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whumpmatsus · 3 years

Note

tw // noises , loud noises : osomatsu afraid of an emergency alert system test

I went ahead and made it an actual emergency alert, because rainy days and Mondays and whatnot-

also it's worth noting I did look up Japan's emergency alert system, but I have no idea how J-Alert actually functions, I've just kind of assumed it's similar to the system that's in place where I live XD

Osomatsu, you've got some top-notch little brothers there!!

it's technically Allmatsu but like... big Sokudomatsu vibes tho :D

All things considered, a few days of bad weather keeping all the sextuplets cooped up in the house pretty much guarantees that they’re all going to be on edge.

They’re occasionally two seconds away from being at each other’s throats anyway, with all the challenges of being a big family in a small house. When the skies darken and open up with rain, though, it all becomes that much worse.

It means Ichimatsu can’t venture out to feed the stray cats, because being out in the cold rain for so long will probably lead to him getting sick. The comfort and stress relief that Karamatsu finds in playing guitar on the roof is vanished into thin air. Everyone has to keep Jyushimatsu from going outside since he’s half determined to play baseball even when it’s pouring. Choromatsu can’t hit the streets in search of a job or anything; too much chance of getting caught in a torrential downpour far from home. That’s also the reason Totty can’t make any plans with his friends, and counts his blessings that he doesn’t have any work shifts during these days.

All things being equal, Osomatsu is almost certainly the most laidback of their little group. Big brother tries his best to find solutions to keep all of them distracted, such as playing games or helping everyone settle on what TV show they should watch. Even though there are other places he’d rather be right now ― like the races or pachinko or maybe somewhere trying to pick up girls ― he can acknowledge that it’s kind of nice to spend time with his brothers when they can’t go outside.

The rain’s been coming down steadily today, a constant pattering that’s rhythmic and borderline soothing. It’s already put Ichimatsu and Totty to sleep, the two of them curled up under a blanket together. Before they fell asleep, Totty said something about the storm being “free ASMR”, whatever that means, and Ichimatsu mumbled an agreement as they cuddled in against each other.

To be completely honest, the energy in the house in general is pretty low. That might be best for a stormy day. Everyone can chill out and recharge their energy.

For the most part, Osomatsu is playing at being as responsible as he can handle today; gathering snacks, making tea, keeping kerosene in the heater so nobody gets too cold. Now that Totty and Ichimatsu are down for the count, everyone else is starting to get sleepy. Which, of course, means it’s time for a collective nap.

He takes a look around the room as he settles in on the couch himself. There’s Ichimatsu and Totty under their single blanket, seeming to be getting along just fine to share it. Choromatsu and Karamatsu are nuzzled against each other with their legs under the kotatsu, with Choromatsu’s head resting on Karamatsu’s shoulder and Karamatsu’s head resting on top of Choromatsu’s. And Jyushimatsu is… huddled up in a few blankets near the couch. For all intents and purposes, sleep has apparently claimed him, too.

Well, that’s good. Now that he’s made sure all his little brothers are comfortable, Osomatsu can doze off himself.

There’s a leftover blanket folded up at the end of the couch, so he pulls it up around himself and lies down with his head propped against one of the arms of the couch. He’d certainly like to be nestled up with one of the others, but he’s not gonna disturb them for that. They’re all in their own pairs, save for Jyushimatsu, and he’s not going to make the second youngest clamber up onto the couch just because Osomatsu wants some physical contact.

Besides, he can get that later if he wants. It’s going to be chilly and dreary all day, so more snuggles are inevitable. If he gets lucky, everyone will gravitate to one big cuddle puddle after dinner.

So he does his best to relax on the couch. He closes his eyes and tries to slow his breathing down a bit. The rain continues to pound in sheets against the window, and in heavy drops against the roof. There’s the soft rumbling of thunder that’s begun in the background, so low and powerful he can feel it. Somehow, it’s a comfort, something that whispers to him that he can go to sleep now.

Surrounded by his brothers and the lullaby of the storm outside, it’s easy to drift off.

Osomatsu is nearly sunk down into the beginnings of a deep sleep when suddenly, a blaring alarm goes off. And it’s not just one ― it sounds like several firing off in perfect, irritating harmony.

He can’t explain why he has the reaction he does. All he knows is that the abrupt, loud, obnoxious noise cuts through everything else and seems to hit the panic button in his head. A terrified yell rips itself from his throat, and he’s bolt upright. Then he’s on the floor, rolled onto Jyushimatsu and waking his younger brother up.

“HOLY MOLY!” And as soon as Jyushimatsu shouts, it’s enough to wake everyone else up. How anybody could sleep through that siren is beyond Osomatsu, though he’s pretty sure if anyone could, Jyushimatsu could. “Osomatsu-nii-san! You’re on top of me! What the heck is that?! Are we late for school???”

Totty groans as he’s woken up in the rudest way possible. “We’re too old for school, Jyushimatsu-nii-san. We’re adults.” He pulls his phone out, and his other hand reaches to pat Ichimatsu on the head. “Aaahnnmmm… it’s a weather alert.”

“Severe thunderstorm warning,” Choromatsu groans, having turned to glance at the TV. “Looks like it’s only gonna last till like 7 P.M., though.”

Karamatsu yawns and rubs at his eyes. “Should we get supplies together in case the power goes out?”

“The rest of you dumbasses can do that,” Ichimatsu huffs. “I’m not moving. As soon as the alerts stop making that shitty noise, I’m going back to sleep.”

“Well, I guess it falls to the three oldest, then.” Choromatsu stretches, giving a quiet, “Oof” when something in his back pops. “Osomatsu, do you wanna come help us… uh… Osomatsu?”

Strangely enough, the eldest brother is still incapacitated from the unexpected sounds, curled into a ball with his hands pressed over his ears. There might even be tears in his eyes, if one’s looking close enough.

Jyushimatsu runs a gentle hand, (or sleeve, as it were), over his big brother’s head, seeing as he’s the closest one. “I think something’s wrong with Osomatsu-nii-san. He’s all shivery and breathing funny.”

That’s really all it takes for Choromatsu to be over lightning-fast, knelt down next to the eldest. “Osomatsu? Osomatsu-nii-san, are you okay?” He frowns and tentatively tugs one of Osomatsu’s hands away from his ear. “Hey. What’s wrong?”

“Th… the noise…” His hand is trembling in his younger brother’s grip, tears welling up in his eyes. It still feels like his heart is trying to hammer its way out of his chest completely. He can’t really get a good breath in.

Choromatsu’s brow furrows and he looks back toward the TV, which Karamatsu scrambles to turn off in case it’s the prolonged sound causing the problem. “Did you… ahah… it startled you, right? I think it startled all of us…”

Ichimatsu pushes himself up a bit so he can turn his attention to his older brothers. “Looks like it did more than startle him. He’s about to jump out of his skin.”

“Ah…” Choromatsu quickly gathers Osomatsu into his arms, and is surprised with the fervor with which the eldest clings to him. It reminds them both of… being kids. “H-hey, Osomatsu-nii-san… it’s okay, it’s okay. It’s over now. Can you, um, try to follow my pattern of breathing here? That might help you calm down.”

Osomatsu nods and does his best, mirroring the way Choromatsu inhales for four seconds, holds the breath for seven, and exhales for eight. It takes several cycles, a few minutes’ worth of this, before he can feel himself starting to be a little less shaky. His heart is still pounding, but not as fast as it was a moment ago.

Choromatsu holds him carefully, rubbing Osomatsu’s back, until he can feel the tension beginning to fade from his brother’s muscles. That was… weird. It’s not like Osomatsu to get so anxious, especially not to the point that he’s crying. “There… is it better now?”

“Y… yeah…” Osomatsu raises a hand in an attempt to scrub the tears away. Man… how embarrassing. He’s the oldest and he’s over here acting like a baby because of a stupid weather alert. “Sorry… I, uh, don’t know where that came from, haha.”

“It’s okay, don’t worry about it.” Neither of them make any move to get out of the position for a minute, then Choromatsu gradually pulls away once he can’t hear his older brother’s heart beating like a gong. “You… good?”

“Yeah… yeah, I think so.”

Ichimatsu stretches his arms above his head. “Damn. I guess we’re all awake. I hate those alert things… remember that one night when we were kids, and it came on just as we were getting ready for bed?”

Totty laughs, rolling over and propping his face up against one arm. “Yeah, I remember Choromatsu told me they were warning us a big storm was gonna come and wash all the baby brothers out to sea.”

“A-ah…” Choromatsu’s face goes red in an instant. He was such a little bastard as a child. “I’m sorry about that, Totty!”

He waves a hand. “Nah, it’s okay! ‘Cause remember what we did next?”

“Ah… I remember!” Karamatsu grins. “We all said we wouldn’t let the storm get you, and we wrapped you up in blankets and stood guard the whole night.”

“Until we fell asleep,” Jyushimatsu giggles. “I remember panicking when we woke up, but then we all high-fived each other when we saw Totty was still there in the morning!”

“W-we could do that again,” Choromatsu suggests, stealing a peek at their eldest who still appears to be tired. “Except this time…”

Totty’s up in a second. “Ooh, yeah!! Let’s cocoon Osomatsu-nii-san so the big, bad weather alerts can’t hurt him!”

Osomatsu feels like he should be having the hairs on the back of his neck stand up right about now. Instead, he feels sort of warm in a good way when everyone starts to wrap blankets around him. “Geez… you guys don’t need to do all this shit…”

“Well, no, but it’ll be fun.” Choromatsu gives him a smile and nestles in against his older brother’s side. “I’ll take first watch.”

Osomatsu snorts, but lets his head fall on top of Choromatsu’s anyway.

“Man… you guys are lame.”

Thank God for that, though.

#loud noise tw #Osomatsu san #whump #Sokudomatsu #Allmatsu #Osomatsu #anxiety #hurt/comfort #LOOK AT THESE GOOD BOYS #TAKING CARE OF THEIR BIG DUMB LEADER #WARMS MY COCKLES LEMME TELL YA

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frankendykes-monster · 3 years

Text

Space Jam: A New Legacy is content to be content.

The original Space Jam was a calculated marketing exercise. Michael Jordan was the biggest sports star of the nineties, and Space Jam capitalised on Jordan’s brand potential while also allowing the athlete to refashion his own narrative into a family-friendly mythology. Space Jam packaged Jordan for a generation, smoothing the wrinkles out of his story by presenting a wholesome family man making an earnest transition from basketball to baseball.

It also helped Warner Bros. to figure out what to do with their Looney Tunes characters, which had largely laid dormant within the company’s intellectual property vaults. There had been a conscious effort to revitalised the company’s animation with shows like Tiny Toon Adventures and even Animaniacs, but those classic and beloved cartoons were a merchandising opportunity waiting to happen. So the logic of the original Space Jam was clear, it was an excuse to tie together two potentially profitable strands of intellectual property.

Space Jam itself was something of an afterthought. The movie struggles to reach its ninety-minute runtime. It often feels like the production team have to utilise every scrap of film to reach that target, with extended riffs focusing on Bill Murray and Michael Jordan on the golf course and with a lot of the improvisation from the voice cast included in the finished film. The movie’s ending comes out of nowhere, and Space Jam struggles to hit many of the basic plot beats of a scrappy sports movie.

The movie itself was immaterial to the success of Space Jam as a concept. After all, the film only grossed $250m at the global box office, enough to scrape into the end of year top ten behind The Nutty Professor and Jerry Maguire. However, the film’s real success lay in merchandising, with the film generating between $4bn and $6bn in licensing and merchandising. Key to this was the success of the six-time platinum-certified soundtrack which remains the ninth highest-grossing soundtrack of all-time.

In some to trace a lot of modern Hollywood back to the original Space Jam. So much of how companies package and release modern media feels like an extension of that approach, the reduction of the actual film itself to nothing more than “content” that exists as a larger pool of marketable material. After all, the unspoken assumption underlying AT&T’s disastrous decision to send all of their blockbusters to HBO Max was the understanding that HBO Max itself was often packaged free with company’s internet. Movies would no longer be their own things, but just perks to be packaged and sold as part of larger deals.

In the decades since the release of Space Jam, the industry has become increasingly focused on the idea of packaging and repackaging intellectual property. It has become increasingly common for films to showcase multiple intellectual properties housed at the same studios. Simple crossovers like Alien vs. Predators or The Avengers now seem positively humble when compared to the smorgasbord of brand synergy on display in projects like The Emoji Movie or Ralph Breaks the Internet.

Interestingly, as Disney have steadily securing their intellectual property portfolio with additions like Pixar and Lucasfilm and Marvel Studios and 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros. have becoming increasingly bullish about showcasing the depth and breadth of their bench. The LEGO Movie imagines a wide range of properties consolidated under one brand. Ready Player One depicted a pop culture user space lost in nostalgia for properties and trinkets. However, those movies also managed to tell their own stories, even as they grappled with the weight of brand synergy pushing down on top of them.

Space Jam: A New Legacy has no such delusions. It understands that it does not exist as a story or as a feature film. Instead, it has distilled cinema down to a content-delivery mechanism. The plot of the movie finds basketball star LeBron James sucked into the “Serververse” and forced to ally with the Looney Tunes in order to play a basketball game with the fate of the world in the balance. However, while the original Space Jam ran a brisk and unfocused ninety minutes, A New Legacy extends itself to almost two hours. There is always more content to repackage and sell, after all.

A New Legacy slathers its cynicism in nostalgia, directly appealing to a generation of audiences who have convinced themselves that Space Jam was a good movie and a beloved childhood classic. A New Legacy is built around the understanding that the original Space Jam walked so that it might run, counting on the audience’s nostalgia for the original film to excuse a lot of its indulgences. After all, it would be a betrayal of the franchise if A New Legacy wasn’t a crash and vulgar cash-in. In many ways, A New Legacy does what most sequels aspire to do, scaling the original film’s ambitions aggressively upwards.

As with the original Space Jam, there is layer of irony to distract from the film’s clear purpose. In the original Space Jam, the villainous Swackhammer planned to abduct the Looney Tunes and force them to play at his themeparks. The implication was that the characters did not want to be sold into corporate servitude, stripped of their own identity and rendered as crass tools of unchecked capitalism. The irony of Space Jam lay in the fact that the entire movie was a variant on Swackhammer’s themepark and the Looney Tunes were dancing to that theme anyway as Daffy puckers up and kisses the Warner Bros. stamp on his own ass.

In A New Legacy, a sentient algorithm – Al G. Rhythm – is cast as the movie’s primary antagonist. The film gestures broadly at a satirical criticism of the modern film industry, with Al G. Rhythm shaping and warping the future of movie-making by suggesting things like computer-generating movie stars and producing a constant array of recycled intellectual property. A New Legacy recognises the machinations of Al G. Rhythm as unsettling and horrifying, with throwaway jokes about the theft of ideas and the violation of privacy, but the villain largely serves as a smokescreen to let the movie have its cake and eat it.

After all, A New Legacy revels in Al G. Rhythm’s plans. LeBron James is turned into an animated figure and dumped into classic Looney Tunes shorts like Rabbit Season and The Rabbit of Seville. The film understands that while the audience might be afraid of the algorithm, they also yearn for it. After all, it isn’t Al G. Rhythm who structures A New Legacy so that the film spends an extended sequence touring the company’s beloved intellectual properties.

A New Legacy is really just an investors’ day presentation that celebrates the sheer amount of content that Warner Bros. own. It’s not too difficult to imagine the film screened investors before the Discovery deal, as proof of just how many viable franchising opportunities existed within the copyright of the company itself. It’s a weird and unsettling showcase, in large part because it feels like that warning from Jurassic Park. The studio were so obsessed with whether they could do a thing that they never stopped to consider whether they should.

The film’s middle section includes a whirlwind tour of the properties owned by Warner Bros. After Bugs “plays the hits” with James, the two set off on an adventure to recover the other Looney Tunes from other beloved Warner Bros. properties. Some of these advertisements make sense: Daffy and Porky are living in the world of Superman: The Animated Series, while Lola seems to have found the Wonder Woman from the Bloodlines animated films. Others make much less sense in a movie aimed at kids, like the Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote hiding in Mad Max: Fury Road or Yosemite Sam living in Casablanca.

Of course, it’s debatable how much of A New Legacy is aimed at kids, as compared to the kids of the nineties. Its target market seems to be kids in the late nineties who never grew up, because they never had to. Elmer Fudd and Sylvester are hiding out in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. Granny and Speedy have taken refuge in the opening scenes of The Matrix. While the original Space Jam featured odd pop cultural shoutouts to things like Pulp Fiction, at least that was somewhat contemporaneous.

To be fair, there is no art driving these choices. Many of these references serve to point the audience towards established properties. It is a sentient recommendation algorithm for HBO Max and a handy way of stoking audience interest in upcoming projects like The Matrix 4 (December 2021) or Furiosa (June 2023). It is a helpful reminder that Superman: The Animated Series has been remastered in high definition to stream on HBO Max. Foghorn Leghorn even rides a dragon from Game of Thrones to remind viewers that the show is streaming on HBO Max and that there are prequels coming.

It’s all very bizarre, but also strangely lifeless. The climax of the film finds the inevitable basketball game played in front of a crowd of familiar pop culture icons drawn from a wide range of sources: King Kong, The Iron Giant, Batman ’66, The Wizard of Oz, The Mask and many more. It feels very much like a surreal power play, a company showcasing the depth of its own vaults at a turbulent time in the industry. It leads to weird moments, like Al G. Rhythm even quoting Training Day, perhaps the film’s most unlikely draw from the “Warner Bros. Intellectual Property Vault.”

The most revealing aspect of the movie is its central conflict, with Al G. Rhythm cynically manipulating LeBron’s son Dom. Dom is convinced that his father doesn’t understand him, that his father is unable to see that his skill lies in video game coding rather than old-fashioned basketball. Rhythm is able to create a schism between father and son, using Dom’s code and his anger to attack and undermine LeBron James and the Looney Tunes. It’s a very broad and very archetypal story. There are no points for realising that Dom eventually comes around to his father and accepts that Rhythm is a villain.

However, it signals an interesting shift in these sorts of narratives. Traditionally, these sorts of generational conflicts played out between fathers and sons, with fathers presented as antagonistic and sons presented as heroic. The original Star Wars saga is built around Luke Skywalker trying to wrestle and grapple with his father Darth Vader. In Superman II, the eponymous superhero is forced to confront Zod, a representative of his father’s generation and the old world. Even in Batman Begins, Bruce Wayne is set against his surrogate father figure Ra’s Al Ghul.

The metaphor driving these sorts of stories was fairly simple and straightforward. Every generation needs to come into their own and take control of their own agency within the world. Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi ends with Darth Vader dead and Luke staring out into the wider universe. Times change, and each generation has an obligation to try to create a better world than the one left to them by their parents. In the conflict between parents and children, it has generally been children who have prevailed.

However, in recent years, the trend has swung back sharply. It’s notable that the villain in Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens is an errant child who doesn’t properly respect his parents, and that Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker ends with order restored when the protagonist takes the name of the beloved heroes of the older films. Shows like Star Trek: Picard are built around the idea that kids need their older generation of parents to swoop in and tell them how to properly live their lives.

A New Legacy is an interesting illustration of this trend. The movie ends with a reconciliation between LeBron and Dom, but it is very clearly on LeBron’s terms. Dom is manipulated and misled by sinister forces, and his father has to save him while realigning his moral compass. Father knows best. It demonstrates how the underlying logic of these stories has shifted in recent years, perhaps reflecting the understanding that perhaps the older generation won’t surrender the floor gracefully.

As with Ready Player One, there’s a monstrous Peter Pan quality to A New Legacy. It is a film about how the culture doesn’t have to change. It can be recycled and repurposed forever and ever and ever. At the end of Space Jam, Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny parted ways. There was an understanding that the two worlds existed apart from one another. However, A New Legacy ends with the collapse of these worlds into one another; the “Serververse” manifesting itself in the real world. As LeBron walks home, Bugs asks if he can move in.

Of course, with HBO Max subscription, the audience can take Bugs home anytime they want

#long post

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roanniom · 3 years

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Happy Friday Issa! Today I am thinking about Paterson, and what it would be like to end up on his bus one day by happenstance. It would be impossible not be smitten at first sight. I can't stop picturing the way his eyes would just bore into ours when he catches us staring in the rearview mirror. The blush that spreads over him would be just unreal. 😍🥺💜 Thanks so much for sharing nyour imagines with us!

Lovely Claire, as you know I’ve been excited to get to this one. Partly because I love Pat with all my heart and partly because I looked forward to bringing such a beautiful idea to life in that calm Paterson style. I hope you like this little story <3

Three Stops, Five Regulars, and You

Word Count: 2,152

Warnings: Really just sweetness, the slightest angst from ~yearning~

Paterson drives the same route every day. He knows the people who get on, where they board, and where they disembark. The sweet old lady who gets her groceries at the corner store on Tuesdays. The recent emigrant from Nigeria who sits in the front and practices English with the local florist as they both commute to different jobs in the same strip mall. The high school baseball player who acts rowdy in the back of the bus with his teammates until the teammates get off on Maple Street and he remains on for eight more stops, always moving to sit shyly with a girl Paterson has gathered to be the boy’s old English tutor.

But never you.

When Paterson opens his folding doors and you walk in, he is immediately struck by your newness. The way the planes of your face reflect no familiarity back onto him unsettles Paterson as you pass him by to take your seat a few rows down. He inhales the scent that wafts in your wake, trying to place it but, as with your features, he draws a blank. Freesia? Gardenia? Paterson blinks at the expanse of windshield before him in an attempt to ground himself in the here and now.

It’s a Friday afternoon, almost early evening.

He’s on 5th and Potomac.

Three more stops till he’s done with his shift.

Done to go home to a microwaved meal and a comfortable couch.

Five more regulars to get to their destination.

And you.

Paterson looks up then into the rearview mirror only to meet those unfamiliar eyes. Beautiful eyes, he registers somewhere in the back of his short-circuiting brain. Eyes that take him in through the mirror. Appraising him. He wonders what they see in him, these eyes that can’t possibly know him any more than his know you.

“Hey Pat, we outta gas or something, buddy?”

The good-natured tease comes from Ollie, the auto mechanic, sitting in his usual seat in row six. This does nothing to stop Paterson from jumping a foot into the air and muttering his apologies before clunking the bus into gear.

It takes Paterson several minutes of silent driving before he works up the courage to glance at the rearview mirror again. He argues with himself internally before he does so.

You’re probably not even looking anymore. No, it’s much more likely you’ve become engaged in polite conversation with another passenger or pulled out a book or lost yourself looking out the window, taking in the outside world with those beautiful eyes…

Or, less likely but much more anxiety-inducing, you could still be looking. Looking at the lanky bus driver with the goofy ears who stared like an idiot instead of doing his job. He kicks himself at the thought of the way he’d gaped at you. Openly and so out of character.

What he should have done was averted his eyes when you’d entered, waited a respectable amount of time, and then peered back a few times to catch a glimpse. He could have taken in the curve of your jaw, the arch of your brow, the turn of your nose, all without detection from the comfortable anonymity of the driver’s seat. Gone home and written a poem or two about the ethereal creature who’d gotten lost and found herself on his bus route, a sprite or a fairy who would disappear tomorrow like some Freesia-scented vapor, perhaps never really there to start.

But no. He’d looked. And you’d looked.

And now he looks again.

His eyes dart back to the road immediately and his pulse races.

You were looking.

Paterson takes a few deep breaths and minds a stop sign before he hazards a glance again.

Yes. Still looking.

But this time he notices the smile on your face. The lips he hadn’t noticed, being so far below your eyes as they were, your eyes which had been just about as far as he had gotten to this point. The smile is soft but amused. Your hand lifts up in a small wave and Paterson feels himself heat up all the way down to his sensible shoes. His ears burn and he brings his eyes back to the road by force of habit and in order to do his job of steering this bus full of people but for absolutely no other reason. Because now he has two different things that require his attention – your eyes and your lips. Both deserving of equal consideration.

When his eyes revisit the road he realizes the next stop is upon him. When the bus pulls to a halt and deflates down steadily to allow passengers to climb out, Pat counts the seconds with his heartbeat. Wondering if this is your stop. Knowing which stop it is for all other riders but you. Knowing Mr. McKinney will get off to see his nephew and that the kind goth boy whose name he doesn’t know is off to the library with music blaring in his ears. Paterson nods to each of them as they pass, but does not look up to see them, opting instead to stare straight ahead.

When his peripheral vision doesn’t show him your retreating figure Paterson looks up to find you still in your seat, this time sitting lower. More comfortable. But still looking. Still smiling.

Involuntarily, Paterson feels a smile spread across his own face. He closes the folding doors and shifts back into gear.

Two more stops and three more passengers.

And you.

As Paterson navigates his way into the middle lane to avoid construction, he tries to settle his racing thoughts. He’s confused by this reaction, mental, physical and otherwise. It’s not like he’s never had a pretty passenger before.

So why does your face look like nobody he’s ever seen but everything he’s ever looked for?

“What’s your favorite thing about being a bus driver?”

Paterson inhales sharply and he jerks his head around at the unfamiliar voice to see that you are now sitting in the seat directly behind him. Your smile larger than ever.

Paterson swallows thickly, searching for the first words best to say to you.

“Passengers shouldn’t move about while we’re in motion.”

Wrong words.

“So is it that? The authority?” you joke, your smile becoming more lopsided, Paterson’s thankful to be able to see. Even with you right behind him he can still see you in the rearview mirror.

“No! No I didn’t mean to…I mean it’s really not that big…we’re only going 30 –” Paterson’s stuttering is cut off by your laugh.

“Ok if not that then what is it?”

“Um, what is what?” Paterson asks, looking back up after yielding to a bicyclist.

“What’s your favorite thing about being a bus driver?”

“Oh.” Paterson looks back at the road.

He’s never really thought of it. Mainly because nobody had ever asked it before, so he hadn’t bothered to ask it of himself. But it only takes another second of thought before he has his answer.

“It’s a weird limbo.”

“Come again?” Judging by your expression this was clearly not an answer you’d anticipated.

“Being a bus driver you are part of people’s daily lives. You go with them to work, you take them home after a long day. You see them with their friends and family. Or alone.”

“I’m alone,” you point out with a nod. It’s a simple statement, as if corroborating his assessment. Paterson grins and nods.

“Exactly, you’re alone. It’s very personal, in a way. Being there for these moments in between where they are coming from and where they’re going.”

“Intimate?” you offer. Paterson feels his throat go dry as he nods again.

“Yes. Intimate.”

“But you called it limbo?”

“Well it might be intimate, but it’s from a distance. A bus driver is only a small part of someone’s day, but my passengers are my day.”

“Oh,” you exclaim, voice softer than before. “I guess I never thought about it that way.”

The next stop, the penultimate one, comes into view and Paterson eases to bus to halt. A single mother known for jogging around the park in the evenings bids Paterson good night and Ollie claps him on the back as he heads out for dinner with his kids. Upon their exit, Paterson’s eyes seek out yours in the mirror once more. Wondering again if this is the place where you get off.

You lean against the back of your chair. Still very much seated.

Still very much a passenger.

It is then, as Paterson closes the folding doors once more, that he realizes the rest of the bus is empty. This startles him, as usually there is one more regular on the bus for this last upcoming stop. A man, very quiet and not unlike himself. Though Paterson doesn’t know much about him, he’s always wondered just how similar they are. Wondered if the man who enters a residential complex across the street from this last stop also has an empty apartment waiting from him. A lukewarm meal and a cold bed.

Paterson spares a moment to wonder where the man is, feeling a tinge of hope burn through the usual pity – perhaps the man is not alone, wherever he is, and perhaps tonight his dinner will be hot.

The folding doors hiss as they close for the second to last time tonight and Paterson pulls back into traffic. A glance in the rearview mirror reminds him that, not only are you still there, but that the absence of his final regular means that you two are very much alone.

The thought makes blood pound in his ears and he finds his eyes darting between the road and the mirror, not wanting to miss a second of whatever you may do, whatever you may say.

And you don’t make him wait long.

“That man called you Pat earlier,” you say in that lilting voice. “Is your name Patrick?”

“Paterson.” He says it wearily, bracing himself for the inevitable exclamation sure to come about how his name couldn’t possibly be what he says it is because no, that’s the name of the town.

Instead he sees you nod in the mirror as if this is the most rational name he could have given. Of course his name is Paterson.

The silence that follows is heavy with a lot of things, chief among them the things he wishes he could bring himself to say. Questions mainly, ones to counter the questions you’ve lobbed at him. After a block passes he opts for a simple one.

“What do you like best about being a bus passenger?” The question is timid and he hates himself for it, but the sound of your laugh is an pleasantly unexpected reward.

“I like the bus drivers.”

Paterson laughs with you then.

“Now you’re making fun of me.”

“No, I’m not!” you say with mock offense. Paterson flexes his fingers on the steering wheel, starting to feel them tingle. Probably a symptom of a long day of driving.

Or a symptom of you.

“Ok maybe you’re not making fun of me, but there’s no way that’s your answer.”

“You’re right, maybe it’s not the bus drivers,” you say then, leaning forward to rest your chin on your arms as they fold on top of the ledge separating the first row from the driver’s seat. Paterson can practically hear your breath as you speak your next words. “Maybe I just like you.”

If Paterson hadn’t already been pulling up to the final stop he’s pretty sure he would have slammed on the breaks. When the bus eases into motionlessness, Paterson’s hand automatically opens the folding doors, something he probably wouldn’t have thought to do if the action wasn’t so tied to muscle memory at this point.

Paterson’s mind is reeling. He needs to ask you out, or at least as you your name.

But his tongue is tied and you’re standing up and reaching for your bag.

You step down the one step that brings you to the level of the driver’s seat and he gets another good look at you, eyes skittering up and down in a vain attempt to take in every detail incase this was both his first and last chance.

“Good night!” you say cheerily as you move to the door.

Paterson’s heart is sinking faster than the hydraulics on his bus when suddenly you turn around once more, almost as an after thought.

“Oh and Paterson? You were my day.”

And with that you step into the night.

Perhaps to continued tangibility.

Perhaps to vaporize into thin air.

He’s not sure which possibility scares him more.

Paterson allows himself to sit still for a few more moments, not bothering to close the folding doors so quickly this time. Allowing the cool air to flow in. Air that contains the remnants, and potential, of you.

~*~

Tagging some lovely people (please let me know if you’d like to be tagged or untagged in future work!) @mariesackler @direnightshade @safarigirlsp @sacklerscumrag @paper-in-ashes-fanfiction @historyandfandoms50 @clydesfavoritegirl @wayward-rose @hopeamarsu @thegreenmatt @barbers-glimmerin-darlin @finn-ray-nal-beads @fizzywoohoo @maybe-your-left @aliveandlonely @han-not-solo @morby @emeraldsiren20 @maryforyou @aloneandsleepless @jynzandtonic @renmaulxo

(AND PLEASE LET ME KNOW IF YOU ARE GETTING NOTIFIED ABOUT THIS TAG, TUMBLR HAS BEEN WEIRD LATELY that is all, love you guys <3)

#millenialcatlady #request #Paterson x reader #Paterson x you #Paterson/reader #paterson/you #paterson fluff #Paterson fanfiction #Paterson fan fiction #fluff #writing #roanniom

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brattyfics · 4 years

Text

Pairing: Miguel Galindo x Daya Galindo [Black OC]

Word Count: 4,681

Synopsis | Masterlist

Chapter One

On the last leg of a week-long trip to San Diego, Daya Galindo did her best to remain engaging, open, and approachable.

Along with thirty other members of San Diego’s elite inner circle, she occupied one Petco Park’s most expensive and exclusive Skyboxes. Many of her nights were spent in the same Skybox attending the Padre’s baseball games.

This time, however, the Skybox has been transformed into a ballroom of sorts. Several circular tables were spaced out in the large room, eight chairs provided at each. Simple but elegant centerpieces decorated the tables.

The $10,000 a night Skybox opened up to the empty stadium on one side, and a breathtaking view of San Diego’s skyline on the other side. The sliding floor-to-ceiling windows were closed, and Daya found herself missing the fresh air she enjoyed on game days.

Most attendees remained inside, adding to the suffocating feeling in her chest.

Her husband, commercial real estate mogul and serial entrepreneur, Miguel Galindo, was one of the few people outside on the brick terrace. He used the balcony to take a private call.

“You look so pretty!” Marcy Stevens, the wife of a potential business partner, complimented Daya in a chipper tone.

An eight-hundred dollar silk cocktail dress stopped just above her ankles. An equally expensive pair of nude heels complimented the deep red of her dress. The front was designed to cover her breasts, giving the illusion of modesty while the fabric hugged her curves, outlining her shape. Thin straps were tied intricately on the back of the low cut dress. The ensemble was on-brand for Mrs. Galindo, a perfect balance between sexy and classy.

The big, springy curls that framed her heart-shaped face, bunching around the top of her shoulders, were also on brand. Her makeup was done simply, shades of brown and gold to complement her features.

Marcy was right. She did look stunning.

Regardless, Daya did her best to appear humbled by the compliment. It wasn’t that she was cocky or arrogant. The truth was she had become numb.

“You too! I love your lipstick. What shade is it?”

“Hmm. I’m not sure.” The middle-aged woman considered it for a moment before ruffling through her compact.

With a bright smile, she held the tube of lipstick up victoriously. She passed it over to Daya to inspect.

After pretending to take note of the brand and shade in her mind, she passed the tube back to Marcy. “Thank you.”

She couldn’t care less what shade of lipstick the woman wore, but the name of the game was flattery. Fundraising galas, country club banquets, and art exhibits had all become a blur of polite one-liners one after the other.

“It’s so nice to see you.” She lied even when it wasn’t.

“We have to have dinner and drinks soon.” She said to be polite, even when she’d rather not spend her time discussing the newest fashion releases with bored housewives.

“How are the kids?” She asked, although she had no interest in listening to parents ramble on about how great their mediocre children were.

“I love your dress. Who designed it?” Chances were she didn’t care.

A lively buzz of murmurs was standard for these events. Conversations flowed as freely as the champagne. Whether it was to foster relationships or just pass the time, people desperately spewed out the words like they would die if they couldn’t get it all out.

The constant chatter annoyed her, but Daya was able to connect with almost anyone on some level.

She knew a little bit about a lot of things, so conversations about sports, stock-trading, or even spa treatments were right up her alley. She never would have imagined herself as the type of woman to participate in meaningless conversations daily, but alas, she was. Her experience as a member of California’s high society was a far cry from her upbringing.

Daya Galindo was born Dayana Sims inside a community hospital in Hawthorne, California. Her mother, Denise Sims, settled in Cali sometime during her pregnancy. Denise didn’t talk about her life before Daya much. Her daughter knew almost nothing about her mother’s family or her reasons for moving to California. She didn’t even know her dad!

Daya was as inquisitive as any kid. She often wondered about him—who he was, what he looked like, where he lived, and if he ever thought about her. Her mother shut down any questions about him. The answer was always ‘stay in a child’s place’ or ‘grow up and let it go’. That was her mother’s response to anything uncomfortable, and inadvertently she taught her daughter to shrink herself to avoid conflict.

It was one of many bad habits that years of expensive therapy hadn’t completely fixed.

Denise had also taught her daughter to not form attachments. They moved around a lot when Daya was young. Most times it was only a few cities over, but each time she left someone behind. There was no explanation for why. That’s just how it was. She made it through her teens and early twenties without feeling the need to set down roots.

Her husband, Miguel, changed that.

On paper, Miguel Galindo was everything any woman would want in a husband. He was wealthy, smart, handsome, and charming when he wanted to be.

An honors graduate of Stanford, he quickly established a name for himself in business. Fresh out of college, he moved to New York and started a career in luxury real estate. From there, his interests transferred to commercial properties, and thus the entrepreneur in him was born. Miguel now owned successful businesses on both the East and West Coast.

When Daya met Miguel, he was new to Santo Padre and adjusting to his new lifestyle. The man who raised him died, and his mother, Dita was a wreck. Miguel vividly remembered the sounds of Jose beating Dita a room over, and the way he viciously chose his words to cut her down. Everyone thought she would be excited to start the next chapter of her life without him, but Dita took his death the hardest.

Becoming the man of the family meant his own complicated relationship with Jose was put on the back burner. His mother needed him, and the family business desperately needed tending to.

As the couple’s only child, he was the obvious heir. Regardless of his feelings about it, it was inevitable. Miguel’s future had been decided before he was even born.

Through the crystal clear glass, Daya watched Miguel’s face contort in annoyance. With a quick wave of his hand, he gestured for his head of security, Nestor Oceteva, to join him at his side. A few words were uttered between them before they were making their way inside. She expected Miguel to rejoin her at the table, but instead, he made a beeline for the elevators.

She was a little concerned, but not alarmed. If anything had gone seriously wrong, Miguel would be by her side, excusing them for the evening. He probably just needed more privacy.

Daya stepped up in his absence, focusing on the Stevens’ project in front of her.

Tom Stevens was Marcy’s husband and the owner of a chain of hotels in downtown San Diego. Property value in San Diego was higher than ever and steadily increasing, which made the hotels a worthy addition to Miguel’s portfolio.

An epiphany inspired Tom. He was passionate about the hotels because he built them from the ground up, but he realized his passion was better suited for home.

Marcy was a forty-something widower who decided to give love another chance with Tom. He was ten years her senior and even more unlucky in love, but he didn’t let his previously failed relationships stop him from trying again. The couple were newlyweds, and it showed with the way they giggled and grinned at each other every few seconds. It was cute watching them interact like love-struck teenagers.

Daya and Miguel had their moments, of course, but what they had was much different than the Stevens’. The young couple had gone through their rough patches and made it out on the other side, but the newlywed glimmer was definitely gone. Tom and Marcy were still open to each other and hopeful for the future. Willfully naive in Daya’s opinion.

No, what she and Miguel had was much more complicated. Neither of them trusted anybody completely, even themselves.

In between light conversation, she admired the night sky. In the distance, she could see the top of their hotel. It would be at least another hour before she could go back there, sinking into the king-sized mattress for the night. The Egyptian cotton sheets were calling her name.

“I was out in Brawley the other day, and I saw some of your signs up. What are you guys working on out there?”

If she remembered correctly, it was Luke that was speaking to her. Daya turned in her chair to face him as she responded.

Mama always said, “A woman’s work is never done.”

Another fifteen minutes passed before Miguel rejoined them, the vein in his forehead also present and in attendance.

Daya took a quick glance over her shoulder in search of Nestor. He wore a similar expression, confirming her suspicions.

They hadn’t resolved the problem.

Her hand found her husband’s thigh, softly stroking the strong muscle through his slacks. They sat close enough to the table that the movement was hidden. She smiled at him innocently when his eyes found hers for a second, a clear warning behind them.

A young woman with toffee-colored skin, and a short coiled Afro, approached the table, introducing herself as Eva.

Daya scanned her slim frame in the bright green dress she wore while Marcy explained how they met. Seven months ago, while volunteering at Skid Row, apparently.

Tom stood to offer Eva his seat, hand resting on the back of Marcy’s chair.

Eva talked about her non-profit organization, speaking passionately with her hands about what needed to be done to eradicate poverty. She shared her personal experience with homelessness, and how it shaped her life.

The expression on everyone’s faces said they were listening intently, but Daya knew better.

Millionaires didn’t care about poverty, because their wealth depended on it.

Daya had never been homeless, but she had been poor, and it wasn’t fun. Helping to dismantle capitalism was the last thing on her to-do list. She knew it was selfish, but she didn’t care.

While Eva spoke, Daya’s fingers inched up her husband’s thigh. She wasn’t surprised to find he was already half ready for her, his length thickening underneath his expensive slacks.

Miguel leaned over to whisper in her ear, the hairs of his beard just lightly tickling her ear.

“Watch yourself, conejita.”

The words sent a chill down her spine, but she didn’t remove her hand. Shifting in her seat, she crossed her legs in a poor attempt to dull the subtle throb below.

To her left, Luke asked Eva a question, diverting everyone’s attention to him. Daya used it as an opportunity to push her man further.

“Or what, papi?” The term of endearment rolled off her tongue with ease.

“Keep it up and you’ll find out.” He whispered through clenched teeth, speaking without moving his mouth. It reminded her of a mother scolding their child, and she resisted the urge to laugh.

“Don’t threaten me with a good time.” She warned Miguel, tapping his knee patronizingly.

Miguel’s arm came up to rest on the top of her chair, and his head dipped to whisper in her ear once more.

“Brat.” The word triggered something in her, and she bit the inside of her cheek.

A better woman would be annoyed by the nickname, or even insulted. Along with other words a wholesome woman wouldn’t appreciate, brat was a term of endearment between them.

Daya straightened, trying to clear her mind of dirty thoughts. The heated looks they were giving each other weren’t appropriate for the topic of discussion.

When she and Eva made eye contact, she nodded politely. When the woman stopped speaking, she would need to have something of substance to add to the conversation.

“Are you ready to go?” Miguel asked his wife, hand resting on her hip. She sighed with relief at his words.

The two of them had left the table under the guise of socializing, only to slowly make their way out onto the balcony.

"I've been ready. I hate to say it, but Marcy is working on my last nerve." Daya groaned as she remembered how Marcy kept her locked down for the past forty minutes. She had left the woman inside, and she hoped Marcy had found someone else to occupy her time.

"I don't know how many more fake bathroom breaks I could have taken before she noticed it was just to get away from her."

Miguel smirked at his flustered wife. She had a good poker face and tried to sell that nothing could face her. It was always a little entertaining to see cracks in her facade.

“I just hope this is all worth it. I have a headache from listening to everyone talk, and I can feel blisters forming on my feet.” She complained, pouting up at him.

Miguel dropped a quick kiss to her lips in apology before sparing a glance at her feet. "You don't have blisters, honey."

“You don’t have blisters, honey.”

“How do you know?”

Daya’s eyebrows raised, challenging him.

“I just do.”

“Well, how about you inspect them tonight when you’re massaging them?” She asked in a sweet tone.

Miguel laughed.

“Is that your way of asking for a foot massage?”

Daya nodded.

“Come on, loca. Let’s say our goodbyes, so we can get out of here.”

Locking hands, the couple began the slow process of trading goodbyes and promises for later dates. Another fifteen minutes later, they made it outside into the chilly night air, the California breeze kissing their skin. Daya was more than relieved to see the fleet of black SUVs that waited for them.

Nestor Oceteva stood by the truck in the middle, opening the back door for them. “Thank you, Ness.” Daya told him, accepting his help up into the vehicle.

A driver and Nestor's second-in-command and cousin, Antonio Oceteva, occupied the front seats. Daya greeted them both warmly as she crawled across the leather seats.

"I can't wait to get out of these shoes." She said to no one in particular.

With no answer, she slid across the seat to see what the hold up was. Miguel stood outside of the car, several feet away. In a heated tone, he and Nestor discussed something she couldn't make out.

Antonio turned around in his seat to stop her, hand stopping just before it touched her knee. She eyed his hesitant hand for a moment before she met his eyes. Neither of them spoke for a moment.

Antonio was all business when he gathered himself to speak. "He'll be with you shortly, Mrs. Galindo." She huffed in response.

Daya craned her neck to look out of the window once more, but it didn't do much good. From her vantage point she could see that Nestor wasn’t happy, but not much else.

"What's going on?" She asked Antonio catching his hazel eyes in the rear view mirror. He didn't look worried, and that helped to soothe her some. At the same time, she knew it could just be his military training at work.

"I'm not sure, ma'am." He spoke in an even tone, giving nothing away. She thanked him but continued to look out of the window.

Daya didn’t need to know every single gory detail, but Miguel knew she hated being left in the dark. It created distance between them and made her feel shut out.

She could almost hear her therapist telling her to slow down and think. Logically, she knew Miguel meant no harm, but it reminded her of her childhood, making her feel small and insignificant.

He found her in the backseat with her arms crossed, eyes closed, and heeled feet tapping impatiently against the floor of the car.

“Sorry to keep you waiting, mi amor.” With a simple nod, he signaled for the driver to take them to the hotel.

His warm hand found her belly, holding her there while his tongue slipped past her pouty lips into her mouth.

She responded the way he expected, melting under his touch. Soft hands cupped his face, deepening the kiss. His hands slid down to rest on the curve of her ass as she leaned into him. With each movement, Daya felt less tense. Several moments passed before they broke apart.

“What’s happening?” Daya asked, breathless from the kiss. Her eyes scanned Miguel's face for answers.

“It’s nothing you should worry yourself about.”

Miguel’s hands roamed her body, but she knew it was a distraction.

There’s a saying, “You either tell your wife everything, or nothing.”

Miguel often found himself stuck somewhere in the middle. There had been a time where he told her almost everything. Now, he operated on a need-to-know basis.

“That’s your favorite thing to say these days.” Daya said it with a smile, but her eyes told a different story.

“I didn’t mean it that way, mi alma. I just mean it’s not important enough to bother you with. I’m going to take care of it tonight, and then it’s done.”

“You’re leaving tonight?” She didn’t bother to hide that she was upset anymore.

The couple had spent the last three days in San Diego, occupying the penthouse suite of a downtown hotel. Their home was located in Santo Padre, a small border town on the outskirts of Calexico, two hours away from San Diego. Miguel had several meetings in San Diego during the week--with Tom, one of his lawyers, and the event. It just made more sense to stay in town for the week, rather than make the trek back and forth.

“I know I promised, but...yes. I have to take care of this tonight.”

The young couple had agreed to use the few days as a mini-vacation to recharge and spend quality time together. He had kept his promise so far, but she wasn’t happy their time together would be ending early.

“I understand.” Business came first. Always.

“Don’t be like that.”

“I’m not being like anything. I said it’s fine.” She pushed down the anger she felt bubbling in her chest. “Seriously, I’m not upset. There’s no point. You’re still going to do what you have to. Right?”

He nodded, watching as she checked out of the conversation. She faced the window, staring out of it at the blur of lights.

“Do you want to go home? If that will make you more comfortable, they can take you tonight.”

“No. I’m okay. I don’t want to be on the road in the dark." She told him with a grimace. "I’ll find a way to entertain myself.”

The blur of neon lights transitioned into shades of shadowy grey as they entered the parking garage of the hotel.

“Nestor’s going with me, but Antonio will be here along with…” Daya tuned out as he named the guards that would stay in San Diego with her.

“They’ll take you home in the morning.” She nodded, gathering her bearings as the driver parked.

“Will you be there?”

“I’ll try.” She was disappointed in his answer, but at least he wasn’t getting her hopes up.

Antonio opened her door, and she accepted his warm, calloused hand as she stepped out of the vehicle.

Miguel met her halfway at the back of the truck, opening his arms for a hug. She stepped into them, the smell of his signature cologne washing over her. It relaxed her, and she forced herself to enjoy the moment. She was annoyed at her husband, but she loved him and wanted to appreciate every moment with him.

“Be good.” He whispered in her ear, tone gentle, but serious.

“I can’t make any promises.”

Antonio averted his gaze, turning his back to them. Nestor and the guards followed, choosing instead to focus on different parts of the garage. There were plenty of shadows for a person to hide in, and the couple needed privacy.

Miguel’s arms tightened around her waist, squeezing to let her know he was serious.

“You heard what I said.”

Before she could get a smart response out, she felt his manhood poking against her belly. Miguel wasn’t a tyrant, but he liked to play King of the Jungle sometimes; backing her into corners, and giving her silly ultimatums that he knew she’d rebel against. It was a fun game because it elicited a carnal response in both of them to fight for dominance.

“Be good or else I’m going to have to spank this fat ass.” She gasped as his hands cupped her ass. He squeezed the fat in his hands before jiggling it.

Daya moaned quietly, pinching her plump bottom lip under her teeth.

“You’ve told me what’s behind door number one. Now, what do I get for being a good girl? ‘Cause I have to say door number one doesn’t sound so bad right now.”

He pretended to think, cocking his head to the side. “What’s the saying, ‘happy husband, happy life’?”

Daya pressed a kiss to his chin. “That’s definitely not the saying, but fine. I’ll be good, but you owe me a foot massage for skipping out early.”

“I thought I owed you one because of the heels.”

“Thanks for reminding me.” She would also have to pack his luggage for him. “Three. You’re in the hole for three foot massages, mister. I expect full payment by the end of the month. Got it?” There were plenty of people with better massage skills than her husband, but for some reason, they felt better when they came from him.

“I have no idea how you calculated three, but yes ma’am. I miss you already, conejita.”

Her arms circled his neck, pulling him for a kiss. “I miss you more."

Years of learning each other made it so they were in sync when their lips met, stoking fires in each other that wouldn't be extinguished any time soon.

“I. Love. You.” She told him in between greedy pecks. “Call me when you get a chance, ‘kay?” He nodded, understanding she meant for him to call when he reached the border. She would probably be asleep by the time he made it there, but it made her feel better when he checked in.

“I love you too.”

Entering the luxurious penthouse suite, the first thing Daya did was free herself from the designer death traps disguised as shoes.

There were plenty of amenities for her to enjoy— a jacuzzi style bathtub, and a spacious balcony with a breathtaking view of the bayfront. She intended to make the most of her time alone.

After assuring Antonio she was in for the night and wouldn't need his services, she stripped down to her birthday suit and ran a bubble bath.

The purple bottle was nearly finished from all the bubble baths she'd taken during the week. Whiffs of the lavender essential oil flowed up through her nose as she eased herself down into the rectangular tub. Powerful jets massaged her aching muscles with hot water, washing the day away.

Her hair sat in a messy bun on top of her head, loose strands clinging to her neck. Sweat beaded on her forehead and her hair puffed up with frizz, but she didn't let it bother her.

Old school R&B played on her phone. She could barely hear it over the sound of the jets, but she crooned right along with the singer enthusiastically.

Eventually, the water was too cool to stand and she was forced to get out. With wrinkled palms, she dried herself off with the fluffy white towel.

Wrapping it around her midsection, she settled into the low chair of the vanity. It took some time, but she carefully removed her makeup and moisturized her skin.

Staring at herself in the mirror without all the bells and whistles was always a little humbling. It felt dramatic, like she was in a cheesy coming of age movie or something, but it was eye-opening. So much of her time was spent pretending for others—dressing her body up, and her personality down.

The exclusive parties and expensive accessories were fun, but they weren't everything. Most people that came across her thought she was superficial, but in reality, she was the opposite. She would never be able to convince them otherwise and that was fine.

The people that knew her understood her, and that was all that mattered. She had a close-knit, but complicated relationship with her friend group. Most of them had known each other for years, so there were layers to their relationships.

Daya, her very best friend, Ariel Castillo, and Ezekiel Reyes made up the core group.

The three of them met freshman year when Daya moved to Santo Padre. Along with the pressures of going to a new school, she had to deal with being the small fry in a group of big fish. Ariel and Ezekiel had been there to make the experience bearable. They connected through honor classes and bonded over their shared desire to go somewhere else, and be someone different.

Miraculously, all of them ended up stuck in Santo Padre.

Ariel received a full-ride scholarship to UCLA. She made it through the first year and a half, completing all her core courses, but then her father got sick. She came home to take care of him, but couldn't bring herself to leave again when he got better. So she settled, forgot her dreams of being a surgeon, and went to nursing school. Ariel was great at her job, the best Santo Padre Medical had to offer, but it hadn't been her dream.

Ezekiel hadn't even made it through his first year of college when his mother was shot and killed in his father's store. Her unexpected death made him spiral, sending him on a witch hunt to find out who was responsible. One thing led to another and he made a fatal mistake that ended him up in prison for eight years.

Daya never left Santo Padre for college. She was good with academics in high school, but always had a passion for art. Her mother didn't have any money to put towards college, and she wasn't particularly excited about spending another four years in school. So, she did what she was good at, designing web pages for business owners around Santo Padre.

It didn't pay great, but it allowed her to make connections. People were impressed with her work and shared it with their friends and partners. With a stroke of good luck, she was able to form the connections and save the money to start her own web development and design company. In thirteen years' time, she expanded the business across California from Santo Padre to Los Angeles, becoming one of the most popular and successful in its industry. Daya had touched more money than she ever thought possible.

She had traveled for a while, creating new stations took time and a lot of energy. In between, she went on trips out of the country, learning about new cultures and customs. It was hard to do with a growing business, but the experiences were worth it.

Eventually, she met Miguel, a kindred spirit who wished to be anywhere but Santo Padre. It was ironic that it was the very place they were both forced to settle. Miguel out of duty, Daya out of love and stability.

People came to Santo Padre from the north, south, east, and west. From Northern Cali, Arizona, or Mexico. The quaint town was like a vortex, drawing people towards it from all sides. Most were smart enough to pass through, but those that stopped stayed forever.

GENERAL TAGLIST:

@woahitslucyylu @briannab1234 @sheeshgivemeabreak @breakingnewsin-no-oneasked @angelreyesgirl @blessedboo @glimmerglittergirl @apantherinmypastlife @brownsugarcoffy @marvelmaree @starrynite7114 @scuzmunkie @thewarriorprincessxo @ifoundmyhappythought @sadeyesgf @pearlkitten33 @imanerdychubbyqueen @literaturefeen @thesandbeneathmytoes

“DEARLY DEPARTED” TAGLIST:

@buttercup812 @princesscornbread @oa-zidan @tian-monique @lovebennycolon @aria725

#mayans mc #miguel galindo #miguel galindo x black!oc #miguel galindo x black oc #miguel galindo x reader #please let me know what you think

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kyber-crystal · 4 years

Text

united we stand || s.r

summary: in which you, sam, steve, and natasha are forced to go on the run after civil war. unfortunately, being a fugitive with government officials out for his blood doesn’t seem to stop the great captain america from falling even more in love with you.

words: ~2.5k

warnings: slight angst, sam and natasha being matchmakers, fluff

a/n: OMG IM SORRY THIS ONE WAS SO POORLY WRITTEN ADLFJDSF

It doesn't have to come down to this, Tony. Look what you're doing. You're tearing the Avengers apart."

"You did that when you sided with Cap, Y/N."

"What do we do now?"

"We fight."

"He's my friend."

"So was I."

"He killed our parents, Y/N. And you're still willing to take his side? I thought I could trust you. But I guess I can't even rely on my own judgement anymore to make decisions, can I?"

Your heart hammered against your ribcage as you jumped from rooftop to rooftop, a dull ache forming at the edges of your skull due to all the thoughts rushing around in your brain and narrowly escaping a flurry of over two dozen of General Ross's men.

Guilt settled in the pit of your stomach, making your insides churn. You turned against the last family you had left, and now you were paying the price.

You're one hundred percent sure that Tony hates your guts at this point. Leaving your brother for someone else; what had you become?

"What now?" Sam asked, looking around and sending Redwing out to survey your surroundings for any other agents that could be approaching. "What's our next step?"

"We gotta catch a train. Belfast's no longer safe for us," Steve panted as he slid his shield over his back, trying to catch his breath. "Our safety's already compromised as it is."

"Nat's gonna go get the tickets, I'll buy us some disguises. We're less likely to be recognized because you guys are all suited up with your wings and shield," you explained. "Wait here."

A few minutes later you were all dressed inconspicuously in your new disguises, looking like the other civilians that were walking around. You didn't have enough time to check the sizes of the clothing, so Steve ended up wearing some jeans and a light grey T-shirt that was about a size too small for him, outlining every inch of his toned torso.

You quickly tore your gaze away before anyone noticed you staring. Sam caught this, however, and sent you a little wink. You glared at him in response.

"The next train to Glasgow leaves in nine. We gotta hurry," Natasha said as she handed you your tickets. "Come on."

Luckily you weren't recognized as the ticket holder came around, though you tried to keep your heads down low when she passed by.

"It's a 14 hour ride. You fellas might wanna relax, take a nap or something," she said, reclining her seat back and closing her eyes. "We won't be arriving until early tomorrow morning."

You relaxed in your seat, the tension in your muscles loosening a bit. But Steve saw the distressed look in your eyes and placed a gentle hand on top of yours.

"You alright?"

"Could be better, I mean, it's not like I chose to be a fugitive on the run from the entire world," you joked, but the smirk on your face quickly fell. "No. I'm not."

"It's going to be okay, you know. Things'll work out in the end."

"I sure hope so."

You fell into an awkward silence after that, resting your chin on your hand as you stared out ahead, watching the rolling hills whiz by in a blur, the vibrant green a sharp contrast to the powdery blue sky. Ireland was a beautiful country, really. You wished you could stay longer purely for the sake of admiring all the lovely scenery.

"You know, if you just want to talk about anything, we can do that. 14 hours is a pretty long train ride," he finally spoke up about an hour later. Sam was fast asleep at this point, mouth opened slightly as his head rested on Natasha's shoulder, who was sleeping as well.

"Yeah, it is. But we've had worse days, right?"

"We have," Steve agreed.

So you just talked, about whatever came to your minds. Your childhood, your past before joining the Avengers Initiative where you'd previously served as one of SHIELD's top agents for several years, Steve's life back in the 40's before becoming a super-soldier, how much things changed over the years. About past missions.

Soon enough you felt your eyelids droop heavily from fatigue. He noticed your tiredness and reached out his right arm, gently wrapping it around you and pulling you towards his side, encircling you completely in his warm embrace. Slowly but steadily, your muscles began to release the tension in them and you leaned into his touch.

"Why don't you get some shut-eye. We have plenty of time to talk when we arrive."

"Mhm," you mumbled sleepily. He smiled, brushing a few stray hairs away from your face as you drifted off.

...

"Good morning ladies and gentlemen, this is our final stop. We have arrived at Glasgow Central Station," the conductor's voice announced over the intercom as the train began slowing down. "The weather is currently 59 degrees, and it is 5:27 a.m."

"Wake up, lovebirds," Natasha clapped as you stirred slightly, looking confused as you raised your head from where it rested against Steve's chest. "Time to get going."

You yawned and stood up, stepping off onto the platform into the station, surprisingly busy at the crack of dawn. You really just wanted to curl back up into a ball and sleep. Talking for four hours straight with Steve had knocked you out completely.

After getting new SIM cards, Sam quickly created an account to get you checked into a hotel.

"It's a half hour walk. We should probably limit public transportation as much as we can," he stated as he slid his phone into his jacket pocket. "Managed to snag a 40% off deal including a free night, so we're good for the next few weeks until we get an actual apartment."

"You know," Natasha commented, adjusting her baseball cap and aviators as you made your way outside down the bustling street, "if we weren't currently trying to flee from the government's grasp, I'd say I'd wanna come back here for a vacation. And that's on nice architecture."

"With us?" you raised an eyebrow.

"Why not? You're pretty good company. I wouldn't wanna hang out with anyone else."

"Well, what can I say?" Sam puffed up his chest. "I'm smooth with the ladies."

You simply laughed. "Yeah, sure you are."

Glasgow was a breathtaking city. With sprawling Victorian style buildings and cobblestone roads, brightly labeled bars and restaurants, it appeared as if it was pulled straight from a rustic 19th-century painting.

You checked into your hotel after grabbing some food from the nearby bakery. For a cheap price, your room was surprisingly simple but large: a king bed in one room, a pullout couch, and a small balcony so you could stand outside and take in the view of the city.

Despite having no time zone difference between Ireland and Scotland, you were still extremely jet-lagged, most likely due to the flight you'd taken over to Berlin not long ago. After binge-watching reruns of some sitcom for the rest of the day, you fell asleep, clutching your pillow tightly.

Natasha and Sam had good eyes, and could clearly see something was going on between you and Steve.

The truth was, you wanted something to happen but both of you were too chicken to make a move, thinking being in relationship while on the run was inconvenient and unnecessary.

The first few days passed by relatively quickly. You only really went out to buy groceries, and even then you went two at a time to avoid drawing unwanted attention to yourselves. Once, you treated yourselves to a night out at a nice restaurant, enjoying each others' company. It was a way to forget about your currently unfortunate situation.

...

But then the nightmares began.

You swung your legs over the edge of the bed after waking up in a cold sweat, heading over to the bathroom. Everyone had already gone to sleep long ago, and you envied people like Sam as he could knock out cold almost as soon as his head hit the pillow.

Staring at your ghostly reflection in the mirror, you squeezed your eyes shut, releasing tears that cascaded down your flushed cheeks in a hot flood. You ran trembling fingers through your messy hair in an attempt to tame it, taking a brief look at your disheveled appearance. The heavy dark circles underneath your bloodshot eyes that were a result of hardly sleeping over the past week were clear, as well as your sunken cheekbones and deathly pale complexion.

You studied the woman that looked back at you, with the same unnerving and hollowed out gaze that she'd worn for years; a façade she learned to develop so that nobody could see when she felt weak; helpless.

Ten days.

Only ten days had passed since you arrived in Scotland, yet it seemed as if you aged ten years during that short amount of time. Small creases in between your brows indicated stress and anxiety from leaving everything you knew behind, for a future you could barely see ahead of. For a life that held an endless amount of consequences if you took one misstep, one wrong move.

Your body felt heavy, weighed down as if you carried the weight of a thousand men upon your aching shoulders. You didn't know what to do; what to think anymore.

You didn't look thirty-two anymore, you looked older. Almost as old as Tony. And there was a 10+ year age gap between you and him.

God, Tony.

You betrayed him. The last living member of your family on earth, and you betrayed him.

Turned your back on him, because you didn't believe in the same ideas. Was it really worth turning your back on your own blood just because of a disagreement?

I thought I could trust you.

I thought I could, too. But I guess things don't always work out as planned, do they?

They don't. I don't even know what I can say to you anymore. Hell, I can't look at you without seeing a traitor. You turned your back on all of us, and that's unforgivable.

The Accords, you know I couldn't sign them. It isn't right. I'm fighting for what I believe in.

No, you're fighting for Steve, not yourself. Always running over to precious Cap even if it costs you your safety, if it costs you everything and everyone you ever loved. Because you think that you can rely on him and him alone, to get through this. You won't get very far by keeping this act up, you know.

News flash; the world doesn't revolve around you, Tony. Just because someone doesn't agree with what you believe, doesn't mean you have to tear their team, their family, apart for it.

You're blaming me?

Maybe I am.

"What are you doing up this late?"

Steve's voice jolted you from your train of thought, and you looked up to see him leaning against the doorframe dressed in sweats and another tight-fitting T-shirt, his blue eyes scanning over you worriedly.

"I could ask you the same thing."

"I'm fine, if that's what you're wondering. I'm just a bit jet-lagged," you muttered, hastily wiping away another stray tear that escaped. He pushed himself off the wall and caught your wrist as you were bringing your hand down, tugging you towards him slightly.

"Tell me what's going on."

"I'm fine!"

"No, you're not. What's wrong, Y/N?"

"I..." your voice faltered. You didn’t even realize you’d started crying until you felt your face grow wet from the salty tears that rolled silently into your cracked lips. "I don't know. Everything's wrong."

"Everything?"

"I made a mistake."

"What do you mean, mistake?"

"I turned my back against Tony. My family. I betrayed my own family, Steve." Your voice cracked. "And now I can't even guarantee that I'll ever see him again."

"You did what you had to do," he said softly, placing a hand on your shoulder. You felt your skin burning up under his touch. "You were just trying to do what you felt was right."

"Yeah, by teaming up with the side of the man who killed my parents. I can't imagine what he even thinks of me right now."

A look of hurt briefly passed over Steve's face at the mention of Bucky.

"...But I know their deaths were out of his control, so I don't blame him," you continued. "Still..I hurt him. And now, I have to live with knowing that fact." "Look, I'm sorry."

"What?"

You looked up and met his gaze, feeling his bright blue eyes boring into yours. He didn't seem upset or angry at all; there was an eerie softness and calming feeling about the way he looked at you that made you relax a bit.

"I shouldn't have dragged you into this mess. I never wanted you to have this kind of life; where you're always living in uncertainty. You deserve better than that."

"It's not your fault at all," you swallowed hard. Talking and breathing grew increasingly difficult with the sob that was building up in the back of your throat, that you tried desperately to conceal for so long, "it's mine. I made that decision to side with you, not only because I couldn't stand the idea of signing the Accords. So it's...it's on me. God, I don't know what to do anymore, I can't—"

A wave of grief suddenly hit you from all sides, causing you to keel over, sliding down against the cold wall with a hand clutching your stomach as an agonized scream tear itself through your body and out of your throat. And you were drowning; suffocated by your own tears as you struggled to breathe. You tried desperately to stop them but nothing could seem to hold back the heavy sobs that wracked your body, clawing at your lungs and heart.

Steve crouched down in front of you and pulled you against him, arms tightening around your body with each cry that escaped your lips. In that moment he wanted nothing more than to take all your sadness and frustration and grief and put it upon himself, to carry the weight on his shoulders so he wouldn't have to watch you endure the pain. He'd much rather have to suffer himself than watch you try and bear the burden and fall to pieces in the process.

Seeing you breaking down before him with your gut-wrenching cries that echoed across the small space, more vulnerable than you'd ever been in front of him before, made it feel as if someone was directly ripping his heart right out of his chest and tearing it into a thousand pieces with their bare hands.

"Hey, it's okay," he whispered soothingly as he pressed his lips to the side of your temple, "it's okay. I've got you. You're gonna be okay."

Despite how you felt as if your heart was twisting itself into knots, there was something comforting about the way he held you ever so gently in his arms, the way his warm breath fell against his neck as one arm was firmly hooked around your waist, running his free hand through your hair.

So for a moment, you allowed yourself to believe that there was no one else in the world except for just you and him, holding you close, and that everything was fine, even if the feeling only lasted for a second.

#steve rogers x reader #avengers x reader #captain america imagine #marvel fic #avengers fanfiction #steve rogers one shot #captain america one shot #captain america fanfiction #steve rogers fanfiction #steve rogers x you #captain america x reader

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malaysiankpopfans · 4 years

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8 RISING K-DRAMA ACTORS TO KEEP YOUR EYES ON

Meet your new favorite actors!

There are so many handsome rising actors to take notice of these days. Many of them have been steadily building up their experience and taking on more lead roles. You’ll definitely be seeing more of them in the future. Check out some actors who are ready to become household names below!

Lee Jae-wook

Lee Jae-wook made his debut less than two years ago through Memories of the Alhambra. He also made quite an impression through his role as Lee Da-hee’s love interest in Search WWW. With subsequent roles, such as in Extraordinary You, the young actor has continued to be a chameleon embracing very different characters. Lee Jae-wook has definitely hit his stride and nabbed his first lead role through Do Do Sol Sol La La Sol. His latest character is also quite swoon-worthy!

Lee Do-hyun

Lee Do-hyun stacked up experience through roles in Prison Playbook, Still 17, and Clean With Passion for Now. His breakthrough role thus far was definitely his character in Hotel Del Luna. The actor was able to portray duality with his character Go Cheong-myeong being a fierce fighter and a cute friend. His character received an immense amount of love due to his emotional acting and heartbreaking circumstances. You’ll be able to see more of him in 18 Again and Sweet Home.

Rowoon

Rowoon made his debut as a member of boy group SF9 in 2016. He made his TV debut through School 2017 and has been acting more and more prominent roles. After portraying supporting characters on About Time and Where Stars Land, Rowoon got his first lead role through Extraordinary You. As the story in Extraordinary You progresses, Rowoon shows great range in his acting from being innocent and cute to experiencing great turmoil and sadness. Rowoon will make his drama comeback with Senior, Don’t Put on That Lipstick in 2021.

Jang Dong-yoon

Jang Dong-yoon actually got into acting after being on the news for catching a thief in a convenience store. He made an impression through his solid acting in many dramas including School 2017, Mr. Sunshine, and more. However, his role in The Tale of Nokdu really solidified his bankability as a lead actor. In addition to his convincing and hilarious cross-dressing, Jang Dong-yoon is adept at channeling emotions. As for his next project, he’ll be acting alongside Krystal in Search.

Byeon Woo-seok

Byeon Woo-seok is a model turned actor who has been accumulating experience with roles in multiple web dramas, Dear My Friends, and Search WWW. He further got on K-drama fans’ rader through Flower Crew: Joseon Marriage Agency where he impressed with his seriously handsome looks. These days, there's a lot more attention on Byeon Woo-seok with his role in Record of Youth acting opposite of Park Bo-gum and Park So-dam. The good-looking star has a promising future in the works!

Kim Kyung-nam

Kim Kyung-nam debuted as a theater actor in 2012 and started acting in dramas in 2017. He has pulled off numerous roles in popular dramas including Defendant, Strongest Deliveryman, and Prison Playbook. Through his larger roles in Where Stars Land and The King: Eternal Monarch, the actor has received more love and recognition. From nerdy baseball superfan to tortured detective, Kim Kyung-nam has a lot more to show us. He’s currently in talks for the male lead role of upcoming historical drama Red Cuff of the Sleeve.

Kim Seon-ho

Kim Seon-ho has the most experience of the actors on this list having debuted as a theater actor in 2009. He made his TV debut through Good Manager and quickly got larger roles in Strongest Deliveryman and Two Cops. Having shown his versatility through different characters, Kim Seon-ho especially shines when he displays his comedic chops, as evinced by Welcome to Waikiki 2. His star will be shining even brighter with his upcoming role in Start-Up opposite Bae Suzy and Nam Joo-hyuk.

Song Kang

Song Kang debuted in 2017 through The Liar and His Lover as a friend who experiences one-sided love. His breakthrough project was definitely Love Alarm where he portrayed model Hwang Sun-oh. Song Kang’s popularity soared as viewers worldwide fell in love with him and his character. Therefore, it’s no surprise that there’s great anticipation for Love Alarm 2. Furthermore, Song Kang will be taking on a completely different character in the webtoon-based drama Sweet Home.

Which of these rising K-drama actors have you fallen for? Watch their breakthrough dramas on Netflix!

#LeeJaeWook #LeeDoHyun #Rowoon #JangDongYoon #ByeonWooSeok #KimKyungNam #KimSeonHo #SongKang #Netflix #KDrama #article

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mighty-ant · 5 years

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Déjà Vu

Drake can’t remember the last time he was in this much pain, and as a former stuntman that’s saying something.

His body aches like a steamroller passed over it, backed up, and crushed him again. His head pounds with the very distinct pain of a head injury, which Drake is unfortunately all too familiar with. But it’s worse than any concussion he’s ever had. His skull is cracking down the middle like an egg, as if someone tapped his crown against the edge of a kitchen countertop. The splitting pain only worsens when he opens his eyes. It’s not especially bright—he assumes their filming one of the night scenes—but any stimulation is painful at this point.

When Drake manages a squint he makes out what looks like a lab setup. There are beakers and shiny metal tables and things bubbling and blinking, and looming over him is a tall, wicked looking device with a screen attached to its hinged, metal arm. When he tries to rub his eyes he realizes he’s been restrained, his wrists and ankles strapped to the examination table beneath him.

He doesn’t remember any scene calling for a hokey mad scientist’s lab, but maybe he missed something in the latest script revision.

Drake’s ears are ringing like someone’s hit him upside the head with an aluminum baseball bat but he still hears a voice, muffled like it’s coming from another room. It steadily grows louder, though the words are no more distinguishable, until a face fills his vision and a shock of red hair breaks up the gloom. The man, tall and barrel-chested, is still talking to him, eyes wide and terrified and so breathtakingly relieved that it feels like a punch to the gut. Drake is too weak to turn his head, but he feels the man undo the straps around his wrists, then his ankles. But even once he’s freed, Drake’s limbs weigh heavily on the table and he doesn’t have the energy to move.

He wonders what even happened to knock him out cold in the first place.

The man’s movements become more frantic. His hands are shaking, and Drake surmises he’s no paramedic. He squeezes Drake’s arm, cups the side of his face. His beak is still moving, but he can’t hear it over the ringing in his head. But something about the intimacy of the gesture shocks him out of his indolent state, and like a drowning man yanked back to the surface, the world rushes up to meet him.

“DW, can you hear me? Are you hurt?”

Movement behind the stranger briefly distracts Drake, and he looks past the man to see men and women in crisp, dark suits flooding into the room. Several of them are carrying guns, others large black cases.

“It’s—it’s just SHUSH. They helped me find you,” the man says, stuttering. Louder, he shouts, “Hey, I need a doctor over here or something!”

The room spins, and Drake drops his head back onto the frigid metal table.

“You’re gonna be fine,” the man is saying, “I promise, DW, you’re safe now.”

Exhaustion is crashing down around Drake’s ears, and he can barely keep his eyes open, much less turn to look back at the stranger. Dark spots pepper his vision and he feels more lightheaded than before.

“Drake,” the man says at last, voice breaking.

It’s a devastating sound, and Drake’s gaze snaps back to him almost of its own volition. The man looks like he’s on the verge of tears, and Drake’s chest aches like someone reached inside and gripped his heart in an iron fist. He doesn’t understand his immediate reaction to the stranger’s pain. But something compels him to reach up with an arm that feels as though it has a two-ton weight attached to it, and grip the hand that is stilled pressed to his cheek.

“You’re going to be okay,” the man says, his teary expression steely, his smile trembling. “I’m here, Drake.”

Drake finally musters the energy to reply, voice barely above a whisper.

“Who are you again?”

The last thing he sees before he loses consciousness is the stranger drawing away, the confusion on his face giving way to dawning horror.

When Drake opens his eyes again, his head is still pounding though not as strongly as before.

The room he’s in is brightly lit, and its takes his eyes a moment to adjust. His other senses return swiftly, unlike before. The smell of antiseptic, the constant beeping of a nearby heart monitor, the cotton-like taste in his mouth that comes from being unconscious for a long period of time. He didn’t realize how muted everything was before, in the dark, dank laboratory. He wonders, wildly, how drugged he’d been.

He’s laying on a bed now, not an operating table; he can feel the light weight of blankets over his legs. When he moves there are no restraints.

“You’re perfectly safe, Mr. Mallard,” a voice says above him.

Startled, Drake opens his eyes again, not realizing he’d closed them. Standing over his bed is a tall hen in a lab coat, her dark hair pulled into a bun. She meets his perplexed gaze shrewdly behind small round glasses.

“Who…” Drake starts to say, looking around the room. It’s nondescript, in the way all hospital rooms are. “Where am I?’

“Dr. Sara Bellum,” she replies, glancing down at the tablet in her hands. “And you’re in the medical wing of SHUSH Central Command.”

“Okay,” Drake says slowly. “And where’s that?”

“Classified.”

“Hey, you’re awake.”

The man who found him enters the room. Though he’s smiling and his voice is gentle, there’s a worn, tired edge to him. He practically flops into the lone chair beside the bed, close enough for Drake to reach out and touch him if he wanted to. The man’s red hair is messy under the baseball hat and his clothes look rumpled and slept in.

Drake tries to sit up. He doesn’t like the idea of lying in his hospital bed like he’s sicker or weaker than he his, especially while others talk over him. But his limbs are shakier than he expected, and his arms won’t fully support him.

There’s a hand on his arm, and the man is helping guide him up. He doesn’t offer platitudes or insulting reassurances, nor does he do all the work. He’s only a steadying presence, a helping hand literally and figuratively. He smiles when Drake is able to prop himself up against the pillows, and it lights up his entire face, gentling the lines of exhaustion around his eyes.

Apropos of nothing, Drake thinks he’s beautiful. He hardly understands it, but the sight of this stranger fills him with a sense of rightness, an overwhelming fondness that he has no reasoning behind. He felt it before, in the cold, dark room with the restraints and his head splitting open from so much pain. He felt calm the moment the man appeared, despite there being so much to be afraid of.

It’s happening again now. Any nervousness he might’ve felt in an unfamiliar place, with a stranger giving cryptic answers to his questions, fades the moment the man walks into the room.

Drake smiles at him, though he isn’t sure why.

“Who are you?” he asks again.

The man’s smile falls like Drake slapped it off his face.

In a rush, guilt floods him with enough force to make his breath catch. He fights the urge to apologize for something he scarcely understands. Drake doesn’t know him, after all.

The man bounces back painfully quick, albeit with his smile dimmed.

“I guess they weren’t able to fix things, huh?” he asks with a wry smile, but Drake is certain he isn’t imagining the blink-and-you-miss-it flash of grief in his eyes.

“Brains aren’t computers,” Dr. Bellum butts in acerbically, “you can’t reupload files and ‘fix’ them. They’re complex and delicate and strange.”

They look at Drake at the same time, and discomfort prickles the back of his neck at being the sudden center of attention.

“Mr. Mallard,” Dr. Bellum begins, “what’s the last thing you remember?”

The man leans forward, as if in anticipation.

“Um,” Drake scrambles for what to say, searching his memory. Everything feels distant and out of focus like happened a long time ago. “I was in my trailer. We were getting ready to film my first scene with Megavolt.”

The man falls back in his seat, looking stunned. He doesn’t take his wide eyes off Drake’s face.

Dr. Bellum scowls and punches something into her tablet.

Drake is struck with the feeling that he’s failed a test for a class he can’t remember signing up for. “What’s going on?” he demands. There’s a pit opening in his gut, and he feels his abdomen tumble in, his lungs and heart following it into the yawning abyss.

The man tears his gaze away from Drake to look at Dr. Bellum. Dr. Bellum looks back at him. After a prolonged staring contest, he shakes his head.

“You were in an accident,” Dr. Bellum says eventually. “We believe you have temporary amnesia.”

“You believe I have temporary amnesia?” Drake repeats incredulously.

“Oh no, we know you have amnesia,” Dr. Bellum replies immediately. “It’s the temporary part we’re unsure of.”

“I…” Drake trails off with no idea what to say. What can he say? He swallows tightly, curling and uncurling his fingers. “Do you...do you know how much time I’m missing?” he asks the man, rather than Dr. Bellum. He doesn’t allow himself to think about why.

The man grimaces, looking as lost as Drake feels. He rubs the back of his neck and doesn’t look Drake in the eye when he quietly replies, “Two years.”

Drake’s breath leaves him in a rush, and he’s left feeling hollow.

Two years. Who is he now? What happened to the movie? His life? How did he go from stuntman, to landing the role of a lifetime, to then being the sort of man who wakes up in a mad scientist’s lab and receives treatment in clandestine locations?

“How did this even happen?” he asks numbly.

The man opens his beak, looking like he’s about to answer, when Dr. Bellum stops him with a raised hand. Her other hand is pressed to her ear, where Drake realizes she must have a hidden earpiece.

“That’s classified,” she tells Drake. Over his affronted sputtering, she says to the man, “Your presence is required at the entrance. Agent 22 just arrived.”

The man frowns, straightening in his seat. “I’m not leaving,” he declares.

Dr. Bellum is unamused. “Agent 22 didn’t arrive alone,” she stresses.

Whatever she’s trying to say, it clearly takes a moment for him to understand the connotation. When it clicks he nearly jumps with how abruptly he stands up, pushing his chair back at least a foot. His face is ashen, Drake notes with worry.

“Tell them I’m on my way,” he says in a rush. He clearly makes to leave, but hesitates over Drake’s confused expression. “I’ll be right back,” he says, and his smile lessens the tension in the air.

For lack of a response, Drake just nods.

He ducks out of the room, leaving Drake alone with Dr. Bellum.

“So,” he says. “Agents, huh? Was—am I a spy?”

Dr. Bellum’s poking angrily at her tablet again, and she glares at him out of the corner of her eye. That feels familiar too, like the man’s smile, but nowhere near as nice.

“That guy,” Drake says, looking down at his hands. There’s a scar on his thumb that wasn’t there two years ago. “Who is he?”

He doesn’t know if Dr. Bellum would’ve answered his question this time because there’s a commotion outside his hospital room. He hears running footsteps and several voices bark some version of, “HEY! This is a restricted area!”

A child responds, their voice fainter than the others like they’re being led further away.

“You have to let me see him! He’s my dad, you can’t do this! Just let me see him! Please!”

They sound distraught. More than that, they sound devastated and angry; they sound like they’re in tears.

Before Drake knows what he’s doing he’s started climbing out of bed, nevermind how his knees immediately begin to shake, still too weak to support his weight. His heart is roaring, and his body screams at him to move, to follow their sounds of obvious distress. He doesn’t understand what he’s feeling, or why, but he feels compelled to...comfort the child? See for himself that they’re safe?

“What do you think you’re doing?” Dr. Bellum snaps. Drake freezes, and she manhandles him, startlingly gentle, back into bed. “You’re conscious, not healed. You still need time to recover.”

“But—the kid,” he starts to say, stammering. He doesn’t understand his reaction, which hasn’t gone away but changes instead . Now grief and guilt pool in the center of his chest, weighing him down against the bed.

Dr. Bellum looks at the door, a pinched look to her face that it takes him a moment to recognize as remorse. “You’re not the only one who’s lost something tonight,” is all she says.

When Drake wakes up for a third time, he suspects it’s night.

There isn’t much about his surroundings that lend credence to that idea. The lights in his hospital room are dimmed, but that could just be because he was sleeping. There are no windows, so it’s impossible to tell the time of day regardless. But something innate inside Drake, something new and strange to be added to the growing list of new and strange things, tells him that it is very late indeed.

A snore tears through the tentative peace of his room, and Drake jumps. The heart monitor he didn’t notice he was still attached to blips sharply in accord, but quickly levels out when he sees who’s in the room with him.

The man from all the times before, whose name Drake still doesn’t know, is here again. He’s in the same chair as before, slumped forward on the side of the bed with his head pillowed on his folded arms. His broad shoulders rise and fall with every deep breath, broken up by the occasional snore and Drake can see the barest glimpse of his face, blank and relaxed in sleep.

“He insisted on leaving the EKG on, should your health take an unexpected and highly unlikely dive,” a new voice says in a polished British accent, one that prods at the back of his mind with its familiarity.

But the voice rises out of the darkness, and unlike the man it immediately puts Drake on the defensive. His body reacts before he can put conscious thought behind it, and he reaches for something at his right side that isn’t there. He feels off-kilter when his hand closes around empty air, and that makes no sense. He’s never carried a weapon of any sort, barring the gas gun prop for the movie.

Obscured in the shadows of an already dark room is an older duck, tall and with enough muscle mass to give the man beside Drake a run for his money. She coolly raises a brow in observation of his antics.

“Well,” she says, “it’s good to know you haven’t completely lost yourself.”

“Who are you?” Drake demands, keeping his voice low. “Where am I? And—were you watching me sleep?”

“Bentina Beakley,” she says, crossing her arms with casual grace. “You may call me Mrs. Beakley. You’re in the medical wing of SHUSH Central Command, in Duckburg. And yes.”

Drake gapes, scrambling for something to say and affronted by her matter-of-fact tone. But a crack appears in her austere expression in the form of a small, wry smile, and he relinquishes the battle with a heavy sigh. He rubs his brow carefully. His headache is nowhere as fierce as before, but now it’s lingering just beneath the surface, a snake in the grass.

“I don’t suppose you could explain what happened to me,” he mutters sardonically, keeping his voice low to avoid waking the stranger beside him. “Or is that still classified?”

Mrs. Beakley frowns. “It never was. But there are...certain individuals in this organization who believe you need protection on account of your current condition.”

She doesn’t even look at the stranger asleep on the side of his bed, but Drake does. He takes his eyes off her to study the man who insists on a heart monitor Drake doesn’t need and refuses to leave his bedside besides.

“What happened to me?” Drake asks, turning back to Mrs. Beakley.

“You were kidnapped,” she replies bluntly. “We searched for you for three days before we discovered Major Synapse was the one responsible. From there it was ridiculously easy to find his secret lab, and you in it.”

Drake is stunned silent for several long moments.

“Why-why me?” he breathes, reaching up to bury his hand in his hair. “I’m just an actor. What could, what I can only assume is a supervillain, want with me?”

Mrs. Beakley laughs, a startled burst of sound. It’s quickly stifled, but she smiles behind the hand she’s raised to her beak. “I’m sorry,” she says, not sounding very sorry at all, “but do you think a clandestine spy organization would go to such lengths to rescue ‘just an actor’?”

Drake opens his beak to retort. Closes it again. Finally, he snaps, “So, what, I’m a spy or something?”

This time Mrs. Beakley does look at the man sleeping on Drake’s bed. “Or something,” she replies. “Major Synapse was experimenting with technology meant to alter a person’s hippocampus when he was dishonorably discharged. He picked his work back up in St. Canard, kidnapping citizens off the street and returning them with entire chunks of their lives missing. You were getting too close, so he kidnapped you and did the same to you so you wouldn’t be a problem anymore.”

Drake’s mouth goes bone dry and his heart beats a rough tattoo under his breastbone. He doesn’t remember any of this, Major Synapse or the three days he spent a captive or anything else in the two years of his life that have been apparently carved out and stolen from him. But Mrs. Beakley’s explanation incites a sense of panic he has no words for, an existential terror of not knowing who he is, what his life has become, everything so alien compared to what he remembers.

“How do you know all of that?” Drake asks, because it seems like the reasonable next thing.

Mrs. Beakley smiled thinly. “Because we have Major Synapse locked in one of our holding cells.”

“He’s here?” Drake nearly exclaims, remembering last minute to control his volume. “Can he—I don’t know, fix me?”

He feels ridiculous even as he says it, and Dr. Bellum’s words dart through his mind. Brains aren’t computers. You can’t reupload files and ‘fix’ them.

Mrs. Beakley doesn’t respond immediately, and that’s answer enough for Drake. “He insists that the memories either come back on their own, or they don’t,” she still says, all trace of humor erased from her personage like they were never there.

It’s what he expected, but it feels as though he’s sustained a blow to his solar plexus, the air driven from his lungs. He forces himself to take a rattling breath, and then another.

“So, what?” he says shakily, “I just have to go about my life, the one I know nothing about, like everything’s fine?”

Mrs. Beakley looks back at him with an expression almost like pity. “That’s what I came to speak to you about. We don’t know how your amnesia might affect your...well, your family.”

Drake scoffs. “I haven’t spoken to my parents in years.”

“No,” Beakley says, shaking her head minutely, “I’m saying you have a family here, now, Drake. A family you have no memory of.”

He thinks chillingly of the people he’s met, the inexplicable fondness and sense of familiarity he feels for utter strangers. He looks at the man sleeping at his bedside, the baseball hat falling off his head revealing the messy head of red hair beneath. It feels right to have him here, this quiet, gentle person who brings light to every room he’s in, even when he’s sound asleep.

“Who is he?” Drake asks for the fourth time, but this time he says what he really means. “To me, I mean. Who is he to me?”

“Launchpad McQuack,” Beakley says, finally, finally giving him his answer. “Your…” here Mrs. Beakley hesitates. “Your partner.”

Drake’s adrenaline-fueled ire abandons him in a rush, along with his breath, and he sags against the pillows. It’s one thing to suspect, and dare he say hope, but to have it confirmed by another is something entirely different . He hadn’t thought it possible for anything good to come out of this nightmare, but he repeats the words in his head and he can breathe a little easier.

His partner.

That sense of overwhelming fondness fills him once more, the truth of it evident down to his bones, memory or no. Finding love was never something he imagined for himself, too high-strung, too career-driven, but find him it did in the two year span he cannot recall.

As he considers Launchpad’s sleep slackened face, he doesn’t stop to think that Mrs. Beakley might have more to tell him and actively decides against doing so.

Mrs. Beakley vanishes when Drake isn’t paying attention, and he drifts in and out of sleep for a few hours. He still can’t shake the heavy cloak of exhaustion that hangs over him; he assumes it’s a side effect of the apparent mindwiping he went through.

Launchpad is asleep every time Drake wakes up save the last.

He hasn’t realized Drake’s awake yet. He’s leaning forward on the bed, propped up on his elbows and while he’s looking at something on his phone his expression is very far away.

“Hey, Launchpad,” Drake says quietly, trying the name out on his tongue for the first time.

Launchpad startles so badly he drops his phone, hitting Drake’s shin through the blankets. He stares at him, speechless and utterly unmoving, hands still poised in midair.

Drake’s gut twists savagely when he recognizes what he’s done, the terrible hope he’s likely instilled.

“Mrs. Beakley told me your name,” he says in a rush and hates himself for it.

Launchpad’s shoulders drop slowly as the tension that so abruptly suffused him fades in time with his breath.

“Oh,” he replies, quiet and near inflectionless. He rubs the back of his neck, an awkward smile growing on his face. “So, did she tell you—”

“She told me who you are,” Drake interrupts him, trying to meet his eyes. His partner. The fluttering in his rib cage makes him want to take Launchpad’s hand in his own and link their fingers together. But despite what his body is telling him to do, Launchpad is still technically a stranger to him.

“She also told me what happened to me,” he tacks on, glancing away. His gaze lands on Launchpad’s phone, the screen still illuminated with a photo. Eager to avoid the subject of the kidnapping he apparently suffered and cannot remember, he looks a little closer at Launchpad’s phone.

The photo is of Launchpad and a young, red-headed girl at the beach. She’s grinning wide at the camera while Launchpad is buried up to his neck in sand and very obviously asleep.

“Is that your daughter?” Drake asks when his gut swoops at the sight of the girl. It’s not unlike what he experiences when he looks at Launchpad, except now he’s left feeling caught off guard and bereft, like he’s forgotten something terribly, awfully important and should know better.

Launchpad barks a sharp laugh that makes Drake jump. His smile, because Launchpad is always forcing himself to smile around Drake, is something small and tragic. He picks up the phone, the photo vanishing from view. Drake feels a pang he doesn’t understand.

“I wish,” Launchpad replies wryly, but there’s a heaviness to his tone belying some deeper truth.

Suspicion settles over Drake where wariness might once have reigned, and his mind churns with the implications of Launchpad’s words. When he speaks it’s thought his voice has been taken over by another, and he feels more like a detective than an actor when he says, “Why? Is there something wrong with her home life?”

“No,” Launchpad says at once, voice fervent and hoarse, “God, no. She has the best dad in the world.”

It’s strange to feel relief over the life of a stranger, but no less strange than the last day has been. He sags a little into his pillows, running a hand agitatedly through his hair, and wonders when his feelings will leave him less confused.

Launchpad continues to stare at Drake in the aftermath of his outburst, a fist pressed up to his beak. It should feel uncomfortable, being the target such an intense gaze but Drake just looks back at him as the silence between them continues to stretch, like a rubber band pulled taut.

“I was so afraid I’d never see you again,” Launchpad croaks.

Drake flinches. “I’m sorry that I’m...well, that I’m not all here.”

Launchpad laughs again, but it’s more a sob than anything else. “Don’t apologize!”

“But I am sorry,” Drake insists. He gives into the urge that’s dogged him since Mrs. Beakley confirmed everything he felt to be true from the moment he woke in Major Synapse’s lab. Reaching out, he tentatively trails his fingers over the knuckles of Launchpad’s hand that still rests atop the blankets.

“I may not remember you, but my heart does,” he blurts in classic Drake Mallard fashion. He can feel Launchpad begin to stiffen under his hand, and he presses on, “What I mean is that the way I feel about you now is the same way I felt about you when I had my memories. It’s why I trust you; I wouldn’t be this calm in a secret spy base otherwise.”

“How did you feel about me?” Launchpad asks, his voice pitched like it’s a joke, but the smile doesn’t reach his eyes. He’s curled the hand Drake isn’t holding into a trembling fist.

“Well, I loved you,” Drake says, “I do love you.”

And he knows it to be true in that innate way he knows other common sense things; the sky is blue, his name is Drake Mallard, he loves Launchpad McQuack. No memory required to recognize what his heart is already telling him.

Launchpad’s chair screeches against the floor when he throws himself to his feet. He looks stricken, hands shaking at his sides.

“Launchpad, what—” Drake starts to say.

“I should let you rest,” Launchpad steamrolls over him, nearly yelling. “I’ll, um, I’ll see you later.”

“Launchpad,” he exclaims, panic thrumming at the base of his throat.

Before Drake can even start to get out of bed, his partner runs out of the room—runs away from him—without a backward glance.

Dr. Bellum keeps him under observation for the better part of a week, and Drake doesn’t mind as much as he thought he would.

He just wants the gaping hole inside him filled, that missing piece that seems so small in comparison to the rest of his life but feels doubly important. That missing piece makes him a different person than he was two years ago, and he wants that person back. The person who knows what the deal is with SHUSH, the actual spy organization he may be part of. The one who knows Mrs. Beakley and Dr. Bellum, and who knows who else, because the old Drake never really had friends but here, now, not only does he have friends but family.

He wants to be the person who knows Launchpad, the one who fell in love with him, and would know what to do now that Launchpad is avoiding him.

They tell Drake close to nothing about the last two years of his life in the hopes that his memories will come back on their own, uninfluenced by whatever they might tell him. All he knows definitively is that the Darkwing Duck movie never happened (but he doesn’t know why) and Launchpad is his partner (who ran from him and he doesn’t know why).

Drake wants to know who he was. Is. But he isn’t even allowed access to the internet here, and he wants SHUSH’s help too desperately to put up too much of a stink about it. So he endures their physical tests, their MRIs, and sessions with what he swears is a hypnotist, all in the hope that he just wakes up one morning with two years worth of memories slotted right back into place.

He can feel the eyes of other agents on him in the halls as he walks to and from Dr. Bellum’s labs, and hears the tailend of their conversations once he passes out of earshot. More than anything it makes him wonder who he was in SHUSH, if he’s worth being gossiped about and having a manhunt sent after him when he gets kidnapped.

The room they’ve provided him in their super secret headquarters is spartan but better than a hospital room, and it almost comes as a relief after Dr. Bellum’s latest round of tests. There’s a bed and a desk, and a television whose only function is playing DVDs.

On the second day of tests he’d returned to his room to find a stack of DVDs with every episode of Darkwing Duck burned onto them, and no idea who to thank. He watches them in the evening, before and after he braves the cold and empty SHUSH cafeteria.

It takes him back to his childhood, sitting with his face inches from the screen in his hat and purple sheet tied around his neck, watching Darkwing take every form of punishment imaginable and still get back up, feeling just as invincible.

It takes him back to long days on the set of Darkwing: First Darkness, sitting in his trailer in costume and watching episodes in between takes. “For inspiration,” he’d say, but really to act out all of Jim Starling’s lines, copying his poses with his own bonafide gas gun, getting the cadence of Darkwing’s voice down perfectly and fulfilling his every childhood dream.

Watching the episodes now in the dark, bare room SHUSH has offered him, he just mouths along to the words and wonders why the sight of Jim Starling makes his palms sweat anxiously.

While there isn’t a window in his room, there is a screen on the wall that displays a different scenic vista every day and has an automated voice that chirps, “Smile! It’s a beautiful morning!” It makes Drake consider the possibility that the room they’ve given him once functioned as a torture chamber.

Today it’s a photo of tropical beach, golden sand and sparkling water, and Drake scowls at it when it’s the first thing he sees when he opens his door. The screen is especially bright with all the lights off, though Drake can’t recall turning them off.

He becomes aware of the presence of another person in the room just before they speak.

“You know, you should really start locking your door.”

It’s a child’s voice, but unlike the tickle of familiarity he’s experienced with everyone for the last week (save Launchpad) this time it slams into him like a truck. Drake’s heart skips a beat, and the feeling of blunt shock barely fades when he turns to face the intruder.

There’s a young girl slouched in his desk chair, her arms crossed over her chest, the perfect picture of a sullen youth. It’s too dark to take make out the details of her features, but he can see her wavy hair even with the gloom.

“You know, breaking into people’s rooms is generally frowned upon,” he replies once he’s capable of speech again.

The girl scoffs. “It wasn’t even locked! I didn’t break into anything.”

“Would a lock have stopped you?” he asks curiously as he paws for the light switch in the dark.

“Nope,” she says. Quieter, she adds, “My dad always taught me to carry a lockpick with me.”

Drake finally finds the lightswitch. “Well, I’m not sure how I feel about your dad encouraging criminal activity—hey, I know you!”

With the lights on he can finally see the girl clearly. She’s young like he suspected, no older than twelve, with brown feathers and curly red hair. She’s wearing a green sweatshirt and a deer in headlights look.

“You’re Launchpad’s friend,” Drake goes on, recognizing her from the photo of them at the beach.

For just a second, the girl’s expression crumples.

Horror jumps chillingly in Drake’s chest and he scrambles for something to say, wondering what he’s done wrong already.

But the girl locks down her expression, alarmingly quick for someone so young. She’s scowling in the next moment, and roughly wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. “It’s worse than I thought,” she mutters as she pushes herself out of his chair.

“What?”

“Do you wanna know what you missed? I know they haven’t told you anything,” she retorts bluntly, arms akimbo. She rolls her eyes. “Launchpad said they didn’t want to overwhelm you. I told him he was being dumb.”

“I—yeah. I want to know,” Drake says, startled and breathless. He wants to know who he is more than he’s ever wanted anything, even landing the role as Darkwing Duck. Of course, he remembers that this is a child. “But how are you going to do that?”

“We’re gonna sneak out of here, obviously. Do you still know how to hotwire a car?”

Drake might not remember how to hotwire a car, but his body certainly does, and does so with startling alacrity.

Stealing out of SHUSH headquarters proves remarkably easy, to the point that Drake wonders why he didn’t do it sooner.The girl (she refuses to tell him her name) tells him to take one of the big, black SUVs out of SHUSH’s ludicrous collection of cars, because the smaller, fast ones, “turn into submarines or helicopters or whatever.”

He doesn’t know where he’s going, but the girl watches the road and directs him, seemingly with a specific destination in mind. They’re in downtown Duckburg when Drake speaks again, hoping against hope.

“Do you know where Launchpad’s been all week?”

She frowns, turning away to look out the window. “On patrol,” she says shortly, “he’s had to pick up the slack. Or at least he feels like he has to.”

The explanation makes as much sense as any other he’s received, in that it doesn’t. But the girl looks upset enough that he doesn’t want to pry no matter how worried he might be.

“What were you doing there, anyway?” he asks instead, scrutinizing the girl out of the corner of his eye. “At SHUSH.”

“Turn right up ahead,” she replies snipily. “And I was there to visit my dad.”

Drake turns, bringing them within view of the looming towers of the Audubon Bay Bridge. “Is he an agent too?”

The girl glares at him again. “What’s with all the questions?”

“I’m just curious!” Drake exclaims, raising his hands defensively while never removing them from the steering wheel. “You’re going out of your way to help me, kiddo. Not a lot of people would do that.”

She crosses her arms. “Yeah, well, Launchpad’s been miserable since you went off the deep end.”

Traffic is low, and Drake maneuvers onto the bridge with little difficulty. He moves into the far right lane without thinking much of it.

“You’re gonna turn right,” the girl says before they’re even halfway across the bridge.

“I’m making the first right?” Drake repeats to confirm.

She shakes her head. “When we reach the first tower, turn right.”

Drake’s palms begin to sweat, clammy against the leather of the steering wheel. “Kid, I don’t think I need to tell you that we’re on a bridge. ‘Turn right’ means we’ll be taking a swim.”

“We’ll be fine,” she says firmly. “I promise I’m not sending us to our deaths.”

“Okay, but—”

“Just trust me,” she interrupts him. She stares him down as the first tower nears, no longer antagonistic but beseeching. It feels as though his entire future hinges on his response.

“I do trust you,” he murmured. “I have no idea why, but I do.”

“Keen gear,” she says brightly, smiling for the first time in their brief acquaintanceship. “Now turn right, and try not to drive us into the bay.”

Drake chuckles nervously, tightening his grip around the steering wheel. “Just tell me when, kiddo.”

She’s pulled her phone out of her pocket, but she doesn’t look at it, letting her thumb hover over the screen. “You see those tall dividers under the tower?” she says. “Turn right there.”

There are indeed concrete dividers beneath the first tower, nearly taller the SUV and very, very sturdy looking.

Drake takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. When he comes upon the dividers, he turns right.

Before he even moves the steering wheel, the girl presses down on her phone screen. As the car turns, he watches in awe as the divider splits, creating enough room for the SUV to pass. Once they’ve crossed the divider, he watches in his left mirror as it seals shut behind them.

Up ahead is the base of the tower, and two massive doors slide open before them just like the divider not seconds before. Drake shuts off the engine once they’re inside, the closing doors plunging them into darkness. But even that doesn’t last long, as a row of vertical lights activate on the right and left walls, and keep going for several hundred feet above them. There’s a series of mechanical whirring noises before then the car, and the platform beneath it, begin to rise.

Drake turns to the girl with wide eyes. “Please don’t tell me we’re going to a secret hideout inside the tower.”

She grins. “We’re going to a secret hideout inside the tower.”

The lift docks, and Drake doesn’t stop gaping as he stumbles out of the SUV. The sheer size of the space astounds him. The vaulted ceilings hang at least fifty feet over his head, and the long, rectangular windows are at least half that in size. There are raised platforms laden with computer screens and technology he doesn’t recognize, and there’s a firing range against the far wall.

“This is incredible,” Drake breathes as he spins in a circle, taking everything in.

“Does it feel familiar?” the girl asks as she walks out from behind the SUV.

“Should it?” he replies distractedly. All he can feel in that moment is awe as he takes in a secret hideout the likes of which could’ve been plucked from his very imagination.

“Let’s look around some more,” she says, businesslike, and takes Drake’s hand to lead him along.

“Who built this place?” he wonders as the girl directs him to one of the raised platforms.

“Just a couple of fanboys,” she responds glibly.

There is a large screen with a tableau of buttons and levers beneath it, and a handful of desks each with electronics in various states of disassembly atop them. The last desk just has papers stacked in some semblance of order.

The girl leads him past all of this, going so far as to push him when he hangs around in front of what looks a lot like a dismantled freeze ray. At the opposite end of the platform is a tall, domed cylindrical object covered by a drop cloth. She stops him just in front of it, raising her hands dramatically.

“What’s under here will make you remember everything,” she declares, stepping backward until she’s beside the object. She grips the drop cloth with both hands. “Feast your eyes on this!”

She yanks the cloth down in a theatrical flutter.

Drake gasps in delight at the surprise that awaited him. In a domed, glass case is his Darkwing Duck costume, perfectly preserved. It’s in the same condition as the last time he wore it and it’s almost a relief to see it again, something so familiar in a world that has become uniquely alien to him.

“So…” the girl says pointedly, “remember anything yet?”

Drake smiles as gently as he can when he looks back down at her. “Sorry, kiddo. No dice.”

But her expression curdles, and she doesn’t just look aghast but furious.

“No,” she says, “no, that should’ve worked. You wore that when you fought—”

She shoves past him to attack the uneven stacks of papers behind him. Rifling through them wildly, she makes a mess on the desks as she carelessly shoves them around. “There has to be something here that proves that you’re—”

“Hey, kid, calm down it’s okay,” Drake tries to soothe her, tentatively reaching out to place his hand on her shoulder.

She shakes him off roughly. “No, you don’t get it, it’s not okay. This is the farthest thing from okay!” Throwing a thick file to the ground, it explodes in a shower of loose paper. She lets out a wordless cry of frustration. “And of course there’s nothing here! Just-just wait, I’ll find—there’s gotta be something—”

Drake bends down to pick up a colorful piece of folded paper that catches his attention amidst the sea of plain white.

He’s vaguely aware of the girl running around on the platform, creating chaos, as he stares down at the card and wonders why it’s arrested his attention so. It’s clearly handmade and a child’s creation at that, crafted out of blue construction paper and decorated liberally with hockey stickers and multicolored paper flowers. HAPPY FATHER’S DAY is spelled out in puffy stickers.

He opens the card. A plain white piece of paper has been glued inside, as well as another smattering of stickers. There’s a message written out in a child’s hand.

Happy Father’s Day again!

I was just gonna buy you a card but LP said making one would be nicer. I’m not really good at making stuff so I hope this is ok. Did you know this is our first father’s day? I thought that was cool. Cause even though we knew each other during the last one you hadn’t adopted me yet so that doesn’t count.

I guess I wanted to say thank you for being my dad and not being a total loser all the time. You’re still a nerd but like a cool one who beats up bad guys and is totally ok with me accidentally breaking that ugly vase you had by the front door. I was practicing for the championship, which we won!!! so you can’t be mad!

Love,

G—

“Gosalyn,” Drake breathes, like a hundred pound weight has been lifted from his chest.

His daughter is still running herself ragged and tearing apart his R&D area in the process. “Just you wait,” she’s saying, crawling under a desk to drag out a box of random junk he stuffed in there, “you’ll remember everything in no time. You’ll remember who you are, and what this place is, and—”

“Gosalyn,” Drake says again, his voice breaking, “Gosalyn, sweetheart.”

She lets go of the box with a huff and sits back on her heels. “What?” she demands.

Drake falls to his knees beside Gosalyn and gathers her up in his arms.

After a long, frozen moment, her hands wrap around his back and cling tentatively to the back of his shirt. Her voice warbles up brokenly in what little space there is between them. “Dad?”

“I’m here, Gos,” he murmurs against her hair. “You did it, kiddo.”

She gives a wordless, muffled cry against his chest and grabs big handfuls of his shirt. She trembles in his arms, her small frame wracked by the force of her hiccuping sobs.

“I-I thought you would n-never remember me,” she says miserably, “it was like you were dead but not ‘cause you were right there but you would look at me like you didn’t know who I was and-and—”

Drake rubs her back, blinking back the burn of tears himself. “Hey, hey, sweetheart. Munchkin. Moonpie.”

Gosalyn’s laugh verges on a sob, and the sound cracks Drake’s heart in half. “I’m getting snot all over your shirt for that,” she warbles, without any of her customary cheek.

“I’ll hug you anyway, my disgusting snotty child,” he retorts, wiping away the tears on her blotchy face.

She puts up with this treatment for a handful of seconds, a new record. But then she brings her own hand to her face, rubbing her eyes with the heel of her palm.

“What made you remember?” she asks quietly. “Was it the costume?”

Drake’s laugh is more an incredulous exhale than anything else. “The cos—no, of course not, Gos. It was your card.” He reaches behind him for where he dropped it. “Remember, the one you made me last Father’s Day?”

Gosalyn looks at the card like it’s a bug she found under her shoe. “My ugly card made you remember? But-but I brought you here because you were supposed to remember that you’re Darkwing Duck! I thought-I thought it would be easier to remember here than at home.”

He cups her face between his palms. “Gosalyn, nothing will ever be more important to me than being your father. I couldn’t be Darkwing Duck without you. I couldn’t even be Drake Mallard without you. Of course your card brought my memories back.”

She buries her face in his chest again to hide her tears, but this time she does so smiling. “It’s still an ugly card.”

“There’s room for improvement,” Drake allows. “We can scrapbook together, as practice for next time.”

They sit quietly, surrounded by disarray, for several long moments. Gosalyn’s breathing evens out, and her hold on Drake is no longer quite as desperate. Drake surreptitiously wipes away a few tears of his own, and puts Gosalyn’s card up on one of the desks where he can find it again.

Their peace is disrupted by a ear-splitting beeping from the nearest computer, as well as Gosalyn’s phone. They’re startled so badly that Drake again goes to grab a gas gun he doesn’t have, and Gosalyn almost hits her head on the underside of his beak.

“Geez, alright,” Drake gripes as he forces himself to his feet, helping Gosalyn up along the way. She’s quiet and weary now after releasing a week’s worth of pent-up stress, and Drake holds her close to his side with an arm around her shoulders.

He slaps at the computer console until the beeping stops and the call comes through. Beakley’s visage fills the screen, and she takes in their respective exhausted and annoyed expressions with a deadpan stare, not looking surprised to find him in the Tower.

“I take it then that your memories have returned,” she says, a statement of fact rather than a question.

Drake allows the former super spy a small smile. “Got it in one, Mrs. B.”

“And here I’d hoped that nickname would stay forgotten,” she muttered. “Anyway, I didn’t call to chat. Is Launchpad with you?”

“No,” Drake responds, and he feels the icy fist of dread curl in his gut. “I haven’t seen him all week. Gos, you said he’d been patrolling right?”

Looking more awake now at the mention of Launchpad, Gosalyn nods. “Yeah, but I don’t know where. I’ve barely seen him all week, too. Uncle Scrooge was letting me stay at the mansion.”

“We believe he took the Thunderquack,” Beakley says, worry evident in the furrow of her brow, “but we’ve been unable to track him.”

“You might not be able to find him, but we can,” Drake realizes, hunching over the console and typing quickly. “We can disable your SHUSH trackers, but not our private ones. It’s a closed frequency between our vehicles and our computers. So we should be able to find the Thunderquack and if we find the Thunderquack—”

“We find Launchpad,” Beakley finishes.

Drake’s frantic typing pays off when the computer pings, and a corner of the massive screen displays a small map and GPS location.

“There he is,” Drake murmurs, “he’s in St. Canard, over by the docks. I can get there on the Ratcatcher in ten minutes—”

“We can get there,” Gosalyn cuts him off, expression steely.

“Gos—”

She shakes her head sharply. “The last time you went somewhere alone you got kidnapped. If I’m with you, you won’t let yourself get kidnapped.”

All fight leaves Drake in a rush. He reaches out and cards his fingers through Gosalyn’s long bangs, smoothing them back. “You got that right, kiddo,” he murmurs.

She nods decisively. “Let’s get going then. Don’t forget your helmet!”

They find the Thunderquack sitting dark and silent in a more rundown area of the docks. The warehouses here have plentiful graffiti and the cars parked nearby have had their windows smashed. Weeds are the only other living thing besides them, sprouting out of cracks in the cement every which way they look. It’s the last place Launchpad should be.

Drake approaches the Thunderquack carefully, keeping Gosalyn close at his back. They don’t have keys for the jet (they’d just be asking to get themselves locked out). Instead there’s a keypad and a hand scanner with very few imprint profiles uploaded to it. He inputs the code (the date they adopted Gosalyn) and puts his hand up to the scanner.

Drake waits with bated breath as the hatch begins to open, rising with a low, mechanical hiss.

He hears Launchpad’s snores before he sees him and Drake very nearly collapses in relief, sagging against one of the wings. Beside him, Gosalyn laughs.

Launchpad is sprawled in the pilot’s seat, snoring at decibels he only reaches when he’s well and truly exhausted. The inner console is dark, and he’s illuminated solely by cold moonlight. His hat is missing and his jacket’s torn and burned in places, and most of the right side of his face is just a spectacular black eye. As ever, he’s one of the most beautiful things Drake has ever seen.

He climbs into the Thunderquack, Gosalyn not a second behind. He closes the hatch behind them, and moves to sit beside Launchpad. This close, Drake can see the lines of fatigue running deep on Launchpad’s face, even in sleep, even in the dark. His knuckles are scabbed over and already purpled with bruising.

Drake feel his heart break all over again.

He reaches over and activates the Thunderquack’s dark console. The cockpit is set aglow by the soft purple lights, softing the planes of Launchpad’s face.

Drake turns to Gosalyn, awash in purple light. She’s looking Launchpad over with a scared, pinched look on her face, one that Drake hopes he never has to see again.

“He’s gonna be fine, Gos,” Drake murmurs, rubbing her arm. “He’s just been worried, like you, and working way too hard. What do you say if after this, we give him a break? Get Uncle Scrooge to pay for a vacation for all three of us.”

Gosalyn’s answering smile is shaky, but genuine for all that. “We’ll have to trick him into forking over the cash. I’m in.”

Drake shares one more comforting smile with Gosalyn before moving closer to Launchpad. He gently squeezes the pilot’s arm, nudging him gently. As Drake feared, Launchpad awakes in a flurry of movement. He shoves Drake back with one hand and makes a wild, blind swing with his left arm that probably could’ve knocked Drake out cold had it connected.

“Launchpad,” Drake says quickly, gentling his voice. Yelling would only send him into more of a panic. “Launchpad, listen to my voice. You’re in the Thunderquack. It’s Drake and Gosalyn, we’re here with you right now.”

Launchpad breathes heavily, his eyes wide and dazed in the glow off the console. “D-Drake?” he says hoarsely.

“Yeah,” Drake responds, sighing in relief, “I’m here, Big Guy.”

Launchpad swallows thickly, his breathing shaky as he reaches out to touch Drake’s cheek. He hesitates at the last moment, his hand hovering in the air before he begins to pull it back.

“Who are you?” Launchpad asks, and there are tears in his eyes.

Drake moves to catch Launchpad’s hand before he completely pulls away, gripping it tightly between his own.

“I’m Drake Mallard,” he begins, blinking back tears of his own, “I’m Gosalyn’s father. I’m your partner. And I’m the man who loves you.”

“You love me?” Launchpad’s voice breaks halfway through.

“Didn’t I say as much before you ran off?” Drake replies wryly, drawing Launchpad’s hand closer.

“I didn’t—I mean, I didn’t want to-to influence you or put pressure on you,” Launchpad stammers, “I mean, geez, Drake, you didn’t even know my name.”

Drake squeezes Launchpad’s hand. “Losing my memory made me realize how much you meant to me. With everything else out of the way, all I felt was love. And I was done ignoring it.”

Launchpad gapes for a long moment, looking gobsmacked. “I..well…” he swallows, eyes glassy. “I-I love you too, Drake. So much.”

Drake leans forward, pressing his beak to Launchpad’s forehead in a lingering kiss.

“Well, it’s about time!” Gosalyn announces, jumping in between them. She nearly knocks Drake over, and Launchpad bursts into laughter.

“Gos! I thought your dad said you were here,” Launchpad beams, and she hops into his waiting arms. “Sorry I haven’t been around, kiddo. You doing alright?”

“Well I broke Dad out of SHUSH headquarters,” Gosalyn chirps.

Launchpad chuckles. “So, more than alright?”

She plucks at his burned jacket, taking in his bruised face with a look of trepidation. “Are you okay to fly us home?” she asks.

“You kidding?” Launchpad replies brightly, “I could fly this baby with both my eyes closed and both my hands tied behind my back!”

Drake is quick to cut in. “Uh, how about we use the autopilot? I'd rather not test that theory.”

But he reaches out and takes Launchpad’s free hand in his own, his grip gentle around Launchpad’s bruised knuckles. As the Thunderquack takes off, Drake drops a kiss onto the back of his hand.

#ant writes #drakepad #amnesia fic #happy ending I promise #fun DW cameos #darkwing duck #gosalyn mallard #drake mallard #launchpad mcquack

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undermounts · 4 years

Text

Bound―Chapter 3: Common Ground

Summary: While traveling to Rome, Diana learns about Gaius’s life alone in Europe and is forced to confront the weight of her decisions.

AO3 | Masterlist

Pairing: Gaius Augustine/Diana Leigh (BB MC)

Somewhere in Northern Italy, 2042

The following evening, Diana sat with her arms folded across her chest, nestled in her oversized coat as she slouched in her seat, feet propped up on the seat across from her as the sparsely populated train car gently swayed from side to side. Gaius sat opposite her, looking perfectly normal as he gazed out at the Italian countryside that passed through the window in a dark blur. Their weapons sat in a nondescript black sports bag, one typically used for baseball bats, beneath his seat.

It was still bizarre, seeing Gaius in the modern world. Diana realized that most of her memories of Gaius were not her own but those that she had gathered as the Bloodkeeper and all of those visions had taken place long before her time. Whatever personal memories she had of Gaius usually involved fighting for her life, so there was never time to note just how out of place he was.

“Stop that,” he huffed, not turning away from the window.

“Stop what?”

“Staring.” Gaius rolled his eyes, directing his attention to her at last, gaze cool. “Weren’t you the one who said it was rude?”

Diana frowned, shifting in her seat. “Sorry. It’s just… weird. Seeing you here.”

“Perhaps you should have considered that before proposing I come along with you,” Gaius scowled, turning back to the window, slouching down in his seat and folding his arms. If Diana didn’t know better, she would have assumed he was pouting.

“No, that’s not what I meant,” she amended, brow furrowing as she tried to find the words to explain it properly. “I meant that it’s weird to see you―”

“In pants?” Gaius supplied, eyebrow lifting.

“...Essentially, yeah.” Diana shrugged, pursing her lips and glancing around. Although no one seemed to be paying them even the slightest bit of attention, she lowered her voice, so that only he could hear. “Gaius, so many of my memories of you are the ones I saw in fragments. Decades before I was even born.”

“Is this your way of calling me old, Diana?” His tone was flat, but Diana noticed the way his lip quirked ever so slightly. He was teasing her.

“You said it, not me,” she said innocently, before shaking her head, serious once more. “But you know what I mean.”

He hummed. “I suppose I do. But if I’ve learned anything over the course of my arduous existence, it is how to adapt to the changing times. Just like Kamilah and your Adrian. Just as you will continue to do.”

Just like Kamilah and your Adrian.

Diana winced but didn’t bother to correct him.

She directed her gaze to the window, but instead of a moonlit countryside, she only saw shadows and her own reflection.

“What’s it like?” Diana asked, setting her feet on the floor and sliding into the seat next to her so that she sat directly in front of Gaius, nestled against the wall of the train. “Rome?”

“Never been?” Gaius faced her fully now, their knees just barely touching.

“No,” Diana sighed wistfully. “I thought one of the pros of being a vampire was having an eternity to do whatever you want, but I’ve never had the time. It seems that I only get to travel when I’m on some sort of mission or running for my life.”

There it was again, that nearly imperceptible quirk of his lips. Good to know he could appreciate the irony as well.

“I have… fond memories of Rome,” Gaius admitted. “I spent quite a bit of time there in the early years after I was Turned. I watched it become an empire, watched it fall. I went back a while ago; a lot has changed, but you would be surprised how much is still the same. There is a lot of supernatural activity there―vampires, werewolves, and the like.”

“Wouldn’t it be smarter to go away from hotspots like that?”

“That logic is the exact reason why we are going. If someone is searching for you, say the Daughters of Rheya, they should expect you to steer clear of populated areas. As long as you conceal yourself,” Gaius said with a very pointed look, “it should be a perfect place to lie low until you figure out where we’re going next. And there should be plenty of activity for me to keep tabs on.”

“What, like, vampire attacks on humans? Werewolf and vampire territory wars?”

Gaius scoffed, rolling his eyes. “No. Well, occasionally, that first part. But all sorts of creatures, minor but still troublesome, occupy the city. I try to visit every few years to make sure they don’t get out of hand.”

Diana nodded to herself, tucking this information aside. Rome was heavily populated with vampires, werewolves, and other supernatural beings. Gaius made rounds across Europe, single-handedly watching over an entire continent. She supposed that after nearly twenty-five years of seeing the impossible, none of this should have surprised her. And yet, she couldn’t help but feel as if there was so much she didn’t know, so much of the world she had neglected to see while she was content in New York. Diana frowned; there was one more thing…

“Were you alone this whole time?” Diana asked. She couldn’t imagine wandering around for twenty years, much less on her own.

Gaius simply said, “Yes.”

Her frown deepened. “Didn’t you ever get lonely?”

He fixed her with an odd look as if he either didn’t understand how the question was relevant or why she cared to ask. “There was not a second that went by that I didn’t feel alone, Diana. But what can I do? There was no one I could ask to accompany me, no one I would have asked to do so.”

“Why?” Diana shook her head. “There weren’t any other vampires that wanted to join you?

Gaius pursed his lips as if something about what she suggested was distasteful. “People want stability, humans and vampires alike. They want safety. Most would not consider traveling around Europe in search of murderous beasts to provide either of those things.”

“Then couldn’t you have done something else? Something where you didn’t have to be alone all of the time?” Diana asked. When she had sentenced him to live, she had not given him specific instructions on how to do so. She hadn’t even allowed him to live on the condition that he atone but merely given him the chance to do so.

Gaius’s gaze suddenly went flat, his face a stoic mask. When he spoke, his voice was carefully neutral, devoid of emotion. “With or without Rheya, I am a killer. Do not be mistaken. At least now, I can try to kill the right monsters this time, if it will provide protection to those who need it along the way. I would not subject anyone else to that sort of life with me. So if loneliness is part of the price I must pay in order to atone, then so be it.”

A chill ran down her spine at that. While his expression, seemingly impartial and aloof, reminded her so much of the Gaius of the past, his words were a far cry from who he used to be. It was this difference, more than anything, that unnerved her the most. Perhaps removing Rheya’s influence on him had broken Gaius more than she had thought.

Despite everything, she couldn’t help but feel some compassion for the man across from her. It occurred to her briefly that this could have been part of some scheme, that he was playing up his guilt to deceive her. But for what? The threats to both humans and vampires had gone, and if it came down to a fight, Diana knew how to win. Nevertheless, she could feel his remorse as clear if it were her own. Without even touching his mind, she could sense that he was telling the truth.

“You’re more than just a killer, Gaius,” she said softly, studying his countenance. “Fighting might be what you are good at, but it’s not the only thing you have to do. I think… I think you owe it to yourself to find out what else is out there for you.”

Gaius stared at her, brows drawn together and lips pulled down into a frown. He shook his head and Diana realized that this was the most honest they had ever been for each other. Willingly, at least.

“I don’t understand you,” Gaius confessed after a long moment had passed. “You gave me a second chance on the basis that I would have the chance to atone. That rather than face death, I would face the truth of what I have done. And now that I have, you seem uncomfortable with the notion of it.” He leaned forward, gaze intense and searching, although Diana noticed that she found nothing menacing about this gesture as might have before. “Tell me, Diana. You know who I am and what I have done. You set me off to do some good in the world. Do you not think me deserving of punishment along the way?”

Diana opened her mouth to respond, but paused, realizing she didn’t know what to say to that. There had been times, even within the last twenty years when she had seen some of the lasting effects of Gaius’s misguided ambition, and in her anger, had momentarily wished she had made him suffer just a little bit more.

“I don’t know,” she breathed, surprised that her answer was more complicated than it should have been. Diana sighed and set her forehead against the window, watching the lights of a nearby station grow steadily closer. “Truthfully, sometimes I think I should have punished you somehow. But there’s another part of me that thinks you have already suffered enough.”

When she glanced over at him once more, Gaius was no longer looking at her, but at some distant point inside the train, although she could tell that he wasn’t really seeing. His eyes were distant, lost to some memory she was not privy to.

Diana closed her eyes, suddenly exhausted, mentally and physically. Why did every conversation with Gaius have to be so… taxing? Beyond that, it had been a while since she last fed. Even if she didn’t need blood as often as the average vampire, it still helped keep up her strength, and she didn’t think it would be exactly appropriate to pull out one of her blood packs in public.

“When was the last time you fed?” Gaius murmured and Diana opened her eyes with a start, slightly unnerved that she had just been wondering the same thing.

“I had a blood pack on Adrian’s plane about a day ago,” she shrugged.

“So you do still need it. Blood,” Gaius observed, giving her a look of appraisal. “Rheya fed regularly with me and Xeno, but in your memory, she made it sound as if she only needed it to gain power.”

“I can go without it, but it doesn’t exactly feel great.”

“Hmm.” Gaius hummed, eyes roaming to the sparkling lights visible through the window. “I recognize this town. When the train stops, we’ll have about an hour to find something. Does that work for you?”

Diana licked her lips, running her tongue along the sharp points of her incisors. “Perfect.”

***

The moment they were a safe distance away from the train station, Diana unshouldered her pack and unzipped it, searching for a blood pack when she felt a hand on her shoulder, stopping her.

“Not that,” Gaius said, wrinkling his nose in distaste. “I know where we can find something better.”

They were stopped in a rural farming town, surrounded by pastures and rolling hills. Diana followed Gaius down a nondescript country road, their path lit only by the moon overhead. She scrunched up her nose; mixed in with the scent of fresh grass and dew was the unpleasant tang of fertilizer.

“Where are we going?” Diana asked, glancing around. All of the houses were behind them; only farms lay ahead.

Gaius shifted the sports bag that held their swords from his shoulder to hang across his back and shrugged. “You’ll see.”

Before long, Gaius suddenly turned off the road and heaved himself over an old wooden fence, landing in the field on the other side. Hesitantly, Diana followed, taking Gaius’s offered hand as she climbed over the post, although she was quick to drop it once she landed, mud squelching under her boots.

“Gaius, what―”

“Patience,” he murmured, leading her away from the road and up a hill, seeming to have no trouble with the muddy ground that was sucking Diana’s feet down. Diana was relieved when the ground became more solidified near the top of the hill, although her spirits quickly dropped when she heard it. The reason they were here.

“Oh no, you are not serious.”

“It’s better than those sacks of blood,” Gaius quipped, and although she couldn’t see him clearly in the dark, she had a feeling he was rolling his eyes at her. Diana sighed as he continued on to the other side of the hill where familiar shapes roamed.

Cows.

Diana swore but followed anyway. Fresh blood, no matter where it came from, had to be better than the packs.

“You do this often?” she huffed as they stopped beside one of the hulking animals. It seemed to pay them no mind, nonchalantly grazing, its tail swishing in the breeze.

“It’s not often that I find random humans that are willing to let me feed on them, especially when I’m in the middle of nowhere,” Gaius shrugged, reaching out and trailing his hand along the cow’s wide neck.

Despite her misgivings, Diana felt her fangs dig into her bottom lip, ears immediately picking up the animal’s powerful heartbeat, the blood rushing through its veins. Stepping forward and resting her hand against the cow’s flank, she looked to Gaius. “Will it… mind?”

Gaius scoffed. “If you’re asking me if the cow consents, you don’t need to worry. We’re barely more than pests to it. She’ll just be tired afterward, that’s all.”

Diana swallowed, petting the cow’s hide as if she could apologize for what they were about to do. “If you say so,” she mumbled, and then sank her fangs into its neck. On the other side, Gaius did the same, the cow merely grunting in surprise. Diana was pleased to find that its blood tasted pretty much the same as a human’s aside for the slightly bitter taste of dirt from its hide. She drank deeply, feeling strength return to her bones, the familiar tingle of her power once again awakening beneath her skin.

A minute or so later, she pulled back with a gasp, hunger thoroughly sated. Wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, she stepped back unsteadily, nearly overwhelmed with how refreshed she felt as she pricked her finger and sealed the puncture wounds she had left.

“Better?” Gaius was standing beside her, watching her curiously. She hadn’t noticed when he had finished feeding or when he had come so close.

“Yeah,” she breathed, running a self-conscious hand through her hair before settling her hands on her hips. “That was…”

“Filling?” he supplied.

“Humbling.”

Gaius smirked, exhaling a small huff through his nose. Diana supposed it was the closest she could possibly come to ever seeing him laugh.

Before she could truly come to appreciate this odd moment of camaraderie, simple as it was, Gaius’s face fell, lips tightening into a grim line. He swung the long black sports bag over his shoulder and withdrew his gladius, its sharp edge glinting in the moonlight.

“Gaius, what―” Diana started as she turned around, following his gaze. Her mouth dropped open, heart seizing in her chest. “What the hell is that?”

Barely discernible against the dark sky was a large black figure, vaguely shaped into the form of a dog. Tendrils of night wicked off its edges, as if it were made from shadow and darkness itself. Diana would have thought what she was seeing was merely a trick of the light, her mind simply seeing danger where there was none, if it hadn’t been for its eyes . White, glowing orbs burned at the center of the darkness like twin flames of heavenly fire. And they were staring right at her.

Diana took a cautious step back, snatching the bag from Gaius and retrieving her own sword. “Gaius?”

“It’s a Black Shuck,” he said quietly, deathly still and eyes trained on the dog as it remained approximately twenty feet away, unmoving. He held his sword out in front of them with one hand, the other stretched out before her, the gesture almost protective.

“Okay,” Diana nodded, glancing once more at the figure. “But what is it?”

“It’s a sort of spectral hound,” Gaius supplied as he studied the dog, expression focused. Calculating. “Shucks are said to be malicious omens of death, although there are many accounts of them being companionable creatures, especially to maidens and lost travelers. Some are more helpful than threatening. But they’re native to East Anglia… This one is either lost, or it’s here for a reason.”

“So what kind of Shuck is this?” she breathed. “The good or the bad?”

“That remains to be seen.”

“Wonderful,” Diana said, her voice flat as she gave in to her instincts, readjusting her grip on her sword. She willed her heartbeat to slow, settling into that killing calm. She’d fought plenty of monsters before and come out on top. She would do it again if she had to. She was one of the most powerful beings to ever walk the earth. She would not die in some random pasture because of some dog.

Gaius’s concentration broke and he glanced over at Diana, as if sensing the change in her demeanor. If Diana had been paying attention, she would have seen the range of expressions that flurried across his countenance. Surprise, confusion, recognition, fear, and concern. It passed like a shadow, leaving only traces behind as Gaius focused once again on the creature before them.

He took a step back, the arm he extended before Diana encouraging her to do the same. “Slowly, now, Diana. If we can leave without a fight, no one has to get hurt―”

As soon as the words left his mouth, the Black Shuck’s gaze shifted from Diana to Gaius, and it snarled, crouching down as if ready to attack. Diana cast her senses out but could find no trace of the Black Shuck’s presence. There was no power, no energy, no mind or life force for her to control.

“Gaius,” she murmured, voice eerily calm. “I don’t think we’re getting out of here without a fight.”

Diana let out a long breath and held her sword out before her, sensing all of the life forms around her, the cows grazing nearby, the creatures that burrowed into the ground beneath her, and Gaius, a pillar of strength and stability beside her. She heard the crunch of hard-packed earth underfoot and felt the air shift, the tension snap, as the Black Shuck snarled and lunged.

Diana shifted her stance, digging her feet into the ground as she brought her sword up in preparation for a devastating blow when she was suddenly thrust to the side. She stumbled, arm falling to the side, sword missing its target as the Shuck rushed by her in a dark blur and launched itself at Gaius.

Diana barely turned in time to see Gaius toss his blade to the side and throw his arms up, burrowing his hands into the shadowy, shifting fur of the hound. As the Shuck barreled into him, Gaius spun with it, hurling both himself and the beast away from Diana in a tangle of shadow, fangs, and claws.

“Gaius!” Diana shouted, snatching his gladius from where it had fallen in the tall grass. What the hell was he doing? She ran down the hill where Gaius and the Black Shuck had tumbled away.

“Diana, don’t!” Gaius’s voice came from amidst the shadows and she felt a wave of his presence wash over her, a manifestation of his insistence. “It’s trying to protect you.”

Diana didn’t have time to process what that meant, how it was possible that Gaius had exerted some sort of psychic will over her as she raced towards the fight, two vicious shadows in the night. As soon as she was within a few feet of Gaius and Black Shuck, she paused, locating Gaius in the fray. He was bloodied and flagging. That creature never should have gotten a single blow on him, unless Gaius let it.

Diana faltered. Gaius was letting the fight go on. She watched for a moment, noting how he was pulling his punches, doing just enough to project himself and fend off the hound, but careful not to actually inflict serious harm. But why?

The Shuck lashed out, gnashing its teeth mere inches from Gaius’s neck and Diana snapped out of her thoughts. She grit her teeth and closed her eyes. If Gaius wasn’t going to end this, she would. Diana reached out with her power and found Gaius’s presence. She could sense his pounding heartbeat, the blood rushing in his veins. She used this, anchoring her power to his body, and yanked.

Gaius came tumbling away, crashing to the ground at her feet with a grunt. His eyes widened as he pushed himself to his elbows, reaching out towards Diana. “No!”

She ignored him, calmly striding towards the Black Shuck, which now faced her, silver eyes flaring. It did not waver, staring her down as she approached. Diana gripped the swords in her hands, both hers and Gaius’s as she towered over the shadow beast, blood singing with the anticipation of another threat neutralized. The Black Shuck snarled once, then backed away, whimpering.

Something inside of Diana delighted in the sound and snarled, Good.

She raised both of the swords above the creature, prepared to put the dark dog down.

“Diana!”

She glanced over her shoulder, prepared to tell Gaius to just be quiet―

And then she wasn’t in her body. She was on the ground, watching herself from behind, a hand that wasn’t hers outstretched before her. Diana saw herself through Gaius’s eyes, saw her rigid posture, locked in an executioner’s stance, two swords of different makes and eras gleaming silver in the moonlight. She saw her own face, blank and perfectly impassive, dark eyes staring back at her. There was no rage, no fear. Only detached indifference.

Diana came back to her body with a gasp, legs weak beneath her. She once again saw Gaius over her shoulder, his expression alarmed, as if he had sensed her mind merge with his too. Diana tore her gaze from his, once again facing the cowering shadow hound before her. All around her, she felt fear. From the Black Shuck, from Gaius, from herself.

She lowered the swords in her hands, breathing hard. The Black Shuck’s ghostly gaze met hers and she finally sensed its presence, sensed its will. This was not a malicious creature. She felt its intentions, its desire to help and protect.

It had come to protect her.

Before Diana could do anything, the Black Shuck disappeared, dissipating into shadows and wisps of darkness.

“Why?” she asked, her voice faraway in her own ears. “Why did it want to protect me from you?”

“It seems that even mythical dogs know what I have done. It must have thought I was a threat to you. Shucks tend to have a soft spot for wandering women,” Gaius huffed, but Diana had stopped paying attention.

Diana collapsed to her knees, blades falling to the ground, forgotten. She had been prepared to kill the Black Shuck in cold blood. Even before she had sensed its truth, it had backed down, unwilling to fight her. And Gaius had urged her not to get involved.

She had lost herself, given into warped instincts and the power in her veins. She had become… detached.

Diana frowned, eyes falling to the ground. Was this how it began? How power set her apart from everyone else? Not all at once, through pain and anger like it had for Rheya or Gaius, but slowly, as she gradually lost touch with the things that kept her grounded. As she gave pieces of herself away, bit by bit to the immense power at her disposal. Was this why she had started having those dreams about the artifacts? Why she had wanted to go alone to Europe? Why… why she and Adrian had grown apart?

You’re different, Gaius had said. He had known right away.

She heard grass crunch underfoot behind her and turned around, hands shaking in her lap.

“Come on, Bloodkeeper,” Gaius said softly as he stood over her, expression surprisingly tender as he extended his hand. “You’re okay. Let’s get back on that train.”

Diana closed her eyes, taking a deep breath to center herself. She would not lose herself. She had made the right decision before, had resisted the temptation to give in to power. She would do it again. Diana looked up at the night sky, the stars twinkling overhead, and nodded. She took his hand, gathering the fallen swords with the other. “Let’s go.”

Gently, Gaius took the blades from her grasp and set them back in the bag, slinging it across his back. They walked together, side by side, back to the train station, and Diana tried hard not to think about how for the first time in years, she was afraid.

Note: Check out the Black Shuck here.

Tagging: @bigmemesplz, @somin-yin, @bachelorettebound14, @mkamra2355

#gaius augustine #gaius x mc #my writing #bloodbound #adrian raines #kamilah sayeed #jax matsuo #lily spencer #choices #my fic #rheya apostolous #serafine dupont #fanfic

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