#thread knots make me SO MISERABLE sometimes

[hookaroo]

Laden of the Torn (9 of 25)

AO3 link Catch up on tumblr: One Two Three Four Five Six Seven Eight Tagging @priscilla9993 @cocohook38 <3 Chapter 9 warning: Discussions of death & the fear of losing loved ones

***

9 months ago…

Stashed among the countless books and scrolls that made up the tower’s extensive library, one folded piece of parchment contained a hand-sketched map of Neverland.

Not the real thing, of course: Killian had burned that wretched rag stained with far too much blood, filth, and despair the moment he’d managed to finally free himself of that cursed place. Its successor--a much-censored, overly positive version created more from imagination than memory--served as a visual backdrop to the fanciful tales he would concoct whenever Alice asked of his history there. She knew vaguely of the island’s dangers, and the tribe of feral children posing the greatest of its threats, but this map and its accompanying adventure stories painted more a vision of a tropical paradise than the jungles of Hell that it truly was.

Alice sat perusing that map now, idly outlining wave shapes in a blue far more bright and beautiful than any the moonlit, eternal night could ever produce. Nearby, Killian was attempting to mend a beloved doll that had fallen victim to an excessively enthusiastic game of Alice’s own creation. The seams had been stitched so many times through the years that it seemed to be composed more of leftover threads of all types than the fabric of its origin. Alice still played with it though, and any source of comfort was worth preserving for as long as possible.

“Papa?” Alice began. 

“Mmhmm?” Killian replied, mentally preparing for a trip to Fantasy-Neverland that hopefully wouldn’t include a detour through Memory-Neverland on the way out.

“Do you think that Captain Smee would ever return to Neverland, if he could find the way there again?”

Killian hid a smirk and pulled on a carefully placed thread to tighten the knot. “I very much doubt it, Starfish. Captain Smee has always been… rather a timid man at heart. I think he prefers to stick to the familiar tides of this land, and keep the wilds of Neverland safely tucked away in memory.”

“But… didn’t you once say that the reason he snuck aboard the Jolly Roger in the first place was to steal a magic bean so that he could trade it for immortality?”

Raising an eyebrow, Killian looked up in surprise. “You have a very good memory, love.”

“And you told me that no living thing in Neverland ever grows old.”

“True…”

“So if he truly wants to live forever, all he needs to do is to go back! I hope he does. Then when we get out of this tower, maybe you and I could go there too, Papa!”

She could not know the icy terror that gripped his soul at the thought, nor of the visions that sometimes haunted his hours both waking and sleeping… his exact worst nightmare, innocently longed for in such a casual manner. Heart suddenly pounding, Killian swallowed the sickening dread constricting his throat and presented as calm a demeanor as he could muster.

“Aren’t you forgetting one not-so-small detail?”

“Am I?”

“Surely I must have mentioned a certain horrid little boy who makes Neverland his home. An eternity in his domain is hardly the paradise you’re imagining it to be.”

“Oh.” Alice looked crestfallen, and though Killian always hated disappointing her, he could not stop the wave of relief from coursing through him when it seemed she had accepted his objection. Adding one final stitch to the doll’s ragged seam, he was quick to assure her,

“There are dozens of other beautiful places I’ll take you one day, Alice, where we’ll have adventures much more exciting than we could ever find on that godsforsaken refuse heap. Remember? The Sea of Glass, and Rainbow Falls, and the purple cliffs where the goats climb right up the vertical rock faces…”

He trailed off when he heard a miserable sniffle from his little girl. She was staring down at the tabletop, obviously not seeing the map laid out before her as she quietly wiped away tears. Hastily, he severed the thread and laid it aside, then moved to kneel at her side. He placed the doll in her lap and reached up to stroke the hair back from her face.

“Alice? What is it, love?

She sniffed again, met his eyes briefly, then looked away.

There were periods of time when her circumstances got the better of her, and understandably so. Killian had always done his best to console her, but it would never truly be all right until he could free her from this damned tower. And the more she grew up, the heavier the burden was for both of them.

“I’m sorry, Starfish; it must be frustrating to hear of wondrous places without the ability to see them yet. But I promise you will someday; you’ve just got to keep--”

“You’re going to die one day, aren’t you?”

The tiny voice took Killian by surprise, and he fell silent. This wasn’t at all where he had thought the conversation was heading. It made sense in hindsight, though. She wasn’t asking about Neverland for the adventures, or for immortality for Smee… it was all about Killian’s mortality.

“Oh, Alice…” He pulled her into his chest, wrapping her tightly in his arms. Gently, he murmured, “I don’t want you to be worrying about that, love. Not for a long, long time. You have enough to think about.”

Alice squeezed him back, shaking with sobs and saying,

“I don’t want you to die, Papa, not ever! I love you so much I think I would die too!” She pulled away and scrubbed at her face, continuing in one long, hysterical breath. “I couldn’t bear to live without you--I don’t care about Pan; if we went to Neverland, then we could be together forever!”

Killian watched her for a beat, unconsciously stroking her hair as his heart broke. He understood exactly how she felt; he would give anything to ensure he’d never be separated from her, as well. But there was an additional element to her anticipatory grief. Once he was gone, if she were still trapped here, she would be completely alone, probably for the rest of her life. It was too horrible to even imagine. And here he was, pretending like he didn’t constantly think about what would become of her if something should happen to him.

Tenderly, Killian covered her hands with his, willing her to feel how overwhelmingly powerful his love was for her.

“It isn’t easy,” he admitted quietly, “thinking about losing someone you care for. I feel much the same way about you. And sadly, part of what makes life so special is its brevity. But you can’t let that overshadow or take away from the time that you do have with your loved ones.”

He reached up to wipe a tear from her cheek, feeling his own eyes brimming. “I hold on to a piece of everyone I’ve loved: my mother, my brother… Milah… after each loss, there were days when I felt like I couldn’t go on. But you know what? I’m so very glad I did. Because that brought me to the greatest joy in my life.”

Killian waited until Alice tentatively met his gaze, and he confirmed her unasked question with a watery, adoring grin. She could not resist a shaky half-smile in response. Killian embraced her again, planted a soft kiss on the top of her head, then rested back into his crouch, watching her compose herself. After one final hand across her eyes, Alice mumbled,

“Thank you, Papa.”

“I love you, Alice.” 

He got slowly to his feet, stifling any outward sign that his joints were not quite as young as they used to be, then added,

“Try to stop worrying, love. I plan to be around for quite a long time yet.”

***

Less than a month later,

“I plan to be around…” echoed through his head as ten paces were marked and two bullets flew.

“Quite a long time yet…” rang in his ears as he collided with the tower wall, a new and deadly pain coursing through the center of his chest.

“A long time…” mocked him as melancholy rain drenched him, body and spirit, and evil laughter gave way to devastated wailing from on high.

“A long time…” continued to destroy him now with its meaningless, endless promise, as hope and resources dwindled.

What a fool he had been.

***

Present Day…

Killian woke with an ache in his throat and chest: a common occurrence these days. Apparently, despite his resolution to make use of the alone time, he had fallen asleep instead. He rubbed his eyes and scoured the clearing for any sign of Blackbeard, but the other man had not yet returned. 

He should conserve his strength, try and rest some more and prepare for whatever ordeals lay ahead. But there was only one thing that could begin to soothe the pain of the familiar nightmare-flashback he’d just experienced, and he knew he owed it to Alice to make the attempt as well. This was the longest he’d gone without connecting ever since he’d acquired the mirror, and the worry would be eating her alive. So, despite the danger and the various pains afflicting him, Killian finished freeing himself from the ropes and forced himself up to retrieve Blackbeard’s unattended satchel. 

No hook, of course; no weapons of any kind, or even any food. Killian was immensely relieved to find his black rook near the bottom, which he stashed in an inside pocket closest his heart. But Blackbeard had taken everything else of value, leaving only a few first aid supplies and other odds and ends… one of which was Killian’s mirror, blessedly intact despite its careless treatment. With mild surprise, he noted that the ceremonial cloth once containing bread remnants now protected the mirror’s glass face, somehow counted amongst his possessions recovered from the quarry transport guards. Maybe the rumors of its mystical powers were indeed true… and he was finally about to put it all to the test.

After stashing the dusty cloth back into the satchel, Killian grasped the mirror’s handle and drew a few calming breaths.

“Alice?” he called quietly. “Are you there, love?”

Her likeness materialized almost immediately, as if she’d been expecting him to call.

“Papa!” she cried in tremulous delight. “Are you all right? I’ve been so worried!”

The cursed tingle in his heart told him all he needed to know. That sickening mold residue, another failure of a lead--this one costing him dearly, its total sum yet to be determined. Killian tried not to let his disappointment show as he gave her a reassuring smile.

“I’m okay, but I haven’t got long. I just wanted to make sure--”

A distant oath sounded from somewhere beyond the twist in the canyon, and Killian froze for an instant. Then, hastily, he hissed,

“I’m sorry, Starfish; I need to go, but I’ll try again as soon as I’m able.”

“Hook? Who is that you’re talking to?”

Killian still could not see Blackbeard, but that villain had to be close. He lunged for the satchel and, over Alice’s muffled protests, he thrust the mirror back into its hiding place just as his red-clad captor sauntered into view. 

Then he remembered what the sorcerer had told him about the enchantment: both parties had to agree to the connection being severed. And, judging by the continuing prickle beneath his breastbone and the quiet sounds emanating from the satchel, Alice had not been willing to let her father go so quickly.

“What the devil are you up to?” sneered Blackbeard. He tossed the waterskins carelessly on the ground and stumbled over to menace Killian.

“It’s nothing, mate; only searching for a bit of food is all. I’m completely famished.”

Blackbeard snorted. “Well, that makes a change. No more heaving your guts out, then?”

He cocked his head, listening, and Killian answered quickly and too loudly.

“It looks as if you were at least successful at locating water? If you want me to make it to the genie monkeys, you’ll have to be a bit more generous than you're accustomed to--”

“Shhh!” hissed Blackbeard, holding up a hand. Without pause, Killian said,

“What are you listening to? I don’t hear anything, and we should probably get a move on if we’re to make any progress before sundown--”

It didn’t work. Blackbeard lunged for the satchel, and though Killian made a feeble attempt to keep it from him, the bigger man easily tore it from his grasp. Killian clambered to his feet, desperate to stop what he knew was coming.

Blackbeard immediately zeroed in on the noise-making mirror, and he let the satchel and the rest of its contents fall to the ground.

“Papa?” squeaked Alice, and Blackbeard leered.

“What’s this? That the child you abandoned?”

Killian took a step forward, hand outstretched, feeling like he was moving through mud. “Blackbeard… please…”

“Oops.”

Blackbeard laughed loudly. The mirror “slipped” from his fingers. Killian dove for it. Alice’s frightened image flipped around and around in midair. The ball and chain hampered Killian’s lunge. His fingertips just brushed glass before it shattered on the razor stones. Alice’s voice cut abruptly to silence.

Breathing heavily, Killian sat on his knees and stared at the remnants of his only link with his daughter. Even if he managed to escape and find his way back to the sorcerer who had arranged the enchantment, he could not afford to pay the exorbitant price a second time, not without considerable effort… or risking additional imprisonment by doing something illicit. “Blackbeard… you… bastard!”

Unconcerned, Blackbeard chided,

“You may want to be careful throwing that term around, considering…”

Killian seethed, still watching the shimmering halo of glass shards as if they could somehow reassemble themselves on their own. “That was her only connection to the outside world!”

“And whose fault is that, really? I’m not the one who trapped her there, nor the father foolish enough to go and get his heart cursed so she’s left with no one. Frankly, I’m surprised you’ve managed to live with the guilt for this long.”

Blackbeard bent down and scooped the few scattered supplies back into his satchel, then flung the strap over his shoulder. “Taking you to the monkeys is a kindness. They’ll quickly put you out of your misery.”

None-too-gently, he draped one of the waterskins over his captive’s shoulder and dragged him to his feet. Then he reached for the mirror’s empty frame. Killian glared daggers at him as he turned it over once in his hand.

“Glue in a bit of cheap, ordinary glass and it will fetch a copper or two,” said Blackbeard. He stuffed the frame in with the rest of his belongings, then hauled up the remaining skin of water and took a large swig. Noting the hatred in Killian’s stare, he rolled his eyes and waved at the waterskin Killian was holding, encouraging him to drink.

“The girl has my sympathies,” he remarked mildly. “But not my allegiance. And a broken mirror won’t matter in the slightest once you become the monkeys’ main course.”

In truth, Killian was nearly as angry at himself for being so reckless as he was at Blackbeard for callously destroying the enchanted mirror. But even so, the wanton cruelty of the act filled him with loathing.

“You will regret making an enemy of me,” he snarled. Blackbeard only scoffed.

“Empty threats. Never heard those before.” He once again pointed to Killian’s water. “Now drink up. We’ve a long way to go before nightfall.”

#ouat fanfiction #laden of the torn #wish hook #alice jones #knightrook #ouat blackbeard #angst #mirror magic #cw: death #or at least thinking about death #existentialism #? #not sure how to tag this #fear of losing loved ones #blackbeard being a bastard

[embroid-away]

Hi! You've inspired me to start embroidery, and I have to ask - how do you keep the thread from tangling? It seems to happen to me constantly and it's driving me crazy!

Hi there! I’m so excited that you’ve started embroidery, and how special to know that I’ve been able to help!

floss tangles are i n c r e d i b l y annoying, for sure. while I’ve never been able to avoid them entirely, lately i’ve started to use a shorter piece of floss when I’m working, about 18-24 inches to start, rather than anything longer than 24 inches. Every time you pull the floss through the fabric, that friction is acting on the floss similar to scissors dragged along a ribbon -- the floss will curl, which will cause the floss to twist and then bundle and then knot... so the shorter your floss is to start, the fewer times it’ll be dragged through the fabric, reducing the curl/twist/bundle. If you ever need an emergency un-twist, let the floss --still through the needle-- hang from the fabric and pull the floss through a soft pinch between your index and thumb starting at the fabric down to the end. this will can help straighten it out again, at least enough to last you until the new floss piece. 

on a related note...an ask from @sinnersinc 

[Ask text: “Do you have any good tips for keeping that gold DMC embroidery thread (like in the WW lasso you did) from immediately self-destructing into a complete tangled knot? I really like DMC’s metallic line of flosses, but they are SUCH A PAIN to work with! 😫”]

oh man, I wish I could offer better tips here, but I don’t have too many. 

[Images 1 & 2: Two images of the back of the Wonder Woman embroidery with a focus on the gold metallic floss, which is obviously frayed and bundled more so than the black floss. The second image includes three emojis next to the gold floss: distraught face, face with symbols over mouth, and expressionless face]

With metallic and sparkle floss, my biggest issue is the fraying, which you can see in the images where there are lots of single threads coming off the back. those lead to the most tangles and knots for me, and they’re super annoying going through the fabric. 

I recommend a similar method to avoiding tangles/knots with standard floss: shorter lengths to start with, except much shorter, like 8-12″. I’d much rather re-floss than spend too many minutes untangling! 

I hope this helps, but ultimately with metallic and sparkle flosses, I think you just have to power through the floss frustration knowing that the finished product will look really sharp. ✨🧵✨ Good luck!!!!

#teratomatastic #sinnersinc #thanks for the ask #helpful tips #how to #thread knots make me SO MISERABLE sometimes #(also so oddly satisfying when you're able to pull a particularly stubborn knot loose) #(rare but wonderful) #sinnersinc-- thank you for your patience! i know you've been waiting for my response for a while

[sugarakis-p2]

Gamble Ch 3: Deals

Deals are made, Rebel uses her body and her brain to prove that yes she is smart, fast, and useful. She gets to meet the flock and doesn't seem to like them much.

Yeah I got carried away. I'm starting to worry this is my thing now, lol, I don't worry to hard. Whether you hate it or love it I hope you are entertained. Enjoy!

Awwww she teaches him how to kiss

Warning: Knotting and bad words

Chapter 2

Chapter 3: Deals

Rebel had stopped bleeding sometime in the middle of the night.

Shigaraki's knot and cock going soft enough for her to pull it out of her. However, two hours later, he shoved himself back in, not humping, just staying there, making her miserable.

Tomura wakes, pressing her closer to him, nuzzling the back of her head, his cock hardening as it’s buried in her pussy. He chitters and chirps when he finds his mark. He licks it clean; her blood is delicious to him, and he can’t get enough. Her scent is off.

“Are you tired, little butterfly? Nest not soft enough?” He asks. “No shit! Your scary fucking hands are near my face the whole time. It was like sleeping with a sword hanging by a thread over me. Then the stabbing in my crotch all God damn day. By the way, humans are not nocturnal.” She squirms. Trying to pull away from his body, he’s solid like iron. He’s not done. The wiggling is only making him harder.

“Today, we will meet up with my flock. In the meantime, I want more of you.”

“I fucking loathe you,” She hissed at him. He snickers at her. He shoves his thumb in her mouth, feeling her tongue writhe against him with delight. “I like that little butterfly. So, honest. Here I was willing to compromise. A mate that misbehaves gets it rough. A sweet mate that behaves gets more consideration.” “Considerations? Ok, I think I can do that. I’ll be good if we can talk about my life afterward?” Rebel's tone completely changing. “If it involves you leaving, it will never happen. You are mine now. Be good and cum on my knot again.” She doesn’t want him to know how hopeless that makes her feel. She shuts up and tries to do what they talk about in the gambling halls and dive bars; daddy used to work over. The worst has already happened, she might as well try to like it and make it work in her favor.

“Can we..um..mate, face to face? Gently please, with kisses.” He chirps. She can feel his heart pounding against her back in excitement. “I’ve never mated like that. I can be gentle if you will be good. Good mates don’t run. Good mates take the knot. Good mates follow directions. What are kisses?”

“Well, kisses are like what you did yesterday with your mouth on my, um. Pressing lips together. Look, I’ve never done any of it either.” She could feel her face burning with embarrassment. Tomura watches her struggle with her words. She is adorable like this. It makes him want to be gentle with her. He pulls out and lays her flat on her back to climb on top. A fisted arm under her head. He stares at her with those red eyes, and she cringes. He’s so aggressive and terrifying. His wet cock covered in flakes of her blood pressing hard on her hip. Rebel is determined to hate him forever for what he took from her.

“Show me.” He demands. Good mates follow directions she thinks. She presses her lips to his chapped scared ones. It’s chaste, and he is stiff against it. She continues pecking his jawline. She has no idea what he likes or doing, and he’s no help. He’s smiles as she struggles to please him, and she wishes she had killed him in his sleep. She tries more kisses while exploring with her hands. Running her fingers through his hair, then his soft fur on his neck, she plants little kisses on his scars. He’s closing his eyes and leaning into her touches and kisses. His antennae are caressing and tickling her.

She shoves her face in his soft fur. Inhaling the scent of sunflower fields; it was the most pleasant thing about him. He purrs at this and gives her gentle little licks on her neck. He licks up her jawline to her soft mouth and presses hard to part her lips. His tongue darts in lapping at first. He’s quick at what feels good and begins gradually entwining their tongues for a sensual kiss. Her scent is changing from anger and fear to arousal. Rebel presses her fingers deep into his fur a slight whine grows in her pleading kiss.

He is so excited by this his wings open wide in a mating display. He pulls away to keen and coo at Rebel. Golden dust is landing on her skin as she watches the flashes of color dance above her. It reminds her of a peacock she once saw, and will never admit it looks pretty . He lowers his face to run his tongue down her middle, wings fluttering, feelers dancing over her.

As he glides down he darts his tongue in her belly button, causing her to fidget and titter. He looks up, and she is giving him a dirty look for it. He likes it and continues running his tongue down until he reaches her hot wet pussy. His long tongue finds the entrance, past her slick folds and he sucks at her core, bringing her to heat quickly. He tastes tinges of blood and the flavor of them mixed, he doesn’t care. He’s feeling her tighten around his tongue. She’s holding back her moans, pretending she hates it; her body is honest though.

Her wetness tightens and spasms soaking his tongue. Her hole and clit are pulsing against his face. She’s biting her own hand as she groans and pants.

He’s fast. He’s back up, giving her chaste pecks and embracing Rebel close as his cock finds her wet heat. He moans eys rolling at the sensation of entering. She’s as tight as before, but it’s less painful for both. Her tiny nails are digging into his shoulders, and she’s groaning; no tears today. He slowly glides his length against her walls. This time with no pain. Shiggy feels so good in her; she hates herself for it. He’s kissing as he thrusts a little faster, hitting her sweet soft spots. She groans into his mouth.

Pressing her tits firmly to his chest. She can feel the rumble of his purrs and the pounding of his heartbeat in her center. When he breaks away from the kiss to go faster, she bites his shoulder. Her orgasm building like a hot knot in her center. She’s tightening around him, forcing herself to be a good mate and take the knot by pushing back into his thrusts. He hisses in pleasure, abandoning control to erratically hump and bottom out in her waiting center. She screams and jerks when she feels his partially inflated knot enter her. He’s grinding his cock and knot into her. His wings are vibrating. He's making strange intermittent chirps.

“Shiggy,” She whispers. And they both come undone. Tomura is growling, and she’s biting him as hard as she can. Her back arching into him. He feels her walls flutter around his girth, sucking and milking him. She goes limp under him. Panting in his fur, her hot breath giving him goosebumps.

Rebel shivers each time his dick spasms, spilling his seed deep in her. After a few minutes, he lifts off of her to see himself tied in her. He can see the outlines and rubs a thumb over, the pressure making him shudder with pleasure. She gasps and squeezes him. Her sweet pussy is stretched to her limit around him. She smells delicious. She smells like his, a tiny sting where she had marked him. Her face sweet and slack with exhaustion. With his knot firmly planted, he has never seen a more beautiful sight in his life.

“Was I a good enough mate to earn considerations? Maybe some accommodations? I am a weak little human female, after all.” She pouts at him. He laughs. She can feel it through her body and whines.

“What does my little butterfly want?” He asks, thumbing her clit. She whimpers and smiles at him. Rebel has a list in her mind ready.

Later that night:

"I found a family of poosums." Toga squealed at Shigaraki when he arrived. "Wait, what is that? Does it taste better than poosums?" "What do you have there?" Dabi asked. "Flock, this is my mate, Rebel. Rebel, this is my flock. Toga, Dabi, Compress, Spinner, Twice." The flock crowded, and his mate cringed behind Shigaraki. The entrancing fire and cooked possum near the cave entrance were forgotten. "You were supposed to get us more gold, not bring back a cute little mate for yourself." Dabi scoffs.

They are talking Mothman, which sounds like a series of hisses, guttural growls, warbles, and chittering. The burned dark one is leering at her when he catches her eye from around Shigarakis wings. She tries to make herself smaller, pressing and hiding her face in Tomura's back from the flock.

"Oh, she is cute. Can we eat her?" Toga asks. "No," Tomura rasps as he tucks his wings protectively around her. "No threats or attempts to eat her either. She's an important piece with Hoodwink. Treat her as a part of the flock."

"How?" Dabi asked, sniffing. She reeks of Shigaraki, but he can smell you underneath, and it is fantastic.

"We can't afford another member to feed. We don't even have a hive," Spinner shouts. Shigaraki growls at this annoying bombardment. She's his mate, and that should be enough. "I won't accept her as a flock mate until either of you tell us how she is useful. Otherwise, you just brought another mouth to feed." Spinner huffs his green wings buzz in irritation.

"Oh, I could think of ways," Dabi says, trying to coax his mate out with some cooked possum. If they were back at the hive, Shigaraki would have torn him to pieces. However, they are not at the hive, and Dabi is his firepower. Fire is vital to survival, so he must swallow his hate and keep them all close. Growling, he pulls Rebel from behind his wings. Dabi and Toga flutter in excitement.

"She's gorgeous!" Toga squeals. The others agree, which gives Shigaraki a sense of pride. He sits her in his lap in front of the fire. The bundle around her waist jingles as she looks back at him with a disgust. Now is the time to tell her, she can't run and it's been delayed enough. The cave is much too high, she would be caught instantly. He strokes her hair as the flock, and Rebel ogles each other.

"Little butterfly, we need to pass through Hoodwink territory to get to an abandoned hive. We are going to start our own." He says as if this is the easiest thing in the world. She gives him a look of horror.

"You jest?" she squeaks. Tomura gives her a hard stare. She gives him another sour look.

"This doesn't affect our deal, does it? She asks. "If we don't get the hive, it does." He hisses at her. Her sweet face twists in annoyance. Toga holds out some cooked possum to her.

"Want some poosum?" Rebel looks to Shig for approval. He nods, and she snatches it, poking at it with her fingers to check it was fully cooked before eating ravenously.

"Well, how is she useful?" Spinner insists. "Let her eat," Dabi interferes. She's giving them all wary looks. A pack of freak monsters, and apparently, she had to help to them survive; to survive. What a pain in the ass. She ate half the possum's side before holding for someone to take.

"She didn't eat the anus; it's the best part." Toga laments. Shig pulls it off the stick, devouring bones and all.

"All right," She says, drawing shapes into the ground. "This is Hoodwinks kingdom, here's the lake, here's griffin territory, and over here is the human kingdom of Arguer. Where is this hive in relation to this?" She asks. With a clawed finger, Shig marks an X on her map. She sits and thinks. "What does that have to do with anything?" Spinner hisses.

"Shut up, I'm trying to think." She snarls. Everyone jerks in surprise. Dabi and Toga chuckle at Spinner, who is ordered around by a frail human.

"What?" He roared at her. Shigaraki gave him a dangerous look when his mate turned to Spinner and shouted again.

"I said shut up, stupid scaly monster, what the hell did your kin breed with? A lizard?"

"I should kill you," He hisses.

"Do that, and you will never see that hive. Whoever told you to give gold to Hoodwink for passage was only telling half the story. Hoodwink is the head, no doubt, but his favorite mate is the neck. He's a lazy hedonist who would rather play all day than make decisions. Hoodwink loves keeping species in his kingdom until they are so broke, they owe them their lives. That hive is on the edge of there territory. To own it you must convince his mate Lunar. Only females can talk to his females. Who is going to negotiate for you? That wheat-haired one? She looks fucking insane, no control over her emotions or desires." Shigaraki is cooing to his mate, pleased with her insolent display. She is fit to be a queen. Spinner is warbling with rage.

"She's not wrong," Toga chitters.

"We can find another female!" He shouts at Tomura.

"She has met Hoodwink and his mates. No, she is our best option aside from the fact she is my mate."

"A mouthy mate. Are you sure she has a silver tongue?" Compress sniffs at her.

"Oh, I am sure. She doesn't like any of you, which is fine for me." Shigaraki coos admiring her hair in the firelight.

"Stupid monsters, I only speak human, quite twittering over me as if I'm a pet. Do any of you have "foresight or premonitions" magic?" All of them shook their heads no.

"Good, I don't know much about your species, other than your evil predators and smart. How good are you at killing things like griffins and vampire huggers?"

"We're the best, Nah we suck." Twice says.

"We're excellent at it. Ever had griffin with elderberries? Delectable." Compress corrects for Twice. She nods.

"You can't get us through; you're dead." Spinner states. Rebel shrugs.

"If I can't get us through, we're all dead anyway, Hoodwink will eat us. I have in investment to help; I can do this if you can keep him entertained. He likes sticks, but don't win too much, keep it balanced to keep his attention." She looks to Shig, who is nuzzling her hair. "See, my mate is useful and shrewd."

"Control your female," Spinner turns to pout.

Chapter 4: Bad Mate

#bnha shigaraki #boku no hero academia tomura #lemon #smut #mothman shigaraki #motharaki #moth shigaraki #shigaraki tomura #tomura smut #MHA fantasy

[pleasancies]

Tied To A Tree

written for @amonthofwhump twelve day's of whumpmas. warnings include : implied hypothermia, long-term captivity, broken whumpee, left to die, and whipping mention

"I'm bored you know," A absentmindedly muttered. They pulled the rope again. The threads grew taut, grazing B's exposed skin until it's red. Doesn't took much for them to draw blood from it. Constant whippings tend to make one's skin fragile.

A kept going. "It's just, what's the point? I hurt you, you scream, I feel good, then I go back to living my life while you wither in my basement. Sometimes I might explore new ways of inflicting pain, but all of those options have been exhausted. Seeing you curse and beg, it's almost mechanical. You don't even do it anymore. Everything we do is so pointless."

Water dripped from the branches above them. B's teeth chattered as it slowly rained down on them. With a slight stutter they said, "You could, let me- let me go. If that's alright. I won't tell. Won't tell anyone."

"No, I fucking hate you." A tied the knot. The rope was tight enough to constrict B's chest so they can't take any full, satisfied breaths. "If you're free, maybe you're going to live an even more miserable life. Especially with no family or any money. Would be great to see you foaming at the mouth in some dirty alley. But there's always a chance of someone giving you a warm food or a blanket. I can't have that. I resent it. You don't deserve shit."

B nodded slowly. The cold is biting into their skin. "I'm sorry I bored you."

"Don't be." A stepped back, admiring their handiwork. "Hope it's the cold that kills you first. Goodbye."

#amow twelve days of whumpmas #tied to a tree #long term captivity #broken whumpee #left to die #whump writing

[pleasantanathema]

Graves into Gardens | Reiner Braun x Reader | Chapter Seven

Chapter Seven: Blinding Pleasures 

Pairing: Reiner Braun x Fem!Reader

Rating: Explicit (18+ Only)

Warnings: Modern AU, spoilers up to season four, slight manga spoilers (only by including characters met later), captivity, mentions of death, violence enemies to lovers, angst, smut, rough sex, hate sex,

Word Count: 6.5k

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          He hadn’t let you go, not completely, fingers still timid and loose against your skin, in your hair. But your palms on his cheeks were so solid, warm, like you were grounding him, fingertips molded against his face with purpose.

           Your lips were plump, swollen, parted like they were begging for a bit of mercy from his brutishness.  

           He needed more. He wanted to pour more apologies into your mouth and have you drink them down like they were sacrament.

           Thoughts of you consumed him. He hadn’t even realized it until this moment—every waking thought, every dream, every nightmare, even the flashes when he slipped away into a state of unreality; it all orbited around you. Ever since you fell back into his life again, nothing else had mattered. He’d gone from wishing for your death to dying to feel your breath against him.

           “Reiner…” you purred, the desperation from before now bleeding into desire, “I want more .”

           “More?” he felt your thumbs at the edge of his smirk, a thrum of confidence building in his chest, “What was it you called me? Pathetic, miserable, deplorable…and now you want more?”

           He was grinning, he couldn’t help himself. He wanted to hear you acknowledge how your tongue had tried to wound his pride the night he found you behind bars; he wanted to hear you admit to wanting, needing him, despite his wickedness. Or maybe because of it.

           “Please.”

           Your voice was soft, simple.  

           The power between the two of you shifted, he could feel it. Your hatred was still simmering in the air, your earlier screams still caught in silent echoes of the room, but he’d shifted the tides when he’d claimed your mouth.

           He knew you hated him for countless reasons: his arrogance, his deceit, his bloodied hands, but more than anything you hated him because you wanted him . You craved for him to shatter you and take up residence in your remains, to fill the cracks with his presence, to both destroy and become the mirror you saw in one another.  

           “Please,” you whispered the word again like it was shameful, and it was.

           He pulled your hands away from his face.

           “I never thought you’d be one to beg.”

           “I’m not—,” you scoffed, an indignant little huff into the air.

           “If that’s not what you call begging, then I can’t wait to see what you’re like when you’re desperate.”

           His full grin was back, something bubbling inside of him that had gone dormant for years. That happiness he felt back in Paradis, that pride that had once gotten him into so much trouble. It was surfacing again—paler in comparison, but still present nonetheless.

           You caught his infectious confidence, something devious flashing in your eyes.

           “Then make me desperate,” your tongue was coy, fingers pulling at his shirt. He’d always liked those words: make me . He enjoyed them because they were an easy command. The strength in his hands and his body allowed for him to break anything he wanted. Even if his mind was poisoned, he could still dominate you like he wanted to. He could control you under the weight of his hands.

           He stepped back toward his bed, capturing your wrist to have you follow. The mattress was silent under his weight, the springs too accustomed to nights of fitful sleep to complain. You stood between his spread thighs, still clad in Annie’s clothing, still wearing that white armband that had been forced onto you.

           “I’ve seen you wear so many things,” his hands were on your hips, pads of his fingers already dipping beneath the worn shirt, tracing patterns onto your stomach, “but this is the worst.”

           “Then take it off.”  

           He had half a mind to make you say please, but he was too eager to finally see you naked.

           Slowly, he peeled away your layers, taking his time to brush his knuckles across every fresh piece of hot skin that was revealed. When your breasts fell in front of his face, when the curve of your thighs melted into his hands, he suddenly wished he had claws to scour you, mark you, carve his name into your skin and own you.

           He knew you were having the same thoughts, could feel your nails gliding, nicking at his skin as you tore his own threads away. His hands met yours as you both worked to pull his pants down his thighs, his hard-earned muscle making the endeavor slightly difficult.

           Then, he was pulling you into his lap, his mouth greedy against your skin. He peppered kisses along your neck, your shoulders, sinking his teeth into the slope of your throat. You were moaning, body settling against his, your too-hot breasts bouncing against his chest, slick pussy pressing against his briefs. He slid a palm up your back, fingers spread wide, eager to twist in your hair again.

           “I’ll make you mine,” he mumbled against spit-slick skin, his mouth biting into your neck, sucking until delicate vessels burst and spread into dark colors of his creation.

            “I’m not something you can own,” you punctuated your words by knotting your fingers into his hair, mimicking him and tugging at the soft blonde roots, guiding him to patches of virgin flesh still left unmarked by his mouth.

           He took special care to kiss and lave over the circular scar on your shoulder. His brain felt like flickering again as he traced over that forgotten memory of yours with his fingers, but you were centering him, your nails were biting into the sinews of his back, pulling him closer, hips rolling in his lap.

           “But you’re something I can take.”  

           “Fuck,” you sounded breathless, head tipping forward so you could scatter wet, open-mouthed kisses along his cheekbones, his temples, his ears. It was like you couldn’t get enough of him. He groaned when he felt your hot tongue dip into the muscle of his shoulder, only to gasp when you bit him more viciously than he had you.

           “Easy, princess, you don’t have to hurt me.”

           He wrapped his fist in your hair to tug you away, hissing with a mixture of pain and pleasure when your teeth scraped across his skin.

           “Don’t call me—” his other hand engulfed your breast, thumb rolling and pinching at your nipple, causing your complaint to be caught between your teeth as you hissed, “—I want to hurt you.”

           There was an intensity steaming within your eyes as you looked down upon him. You meant those words, and he couldn’t blame you for it. He’d hurt you so many times, the hands on your body were stained with blood and steeped in apologies he owed you.

           “I’m always hurting for you.”

           He bucked his hips, letting his aching cock slide against the folds of your bare sex through his briefs. His stomach was in knots; he still couldn’t believe this was happening, he was anxious, but lust and pride were making his brain foggy, making his body hurt.

           “I…” he kneaded at the soft flesh of your tit in his palm, encouraging some jolts of pleasure to race under your skin as you decided on your words.

           “I like it when you’re speechless, princess. ” He put emphasis on the pet name, reminding you that he could call you whatever he fucking wanted when he had you on his lap, in his arms, in his hands.

           Ferocity was revving inside you. He knew you didn’t like that moniker, it was something he used to call you years ago. He did it to knock you down a notch, to get under your nerves and pull at the frayed ends because he had an inkling you were just a little princess who liked to be spoiled underneath all your pride.

           You were like him; you enjoyed putting up a fight, but in the end, you wanted to be broken.

           Your fist wound itself around his throat, your thumb putting pressure on the fragile column of muscle and bone. He could feel his chest tighten as his breath was caught under your hand.

           “Fuck me before I change my mind.”

           He would’ve laughed if you weren’t bearing down on his neck.

           Reiner let you push him onto his back, grunted when you continued to pull the breath from his body when your mouth crushed against his. He felt your thumb pet at a raised scar on the left side of his throat.

           “What’s that?” you mumbled it more to yourself, lips moving between your fingers to kiss and suck at the offending piece of flesh.

           He was harder than he’d ever been, cock straining toward his stomach because you just had to have your hot little mouth sucking at that spot—

           “It’s where you fucking cut me.”

            “Oh.”

           He took in a deep breath when you released his airway, only to have it pour out in a groan as your tongue traced the familiar scar. It wasn’t long, but it had been deep, enough to leave his skin pink in the wake of healing. Normally the collar of his shirts kept it hidden away; it was small enough to forget, but sometimes he’d touch it just to make his heart hurt.

           You’d been in nearly the same position when you’d given it to him. You’d knocked him down, kept him pinned under your fighting body, threatening to slice him open and watch him bleed out before your eyes. But those had been empty words, only cut off when you’d been commanded to retreat from Zeke’s onslaught on Shiganshina. Your blade had still nicked him, however, your wrist purposely digging the tip end into his skin.

           He deserved that cut far more than he deserved to feel your plump lips pressing against its scar.

           You’d both already branded each other in the past.

           Quickly, his hands found your hips, smoothly rolling to where he was on top of you so he could gain more of the control he desired.

           Reiner loved how you molded against him, back arched, legs searching for a way to loop around and keep him closer. He loved it because he knew you hated it; your eyes were squeezed shut, lips pressed together like you were trying to muffle sounds, like you were still so full of shame and conflict.

           He pressed his fingers to your cheeks, thumb and index fingers settling back into the same spots they held before when you’d been fighting.

           “Look at me,” he coaxed, bracing his weight on his elbow so as not to crush your delicate body beneath his.

           Your pupils were blown and so, so dark as your lashes lifted toward him. It was the same look you gave him the first time he found you awake in your cell. It sent a shiver racing down his back, spreading up to his neck. Had you wanted him then, too?

           Reiner brushed his lips against yours, gentle, reverent, “I’ve wanted you for so long,” he was lost in the slant of your mouth, your tongue teasing him, “have you thought about me?”

           He was already trailing down your body, taking his time to revisit the swollen spots and dark bruises he already left on your neck and shoulders. Heat hit his cheeks as he realized the marks would be hard for you to hide—people would know what he’d done to you, and he wanted them to. There was no rule that he couldn’t fuck you; he could even say he was just following his orders of making you comfortable enough to spill Paradisian secrets.

           “Sometimes,” you admitted, head dipping back against his pillow as you moaned, “I’ve wondered what those big fingers would feel like inside me.”

           His hand slid down to your chest, wrapping itself around your breast so he could feel the weight of it within his palm. Then he enveloped it within the warmth of his mouth. Your lips fell open as you whined for him, desperate for more, the sounds racing between his legs.. His tongue swirled around the peaked bud of your nipple, his hand mimicking the actions of his mouth upon your other breast. Your hips pressed up against his firm body, reacting to every little touch or scrape of teeth. He groaned against the sensitive skin; he could feel gooseflesh trickling down your sides. His lips left your nipple, only to be placed on the top curve of your breast. He sucked at the soft flesh roughly, causing you to jump at the sudden influx of pain and pleasure. He growled, biting at your tit, littering it with dark red and purple bruises just like the rest of you.

           But he was too impatient, quickly abandoning your beautiful tits to move further down your body. He pressed kisses into your stomach, already imagining how pretty you were going to look stuffed with his cock.

           He hooked his arms around your thighs, reveling in how loudly you moaned when he spread your legs even further apart so he could drape them over his shoulders.

           “I always knew you’d have the prettiest pussy.”

           “Fuck —Reiner, just, shut up and put your mouth to good use.”

           He arched an eyebrow as he looked up the expanse of your body to find one of your hands gripping the pillow above your head, the other digging into his sheets like you were holding on for dear life.

           He kept his eyes on your face as he dug his fingers into the fat of your thigh, bringing it to his mouth like it was a delicacy to be revered. He took too much delight in watching how your mouth parted as he sunk his teeth into your thigh, just enough to abuse the sensitive skin and make you squirm. He then ran his tongue across the sore flesh, knowing that his spit would cool and cause your skin to prickle. He repeated this a few more times, slowly inching his way toward your alluring, soaked pussy.

           “Reiner…”

           God his name sounded so good in your mouth.

           He didn’t answer you, just dipped his head lower, tongue now tracing a path at the juncture of your hip and thigh.

           That hand of yours that was twisted in the sheets suddenly found its way into his hair, your fingers lost in the shaggy locks.

           “ Reiner , please, please I want more .”

           But you’d already said those words; he’d heard them earlier when you begged for more of his kiss.

           “You can do better than that.”

           He let your thighs rest against his shoulders, his too-strong hands moving to where his thumbs could spread that pretty pussy of yours apart. He bit back a groan at the sight, practically salivating at the sight of your wet, weeping cunt just begging for him to dip his tongue into you.

           You sucked in a very deep breath, “I think about your mouth, your hands, on my pussy all the time, I-I’ve wanted to sit on your face for years, so please, please, do something before I—!”

           A low, deep growl left his throat as he licked a long, hot stripe up your quivering cunt. He heard you slap your hand over your mouth, muffling a loud moan.

           “Ah, ah,” his arm was long enough to reach the crux of your elbow on the bed, jerking your palm away from your cheeks, “I want to hear everything that comes from the filthy little mouth of yours.”

           “But, your neighbors…”

           “I thought you didn’t give a fuck about my neighbors? Or do you only want to scream for me when you’re angry?”

           He grinned against your folds as your thighs pressed against his cheekbones, your poor skin still so hot from all the hickeys he left behind.

           You used the fingers in his hair to tug him forward, but he resisted, instead electing to just repeat the motion of slowly sliding his flattened tongue up the middle of your pussy, your folds hemming around the wet muscle. He could already tell he was going to get addicted to your taste, to the way you kept gasping at his touch.

           Quickly, he dove between your thighs, mouth eager and insatiable. He was messy because he wanted you dripping, wanted you needy and whiny and begging and crying for him like he’d always imagined. He kept you spread open with his fingers, tongue assaulting your sensitive clit. He moved the tip of his tongue in tight circles, feeling your lower stomach and thighs clenching and shivering beneath his ministrations.

           He relished in the power he had with his mouth between your legs, but at the same time, he was here to repent. He hadn’t forgotten the raw emotions that had poured from your chest earlier.

           Reiner mumbled apologies against your pussy, the words lost within the sloppy sounds of his tongue and lips against your wet folds.

           He would make you feel lost; make you forget everything if only for a moment.

           “You taste so good,” he praised, purring against you before dipping his tongue lower, prodding at your tight hole. Your fingers in his hair turned into a fist, your hips rolling up and encouraging him to plunge into you. Sweat was beading at the nape of his neck, his cock so hard he felt like he was going to burst. He kept his hips pressed to the mattress, trying to keep his mind between your legs instead of on his own body. He needed to prep you first, needed to award you the fingers you’d admitted to thinking about.

           Soon, he shifted his mouth upwards again, filling your needy pussy with two of his fingers as his mouth continued to work at your clit.

           The most exquisite little moan left your lips, followed by a whispered, “yes, yes, yes, yes,” your gummy walls tightening around his digits as they pumped into you a little recklessly. Initially, he’d wanted to take his time with you, to drag out your pleasure and have you aching for him, but you were already so wet, so willing, mouth open with quick, breathy pants and your pussy clenching and drawing him in closer. You were already so needy, your slick staining the hair on his cheeks and pooling into his mouth.

           “You like that?” He curled his fingers inside you, quickly finding that sensitive and spongy spot inside of you that had your eyes rolling back and your hands grasping at your tits for some semblance of stability.

           “S-so good, feels so good , just a- ah, a little more.”

           He spread his fingers as he curled and pumped them, taking a moment to marvel at how your pussy wrapped around them.

           “A little more and what, princess? You’ll cum for me?”

           Your head snapped up, blinking like you’d be snapped out of a dream.

           “D-don’t call me—”

           He silenced you by stuffing his fingers deeper inside of your cunt, thumb taking over for his mouth and drawing heated, sloppy circles around your clit. Your whole body was rocking, hips bucking down against his hand as you sought your release. He felt like he was watching something forbidden; you were not supposed to have his name on your breath, you shouldn’t be naked, writhing in his sheets, squeezing at your divine tits while you prepared and shuddered as your orgasm prepared to release from his hands.

           But there you were, a blessed sight before him, his apologies and his fingers stuffed inside of your pussy.

           Your thighs clenched closer than before, your whole body tightening. He kept his face close to your sex, admiring how you well you took in the onslaught of his greedy fingers.

           “Fu-uck,” he heard you rasp, your body stilling. He ceased his motions, cupping his mouth around your pulsing pussy so he could lap up what leaked from inside of you. You looked beautiful, spent, like you’d been swept out to sea but floated home to safety.

           Next time you came for him, he was going to make sure his name was on your tongue.

━━━─── • ───━━━

          You watched with watery eyes as Reiner sat up between your thighs, bringing his dripping fingers to his mouth. He dragged the digits along his tongue, cleaning them with a cocky grin tugging at his cheeks.

          Your chest felt so heavy after your orgasm; it had torn through you like an arrow pierces flesh, hot and fast and pointed, like you were ripping apart in ecstasy. And all because of him, because of Reiner Braun. Not that long ago you were desperate to wrap your fists around his neck and kill him, and now you were just desperate to feel him take you, to use your body and make you feel that blinding pleasure all over again.

          That urge to hurt him was still present, still lingering underneath your composure, but it was being battled by your lust and the years you’d spent wanting to fuck him. You’d never allowed yourself to when you were both back home; Reiner always seemed like trouble, especially to you. You were worried if you opened your legs for him, he’d worm his way into your heart, into all your hurt.

          But everything was different now—you didn’t know if you would ever see home again, but this man whom the gods and whatever celestial beings existed kept tying and binding you to was here, and he wanted you, and you were so ready to let him have you, hold you, break you.

          You felt your mouth open as you watched him finally rid himself of his boxer briefs.

          His cock was thick and long, curving ever so slightly up towards his stomach. A few veins were throbbing up his length, plump and enticing. His cock even looked big in comparison to his mighty palm, the red, swollen head leaking out over his thumb. He had the kind of cock you thought only existed in porn, so fucking thick that you wonder if coke-can cock would even be an apprioprate descriptor.

          “Oh my god, if you had fucking told me you have such a fat cock…” you trailed off, feeling saliva pool under your tongue. God you wanted him in your mouth.

          “Impressed?”

          “Very.”

          “Then beg for it.”

          You couldn’t believe it, but you loved seeing that ego of his come back to life. You loved seeing confidence brewing behind his honey eyes again, loved seeing him proudly wrap his hand around his cock and pump it for you.

          “Haven’t I done enough begging, Reiner?”

          “You’ll beg as much as I want you to.”

          He held a playful smile on his face as he spread your legs again, this time keeping them around his waist as he settled back on top of your body. He wrapped his fists around your wrists that were lying by your face, keeping you pinned below him. Your pussy was still singing from your orgasm, but a new string of pleasure was coursing down your spine at his words.

          “Pretty please,” you moaned into his ear, “please fuck me, you’re all I want.”

          And you meant those words too; the world could start ending and the only thing on your mind would be how good his weight felt between your hips.

          His cockhead brushed against your slippery folds, your body shivering as he made contact with your swollen clit before pressing gently against your tight entrance.

          He was bigger than— no , you didn’t need to be thinking about anyone else. Just him.

          “Please fuck me, fuck me hard. Fuck me so I forget what you’ve done.”

          He released your wrists, his hands molding to your hips, pushing you down.

          You could feel his groan rumble up your own chest from where your bodies were pressed together. Your hands were gripping at his back, nail already sinking into the rolling muscle of his shoulders. He felt heavy, solid. He smelled familiar, like nostalgia was bubbling at the surface of his skin, enveloping your senses as you took in a deep breath. He felt like home.

          White-hot heat spread over every nerve ending as he pushed himself inside of you. He was rough, quick, hips snapping so he could plunge into your depths in one swift motion. You were wet enough to accept him, but still you burned from the intense stretch. You whined his name as you felt yourself slipping away into that headspace of sex.

          He kept himself sheathed deep inside of you for a moment, letting you feel the thickness of his cock, the heaviness of his thighs against yours. He was panting into the curve of your collarbone, like he was steadying himself, or perhaps he was preparing.

          “Move,” you demanded, trying to roll your hips that were pinned under his might.

          You both moaned and hissed as he followed your order, drawing himself in and out of your compliant pussy. The thick veins of his cock dragged against your walls as he moved, making your lashes flutter from the sizzling pleasure of it all. He’d barely started and you were already falling into a delirium. It was like the first taste of an addiction; heavy, sweet, all encompassing, like his cock between your legs was all you ever needed.

          He set a slow pace, a purposeful one, each thrust causing primal sounds to erupt from your throat. All worries were gone —you couldn’t think about his past, your future, if anyone was looking for you, if you were in danger. All that mattered was him, was this moment.

          Soon his tempo changed. He sped up, hands still locked around your hips, fingers mean and bruising. Every mark he’d left on your body suddenly began to sing with the ecstasy of him pounding away inside of you. Your nails were helpless, scratching lines you knew would bleed red down his back.

          “How does it feel?” He whispered your name against your neck; you could feel him smirk against your skin.

          “S-so good,” your breaths were quick, hot, “so full .”

          You whined when he pulled his body away from you, seamlessly settling on his knees so he could look down at you as his cock pumped away inside your clenching cunt.

          “Yeah? Like being stuffed full of my cock?”

          You merely nodded your head, lips pressing together as your hands fisted the pillow next to your head. All your shame was gone, instead filled with delight as you watched how his eyes raked over your bouncing body, over all the damage he’d done to it for the sake of claiming you.

          Those shining, golden orbs of his landed on where your bodies were conjoined. It was like a fire was lit behind them as he marveled at your tight pussy sucking him in, perfect flesh wrapped around him, cream pooling at the base of his cock showing how much your body wanted him.

          “I hate you...so much,” he whispered it into the heat of the air, his confession encouraging him to grip tighter, push harder. You felt the change in the atmosphere, like something darker was brewing between you.

          You were tempted to spit the hatred back at him, but any words you were thinking of were lost when he flipped you over far too-easily.

          It was a shock, to suddenly have your face smashed into his pillow, his leftover scent invading your nose. And it was wicked to feel him maneuver you like a little rag doll, heavy paws gripping at your waist and pulling your ass up to meet him.

          He shoved his cock into you wickedly, roughly big hands holding your ass and pulling you back against him as he began a ruthless pace. It felt like a punishment. You screwed your eyes shut, a cry erupting from your throat at his brutality. Your fingers fisted into the sheets, your back arching from his force. Your world narrowed; all you could focus on was Reiner inside of you, using your pussy like it truly belonged to him, like he had a right to treat you however he wanted.

          You felt a sick, twisted satisfaction of feeling him come alive behind you. You did this to him, made him go nearly feral and lose control. Or maybe it was the opposite. With you, he could have all the control he wanted, needed. Your body reacted to every touch, every suck, every plunge of his hips. You moaned, whined, bucked, shivered, like an instrument being played by vicious hands.

          His heavy balls were slapping against your clit, making your body twitch with little shocks of bliss with every movement. You could feel every splayed finger upon your ass and hips, each one digging and pressing into you, pulling you in closer, deeper upon his cock.

          “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” his curses kissed your ears.

          You didn’t have the mind to speak, his depraved pace had you drooling against the sheets. Little gasps and groans of pleasure were the only things able to escape your mouth.

          He was like an elemental force taking over you, and you wanted him to. You wanted to fall prey to him, wanted to get lost in the gravitational well that was Reiner Braun.

          One of his hands began to glide up your back, fisting in your hair and jerking you back. A small scream fell from your lips as your head was pulled from the pillow, pain blooming from your scalp. It changed the angle, had his cock hitting a new, softer spot inside you that had your vision blurring.

          Your hands were barely able to keep their grip on his sheets, making your thighs slip back against his.

          “I like watching you struggle,” he purred, yanking his hold on your hair. You whimpered in response, starting to become overwhelmed by the pain and the pleasure. Your body was aching, from lust and discomfort, from ecstasy and weakness. You knew you were entirely in his hands. He could drop you, he could stop giving you the bliss that was burning between your legs and around his cock. But he kept pumping inside of you, deep groans spilling over your naked back and soaking into your skin.

          H e pulled you up higher, leaning forward to capture your shoulder between his teeth. You could feel his massive body rocking against yours, over, and over, and over again, a sinful rhythm. His cock ramming so deep inside of you that you felt it deep within your throat. His hand on your hip slid to the front of your body, fingertips circling over your clit and making you cry. Tears were pricking your lashes —you were full of emotions you couldn’t name, full of him.

          “Reiner, fuck, oh god,” one of your hands flew to your breast, the other landing on the merciless fingers that toyed with your pussy. It was a weak effort to keep him there, to have some semblance of control.

          “You’re getting tighter,” he grunted, hand leaving your hair so he could wrap it around your belly, brawny arm caging you against his solid body, “gonna cum?”

          Your head leaned back against his shoulder, salty, burning tears now streaming down your cheeks.

          Your cunt was throbbing with every wicked plunge of his cock. He was reckless, fucking you like an animal, like man both in and out of control.

          “Please, please, please, please,” you were back to begging, so close to release that it was almost painful.

          “Please what, princess?”

          “Please, let me cum.”

          Let me , like he had dominion over your pleasure. And he did, you knew he did.

          He kept his fingers on your clit, ruthlessly swirling through the wetness, keeping you close and shaking around his cock. Your stomach muscles were tightening, fresh heat creeping over your skin. It was like each thrust was taking you up a ladder to heavenly pleasure, each one sending you higher, but making you fall harder at the same time.

          “Cum for me,” it was a hushed command, pressed into your neck, “say my name when you do.”

          Your mouth opened, pretty, pained sounds falling down onto your bodies. He somehow pulled you closer, cinching your back against his chest with that heavy arm beneath your breasts.

          You were too hot, you were losing yourself, lost to the indurate thumping of him inside your pussy.

          “Gonna... fuck , I’m…” your head hung low, waves of pure bliss already creeping up on you, “ Rei-ner! ”

          You weren’t sure if it was the sound of his name or the sucking of your cunt that sent him over the edge with you. Hot, thick ropes of cum coated your insides as you completely fell apart. Your orgasm was more intense than before, lasting longer, like the thick stretch of his cock kept you open for more ecstasy to keep rolling over your body. You were screaming silently.

          Though his body was still, he was solid and kept you in place as you both rode out the intensities that your bodies were craving. Your hands clung to his forearm, head now so heavy you could barely think.

          But soon the cloud of lust was lifted, your forms crumpling into the mess of sheets below you. Reiner landed on his back, chest heaving with breaths. You were still on your knees, palms spread onto the bed as you tried to regain your senses. You could feel his cum sliding down your thighs, sticky and slow.

          You were used, spent. But suddenly the weight of the world was back on your shoulders.

          You glanced over to him, straightening your back and sitting up. He looked as wasted as you were, drunk but coming back to life, face flushed with those glorious arms of his above his head.

          Reiner brought one of his arms down, hand upturned and offered before you on the bed. He looked like some muted, tired god within his sheets, looked like he was giving you an offering.

          What waited for you within his hands after this?

          Peace? Forgiveness? Or was it judgement? Pain?

          “You okay?”

          You nodded solemnly, taking his outstretched hand and bringing it up to your face. He cupped your cheek, thumb wiping away the remnants of tears that he wasn’t quite sure why you shed.

          “What now?”

          It was one of those loaded questions, you knew that. It held too much meaning for him to answer. What would come of the two of you now? What feelings were brewing after this? Where did you go from here, physically and mentally?

          “I don’t know,” he answered honestly. His eyes were trailing over the carnage he’d brought upon your body; years of pent of anger painted all over your skin.

          You pulled away from him, even though the hormones in your body, your emotions , were begging for you to curl up next to him and be coddled.

          You turned your back, sitting on the edge of the bed, fingers plucking at the sweaty sheets. You gazed out the window, found the moon trying to show her face behind snow clouds. The same moon you gazed at from your home, now presenting herself to you in a new, foreign place. Kind of like the man behind you, who offered you pieces of himself to fill your voids.

          The bed moved as he did, an open palm finding your back, running down your spine. He stayed behind you, kissing at your ruined shoulders with the mouth that had hurt them.

          “I’m tired,” you admitted, feeling little bits of heaviness pulling from your chest, “tired of everything .”

          “I know.”

          “I don’t know what to do anymore. I’m tired of just surviving. Here, home, it’s always just steps to live another day, to not get caught up in wars that aren’t of our making.”

          He hummed knowingly.

          “We could run away.”

          That was a thought you’d had before. But running gets tiresome too, you supposed. This time you might not have to think about doing it on your own. You’d collided with him again, the fates had tied you together once more. Perhaps it was to start a new trajectory.

          “We could,” you smiled then, a little flame of hope, of happiness, licking its way into your still hazy mind.

          You turned around to catch him in an unsuspecting kiss. Your grin was still present and infectious, making him laugh as you pressed your mouth eagerly to his.

          “I don’t know if we like each other enough to run away together, you know.”

          You pushed him back into the mattress, leaning over him to plant little, messy kisses upon his cheeks.

          “True,” he chuckled, moving your hair out of your face to give you a proper kiss before settling back into his pillows, “we’ll have to learn how to treat each other better.”

          You took a moment to look at him. He looked so much the same as when you were younger, his beautiful smile crinkling the edges of honey eyes. But there was more etched within his features, more prominent cheekbones begging to be touched and kissed, a softness lingering within his lips.

          “We’ll find a way to make gardens out of the graves we’ve made.”

━━━─── • ───━━━

          You didn’t move again until he was fast asleep, the barest hint of a snore escaping his nose.

          There was a growing soreness in your limbs as you silently removed yourself from the bed, feet cold against the floor. Your whole body ached, those bruises and hickeys stinging as you carefully moved the strewn desk chair back in front of his computers.

          God he was a fucking animal , but you couldn’t complain. You’d wanted it far too much. You rubbed at the painful heat in your naked shoulders as you turned on the monitor that had gone dormant. Blue light filled the small space, making you glance over your shoulder to make sure he was still sleeping. His chest was still rising and falling peacefully, the light illuminating his hulking figure in the bed sheets.

          Your mind was so heavy, having carried the memory of his password up until this moment. You’d been sure to watch him type it in earlier, just in case. Though, it wasn’t that hard to remember—it was the name of his first dog that he’d talked about while on his mission in Paradis, and of course Bertholdt’s birthday. You typed it in quickly, Honey1230 , and sighed with relief as his desktop flashed to life.

          You knew this was a risk. But it was one you had to take.

          You knew the email by heart. It was the one that always sent you photos and love notes, a non-government one that you knew would still be checked.

          You didn’t take long, just typed out the words that had been playing in the back of your mind when the world went silent; when you weren’t wrapped up in the mess that you’d created with Reiner.

          It took an awkwardly long moment to send, all the files you’d attached to it slowing it down. You sat there naked, dripping, a mess, heart pounding like you were worried sirens would start blaring at any moment.

          After the email blinked away from the sent box, you deleted it, watching the name it was addressed to disappear.

Next Chapter

#reiner smut #reiner x reader #reiner braun #reiner braun x reader #reiner x you #reiner braun x you #reiner fanfic #snk #snk fanfic #snk reiner #aot #aot reiner #attack on titan fanfiction

[johaerys-writes]

Where Blood Roses Bloom

Fandom: Castlevania

Pairings: Alucard/Trevor Belmont/Sypha, Hector/Lenore

Summary:

After Trevor gets grievously injured by a night creature, he and Sypha return to Dracula’s castle to seek Alucard’s help. The man they find there, however, is but a shadow of the friend they left behind.

Meanwhile, in far Styria, Hector does his best to survive in the vampires’ court, a lamb amidst wolves. Little do the wolves know, the lamb has fangs of its own.

Chapter 10: Higher Than Heartache is up, where Alucard leaves the ghosts of his past behind, with the help of his friends. Oh, and smut ;)

Part of the chapter here, the rest on Ao3! Or read from the beginning

“You don’t have to do this with me,” Adrian says. “You don’t have to be here for this.”

The wind whips at Sypha’s hair, bringing strawberry blond locks before her eyes as she turns to look at him. Her smile, when it widens her lips, is soft.

“Don’t be silly. Of course we do.” She turns to Belmont, who is already advancing towards the staked bodies. The thought of going near them has Adrian’s stomach turning in knots, but he makes himself follow, albeit reluctantly.

“She’s right,” Belmont says, grabbing the wooden base of the stake and pulling. “Some friends we would be, if we left you alone with… with that.”

“I did that,” Adrian says quietly. “It’s only fair that I take care of it myself.”

“Nice try, Alucard, but no,” Belmont says, casually waving his words away. “Besides, there has to be someone strong enough to lift those things, right? Wouldn’t want you to pull a muscle or something.” He makes a face as he pulls again, the stake budging only a hair.

Adrian rolls his eyes and huffs, and the faint loathing and apprehension that had coiled in his gut a moment before, when he was looking at the bodies, dissipates as he makes his way to Belmont’s side. He grabs the stake with one hand and easily plucks it out of the ground. “I am stronger than you, you know.”

Belmont grins, his face flushed. He brushes the back of his sleeve over his brow and winks at him as he says, “Keep telling yourself that, sweetheart.”

Sypha chuckles, and it’s such an odd thing for them to laugh and joke and smile, while doing something like this. Thinking about it, though, it’s not that odd at all, when it comes to those two. Belmont and Sypha have always defied the odds, have always done the impossible. Perhaps it’s one of the reasons, Adrian thinks, that he’s so drawn to them.  

Before long, the stakes with the bodies are on the ground, side by side. Adrian takes a step back, letting them rest for a moment while he catches his breath. Belmont is beside him, and Sypha’s standing on his other side, the three of them together gazing at the withered corpses. Adrian can still discern the traces of resemblance, but they’re twisted beyond recognition.

Even so, he can bring their faces to mind, as if he only saw them the day before. It still stings to look too long, to think of it too long.

It is Sypha that takes the first step forward. She lifts her hands, and the bodies burst into flames, the pikes with them. Adrian takes a sharp breath as he watches the black smoke drifting up in thick plumes towards the sky. They watch in silence as the flames consume them.

When all but ash remains, Adrian stares at the miserable, blackened pile on the ground, the sorry remnants of the people that betrayed him, that hurt him. Perhaps, in a different life, where their paths had not crossed his, they would have still been out there somewhere, hunting vampires and monsters, living their life as best they could. In this life though, they met their end in a place such as this, for a reason such as this —which was no reason at all, really— and there’s nothing Adrian can do to change it.

The thought is a dark one, depressing, boring down on him like a mountain. If only they’d believed him, if only they'd stopped to listen…

He shakes his head, refusing to let the thought linger. His skin feels hot with shame and the still hot embers of an anger he thought he had gotten rid of. The more he looks at them, the clearer he remembers the icy rage that had taken hold of him, that had led him to sharpening the stakes and mounting their lifeless bodies on them. He thinks that, in some way, his father still lives on in him, that part of him that’s eager to burn and kill and take revenge and consume. But it never brought him peace. The same way it never brought his father peace.

With a quiet sigh, Adrian reaches in his coat pocket for the rose he had stored there, the one he plucked that morning. The intensity of its crimson colour is stark against the drabness that surrounds it, and Adrian gazes at it for a moment too long. Then, he leans down, and places it upon the ashes on the ground.

He doesn’t know if he can find it in his heart to forgive, perhaps not yet. But he knows it’s what his mother would have wanted.

Belmont’s hand is warm when it falls on his shoulder, and so are Sypha’s fingers when they thread through his own. They stand there for a short while, watching the shadows of the late afternoon sun stretch along the ground.

~

The fire in the hearth of Belmont’s and Sypha’s room crackles merrily, flames licking up the blackened logs. A glass of brandy is in Adrian’s hand, golden, strong and aromatic. As he takes a sip, staring at the flames, Adrian idly wonders how fire is more or less the same wherever you find it, whatever it happens to be burning —plain logs or bodies on stakes— but it somehow feels so different.

Sypha is sprawled on the couch behind him, chatting with Belmont who’s by the liquor cabinet, pouring himself another drink. They all returned to the castle after the deed was done, and Belmont insisted on drinking on the whole thing being over— because of course he would.

“It just seems like a fine opportunity to celebrate,” he says, tipping the mouth of the bottle over his glass. Apparently, it’s one of the finer bottles of brandy he found when snooping around the place, and Adrian can’t disagree. It’s quite good, gliding down his throat like sweet, liquid fire. “You know?”

“Celebrate what, exactly?” Adrian says dryly, still staring at the flames. “We just watched the sad remains of two people that died horrible deaths being swallowed by the fire. A nice fire, all things considered,” he nods at Sypha, “masterfully summoned, but still. Not something worthy of a celebration, if you ask me.”

Belmont laughs and shakes his head. “It’s not the fire that we’re celebrating, you maudlin bastard.” He saunters to the couch, dropping next to Sypha and placing his arm over her shoulders. “It’s the closure. You finally got some closure on the whole thing, did you not? That, and your front door doesn’t scream: Keep out, danger of death anymore.”

“Perhaps it should,” Adrian muses dejectedly. He returns to the couch, sitting on Sypha’s other side.

Sypha slithers just a bit closer to him, her large, crystal blue eyes trained on him. “How are you feeling?”

Adrian lets out a sigh, glancing down at his glass. “I’ve been better,” he says earnestly. “But at the same time... it’s not quite as bad as I thought.”

Part of him knows it’s because Sypha and Belmont are there with him, holding his hand through it, but it’s more than that. It surely is. He had once thought that he wouldn’t have been able to even stomach the sight of Sumi and Taka again, and while that’s partly true, there’s another sliver of… something else rearing its head inside him. It’s almost like regret, almost like the guilt and shame he’s been carrying with him all this while, but it’s different even than that.

“Sometimes,” he says, “I think… I think I understand why they did it. Why they betrayed me, why they attacked, why they were so mistrustful of me. The life they had led left them with no other choice. They only told me a little of what they went through in Cho’s court  —just what was absolutely necessary, I presume— but even from that I could tell that their past was filled with hurt and injustice. I don’t think that anyone’s ever shown them kindness before, or respect.” He takes in a slow breath. “It makes sense, in a way, to bite the hand that feeds, if every other hand extended has held a blade, ready to wound. It’s only logical that they would… hate me. For what I am.”

Belmont clicks his tongue and shakes his head. “There’s always a choice,” he says sharply, with an odd sort of finality. “No matter what your life has been like before. Either one of them could have stood up to the other, told them to knock it off, made them see that you were only trying to help their miserable hides. They could have left this place better and stronger for it, and made the world a better place too. But guess what?” He fixes Adrian with a look that brooks no argument. “They chose not to do that. They chose to be sorry pieces of dung that lash out at every perceived wrong, that punish those that don’t deserve it. They chose, Alucard. Never forget that.”

Adrian returns Belmont’s gaze, and his pulse quickens at the surety and steadiness of his voice, the fury in his eyes.

He swallows thickly.

“I… I’m not sure it’s quite as black and white as that,” he says.

Sypha reaches out to him, placing her hand on his forearm. “They might have had a choice,” she says softly, “yet they left you with none. You couldn’t have helped them any more than you did. You did everything you could. You know that, yes?”

Her touch is so warm and comforting, that it eases his unease, his discomfort. Adrian takes heart from it, and manages a quiet, “I know,” before he falls silent again.

“So, no looking back. Alright?”

He sighs. "Alright."

"Promise?"

“Promise.” He has to smile a little at that. It’s so much like Sypha to give orders, even for something like this. Adrian has little control over what his mind and heart decide to do most days, but it's nice to dream, isn't it?

“Alright!” Belmont exclaims, filling all of their glasses yet again. “A toast then.” He raises his glass to Adrian, cheeks already a bit rosy. “To new beginnings.”

Adrian shakes his head with a laugh and tiredly follows suit. “To new beginnings.” He takes a sip of brandy, letting it warm him from the inside out, as he teases, “Does that mean you’ll start using soap, Belmont?”

“Shut up, Alucard,” the other man rolls his eyes, laughing in his glass.

Adrian turns to look at Sypha, and his smile is met by her grin. She sets her glass on the table and slithers closer to him still, and then her slender arms are around Adrian’s neck, her sweet and heady scent filling him to the brim.

“To new beginnings,” she whispers in his ear.

Adrian sets his glass aside too and hugs her tightly, taking a deep breath.

“Thank you for being here,” he whispers. “Thank you for everything.”

“Thank you for letting us be here,” she says, then leans back to gaze at him. “I can only imagine how hard it was for you.”

Adrian smiles, and prepares to tell her that they didn’t really leave him much choice in the matter, when she leans forward to kiss his forehead. Her lips are soft against his skin, and they send a shiver down his spine. It’s all too reminiscent of that night several days ago in his room, after he had returned to the castle, and he can’t help the beat of anticipation in his blood. She kisses his brow, each one of his eyes, his cheek, the angle of his jaw, cradling his face in her hands. It’s so tender and soft that Adrian almost whimpers with need when her lips skim the side of his neck, leaving him wanting more, infinitely more. He wants this closeness; he needs it.

When her mouth brushes his own, Adrian can’t hold back the sigh that leaves him. His lips part readily under hers, pulling her in before he can stop himself. Her tongue is warm and soft as it flicks over his own, and it tastes of the sweet spice of the brandy.

Adrian bites back a moan when Sypha’s teeth close over his bottom lip, sucking. He shifts closer to her, touch-starved nerves catching fire, his hand finding its way to her lower back. There is heat coiling inside him now, just with Sypha’s lips on him and her arms around his neck, the feel of her body against his.

He draws back abruptly, gulping down a breath as he does. “Sypha,” he croaks.

She blinks back, and her cheeks are flushed, her eyes glistening. Adrian can’t tell if it’s from the drink or their kiss or both, but he suddenly finds it impossible to look away. “Yes?” she asks softly.

Adrian swallows. He darts a glance at Belmont, who is gazing at them both with a sort of hunger in his gaze, his glass forgotten in his hand.

“Are you—” Adrian starts, uncertain what to say. His thoughts are hazy, and his tongue feels too thick in his mouth to form words. He takes a slow breath, and tries again. “Are you alright with this?” he asks him.

Belmont looks at him, a little confused, a small smile playing at the edges of his lips as he says, “Me? Yeah, I’m alright.” He nods at Sypha. “She, on the other hand, is more than alright.”

“Stop it, Trevor,” Sypha laughs, swatting playfully at his shoulder. Her face is bright pink now, but she doesn’t seem at all embarrassed as she leans into Adrian again and reaches out to run her fingers through his hair. “Oh, you’re pretty,” she sighs.

“I— thank you.” Adrian runs his tongue over his lips, trying to get his raging pulse under control. Sypha’s teasing comments over the past few days start to make sense as Adrian plays them again in his head. Adrian has been attracted to her from the start, almost ever since he met her, and the thought that she might be attracted to him sends a sharp thrill through him. Her fingertips, when they caress his scalp, make him shiver, and her breath that skims his skin as she leans in to nuzzle his nose sets the hair at the back of his neck on end. If he were standing, his knees would have surely given way by now.

But Belmont… He is watching them, and there is no jealousy in his gaze, and Adrian isn’t sure what that means. They are a couple, after all, aren’t they? Adrian doesn’t know of many couples that would welcome a third person in their midst so easily, like this.

Come to think of it, he doesn’t know any other couples at all.

He draws back just a little, pulling away from Sypha’s kiss, before his thoughts slip away from him completely.

“I wanted to talk to you,” he tells them, finally finding the courage to speak about what has been troubling him for days. “I wanted to talk to- to both of you.”

Sypha blinks, then raises her brows in question. “About?”

“About this. About you. About… us.” He takes in a breath, mustering his strength. “I like that you’re here. That we’re all together again. There’s nothing I wanted more than to… to be with you again. And now…” His heartbeat soars as the words tangle on his tongue. There is no way to give voice to what he wants the most, his most well-hidden desire. He glances at Sypha, with her clear-sky eyes and her soft lips and even softer hands, and at Belmont, with his dark bangs falling over his eyes, his sharp jaw, his broad chest. The fire that has kindled in Adrian’s core rages, images and sensations flooding his brain until he can barely think, just at the mere sight of them there.

Mad. He is mad, he is out of his mind, he is...

In love.

Damn it.

Adrian takes a breath, his hand gathering into a fist at the realisation.

At that moment, he knows with perfect clarity, and he admits it to himself for the first time: he wants them. He wants them both.

But it is wrong. It is selfish. It is asking too much. They’re his friends and they care about him, certainly, they agreed to stay with him, but this… asking for something like this would be unthinkable. He wouldn’t blame them if they thought him crazy, if they believed he’s lost his mind.

He’s not sure he hasn’t, himself.

“You are both so… important to me,” he says quietly, afraid to meet their gazes. “And I want… I want—”

“Yes.”

Adrian stops, blinks at Sypha. “I beg pardon?”

She returns his gaze calmly, tilting her chin up. “Whatever you were going to ask of us, the answer is: yes.”

“But— but you don’t even know—”

Her lips are on his own before he can say another word. He finds himself melting against her, helplessly, a soft moan escaping him as she deepens the kiss, threading her fingers through his hair to pull him closer. A quick moment later, and she has somehow found herself on his lap, straddling him.

When they part for air, Adrian stares at her, at the curtain of strawberry blond locks that’s falling around her face. “You didn’t even know what I was going to ask,” he tells her, voice hoarse.

She grins. “Trust me, Alucard, I know.” She nods towards Belmont. “Even Trevor knows, and he’s even worse at these things than you are.”

“Hey, that’s not true and you know it.” Belmont laughs, though his face is steadily turning bright red as Adrian’s befuddled gaze falls on him. He gives his head a small shake, then rubs the back of his neck. “I mean, I had an inkling. And… well… I might have given it some thought myself.”

“He has a crush on you,” Sypha tells Adrian conspiratorially.

“I do not! ”

“Yes, he does. Don’t let his antics fool you.”

Belmont groans and rolls his eyes, draining the last of his brandy. “Teenagers have crushes. I am not a teenager.”

“Hm, you’re right,” Sypha says. “Perhaps there’s another word for it. Let’s see…” She leans forward, pressing her forehead to Adrian’s. There’s a mischievous grin widening her lips, her thumb brushing over his bottom lip. “How about ‘lust’? It sounds much more mature, doesn’t it? You’re in lust.” She hums and bites her lip, her eyes alight. “You want him.”

Adrian lets out a shaky breath. His tongue darts out instinctively to lick his lips, and brushes over her finger, momentarily tasting the sweet saltiness of her skin.

“That…” Belmont’s voice trembles only slightly as he speaks, “that sounds about right.”

Adrian can’t help but turn to look at him, startled by his admission. Belmont shrugs and rolls his eyes with a helpless smile. “Don’t let it go to your head, alright?”

“Finally!” Sypha throws her head back and laughs. “Finally he admits it! I never thought I’d see the day.”

“That was meant for you too,” Belmont reprimands, but the bite has thoroughly gone out of his words. His face is red like a pomegranate now.

“You… you want me?” Adrian asks incredulously, his pulse thumping in his throat. Surely, he must have misheard. This can’t be happening.

“We both do.” Sypha reaches down to take his hand, her fingers threading through his. “Do you?” she asks softly.

Adrian gapes at them both, suddenly lost for words. Ever since they met, and even though they’ve both offered him their friendship and affection, he always felt like the third wheel. As if it was just the two of them, and Adrian was always on the outside, looking in. After they’d left the castle, leaving him behind in search of adventure, there were moments Adrian had thought his heart had been broken so thoroughly, that it would never mend again. And now they’re both here, offering him something like this, and… he doesn’t quite know what to say.

There are a million things he wants to tell them, but they all die on his tongue. They want him? Both of them? It seems so hard to believe, that Adrian wonders if he’s dreaming.

Both Belmont and Sypha are watching him now, holding their breaths, and Adrian isn’t sure what to tell them.

He opens his mouth.

“I—” I want you, I missed you, I never stopped, I can’t bear the thought of being without you , I— “I’m—”

Adrian closes his mouth again and swallows, taking in a deep breath.

“Yes,” he whispers, heart beating in his throat. “I do.”

Sypha beams at him, her countenance lighting up. She stands up, still holding his hand. She tugs at it, pulling him to her, and he stands up too.

“I never thought I’d see this day either,” she whispers teasingly, pulling him in for a kiss.

Adrian lets out a quiet, startled laugh, wrapping his arms around her. She’s shorter than he is and he’s looming over her, but she cups his neck and draws him closer to her.

“If I’d known you were such a good kisser, I would have done this sooner,” she says, a soft murmur against his lips. She reaches up to undo the laces of his shirt, and Adrian shivers when he feels the brush of her fingers on his skin.

“You’ve been wanting to do this for— for a while then?” He follows her as she steps backwards towards the bed, tries not to stumble over his own toes. He doesn’t have the heart to tell her how inexperienced he is at this, how little he knows how to act and carry himself with confidence. But something tells him he does not need to.

Sypha grins, pulling his shirt over his head, and proceeds to brush her palms down his chest. Her palms are even softer than he remembers, and he barely even thinks about the scars as she touches them. “You really had no idea, did you?” A soft sigh escapes her as she deepens the kiss, arching into his touch when his own palm skims the line of her spine, the curve of her waist. She feels so small and delicate in his arms.

“Not sure if you’ve noticed, Sypha, but he is kind of slow on the uptake,” Belmont remarks from his spot on the couch, nursing his glass of brandy. His cheeks are still flushed, and he looks vaguely embarrassed, like he doesn’t quite know what to do.

Adrian smirks. “You’re one to talk.”

Belmont scoffs and takes a large sip of his brandy, without offering a rebuttal, and if that isn’t evidence that the man is thoroughly out of his depth then Adrian doesn’t know what is. Sypha glances over at him with a smile.

“Come, Trevor.”

Belmont looks up at them, then at Sypha’s outstretched hand. His throat bobs as he swallows, and he hesitates for a moment before he tosses the rest of his drink up and stands. “I am not slow on the uptake,” he mutters darkly, frowning at them both.

“You may not be,” Adrian tells him, amused, “but your reply was definitely a few seconds too late. That’s so unlike you. Usually, it’s your tongue that moves first before your poor mind can ever catch up.” He tilts his head to the side, and is surprised by the affection that swells in his chest at the sight of him, red-faced and embarrassed and for once incapable of coming up with a scathing comment for practically everything that’s taking place around him.

“Aren’t you going to join us?” Adrian quirks a brow, “Will I have to challenge you to a duel?”

Belmont licks his lips and grumbles something under his breath before he straightens and walks over to them, reluctant yet still somehow eager.

He stands tall before him, his pale blue eyes searching Adrian’s. Adrian would never have expected someone who is so confident on the battlefield to be so timid in a situation like this. He always expected Belmont to be the energetic, brutish sort, the one to grab his mate by the hair and drag them to his lair like a caveman, but he is surprisingly guarded and reserved. It’s almost… adorable.

Or it would have been, had Adrian not been a mess of nerves and emotion himself right then.

Still, there’s something drawing him to Belmont, something that he fight any longer. He takes a tiny step forward, coming to stand before him. “What’s wrong, Belmont?” he asks softly. “Are you afraid of me?”

Belmont scoffs. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Am I? I could swear that you’re avoiding meeting my eyes. Why would that be?” He steps closer to him still. “Are you suddenly afraid of vampires now?”

Belmont’s eyes flick to his and stay there, penetrating. “You’re no vampire.”

“Oh?”

“You’re only a half-vampire,” he says, voice dropping low, “and I wouldn’t be afraid of you even if you were.”

“Odd.” Adrian tilts his head to the side, his pulse buzzing with the thrill of the challenge in Belmont’s gaze. There. That’s more like it. “Then why does it look like your tail’s between your legs?”

Belmont puffs up just a little, his bashfulness gone as he leans forward, their noses almost touching. “There’s something else between my legs. Care to find out?”

Adrian licks his lips, meeting his piercing gaze. “Please,” he says, thanking God that his voice is level. “Don’t be so crass. This isn’t a whorehouse.”

“You have a big mouth, Alucard. Pity you don’t know how to use it.”

“There’s plenty of things I know how to do with my mouth. Shutting you up is one of them.”

“Is that the best you can do with it? Because I could swear—”

“Oh, my goodness,” Sypha throws her arms up in exasperation. “Just kiss already!”

Adrian takes a breath, preparing to retort, but Belmont is faster. A strong arm winds around his middle, pulling him closer, and Adrian simply melts against him, like so much clay in his hands. Belmont’s lips are slightly chapped, tasting strongly of brandy, and the scruff of his chin tickles Adrian’s skin. Adrian reaches up as if in a dream, his hand finding its way to the back of his neck, fingers threading through his hair. His skin is so warm , it’s like he’s on fire. And his hand on the small of Adrian’s back, pulling— his chest, hard and taut underneath him, the fabric of his shirt pressing against his bare skin—

Just when he thinks his knees will buckle, he feels Sypha’s hand brushing down his back, her lips skimming the side of his neck. He glances down at her as his and Belmont’s lips part and sees her smiling, rising up on her tiptoes to kiss him again. In his haze, he feels Belmont moving closer, holding him tighter, pressing his mouth to the side of his head, nuzzling his ear.

Adrian closes his eyes, disintegrating into that kiss, those tender touches. He can’t help but think of all those nights he spent alone in this castle, thinking about them, both of them, pretending that he didn’t wish they were still there. He thinks of the drawings he made of them to keep the memory of their faces crisp in his mind, the dolls he kept in the kitchen, those lifeless toys that bore their shape; the only things to keep him company. He remembers the crushing emptiness of all those endless, identical days, and his heart thumps painfully with such intense longing, a craving that’s impossible for him to bear.

They’re both so close to him now, touching him, holding him, and it all suddenly feels too much, far too much. But he doesn’t want this to end. He doesn’t want this moment to end.

“I missed you,” he breathes into his and Sypha’s kiss. He leans back just a little to look at her, and he realises his eyes are stinging. “I missed you both so much. I—” He glances at Belmont, who’s gazing at him with so much warmth and tenderness now that it makes him ache, and the tears he has been trying so hard to hold back escape the confines of his eyes, gliding down his cheeks. “I missed you.”

“We missed you, too,” he says softly. “I missed you.” He reaches up to brush the tears from Adrian’s cheek. “Was there ever any doubt about it?”

Adrian smiles at him through his tears, shivering when Sypha’s arms wrap around his middle.

“We’re here now,” she whispers. “We’re here.”

Adrian sighs as he leans into them both, letting them guide him to bed.

Read the rest on Ao3!

#castlevania #castlevania netflix #trephacard #alucard x trevor x sypha #alucard/trevor belmont/sypha belnades #alucard #adrian tepes #trevor belmont #sypha belnades #alucard/trevor/sypha #where blood roses bloom #johaerys writes

[stop-breaking-my-heart-telltale]

[against all odds, your hand is in mine] [1/4]

Seasons change, and with each comes a different story. In a world where the dead roam around, romantic companionship seems unlikely. Yet Ericson stands, and within it are four couples who are proof that it's possible.

Spring: Briolet | flowers, picnics, blueberries, running river

Read on AO3

Notes: Sometimes I get the urge to write four oneshots over the course of two days. This is the first of those oneshots. It’s briolet in spring, but be careful: there is so much hand holding and some smooches. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. 

[screenshot used is from the lovely @pi-creates]

---

Brody pricks her finger again. It's easy to avoid that, but she doesn't have a thimble, and her hands refuse to stop trembling.

No blood, and really, it didn’t even hurt. It more startled her, a bit of panic sparking in her gut at the idea of staining the martial and ruining her project. She stops her work to rest her hands and the fabric in her lap, closes her eyes, and sucks in a deep breath. It does little to calm her nerves or her impatience.

“Don’t rush,” she mumbles to herself, readjusting her position on the bed. She crosses her legs and notices a long strand of thick, pale blue thread stuck to her pants. Great, she needed that color an hour ago to finish one of the flowers.

Doesn’t matter now, the floral design is complete and all she has left is to sew the pieces together. If she can finish soon, there’ll be more than enough time to clean up, gather the basket she made up the night before, and head down to the greenhouse. Violet should still be there.

Brody smiles, setting down her needle and holding the handmade eyepatch in her hands. She rubs a thumb over one of the little white flowers. She embroidered them just this morning, a final touch to the overall design. That feeling strikes her gut again, exciting her nerves.

The idea came to her one night after Violet found her in the common room. It was late at night, and the two shared a blanket on the couch and drank tea. Violet's ruined eye was covered with bandages despite being healed over. No one was able to find her an actual eye patch. The best they found was a plastic one used for a children’s pirate costume, so she kept it bandaged.

Violet never complains about it. She considers the bandages her patch, even though they're not the most comfortable to wear every day.

Brody decided at that moment that she would make her one. She tore through her closet the next morning, sorting through old shirts until she found one she never wore. Taupe in color, a thicker material, something she could easily work with.

Though she had no idea how eyepatches were made, figuring those things out came easy to Brody. She made several patterns, testing each one out on scraps until one worked. From there, it was all about creating a design should could see Violet wearing. It wasn't difficult- sewing and embroidery work came easy to her.

A family thing that stuck, she assumes.

Her grams used to do embroidery and cross-stitching work. She made a living off sewing intricate designs, all more beautiful than any painting. If Brody closes her eyes, she can still see the doorway into her gram’s cabin. The framed design of a flowery cottage with a stone path, rural trees and a cloudless sky hung up on the wall. Her gram’s final masterpiece. She worked on it for months, pouring every ounce of love she had into each stitch. It was something Brody admired every time she walked through that doorway.

She learned to hunt and skin animals from her dad and uncles, and sewing from her grams. Best of both worlds, she supposes. Two skills that became handier than she would’ve ever thought at the time.

Though her flowers weren’t as flawless as her gram’s once were, she still put her heart into each stitch just as she did. She hopes that when Violet sees it, she’ll feel the unspoken words Brody threaded through the fabric.

Purple, white, and blue flowers of all sizes, each with a yellow french knot in the center, standing bright against the muted taupe. She sewed a thicker piece beneath it, used a tiny bit of stuffing from an old, ripped pillow to give it some comfortable cushion. A piece of a silky shirt lines the inside so Violet’s skin won’t get agitated while wearing it.

After weeks of work, all she has left to sew is the straps she made. She had no way to measure the fit for Violet’s head since she wanted this to be a surprise, so she figured she could make them extra long enough to tie comfortably while wearing. If she needed to adjust anything, she could do that later.

Brody picks her needle back up.

It doesn’t take long to finish, even with her forcing herself to take her time.

With triumph, Brody sticks her needle back into its rightful container and hops off her bed, singing, “Ta-daah~ !”

Her mind is all over the place. Wrap up the patch-- does she have a box or even a bag?-- and hide it at the bottom of the woven basket she found in the basement, stuff the blanket in as much as she can so the two cups don’t clank together, and start boiling water for tea-- where the hell did she put the jar of blueberries?

She flicks a match to light the heater she borrowed from Clementine, letting the water come to a slow boil as she searches around for the mason jar. It’s right under her nose, of course, sitting in plain sight on her shelf.

With the greenhouse running smoothly and the trading they’ve done with the traveling caravan that comes around, they're able to plant seeds for several different fruits and vegetables. This week, they finally got their first bunch of blueberries in. She managed to pick a bunch and seal them away in a jar yesterday without Violet noticing. She thought they’d make for a refreshing picnic snack to pair with tea.

Brody’s been planning this picnic for a while now, all while she was working and spring came to chase the cold away. Her favorite time of year where it’s finally warm, but cool enough to not overheat everything. Grass grows greener, flowers bloom all over the place, the river flows, and the sun shines bright in the sky most days. Other days, like yesterday, it rains. She was worried it would rain today as well, but there isn’t a cloud in the sky today.

She lets the tea steep in a large mug and squeezes what she can from an old container of mostly crystallized honey. When it’s cooled down enough, she pours it slow and steady into an empty water bottle. Sure, they can’t have iced tea given they have no way to actually make ice once winter ends, but lukewarm tea would be just as good.

Basket in hand, Brody looks out her window one last time before leaving the dorms. With every step she takes, she grows closer to the greenhouse and her heart thumps gaily against her ribs.

Outside, everyone is out and about, enjoying the warm weather. AJ and Tenn color together at the table while Mitch works on sharpening his favorite knife. Willy sulks on the couch beside him with Ruby attending to his bleeding knee. She's going on about him needing to be more careful.

Clementine and Louis sit on the steps leading into the admin building. She sits a step lower, leaning back into his chest as the two talk. Brody waves at them as she passes, and Louis gives her a knowing grin when he eyes the basket.

It’s not a long walk to the greenhouse from there. She stops when she notices the wildflowers growing by the fence of the rabbit coop. Bees buzz around the white flowers, landing in their yellow centers. She hates to disturb them, but these flowers were part of her inspiration when designing Violet’s eyepatch. They're too perfect not to pick. She shoos away a fat bumblebee with pollen sticking to its little black legs, and gathers eight of the flowers, leaving plenty for the rest.

A simple bouquet, if she could even call it that, but it works.

Once inside, the fresh scent of wet soil and leafy greens hits her. Not as refreshing as the sweet air outside, but still, it fills her lungs with warmth. Or perhaps that sensation is from seeing Violet standing beside Omar, watering what Brody believes are the potatoes.

Most of her hair pulls back into a hair tie, apart from the bangs that fall over her forehead and bandages. She hasn’t had a haircut in a while, letting it grow long enough past her shoulders. A surprise, actually. Violet hasn’t had long hair since they were kids.

Not that Brody was complaining- she likes it very much.

Violet breaks her attention from the potatoes to meet her gaze. She grins, and yes, that warmth is definitely from her. Omar continues on about some sort of new stew he wants to try making, only stopping when he notices he’s lost Violet’s attention.

“Everything doin’ okay in here?” Brody asks.

Violet gives a shrug. She sticks her hand out to run along the wooden planter to steady herself. She meets Brody halfway, replying with, “Eh, nothing too exciting. Willy biffed it while watering the rabbits this morning, but other than that...”

“He about crushed one of the babies,” Omar adds with a shake of his head. “More upset about that than he was about his skinned knee.”

“Aw, poor little guy,” Brody laughs. “That why he looked so miserable when I passed him?”

“Probably. He tried to catch it to apologize, but it was too quick even for him, and Ruby didn’t want him getting a bunch of muck all over him with an open wound, so…”

Apologizing to a baby bunny that they’re eventually going to eat? Sounds like Willy, Brody thinks. But never mind that, she has more important things than rabbits.

She reaches out to grab Violet’s free hand, her lips involuntarily curling into a bright smile as she asks, “Are you almost finished ?”

“Yeah,” Violet says, raising a questioning brow. “Why?”

“We’re going on a picnic!”

Violet pauses, only now noticing the basket in Brody’s grasp.

“We are?”

“We are!”

“That’s news to me.”

Brody lets go of her hand to present her with the flowers. Violet stares at them for a moment as her skin flushes, starting at her neck and blooming along her cheeks. If Omar weren’t standing over there, Brody would lean over and kiss that lovely blush.

“And where exactly would we have a picnic?”

“By the river. Already got a spot in mind.”

Violet holds the flowers close to her chest and clears her throat. She glances back at Omar, and says, “Uh, I don’t-”

“Go ahead,” he interrupts with a wave of his hand. “I can take care of the rest. Go have your picnic, be careful. And Brody,” he points to her, putting on a stern voice, “have her home by eight, and don’t have too much fun.”

Brody laughs.

“Yes, sir!”

Violet shakes her head, but her smile betrays her amusement.

“Well, okay, I guess we’re going on a picnic. There better be peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in there... that's what people eat on picnics, right?”

“Yeah, but no. Close, though.”

Locking their hands together once more, Brody leads Violet out of the greenhouse and through the gates. Soon, they’re outside the walls of Ericson. Heading down the path, she makes sure to keep watch out for any obstacles to warn Violet about.

Brody knows that Violet’s other eye works perfectly well, but given that her depth perception isn’t what it used to be, she can’t help but be extra careful. She used that excuse to hold Violet’s hand before they were together, both still recovering from their respective injuries. Better safe than sorry, use the buddy system, and that system requires hand-holding. Brody didn’t make the rules.

“Never been on a picnic before,” Violet breaks the silence.

“No? Not even before?”

“No.”

“We used to go out on picnics to eat and play games all the time. Me, my grandma, my daddy and uncles, cousins- if it was warm out, we were out.”

“That sounds nice.”

“Most times it was,” Brody says, giving Violet’s hand a squeeze. “ Just because those days are gone doesn’t mean we can’t do that kinda stuff now, y’know?”

“Yeah, I guess so. Though there are more walkers around than there were back then.”

“True, but that shouldn’t be a big issue today,” Brody smiles. “I asked James to check the area and he collected the walkers he found. The river should be clear.”

Even without looking at her, she can sense her surprise. Violet’s quiet for a moment, turning her head to peer around them before saying, “You planned this.”

It’s not a question, but more of a realization.

“I thought this was a spur of the moment thing,” Violet admits. “I, uh…”

When she doesn’t continue, Brody says, “ Not many opportunities to take you out on a date,” the word makes Violet blush and repress a smile, “and when one does arise, you bet your bottom dollar I’m gonna take it .”

Violet says nothing more, but her grip on Brody’s hand tightens.

They make it to the river without spotting a single walker. She kept her knife handy in case, but James was thorough, it seems. Brody makes a note to thank him again for helping her out.

The running water is soothing and the grass colors with golden dandelions. It’s nice to be down here without the intention of working up a sweat while fishing, she thinks. They find a flat piece of grass, kicking rocks, sticks, and pinecones out of the way to lay the blanket down. Together they sit side by side with the basket between them.

Rubbing her hands together, Brody digs in to pull everything out. Except for the eyepatch. It remains, wrapped in a pillowcase she found. Hopefully Louis won’t notice she snuck it from his horde of pillows.

“Alright, we got tea and blueberries,” Brody says, handing one mug to Violet and opening the mason jar of berries. Their sweet scent escapes into the air, making her mouth water.

“How’d you manage to sneak these past Omar?” Violet asks, popping a blueberry into her mouth. Her face twists at the taste, and for a moment Brody worries they might be sour, but Violet shakes her head. “They’re good, just not used to that.”

By now the tea is completely cooled, and while not cold, still delightful to sip on.

“Open wide,” Violet says, holding up a blueberry. It misses Brody’s mouth, bouncing off her chin. Violet laughs. “Pfft, c’mon.”

“Okay, okay, I’m ready, try again.”

Another miss.

“Aww, nope!”

“Well, let's see you try!”

Brody throws up a berry, and Violet misses it completely.

“Damn depth perception,” she grins, grabbing the berry and tossing it up herself. It hits her cheek, lost to the grass. “Damn it!”

Violet’s laugh, while rare, is as bewitching as it is infectious. It’s been so long since Brody heard her laugh like this, and to know that they’re here together, comfortable together…

Emotion builds in her throat, and she has to eat berries to suppress it. She aims the blueberry just right, and Violet catches it this time. As she chews, they both let out victorious giggles.

Once the laughter dies down, Violet brings her knees to her chest as she watches the river.

“Think we’re missing out on a fish haul?” she asks.

“Nah,” Brody pulls the basket closer to look inside, biting her lip as she runs her fingers over the covered patch. “And if we are, I’m sure the traps’ll make up for it.”

Should she do it now? They did just get here, did she want to surprise her early, or…?

Brody grabs a flower instead, bringing it up to her nose to inhale the soft scent. An idea occurs to her as she admires the girl before. Scooping up the flowers, Brody breaks off most of the stems. The flower slips in through Violet’s hair, right where the hair tie is.

Violet jerks her head around to look back, but Brody says, “Don’t move.”

“What are you-?”

She doesn’t need to answer the question, she merely secures a few more flowers within the light strands of hair before leaning back to admire her work. She even tucks one behind her own ear so they match.

Violet remains quiet, but lays her hand on Brody's. A silent, content thank you.

Brody doesn’t know how long they sat there watching the river, sipping tea, and listening to the birds chirp from the trees . A small butterfly flutters by them, and for a moment, Brody forgets the world around them. Forgets the walkers, forgets Ericson, too swept up in the way the warm air blew against her skin, in how Violet’s hand felt in hers, and the strange sense of wonder, a desire to kick off her shoes and run through the river.

It took Violet kissing the back of her hand to break her out of it.

Violet grew sheepish, glancing away as if she needed to come up with an explanation for the kiss, and that was it.

“Vi,” she started, pulling her around to face her. “I have- I made ya somethin’.”

The nervous pounding in her chest thumps in her ears as she reached back into the basket, pulling out the pillowcase.

“Aw, from Lou’s stash,” Violet grins, amused. “You shouldn’t have.”

“No, no, not the pillowcase,” Brody fidgets with it until she finds what she’s looking for. Her thumb brushes over the flowers beneath the thin material. With a deep breath, she goes for it. “Listen, I’ve been thinkin’ a lot about you. Us... just everything, and- Remember that night we stayed up in the common room talkin’? I thought… well, I wanted to do this for you.”

Brody hands her the pillowcase. Not once does she take her eyes off Violet’s face, noting the curiosity and confusion playing in her features as she accepts the gift.

The eyepatch is finally brought out into the sunlight, laying in Violet’s palm.

Neither of them speaks. Violet’s lips part, eye widening.

Brody lets the air out of her lungs slow, and then the words spill from her lips before she can stop them.

“We couldn’t find you anything to wear other than that stupid costume patch, and I know you said you didn’t mind the bandages but then I got to thinkin’ ‘bout how bandages might not always be the comfiest-”

“Brody…” Violet’s voice is quiet, trembling as it breaks.

“-and I want you to be comfortable in somethin’ that you like, so I made this for you- the whole thing, hand sewed it myself. I- but y’know, if it’s maybe too much- I wasn’t sure if it might bring too much attention and you wouldn’t like that-”

She’s cut off when Violet practically throws herself at her, burying her face in the crook of Brody’s neck and holding her tight. Brody doesn’t hesitate. She embraces her back, pressing a hand to cradle her head.

“I… don’t know what to say,” Violet's voice quivers.

“You like it?”

“Yes.”

“Then that’s enough.”

Violet pulls back, and without warning, her hands cup Brody’s face. She presses their lips together in a way that’s anything but gentle. It’s firm, purposeful, and loving. All tension from her body melts away, and Brody truly believes she could kiss her all day and that tingle? The one that coursed through her veins, the butterflies that fluttered in her belly? It would never go away. It wouldn't even lessen.

They break apart, and Violet’s staring down at the eyepatch in her hands.

“Holy shit. It’s… I don’t-” she tries again. “You didn’t have to do this.”

“I wanted to,” Brody assures her, brushing the bangs that fell over her face.

“No one’s ever made me anything like this before. I mean, not a patch, just … you know.”

“Want to try it on?”

Violet nods, and Brody’s undoing the bandages with ease. Her eye's healed from the damage the raiders inflicted, leaving only angry scars. The patch is a perfect size, covering everything.

“Does it feel okay?”

“Yeah, it’s… nice. Soft.”

“Does this feel tight enough? Like it won’t fall off, but not too tight?”

“Yeah, it feels good.”

“Couldn’t figure out a good way to clasp it together, so it ties. If ya want me to change it or anything, I can make adjustments... There!”

Violet turns back around, avoiding her gaze. Brody studies her face, the way the colors of the embroidered flowers make the green in her other eye vibrant, how the taupe of the fabric flatters her.

“Beautiful.”

Violet scoffs, ducking her head to hide the flustered smile that betrays her lips. This gives Brody the perfect excuse to place a quick kiss on her forehead.

“You’re so mushy,” Violet says, embarrassed but trying to force a playful tone. “Y’know that?”

Well, to be fair, Brody could be mushier, so she replies with an over-the-top, sweet, “Only with you.”

Violet groans and they laugh once more.

They know their little picnic will wrap up soon, so together they sit close and enjoy the comfort of nature for a few minutes longer.

“Thank you, Brody… really.”

Brody responds with another kiss.

Yeah, she thinks. She could kiss Violet all day.

#[against all odds your hand in is mine] #twdg briolet #twdg violet #twdg brody #briolet #violet twdg #brody twdg #spring: briolet #thank you for reading #it's always super appreciated :D #twdg fanfics #twdg fanfiction

[vannahfanfics]

A Caring and Doting Family

Category: General Fluff

Fandom: Fairy Tail

Characters: Wendy Marvell, Mirajane Strauss

Hello, everyone! Here’s my story for the Fairy Tail Reverse Big Bang for 2020! I had the pleasure of working with @lucykirkland for this event (here is the art associated with the story) and @reachingforme as my beta. I hope you all enjoy :) Thank you @ftguildevents for hosting!

Wendy squirmed uncomfortably as her belly twisted in tight, uncomfortable knots. Whimpering quietly, she draped herself over the wood of the table and tried not to seem too conspicuous. The young dragon-slayer wasn’t sure what had aggravated her tummy so, but it was not something she wished to bother anyone else with. Thus, she suffered in silence, watching through teary eyes as the guild went about its daily business. 

It was an ordinary day in Fairy Tail, about one in the afternoon. Cana had begun her daily ritual of draining the guild of its alcohol; she eagerly gulped ale straight from the oak barrel. Loke had elected for a jaunt to the human world and was striding about with meek little Aries clinging to the hem of his waistcoat; little tufts of her fluffy fur rolled on the floor from where she had tugged it out.The guild’s Exceeds now batted it around with their little paws. Juvia and Levy avidly discussed a recent article in the weekly mages’ magazine. Natsu and Gray were embroiled in one of their daily scraps, upending tables and chairs as some of the other adults looked on with hoots and hollers. After a few punches and kicks, Erza grabbed them by the collars and hauled them off for a fierce talking-to. Mirajane meandered through the crowd, delivering platters of food and tankards of drinks. Eventually she wandered up to the table where Wendy sat alone wriggling in pain. 

“Wendy?” Mirajane inquired quietly. She set down the plates of food she was about to deliver when she noticed the young girl’s apparent distress. “Are you sick, honey?” Wendy vehemently shook her head, not wishing to bother the pretty model-slash-mage with her stomachache. However, the movement sent her stomach twisting further into pretzel knots, and she whined miserably. Mirajane eased onto the table bench beside her, looking at her with raised eyebrows. 

“... My tummy hurts,” the pigtailed girl admitted finally. Mirajane blinked puzzledly; then, her expression softened, and she reached over to rub soothing circles into the small of Wendy’s back. The blue-haired mage sniffed and buried her face into her forearm, embarrassed to be seen in such a compromised state. How weak was she, to be incapacitated by a mere stomachache? “I’m sorry…” she peeped on instinct.

“Wendy! There’s no need to be sorry,” Mirajane laughed amiably, her long white hair swishing as she rose from the seat. Wendy peered over the curve of her arm to look up at her. “Why don’t you come back to the sick bay?” Mirajane offered kindly. “I know just the treatment for a tummy ache!” Her blue eyes sparkled as she offered a hand to the younger mage. Wendy gazed at the presented hand with a small measure of hesitation. She didn’t want to burden Mirajane with her silly illness. Although, when her insides contorted into another painful position and sent ribbons of pain flaring across her abdomen, Wendy abandoned her pride.

“Okay,” she murmured and took Mirajane’s hand. She slipped off the bench, cringing as her ailing stomach protested loudly to the action. Tears pricked the corners of her eyes and she clutched at the skin of her stomach as the twisting, contorting pain clawed at her insides. Mirajane tutted soothingly and pulled her flush to her side, drawing an arm around Wendy’s slim shoulders. Simpering, Wendy pushed her forehead against the flesh of Mirajane’s side. She was soft and warm, and Wendy found herself relaxing in her soothing presence. Somehow, the roiling in her stomach settled down just a smidgeon.

Mirajane steered the ailing girl towards the back of the guild where a small room with a bed and medicine supplies lay. Despite the proclivity for Fairy Tail members to end up in all sorts of trouble that resulted in wounds, from small to grievous, it was unoccupied. When Mirajane opened the door, Wendy immediately tore from her side to scamper over to the bed and crawl in. The freshly cleaned sheets smelled of vanilla and lavender; as Wendy inhaled the calming scent, she crooned in gratification. The fabric was soft and silky on her skin, which she now realized was flushed with mild fever. Mirajane chuckled as she strode to the bedside and leaned over to tuck her in.

“Feeling better already?”

“Mhmm. I feel like a pampered princess!” Wendy laughed as Mirajane pushed the sheets and comforter under her body to envelop her in a nice, warm cocoon. Her intestines were still writhing like a beast inside of her, but the pain had lessened some. Mirajane hummed and laid the back of her hand against Wendy’s forehead.

“You have a slight fever,” the woman frowned. She retrieved a glass of water and two fever-reducers. Wendy gulped down the pills, grimacing at the uncomfortable feeling of the smooth tablets against her throat. She coughed a little before settling back down into the bed, squirming uncomfortably at the smoldering pain in her tummy. The mattress dipped as Mirajane eased down onto it; her hand reached out to stroke Wendy’s stomach over the soft down comforter. “Don’t worry, Wendy,” she smiled kindly when the girl pouted uncertainly at her. “I’ll stay with you until you feel better.”

“Are you sure?” Wendy frowned deeply. “I feel bad… You have work to do, Mira.” Mirajane chuckled warmly and shook her head.

“No work is more important than making sure our cute little Wendy is okay!” Wendy blinked, then smiled bashfully. Mirajane is so kind, she thought happily. She snuggled further into the warm, cozy bed, appreciating the way the sheets and blankets enveloped her like a hug. To occupy herself, Mirajane brought her bin of silverware and napkins into the room so she could fold them and replenish the store. The Fairy Tail guild members collectively had insatiable gullets, meaning that the kitchen was constantly under some strain or another. Wendy watched through lidded eyes as Mirajane wrapped the silken black cloths around forks, knives, and spoons and tied red ribbons around them. She dropped them into another empty bin beside her. She was meticulous yet efficient, so very soon she had filled the bin nearly halfway.

In the interim, various members of the guild meandered in and out of the sick bay to see Wendy. Lucy popped by to deliver a warm cup of chamomile tea that she had prepared using Mirajane’s bar equipment. It’s soft floral flavor melted into Wendy’s bones, pulling her into a sense of ease and tranquility. It also made her a little sleepy, so she caught a quick cat nap; when she awoke, her belly pain had dulled considerably, but was still mildly uncomfortable. 

Gajeel and Levy came by to see her. Gajeel got halfway through one of his senseless, raspy original songs before the bookish girl ushered him out bleating about how he was disturbing the sick girl. Levy hopped back in to give Wendy a plush rabbit she had bought at the local antique store. Its threads were frayed and it carried the aroma of mothballs, but it was incredibly soft.Wendy hugged it tightly to her side.

Next came Erza, who brought her a strawberry shortcake. The redhead seemed very pleased when the sugar aggravated Wendy’s upset stomach too much to finish eating it and she was given the opportunity to polish it off. Natsu and Happy stopped in too but didn’t seem to understand Mirajane’s annoyance when they insisted that a nice cut of roasted meat cured all ailments. Gray and Juvia came in also, and Wendy was very entertained by the way Juvia insisted on wrapping her head in a scarf to stave off her fever. Laxus even came to see her, though he grew very flustered about what to say and just sat uncomfortably in a chair for five minutes holding her hand. Wendy found his hesitant caring very charming.

Wendy was very grateful for all the attention she had received over the course of the day, though she was only suffering from a stomach ache. Her guildmates regaled her with silly jokes and funny faces and kind words. By the time the sun was sinking below the horizon to cast a golden glow into the room, her pain had faded into a mild dull throbbing. Mirajane had finished preparing silverware and was now polishing the glassware they used on special occasions to prevent the accumulation of dust.

“Mirajane?” Wendy asked quietly. Sapphire blue eyes locked on her, sparkling and content. Wendy blinked slowly and squirmed in the bed. She wasn’t quite sure what she wanted to ask, now that she thought about it; she had just been compelled to call out to the model. To save face, she sputtered, “Th-thank you for sitting with me.”

“It’s no problem, Wendy!” Mirajane smiled sweetly. Sensing that something troubled the younger girl, she abandoned her current work and turned to face her fully. “Is something on your mind, Wendy?” Meekly, the little girl nodded. “What is it?”

“I just… This kind of feels like how my old guild used to dote on me,” Wendy explained with a small blush. The rest of her guild was familiar now with her origins and were usually careful not to bring up her disheartening past. Though Wendy was exceptionally happy with her home in Fairy Tail, of course she still thought about her old friends- no, family- from time to time. They were the first to embrace her when she became lost in this strange and foreign world. Though they had faded from existence, Wendy still treasured them very much and sometimes descended down the bittersweet road of memory.

Her bottom lip wobbled as she fingered the stitched hem of the comforter. The tears budded again in the corners of her eyes, blooming like little dewdrops before slipping down her cheeks. “O-one time… I ate some bad meat and got food poisoning. It was so awful; I was terribly sick… The whole guild stayed up with me all night, telling me funny stories and bringing me water and medicine and just helping me through it.” Dark stains appeared in the fabric where her tears had soaked through. “I-I’m sorry, Mira. I must sound so ungrateful right now!” she fretted and rubbed at her teary eyes with the heels of her palms.

“No!” Mirajane interrupted quickly. She scooched up the bed to lay on her side beside Wendy, hugging her head and bringing it to her chest. Wendy sniffled as Mirajane tenderly embraced her. “We could never, ever ask you to forget your former family, Wendy,” the woman told her gently. “They are as much a part of you as we are.” The tears continued to roll down Wendy’s cheeks as she whimpered in relief. She wasn’t sure if telling the truth would offend Mirajane, and the last thing Wendy wanted to do was upset the motherly woman that she so looked up to. Mirajane tutted and pressed her cheeks against Wendy’s head, twirling one of her long pigtails around her hand. “We love you, Wendy, no matter what. Frankly, I’m glad that we’re able to give you feelings that remind you of your old guild.”

“Really?” Wendy asked, peering up at her with wide eyes. Mirajane smiled brightly and nodded.

“Yes! That means that we’re doing our job as your new family and taking good care of you! If you feel safe and loved with us, that is all we could ever ask for.” Wendy trilled delightedly and threw her arms around Mirajane’s neck to snuggle happily into her. Mirajane beamed and embraced her tightly. “You are our guild’s treasure. Never, ever forget that.”

“Thank you, Mirajane,” Wendy giggled elatedly. Mirajane pulled back to smile happily  at her.

“Is your stomach hurting anymore?” Wendy perked up and her hands flew to her stomach. Sure enough, the dull pains in her stomach had ceased. Wendy grinned ecstatically at Mirajane.

“No! I’m cured!” she squealed. She threw the covers off herself and jumped up in the bed, flinging her arms triumphantly in the air. Mirajane chuckled good-naturedly as the blue-haired girl did a little happy dance across the mattress. “Thank you for your help, Mira!”

“Of course. Since you’re feeling better, would you like some cookies?” Wendy shrieked in delight and vaulted off the bed to dash out the door, yelling, “Yay! Cookies!” She ran out into the main guild hall and dozens of pairs of eyes fixed on her.

“Hey, everybody!” she cried, cupping her hands to her mouth. “I’m all better and Mira’s making cookies!” she shouted just as Mirajane came strolling out of the room. A chorus of excited shouts and hollers rang through the room. Mirajane clicked her tongue and teasingly leaned over to tickle Wendy’s sides.

“Hey! That was gonna be our secret!” Screaming in laughter, Wendy wriggled away from her and fled to scramble up into Gajeel’s lap. His big, strong arms wrapped around her middle and he regarded her with raised eyebrows.

“Protect me, Gajeel!”

“From Mira? You’re on your own, squirt,” the iron-eater snorted playfully. Wendy giggled and climbed up to sit on his shoulder like a parrot, heels kicking into his back as she watched Mirajane walk behind the bar to begin preparing the cookie dough. After a few seconds, she hopped down to run over.

“Can I help? Can I, Mirajane?”

“Of course. Here, can you get me the flour?” Nodding, Wendy ran to the cabinets to begin looking for the bag of flour. As she pulled it out and brought it over, she paused to look out into the guild hall, drinking in all the friendly faces.

I miss my old home sometimes, she thought, but I’m very grateful to have found such a caring, lively, and amazing new one! Wendy scampered over to Mirajane and climbed up into a chair to deliver the flour. As Mirajane handed her a whisk to stir the dry ingredients, Wendy prepared to add this moment to the plethora of happy memories she had made at Fairy Tail.  

Enjoy this oneshot? Feel free to peruse my Table of Contents.

#ftrbb2020 #wendy marvell #mirajane strauss #fairy tail #ft wendy #fairy tail wendy #ft mirajane #fairy tail mirajane #ftfanfic #ft fanfic #ftfanfication #ft fanfiction #fairy tail fanfic #fairy tail fanfiction

[mor-beck-more-problems]

To the Light of Day || Solo

TIMING: Early morning, after the destruction of Constance

SUMMARY: Morgan tries to lay her pain to rest.

CONTAINS: brief mentions of parental abuse

The snow was coming down hard enough to bury White Crest as Morgan walked home from the outskirts. The sirens had quieted and the Christmas lights all switched out. The only sign it was morning came from the ring of church bells as a midnight service let out and oblivious churchgoers turtled out to the parking lot in their puffy coats. From where she stood, Morgan could see the flicker of Advent candles, the Christian bastardization of her Yule log. Morgan watched a pimply twelve year old snuff them out one by one until the last of the faithful left and the door shut for the night. She walked behind the straggling flock, head bowed against the snow as it fell harder. She wanted to imagine what being a part of them would be like, just one of the humans, lighting a candle against her fear and praying en masse to a big nice dad in the sky who would whisper while you slept that everything was okay and for your own good, just you wait and see. But Morgan had never known anything close, and she didn’t deserve much of an escape right now, did she?

When she was little, Morgan spent Yule with her parents gathered around a row of three tapers nested into a log holder, one for each of them to burn all night and day. Her mother lit the candles because Morgan ‘didn’t do it right’. Her dad picked out the prayers from the family grimoires or wrote something more personalized to the family on his own. And Morgan agonized over whether she should wish for snow or a new friend or a pony. They were together and apart keeping this sweet, wonderful secret winter holiday from all the boisterous Christmasers. The room never erupted with the sound of their poetry recitations, the songs her parents picked to honor the day changed from year to year, so she never grew a familiar, cuddly attachment to any tunes except for the verses of ‘The Holly and the Ivy’ they stole for themselves. When Yule became just Morgan and Ruth, the candlelight seemed dimmer, their voices barely rose at all, and her dad’s old prayers rang hollow without his intentions to power them. The darkness of the longest night grew heavy in a primeval way that reminded Morgan that the first Yuletides were made to make sure the sun wouldn’t abandon humanity for good. It was the kind of dark that you could drown in, the kind that broke your shoulders to strain against. Morgan felt that old, cruel weight of the night wrapping around her now as she walked. She didn’t have a yule candle log for herself this year. After dying and the various breakdowns that followed, merrymaking and yuletide seemed like more of a pipe dream. And peace, after what she’d done? Morgan scoffed bitterly at the thought.

“It’s not about the candles, pumpkin,” Ruth’s voice said. On their first solstice without her dad, Ruth had fumbled their last match, and it was too icy to run to the 24-hour pharmacy for more. Morgan fretted so hard conjuring up a fire to replace it, she’d scorched the candles and ruined their old log. Ruth grabbed her hands before she could do anything else. “It’s still Yuletide. The sun is still coming back.”

“But it’s not the same! What’s the point of the ritual if we can’t even get one stupid candle going to pretend like this is going to get better!”

Morgan couldn’t remember what her mother had said to that. She only knew that afterwards she’d left the room and cried, missing her dad and the kind of life where you didn’t hold your breath for the next crisis and just did things. At sunrise she went out to the window to watch the return of the light and found her mother in the backyard, praying in a stone circle she’d cast the mundane way, reciting the charge of the Goddess...

Morgan trudged through downtown until she came across Al’s. Half the rainbow lights strung around the awning were burnt out, and the inside was dead except for the lonely old man Morgan always saw in the corner. The old TV in the upper corner was switched to one of those fireplace broadcasts, where the flames never dimmed and the lights shined on glass baubles just right. Morgan couldn’t help but stop and watch. It wasn’t the best picture quality; what billows and whispers she imagined coming from the flames were more from her memories of better, brighter fires. But it was the first fire Morgan had seen all season, and it brought tears to her eyes.

Could you wish on a yule log if it was fake? Was it an affront to the ancestors or the spirits if you paid homage through pixels? Morgan laughed hopelessly. The spirits she knew had been pretty clear about what they wanted her to do, and after tonight, wishing on a crappy TV probably ranked really low on the list. What would she wish for anyway? A fucking do-over? Morgan pressed her fingers to the frosted glass, staring as hard into the screen as possible. “I’d do it all different if I could,” she whispered. “If anyone could just tell me how to make it stop hurting without passing it off to other people or--fuck, killing random nobodies who never did anything. If I could just know how we’re supposed to…” Morgan quieted and shut her eyes, realizing that for all intents and purposes, she was talking to herself. She had lied, threatened, stolen, maimed, and killed for her pain. And here she still was, carrying it like a growth in her chest she couldn’t excise. What do I do? If someone could just tell me what to do, tell me how this stops. I don’t care what else I have to do as long as we can all stop hurting...

But the universe didn’t speak to you in words, it didn’t speak at all. It just worked. It moved. Energy cycled through you and around you and sometimes if you were lucky and alive, you could move it back. But it’s not about the light, pumpkin, Ruth said again. Morgan reached for her in her mind, to that soggy, miserable Yule and the purple sunrise that came after, and the words her mother had said to the reborn sun.

To thou who thinkest to seek Me, know that thy seeking and yearning shall avail thee not unless thou knowest the Mystery: if that which thou seekest thou findest not within thee, thou wilt never find it without.

“Fuck,” Morgan whispered. Could it be that simple? Was that something she was allowed after death? She opened her eyes. The TV had been switched to some Christmas cartoon, but that didn’t matter. Morgan resumed her walk, swift and purposeful in a way it hadn’t been before. She didn’t stop until she made it to the cemetery on the East End, where the weeds were always a little too tall and the stones a little grubby with moss. Morgan played the words in her head on herself, burning with longing.

She was dead, her nerves were smothered in death, she couldn’t grow or age or shift along the wheel of life the way the living did, but she grew a new hand for every one she lost. Her body frayed and sagged closer to the earth it could never rest in when she got hungry, but maybe that wasn’t a mark of betrayal. Maybe it was a reminder from the earth, a hand on her hand, a bridge between the flow of the world and the place where she dwelled in between. Maybe it was a rope to keep her connected. Maybe the dead could still pray. She had come back this far, hadn’t she? She’d done it wrong and twisted and broken all over again, but she could walk and burst through the rickety gate and carry herself to the highest mound in the place and brush back the snow gathering over the graves. She had enough sense to be sorry and scared. She had enough of her self to wonder.

Morgan cleared the snow away until there was a body sized patch of brown grass to lay in. She fell face forward and dug her hands in deep. Please… If I am still a part of you, please…

The ground was hard with death, but the deeper Morgan dug her hands in, the softer it grew. Layer by layer, into that place where life only slept, like the day during the long night. Was that her? A night, a season, moving slowly until her sense of light came again?

If that which thou seekest thou findest not within thee, thou wilt never find it without.

Let me, Morgan whispered in her heart, the words no longer a question. I need you to let me. And I need you to take this. She crawled up to her knees and dug her nails into the fabric of her sweater. She worried at the threads, thinking of the memories that had twisted around her heart every time she’d had a chance to let Constance leave this plane for good and said no. Yelling at the paramedics while her dad was wheeled away, her mother’s nails cutting moons into her neck and shoulder as she dragged her down the hall, the pole in her stomach and how her head flashed with pain every time she tried to move, the coffins lowered into the ground, the phone calls unanswered, the weeks lost to laying in bed because there was no point in getting up when it was all going to get ripped away again, the loneliness, the sting of every lost friend and broken hope… Morgan pulled on herself, shuddering as she let the hurt cut her on the way out, as sharp as if they’d been made fresh. In her mind, she made them into one braided cord, plain and riddled with knots and kinks in the fibres. She pulled, letting the other awful little things stick and tangle into it. When she could think of nothing else she pulled again, feeling the claws at the end of the hurt clinging to her.

Let me give this to you for safe-keeping, she silently asked the earth. Take this in lieu of my body. Let it decay in its own good time and nourish something else. Because it’s going to take me away from you and myself and everything I love. I trust you not to use this for any ill. You have held me up this far, and you will hold me further still, my dear, old Earth. Even Morgan’s wildest imagination and most desperate devotion couldn’t unhook every cord binding her to her hurt, but some of them gave, root and all, and fell into the ground. She piled the dirt she’d loosed over the spot her mind’s eye conjured the fallen cords. There was nothing to forgive, because the earth didn’t weigh value like that, only poison and barbs that needed to be worked out. Only healing for the holes the cords had left in her, rest for the girls she’d been and was no longer, and courage for the woman she wanted to be from now on. Someone who touched others with understanding before spite, who guarded the world against her hurt, who stood up for as many people as possible and not just her friends, who was kind and soft and forgave as much as her soul could bear it. Someone who could mourn and atone for the hurt she spread instead of brushing it off. Someone her past selves could be proud of and mystified by. As day follows night and spring follows winter, keep me steady until I find my own light.

“So may it be,” she said, promising herself even more than the ground at her feet. By the time Morgan finished, the dark had washed away to a pale gray. Through the veil of snow clouds, Morgan was sure she saw a white silhouette of the newly turned sun.

#to the light of day #wr solo #wr chatzy #wickedswriting

[clairenchanted]

man / monster. 

maybe the creature was the monster anyway. 

that’s the line, the frankenstein’s not the monster, he’s the doctor! and then  the well meaning pause, the he’s still the monster, isn’t he?  to make someone and leave them? to revile them? to hurt them?  a little laughter, the kind you find in polite, intellectual conversations.  honestly, you say to your grad school friends, he’s still the monster. 

my mother and i have spent our lives fluent in anger. english is our second language. i remember getting off the bus at the stop before the bridge where i’d meet her after school. i remember the car was silver that would camouflage itself against the watery afternoon light, and the thing that took up most of the space in the interior was the anticipation of what would come. do you know how long i’ve been waiting she would say, or. what did you forget to do today. or, i bet you didn’t start your homework yet. or, i can’t today i can’t do this with you today. i would breathe, i would start my words, and they would all fall against the knife edge of her anger; i learned that mine needed to be sharper and harder if they were ever going to stand a chance. 

whenever i hung out with the girl down the block, or the only cousin my age, my mother would sigh. she would say you talk just like her when you get back. like it’s a bad thing. i searched in her tone and in her eyes and in my own words circling me in my empty bedroom, trying to find the part where it went wrong. 

the thing was, the creature was beautiful.  canonically, specifically. his limbs were in proportion, and i had selected his features as beautiful. beautiful! the creature is eight feet tall and does not fit the beautiful features the doctor --  (he’s not a doctor, your grad school friend whispers to you with the delight of knowing these kinds of things. he dropped out of college! where’s your degree, buddy? where’s your student loan debt? and he calls himself a doctor.)   misery became me in college. that was our currency -- money secondary. we traded in sleepless nights and how many pages we had to write and how many classes we took. i started to fall from where i had been (a star of a student, an apple of an eye, a requisite on the honor roll) and i learned how to make failure my home. it was what i heard, it was what i saw. so, necessarily, it was what i lived. 

they would drink, so i would drink. they would beset their sentences militantly with as many syllables as they could mange -- i learned how to breathe around longer and longer words, lost in my own verbosity. (read: wordiness.) 

anyway, the creature does not fit the beautiful features frankenstein selected for him; he stretches his skin and makes it sallow. all of the parts of him, beautiful on their own, are disparate together. they show their differences, their points of origin. they do not hide. they do not make one seamless whole.  so frankenstein, in revulsion of what he has done, leaves.  and the creature, who does not know that he is a creature, does not know why, because he does not know that he is a creature. 

i am used for my intelligence, so i start to use others for what they can give me. i structure my world in varying degrees of usefulness. i curl around the empty parts inside of me and tell myself that they are unnecessary; what can emotions do for me? how can loneliness harm me? 

but then i am met with understanding, and something in me surges up and out, trying to copy what i have just seen. 

we learned about mirror neurons in a cognitive neuroscience class i didn’t do very well in. but i remember those; i remember thinking about looking at someone else and letting myself feel the urge to mimic them. i remember wondering if it would happen if i looked in the mirror; if i could ever want to mimic myself. if there was an answer at the bottom of that endless philosophical cycle the very question would create. 

in the story, the monster doesn’t eat meat.  he is well spoken; he asks things like: isn’t he meant to be adam (biblically, literally)? who is he, where did he come from, why is he alone?  was he made to be alone? 

what the creature also doesn’t know is that frankenstein (the man who is not a doctor) did not ask any of these of the creature he made, because it was never about the life that would be made. what he loves are the questions: how much blood, how much flesh, how much air makes a corpse a living thing? what he hates is: how can one live now that they are alive? 

the man hates the monster, and the monster learns how to hate. 

(all men hate the wretched, says the creature who becomes a monster, how, then, must i be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things!) 

(this is not a justification for murder, of course. but this is a story, and the monster is making a point here.) 

my best friend’s laughter -- rare and quiet -- is infectious. we sit on my couch in my apartment and start howling with laughter until we forget what we were laughing about in the first place. but her red face, streaked with joy and tears, fills my chest with an electric warmth and her euphoria becomes my own and we laugh again and again. i cry with her, too, when the hour grows late and she opens the shell around her fragile heart; we are connected with a thin live wire and when she feels, i feel. 

they (a special they) approach me with gentle hands and words unmasked and unbeguiling. they come without wants except for the fact that that’s not true; we all have wants that live deep within us, tender and lacking bite. wants that don’t hurt, that fill us with a softness that wraps around our jagged edges and soothes the ache in our throats. they come with understanding and honesty and everything in me rushes to meet them with the same: twin waves kissing at the crest. 

i have learned things in the intervening years and my slow crawl into adulthood. i have learned that my anger is sparked by its twin, brought to life with the same electric shock that raises the creature in every film iteration. i have learned, sometimes, to swallow it back. i have learned to want things that are not shown or given to me: i have learned to want to be soft and open, to want to hollow out my chest and make space for the things and people i find around me. i have learned the things i like and dislike about my disparate, stitched together parts. i have learned to find the seams bound in tight, black thread. 

i have learned my creature-ness. 

the argument inherent in monster versus man is what makes each. inevitably, though, you can only find the similarities: both are made; both are made of what they see of others like so many fingerprints left behind on glass. both desire; both desire to understand who they are (doctor, philosopher, loving, loved). both are who they make of each other: monster, man. murderer, meddler. 

there is something relieving in monstrosity, as if i can breathe fully around the idea in a way that humanity denies. there are many ways the story could have ended: in understanding, in acceptance, in dignity and knowledge and perseverance. and there is only one way it could have ended (tragedy) because the question sits like a knot in the deepest part of the story’s heart: what is the difference between monster and man? 

as if it’s important. 

i am not un-dangerous. but i can reach out my hands, palms up, fingers without claws, and know that i, the monster, will be gentle and loving. and in that moment, it and i become only a word to keep track of things, at home in our sewn together body. 

#frankenstein #halloween #horror #poetry #writeblr #lesbian

[mikauzoran]

Adrienette: Serendipity: Fifty Marichat and Adrienette Kisses: Kiss Eight

Serendipity: Fifty Marichat and Adrienette Kisses: …in secrecy.

(I forgot to post this on Tumblr too when I uploaded it to AO3 on Thursday. ^.^; Sorry!)

“Oeuf,” Adrien grunted as Marinette pushed him roughly up against the wall of the school utility closet, nearly knocking an industrial-size roll of paper towels down on them.

Marinette pulled back just enough to whispered, “You’re sure no one comes in here?” against his lips.

“Positive,” he assured breathily, even though it seemed a little late for her to be asking fifteen minutes in. “It makes a good hiding spot for akuma attacks.” No one had walked in on him transforming yet, and he’d been using the closet periodically over the past three years.

“Okay.” She gulped and started to take her shirt off.

“Whoa!” Adrien’s hands flew out to stop her.

This was not how he first wanted to see his girlfriend in negligée.

Marinette blinked in confusion before her expression quickly evaporated into hurt.

Adrien rushed to explain himself. “Sorry. It’s just…there’s only fifteen minutes left before lunch ends, and I don’t think we have time for…whatever it is you had in mind.”

Marinette’s bottom lip jutted out in a pout. “I want…”

She looked away, shaking her head as she took a step back. “Never mind.”

He advanced a pace, catching her hand. “No. Tell me. Please?” He tipped up her chin with a finger.

She gave him a shy look. “I want…you to kiss me.” She bit her lip and brought his hand up to touch her neck. “Here.” Slowly, she guided his hand down along the curve of her collarbone, down between her breasts, down past her bellybutton, stopping at the top of her jeans.

Adrien gulped. “O-Oh. I…”

She searched his face, anxiously awaiting his response.

“Marinette…” he answered carefully, “I don’t think I’m ready for something like that at this point in our relationship.”

“Right.” She pulled away, avoiding his gaze. “Sorry for jumping the gun.”

Mentally, Adrien cursed at himself for accidentally hurting her.

“Marinette,” he tried again, taking her by the shoulders so she’d have to look at him and see how earnest he was. “Ohime-sama…you are so hot, and I would be delighted to see you topless someday, but not in a utilities closet, okay?”

Finally, she looked at him and smiled tentatively. “Really? You really think so?”

“Yes,” Adrien laughed at the fact that she could ever doubt it. “Yes to all of the above.”

She started to laugh softly too, leaning in for a quick smooch. “Okay. That’s okay, then.”

“Good,” he hummed contentedly, gazing at her lovingly as his thumb stroked her cheek. “So…I’m free this Saturday. Would you want to meet up for lunch and maybe check out that exhibition at the Grand Palais on eighteenth and nineteenth century French and English dresses? And maybe then go for a walk in the Jardin des Tuileries?”

As he spoke, with each phrase, Marinette’s face descended a little bit more into a frown.

“Adrien,” she sighed, stepping back as far as the small closet would allow her.

There was only about a meter between them, but Adrien felt every centimeter of it. His face fell as he realized he was never going to get a real date with her.

“I have a boyfriend,” she reminded needlessly.

He felt ready to scream. He wanted to shake her and shout, “I am your boyfriend! Now, let’s go on a date for the love of God!”

Instead, he crossed his arms and looked away, muttering sullenly, “Yeah, a boyfriend you can’t go out in public with.”

“What was that?” She frowned suspiciously.

He shook his head. “Nothing. Sorry.”

“No. What did you say?” she insisted, hands going to her hips.

“Just…” He swallowed. “That… What use is a boyfriend you can’t go out in public with?”

Her face lost all color. “How do you know that I can’t go out in public with my boyfriend?”

Internally, Adrien cursed up and down the Greek pantheon. “Uh…I…”

“How did you find out? Did he tell you?!” she demanded, cheeks rapidly going from red to white in a fluctuation of fury and fear.

Adrien groaned, giving up any hope he’d had of getting out of this. “No. He didn’t tell me. I…I figured it out…sort of.”

Her eyes narrowed, looking dangerous and dark and almost navy blue in the dim closet. “You figured it out? How?”

Adrien shrugged. “Look. He told you before that he knew me, right? That we’re friends?”

Her pupils shrank to pinpricks as her skin blanched again. “Oh my gosh. Do you know his identity?!” she squeaked.

“No!” Adrien lied. “He…He visits me like he visits you. He showed up at my window one night to check on me. After my father was akumatized,” Adrien invented. “He just kept coming back after that, and we became friends. We’re really similar. Similar background. Similar mommy and daddy issues. We play video games and talk. He helps me sneak out sometimes.” Adrien shrugged again, avoiding her eyes as he lied his way through calming her down. “He got a girlfriend around the same time you told me you’d gotten a boyfriend, and…I don’t know. Things just lined up, so I asked if he was dating you, and he said yes, so…don’t be angry. No one else knows.”

Gradually, she began to nod, her panic receding…until it spiked once more, causing her to gasp in terror. “He doesn’t know about us, does he?!”

“God, no!” Adrien scoffed. “I am taking this secret to my grave.”

Marinette slumped back up against the opposite wall of the closet. “Okay. Okay. Good.”

Adrien groaned, carding a hand roughly through his hair. “…Don’t you get sick of it?”

“Hm?” Her head tipped to the side.

“Having a boyfriend you can’t actually go on a real date with,” he clarified miserably. “Isn’t that frustrating?”

Marinette thought about it for a minute before shrugging one shoulder indifferently. “I mean…I’d like to go on dates like normal couples. That would be nice, but…no. I don’t really mind it that we can’t right now.”

He gawked at her incredulously. “You don’t mind that you can’t actually date your boyfriend?”

She rolled her eyes and waved him away. “It’s not like that. We are dating. I see him most nights of the week. We spend plenty of time together. True, we can’t really leave the house, but there’s plenty to do at home.”

A soft, content look washed across her face as she explained, “I used to daydream about romantic dates when I was younger, but now that I’m actually in a relationship, I realize that all of that isn’t really important. Just spending time with him is enough. We don’t have to do anything special. I’m happy so long as I’m with him.”

The bottom dropped out of Adrien’s stomach right in the middle of it trying to twist itself into knots.

“Oh,” he replied eruditely. “That’s…good.”

Good for her, maybe, but it didn’t help him. In fact, it made him suspect that there might be something wrong because Adrien was definitely not happy with the way things were. Chat Noir had been dating Marinette for several months now, and Adrien was just dying to go somewhere with her. Even getting coffee would be good, but he needed something. It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy the time they spent at her house. He really, really did, but…he felt like something was missing.

“…Are you sure we can’t hang out on Saturday?” he pleaded in a small, pathetic voice.

“Adrien,” she groaned.

“Just as friends,” he quickly amended.

“That isn’t a good idea.” She tried to let him down gently.

“Marinette, friends can get lunch and go to exhibitions together,” he argued, beyond desperate. “We’ve hardly spent any time hanging out the past month. Come on. Please? We’re still friends, aren’t we?”

“Adrien,” she sighed, sounding exhausted.

“Aren’t we?” he challenged. “Come on, Marinette. I shouldn’t have to beg you to hang out with me, especially when I know you really do want to check out that dress exhibit. What?” he snapped. “I’m good enough to snog in a janitor’s closet, but you don’t necessarily want to spend time with me otherwise?”

“Adrien,” she chastised, glaring.

He refused to back down. “Don’t ‘Adrien’ me. What am I supposed to think when you’d rather I take your shirt off than take you out to lunch?”

She opened her mouth, but he cut her off.

“—You don’t get it,” he accused. “My whole life people have only wanted me for my looks, my money, or my influence, Marinette. It’s only gotten worse the older I’ve gotten.” He looked away, the fight in his voice replaced by hurt and shame. “The past year and a half, it feels like the media’s been counting down until I’m ‘legal’…. It feels like everyone’s only interested in me for my body…so I’m sorry if I’m a little touchy about you only wanting to be alone with me lately if we’re making out.”

She didn’t reply right away, and he tried to tell himself he was being silly and paranoid, that the reason she was cutting Adrien out of her life was that she didn’t want to be tempted to cheat on Chat Noir.

Adrien was really good at being paranoid.

But then she took his hand, threading her fingers through his as she brought the back of his palm up to her lips.

“I’m so sorry, Beau Gosse,” she whispered against his skin, looking up at him with glistening, wet eyes. “I’m not being fair to you. I’m being a really crumby friend, aren’t I?”

He shook his head, even though she was right.

“We need to stop this,” she said for what was probably the ninety-second time. “What we’re doing isn’t healthy. It’s tearing us apart. We need to stop.”

He didn’t disagree. If she would just let him tell her his identity, there wouldn’t be a problem, but…

“The reason we can’t be alone together is because every time we are, we end up making out,” she tried to straighten out the misunderstanding. “I would love to spend time with you just as friends, Adrien, but we don’t seem to be able to do that at this point.”

“What if we get someone else to come with us on Saturday?” he suggested, willing to compromise so long as it meant he got to spend time with her outside the confines of the Dupain-Cheng abode. “You know. A chaperone?”

Marinette bit her lip, leaning back so that their hands were joined only loosely. “…I suppose that could work.”

“Perfect!” Adrien cheered, mood lightening instantly. “I’ll ask Nino next period. You ask Alya.”

Marinette grimaced. “Adrien…that’s like going on a double date.”

“Fine,” Adrien sighed. “How about…Juleka and Rose? Juleka’s into fashion. She’d probably enjoy the exhibit.”

Marinette rolled her eyes. “You know Juleka and Rose are a couple.”

Adrien pursed his lips. “Okay. Fine. How about Juleka and Rose and Mylène and Ivan. I doubt we’ll get up to anything with that many other people around.”

“What? So we can have a triple date instead of a double date?” she snorted.

Adrien groaned, pulling his hand away from her so that he could slide down the wall to the floor and cradle his head in both of his hands. “You are killing me. Don’t we have any single friends? I don’t care, Marinette. Let’s just invite the whole class. If that’s what I have to do to get a date with you, I’ll do it. I’ll buy the whole class lunch and tickets to the exhibit. I don’t care,” he moaned miserably.

“Adrien…” Marinette sighed, sinking to the floor across from him, her feet right beside his in the cramped space. “Oh, Adrien.” Her voice was full of pity. “I’m so sorry I’m doing this to you.”

“You’d better be,” he pouted half-heartedly, reiterating, “You’re killing me, Marinette. I am so romantically frustrated right now I am going insane. I have needs,” he whimpered, “and I can’t take it anymore.”

Marinette blinked at him, wide-eyed. “O-Oh. I’m sorry. I thought… You said you weren’t ready to do anything like that at this point in our relationship, so I thought…” She frowned in confusion. “But…you want to have sex?”

Adrien’s mouth dropped open, and his eyes nearly flew out of their sockets. “What?! No! That’s not what I meant! I don’t want—” He abruptly cut himself off, looking at the floor and trying to get his blush under control.

He took a deep breath. “Okay. I mean… Yes, I’ve thought about making love to you before, and, if it’s something you want, I’d be willing to explore that possibility eventually, but…not right now. Not how things are now. I don’t…”

He bit his lip and looked back up, forcing himself to meet her gaze, even though this conversation was mortifying. He knew he had to be honest with her. “Look. I’m not opposed to sex, but it’s not really up there on my list of must-haves either, okay? I definitely am not interested in sex without a relationship to go with it. I don’t want to actually be friends with benefits with you. The thought horrifies me.”

He shut his eyes and shook his head. “The fact that we sneak away to make out in closets horrifies me, if we’re being honest. I never meant for things to turn out like this.”

“So…what do you want,” Marinette prompted gently, trying her very best to follow.

Slowly, he inhaled and then let the breath out. “When I said I had needs, I meant things like going for walks holding hands and buying each other Valentine’s Day presents and celebrating obscure anniversaries like the first time we went ice skating or the first time we ate ice cream together,” he explained, hoping he didn’t sound ridiculous to her. It was apparent already that they required vastly different things out of a relationship. “I want you to come to fashion events and benefit galas as my date. I want to wear the things you make and be able to say, ‘my girlfriend made this’. I want to be able to tell people I’m in a relationship…that I’m in a relationship with you. I want to be able to show you off, Marinette. I want to be your boyfriend officially. I want this to feel legitimate.”

Marinette let her head drop to the tops of her knees as she forced herself to process everything he’d flung at her. It took a minute, but she finally gathered the words she needed to answer.

“Adrien, unless things don’t work out with Chat Noir, that can’t happen,” she replied patiently, trying to be gentle. “I already have a boyfriend.”

He deflated, curling in on himself with a soft groan.

“What we can do, though,” she hurriedly continued, “is spend more time together as friends. We can hang out as friends. I can come with you to events as your friend. You’re right. I have been neglecting our friendship lately, and I’m sorry. We’ll try to fix it. If we work together, we can make this work again. You’re a really precious friend to me, Adrien, and I don’t want to lose that with you.”

He sucked in a deep breath, straightened up, and nodded. “Okay,” he agreed. “All right. That…That’s just going to have to be enough. Thank you, Marinette. I appreciate you putting up with me.” Tired though he was, he summoned up enough energy for a roguish smile.

She tapped her foot against his. “I like ‘putting up’ with you,” she snorted, using air quotes. “It’s one of my favourite things to do.”

His smile softened, and he nodded. “You know, you actually make me believe it.”

“Because it’s true,” she chuckled, pushing herself up to her feet as the five-minute warning bell signaling the end of lunch rang. She held out her hand to help him up, and he took it happily.

“Hey. Ask Chloé to come with us on Saturday,” Marinette instructed. “I’ll ask Alya, and we’ll all go as just friends, okay?”

“You’re the best,” Adrien sighed, leaning in to catch her lips in one last secret kiss before they had to go back to reality.

#Marichat #Adrienette #Adrinette #Miraculous Ladybug #Miraculous Ladybug Fanfiction #Adrien Agreste #Chat Noir #Marinette Dupain-Cheng #Kissing #Writing Prompt #Mikau's Writings #Serendipity: Fifty Marichat and Adrienette Kisses

[glorious-spoon]

The Life Span of Parrots

Title: The Life Span of Parrots Fandom: Shadowhunters Link: On AO3 Warnings: None Other Tags: Fighting and making up; immortality angst Summary: Alec wants to live forever. Magnus thinks it’s a terrible plan.

Based on this thread.

*

The loft is dark when he finally gets home. Magnus pauses on the doorstep, wavering between disappointment and relief before finally settling on the latter. The outrage of this afternoon has curdled into a cold knot of miserable frustration; Magnus’s temper flares hot, but he’s never been able to hang onto it for long. Not the way Alec can.

The way Alec must be now, since apparently he didn’t come home after storming out of the restaurant earlier. Magnus sighs, kicks his shoes off, and shuts the door behind him, then leans against it. He feels exhausted, sad, ancient in a way that he rarely does these days.

For what must be the first time in decades, he finds himself thinking of the precise shade of blue of the Mediterranean the first time he saw it. The salt sting in the air and the hot Italian sun.

There was a boy there that he loved, centuries ago, when he was barely more than a boy himself. Magnus has always been careless with his heart, although at least he’s developed a talent for misdirection over the years.

It ended badly, as so many of his dalliances did in those days. As so many have over the course of his life.

Magnus knocks his head back against the door, staring up at the dark ceiling. He could use a drink, but he knows himself better than to think that’s a good idea right now.

He’s tempted to snap his fingers and summon one anyway when he sees something move out on the balcony. A shift of shadows silhouetted against the soft glow of the street lights below—Alicante is never as bright as New York, but it’s still a city—that resolves itself after a moment into the familiar shape of Alec’s profile.

He did come home, then. Magnus groans softly. It’s a rarity for Alec’s presence to fill him with irritation like this, but he was hoping to put off the rest of this particular argument until both of them have had some time to cool down. Maybe get some sleep.

Magnus could probably do that anyway. Alec had to hear him come in, but he hasn’t come back inside, hasn’t called out to Magnus. In fact, as far as Magnus can tell in the gloom, he’s still stubbornly looking out over the stern grandeur of Alicante. Giving him the cold shoulder like a petulant child, Magnus thinks, petulantly. It would serve him right if Magnus just ignored him in turn and went to bed.

Instead, he pushes away from the door and crosses the dark apartment to step out into the cool September night. Alec is leaned against the railing, arms draped over the edge, staring out into the night. A beer bottle is dangling from one hand, the label mostly picked off. He doesn’t turn as Magnus comes up beside him, but a muscle tics in his jaw. The silence between them stretches out into some miserable, leaden thing before Magnus finally leans against the railing, mirroring Alec’s posture. “How did you get home?”

“I walked,” Alec says shortly.

It has to be five or six miles, and that’s as the crow flies; on the narrow twisting streets of Alicante, it’s closer to ten. It must have taken him hours. Magnus firmly stomps out the fleeting impulse to apologize. Alec, after all, is the one who stormed out.

After Magnus called him a reckless impulsive child, but still. He’s not quite ready to apologize for that, although he probably should.

“Clear your head?” he asks, instead.

Alec lets out an unamused-sounding huff of laughter. “Sure.”

Magnus sighs. “Alexander…”

“You know,” Alec interrupts. “We never got to have pets when we were kids.”

“I’m not surprised,” Magnus says honestly. He’s not sure where this little segue is going, but with Alec it’s usually better to let him get the words out in his own time. Especially when he’s upset. Magnus dislikes the random tangents, but he’s learned patience over the centuries. A little, anyway, although the truth is that it’s never come easily to him.

That, and he doesn’t want to fight with Alec anymore. He never does, really, but now he just feels tired and unsettled and sad, without even the temporary fire of anger to warm him.

He just wants this to be over with.

“Yeah. Shadowhunter kids get weapons training, not pets.” Alec tilts the beer to his mouth, then sets it down on the stone with a hard clink. “We used to go to the Bronx Zoo sometimes, when we had the time. Izzy always liked the World of Birds. The parrots. She used to nag my mom about getting one for a pet. She wanted to teach it how to swear.”

“I’ve heard that they don’t make especially good pets.”

“No. They can live for more than seventy years, some species, did you know that?” Alec’s voice is quiet and even, but there’s an edge of bitterness there. Magnus thinks, finally, that he might be starting to see where this is headed. “You get one when it’s young and it’ll be with you your whole life. Then you grow up, move on, lose interest, and you’re still stuck with this fucking parrot.”

He’s drunk, Magnus realizes. Should have realized sooner, but Alec is usually affectionate and handsy when he’s been drinking. Prone to draping himself over any warm body in his vicinity, especially when the warm body in question is Magnus’s.

Not tonight, though.

“You’re not a parrot,” he says, somewhat absurdly.

Alec shrugs, turning back to look out over the city. “No, but wanting someone for fifty years is a lot different than wanting them forever, isn’t it? Especially for you. I just thought…” he shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter what I thought, I guess.”

Magnus sighs, the last of his anger leaching away to leave something tired and cold in its wake. He moves closer, sets his hand on Alec’s shoulder and feels muscles twitch beneath his palm. An abortive flinch, but Alec doesn’t pull away. He doesn’t look at Magnus, but he doesn’t pull away. That’s something.

Finally, quietly, he says, “You’re not wrong.”

A short, bitter bark of laughter, and Alec does pull away from him, twisting jerkily out of Magnus’s reach. Now that he’s moving, it’s easy to see how unsteady he is. “Okay. Great. I’m going to bed.”

“Alexander,” Magnus says. It comes out sharp, banked frustration flaring up again. “Would you just listen to me for a moment? Please? Instead of storming off again?”

Alec pauses, then finally turns, folding his arms over his chest. “Fine. What?”

Magnus takes a breath, then says, “Immortality always comes with a price. Always.”

“You think I don’t know that?”

“I think,” Magnus says carefully, “that you lack perspective. You’re twenty-seven years old. You’re so young—”

“I’m not a child,” Alec snaps, and Magnus grimaces.

“No. You’re not. But you haven’t outlived all the people you love. Your family, your friends. Isabelle and Jace and Max—” That last one hits home, if Alec’s slight flinch is anything to go by. Magnus wishes he could feel triumphant. “You would watch them age and die. And you’d love more mortals, and watch them age and die as well. Over and over again, for centuries. Forever. And immortals, what love is between immortals—” He breaks off again. “Camille was the norm, not the exception.”

“Cat isn’t like that,” Alec says stubbornly. “You aren’t.”

“Until five years ago, it had been a hundred years since I’d spoken to Catarina. In a few decades we’ll drift out of each other’s lives again for God knows how long. That’s what would happen between you and me, Alexander. If we were lucky and things went well and we didn’t end up hating one another a few hundred years from now, that’s what would happen. You can’t be married to a person for centuries. Not without destroying every bit of love there is between you.”

Alec is finally looking at him.

“I could never hate you,” he says.

“Time changes people,” Magnus tells him. “Do you honestly think I’m the same person now that I was when I was twenty-seven?”

The hot sun and the blue, blue sea. The boy with black hair and rough hands and a ready smile, laughing at Magnus’s clumsy Genoese and kissing his mouth in the shadows beneath the olive trees.

It was so lovely, until it wasn’t. Magnus was young then, young and foolish and in love, and honest in the way that only love-struck young fools can be. At twenty-seven, forever seemed romantic.

At least until the decades passed, and the boy with laughing eyes grew gray and bitter and eventually sought out the very solution that Alec is considering right now.

Nicolo Cavanei is in Paris these days, or at least he was the last Magnus heard. A respected leader among the vampire clans of Europe; Magnus has spoken to him in passing perhaps once in the last two centuries. There’s no sign left of the shoemaker’s son he once loved, but Magnus supposes he doesn’t bear much resemblance to the young man he was then, either.

Are you happy? he remembers asking Nicolo the last time they met, sometime in the late 1890’s at some political affair or another. Even then, it was an impertinent question imposed on a near-stranger, and no matter that once they’d shared a life together.

He remembers that Nico laughed. Five years younger than Magnus, and he looked twenty years older. Centuries tireder. Elegant and untouchable.

Are any of us, my dear? he asked in the same lilting Genoese that had so charmed Magnus the first time he heard it in that dark little shop that smelled of wax and shoe leather.

It’s a question that has lodged itself behind Magnus’s heart in the years since, not because he can’t answer it but because he can, all too well.

Alec tilts his head. His expression has softened, and there’s something curious about it. As though it never really occurred to him until this very moment that Magnus was once young.

“I don’t know,” he says finally. That’s softer, too. The consonants slightly blurred with drink, but his gaze seems steady enough. “Are you?”

“Are you the same person you were five years ago?” Magnus counters. “Ten years ago? Do you think you’ll be the same person you are now in ten years? Twenty? Two hundred?”

Alec takes a breath, lets it out, then says, “I don’t know.”

“I do.” Magnus rubs his fingers over his knuckles, over the familiar shape of his wedding ring. “Being immortal doesn’t mean existing outside of time. You still have to live through every damn minute of it.”

“Magnus…”

“I love you,” Magnus interrupts bluntly. Perhaps it’s what he should have led with at the start of this, but pulling apart the tangled threads of grief and regret and fear has never been easy for him, and Alec caught him off-guard earlier. “I don’t want to lose you. Not now, not fifty years from now. But this… it would destroy you, Alec. And I don’t know if I can survive watching that again.”

“Again?”

Magnus closes his eyes. “Someday I’ll tell you. Not tonight.”

“Okay,” Alec says quietly.

“I can’t stop you. If you choose to go through with this, I can’t—but I hope you’ll reconsider. Whatever it is you think you’ll solve by giving up your mortality—it’s not worth it. Please believe me.”

“Okay,” Alec says again, finally. It’s not acquiescence, Magnus can tell, but it is… something. Acknowledgement, at least. Some hope that Alec has been listening to him.

Alec touches his shoulder, tugging slightly, then says, “Can I—?”

Before he can finish the sentence, Magnus is already stepping into the circle of his arms. He wasn’t aware of being cold until now, with the heat of Alec’s body surrounding him like a warm blanket. It feels wonderful, and there’s a childish, cowardly part of him that wants to take it all back, that wants to tell Alec, Forget it, forget it all, everything I just told you, forget it and stay with me forever.

Instead, he tucks his face into Alec’s neck and says, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have shouted at you earlier.”

“I shouldn’t have just dumped that on you out of the blue.” Alec’s sigh ruffles his hair, and then he says, “Can we just—go to bed? And finish talking about this tomorrow?”

Magnus nods without lifting his head. There’s a lump in his throat that he has to swallow back before he can speak. “Okay.”

“Okay,” Alec says back, but it’s a long time before he finally lets Magnus go.

#shadowhunters #malec #malec fic #my fic

[kalgalen]

31 jm

I started this before this week’s ep but boy did it give me more fodder

Tell me a nice memory.

Cutting off a part of himself was never going to be easy.

It’s not literal, this time, but it isn’t any less painful. He’s attempting to destroy that which brought him back to life once before, and the process feels like dying all over again - but slowly, this time, as shreds of himself are torn away by the cruel talons of a god that doesn’t give anything for free. The Powers don’t look kindly on the ones who chose to reject them, especially when they’ve embraced them so thoroughly in the past. The Eye will take and take until it’s got everything it has ever given him back, and does not care if everything that’s left once the Archivist is gone is an empty shell.

It’s a choice Jon had to make, though, after the world had not ended. He couldn’t justify keeping his status, after everything they’ve been through; the monster wasn’t needed anymore. Perhaps dying would have been simpler then - and he’d tasted the same thing in Melanie’s thoughts and side glances: we should just kill him.

But Martin had caught it too, and he had taken a sidestep closer to Jon, and glared at Melanie with such ferocious protectiveness Jon had felt his knees weaken.

And so he’s giving up on the monstrous part of himself. It feels like painstakingly picking shards of glass out of an old wound, like rooting out ivy from the old tree it’s keeping together. They’ve locked him in Elias’s old office; it isn’t the most agreeable place to spend his days and nights in, but it’s got a couch that’s comfortable enough, and the others can check on him regularly. They bring him food, as well as books to keep him distracted, but it’s like being offered vegetable scraps when what he craves is a five-courses meal. 

Daisy and Basira visit quite often, together or on their own, for mindless chatter - or companionable silence, as they each settle with a book and read quietly for a few hours. Melanie doesn’t come unless she’s on meal duty, and he supposes he should be grateful she agrees to do that at all. She seems to be warming up to him, though; he doubts she’ll ever go as far as calling him a friend, but she sticks around for a bit, once, and tells him Georgie has been asking about him.

“And… what did you tell her?” he had tentatively asked, voice rough with disuse. Melanie had shrugged.

“I said you were trying.”

Which is probably the most charitable way to describe his situation. There’s not much he can actually do to help with the withdrawal process; he can only hold for dear life when the deprivation hits him badly, and hope he won’t wake up outside of the Institute with several more victims on his conscience - and in his dreams.

The nightmares have never been a fun part of his night, but now, as he loses the favor of the Beholding, they are even less so. He stops being a silent witnesses, living instead through the terrors that happened to other people. Buried, hunted, haunted; he wakes up choking on a scream more than once, spending the rest of the night with all the lights turned on and his back to the wall.

He feels lonely. No one asks how he’s doing in that fight against himself; the memory of the things he’s done is still too raw for them to pity him the way they would a human being. It’s unfair, and it hurts, and he hopes he can earn their forgiveness some day; in the meantime, he can only pretend he does not care when they find him huddled in a corner after a particularly bad attack, skin marred with bloody grooves and cheeks still wet with tears.

Jon misses Martin.

Martin visits a couple of times a week, mostly to bring him food, sometimes to tell him news from the outside. Jon shouldn’t miss him; but even if they’ve won, even now that the distance isn’t necessary anymore, he can’t help but feel like Martin’s avoiding him. He’s avoiding his gaze, for sure - though Jon can’t blame him for this. Martin talks about the weather as if it’s the prelude for something bigger and more important, but then tells Jon to have a good day and disappears. Their meetings are a frustrating ballet of silent apologies and unsaid confessions.

Jon misses Martin.

He knows Martin is fighting battles on his own. On some days - the bad ones, when his Sight is particularly strong - he can still catch glimpses of the fog stuck to the sole of Martin’s shoes, or the gossamer threads of silk caught between his fingers - or the inhuman spark in his eyes, hungry and curious, mirroring Jon’s own. And it feels - silly, and counterproductive, to avoid addressing their common struggle as an attempt to normalcy. What they save in shared awkwardness they suffer in private anguish.

This is no way to heal.

When Jon finally decides to break the ice, it’s more out of necessity than thanks to a spark of bravery. He’s not been having a good day; the Archives are calling to him, promising knowledge and power and relief, and he’s backed himself into a corner of the couch, frowning deeply at the book in his hands. He’s been reading the same paragraph over and over again, unable to focus on the lines; he hungers for more than empty words.

He jumps when the key turns in the lock, but slightly relaxes when Martin slips through, holding a tray.

“Hey,” Martin says, careful.

“Hi,” answers Jon. He closes the book, not bothering to hold it at the right page, and watches as Martin deposit the tray on Elias’ desk.

Martin shuffles in place, uncomfortable but unwilling to leave so soon; Jon finds himself smiling - longing.

“So. How was your…day?” Martin asks, putting on an interested face.

Jon chuckles, makes a show to think about it for a second.

“Oh, you know. Been doing some light reading, mostly? Not much else to do around.”

Martin winces. “Right.” He doesn’t let the short answer stop him, though. “Is it any good?”

Jon looks down on the ornate leather cover. He’s actually not even sure what it is about at all. He shrugs.

“Hard to tell. Did you know there still are two different letters from Adelard Dekker down in the Archives?”

Martin’s optimistic attitude doesn’t withstand this particular blow; he sighs, leans his hip against the desk as he crosses his arms. He’s deadly serious, suddenly, and Jon is reminded once again of how much he’s changed.

“You know you can’t ever see those, right?”

Jon slumps, feeling like a chided child.

“Right. Of course, I know. But I also know they’re here, and I want -” He cuts himself with a frustrated sign. He knows he has to take responsibility for his actions, but the yearning that lives in his chest isn’t his. Not entirely. “It wants to know, and I can’t stop thinking about it, and I swear I’ve been trying -”

The last few words are lost as he chokes on a sob. He swallows hard, tries to blink frustrated tears from his eyes as he looks away. He feels pitiful - the miserable shell of a man, about to crumple on itself if he doesn’t find anything else to fill him soon.

The couch dips when Martin sits next to him, and it takes all of Jon’s frayed will not to shuffle closer to his heat, both metaphorical and literal.

On his lap, Martin’s fingers are fiddling with the fabric of his pants; his hesitation is almost palpable in the silence of the office. Jon can taste his decisiveness on his tongue a split second before he speaks up:

“Alright, come here.”

Jon looks at him, bewildered. Martin has opened his arms for a hug and is staring at him expectantly, resolution in the slope of his eyebrow but apprehension in the set of his mouth. It takes a beat more for Jon to understand what he means, and that he means it, and then he’s closing the distance between them and letting himself being wrapped in an embrace that instantly loosen the knot in his throat.

It occurs to him he’s never hugged Martin before. Slowly, his movements jerky and unsure, he raises his arms - closes them around Martin’s middle and lets his face fall into the crook of Martin’s neck, breathing in deeply.

“You - are you alright, Jon?” Martin asks after a moment. “Or rather, is there anything I can do to help?”

One of his hands has started rubbing soothingly the back of Jon’s head, and with each scrape of fingers in his hair his mind strays further from the hunger in his chest.

“Don’t leave, please,” he mumbles into Martin’s collar.

“I’ll - I can stay with you for a bit. Of course.”

“Thank you.”

Martin hums and keeps petting him, and the tension Jon has been feeling for so long starts to fade. He closes his eyes.

“Do you mind if we - This isn’t the best position,” Martin says, half-pulling away. Jon is confused until he understands what Martin in trying to do. They rearrange themselves until they’re sitting side by side, Jon’s head on Martin’s shoulder, Martin’s fingers still running through Jon’s hair.

“Not that I’m complaining about what we’re doing right now,” Martin chuckles, “but is there anything else I can do?”

“I -” Jon hesitates. There’s an idea forming in his mind, something that might satisfy his hunger without having him giving up on his control. A parody of a statement, something for himself instead of for the Eye. He licks his lips, but in nervousness more that anticipation. “I don’t think I know you well yet, and I think it’s a shame, because we - because I, uh,” missed you love you want you to stay here with me for as long as possible, “care about you, you know? So I was thinking - can you tell me about yourself?”

Martin blinks at him in surprise, then squints.

“This isn’t - like, Beholding-related, right? Because you know I can’t do that.”

“No! Not at all. I just - I truly want to know you. What brings you joy. What makes you happy. That sort of thing. Tell me - tell me a nice memory.”

“A reverse-statement, huh?” Martin smiles, and Jon thinks the sight alone might be enough to bring him back to humanity. “Okay, I can do that. Give me a second.”

Martin thinks for a bit, and Jon closes his eyes again, letting himself enjoy the scrapping of nails against his scalp. When Martin starts speaking again, he is Jon’s only focus.

“So there was that one time, when my dad was still around…”

#ask meme #i'm gonna put in on ao3 as well cuz it's LONGER THAN EXPECTED #the magnus archives #jonmartin #fic tag #therashumoneffect

[mutantsrisingrpg]

Congratulations ABBY! You’ve been accepted as IAPETUS.

Choosing between two amazing apps is always a hard thing to do. With Jack, it’s very easy to forget that he still has emotion left within him and to see it crack through in your app made me so happy, Abby! “Alma showed him kindness; he’s still trying to understand how to pay it back with interest.” This line, and more specifically the mention of kindness, pulled me into your app and sold me on him right away. That sliver of kindness can either make or break Jack in this world and I can’t wait to find out. We’re so excited to see both you and him back on the dash! 

Welcome to Mutants Rising! Please read the checklist and submit your account within 24 hours.

Out of Character Information: 

NAME/ALIAS: Abby

PRONOUNS: she/her

AGE: 22

TIMEZONE & ACTIVITY LEVEL: PST, 6-7/10 – I’m a full time grad student with a pretty heavy course and research load, so generally I’m busy during the day but my schedule is kind of flexible? Generally speaking I’ll be online every day but either in the early mornings or evenings.

In Character Information:

DESIRED ROLE: Jack Mizuno / Iapetus

GENDER/PRONOUNS: cis male & he/him

DETAILS & ANALYSIS: 

Jack Mizuno does not exist. He is a ghost, a dead end paper trail strung together by fraying ties that knot themselves so easily in circles. Jack Mizuno exists in sharp fragments littered against the pavement, indistinguishable from shattered glass; small, sharp, glittering like teeth. He wasn’t always like this – a dark, brooding thing shaking in his skin with a death-rattle that sounds so close to fingers on keys. He wasn’t ever quite human, but none of them were, fundamental flaws cut and cured in the womb and left to fester thereafter. 

He lived in years, once. Whole handfuls of them, one right after another, like a fucking feast you never got full of. And then shit got bad – not just for him, but mostly for him within the confines of his adolescent tunnel vision. Years shrunk and shriveled, and sunk and shriveled some more. Sometimes he gets days, most of the time he lives in hours. If he’s lucky he gets a whole week of feeling like a person and not a tool, something to scratch out the cockroaches with when they get stuck in the cables.

He is empty and full. Stretched thin until he’s cracked and bloated, like a goose waiting to lose its liver for a main course. What did he expect? Jack has secrets, knows secrets, has seen and buried the terrible things mutants will do to and for each other in the name of survival. Most of them don’t belong to him. There has to be somewhere for it all to go. 

Before Alma held him up by his hair and gave him a choice that wasn’t a choice at all, Jack had to make his own purpose. That was difficult, mostly because he didn’t feel he had one. He had a mutation that felt less like a mutation and more like a target blinking in binary. He had a computer. It doesn’t take a lot of brain power to piece together the next logical step. Jack never made a charity about what he could do for other mutants. It doesn’t make him a tin man in the corner banging on his keyboard for oil.

People like to call Jack a robot, it’s fine. They can say whatever they want, it has no bearing on whether Jack has a heart. He has quite a lot of it – heart. Even if half the time he’s shaking so violently he can’t feel it beating in his chest. The heart he holds on to so tightly, you see, is a balm on the coals raked over his skin every time he digs into another putrid crevice of the internet. It doesn’t surprise him, anymore, the human capacity for cruelty. Kindness, though, that’s what gets him every time. Alma showed him kindness; he’s still trying to understand how to pay it back with interest. 

Self-preservation is paramount. Jack has been a bottom feeder for as long as he can remember – taking the ugly, awful work law enforcement doesn’t care for and private eyes find distasteful. It bred in him a fine-tuned intuition, sharp as a knife’s edge. He knows when to take the money, when to ask no questions, and when to disappear. Disappearing is an art like any other, and Jack is exceptionally good at it. A fool’s errand is inviting Jack into your life and thinking you can keep a secret from him after. He’s not curious, he’s careful. Thorough. He leaves nothing and then less to chance.

The knife’s edge is double sided – Jack has a flighty, nervous nature to him that he stamps down with caffeine and cigarettes. It doesn’t go away, and dampens at the expense of his better judgment, but doing so sweeps down the hair at the back of his neck and stills his fingers when there’s work to be done. Jack is a shark; stop swimming for too long and he’ll sink straight to the ground.

BIO:

Everyone expects it to still be snowing in March. Chicago, they say, with an endeared little smile and the flat ah to tell you without telling you they’re a native, winter from October to April. In 1989, March rained. Buckets of it for more days that most folks bothered counting. March was a gust at the end of winter just warm enough to make it miserable. Jack was born smack in the middle, when the city was drowning. 

Jack’s mother was a nervous woman and his father was a ghost. He wondered, later, if that anxious constitution was something inherited from the womb; if his mother’s uneasy heart set in his a parallel double-step from conception. Perhaps it was imparted later, swallowed up by Jack’s open pores exposed early to the lined up bills on the kitchen counter, angry locks that stuck in the cold, and trembling hands over thread-bare collars. 

His father was the kind of ghost that lingered heavy, an almost-hand that threatened above his shoulder and the doorway. More than once Jack wondered what he inherited from his father, what strange neuroticisms – or, indeed, mutations – he left in place of a hand print. It’s the only secret Jack has refused to recover.

School passes unremarkably. Jack is neither the bully nor the victim; insignificant enough to slip under the radar and glaze by. Not a top student. Not struggling. Lost in the waves that ebb through the blown-out halls, into the rusted chairs, out onto the buses that only run on hope and cold air. It’s all very – fine. It’s fine. His mother comes home with a hand in his hair and a question about his day she doesn’t wait to hear the answer to. His school work is swept aside to make room on the table to count what they’ve lost and earned for the day. When he’s old enough, Jack will drop his books to do the same. 

They don’t quite get that far.

See, Jack doesn’t have a flash-bang mutation. There’s no schoolyard scuffle that goes from rowdy to lethal like the flip of a coin and gets the whole neighborhood straight on the news. His is a slow crescendo, and goes like this: His mother is spending laters nights at work, which means a locked door at home and the silent command to find something to do with his time. He’s about fourteen – not old enough to work somewhere safe but too old to be knocking on neighbors doors alone and hungry.

He settles for the library next to school. It’s warm, well-lit, and they have a computer. Jack only gets to go on those an hour a day at school. He noodles around when he’s bored of his homework, stumbles on things he shouldn’t but doesn’t know any better to avoid – or, rather, doesn’t know aren’t normal. He’s smart and stupid enough to keep this to himself, age up into high school with this secret tucked under his tongue; wait until the conversation has already turned to mutants before he dares to bring it up on his own. He doesn’t tell his mother, just yet, wants to know for sure that what he can do is something he can also control. Jack isn’t afforded that chance, either.

Eviction notices were a big red staple of Jack’s childhood – taped to the door or slipped quietly underneath it. It’s only when he’s fourteen with a head on fire that their landlord finally follows through. Jack comes home to the door wrenched open and their meager belongings scattered or gone. He finds his mother in a house down the street – an aunt’s maybe, or a distant cousin’s – with her face in her hands and shoulders shaking. It goes like that for some time, drifting just the two of them, until Jack comes back to their newest makeshift home and finds her gone.

What comes next is – dark. Jack comes to a week after his twenty-second birthday in an apartment reminiscent of his childhood, wearing clothes he doesn’t really recognize but smell like him. There might be someone in his bed. He might be squatting. He shut off for a while, he isn’t sure. The laptop left open on the floor is definitely his – it has his fingerprints all over it. Digital, mostly, but there’s the odd smudge that gives way to physical ownership. This is what he has now, neck deep in the chasm of loneliness: a keyboard and a client list a mile long.  

It goes like this for some while. Jack stays in his probably-not-legally-rented apartment, waiting for the people who know how to find him, well – find him. Most of them pay well. He takes what feels safe and keeps himself warm, but freelancing for strangers with an envelope of cash is a near-vertical learning curve. Jack has an edge, but he’s also stupid in the early days. He still searches for his mother, when he can. He moves apartments twice and nearly gets taken into two more times beyond that. 

The years of smooth sailing and steady income that flow in afterwards makes him arrogant, and reckless. It’s something between a favor and a job that gets him caught – a favor, because, damn him, he cares about the client more than he should, but still technically a job when there’s a paycheck at the end of it. Sentiment makes him desperate, experience makes him careless, and the resource he’d heard Blackburn might have had access to was never even there in the first place. 

The first time he met Alma, the only thing Jack smelled was blood – his, probably. His mouth certainly felt full of it. He never had much use for religion in his short, cold life, even if his mother was devout for all of hers. Staring at Alma, one hand in his hair and offering him a choice that wasn’t really a choice at all, he might have almost understood. With a strong hand and an outstretched arm, he remembers the verses and psalms, as he stares at her. They might even feel true.

Jack is not a watchdog, but he’s something close, maybe. Alma offered him a purpose he already had in front of him but didn’t know how to take. There is no doubt Jack’s loyalty to the Blackburn Syndicate runs deep and unwavering. He believes in the cause, acts for the cause, maybe even lives for it. But he is still a solitary creature, and the rising tensions pull tight at his skin.

EXPANDED CONNECTIONS: Please expand on at least one of the connections set out in the bio. There can be as little or as much as you want to be written here. We would love to see how you interpreted the connections we set out!

LENOX. Jack has spent time adrift – living through a haze that blurred the lines in his mind. He has no desire to return to that state, ever. He grounds himself in reality, more so than ever. His life depends on truth and the relentless pursuit of it. Lenox is a direct threat to his own stability, and worse, they seem to find pleasure from seeing him squirm under their little games. He hates it, he hates them, and he hates more how he doesn’t really hate it at all. Jack has built his life into a routine, and the illusions annoy him. They set his teeth on edge and give him the shakes for days after, but there’s a reason he hasn’t asked Alma for one of her fists into Lenox’s pretty little face.  

ILIE. Jack doesn’t make a habit of sitting on any of his secrets. He tried it, once. He almost bled out on the pavement. The second time he was nearly locked up in a testing facility. So, no, he doesn’t hold on to the transgressions of others any more than he needs to. Chances are there’s some way to spin it in his favor – or, the Syndicate’s, now. It’s – different with Ilie. Jack is meant to be playing nice with the King’s Collective, so says the hand on his leash, but he just can’t help this small amusement. It’s a vice that will get him killed, or worse, he knows. The second he slips Ilie will go running, but it’s so nice to be the one in control for a time. Even if it’s not really enough, only the illusion of it. 

RAHIM. Jack isn’t sure quite what to make of Rahim, and that’s a dangerous thing. Jack likes to have the answers – is rather used to it – and doesn’t know what to do with himself when he is left wanting for them. Enter, Rahim. A man Jack is meant to be getting along with, tries to get along with, but can’t quite seem to figure out. They dance around each other, careful, and Jack is unwilling to take the first step forward or back. He’s a watcher, so he watches. He knows it unsettles Rahim, and maybe that makes it all the more worth it. It’s more fun to earn the answers, anyway.

EXTRA: 

Pinterest

Headcanons

Jack Mizuno is an alias, easy enough to assume. He told Alma his real name privately after he agreed to his terms, but no one else knows it as far as he’s aware.

He’s left handed; insignificant, but it’s a pet-peeve of his when people point it out like it’s something secret or exciting. There are lots of secret or exciting things about him, this isn’t one of them.

Jack doesn’t define his sexuality in strict terms or labels. He’s more of a convenience person who recognizes he has needs, but doesn’t much care who satisfies them. If he had to choose he might prefer men, but it’s only by a slim margin.

ANYTHING ELSE:

Nope ! ilu

#accepted #accepted: iapetus

[lady-o-ren]

Just Between Lovers

A/N: I rambled hard to the core this chapter (mistakes will be had!) so for an easier reading experience here’s the Ao3 link (x). I write under Soloh over there so don’t think you’re reading something different.

Previously

Chapter Five

Jamie

There was something different with Claire, that Jamie knew. Throughout class that day with the wee ones, he had tried to puzzle out what had shaken Claire so. Jamie knew it wasn't a matter of her being cross with him like when he admired her ever growing arse for the fat, sweet thing it was. Aloud. Her revenge at the time had been to bite his lip sore, most pleasantly as he recalled.

 So Jamie brought forth memories of the day before, seeking whatever signs of disturbance that he'd obviously missed with his Sassenach.

 A morning where the burn of desire had awoken them with need - hands roaming over warm supple skin, fingers enticing one to a gasp, teasing the other to a moan while mouths marked tender flesh to a glowing blush until finally, with breath and hearts heaving as one, they melted to one another in a shared bliss. He, nestled in the soft curve of his hearts shoulder as she, threaded her fingertips through his dampen locks - twisting and smoothing.

 A lost cause the both of them.

 Reluctantly they had parted from their world beneath the covers, where Jamie haltingly whispered about having perhaps created a sprig of life that had Claire shy and beaming. He then fed her a breakfast that wasn't the spackle of dry cereal she preferred eating by the handful and sent off his Sanasachd with a thorough kiss to keep her warm from the sharp slap of the Scottish wind. He remembered Claire was heavy lidded in her whisky eyes as she left, but it was coupled with a smile of excitement for work she found so fulfilling and a flush of cheeks at being well loved by him that Jamie knew his own face mirrored as well.

 Jamie then dove towards the end of that day, when he met Claire after a long shift, both tousled haired and huddled together under a bright starry sky. Her brown curls were slowly escaping from her bun and soon her hair tie would be lost forever as another battle would be lost to the sightly kraken on her head. An observation that earned him a hard pinch at the ribs and her, the final tug to free the beast he adored so very much.

 They talked of his sister, Jenny - Jamie had crossed himself just thinking about her out in the unforgiving, bleak expanse of the ocean in nothing but the smallest of sailing boats - How there was still no word from her and Ian if they had made it to South Africa yet. Claire had pulled him by his coat and told him to stop his bloody worrying, Jenny could calm a tsunami with nothing but a glare. There was nothing to fear. She kissed him then, loving and long, leaving all his worries to the wind whipping around them.

 They walked home happy.

 To bed again filled with love.

 No, it wasn't that, Jamie had thought. Nothing there to explain the change her.

 His mind then spiraled to the last time Claire looked despondent, exhausted with more then just fatigue. Was there a moment where her heart ached and he didn't see? He was consumed with her until exhaustion overtook him, waking on the couch to her sullen face that he tried to put a smile to and failed as she spoke of feeling lost. A lass with a glass face, to not know she had felt such a way had shamed him and all Jamie could do was hold her in his arms.

 He only wished there was more he could do.

 Now, as a brand new day began, Jamie wondered if Claire was on the mend. She sat in front of him, frizzled with sleep still clinging to her and red of cheek as she was now prone to be of late. But then she gave him a look of keen interest that sparked a hope that her troubles were maybe past. He had made up his mind to at the very least distract her from her thoughts, whatever they may be.

 Jamie was very good at that.

 ________

 Claire

 I was surprised I was able to sleep with him so close, but not as near as the morning before. The dark patch gracing him from groin to hip had Jamie splayed on his back and me off to the side of a still foreign bed. Room. Home. When we parted I felt the loss of his embrace where I had surrendered to fear and heartache that he so easily cast away. A touch gently behind my ear, a rhythmic stroke from neck to back that had me sinking further to the heat at his breast - the slow steady thump of his heart that whispered to my own and all the while soothing me with incomprehensible speech.

 But in the quiet night, as I slipped in to bed, Jamie's eyes opened to mine, his palm crossing the distance, gentle and reassuring in my keeping and only then did I finally succumb to a dreamless slumber. As long as I trusted him I would find some semblance of peace here, I thought. That is untiI I woke to the sound of twin alarms. Mine I swatted, throwing a pillow over my head not yet ready to seize the day and find what awaited me. Either my recognisable Englishman, the Scotsman, or someone completely new, God help me.

 A groan of gaelic signaled where I was still and with who. No spell was broken at the stroke of midnight apparently. I felt myself sigh with either relief or frustration, I wasn't sure.

 With a shuffle of the mattress and walk around the room, I peeked through the narrow opening of my pillow and tangled streaks of hair and saw Jamie turned from me, digging for clothes that were quickly pilling in his fists. The shaft of bathroom light highlighted the line of his backbone running from the hard muscled contours of shoulders down to narrow hips that curved to a squared roundness. I quickly smothered my face to the soft linen as an absurd urge to giggle burned my throat while a sensation all too familiar coiled hot in my belly.

 Harmless, I told myself. Looking was completely harmless. I did worse in dreams and so did he. But now I could no longer blame an attraction or actions on the imaginary when it was very real and present before me. Where a casual observation could turn in to a tender kiss, that could push me flat against a tabletop completely at his mercy or hard and fast up against the wall. And then there was the bed...I pushed myself harder against the sheets until my lungs ached from lack of air. I didn't want to think about the rules and boundaries I was breaking in the world of what if I found myself in. I would figure something out. The only problem was would Jamie let me.

 "Where the hell….Och! There ye are wee bastard." Jamie mumbled to himself, pulling me from the laws morality as they turned and turned into a dizzying round.

 I lifted the pillow once more to see what the Scot was prattling on about. He was clothed now, but just barely. Trousers were attired and well fitted (my traitorous mind chimed in) and his arms were just slipping into a plaid button down when he caught my eye and replied with his ridiculous wink. His only genetic defect from what I could tell.

 "How did ye sleep, Sassenach?" Jamie stopped the fumbling of his buttons. He had promised not to press me further last night and gave only a cautious query to my being.

 "It was all well until my alarm and yours went off." Then to ease him I added, "Today is better. Not as clouded as before."

 "That's a start. And I hope your day gets brighter ever more." Jamie had answered with a cheek to cheek grin and sat at the edge of the bed beside me as he fiddled with the buttons once more. I sat up fully clothed in shirt and pajama bottoms. There would be no repeat of yesterday's lack of attire from me.

 "Why is a school teacher up this early, anyhow? Paint to refill? Blocks to rearrange? Pencils to sharpen?" I questioned, truly curious to how a big man like Jamie could be a primary teacher. I couldn't imagine Frank surrounded by bright-eyed youths teaching them their ABC's, sometimes not even if they were ou - I threw the line of thought away with a yank at a lock of tangled hair.

 "I wouldna sharpen a crayon for those wee gremlins." Despite his tone the fondness in his eyes betrayed him. "It's Laoghaire that has me up, remember?" Jamie smoothed his shirt down the front then frowned at the mismatched buttonholes.

 No. "Remind me." My anxious fingers were tackling the disarray of knots when I noticed his blue eyed gaze of affection towards my unruly nest that no one had ever looked at in such a way. I dropped my hands to my lap to pick at the fuzz dotting the fabric instead.

 "She's got to prep her room for her bitty ones, a birthday party, and she needs some help setting up her room as she's two months along now." He reached towards me, running his hand absentmindedly along my thigh and the rush of sensation at his touch did the opposite of soothing me this time.

 Would it be rude to just run to the bathroom again?

 Jamie continued, with an acute focus of a fox. "She still refuses to step on a ladder or bend over to pick a pencil fearin' the bairn will twist about and come out disjointed. Every one of us teachers has had to deal with her and now it's my turn. Though I dinna mind so much, she's a sweet thing just scairt is all."

 "Still," I shuffled underneath his touch that by reflex only made his grasp tighter and my pulse higher. "That doesn't mean you have to get up this early." Jamie's face softened and I realized it must have been a conversation argued before with him and other me.

 "I thought I'd make ye something resembling proper food. Then again - " Jamie looked appraisingly at me, "Ye do look a right mess this morning, mo nighean donn." He leaned in and I fell back against the headboard, bringing my knees to my chest.

 "I look like hell and if you so much as touch me we'll both be late for work." I did my best to give an authoritative presence, failing miserably as Jamie's hand found my waist, with a long finger slipping under my shirt, stroking at my skin.

 "Ye look like beauty itself my wee porpintine. I'll take the punishment here and now. Bullseye aim ye promised, aye?" His voice was husky as his palm traveled hot across my back, pushing me towards him where I tried once more to delay what was becoming the impossible and my heart skittered at the possibilities to be had if I couldn't.

 "Pull a muscle then, it will be another week of pain. Maybe an injection straight to the groin." My hands were locked at Jamie's forearm tight with muscle but I did nothing to push him away or bring him closer. It seemed my body was already bracing itself for a hard press of blazing Scot and excited at the prospect.

 "I believe I chose punishment, Sassenach." Before I could register his movements, Jamie drew my legs down with a squeak from me and a painful groan from him as he twisted his muscles sharply, falling to his side and taking me down along with him.

  "Dìmeas an olc eadar sinn!"

 "I warned you -"

 Jamie silenced me then with a throbbing kiss that coursed heavy in my blood, to the very tips of my fingers curled at his chest. From his throat to my lips rumbled a growl of cocky satisfaction and I responded by parting my mouth welcoming more.

 So much for bloody self-restraint and boundaries.

 We parted sharing the same gasp for air that caught in my throat as Jamie pressed his mouth to me again. Slowly this time, with a smile of scruff that scratched at my skin and a hand gripping my arse that had my teeth clasping around his bottom lip in retaliation. But that did little to stop him as he hummed in appreciation until I broke away.

 "You are very single-minded for a schoolteacher." I breathed, not bothering to feign being cross." I hope it was worth the pain."

 Jamie chuckled then jerked with a wince at the twinge he deserved both on his face and lower down. But despite the momentary pain he still sighed, Worth it, as he brushed the hair from my face and kissed my nose. "Anything to make ye smile. Now make yerself presentable Dr. Beauchamp and I'll make ye a bit to eat."

 As he left me to the kitchen, again with a hobble, I couldn't help but doubt my other selfs qualifications as a doctor if she had to deal with that man everyday. Then again, as I pressed my palms to my face there was indeed a smile painted wide and aching that cast out any feelings of guilt.

 Almost, anyway. But the smile lingered still, one I hadn't felt in so many months and that confused me even more.

 Dressed, I made my way to the kitchen, making a detour to the living room as Jamie began to croon off tune. I tried to figure out what was mine and his over the warbling. What piece of furniture was quibbled over and who won the fight. Was it with words or was it with manipulation masked in a kiss that christened the piece theirs under a woolen tartan throw?

 My hands passed over a wooden tabletop with photoframes of strangers and rolling hills of heather, before coming to a bookcase filled to the brim and well loved it seemed. There were books of more then just wars and history and novels of classic English literature. These spoke of poetry ranging from Burns and Tennyson, to Neruda and Frost with a well worn Silverstein that had seen better days.

 However, what I noticed most were the spines of faded brown leather, titles in french, classic greek and latin that had belonged to my Uncle Lamb all those years ago. As a child I would skim through these heavy books, memorizing the pages with the pictures and guessing at the secrets hidden away in their strange lettering, only ever having luck with the french. Now these books had markers scattered about between pages with perfectly written notations I still couldn't decipher. I wondered what type of scholar I was attached to in this universe that could read multiple languages, some being ancient, and next devour a shelf full of spandex wearing caped crusaders.

 _______

 After Jamie fed me, kissed me (I gave up trying to stop him), I loaded on to a rickety creak of a bus, late for work. I prepared myself for an even more formidable force then the one I could still feel along my waist and lips and even that final pinch of the arse. I prepared myself to see Geillis.

 I had gathered enough courage to dip into my history of this life through my mobile. While I hadn't quite the fortitude to look back into the vault of photos (though that was quickly changing) I had looked through the messages to figure if Geillis was still who I knew her as.

 Conversations where familiar. Centering on blaming each other over our indulgences of greasy food and drink, my bad taste in music and apparent trash opinions, her bad taste in all that was human - man, woman and once with Tom Christie.

 Pictures between us were numerous and random as always, but the new additions were of her only known weakness - animals. A blackbird that Geillis was convinced held a human soul within itself that had been visiting her windowsill and a neighbors dog she was very near to kidnapping, and almost succeeded in doing so too. All in the norm of who she was to me. Then there was the endless teasing of Jamie and ours relationship. No matter what Jamie was everywhere.

 As the bus came to a stop I began to feel the calming pull of the hospital A&E. The walls of white, the smell of bleach, the constant hum of ventilators to vending machines and always an overflow of patients in need.

 ______

 Only an hour passed before she found me.

 Where Jamie had the patience of a saint (as long as it didn't involve intimacy), Geillis was more the type to press your face against the floor, hair wrapped around her fist with a knee stabbing at the back. Information would be extracted by any means necessary. And as she cornered me in an empty hallway I had to remind myself that I took down a full grown man more then twice her size.

 "I called ye."

 "I know -"

 "I had to cover for ye."

 "Which I'm grateful for -"

 "Grateful she says!" Geillis scoffed. "After the day ye missed, you better have ridden yer Scots cock to damnation."

 "Christ, Geillis!" My face flushed as the hallway chose that moment to fill with people.

 "Oh ye did!" Her expression flipped with a waggle of her brows at me.

 "Still mad then?"

 "I can't afford to be. It's you or wee Mary I have to talk to and I scare the lass to a stuttering. Besides after terror that ye missed I own yer soul now. That's the deal." Geillis smiled sweetly, poking her finger right below my collarbone.

 "Is that all?" She nodded then pulled me flush to the wall to what I assumed was a collection of that debt, instead she asked -

 "Now tell me all the dirty details about yer red thatched schoolboy and dinna skimp."

 Her interest surprised me. She never wanted to know a sliver of a detail about mine and the professor's sex life. Only ever my dreams and apparently now of the living embodiment himself.

 "You like Jamie don't you?"

 "That's a funny thing to ask. I was the one that told ye the first time you met him, fuck the bastard filthy. And then as I recall, when you were 'bout to leave with a face of shocking depravity," she grinned approvingly, "I took ye by the ear and said have him fuck ye something unholy.

 "God Geillis." I couldn't help but laugh. "You are the little red devil on my shoulder aren't you?" I took a lock of her hair and twirled it up to resemble a horn.

 "I only ever tell ye what yer heart needs."

 "Maybe you are a witch?" Another silly theory that she could be the cause of it all had me chuckling.

 "If I were I'd have better luck." Geillis shook her head. "No vicious wee blonde who doesn't know what she wants or a man who wanted to see the world just no with me."

 "Oh Geillie -" my dearest friend was very much the same and like always it broke my heart.

 "Forget your man tonight, let's go out together." She said, stopping she would consider words of pity. "Who knows when will get another chance. Anyday now yell have a ring the size of a sapphire to go with the lads bonny blues."

 That was the final pound that my heart would except without proper alcohol.

 "I knew you'd be the death of me today, Geillie."

 ______

 Shift over, eyes heavy but a hungry stomach overriding everything, I walked out the hospital doors expecting to find Geillis waiting with impatience. I found Jamie sitting on a bench playing with his mobile instead.

 I wasn't expecting him to walk me home it was always a solitary trek unless Geillis came over. I didn't think to call, that I even needed to.

 I felt a soft push at my shoulders and turned to see Geillis' head on my shoulder.

 "Dinna fash." She mumbled with a kind smile directed at Jamie as he walked towards us. "Raincheck?"

 I didn't have a chance to answer, Jamie was with us in three long strides. He looked from her to me and gestured with his chin to Geillis.

 "Want to eat with us lass? My treat." He was earnest in his offer. He liked Geillis too and I felt myself grow warm towards him that had nothing to do with his appearance. I couldn't remember a time my other man had ever spoken to Geillis past civil conversation, except the few times of the same back and forth jabber about Jacobites. She would talk with passion and Frank, being an impartial judge of history, would join her. The only time I ever saw them agree on something.

 "Why not. A free meal and a cute ginger to carry me home when I'm too gone with drink to walk." She winked at me. Her plans wouldn't be changed.

 "Good. How 'bout something sloppy that spills off yer plate with grease for you two physicians?"

 "Perfect." Geillis cheered.

 As we walked I noticed Jamie's hair was speckled making it shimmer under the moonlight.

 "Wee Rabbie turned me to a unicorn today." He informed, swishing his hair back and forth in a sparkly drizzle to transform me as well.

 "All that's missing is the horn." I touched the spot on his forehead moving away a wavy lock of copper hair.

 "Not when we go home."

 "Didn't get yer fill yesterday, young buck?" Geillis teased up ahead leaving Jamie confused and me waving off her comment.

 After eating what Jamie described as, The kind of food ye only eat with someone ye love, we deposited a very comatose Geillis and went slowly with minor stumbling steps home.

 "So," Jamie ever so slightly slurred,"How has the ending of yer day been, Sassenach? Brighter I hope."

 I blame all the bottles we left on the table (mostly to temper myself from his ever constant touch) for my drunken slip of tongue. "Why must you call me all these names?"

 Jamie's mind wasn't as far gone however, and another warning sign flashed red for him.

 "Different ways to say I love ye, Claire." His voice sounded restrained and he kept his gaze ahead. Where my mind faltered my body made up for. Taking control without my bidding, my hand grasped his that he squeezed fierce and wrapped my other arm around him.

 I was starting to think he was a damn unicorn.

 Around the corner of home, there was a dribble of water, barely a puddle and I walked forward with no hesitation, daring it to send me to the upside down, forgetting Jamie's hold on me if it tried. He suddenly held me flush to his side, pulling me up and over the water, setting me down with utter ease.

 "No beasties today my Sassenach." Jamie kissed the top of my head leaving me in a daze of -

  What the hell did you say?

____

A/N:

*Sanasachd means healer. I didn't just majorly eff up Sassenach.

*Dìmeas an olc eadar sinn - damn the evil between us. Which I take as Frank.

*A million dollars to whoever remembers the wheel of morality

*The blonde that Geillis is referring to is Annalise.

FYI- In the witch and the red man story Geillis was supposed to be this feral witch who lived in the deep forest surrounded by bogs. Louise was her water nymph lover during the summer while her pet raven, who was really a man, was her lover during winter. So I put a smidge of that random background here for no other reason other than because I felt like it.

#outlander #outlander fanfiction #outlander fanfic #jamie x claire

[johaerys-writes]

Where Blood Roses Bloom

Fandom: Castlevania

Pairings: Alucard/Trevor Belmont/Sypha, Hector/Lenore

Summary:

After Trevor gets grievously injured by a night creature, he and Sypha return to Dracula's castle to seek Alucard's help. The man they find there, however, is but a shadow of the friend they left behind.

Meanwhile, in far Styria, Hector does his best to survive in the vampires' court, a lamb amidst wolves. Little do the wolves know, the lamb has fangs of its own.

Chapter 7: Dark Was The Night (Cold Was The Ground) is up! Where Hector tries to get used to his new life as the vampire sisters’ forgemaster, and Trevor and Sypha set out to find Alucard.

Read on Ao3! Or read from the beginning

Hector moves through the castle largely unseen.

He drifts along the torch-lit corridors during the day, when the vampires are asleep. After the sun sets, he stays in his quarters, hidden, out of the way. Biding his time.

It's not that he doesn’t enjoy his quarters. On the contrary. His new rooms are warm, spacious; Lenore has made sure he was given the part of the east wing that gets the most sunlight. The bedroom is large and tastefully decorated, the bed is wide with a crimson velvet canopy, there are priceless carpets covering the floor. The large windows of his forge overlook the snowy mountain range beyond the castle, past field upon fields of endless white. Hector has an office, too, with a mahogany desk and a small library, and there is even a small room for his personal servant to sleep in.

He has servants now. Hector, with servants. He never actually thought he would see the day.

It’s quite comfortable, really. Hector can’t complain. The vampire sisters don’t much care for him, and Hector has learnt to stay away. Striga and Morana are absorbed into their work. It’s all money and soldiers and plans of attack with them. He is sure Carmilla forgets he exists most of the time. He is someone else’s concern now.

He is Lenore’s concern now. Her pet.

Hector clenches his jaw as a rush of loathing and dull anger swells within him. The wind that blows through his half open window is suddenly not crisp and refreshing as it was a mere moment before, but frigid and merciless instead. The ring on his finger is cold now, but there are times when he can almost feel it thrumming with energy when Lenore is near. The thought that she might know where he is, what he’s doing, what he’s thinking at any given moment unnerves him.

Even a pet is more autonomous than this, he thinks, and the thought burns through his gut like pure acid.

That is his life now. Fear. Anger. Loathing, simmering under the surface. He is steeped in it, wallowing in it. He often tries to take his mind off it,  and there are moments when he forgets all about it. And it works, for a while. Until it comes back with a vengeance. Until he remembers where he is, what he is, and the force of the realisation chokes him, and he’s not even sure whether he's ever known anything other than this, something other than the sharp sting of betrayal and the hollowness it leaves behind.

Part of him thinks he’s always been like this: angry, miserable, fearful, easily manipulated. Small. So small. A pet, and a bad one, at that.

“Forgemaster, sir.”

He starts at the servant’s voice. “What is it?” he snaps at the man, scowling at him. He is wearing the vampire sister’s livery: black, silver and red.

“Lady Lenore has asked for you, sir.”

Hector turns to glance at the sun beyond the window, that has just dipped below the horizon. His stomach twists in knots.

“Prepare my clothes,” he orders his servant before snapping the curtains closed.

~

Lenore is curled on her couch before the fire when Hector is led to her quarters, a book open in her lap. She sets it down as soon as she sees him, and a smile curls the corners of her lips. A faint blush, like an early spring rose, creeps up her smooth, porcelain cheeks.

“Hector. You’re here.”

She gracefully uncoils from the soft cushions and walks up to him to inspect the new clothes she ordered for him. With light and careful fingers, she traces the thread of silver embroidery on the sleeves of his dark blue velvet doublet, the colour and fabric of which matches her own dress almost exactly, then moves up to his shoulders. They linger for a breath on his lapel, fixing it in place.

“This colour looks wonderful on you. I’ll have more doublets made in this hue. It brings out your eyes.”

There’s a sort of familiarity to the way she touches him. It’s gentle, and just a little condescending, and it makes his skin crawl. Hector can still feel the ghost pain of the bonding spell she cast on him, the ring burning around his finger. He still hasn’t forgotten what her touch has led to. He doesn’t think he ever will.

Still, he doesn’t dare move away. He grits his teeth through it, and his hands curl into fists, but he stands his ground.

Finally, she lets her hands drop. She motions for him to walk with her, and he obeys.

“You’re up early,” he tells her cautiously.

The servants open the doors for them, and they step out of her quarters. Her arm threads through his as they walk, and once again a spike of something sharp and uneasy slithers up Hector’s spine at the contact.

“My sisters ordered a council meeting. You’re coming with me.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t sound so enthusiastic about it,” she teases, glancing up. The trembling light of the torches along the walls casts shimmering reflections in her blood-red eyes.

“It’s just…” Hector swallows. “You’ve never taken me to one of your meetings before.”

She smiles softly. “There is a first time for everything, Hector.” Her fingers wrap around his wrist as she stops before the tall and doors to Carmilla’s study.

Hector has the strongest urge to bolt.

“We need more soldiers patrolling the borders,” he hears Striga saying as soon as he and Lenore cross the threshold. She has her head bent over one of the maps, brows gathered in a displeased frown. Carmilla is standing beside her, arms crossed before her chest, eyes rolling in exasperation. Her pale skin gleams like ice, even in the amber light of the fire in the hearth behind them. She is wearing a dark red gown cut low at the front, and on her fingers shine a multitude of golden rings.

“We have been over this,” she tells Striga, swirling the wine in her glass. Hector’s blood runs cold when he hears the sound of her voice. He still hears it, sometimes, in his nightmares.  “Morana has been over this, too. It's a perfect plan, and it's bound to work. You really should find something else to be obsessed with, Striga, because this conversation is boring me to tears.”

“Carmilla is right,” Morana says. “I have it all figured out. We have hired as many of the mercenary groups as we could find. The nearby villages are left with virtually no protection.”

Striga’s frown does not relent as she replies, “It is not enough. The men we have hired are barely enough to patrol the western border. To hire enough men would mean emptying our treasury.”

“Let me worry about the finances, hm?” Morana smiles at her, placing her hand on her shoulder. “You worry about your battle plans, my love.”

Striga opens her mouth to say more, when Carmilla cuts her short. “What is it doing here?” Her icy blue gaze glides over Hector, and it is filled with disgust.

“Hector will be attending some of our council meetings from now on,” Lenore says smoothly. Her fingers are still wrapped around Hector’s wrist. “It was part of our agreement.”

“I don’t suppose you expect him to sit at the table with us?” Carmilla says, aghast. She pours more wine in her goblet, filling it almost to the brim. “Go to your corner now,” she tells Hector, waving him away with a careless hand, “and be quiet.”

Lenore’s expression is one of utter calmness. She takes a small step forward and straightens to her full height, however small her stature, and doesn’t even miss a beat before she says, “If he stands, then I will stand also.”

Carmilla freezes in the act of setting down the pitcher. She blinks, and a flicker of amusement dances in her eyes. “You cannot be serious.”

Lenore says nothing as she continues to stand calmly beside Hector, meeting her Carmilla's gaze levelly.

The disdain in the curl of Carmilla’s lip is unmistakable. She rolls her eyes and takes a large sip of wine. “Ugh, just take a seat, both of you. You’re late as it is. Oh, and keep your pet on a tight leash, please. I don’t want to hear a squeak out of it.”

“Come, Hector,” Lenore says softly with a small, encouraging smile as soon as Carmilla turns around, and tugs gently on his wrist.  

~

The vampire sisters' plan is even worse than Hector thought. By the time he leaves the council room, he feels cold, numb. He barely even notices Lenore’s fingers that thread through his own as she takes him back to his room.

He sits on the chair next to the fireplace while Lenore walks to the liquor cabinet and pours them both a glass of wine.

“This is… this is madness,” he says. “When you first told me, I thought you were joking. An entire stretch of land, from here all the way to the sea? I can’t believe Carmilla is actually going through with it. I can’t believe you’re all helping her.”

“So dramatic, as always.” Lenore glides towards him and holds the wine out for him. “It will be difficult, yes. But not impossible. Striga and Morana will see to it. And you will be helping, too.” When Hector makes no move to take her offering, she sighs and reaches for his hand, guiding his fingers to curl around the stem of the glass. “It is a rather smart plan, actually. It ensures we have food for generations to come.”

“You’re talking about thousands of people, Lenore. Thousands, who will not submit to this willingly. Every square foot of land will need to be fought over, and holding it will not be easy.” He shakes his head in disbelief. “Do you and your sisters really have need for all this blood?”

“It’s not just about the blood. More land means more control, and more control means more influence, more power. The vampires have been fighting amongst themselves for aeons, and we have found ourselves in the midst of their squabbles one too many times. After this, we will not be bothered ever again.”

“Perhaps,” Hector says grimly. “But at what cost?”

Lenore tips her glass over her lips, her eyes trained on him beneath her dark eyelashes. She stays silent for a moment before she says, “This is what you wanted, Hector. Is it not? When Dracula took you by his side, this is what he promised you. A cull. A... controlling of the population. Humane feeding, if you can excuse the term. What Carmilla has in mind is… precisely this.” She tilts her head to the side, “Minus a genocidal maniac.”

Hector’s jaw clenches. He wants to contradict her, but she’s right. This is exactly what Dracula had promised him, and why Hector pledged himself to his cause. Back then it had seemed like a good idea, the only viable solution to humanity’s problem. Part of him wonders whether all he had been looking for was just a cause to believe in, something to work for, to aspire to; a goal. A purpose. Something he could be proud of. Or perhaps he wanted someone to... to believe in him. To tell him what to do; to be proud of him.

Perhaps Lenore was right. Perhaps all he ever truly wanted was to be somebody’s pet.

His eyes fall to the ring on his finger, and his heart squeezes into something small and tight. Does it matter what he wants? Did it ever?

When Hector stays quiet for several moments, Lenore comes to sit by his side on the sofa.

“There is no need to overthink things, Hector,” she says softly. “Leave the administrative troubles to Morana. Your job is to make night-creatures. The sooner, the better, or I am positive that Carmilla will make good on her promise to throttle Striga. She is really starting to get on her nerves.”

Her fingertips are cool against his cheek when she turns his face towards her. Her scent reaches him; spring jasmine blossoms and sweet, cherry wine. “Can you do that for me, Hector?” she asks. “Can you start making night-creatures?”

Hector looks at her, really looks at her. It is strange, in a way, that she’s asking him this. She knows he cannot oppose her in anything, not now. She knows he is but a tool to be used, and Hector knows it, too.

But that’s who Lenore is.

Lenore is clever. Diplomacy is in her blood, even when there’s nothing left to bargain for. She is witty and calculating, and she always knows the right thing to say to disarm him. She is thoughtful and caring when she chooses, speaking to him softly, giving him what she knows he wants before taking it away. Lenore is beautiful and captivating, with her porcelain skin and her sanguine eyes, her crimson lips, like blood roses in the snow.

Lenore is poison.

She’s wormed her way into his confidence once. She’s won him over with honeyed words, and she’s cut him to pieces with sharp claws. Hector knows that she won’t stop, not until she has what she wants.

“I’ll do it,” he says quietly, and glances away. “I just… I need time. To make a new hammer.”

“How long?”

“I… I don’t know.” He swallows. “Forge-hammers take time. Days, maybe weeks.”

“Carmilla won’t be happy about that.” She sighs as she caresses his cheek with a light and slender finger. “I’ll stall them. Keep them off you for a while. You take your time. Yes?”

A shiver runs through him, makes his hair stand on end. He feels like a mouse, being toyed with by a cat. “Thank you,” he forces himself to say.

Lenore smiles. Hector watches as she sets her glass down and stands up. He expects her to say something more, to order him about, but she doesn’t. She rarely ever does, these days. She simply turns around and glides out of the room without another word.

As soon as she leaves, Hector lets out the breath he had been holding. He walks to the window and gazes at the endless fields of white beyond, and his features turn hard as stone. The ring on his finger thrums, an insistent reminder, and at that moment, Hector knows. He has to get away.

But he has to be smart about it. For once in his miserable life.

~~~

“We are leaving.”

Trevor doesn’t even turn to look as Sypha as he shoves his tunic in his leather travelling bag. The rest of his clothes are in a pile on the bed, and they are precious few; in less than a quarter of an hour, he will be ready to leave this place, and never return.

That is, if Sypha decides to stop bloody arguing with him.

“Trevor,” she says, “we can’t just—“

“Sypha. I said, we’re leaving.”

“But—“

“No but’s. No if’s. We are leaving and that’s that.”

A long, frustrated sigh from Sypha’s spot next to the window lets him know exactly what her thoughts are regarding that declaration of his. They have been at this for hours, but Trevor has made up his mind. And he is not backing down this time.

Sypha crosses her arms before her chest and pins him with a hard glare. “Since when are you the one to make decisions around here?”

“Since our host has —not so kindly —asked us to leave.”

“Yes, after you told him he is Dracula reincarnate.”

“And isn’t he? Didn’t you hear what he was saying? Weren’t you there?”

“I was there, and what I heard was you two being both quite rude to one another.”

Trevors narrows his eyes at her, but says nothing as he goes back to shoving their clothes in the bags. He huffs in frustration when Sypha marches towards him and sits flat on the bags he has been filling.

“I am not leaving,” she declares.

“Sypha,” he tells her slowly, trying hard to keep his tone calm, “I know you don’t like it when I tell you what to do. I know you think I’m rash and impatient, and perhaps I am, but we are not welcome here anymore. This has been made plain. We have done all we could for Alucard, but he doesn’t need our help. He told us so directly. Sometimes it is wise to simply admit defeat, rather than to keep on fighting a losing battle.”

“I will not admit defeat, and I am not leaving.” She frowns, her pretty brow wrinkling. “Alucard is our friend.”

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph, woman,” Trevor rolls his eyes and huffs, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Look, if you want to stay in this shithole, be my guest. I sure as hell am not staying here another bloody minute, because unlike you, I can tell when I am not wanted. And have we forgotten the people outside the door? I have no desire to join them, thank you very much.”

“No one’s joining them, you silly goose,” Sypha grumbles. They have gone over the same argument time and again since the day before, since Alucard stormed out of the kitchen. “If he wanted to kill us, why would he have helped us? Why would he have saved your life?”

“You saved my life just as much as he did.”

“Yes, but he didn’t have a reason to do it, nothing to gain.” She narrows her eyes. “ I am starting to reconsider my own reasons, now.”

Trevor groans in frustration. There is no talking with this woman. Why has she become so obsessed with staying behind and helping Alucard, anyway? Trevor was on board with her plan at first, but now he is starting to doubt whether there is a point. There really is no talking with Alucard either. Come to think of it, the two of them are very much alike.

He shakes his head in defeat and walks away from her, going to stand by the window. If Sypha is bent on staying behind, then he really doesn’t know what to do. Even if he wanted to stay, he can’t do that, not now. Not while things are like this. Not when he has seen the hatred in Alucard's eyes when he looked at him, at them both.

The bitterness that rises within him at the memory is now a familiar ache.  

“I think,” Sypha says quietly, shifting on the bed to face him, “that you care about him just as much as I do.”

Trevor presses his lips together and turns to frown out the window. Snow has been falling steadily since the day before, and a thick white blanket is covering the ground now. It makes the world beyond the castle seem quiet and serene, but in Trevor’s heart there’s only turmoil.

Of course he cares about him. Of course he does. He cares about him as a friend, a… a brother. It must be because they’ve fought alongside each other, watched each other’s back; being by somebody’s side when they’re in danger does things to people, creates a bond between them even if they do not wish it. That must be it, he tells himself: it’s only natural, a gut reaction, an instinct, forged when the three of them faced Dracula and his armies side by side. And Trevor would do it, again and again; he would face Hell’s fires as many times as he had to, if it meant keeping those he cares about safe from harm. If it meant doing what he was meant to do.

That’s the thing, though. Trevor knows how to fight. He knows how to kill night-creatures, he knows how to squash monsters, how to beat their brains to a pulp. It’s like second nature to him, wielding his sword and throwing his chain about, dealing with trouble head on. What he doesn’t know is… this.

He hasn’t the first idea how to deal with all this. He doesn’t know what to do with Alucard’s fury, or his sadness, or the hurt that’s right there , just beneath the surface. Even Trevor can tell, even though he’s shite at all of it, he’s terrible at talking about feelings. So he gets mad and swears and fights, even when there’s nothing to fight for.

Because… that’s what he knows. That’s all he’s ever known, after all.

Sypha’s footsteps are barely audible, absorbed by the plush rug. She comes to stand beside him, her arm shy of touching his own. “He cares about you, too,” she whispers. “He cares about us. And he needs us now. I know it, even if he doesn’t say it.”

“But what are we supposed to do about it, Sypha?” Trevor asks, his arms still crossed petulantly before him. “You heard the man. He wants us out.”

She worries her lip, gazing out the window. She looks tired, worn out. Neither of them slept well the night before, too wired after the argument they had with Alucard. This day, too, hasn’t gone much better, with them waiting for him to return.

“I can’t leave, Trevor,” she says after a short while. “Not again. I can’t… I can’t leave things like this. If only to find out what happened here, I must stay.” She turns to look at him, searching his face. “You…”

Trevor sighs. “If you stay, you know I’ll stay with you.” He reaches out and wraps his arms around her shoulders, pulling her close. “But he’s already been out all night and day. God knows when he’ll be back. We could be here, waiting for him, for days still. ”

“Then we go out and look for him. What?” she says when he blinks at her. “He can’t have gone too far. We’ll find him.”

Trevor gazes at the snowfall beyond the window, the sky that’s steadily darkening. It won’t be easy finding him, Trevor can tell that already.

He lets out a sigh and drags his palm down his face. “This better be bloody worth it.”

Read the rest on AO3!

#castlevania #castlevania netflix #alucard #adrian tepes #trevor belmont #sypha belnades #trephacard #alucard/trevor belmont/sypha belnades #alucard/trevor/sypha #alucard x trevor x sypha #castlevania fanfiction #where blood roses bloom #johaerys writes #hector #lenore