses.

“Aren’t we all.”

*

Later, back on the fire escape, Dick taps his fingers against the railing, jittery. “I feel like I need to start doing jumping jacks. What was in that stuff?”

Artemis bites back a smile. “Yeah, Vietnamese coffee packs a hit. That’s my bad. Probably should have given you something non-caffeinated at this hour.”

“It’s fine. I’ll jog it out, or something.” He turns to go, but Artemis stops him with a hand on his shoulder.

“Hey, listen—it was good seeing you tonight. And if you need someone to talk to…” What she really means is: it’d be nice to be around someone who’s hurting as much as I am. Not to say that the rest of the team wasn’t as torn up over Wally’s death, but she and Dick had been ground zero. Closest to the blast.

After a pause, Dick nods. “Yeah… I could use a sparring partner, actually. I’ll send you an address.”

“Okay.” Satisfied, Artemis withdraws her hand, curling her fingers into her palm.

It feels like a start.

*

Dick’s directions lead Artemis to Wayne Manor; from there he takes her to the Bat Cave.

“I thought you were striking out on your own,” Artemis says, using her forearms to deflect a kick to her face. Dick grunts and recovers, throwing a punch to her stomach; she dances out of the way.

“I am. I just pop in here from time to time because Bruce has better equipment. Plus there’s less of a chance of me disturbing the neighbors.” He gestures to the eerily blue-lit stone walls around them.

Artemis feints and goes low, ducking under Dick’s guard. Two quick hits to Dick’s sternum pushes him back, before he gets a hand on her wrist and twists her around so that her back is pressed against his chest.

“Weren’t we supposed to be talking?”

Kicking his shin, Artemis breaks free. “All right, fine. I’ll start.”  Jab.  “I keep wanting a scapegoat.”  Kick.  “Like, one person to blame, instead of something as big as the Reach. But it’s not some giant revenge thing, and I know Wally wouldn’t want me to go down that sort of all-consuming rabbit hole even if it was, and that pisses. Me. Off.” On those last words, she manages to use Dick’s momentum against him and flips him over her shoulder.

For a minute, it’s so quiet between them she can hear the faint plip of water dripping from a stalactite into the water below the sparring dais. Still lying on the floor, Dick confesses, “I keep hearing him.”

“I make a joke to myself and he’s there, in my ear, with the punchline. And then…” He passes a hand over his face.  “And then I realize that the real punchline is him being gone.”

Slowly, Artemis approaches him. She feels like she did when they were undercover at Haly’s circus so many years ago, that brief moment of hangtime before their hands connected in the air. She means to sit down next to him, pat his shoulder, she doesn’t know what, but instead Dick sweeps her legs out from under her and she goes down hard, the air whooshing out of her chest as she falls flat on her back.

“Agh!” The release sets something loose inside her. Next thing she knows, she’s yelling again, louder, just because.

Dick catches on and then it’s just the two of them shouting, their voices echoing through the cavern, threading around and piling atop each other like a flock of birds. After they’re done, Dick rolls so that they’re lying side by side.

“You know, when we were starting out—when we first became friends—I used to make fun of Wally that if he kept talking so much while running he was bound to swallow more bugs, or something. And he’d just shoot back like, ‘Nah dude, you think I’m not fast enough to see them and dodge them in the air?’ But you know how he was always so hungry after missions? One time I was so mad at him I put a bug in his sandwich. I’ve never forgotten the look on his face after he bit into it and I said, dodge that.”

“You didn’t.” Artemis gasps and covers her mouth, horrified, but she can see it so vividly: the colors draining from Wally’s face, making his freckles pop even more against his skin, the same greenish tint his cheeks took the time they went to Vietnam and he got food poisoning. He’d spent two days feverishly glaring up at the mosquito netting, and Artemis had draped cold hand towels over his forehead and promised she wasn’t going to leave him for the very obliging boy who kept bringing them ice.

“I did.” Dick is gleeful. “Really put the ‘rank’ in prank.”  

Artemis snorts; the snort turns into a full-blown guffaw. Dick turns toward her, laughing too. His hair is matted with sweat but still soft; it brushes against her forehead.

It feels so good to be close to someone again, to be able to flip on a dime from sadness to frustration to anger to laughter and not have to explain herself. She can’t remember the last time she smiled and didn’t feel guilty about it, and she means it more affectionately than anything when she reaches over and brings Dick’s mouth to hers, like if she inhales whatever they’ve temporarily managed to create here between them, it’ll be enough to tide her over for the next few months. For a second, he’s warm and responsive, before his lips stiffen and he pulls back.

“I shouldn’t have done that.”

Shouldn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t.  Shouldn’t beat yourself up about it, shouldn’t blame yourself for getting back in the game.  Artemis is sick of people telling her how to deal, how it’s supposed to go.  It’ll get better and then it doesn’t. People talk like there are guidebooks for this kind of shit, like it’s a marathon she just needs to pace herself through. And it’s the stupidest thing, but she misses being held.

She sits up and crosses her arms, resisting the urge to curl in on herself. “You didn’t do anything. I’ll go.”

“No, Artemis, wait, I don’t think you should go, I just want to understand what’s going on—”

“I want you to touch me, okay?” she explodes. “I want you to touch me because he’s never going to again and I know you loved him too and—and maybe if it’s you, I won’t feel so desperately alone.”

Dick looks stricken, and then, hesitantly, he reaches for her. His eyes are so blue, the kind of crushed eggshell you’d use to make a paint. “You’re not alone.”

“Prove it,” she says, vision blurring with tears—wanting, needing him closer, and then his hairline is up against hers again and his nose is at her cheek, his mouth at her jaw, soft but with a willingness to bruise. Don’t ask me what we’re about to do, Artemis silently begs, and Dick doesn’t.

 *

 Wally had been a restless lover. Always turning them over, switching positions. Artemis had taken it as a challenge, part of the ongoing competition that defined their relationship. Deep down, she’d known that Wally would be just as content if the rest of their sex life consisted solely of spooning gently on Sundays, which, if anything, was why she’d been so eager to experiment—because it felt like an easy gift she could give, not something she had to master to “maintain excitement” or make him stay.

She’s not sure what she expected from Dick. Maybe that’s a comfort—that she wasn’t fantasizing before they happened, wondering about all the mechanics of how it would go. Dick lets her call the shots, lets her ride him into the ground, the grip of his fingers around her thighs the only reminder she isn’t just angling toward oblivion. When he presses his thumb between her legs, it’s a weird sort of anchor—like hearing a voice pick up on a line you thought was dead. She has a body, and here’s someone on the other end of it, caring about her release. As soon as that thought hits, the relief shudders through her; she keeps rocking long enough to feel Dick follow, a stutter and a grunt, before she collapses boneless over him, the sweat of his skin a comforting stickiness against her cheek.

Internally, she apologizes to Bruce for desecrating his training space. Then again, they’re hardly the first of the Justice League to get handsy in less than appropriate places. She’s seen how Black Canary and Green Arrow act around each other.

Below her, Dick catches his breath. The rush of blood—his or hers—is loud in her ears.

“I didn’t think you’d be so…”  Giving, she means to say, but it gets lost on her tongue. “I mean, Zatanna…” she trails off again.

If Dick’s embarrassed at the prospect of his ex-girlfriend having blabbed about the details of their sex life to Artemis, he doesn’t show it. His fingers find a snag in her hair; gently, he works it loose. The air smells hedonistic. He keeps combing. Nice is the only word she can think to describe it, and that makes her want to cry again, so she squeezes her eyes shut.

“Thank you,” she whispers against his chest.

Dick pauses his ministrations. He flattens his palm against the base of her neck and just—holds her there.

“Don’t mention it.”  

When she goes home that afternoon to shower, she runs the water on full blast for a long time.

 *

 Armed with Chinese food, she visits Dick’s place the next day intent on making amends. Dick doesn’t even act surprised; he just points to the glass coffee table where she can set the bag of chopsticks, napkins, and takeout.

“I’m trying to decide what to watch.”

There’s really no need for him to stand in front of the TV the way he does, one hand propped on his hip as he clicks through options with the remote. Artemis lets herself ogle, a bit. The surest way to blow past what happened between them yesterday is to be honest with herself, right? And as far as coping mechanisms go, Artemis could have done worse. At least her method has a gymnast’s ass.

“Any preferences?”

“Between what?” asks Artemis, cracking open the carton of lo mein and settling back against the cushions. The Netflix suggestion algorithm onscreen paints a condemning picture of Dick’s tastes. “True crime or… true crime?”

Wally had been really into nature documentaries. One time during freshman year, when they were still living on Stanford’s campus, they’d gotten high in Wally’s dorm room and watched Blue Planet. Wally had cried when the seal got flung apart by killer whales.

“I’ll Be Gone in the Dark it is, then,” says Dick. He settles next to her on the couch, peeling back one of the orders and sniffing its contents. “What’s this one?”

“Salt and pepper ribs. They were today’s special.”

“Artemis.” Dick beams. “You really do care about me.”

 *

 Ten minutes into the episode begs a single question: “Isn’t it sort of depressing that you spend so much of your day fighting crime, and then you go home to unwind and just watch… more of it?”

Dick shrugs. “It keeps me sharp. And it’s nice seeing other people solve problems.”

“Well, if you ever feel like branching out, there’s a short film about Rubik’s cubes you might like.” Artemis nudges his side. “Remember when you were a scrawny math geek?”

Bringing both hands behind his head, Dick smirks. “Still a math geek. Just not scrawny.”

Artemis stares. That was just a bit of friendly showboating, right? Or was it a flirt? Not trusting herself, she whips her gaze back toward the TV. What feels like eons later, the credits roll.

“Artemis,” Dick says, too soft for having just finished a show about murder. He taps the corner of his mouth. “You’ve got some food stuck.”

She wipes with the back of her hand; a breaded piece of orange chicken emerges as the culprit. Without thinking, she flicks it off, sending it flying somewhere onto Dick’s carpet.

“Oops.”

Chuckling, Dick shakes his head. “I need to vacuum tomorrow, anyways.”

The mention of tomorrow stirs her. “Right. I should head out.”

“Yeah.” Dick rises to help her clean up their mess, holding open the plastic bag so she can toss in the soiled napkins and other bits of trash. “Or—”

He hesitates, but the hesitation’s enough. It might as well be a hand on her wrist, with how it stops her in her tracks. All night, despite what she told herself, she’s been looking for proof: proof that his aloneness fits the shape of hers, that he needs her, too. This time, Dick makes the first move—cups her face in both hands and kisses her, slow and deep and full of heat. Some pepper from the food they ate still lingers on his lips, making her mouth tingle, and Artemis is dizzy and flat on her back on the couch before she knows it, giving in.

Not scrawny at all, she thinks, admiring the solidness of Dick’s knees on either side of her, the weight of his frame as they grind together. The sheer mechanics of it feel very horny-teenager-after-prom, but the way Dick sucks her bottom lip and swallows her breath down with it is decidedly adult.  These days, Artemis practically lives in her sports bra, which doesn’t exactly grant easy access, but when Dick’s fingertips skim over the cotton covering her breasts the sensation zings all the way down her spine.

“Need… off…”

“Yeah,” Dick murmurs, humming as he moves down the column of her neck. “Gimme a sec, I’m working on it.”

She’d worn sweats because she figured their bagginess would keep her from sparring again and any potential… situations that could arise from that. Instead, all it means is Dick unties the drawstrings easily, sliding her pants down her legs. Cool air brushes across her as he shifts positions; she wants to sob in relief. His teeth graze her hip and then catch the edge of her panties and—oh. Fuck. The moan tears out of her and she scrabbles at the armrest, hips rising of their own accord. Next time, she is handcuffing Dick to a bed, because what he’s doing with his tongue and fingers should be illegal. She can feel him grinning, the bastard, and the only thing keeping her from crushing his head to a pulp between her thighs is the maneuver he pulls where he hooks her knees over his shoulders, so he can change the angle and plunge in deeper. Artemis shoves the edge of her T-shirt into her mouth at the last minute, only barely managing to muffle her cry.

Dick surfaces from his solo mission looking entirely too satisfied, mouth glistening. Trembling, still, from her orgasm, Artemis squints at him, possessed by some combination of unbridled lust and rage.

“Dick.”

“You calling, or asking?”

“Shut up,” she hisses. She feels like a newborn foal, after what he just did to her, but the urge to dismantle him just as thoroughly sends her surging upward and pushing him back. Dick welcomes their reversed positions by peeling off his shirt and tossing it over his shoulder, all while Artemis works furiously at his belt. It shouldn’t feel so good, to hear the metal clink against his button and watch the leather slide through the loops. To see the shadows the light of the TV casts on him—the lashes on his cheeks, the hollow of his throat. Artemis hadn’t paid much attention the first time, too desperate and caught up a bit in self-loathing, but now she’s actually enjoying this, savoring the flex of Dick’s abs as he pushes up to meet her, his skin pebbling at her touch.

“I’m going to take you apart,” she purrs.

Dick groans and bucks. The sensation sends a sharp spike of pleasure through her, and she clamps down on him tighter, refusing to yield.

“Try me, Tigress,” he rasps, pushing himself up on one arm so he can mouth at her collarbone. With his other hand, he pulls off her hairtie so her hair comes free of her ponytail, and this is going to be a thing with him, isn’t it, him wanting to fuck her while her hair swings loose around her face. She indulges him for a few minutes, claws his back and bites his shoulder for good measure, but then she’s pushing him back down and stretching out her body as languidly as possible to remind him who’s boss. Their pace slows. Dick keeps a hand fisted in her hair, so he can tug her head back in order to keep her neck exposed to his wanton mouth, but his grip gets less sure the closer she pushes him to the edge.

“Art—” says Dick, the single syllable like a painting pinned to the wall, fraught with desire, and then he just lets it drop, the tresses of her hair falling through his fingers. She wants to tell him that he’s beautiful, that he does look like a boy wonder, right then, in the midst of coming undone, chest flushed and hair mussed and pupils blown nearly wide enough to overtake the blue.

She doesn’t, but she stays the night, and that’s close enough.

 *

  High-functioning, Artemis’s therapist had called her, before Artemis moved back to Gotham. And it does feel like a high—the sneaking around, the after-hours meet-ups, the back-and-forth. There’s no one really keeping tabs on her, though Artemis has plenty of cover stories if anyone asks (new intel, side reconnaissance, etcetera, etcetera). Her mom eyes her and says, “As long as you’re not planning on staging your own death again, because I will find out and I will kill you this time,” and that’s that. Artemis nearly laughs. If anything, what she’s doing is the opposite, a small resurrection. An entire month and a half passes this way: day trips and dinners and movie nights and Dick and her in a bathtub, in the shower, against a wall. She even wears a gown and heels once, not because they have an actual event to attend, but because Dick has a fantasy that involves taking her from behind in the Wayne Manor library.

They’re in his apartment on a Sunday morning bathing in the afterglow, sheets tangled around their waists. Thank god Dick is one of those assholes that splurged on not only a nice mattress but also a solid bed frame. Artemis reaches over to push the hair out of his eyes. The black tuft on the back of his head that she likes grabbing is fluffed up like a duck's tail, and under the sunlight slanting through the windows, he looks angelic.

“Are you falling back asleep?”

Yawning, Dick snags her around the waist, dragging her to him. She should not delight this much in being manhandled.

“You wore me out,” he complains, tucking his chin over her shoulder.

“They just don’t make them like they used to,” Artemis sighs. Dick growls a little at the dig, fingers tightening against her hip.

Well. If he’s going to nap, she is, too. Comfortably spooned, she snuggles back against him, prepared to drift off.

“Do you think Wally would have wanted…” Dick doesn’t finish the thought.

Artemis turns in his arms. Dick has long eyelashes, and he’s looking at her through them almost bashfully. She places a hand on his chest. Feels his heartbeat thump once, twice.

“I think he would want us to be happy.”

“Are you?” Dick’s voice fades out and he has to swallow hard to clear his throat. “Happy?”

“I’m not… miserable.” 

Dick runs his hand up her bare arm, over her shoulder. “Me neither.”

“You know, Wally and I thought…” She bites her lip, remembering a whoosh of air, Wally speeding to her side to kiss her and interrupting her report on the disabled Paris MFD.  I know we promised each other we’d get out of this game, but maybe we can have our life together and play hero, too.  “We thought we’d have everything.”

Dick’s response isn’t mournful; it’s matter-of-fact. “After my parents died, I never really convinced myself that I could have it all.”

“That sounds like something Batman would say.”

“Does it?”

“A little.”

Once upon a time, Artemis had stood before the team ready to lay bare her darkest secret, waiting to be kicked out. And Dick had shown his hand: he’d known from the beginning and hadn’t cared.  You aren’t your family. You’re one of us. She knows he’s second-guessed himself over the years, wondering how fit he actually is to play leader. But for her, trust has always been the easiest thing about the two of them. It was why she’d said yes so easily to his deep cover mission—because she knew that he wouldn’t quit until he’d brought all of them home, that he would do whatever he could to keep them safe.

Taking his face in both her hands, she looks deep into his eyes. “You deserve good things, Dick Grayson.”

“Mm.” Dick smiles into her kiss, hooks his ankle over hers. “Keep telling me that. I’ll start to believe it.”

 *

 Jade abandons Will and Lian on a Tuesday, and Artemis’s carefully crafted equilibrium falls apart. At least this time she’s not the one directly being left, unlike when she was a teenager. Her expectations of her older sister had hardly been high, but if she’d plotted them on a graph they’d have trended upward. Now they’ve tanked.

“Did she leave any hint of where she was going?” Dick asks over the whir of his juicer. He’s gotten really into squeezing oranges lately; Artemis can’t complain because he always gives her the first glass.

“It’s Jade. She never wants to be found, and I hardly think she’s about to try an  Eat Pray Love type thing.”

“Eat Slash Steal, maybe?” Dick offers, dropping two ice cubes into a drink and setting it in front of her.

Artemis sips, balling up a napkin and throwing it at him at the same time. “Watch it, that’s still my family you’re talking about.”

“I’m sorry. How’s Will taking it?”

“As well as any dad trying to raise a two-year-old by himself would.”

“So, poorly.” Dick taps his finger against the table. “Are they coming here?”

Artemis looks at him blankly. “Why?”

“I figured they might want to be closer to you and your mom now that Jade’s gone. Gotham’s not so bad—you and I turned out fine. And Will probably needs to look into preschools and a babysitter for Lian soon. If you move in with me, you can bring her over whenever.”

The last piece of information slips in so casually she thinks she’s misheard. “What?”

“If you move in with me, you can bring Lian over whenever,” repeats Dick. “This place is as good as yours. You’re over here all the time anyway.”

Suddenly, she can’t breathe. “You’re serious.”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

She can’t meet his eyes. “W—Will’s home is in Star City. He’s not going to move.”

Slowly, Dick says, “Okay. But my offer doesn’t really depend on Will.”

Her stuff is still in boxes. She’s still paying for a storage unit almost 3,000 miles away. And Dick is waiting on her so intently it makes her chest hurt.

Artemis stands up. “We’re not doing this.”

Dick’s eyebrows rise. Annoyance, or maybe anger, flickers across his face. “You wanna fill me in on what exactly it is we’re doing, according to you?”

“We’re not going to fight about this like we’re…”  In a relationship. In love. In anything other than a messy configuration started by shared grief. She doesn’t say any of it out loud, but she doesn’t need to—Dick’s always been great at reading people, and he’s known all her tells from the start.

“Right.”  The single syllable comes out as cold and pointed as an icicle. He pushes his chair back from the table and stands up. The clouds are rolling in, throwing shadows across his features. Even now, Artemis wants to kiss him, wants to be the one to smooth the furrow between his eyebrows away.

“Dick…”

“Do me a favor, will you?” Dick grabs his jacket from the hook by his door, shrugging it on. He pauses, briefly, in the doorway. “Lock my door on the way out.”  

That night, she lies alone in her bedroom next to the picture of her, Wally, and Brucely. Brucely snuffles at the foot of her bed and then leaps onto the covers, and this time she doesn’t shoo him off. Neither does she fall asleep.

 *

 There was a song Jade had liked to sing, passed down from their mother: a Vietnamese lullaby about a yellow butterfly, to the tune of “Frère Jacques.” The butterfly flies all over the sky. Come and see. Come and see. When it became clear that Artemis’s hair would grow in blond, not black, Jade started pulling it, making her giggle. You’re the yellow butterfly, see?

The taxicab she calls for the airport is bright yellow in the morning light. Plain old civilian travel for plain old civilian business. You don’t need to be a superhero to fly across the country and move in with your brother-in-law and your niece. She’ll sing silly little songs and wash Lian’s hair, and they’ll be a family same as anyone else’s: clumsy, incomplete.

“Artemis.” Dick coalesces out of the fog. They haven’t seen or spoken to each other in a week, and she should be mad that he’s here because it probably means he’s been monitoring her web traffic and caught wind she’d bought plane tickets. Still, all she feels is relief.

Jade had laughed when Artemis had let slip what she was doing during one rare sisterly bonding moment. “Oh, darling sister, your thing with your little bird boy isn’t about moving on. You’re using him as a holding pattern. Try not to damage him too much, hm?” Rankled, Artemis had hung up the phone—what did Jade know about anything, besides shoving it under the rug and pretending it didn’t matter? Now, though, Artemis sees things more clearly. Jade did know something about bodies and what they could and couldn’t fix; after all, isn’t that why she ran?

She worries with the strap of her duffel bag, letting Dick approach.

“If this were a romcom, you would have waited until I got to the airport and then run through security.”

“If this were a romcom,” says Dick, stopping in front of her and shoving his hands in his pockets, “I’d be trying to make you stay.”

She thinks he might be the one person left on this planet who knows her best. She thinks they could save each other, if they’d let themselves try. But they each have work to do on their own, first.

Setting down her bag, she tucks her face into the crook of his neck and breathes him in. Wherever else she goes, this spot will always feel like forgiveness. Nose buried in her hair, Dick squeezes her back.

The taxi driver rolls down his window. “Is this guy coming with us or not?”

Artemis pulls back, and there’s so much sky in Dick’s eyes.

“You know where to find me,” she says.

 *

 | STAR CITY

| JULY 29, 2018; 7:30 AM PST

 “Who are you here to recruit this time?” Will asks, leaning against the doorframe, but Artemis doesn’t need an answer, doesn’t need any details but the black hair she can see just over Will’s shoulder, Dick’s voice at the end of a line.

He jumps, and she jumps with him. They’ll figure out everything else as they go.

Before Dick can respond, she says: “I’m in.”

#young justice #artemis crock #dick grayson #traught #dick x artemis #my writing #fanfiction #ff: yj