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practicingmedicine · 3 years

Text

Practicing Medicine: Chapter Seven

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2075 ROBCO(R)

LOADER V1. 1

EXEC VERSION 41.10

32K RAM SYSTEM

14302 BYTES FREE

HOLLOWTAPE LOADED: "THE-WORST-THING-EVER"

INITIALISING….

SUCCESS!

STATUS

Battery Level: 42%

Wireless Signal: (?)

Operating Temperature: 92F

HEALTH

BP: 170/130

SPO2: 100%

Temp: 99.5F RR: 28

HR: 185

TIME

Day: 24 SEP. 2279

Time: 16:10

CLIMATE

Current Temperature: 76 F

Atmospheric Pressure: 750 mm

Background Radiation: 1.321 RAD

WARNING: Dangerous wasteland creature in range!

Yeah, no shit, Sherlock! Why don't you tell me my chance of survival as a percentage too!

I'd been tipping back in my chair when the wall exploded, so now I was sitting on my ass in a state of total mental shock, slowly butt-scooting my way backwards. The NCR soldier who I'd been sitting beside popped up, knocking his stool over in the process.

"Ayuda!" he shouted. He was shooting his rifle, but it wasn't making any noise. He screamed something about shit ammo and started yanking on the charging bolt.

Amongst the wreckage, Tandi tried to stand back up. How she survived an impact like that was beyond me, but I wasn't about to point that out. She turned her head to look at Gram.

"Gram, get the-" she started. Before she could finish, the big white reptile threw itself directly at her, knocking over the entire table and crushing Cook and Jas as Tandi rolled out of the way, trailing pink insulation foam behind her. Gram sprinted past me and started clambering up the stairs to the second floor, leaving poor Chomps sitting in stunned silence.

The deathclaw reared around to face Tandi, who had drawn a six-gun from her hip.

"Fuck off, cyka!" shouted Tandi, and emptied it directly into his face, shattering his jaw and blasting off his nose.

The gunshots, the shrieks of the injured beast, the dust that was gathering in the air... it was all so overwhelming! I'd never been so close to anything so dangerous, and my whole body was screaming at me to run for my life, but I just couldn't send the signals to my muscles. I couldn't move, couldn't shout, couldn't breath...

The beast lunged at Tandi again, and she caught him by his arm and snapped it against her leg, then grabbed onto his broken jaw and forced it into the back of his throat. He immediately swung his other hand at her, impaling her through her forearm and thigh. He probably would have disemboweled her in the next motion, but was interrupted by a sudden hail of gunfire.

My eardrums pounded as the soldier fired shot after shot from his now-functional rifle, striking the deathclaw all across it's back and arms, poking lots of inconsequential little holes in the thing. By the end of the magazine, I couldn't hear anything but a loud ringing, so I didn't even get to hear the soldier's scream as the Deathclaw reeled around and folded him against the wall, taking all the life out of his body and sending him tumbling to the ground in a way that made it clear that he'd not be getting back up. The beast stalked over to him...

And in Came chomps like a goddamn pro wrestler, swinging a stool over his head like a sledgehammer. The beast didn't even bother to turn around as it raked Chomps across his entire upper body with its good claw. I could see the blood running down his face as Chomps stumbled backwards into the fallen table and fell onto his back, trying to figure out which of his massive wounds to clutch as he writhed about with his legs in the air.

Then, the thing turned it's whole upper body to face me. Our eyes connected.

Have you ever been so scared that you choked on your own spit? Because, as the beast stared at me with its one remaining eye, I distinctly remember gagging so hard that I started choking on my own spit.

It started walking towards me- a big, ghost-white beast, stained all over with its own blood, all its parts hanging loose- and I involuntarily let out a mix between a wet cough and a squeal. More logic-defying noises escaped my mouth as I scrambled for the stairs, trying and failing to stand up in the process. But it wasn't me who the deathclaw was keying in on now- It was Gram, standing behind me on the stairwell with a laser gun.

"Cover your ears, Boy!" He shouted over the ringing, and I followed his advice. I pressed my hands against my ears and shut my eyes.

Next thing I felt was heat on my skin- wasn't no light, but there was heat alright! Heat and a noise like a can of sarsaparilla taking a fifty cal right in the center! Drops of hot liquid splashed across my skin.

Next thing that hit were the smells. Burning fat, a delicious dinner and clouds of gunpowder, pools of coagulating blood and bodily fluids; The sounds- screaming, shouting, sobbing, and there was that damn ringing in my ears! My head hurt too, and my skin was all hot and prickly. I swear I could feel my chest caving in, I was breathing so hard…

"Isaac! Isaac, get moving, people are dying! ISAAC!"

Someone hit me in the back of the head, so I turned around and bit them as hard as I could. I could taste blood so vividly, as they pulled their hand back, putting them off balance. I grabbed the wrinkled, bleeding hand and yanked it forward, pulling its owner down the stairs and onto the floor. Someone walked up to me and tried to say something to me so I started screaming as loud and hard as I could, until they backed away.

Then it struck me- the deathclaw was dead. It's head had been hollowed out, pieces scattered all over the room. No one was even paying attention to me as I beat the ever living shit out of Gram, who had probably just saved my life. They all had their own problems.

I was hyperventilating, I realized, and it was making my vision go dark around the edges. I tried to regulate my breathing as I scanned the room, wondering what the hell I was supposed to do first. But it was hard- so, so hard with all the ringing, and the prickly hot feeling on my skin and the static in my head!

Where to start? I started compiling a mental list of all the problems that I had to fix, or "doing triage," as my father would have said. In my head, it looked something like this:

I'd hurt Gram after he hit me in the back of the head, but he was already getting back up.

Cook was lying underneath a table, wheezing and trying to get it off her chest- she was probably having trouble breathing, but Jas was helping her at the moment, and she was making noise so it couldn't be that bad.

The NCR soldier was in a bad way, probably got his back broke. I couldn't tell if the blood all over his back was his or the deathclaws, which warranted a closer look, but there was still air going through his body so I'd put him on the back burner for now.

That left Tandi and Chomps, the two with the nastiest wounds. If the claw had hit his throat, Chomps would be dead very soon, if he wasn't dead already. I decided to deal with him first. Ignoring Gram's muttered insults, I stalked across the room and fell down on one knee beside the old man. There was a frightening amount of blood pooling around his head, and my heart rate picked up when I dragged him on his side and gave him a quick once over.

Three parallel gashes- One deep wound across his stomach, one relatively shallow one across his upper chest and collarbone, and one across his forehead that was bleeding profusely but which had stopped at the skull. I saw no signs of life-threatening bleeding, though his intestines were poking out through the stomach wound. I motioned towards Gram.

"Gemme a wet towel." In spite of what I'd done to him, he didn't argue with me, disappearing into the kitchen without a word. I looked back at Chomps. I'd been an idiot and left my medical kit in the cart, so my emergency treatment was going to have to be improvised. I didn't like that, but I wasn't about to leave any of the people in the room to go get the kit. I'd have to make do for the moment.

First step would be to remove the clothes around the evisceration. How was I going to do that? I couldn't just pull off his overalls. I'd have to cut through them. What options did I have for cutting? My utility knife was in my medical pouch. But, when they'd set the table, there had been steak knives…

Find a steak knife, I told myself, and started scanning the floor. I could faintly hear the back door open as Gram headed outside to pump water on a towel, which I'd use to dress the evisceration. Steak knife, steak knife…

Amidst the debris, I found a fork and steak knife lying together, so I took both just in case I ended up needing the fork for something. After putting a quick gash in the pale, unfeeling strip of skin on my forearm to get a feel for the knife's cutting edge, I leaned back over Chomps and slid the knife against his blood-soaked denim. It took a bit of force, but once I had cut through the tough edge, it became a lot easier to run my knife through the worn material. I cut out a rough square of cloth all around his chest, and carefully peeled it off his sticky, bloody skin. Poor man was conscious, I noticed, but he wasn't saying nothing. Just watching.

"Don't try and move. Your guts weren't ripped, but they might be if you start squirming. No matter how much it hurts, you gotta stand still," I said, tearing off the loose strip of overalls and bunching it up into a makeshift rag for later. It wasn't sanitary, but it'd have to do.

Gram came back in shortly after, carrying several ragged towels soaked in water. I gave him a nod of acknowledgment and held my arms out for Gram to drop the towels into. Not stopping to check his trajectory, Gram tossed the load in my arms, and continued walking until he reached Tandi. He knelt down beside her.

"Toss me the pip boy!" He shouted. I was confused for a second, then remembered the medical profiles I'd created. Quick as I could, I logged off the pip-boy, and tossed it underhanded to Gram. I didn't wait to see if he caught it.

"Remember: Don't move," I said, laying the wet towel across Chomps's jutting intestines. He winced as the towel touched the wound, but he didn't squirm. Don't think there was much that could've made Chomps squirm.

"You're doing great!" I told him, securing the towel around the edges. I checked the rest of his wounds. His airway was swell, and the leaks in his forehead and chest weren't gonna kill him. Which means he was as stable as he was going to get, without a stimpack. "I'll come back to you soon. I need to check the soldier…"

"No, Fuck that guy! Tandi's been thrown through a goddamn wall!" shouted Gram, but it sounded quiet next to the ringing in my ears. I rubbed my temples. Jas had gotten the table off of Cook, and was doing what I guessed to be a misguided attempt at CPR on her, for some reason. Probably because she was complaining about breathing? First things first, I needed to put a stop to that

"Jas, does Cook have a pulse?" I asked, barely able to hear my own voice. Jas nodded.

"Yeah, but she says that she can't breathe, so I'm doing-"

"Stop doing that! CPR is for dead people!" Jas didn't complain no more, instead standing up and going to examine the NCR soldier. If Gram was telling the truth, I didn't have time to worry about how Jas was going to screw him up, so I ignored her and hurried over to Tandi. Surprisingly, she was still conscious. She gave me a weak middle finger as I sat down.

"Helmet off- stop moving it if she complains about her neck," I said. Gram complied immediately. Tandi didn't have anything to say as the helmet came off, revealing her sweaty, mutilated face. There were no new injuries there, though it was still as shocking as ever.

"Where's it hurt, Tandi? Is your back okay?" I asked. She looked up at me like I was stupid.

"No, I'm completely paralyzed. Dumb whore..." I rolled my eyes.

"Surely, I am as dumb as they come! But, the pip-boy says you've got internal bleeding, and it's still figuring out where. Where're you hurtin' at?" Tandi laughed a little.

"Internal? Then it's in the right place." I shook my head and inspected her pip-boy image. There were so many warnings that it was impossible to try to interpret them all. I suddenly really wished I could read, even just a little more.

"Tandi, this is life or death! Where did it-" Suddenly, the image on the screen changed. The pip boy beeped, and a blinking warning sign appeared dead in the center of her character's chest. The BP stat, I noticed, was down from the last measurement.

"Y'have no idea how often people say that. Anyways, he hit me-" she started. I began to pull off her coat. I elbowed Gram in the shoulder, and pointed at the stricken woman.

"Strip her down. Tandi, please help as much as you can!" She gave me a suspicious look.

"And what if I don't want you exploring all up in my nooks-and-crannies?"

"Tandi, something is very fucking wrong! Help me take the armor off!" She clutched her wounded leg and growled at me.

"...Aggghhh, Fine! But I'll kill you afterwards."

Gram worked on taking off the armor supporting her back, while I removed her dented chest-plate. Once I'd gotten that free, I took off her shirt, Gram removed her baggy jeans, and we got to work freeing her armor harnesses. When one of the clips got stuck, I picked up my steaknife from the ground and sliced through the whole strap. It was surprisingly easy to cut through, I guess for emergency situations like this. Once I got that off, Tandi was left in her sportswear. I removed her chest wrapping on account of some bruising in that area. Her knickers weren't covering nothing up, so I left those alone.

The full picture was distressing, real distressing. Amongst Tandi's considerable collection of old scars, there were several huge, rapidly swelling patches of yellow, purplish skin all over her body, the biggest of which was right over her heart. I pulled my stethoscope off my neck and plugged it into my ears- had em backwards, got them in the right way and then checked around for her heartbeat, and got back a faint, muffled noise. Combined with her wormlike neck veins and the fact that I couldn't even get a pulse on her femoral at this point, that made Beck's Triad. Father always told me I'd never be able to diagnose tamponade like that on a real clinical exam, but here were all three symptoms, sticking out like a compound fracture.

"Oh no," I breathed. I tried to compose myself, but panic was already overtaking my mind. Before I even spoke, I could hear my voice cracking. "Jas! Get- uh, break into the wagon out back, and grab the orange bag and the other one, the other emergency-looking one. Bring em back fast!" Jas looked at her fallen companion, who she had sat up against the wall, then at the door, then at me. Slowly, she stood up, walked away from the unconscious soldier, and exited out the back door, picking up speed as she went.

Preparing myself for what came next, I placed the cold knife against Tandi's bare, swollen chest, and started counting ribs. One, two, three, four, five... The tip came to a rest beneath her right breast.

"What are you doing?" She asked. I pressed the knife a bit harder, seeing how hard I'd need to press to cut her sweaty skin. Not very. A drop of blood seeped out from under the knife.

"There's blood gathering in the lining around your heart, Tandi. I gotta open your chest up to fix you." Tandi's eyes opened wide.

"What- NO!"

I felt her grab onto my wrist, but she was late; I'd already abandoned any doubts that might've been left in my head and punched my knife through her chest, right by her sternum. A primal scream filled my ears as I dragged the blade through the layers of skin and fat, all the way to her shoulder blade. I shoved my hand into her intercostal space.

"Spread her ribs and hold 'em," I grunted. Gram made a face.

"Oh, Christ..." Tandi continued to shriek in pain and squeeze my wrist as Gram spread the wound like a clam shell. I tried to wrap my fingers around her pulsating heart, but couldn't quite get at it. I pushed her lung aside.

"Stop it! Da idi ty, fuck you! Otvyazhis'!" Tandi cried, but I didn't stop. I couldn't. It had to be done, or her pericardium would fill up with blood and squeeze her heart til it stopped beating. I kept digging around as the blood coursed over my hands and arms; I was slick up to the elbows with it.

"Anyone got a flashlight?" Gram shook his head. I swore and spit on the ground. That was gonna make this next part a lot harder.

Tandi kept on hollering and thrashing as I tried in vain to get a grip on the pericardial sac without also grabbing the throbbing heart inside. My fingers were too slippery to pinch it, so I pulled the dinner fork out of my pocket and hoisted the sac up that way. It slipped off the fork a couple times before I could get it in a good position, but once I had it pulled taught, I didn't waste any time opening it up between the phrenic nerves- Tandi was dying quick. She looked like she'd been drained by a vampire, and her shrieks of pain had already quieted down to confused sobbing.

"Ah hell Isaac, I don't know how long I can hold this! Could you hurry up?" grunted Gram. I could see the muscles straining beneath his skin, bulging in his face and neck. His arms were quaking.

"Yeah, sure! Now help me turn her over…" I put my hands on Tandi's back and worked with Gram to move her on her side, so the blood could leak out of her cavity. The floor was covered in the stuff by now, and it had streaked and smeared where she'd been struggling. I tried to ignore it as I got down on my hands and knees and stared into her wound. "Great. I'm gonna peek down here again, try and figure out where it's-"

Before I'd even finished my sentence, a gout of bright red blood sprayed out the cut I'd made in the pericardium, all over my chest and face. It dripped down my glasses like some sort of cheesy horror-movie effect.

"Doc! Hey, Doc, I've got the stuff!" I looked over my shoulder to see Jas stumbling in through the back door, carrying both the stimpack bag and my medical bag in her arms. I motioned for her to set them down next to me. "Um, there's a few stimpacks here, which should I-"

"Fuck it! It don't matter!" Something like a laugh rattled through my chest as I snatched the syringe out of Jas's hand. Tandi's heart coughed out another gob of blood, but I'd already moved to the side, and soon my hand was in the clamshell wound again. My fingers clawed for the source of the blood.

"I'm hurting bad!" grunted Gram. I started probing with my stimpack.

"Well don't let go, use a- I don't know, use anything!" I was hardly paying much attention to Gram at this point. I could feel the blood coursing over my fingers as they brushed over some artery, can't say which one, and I figured pretty quickly where the rupture was. I jabbed the stimpack in.

And Missed.

I tried again, and missed. Which gave me that sinking feeling that you get in your stomach when you realize that you've not got much time, and your body just isn't the right machine for the task. Usually that came with a certain embarrassment, that telltale hotness of the skin, but not this time. This time, the hair on my arms stood up straight, and the sweat on my skin grew cold.

I looked over at Gram. His eyes were jammed shut, he'd bit through his upper lip- and his hands, shaking more than ever. My hands were shaking too. The animalistic energy that'd been carrying me through this had gone. For a moment, I was just a kid again, in over his head and scrambling for a way out.

But it was only a moment. Like a lumberjack throwing all his weight behind an axe, I took three more passionate stabs with the needle before piercing the artery. I had no hope of suturing it now, so I just hoped to high hell that pushing stimpack juice through the pipe and pinching the rupture shut with my nails would actually work. I'd made so many choices based on pure hope already, what was more on the pile?

The moment I pulled my hand out and discarded the empty stimpack, Gram grunted and collapsed on top of Tandi. He'd stopped holding the site open, but his fingers were still buried in the bleeding wound. His lungs rattled with each jagged breath.

"What- what should I do? Do you need help with her?" panted Jas, and I waved her away. I was panting too, panting and hot and covered in sweat and blood and god knows what else. I could feel my heart beating in every crevice of my aching body.

But was Tandi's heart still beating?

Her eyes were open and unreactive, her skin was pale and waxy. Seemed like she was breathing, but the hairs on my arms still stood up as I prodded around for a pulse near her groin; there was nothing at first, then a faint squirming beneath my fingertips, and then nothing again. The skin felt cool as glass. I put my hand on Gram's back.

"What's her- check the pip boy, what's her BP say?" Gram lifted his head up just slightly to look at the pip boy screen.

"Seventy six and fifty." There was a solemn silence. "Is that…?"

"That's good. Better, I mean.

I wiped some of the sweat off my brow again. It was pointless, seeing as how I probably deposited a bunch of blood when I did it, but I had to let out all that relief somehow. I hadn't even been able to get a femoral pulse when I'd checked last time, which meant that her pressure had been somewhere below seventy. A jump back up to seventy six was good news.

Of course, Tandi's troubles weren't over- her pericardium was slit, she still had herself a gaping hole in the chest, and the cavity was still full of blood in spite of my efforts. I grabbed my hand-suction pump from out of my bag and hooked up the reservoir, plunged in the tip, and got to work squeezing. An onlooker might have thought that I was still putting in my all, but at this point, my mind was elsewhere. I glanced over my shoulder.

"Jas, you wanna be helpful, right?" I asked. I didn't wait for a response. "Prepare the worker's quarters for all these patients. I want beds, I want chamber pots, whatever we can get. And when you're done with that, you and me are gonna haul these folks upstairs."

Jas might've said something to me after that, but I couldn't hear it over the fuzz in my head, the static of stress. I looked around the room one last time, and I don't think I have to tell you the specifics of what I saw; just that I could tell right then that this would be, without a doubt, the longest night of my life.

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#fallout #fallout fanfic #fallout fanfiction #fallout fandom

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tibbinswrites · 4 years

Note

Hi! For the prompts can you do destiel stories and #4 and #16?? Thanks! ❤❤

Hi Nonnie!! Thank you so much for the request. Sorry it’s taken me so long to finish, I had a few false starts with it. Enjoy ^_^

(prompts are open. Send me a number between 1 and 635 and I’ll write a thing for you)

I’ve now done prompts for: #1, #2, #4 and #16, #10, #78, #170 and #502 but all the others are fair game :D

Prompt #4: “I’m not okay.” and Prompt #16: Kiss

The first time Cas realised that he couldn’t heal anymore, it was when Dean had already lost about two pints of blood. His thigh had a long gash in it, and he was currently slumped against the wall trying to get his breath back from where he’d been winded by the cruel cinderblock while Cas took out the werewolf that had tossed him there. He poked at the wound and hissed, trying not to wonder if that little spark of white in amongst all the red was bone or if his eyes were doing that unreliable thing that happened somewhere around pint two and a half.

The still smoking corpse of the werewolf dropped and Cas was by his side in an instant, crouching down and placing two fingers to his forehead with a small smile. Dean waited for the relief, for the delicate brush of Cas’s grace to get knitting his leg back together, but when the pain didn’t abate, and when Cas’ smile fell into wide-eyed horror, he knew what had happened.

“Dean—”

“Hey, it’s okay.” Dean said quickly. Forcing his lips into something that was probably more a pained grimace than a smile. “It’s alright. Here’s what I need you to do. I need you to go to the car and get the first aid kit out the trunk and bring it back here, okay?” He kept his voice as calm as possible, knowing that this was a huge thing for Cas, and that he was on the verge of panicking, of trying to force a heal, which could mean all kinds of bad shit was about to go down if Dean didn’t give him a task.

Cas blinked and tore his hand away from Dean’s forehead.

“Yes,” he said, standing a lot more clumsily than his usual graceful movements, “I— I can do that. Dean, will you…?”

“I’ll be here.”

Cas nodded, but it still took him another few seconds to leave and Dean was pretty sure he was beating him self up pretty bad right now. He was also pretty sure that he’d beat himself up way worse if Dean actually died while he was out getting band-aids so he concentrated real hard on not doing that. Not that this was a fatal wound really. Infection was the worst danger, and blood loss, but those could both be remedied the human way. It would suck, but he’d be fine.

Sam was going to throw a huge bitch fit when he realised that this meant Dean had a ready-made excuse to do nothing but sit in front of the TV for at least two weeks. What a shame.

Cas returned, holding the box and practically falling at Dean’s side.

“Thanks, buddy. That’s great.” Dean said, deciding that keeping a stream of reassurance would not only keep Cas from freaking out, but it would also give him something to focus on other than the huge, gaping wound in his leg. He took the box from Cas’ shaking hands and flipped open the lid. Well… first things first. He pulled out the fifth of whiskey and put the box down on the floor so he could unscrew the lid.

“What are you doing?” Cas demanded, making to snatch the bottle from him, but Dean held it protectively into his chest.

“Trust me,” he said with a small laugh, “I’m gonna need it.” Then he took several large gulps, waited for the warmth to bloom in his stomach and poured a liberal amount onto his ruined leg. “Fuck!” He yelled as the sharp burning pain sliced through his thigh, he smashed his free fist against the floor as a distraction and would have dropped the bottle if Cas hadn’t rescued it, concern and guilt etched into every line of his face.

“What can I do?” He asked, and Dean’s heart broke at the plea in his voice, desperate to help, desperate for some kind of direction. Dean was breathing hard, and he was shaking with a mixture of pain and adrenaline.

“You’re gonna have to stitch me up, buddy,” he said, holding a hand out so Cas could see the tremor. “I need a pair of steady hands and a can do attitude. You’ve got those, right?”

“I— yes?”

“’Course you do.” Dean said firmly, pushing the towards Cas. “Needle and dental floss, and you can’t stop once you start, you’ve gotta keep going till it’s done.”

“Dean—”

“You’ve got this. Hell, you’re probably more qualified to do this than I’ve ever been. You’ve got all that angel knowledge in your head, and you once built me up from scratch, right? This is easy.”

Cas’ face set determined and he nodded before ripping up the seam of Dean’s jeans to peel the denim away from the wound. Dean winced and was suddenly very glad that all his blood was otherwise occupied because in different circumstances he’d be having another kind of hard time. Cas pulled out what he needed and used a clean rag to wipe away as much blood as he could, used the rest of the whisky to wash his hands with and readied the needle over Dean’s skin before pausing to meet his eyes.

“Ready?”

Dean held up a finger, then grabbed the bottle of Jack Daniels and took a few more slugs. “Okay,” he rasped. “Go nuts.”

The first press of the needle had Dean clenching his teeth so hard he was surprised he wasn’t pushing them back into his gums.

“Ninety degrees, above the fat, centimetre to the right of the wound,” Cas muttered, seemingly to himself.

“Watch who you’re calling fat,” Dean gritted back. Cas’ eyes stayed fixed on Dean’s leg but his lips twitched into a thin smile. Then he twisted the needle into position and Dean forgot to be funny. “Son of a bitch!” He yelled.

The needle poked through the other side of the gash and Dean felt like he might throw up.

“Pull until two inches of thread left on the right side.” Cas continued, his tone apologetic as he took hold of the needle and began to pull.

Dean let out a series of noises that were somewhere between gasping and screaming as he felt the dental floss move through sinew and only the fear of ripping through more of his leg kept him from thrashing and trying to kick Cas away. It might not be the worst pain he’d ever experienced but it still freaking hurt.

“It’s alright.” Cas soothed, pulling the two sides of the wound together and tying off the floss with a precision that made no sense considering this was his first suture.

While Cas worked Dean examined him. There was nothing else to focus on other than the pain but that would be all kinds of unhelpful. So he watched Cas, the firm line of his jaw, the deft fingers adding a third throw to the floss for extra security, the mixture of steel and grief in his eyes.

He let out a grunt as Cas began on the second suture—at what Dean would bet was exactly a quarter inch down from the first—and Cas’ lips pulled in tighter.

“Are you okay?” Dean asked. He might be the one with muscle exposed to air but Cas seemed to be laser focussed on his task, his eyes barely moving from the needle and thread, as though he was terrified to look at the wound itself. Weird, he’d never thought of Cas as squeamish, he’d certainly never shown a sign of it before.

“Fine,” Cas said bluntly, his tone indicating anything but.

“Uh-huh.”

“Dean, please, I’m trying to concentrate.”

Dean wanted to argue, but pissing off the guy stitching up his leg probably wasn’t the best idea so he dropped it. Cas worked quickly, soon getting the hang of the routine of it and in less than half an hour there were eleven neat little knots of thread along his thigh.

“Nice work.”

Cas sat back and dropped the needle and floss back into the first aid kit.

“I’m not okay,” he said quietly, wiping his bloodied hands on a rag.

“No?”

“I could have lost you.” His voice was so soft, so mournful and it twinged something in his chest.

“What, to this?” Dean gestured to his leg. “Dude, it’s just a scratch, it was never gonna kill me.”

“But what if it was worse?” Cas argued. “What if it’s worse next time? If I can’t heal—”

Dean reached out a hand and placed it on Cas’ shoulder. “Cas, it’s not on you, okay? No matter what happens, it’s not your fault. Sometimes you’ve just gotta roll with the punches and do what you can. Like today, you stitched me up real good and once it heals it’s gonna be a badass scar. There’s no point crying about what ifs. What happens happens, and we pick our fate. And I for one wouldn’t want it any other way.”

Then, before he could second-guess himself, he curled his hand around the back of Cas’ neck, yanking him forward so that their lips met. Even startled, Cas recovered quickly, catching himself so that he didn’t topple completely into Dean, one hand came up to hesitantly cradle his cheek. The touch was so light that it tickled and Dean took it as encouragement to deepen the kiss, pushing into it all the things he had pushed down, the words he’d refused to say, the feelings that had always seemed to stick in his throat. Cas let out a breathy sound that was a little like awe as he pulled back, his eyes shining as he looked at Dean like he was somehow worthy of the love of an angel.

Dean looked away. It hurt too much, to have that kind of delicate faith gently placed into his clumsy hands.

“I’ll blame that on the Jack later,” Dean mumbled, ashamed to know that it was true. “But that was my choice and I want you to know that before I chicken out.”

“Dean—”

“Help me up.” He cut in, using the wall behind him and his good leg to start the process. “We should get back.”

“Alright.”

Cas took his arm and helped pull him upright. He hissed in pain as he tried to put weight on his leg but it hurt a hell of a lot less than it did, and it should heal pretty clean.

“For the record,” Cas said conversationally as they hobbled their way to the car, the first aid kit in Cas’ other hand rattling a little with each step. “If you ever wanted to make that choice again, I’d be amenable to it.”

Dean couldn’t help a little grin starting to split his face. “Oh, would you now?”

“Yes.” Cas said, a pink flush spreading up his neck as Dean turned to look at him. “I would.”

Dean chuckled and, feeling brave, ducked his head in to peck Cas’ cheek, relishing in the ensuing blush and the small, sweet smile.

“Good.”

#prompts #prompt #writing prompt #prompt me #destiel #spn fanfic #TibbinsWrites #TibbinsAnswers #supernatural

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long-bodyswap · 5 years

Text

Switch

by Dirk Steel ([email protected])

I was working out at the gym like I did every Thursday night. But this night seemed a bit odd. Barely anyone else was here. Mr. Asito, the night janitor was doing his usual duties. Kathy, the desk clerk, was signing out and heading for home. Dan, Phil and Ted were talking about getting some action at the local bar as they went out the door.Of course Doug and Matt were still here. Being the personal trainers for the gym, they were always working out. Doug was an incredible specimen. He looked a lot like Marcus Reinhardt, the professional bodybuilder, but even taller. At six-foot-two he was a sight to behold. Blond hair, blue eyes, broad shoulders, thick square chest, narrow waist, huge quads and calves. He looked just like a Nordic god. Matt, on the other hand, looked like the all-American football jock. Five-foot-ten, 220 lbs. of pure muscle. Wavy black hair, jet black eyes, bushy eyebrows, Roman nose, square jaw and high cheek bones, a chiseled six-pack, beefy forearms and 19-inch biceps. His shoulders were so well defined; he looked like he was wearing shoulder pads.It took all of my strength not to stare at Matt while I worked out. In my mind he was the "perfect" man. He just oozed masculinity. His voice was at least an octave lower than mine. Unfortunately, he made it perfectly clear to everyone that he was all man, and 100% straight. I had even hired him to help me train a few months ago, but he seemed to sense that I had more in mind than just training, and asked Doug to help me instead.Doug was a different story.

Quiet and sensitive, I had a feeling there was more there than met the eye. There were rumors around the gym that Doug had a thing for Matt, but no one ever had enough nerve to ask Doug if it were true. Matt was always trying to set up Doug with a variety of women. But Doug never seemed to take an interest. A couple of times while changing clothes, I noticed Doug looking over Matt's body a little longer than a straight guy would. My "gaydar" was definitely going off.Doug called over to me and asked if I needed any help. I said "Sure, thanks". Matt rolled his eyes and went off to run on the treadmill. "Looks like you've been putting on some muscle, David.", Doug said. I smiled knowing that my gains had been minimal at best and that Doug was just being kind. "Yeah, I think you'll be ready for competition in no time." Now I started laughing. "Sure, I'm a 6-foot-one, 170 lb. walking Greek statue". I said with a smirk. "Don't be so hard on yourself...", Doug said, "we all can't look like Matt". "If only that were possible.", I said. "Well if it were possible, I'd have a lot better luck with Matt than I'm having now." I'm sure I must have had a shocked look on my face when I looked over at Doug. I couldn't believe he was being so open and honest. "Listen David, I know you're gay. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure it out. I just thought it would be nice to have a gay friend I could confide in. I always have to pretend to be the straight jock when I'm working out with Matt."

I didn't know what to say except, "Thanks." Doug continued, "I know you've got a thing for bodybuilders. I've noticed you checking Matt and me out on a number of occasions. I've always been flattered by it. I had wished that I felt the same way about you, but I have the same desire for bodybuilders that you have. I'm sure you understand where I'm coming from." "I do, Doug. I could tell just by the way you look at Matt." "Matt? That's a whole other story there. I don't know what's going on with Matt. Ya know, I'm going to take a walk around the block. I've got a lot of things to think about. If you see Matt tell him I should be back in about 20 minutes. Thanks, David. You're a real friend". Doug kissed me on the cheek and left for his walk. I felt a real attraction to Doug, but knew that nothing could ever happen between us.While I was working out on the ab crunch machine, I was watching Mr. Asito vacuuming around the various pieces of equipment. He had a big smile on his face. I wondered why he seemed so happy doing such a menial chore. Just then he turned to me and said "A job well done is a job worth doing. It gives one a feeling of pride." It was almost as if he were answering the question I was thinking about. Then I remembered hearing stories about how Mr. Asito was into mystical things like potions, spells and even magic idols. I figured it was just a joke based on Mr. Asito's age and Asian background. "It is no joke, David.", he said. "How did you..." I started to ask, but he interrupted, "There are unexplainable forces that man cannot fathom, but can be used if one learns the old teachings." I smiled back and humored him by saying "I'm sure there are." He knew I really wasn't taking him seriously, smiled, and went back to vacuuming.

I went back to doing my crunches, understanding how all of those stories about him got started. Suddenly I heard a loud clanking sound behind me. Mr. Asito had accidentally hooked the vacuum cord around the weight tower and now it was beginning to rock back and forth. I jumped up from the ab machine and ran toward the weight tower hoping I could stop the rocking. But it was too late. The tower started falling towards him. I pushed him out of the way just as the weights fell to the ground with a loud crash."Are you ok?" "I'm fine, David. No harm done.", he said as he slowly got up off the floor. "You scared me half to death. It looked like you were right in the path of those weights." "Thank goodness you were nearby. The outcome could have been different." "I'm just glad you didn't get hurt." "Now, maybe there is something I can do for you?" With that he put his fingers from both hands around my face. I started to move backwards but felt compelled to stand still. He looked deeply in my eyes, as if he were looking right through me. I felt a chill run up my spine. "You have desires that are beyond the reality of this world.", he spoke in a trance-like state. "The one you wish to be, also wishes the same of you. Sometimes those who live their lives a certain way really long to be free of playing the role they feel they were forced to portray." His hands dropped from my face and the trance was broken. "Sometimes the impossible is possible... as you will see." Mr. Asito winked at me, turned and left the room.I stood there wondering what had just happened. It all seemed like some sort of weird dream. "You have desires that are beyond the reality of this world." How did he know about my desires? I've never shared my desires with anyone. I decided that Mr. Asito was just a kooky old man that liked putting on a show. That was a lot easier than believing all of that crazy mumbo-jumbo.I went back to my workout as if nothing had happened, all the while feeling that something strange had just taken place. After finishing my circuit training, I heading for the locker rooms. Matt walked in just as got to my locker. "What was that loud bang I heard?" "The weight tower almost crushed Mr. Asito.", I replied. "What were you doing messing with weights that heavy? You've got to be in shape to handle that kind of weight.", Matt said snidely. "I'll keep that in mind, thanks." "I didn't think guys like you were interested in getting big like me." "More than you think, Matt." Matt flexed his right arm into a bicep pose. He rubbed the peak of the bicep with his left hand, caressing it as though he was getting turned on by his own fondling. He knew how much I was enjoying the performance. I tried to act like I wasn't impressed, concentrating on the task at hand... not getting an erection. It wasn't working. I could feel my dick swelling in my pants.

Matt saw what was happening. "What's going on down there? I think your dick is confused. It must think I'm one of those Baywatch babes. You might want to have a talk with it -- God, I don't even know why they let queers like you workout here! Shouldn't you be at some sort of bathhouse, sucking some guy's cock?", he sneered then turned away. "Ya know Matt, contrary to what most people think, most gay people don't go to bathhouses." "Whatever.", he said coldly.Matt opened up his locker. "What the hell is this?" He reached into his locker and pulled out a black ring. "What's this doing in here?" He looked over at me. "Is this from you?!" "No, Matt. Of course it's not from me." "I wonder who put this in my locker?" He looked at it closely. It appeared to be made of black onyx. It was square on top, with a recessed square in the middle. It had some foreign writing around each side. "Weird", is all Matt could muster. He decided to slip the ring on his index finger. "It fits like a glove, and looks pretty cool. I'll have to find out if Kathy bought it for me." "Kathy the desk clerk?" "Yeah, Kathy the desk clerk! Who did you think I meant?" "Nobody." I knew that Kathy wouldn't have given Matt the time of day, let alone an onyx ring. She had told me on a number of occasions how put off she was by Matt's egotistical personality. In fact, I couldn't think of any woman at the gym that seemed to like Matt.I took off my t-shirt and opened my locker. There sitting front and center was a black onyx ring, just like Matt's. I picked it up and examined it. It had the same kind of writing, but instead of a recessed square, the square was sticking out of the larger square base by about a quarter-of-an-inch. "Look what I found?", I said as I slipped it on my finger. "What the fuck?! Where did you get that?" "Same place as you. In my locker -- I guess that rules out Kathy." "Are you sure you didn't buy these as engagement rings, hoping I might come around?", Matt smiled smugly. "I don't think so, Matt."He walked over to compare the two rings. They looked identical except for the tops. "This is so strange", Matt said, "they look like the same ring. It almost looks like your ring will plug into mine." Matt was right, it looked like the post on the top of my ring would fit into the hole in Matt's ring.

Curious, Matt reached over and snapped his ring into mine.Both rings started to glow. Matt pulled away, but the rings wouldn't come apart. The lights in the locker room started to dim. Then a cold breeze began to swirl around us. We both stared at each other with frightened looks on our faces. The rings glowed brighter and brighter. The glow started moving up our arms. A sudden jolt of electricity went through our bodies. Both Matt and I went rigid from the wave of energy passing through us. I felt like I was burning up. I could see that Matt was experiencing the same thing. Then, suddenly, the rings separated from each other. We were both beginning to sweat. Matt looked relieved and started to back up, but realized that he couldn't move his legs. I tried to lift my legs and was also unable to move from my spot. The rings started glowing brightly again and Matt doubled-over in pain. I tried to reach for Matt when I felt an extreme cramping of my stomach muscles. I grabbed my stomach, and clinched my teeth from the intense pain. I could feel something happening under my hands as a held my stomach. The muscles felt like they were getting tighter and tighter. The layer of fat that was there burned away, and muscles started forming right underneath my skin. I could actually feel a washboard stomach growing right under my hands. My abs were now hard as a rock. Finally the pain subsided. I stood up straight and immediately noticed Matt. His stomach had lost most of its definition. It was almost smooth... just like my stomach used to be. Then I looked in the mirror, just to the right of Matt, and noticed how developed my abs had become. It looked like I had been doing sit-ups for years. I reached down and slowly ran my hands across my stomach and felt every ridge and crevice. It seemed like I was having some sort of out-of-body experience.The rings started to glow again, and soon our entire bodies were glowing with energy. Matt had a strange look on his face.

Then I noticed what was happening to him. He was starting to change. His chest was slowly caving in. It was losing its thickness. His arms were getting smaller. His lats were narrowing. His thighs were becoming less defined. His calves were shrinking. His tight waist was starting to widen and his shoulders were slowly deflating before my eyes."David, what's happening to me?!", Matt yelled in a voice that didn't sound as deep as usual. "I'm not sure, but I think I have an idea!" I saw Matt getting thinner and taller. Then I realized that not only was Matt growing, but I was starting to shrink. I felt a sudden rush of energy fill my chest. My chest was getting heavier. I could feel it becoming engorged with blood. I looked down and saw it expanding, getting wider and deeper. My nipples were growing, moving out and down to the sides. I could see muscle fibers appearing under my skin. I moved my hands over my chest and felt how thick and hard it was becoming. I touched my larger nipples and a shudder went through me, down to my crotch. Then my arms started to get heavy and they dropped to my sides. My biceps started swelling up, as if something was filling them with blood and muscle from the inside. I could feel my triceps growing, getting heavier. My forearms were becoming thicker and wider. My right arm involuntarily swung up into a bicep curl. It felt like I had a hard baseball buried under my skin. Thick veins started snaking down my biceps. More veins appeared down the inside of my forearms.

My hands were becoming thicker, longer, more rugged looking. Fine black hair was forming on my forearms and legs. Then my arms started moving out from my sides. My lats were growing. They were filling in, getting thicker and wider. My legs started to cramp up on me. I grabbed my calves and felt them growing under my hands. In a matter of seconds they had grown to over twice their original size. My quads and hamstrings were tightening, becoming thicker and more defined. Striations appeared when I flexed my thigh. I could see all of the muscle groups separating. My glutes started burning. I reached behind me and felt that they were getting smaller, tighter and more round... it was very erotic, feeling my own sexy bubble butt forming under my hands.I looked over at Matt.

He didn't look like Matt anymore. He had lost a lot of muscle mass. He was taller and thinner. His face was less angular. His square jaw was rounder. His jet black eyes looked dark brown. He looked a lot like... me. I looked at my reflection in the mirror and saw that we looked almost like identical twins. We were both very well built, ruggedly handsome looking men. Just then a funny thought had crossed my mind. I imagined that if it were possible for Matt and I to conceive a child, he would have grown up to look exactly like we did at that moment. But then ten or fifteen seconds had passed and I actually started to look more like Matt than he did. Matt realized what was happening.

"You're becoming me! Why is this happening?!" "I don't know Matt...", I said in a voice that sounded more like his than mine, "just hold on if you can, I think it's almost over." Matt tried to pull his ring off, but it wouldn't budge. Matt continued to grow thinner and taller. His face was slowly changing into mine. His eyes changed into a lighter brown. His hair went from dark brown to sandy blonde, curly to straight. His high cheekbones moved down his face, and became less angular. I saw the anchor tattoo on his right shoulder slowly fade away then reappear on my shoulder. Then I saw my old appendix scar gradually appeared on his body. I glanced down at my stomach and saw that it was gone.I continued to get bigger and more muscular. I felt my rib cage growing and stretching, making more room for my expanding chest. I could hear my bones shifting, cracking, repositioning themselves.

With every breath I took, I could feel my frame growing wider and thicker. I looked in the mirror and saw my lats expanding, pushing my arms further out to the sides. I watched as my shoulders inflated. I could feel the muscle fibers forming under my skin. They began to look like melons attached to my thick, massive arms. My waist continued to tighten. I looked down and saw my abs were even more defined than before. My legs were becoming so muscular they started to rip my cut-offs at the seams. I could feel my face contorting, my features changing. My teeth were moving in my mouth, shifting position. They were being remade, becoming straighter, more aligned. My jaw was getting wider, more square. As I looked in the mirror, a cleft slowly appeared in my chin. My nose was narrowing. My eyes were getting darker. My eyebrows had become thick and black. My brow was thickening and protruding over my eyes, giving me a masculine "neanderthal" look. My skin tone was darkening. I couldn't believe what I saw when I looked in the mirror. My face now looked like a G.Q. model... it looked just like Matt.

In just a matter of minutes I had become the man I had always fantasized about. I smiled and saw Matt's perfect pearly white teeth smiling back at me in the mirror. I caressed my face with my lumberjack-sized hands. I felt my high cheekbones, my Roman nose, my sexy 5-o'clock shadow. My dick was stirring in my shorts. I looked over at my big, round shoulder and saw Matt's anchor tattoo. I slowly rubbed it with my hand and felt the thick, hard muscles underneath it. Normally, I didn't care for tattoos, but on his well-defined arm it looked really sexy and masculine.The ring's glow and the cold breeze slowly faded away. Matt and I just stood there for a couple of minutes staring at each other. Both of us were drenched in sweat. Matt was standing 3 feet from me in my body. It looked so strange seeing my slender body in his clothes.

His big muscle tank top was draped over my tall, narrow frame. Then I saw my reflection in the mirror. It was so incredible I couldn't stop staring at myself. I was looking at myself through Matt's dark, sexy eyes. When I blinked, Matt's reflection blinked. When I raised my thick black eyebrows, my reflection did the same. When I smiled, I saw Matt's gorgeous smile looking back at me. I still felt like this was some sort of incredible dream. Finally, I took my gaze away from the mirror and slowly looked down at my new body. It was the body of a Greek god. But instead being carved out of white marble, it was made of muscle and bone. Every body part in perfect proportion, all covered in a paper-thin layer of bronzed colored skin. My tanned, chiseled chest was sticking out from me like a slab of granite, moving in and out with every deep breath I took. My ripped abs were carved into my lean torso. I put my hands behind my head; then I blew as much air out as possible while tightening my stomach. I saw my abs form a perfect chiseled 6-pack that any man would have been envious of. I looked past my ripped abs, and saw that my quads had become as thick as tree trunks, each muscle group was clearly defined and separated.

My skin looked like it had been painted on. There wasn't an ounce of fat anywhere on my body. My calves had grown to three times their previous size. I flexed my right calve and saw it separate into two distinct muscle groups. Each a perfectly formed diamond shape. I looked back up at the mirror and swung my right arm into a bicep curl and felt it with my other hand. I could feel the pumping blood coursing through my veins, filling the 19-inches of muscle. My bicep felt as hard as steel. It was surreal. I bounced my pecs up and down, feeling the weight of my newly formed chest. I did a lat spread for the first time. I could feel the thick muscles stretching out from my torso, my arms moving away from my sides, my shoulders rising in the air. These were things only a bodybuilder could do. Only then did I realize that I now possessed the body of an incredible athlete. As much as I disliked Matt, I had to give him credit for sculpting his body into such an amazing piece of art. I did a double-bicep pose and let out a loud, deep yell. "I can't believe this is happening to me!!!" Matt jumped back, intimidated at the sight of my new found strength. "Don't worry. I'm not going to hurt you, Matt." "Thanks David, considering that's my body you've got there, I would appreciate that." "Since I do have your body, I might as well have your clothes too." With that, I pulled the muscle tank top off of Matt and slipped it on my chiseled form. Matt was shocked that I would be so forward. I slipped on the tank top over my sweaty body. It fit like a second skin. It clung to each section of my 6-pack, my thick chest, and my v-shaped torso. I walked over to Matt's locker and pulled out a pair of Speedo posing trunks. "I don't think you'll be needing these for a while, so I thought I might borrow a pair." Normally, Matt would have beat the crap out of anyone taking stuff out of his locker, but he knew he was in no position to argue with me. I quickly slipped off my tattered shorts and briefs.

Matt noticed my hard-on, and was embarrassed to find himself getting aroused. I looked over and saw him trying to hide his erection. "Gee, you might want to go find one of those bath houses I've heard so much about." Matt's looked embarrassed, and his face turned bright red. I slid the Speedos over my muscular legs, slowing moving them over my throbbing hard-on. They were small and tight, conforming to every curve of my "package". They definitely didn't leave anything to the imagination. I could clearly see the head of my penis through the stretched, elastic material. My tight balls hanging underneath, each clearly defined. I walked over to the mirror, and was in awe. I had always fantasized about being a bodybuider, wearing a pair of sexy Speedos, and putting on a show in front of a mirror. The thought that this had become a reality was an incredible turn on. I was on the verge of cumming."Matt, your body is so amazing, I can't believe what kind of shape it's in!" "Thanks... I worked a long time to get it in shape, so what ever you do, don't damage it." "Well Matt, the body you're inhabiting isn't exactly chopped liver. For starters, you're over 3-inches taller than you were before, you're in pretty good shape, and now you are the owner of a very large piece of meat." Matt unzipped his shorts to find a soft 9-inch dick. "Whoa! You're fuckin' huge." "Thanks, Matt. I thought you might find it enjoyable." "My dick is only about 5-inches... sorry about that.", Matt said. "No problem. Size has never been that important to me." "Really. Well, if you had a small dick like mine, it would be. I've always wanted to have a huge piece of meat like this to play with." Matt smiled and started jerking himself off.

While he was enjoying his new best friend, I started posing in front of the mirror, just like I had seen hundreds of times in all of those bodybuilder videos that I owned. I did a side chest, then an ab crunch, single bicep, double bicep, then a most muscular pose. Feeling the blood coursing through my pumped up arms, chest and legs was an incredible rush. My 5-inch dick was now hard as a rock, pulsing with the rapid beat of my heart. I took off my Speedo and grabbed my pre-cum soaked rod and started pumping. A few minutes later we both came, and shot our loads across the locker room floor. We had just wiped ourselves off with a couple of towels, when Mr. Asito walked in."So David, still don't believe in those unexplainable forces?" He was staring at me in Matt's body. "I do now, Mr. Asito." I showed him a double bicep pose. He smiled. "You did this to me?!", Matt chimed in. "You did it to yourself, Matt.", Mr. Asito answered back. "What are you talking about, it was the rings you gave us that did this to us." "That's only partially true. The rings allow the transference to take place, but they will only work if both parties wish for it to happen." "You mean I wanted to change bodies with David?" "In a matter of speaking, yes." "Why would I want to change places with that gay guy?" "Why indeed?" Mr. Asito started to leave the room. "You can't just leave me like this! Come back here!"

Mr. Asito turned around, "Matt, no matter what happens, you and David will always be connected by the rings. David wears the dominant ring, which controls the passive ring, which you wear. This will make you a willing participant to any future transference he desires. You will have no say in the matter. But right now you have a much more important task you must reach deep within your soul and find the truth with which you are afraid to face. Until this happens, you will not be the man you long to be." "What do you mean, the truth with which I'm afraid to face? I'm not afraid of anything. I don't understand." "You will Matt." Mr. Asito left the room."I don't believe this is happening" "I know Matt this is pretty unreal. Let's just try to make the best of this. Let's get dressed and figure out what we're going to do." "The best of this?! My muscles are hijacked without my permission, and now I'm stuck in this body until I face some sort of truth within my soul. No, let's not make the best of this!" I felt a sudden surge of anger flow through me.

I grabbed Matt under his arms, lifted him up and slammed him up against the lockers. "You ARE going to make the best of this, understand!", I roared at him in his deep voice. I could see the fear in Matt's eyes. Then I remembered that Matt was in my body, and that I had Matt's powerful muscles that could do real damage. I slowly put Matt back down on the floor. Matt moved back a couple of feet, afraid of what I might do next. "I'm sorry Matt, I don't know what came over me. I've never felt like that before. It was strange, the feeling of power that went through me. Are you ok?" "Yes, I'm fine. We wouldn't want to damage these goods, would we David." "No we wouldn't, Matt." We both smiled and got dressed.Doug walked in right after we closed our lockers. "Hey Matt, did David tell you I went for a walk?" Matt, in my body, was about to answer, but I cut him off, "Yes, he told me. No problem Doug." "What have you guys been up to?" "More than you can imagine. I feel like I've made quite a few gains.", I answered. "In 20 minutes? What kind of gains could you have possibly made in 20 minutes?" "A lot more than I expected." I smiled at Doug.

He was taken aback. I think he saw something in my smile that Matt had never shown him. Matt looked over at me with a smirk, wondering what was going on. "Doug... David and I were going to go back to his place to talk about some methods of putting on muscle mass. Do you mind if we get together later tonight?" Concerned, Doug said "Matt, you're not going to do anything bad to David are you?" "No, trust me, I'm not going to hurt David in any way. Isn't that right David?" "Yeah, don't worry Doug, Matt's not going to hurt this body. Besides, I'm really interested in learning how to gain muscle mass fast." "Ok, as long as nothing bad happens to David, then it's cool." "So, I'll give you a call in a couple of hours Doug" I said with the biggest, sexiest smile I could muster. Doug looked pleasantly surprised and smiled back. Matt and I headed out the door. Matt was wondering what I was up to. He was suspicious that I would actually give him back his body, and that would be the end of it. He was right, of course. I had other more interesting plans in mind.

Switch - Part 2

I took Matt's keys out of his pocket and headed for his Corvette. Matt protested, "Hey, you're not going to drive my Corvette are you?" "While I've got this body, I guess this is my car, right?" "Fine, drive my car." "Besides, I thought we'd go back to my place and switch bodies back. Unless there's something else you'd rather do?" "No. Let's get rolling!" Matt hopped in the passenger's seat and closed the door. As we were heading for my apartment I could tell that Matt was really anxious to get there. "Matt, having my body hasn't been THAT terrible an experience has it?" "Well, to be honest, I have enjoyed being taller and having your huge dick, and actually you're not in that bad of shape."

"That's what I thought. Haven't you ever wondered what it would be like to be someone else?" "Sure. I guess so.", Matt pondered, "Sometimes I wish I didn't have to act like the 'tough jock' all of the time." "Isn't it tiring putting on a front like that?" "Yeah. I get sick of it. I'm so busy living up to that image, I don't even know who I am anymore." "I think that's what Mr. Asito was talking about." Matt sat there quietly, thinking about what we had talked about. I could tell he was having a hard time dealing with his bottled up feeling. Finally we arrived at my apartment.After we stepped inside, I locked the door. "So David, are you really going to give me back my body?" "Yes, Matt. I plan to give you back your body." "Plan to? What do you mean 'Plan to'?" "Well, I do have a few conditions." "What kind of conditions, I'm afraid to ask."

"I'm going to have access to your body whenever want. If I feel like having a workout in your body, we'll switch. If I feel like taking a shower in your skin, we'll switch. If I want to show off your body at the beach, we'll switch." "You can't be serious?" "I'm totally serious, Matt. But, if you'd rather I keep this hot bod permanently, no problem." "No, it's just that... you mean whenever you want to borrow my body, I have to let you?" "That about sums it up. If you want to have your body back you'll have to be available to swap whenever I want." Matt knew he didn't have any other options but to say yes. "Sure David, whatever you say." "I think you made the right decision Matt. But before we make the switch, I thought we could have some fun first." "What kind of fun?" "First I want you to put on the smallest clothes I've got in my dresser. Then were going to get my weight set and a bottle of baby oil and bring them back into the living room." "What are we going to do with weights and baby oil?" "Well Matt, I figured that you'd be so grateful to get back in your body that you wouldn't mind putting on a very special Chippendales show for me." Matt thought about it and figured if it meant getting his body back he'd do anything. "Yeah. Sure. I'll be glad to put on a show for you." I was surprised that he agreed so quickly, but I figured all he cared about was getting back his body. I told him where the baby oil was, and I went to my bedroom and picked up my 50 lb. weights, which now felt like they weighed about 10 lbs. and brought them into the living room.Matt walked in with the baby oil.

He was wearing one of my old Apple t-shirts that was about two sizes too small. He had also put on my skin-tight aqua swim trunks. I was busy pumping up my biceps with my dumbbells. "You're looking good Matt. It looks like you're about to burst out of those clothes." I smiled at him. "Really cute, David. Can we just get this over with?" I began to rub baby oil on my arms and chest. "I thought I'd give myself one final thrill. This feels so good. I don't know how you were able to control yourself with this body. I've got a permanent hard on." I could see that my oil rub down was turning him on. He was trying to hide his erection with his hands. "Matt, what's going on? I thought you didn't get off on guys?" "I don't! It must be this fag body I'm stuck in! It's giving me gay thoughts." "Wait a minute, Matt. If that were true, I would suddenly have the hots for Pamela Lee Anderson. That hasn't happened." Matt was really getting flustered. "I don't know what's going on. Your 9-inch dick has got a mind of it own, ok!" "Alright Matt, if you don't want to deal with your feelings right now, we don't have to. Come on, let's get us back in our own bodies." Matt was almost in tears, "Thank you, David."We moved into the center of the room. We both tried to prepare ourselves for the electric shock from the rings. We both took a deep breath and snapped the rings together. Nothing happened. We pulled the rings apart and snapped them together again. Still, nothing. "What's wrong? Why isn't it working?", Matt said. "I don't know. Maybe it has something to do with what Mr. Asito had said." Matt was confused, "What are you talking about?" "Mr. Asito said that I have the dominant ring, and that I have the power to switch bodies whenever I want to."

"So, don't you want to switch bodies?" "Sure I do. But maybe I have to do more than just put the rings together. Maybe I have to concentrate on wanting the transference to take place?" "Well, it's worth a try." Matt and I put the rings together and I focused all of my thoughts on switching bodies with him. Suddenly the rings began to glow. A cool breeze swirled around us. Our bodies became engulfed in a glowing energy. It wasn't as intense as it was the first time. It was if our bodies were getting use to the transformation. I felt like I was getting weaker, less heavy. I looked over at Matt and saw him starting to change. I could see his chest starting to expand under his t-shirt. His arms and legs were getting thicker, more muscular. I watched as his waist became narrower. I could see his ripped abs forming underneath the t-shirt. I could feel myself beginning to deflate. I looked down and saw my massive chest moving up my torso, losing its thickness. My legs were becoming less defined. My 19-inch biceps were shrinking before my eyes. I looked over at Matt and saw he had a huge erection in his shorts, and a big smile on his face.

Matt's arms were swelling; straining on the skin-tight t-shirt I made him wear. I could see his rib cage expanding, his thickening chest straining against the fabric. It looked like something out of an Incredible Hulk episode. It was very erotic. I slid my Speedo down my legs and grabbed my throbbing dick. I could feel it growing longer and thicker in my hand. I began to grow taller and thinner. Matt was moaning from the pressure building inside his tight clothes. His sleeves started coming apart at the seams. His biceps poured out of the shredded sleeves. His collar was stretching to the breaking point. It ripped straight down the middle, quickly moving down his expanding chest. His shorts burst apart, exposing his enormous thighs. Matt face was changing from my face back to his. His features were becoming more masculine, more angular. I could feel my face changing back into its original form. A couple of minutes later our transformation had ended. The energy glow around our bodies disappeared and the cool breeze gradually died down. We both stood facing each other, drenched in sweat. Matt looked like a Greek statue draped in tattered rags. I couldn't contain myself anymore. I climaxed and shot my wad across the room. I could see that Matt had also cum in his shorts. It felt really strange being back in my body. I was 50 pounds lighter. I felt a lot weaker, like I was more vulnerable not having Matt's muscles.Matt pulled off his shredded t-shirt and swung his arms up into a double bicep pose. "Yes! I'm me again! Fantastic!" He just oozed masculinity and power, even more than I did when I possessed his body. Standing there in his tattered shorts, in that muscular pose, he looked like a comic book superhero. I turned around to grab the bottle of baby oil. "What do you think your doing, David!", Matt bellowed.

"Remember our deal? The Chippendales show?" "There isn't going to be any Chippendales show." "What are you talking about, Matt?" "It's over. You aren't going to be borrowing my body for taking showers, for working out or anything else for that matter." "What do you mean by that?" "Here's exactly what I mean!" Matt suddenly punched me in the stomach. I had the wind knocked out of me, and collapsed to the floor writhing in pain. I was on my knees, holding my stomach, trying to catch my breath. Matt grabbed me by the hair and jerked my head up to face him. "I'm going to make sure you never get close enough to me to put these rings together." He picked me up and slammed me against the wall. He had me pinned with his left arm, two feet off the floor. "If you think I'm going to willingly trade bodies with you so I'll have to go around as a scrawny little gay guy, you've got another thing coming. Now that I've got my body back I'm not going to give it up!" I had never seen Matt so angry. His jet black eyes looked cold and distant. I wasn't sure what he was capable of doing to me. I knew that if I didn't want to get really hurt by him, I would have to try to switch bodies again. If I tried and failed, I knew Matt would beat the crap out of me.

I wasn't sure if the transference could work without connecting the rings first. But I figured I had better take a chance, not knowing what Matt was going to do to me. I closed my eyes and concentrated on my ring and Matt's body. Matt looked at me and wondered why I had my eyes closed. "What the hell are you doing?! Are you afraid I'm going to hurt you?" I opened my eyes, but didn't answer. I kept focusing on my ring. "...well, you'd be right. I am going to hurt you. Just enough to teach you a lesson, so you'll stay away from me and this ring." Matt pulled back his fist and was about to hit me in the face. All of a sudden Matt froze in his place. He had a confused look on his face. He didn't know why he had stopped in his tracks. Slowly, Matt let me slide back down to the floor. He almost looked like he was in a trance. I looked down and saw my ring was glowing. Matt noticed I was looking down at my hand. "Oh no, the ring! It can't be!" "It looks like I won't be getting that broken nose after all." Matt was staring at the ring with a worried look on his face. "We'll see about that."

Matt was fighting against the force emanating from the ring. He was trying with all his might to break the hold the ring had over him. "You're not going to do this to me again!", he moaned. I stared at my ring and spoke aloud, "I want to switch bodies with Matt." The ring began to glow even brighter. Matt screamed in pain, "Noooo!" His ring began to glow too. "Matt, stop fighting the ring, it's hurting you!", I yelled. Slowly he started to loosen his tight fist. "...I won't let you do this!" His arm gradually moved down to his side. "...make it stop!" I felt the force of my ring pull my arm into the air. Reluctantly, Matt did the same. "...can't let this happen!" Matt's arm was shaking, trying to fight the powerful forces at work. I stared at his ring and said, "I want Matt's body!" His ring began to glow even brighter. The rings moved towards each other as if a magnetic force was attracting them. "...please David! Ahhhhh!", Matt cried. But it was too late. The rings joined once again.

This time the light emanating from the rings was blinding. A huge jolt of electricity ran through our bodies. I went rigid and clenched my teeth from the pain. Finally the shock wave subsided. I could feel a huge surge of power building up in my body. All of my muscle fibers were burning inside my body. Sweat started pouring down my face and chest. Suddenly, as if all of the stored energy was released at once, I began to transform into Matt at an accelerated speed. My chest burst outward and downward, ribcage expanding, biceps and triceps swelling, forearms thickening, shoulders getting bigger and rounder, waist narrowing, abs tightening, legs and calves inflating, lats becoming wider, back growing denser and more defined. My face morphed into Matt's in a matter of seconds. I could hear Matt yelling in pain, trying to resist the transformation. His screams quickly raised an octave as he unwillingly changed back into my body. I had gained 50 pounds of muscle in less than a minute. The surge of strength was incredible. The rings stopped glowing and separated from each other. I looked down at my bronzed body and saw the sweat trickle over my thick, hard chest and ripped abs.

I was in Matt's skin again. I felt my etched stomach with Matt's manly hands. This time it felt like I belonged in Matt's body. I looked over at Matt. He looked weak and tired. He was breathing deeply, exhausted from the failed battle with the rings.I wondered to myself if the rings would have the power to make Matt more submissive and make myself more aggressive. I focused on my ring, thinking how much I wanted to be more aggressive like Matt. Both of our rings began to pulse with energy. I saw an arc of light go from my ring to his. I felt a rush of adrenaline flowing through my body. Matt held his head as if he were dizzy. The rings glow gradually faded out. "Are you ok, Matt?" "Yeah, I think so." "Good. I wanted to make sure you were well enough to start your new job." "New job?" I smiled at him with his pearly white teeth, "Oh, I forgot to tell you. You're going to be my very own personal muscle slave." "Muscle slave?" "That's right. As punishment for your very bad behavior, I've decided that you need to learn what it's like to take orders from a real man." "I am not going to be your muscle slave, David. Forget it."

Without thinking, I reached over and grabbed Matt by the throat and easily lifted him into the air. Matt started gasping. "What was that you were saying?" Matt started choking. He grabbed my arm trying to loosen my grip. "What's the matter, Matt? I can't quite hear you." I loosened my grip slightly. Matt stopped pulling at my arm, knowing that it was a waste of time. Still gasping he managed to say, "Ok -- I'll be -- your muscle -- slave." I let him drop to the floor. He collapsed to the floor in a crumpled pile. I didn't even care that it was my old body lying there. "What are you waiting for slave?! Get up and grab the baby oil over there!", I demanded. Slowly Matt got off the floor and walked over to the baby oil sitting on the table. I picked up the dumbbells on the floor and started doing bicep curls. My arms quickly pumped up and became rock hard. "Rub oil on my massive biceps, slave!", I demanded. Matt obeyed my command without hesitation. He poured the baby oil in his right hand and started rubbing the oil over my 19-inch guns. "That feels good slave. Now rub some oil over my chiseled chest." "Come on David.", Matt pleaded. "Quiet slave!", I shouted; and pushed him down to the floor. "You will call me Master when you are worshiping me." Matt could tell I was serious in my demand and slowly picked himself off the floor. "Yes, Master", he said softly, not wanting to anger me further.

He began to rub oil over my thick, hard chest. I expanded my rib cage and heaved my chest out under his hands. "Doesn't that feel good, Slave?" He put his hand to his head as if he had a fever. I could tell the rings were beginning to have an effect. "Yes... yes Master it feels very good." "Excellent Slave. Now slide your hands down to my sexy abs." I blew some air out and tightened my abs into a hard 6-pack. Matt rubbed oil across them, feeling each recessed groove with his fingers. My display of power was turning him on. He felt aroused giving pleasure to what was once his own body. I could see he was getting an erection. "Ok, Slave. Oil up my quads and glutes." Matt started to slide his hands down to my legs. I grabbed his hands in a vice grip. Matt winced from the pain. "Slave? What do you say?" Matt was rubbing his hard-on. "Please Master, may I apply oil to your massive legs?" I let go of his crushed hands. "How do I know you really want to feel my muscles, Slave?" Matt unzipped his shorts, exposing his pulsing 9-inch cock.I was feeling more masculine, as if I had been injected with huge dose of testosterone. This must be what it's like to completely become Matt. His body and mind surging with aggression, power and masculinity. I knew that the rings had granted my request. I thought I would test the rings power further.

I grabbed Matt's hand and snapped the rings back together. "Hey, what are you doing?!", Matt protested. "I'm just trying something out. Be patient, Slave." I concentrated and spoke aloud, "I want to be 5-inches taller and gain 50-pounds of muscle." "No David, please don't!" The rings began to glow again. "David, I'm sorry I tried to hurt you. I swear! Please make it stop!" The glow gradually surrounded our bodies. I watched as Matt slowly began to shrink. Matt had a frightened look on his face as he shrunk from 6-foot-1 down to 5-foot-8. His muscle tone started to disappear. His arms and legs were losing most of their mass. His shoulders were narrowing. He looked just like a small teenager. He must have weighed about 120 lbs. Suddenly, I felt a surge of power coursing through my body. "It's working... I'm getting taller.", I said in a deeper voice. My body kept stretching taller, until I reached a height of 6-foot-3. I felt my muscles starting to burn. My biceps began to swell with new muscle. I watched as my 19-inch biceps grew to 23-inches in a matter of seconds. I looked down and saw my chest expanding, getting thicker, wider, heavier. My arms were moving further from my body as my lats started to widen. My waist was actually narrowing, giving me a more defined v-shape.

My quads grew 3-inches larger and my calves ballooned out a couple more inches. Each muscle group was even harder and more sculpted than before, if that were possible. The rings glow subsided. I felt like a god standing in front of Matt. I was 7-inches taller and a 150 lbs. heavier than him. At 6-foot 3-inch with 270 lbs. of solid muscle, I towered over him. The sight of a smaller, weaker Matt cowering below me was a huge turn on. I felt incredible power, knowing that I could completely dominate him. I tightened my chiseled legs and swung my arms up into a double-bicep pose. "You will worship this body now!", I said in a deep, thunderous bass. I threw the bottle of baby oil at Matt. The force almost knocked him over. "Get to work Slave!", I bellowed at him. He was shaking from fear, but obediently followed my orders. He began to apply the oil to my massive new body. "Here weakling, let me help you reach my chest." I grabbed Matt by the waist and picked him up like he were a rag doll. He rubbed oil on my thick chest and broad shoulders. I tilted Matt sideways and grabbed his side and one of his scrawny legs. I began to raise him overhead as if he were a dumbbell. He was so light I could have lifted him dozens of times without breaking a sweat. "Put me down, David! This isn't funny." I raised him towards the ceiling about 10 times and finally put him back on the floor. Matt was so frustrated he lashed out at me. With all his strength he slugged me in the stomach. I barely felt a thing. Matt grabbed his own hand.

"Damn. Your abs are hard as steel! I think I broke my wrist." "I guess things have changed since the last time you punched me in the stomach." Matt looked embarrassed and worried. "In fact, maybe I should return the favor and see if you can take a blow to the stomach." "Please don't hit me David. If you punch me using that arm you'll probably kill me!" I thought I'd scare him a little bit. "Well, I guess there's only one way to find out." I pulled my arm back, as if I was going to follow through with my threat. Matt collapsed to the floor, covering his head with his thin, boney arms. He started crying, begging me not to hurt him.We both heard someone honking their car's horn out front. Then I remembered that my best friend Brian was stopping by. He was suppose to wait for me, and I would come downstairs. "I can't let Brian see us like this. We better switch back." I pulled Matt up off the floor. He looked relieved. "If you misbehave again I'll leave us like this permanently. Understand, Slave?" "Yes, Master." The horn blared again, then we heard a car door slam. I connected both rings. Then I spoke aloud, "I want to become Matt again." They began to glow again. The doorbell rang. It was Brian. "David are you in there?" Our transformation was just beginning. I whispered to Matt, "Tell him you'll be there in a minute." Matt yelled, "Just a minute." "Is that you David? You sound funny." Matt's voice was a higher pitch than normal. Matt started growing. "Yeah, I'm fine. Hold on a sec." I could feel myself shrinking. We were now almost at the same height. "David, what's going on in there?" "Ummm, I'll be there shortly..." The transformation was almost over. Brian started knocking on the door.

"Come on David, let me in! Quit joking around!" The metamorphosis finally completed. The rings separated from each other. We were back the way we were before I had started my experiment.I unlocked the door and swung it open. "Hi Bry, come on in!" Brian was shocked to see Matt answer the door. He was even more surprised to see Matt covered in baby oil, wearing nothing but a Speedo. He took two steps back. "Matt what -? what are you ?- doing here?", Brian said nervously. I thought it might be fun to give Bry a thrill. "Step inside Brian, David and I were just having a muscle worship session." I grabbed Brian's arm and pulled him into the room. Brian saw what appeared to be David, standing in the middle of the living room with baby oil on his hands and his shorts pulled down. "David, what's going on here? What is Matt doing here? I thought Matt hated you? I don't understand." Matt wasn't sure what to say. He knew my friend wouldn't believe that he was actually Matt in David's body. "Go ahead David, answer him.", I ordered Matt. "Like Matt said, were having a muscle worship session." Brian looked really confused. "Hey Brian, David and I have worked out our differences. We're a lot closer than you think. You might even say I know David inside and out." I gave Brian a big smile, trying to reassure him. "I don't get it. The last time I talked to David he said that you had called him 'a big faggot'. Now you're the best of friends? What gives?" "Well, whatever problems David and I had in the past are ancient history. Trust me. You're looking at a brand new Matt." Brian looked skeptical. I closed the front door. Brian started to look concerned. "David, hand me the baby oil and go sit down over there." "Yes, Master." Matt obediently handed me the baby oil and sat in the chair in the corner of the room. I turned to Brian. "David told me the other day that you and him had some kind of a secret fantasy involving me."

Brian was shocked and embarrassed. He turned to Matt, "David, I can't believe you told him that secret!" I tried to pacify Brian, "Please don't blame David. We've shared a lot of our private thoughts and fantasies with each other. That's what friends do." "Well, I guess I understand. But it still makes me really uncomfortable to have you standing here, knowing that." "No problem, don't worry about it. In fact, I'm here to make your fantasy become a reality." Brian's interest had grown a bit. "What do you mean 'make my fantasy a reality'?" "I think you know what I mean, Brian." I winked at him. Then I poured some baby oil in my right hand. Brian was staring in disbelief. I rubbed the oil over my chiseled chest, slowly moving my hand in a circular motion over each pec and around each nipple. Gradually I moved both of my hands down to my 6-pack. I arched my back as I rubbed the oil over my abs, then back up to my chest. I could see Brian was getting turned on. I gently grabbed Brian's hands and placed them on my muscular chest. "Is this part of your fantasy, Brian?" "Oh god yeah, Matt!" He had a major hard-on. I moved his hands down to my ripped abs. I knew Brian had always wanted to do that. We both had fantasized about having our way with Matt. Now I was making that dream come true for both of us. "Oh Matt, your body is so hot. I can't believe you're letting me do this to you!" "It's my pleasure Brian. I'm enjoying this too. How about rubbing some oil on my pumped up biceps?" I thrust my arms up into a double-bicep pose, flared out my lats, and tightened my abs and quads. Brian had to control himself from cumming in his shorts. "Matt, you're a fucking Greek god. I want to feel every inch of your body." He reached up and grabbed my solid 19-inch arms. "This is unbelievable! Your arms are made of stone."

Then he moved his hands over my lats, and down to my quads. "Oh god! You feel so fucking good! Every part of you is hard as a rock!" Brian couldn't control himself any more and finally came. He shot his full load in his shorts. "OH GOD! ? That was the greatest orgasm I've ever had!" "Well I think I'm going to need a little help in that department myself, Bry." I slid down my Speedo over my muscled quads and held out my hard cock to him. Brian gladly knelt down and put his mouth over my throbbing meat. I was surprised what a good job he was doing. He knew exactly how to bring pleasure to this body. He put his lips on the head of my penis and tenderly moved his tongue around the outside of it. I could feel my balls tightening from the intense pleasure he was bringing me. He had his hands on my quads and slowly moved them up to my glutes, squeezing them tightly. His hands felt so good on my tight glutes. He started to pump his head up and down on my cock, taking in all 5-inches into his mouth and down his throat. I couldn't contain myself any longer and shot my load. Brian swallowed every drop with a big smile on his face. I knew that giving Matt a blow job was another one of Brian's fantasies. I looked over at Matt in the corner. He had been masturbating in the chair and had just climaxed too."Now that we all got are 'rocks' off. I think it's time we let Brian in on our little secret." Puzzled, Brian said "What are you talking about Matt? What little secret?"

I turned to Matt in my body, "Go ahead and tell him Slave." "Yes, Master. I'm Matt in David's body and David is in my body.", he said matter-of-factly. Brian looked at him in total disbelief. "What the fuck are you talking about David!?" I spoke up, "That's not David over there, Brian. I'm David here in Matt's body." "What kind of shit are trying to pull on me!? I suck your dick and get you off, then you unload this pile of crap on me! I don't think this is a bit funny." Brian started heading for the door. I grabbed his arm and pulled him back towards me. "Don't hurt me Matt! I'll believe whatever you want, just don't hurt me!", Brian pleaded. "I'm not going to hurt you Bry. It's me, David, in this body. I would never hurt you, babe." "Stop saying that! Why are you trying to convince me that you're David? I don't care who you are. I just want to get out of here!" Brian was trying to pull away from me. "Listen Bry. Remember the time we hid in the locker room at the gym and snuck into the special shower stall? Then we both jacked off peaking through the hole in the wall while we watched Matt lathering up his body?" Brian stopped pulling away from me. "That doesn't mean anything. You could have forced David to tell you that story." Matt got up from his chair; "You guys were getting off watching me in the shower? I knew there was something up with that hole!" "David, you weren't being watched, we were the ones watching Matt! What's wrong with you?" Brian said flustered. "I told you, you fuckin' faggot, I'm Matt!" Brian was shocked that David would talk to him in that tone. "Matt, you apologize to Brian, now!" "Yes, Master. I'm sorry I said that to you Brian." "Man, this is just too weird! I don't know what to think anymore." Brian was really confused and upset. I pleaded with Brian, "Bry, do you honestly think that Matt would be willing to come over to my... uh David's apartment and take off his clothes and let you rub oil on his body, then help him get off? Do you honestly think homophobic Matt would do something like that?" Brian thought about it for a minute. "Well, no. But it's easier to believe that, than to fall for your crock-o-shit story about switching bodies!" "Bry, I don't know what else I can say -? wait a minute, I think I have an idea. Come over here, Matt. We're going to put on a show for Brian." Matt did as he was told. "Bry, you stand over there." "Now what are you going to do Matt? Switch bodied with David again?" he said jokingly.

"Something like that. Just stand back and watch." I concentrated on the rings, thinking how I wanted Matt and I to have the same size body. The rings started to glow. Matt was looking forward to the transference and willingly put the rings together. A cool breeze started swirling around us. The light in the room began to dim. Brian looked scared. "Don't worry Bry, it's going to be ok." I shouted. The rings were glowing brighter. The energy slowly enveloped our bodies. Matt and I began to change. Brian watched as he saw his friend David's body start to swell up. He looked over at me. I had become a lot less muscular in a matter of seconds. I started growing taller and thinner. Matt was shrinking and gaining muscle. Brian couldn't believe his eyes. The breeze died down and the rings stopped glowing and came apart. We stood there facing each other. It looked like we were staring into a mirror. We had exactly the same body. We each sported a 7-inch hard-on and 16-inch biceps. My chest didn't stick out as far as before, and my 6-pack wasn't as defined as it had been.

But we both looked like those men you'd see in the International Male catalog. We each had a faded out tattoo on our shoulder, and a partial appendix scar on our stomach. Matt was checking out his improved physique. Brian came over to me and put his hands on my face. "David it really is you! Part of you looks like Matt, and part of you looks like -- you! It's amazing!" "Bry, I'm glad I finally convinced you that I'm really David inside here." "What I don't get is that you let me grope your body and give you a blow job. What's up with that?" "Well, I figured this might be the only chance either one of us would be able to experience this incredible body. Are you mad at me?" "Nah. I could never get mad at you. You're my bud. Besides, it was pretty hot wasn't it." Bry gave me a big smile. "Bry, now I can tell you the whole story." I told him all about Mr. Asito, finding the rings in the lockers, and all the bad stuff that went down in this apartment. Brian turned to Matt, "You fuckin' prick! You were going to beat up David after he gave you back your body!?" "What are you going to do about it, little man?" Matt grabbed Brian, and pinched his shoulder. Brian let out a yell. "He's not going to do anything about it -? I am!" I grabbed Matt's hand and snapped the rings back together. "Oh shit! I didn't mean to hurt your friend. Please don't!" "It's too late for apologies Matt." I stared at the rings, "I want Matt's body." "David I'm sorry... NOOOO!"

A few minutes later I stood there in Matt's body once again.Brian walked over to me, amazed that I had become Matt again. "Dave, you should leave Matt in your old body forever. That fuckin' homophobe doesn't deserve this body. If he had the chance, he would beat the crap out of both of us." "Maybe you're right Bry. I'll have to give it some thought." Matt chimed in, "What do you mean you're going to keep my body forever!? That body belongs to me!" "Not right now, it doesn't. I think Mr. Asito was right when he said, Until you find the truth with which you are afraid to face, you will not be the man you long to be." "Mr. Asito is a crazy old man who is full of shit!" "Maybe so, but until I say otherwise, these bods stay as they are; and if I hear any more lip service out of you, I'll make you SO passive that you'll be afraid of your own god damn shadow! Is that understood Slave?" Matt knew when he was beaten, "Yes, Master." "In fact, while I've got this huge body, I should have something that goes with my size." I concentrated on my ring. An arc of light went from my ring to his. Panicked, Matt said "What are you doing?!" "You'll see soon enough Matt." I felt a sudden movement in my Speedo. Smiling, I looked down and saw my dick starting to grow. Matt had a shocked look on his face. He grabbed his shorts and unzipped them. He saw his 9-inch dick begin to shrink. "Oh, no! Come on David! Please!"

Matt's dick continued to narrow and shrink until it was 5-inches. I watched as my dick became thicker and longer. It grew so long that the head of my penis pushed itself out of my Speedo and was rubbing against my 6-pack. "That's more like it. I guess I'll have to buy a larger Speedo, right Matt?" "Please David. Don't leave me with my old dick and your body. It isn't fair." "We'll see Matt. I'll probably give my dick back to you, but right now I think I'm going to be needing it for later." Brian walked over to me. "Dave, that was really cool. I got a hard-on watching your dick grow like that. Maybe you can give me a huge dick too?" "Maybe later, Bry. Right now I've got other plans. Why don't you take Matt over to Ripples, so he can meet some of our friends and get used to being David. I've got a hot date with a very special guy." "Isn't Ripples that queer bar down at the beach?" Brian swung Matt around to face him. "It's called a gay bar, scrawny boy." "Matt you be a good boy and we'll see about switching back. See ya guys later. Let me know if he misbehaves, Bry." "Will do, Dave -? um I mean Matt." We both smiled at each other. Before I headed out, an interesting idea popped into my head. I reached over and grabbed Matt's hand and slipped off the ring. "Hey! What are you doing, I need that ring to switch back into my body!" Matt said concerned. "Don't worry Matt, I promise I won't lose it. I thought it might come in handy later tonight." I stuffed my erection back inside my Speedo. I kissed Bry on the cheek and headed out the door. I jumped in Matt's Corvette and headed back to the gym. Bry and Matt got in Bry's car and headed over to Ripples. I was really looking forward to seeing Doug again. I had a feeling something might happen between us tonight.

Switch - Part 3

I headed back to the gym, hoping that Doug would still be there. As I was driving, I began to feel more comfortable in my new body. It was if I was getting used to being in Matt's skin. It felt so natural having my muscular arms holding on to the steering wheel and gear shift, and my thick, heavy chest pressed against my skin-tight tank top. I could feel the muscles flexing in my massive legs as I used the clutch, gas pedal and brake. I looked up in the rear-view mirror and saw Matt's handsome face staring back at me. I smiled as I felt my 9-inch dick begin to swell in my Speedo.Brian and Matt arrived at Ripples. "Can't we just tell David that we went in, and do something else instead?", Matt pleaded. "I don't think so Matt. David wouldn't like that, and I don't think you want to get David mad right now." Brian grabbed Matt's arm and led him to the entrance. There was a big guy standing at the door. "Hey, how's it going David?", the doorman said, "...you haven't been here in a while." Brian answered for Matt, "Well, he hasn't been feeling like himself lately." "Oh, you've been under-the-weather, David?", he said with a concerned look on his face. Matt spoke up, "Yeah, you might say that. I've been feeling pretty weak." "Well, I hope you start to feel like your old self again real soon." "I'm looking forward to that dude." Brian grabbed Matt's arm and led him through the door.

Matt was surprised to find the inside of the place looked just like every other bar he had been in. There were a couple of pool tables off to the right. Neon beer signs were hanging all over the place. There were a couple of guys in the corner playing darts. "This isn't at all what I expected.", Matt said to Brian. "What did you expect, guys doing it with each other on top of the bar?" Embarrassed, Matt said "No, it's just that I had this picture in my mind of what a gay bar is like. Ya know, kinda sleazy, everything in the dark. This place is just like my hangout." "I'm glad you like it Matt. David and I come here all the time. It's the only place we can go where we feel safe and can be comfortable being ourselves. The outside world can be pretty cruel sometimes." Matt didn't know what to say. He knew Brian had directed that last comment at him. Feeling guilty, Matt looked down at the floor and said "I'm really sorry Brian." "Thanks Matt. I have a feeling you really meant that. Let's go on upstairs and have some fun."I arrived at the gym and saw Doug's car parked out front. "Good, he's still here.", I said to myself in my deep baritone voice. I walked into the gym and saw Doug laying down on the bench press. It looked like he was trying to lift two or three-hundred pounds. The weights on the bar looked huge. I knew as David, I wouldn't have been able to lift half of that weight; but with Matt's body I could easily handle it. I walked over. "Need some help with that?" I gave Doug a big smile. Surprised, he sat up. "Matt, you're back? How is David? He's ok isn't he? I was really getting worried." It was sweet how concerned Doug was about my well being. "I told you nothing bad was going to happen to David. Trust me, he's fine. In fact, I'd say he feels like a new man today." "That's great Matt.

I knew in my heart you wouldn't do anything to hurt him.", Doug said relieved. "So Doug, do you need a spotter?", I said smiling. "Sure Matt. You can spot me ANY time." Realizing how forward that must have sounded, Doug started to blush. I thought it was cute how shy Doug was. It made him even more attractive, if that were possible. Doug laid back down on the bench and slid under the barbell. I went to the back of the bench and got in position. I watched as Doug hefted the massive weight off the weight rack and dropped it down to his chest. He let out a grunt as he forced the weight upward. His upper body was shaking as he fought against the force of gravity. He was able to do 10 reps before finally giving out. I grabbed the weight and helped him put it back up on the rack. Doug looked so sexy as he laid there breathing so heavily covered in sweat. I couldn't control myself anymore. I walked around to face him, bent down and kissed him on the lips. Suddenly, Doug grabbed me around my waist and pulled me on top of him. It felt wonderful pressed against Doug's muscular body. We wrapped our arms around each other while embraced in our passionate kiss. The kiss seemed to last an eternity, but was more like a few minutes. "Matt, I've dreamed of this happening, but I never thought it actually would." "Well, I was recently told that sometimes the impossible is possible." Smiling, Doug said "That's definitely true for me." "Me too Doug." "Matt, why don't we get cleaned up and go back to my place?" "That's a great idea Doug." We kissed each other again and headed for the showers.Brian and Matt headed up the stairs. They could hear the thumping bass of the disco music getting louder. About halfway up the stairs Matt recognized the song as that old gay standby "It's Rainin' Men". When they reached the top of the stairs they saw about forty young men dancing under the flashing disco lights and twirling mirrored balls. There were a couple dozen men standing around the dance floor, drinking, talking and smoking. Matt had never seen so many gay men in one place before, and they all seemed to be having a great time. Brian noticed how nervous Matt looked, "Matt, how about a drink?" "That sounds like a great idea, Brian." Matt watched the couples dancing as they slowly made their way over to the bar. Matt turned away from the dance floor and looked for the bartender. There standing behind the bar was the most attractive man Matt had ever seen. His face was so incredibly beautiful. Golden blonde hair, crystal blue eyes, masculine chiseled features and a well manicured goatee.

His body was truly a work of art. He had the same muscle mass that Matt used to have, but his torso had a more sculpted look. His waist was narrower and his shoulders were wider, making him look like some sort of living, breathing Adonis. Yet as intimidating a figure as he was, he projected a great deal of warmth and kindness. He was wearing a muscle t-shirt and skin-tight Levi's cut-offs. No man had ever had this kind of effect on him before. Brian saw how entranced Matt was of the bartender. "He's quite a sight isn't he?" "Uhhhh, yeah I guess so." "Ya know Matt... Kevin has known David for a long time." "Kevin? His name his Kevin?" "Yeah, he really has a thing for David, and right now you're David. If you play your cards right you never know." Brian winked at Matt. Matt blushed.Doug and I walked into the changing room and started to undress. We both enjoyed watching each other take off our clothes. I could see that Doug was really getting turned on. I was getting aroused too. He slowly pulled off his bikini briefs revealing a throbbing 8-inch hard on. I smiled at him and removed my bulging Speedo. Doug's smile turned into a look of shock and surprise. I was puzzled. "What's wrong Doug?" Doug didn't say anything, he was staring at my erection. "Don't you like what you see?" "Sure I do Matt, but I'm a little confused." "What do you mean?" "I've seen you naked before Matt, and I don't want to sound cruel but I don't remember you being so well endowed." "What are you talking about?" "Matt, I've seen you hard... you're dick is 5-inches, 5 1/2 tops! What are you doing with that?" I looked down and saw my 9-inch dick pointing up at me. I forgot that I had borrowed my longer dick from my old body. "Doug I think I can explain, but I doubt if you'll believe me." "Try me." "Ok, I'll give you the Readers Digest version. For starters, I'm not the Matt that you've always known. I'm actually David inside Matt's body."

I could already tell that Doug thought I was jerking him around. I continued, "You see it all started when I saved Mr. Asito from a falling tower of weights. He ended up giving Matt and me these special rings..." I showed him the ring on my finger and pulled the other ring out of my pocket. "When Matt joined the rings together they switched our bodies. I became Matt, and Matt became me, ...uh that is he became David." Doug had a blank look on his face. "Later I decided to switch our bodies back as long as I could become Matt whenever I wanted. Matt didn't like that, and had some other ideas. So, I kept his body and borrowed my -- I mean David's larger dick." Doug just stared at me, wondering what to make of my crazy story. "Doug, I know it sounds totally farfetched, but I swear to God it's true. I'm really David in Matt's body." "I don't know what to think. Right now I can't decide if I want to fuck your brains out or if I should call 911 and put you into a padded cell." "Personally, I like your first choice better." I gave him a smile. Doug didn't seem amused. "I should put back on my clothes and get the hell out of here, but something in your eyes is telling me not to." "That's good Doug, maybe you're seeing the real me that's inside." "This is getting really weird. Is there any way you can prove to me that you're telling the truth?" "I'm not sure." "That's what I thought, I'm outta here." Doug started to grab his clothes off the floor. "Wait a minute, I just remembered something. Remember when you told David that you knew he was gay, and you were tired of pretending to be the straight jock? Then you told him that you really liked Matt and that you wanted to have a gay friend that you could confide in?" Doug looked shocked. "How did you know that?" "Exactly. If I were really Matt do you think that David would have told me, I mean Matt, what we had talked about?" Doug pondered what I had said, "No, David wouldn't have told Matt." "See? That proves that I'm really David." "I'm still not convinced.

Maybe you forced David to tell you that secret. Maybe that's what you did when you went over to his place earlier." I was getting frustrated. I wasn't sure what else to do. Suddenly an idea struck me.Kevin came over to Brian and Matt. "Hi guys, how's it going? Hey David, I haven't seen you in here in a while. I've missed you." Matt couldn't stop staring at Kevin. Up close he was even more stunning. Kevin noticed that Matt was in a trance. "David, are you ok?" Matt finally snapped out of it. "Uh, yeah. I'm fine. Yeah, I've missed you too." "Is there anything special I can get you?" Matt thought to himself, "Sure I'd like to see you naked in my bed!" Matt couldn't believe he was having thoughts like that about another man. Brian could see that Matt wasn't going to answer Kevin, so he spoke up, "We'll have a couple of screwdrivers." "Sure thing." Kevin walked off to make the drinks. "Matt, what's up with you? You're drooling all over Kevin. What's going on?" "I don't know. I've never been attracted to men before. I don't know what's happening to me!" "Maybe you're finally getting in touch with your feelings?" Kevin came back with the drinks. "What do we owe you for the drinks?", Matt asked. "No charge for you. But I'm sure you'll think of some way to repay me." Kevin gave Matt a huge smile and put his hand on top of Matt's. Matt's face turned beet red. "It's so cute the way you're embarrassed by the smallest sign of affection." Matt stared into Kevin's beautiful blue eyes and it felt like his legs were turning to jello. Brian spoke up, "Well I guess I'll leave you two guys alone... three's a crowd." Panicked, Matt said "Brian don't leave!" Kevin interjected, "Bry you're a good guy. It's nice of you to give Dave and me some privacy." "It's my pleasure."

Kevin patted him on the shoulder. Brian winked at Kevin and walked away. Matt was nervous and excited. He didn't know what was about to happen. "I've got a half-hour break. Why don't we go in the office and talk?" Kevin came out from behind the bar and grabbed Matt's hand and led him into the private office."Doug how would you like to try an experiment?" "What kind of experiment?" "Well, if my idea really works it will prove that I was telling the truth; and if it doesn't work you can put me in the padded cell. Ok?" Doug thought about it for a minute. "Alright Matt, if it doesn't work you promise to tell me the real story?" "I promise. Let's go into the locker room. People going by can see us out here." "Ok Matt, we're in the locker room. What's the experiment? Don't tell me your going to switch our bodies?" Doug started laughing. "That's exactly what I'm planning to do. At least that's what I'm hoping to do.", I said concerned. "Fine, let's get this over with." I handed Doug the other ring. "Here put this on." "So now what? I've put on the ring, now were suppose to put them together and switch bodies, right?" I could tell Doug was just humoring me. I knew if this didn't work, Doug would storm out of here and never want to talk to me again. "Ok Doug, I just wanted to let you know what's about to happen. When we put the rings together the room is going to darken, you'll feel a cool breeze swirling around you, and there will be a surge of energy that will flow through your body." "Got it, Matt." I had a feeling that Doug wasn't even paying attention to what I was saying, and whatever he had listened to he didn't believe at all. "Ready Doug?" "Yeah, sure Matt."

Doug and I put the rings together. Nothing happened. "Now we have to concentrate on switching bodies. Close your eyes and concentrate." We both closed our eyes. Still nothing happened. "We should stare at our own ring and speak out loud our desire. You should say "I want Matt's body" and I'll say that I want your body." "Matt come on, enough is enough." "Please Doug, just humor me for a little while longer." "Ok, I'll give you one more minute." "Great... ready, get set, 1, 2, 3, go!" We both made our demands to the rings, "I want Matt's body." "I want Doug's body." We waited. Still nothing happened. "I don't understand Doug. I was sure that it was going to work. I don't know what went wrong?" "Sorry Matt, I know you really believed that we were going switch bodies. When you decide to tell me the real story give me call, until then I don't want to hear any more of your fairy tales." Doug grabbed his clothes and got dressed. I decided to get dressed too. I thought I might be able to convince Doug that I hadn't made up the whole thing. We heard a voice behind us. "Those who don't wish to believe, make the possible... impossible." Surprised, we both turned around. Mr. Asito was in the doorway. "Hi Mr. Asito, it's me David." "Yes David, I know it is you." "Oh great, you've got Mr. Asito in on your little joke too.", Doug said sarcastically. Mr. Asito turned to face Doug, "David cares a great deal for you. He would never do anything to hurt you. Why is it so hard for you to believe in something that is beyond this world?" Before Doug could answer, Mr. Asito placed his fingers on Doug's face. Doug stood there unable to move. He looked like he was in a trance. "You must release your mind. You must release your doubt. Now you can believe." Mr. Asito removed his hand, then turned to me. "I can see Doug is a very special to you. Be patient with him. He will come around soon enough." He winked at me, then headed out the door."Are you ok Doug?" "I think so. I feel pretty strange." "Mr. Asito had done the same thing to me. That's how he found out I wanted to be Matt."

"You ARE Matt. Oh, never mind. I just want to get out of here." "Come on Doug. Let's try it one more time, please." "You're not going to let up are you?" "Please Doug. Just humor me." "If I do, then will you leave me alone and let me go home?" "Yes, I swear." "Ok, one last time." Doug and I put the rings together again. "Concentrate on your ring. You have to want the transformation to take place, otherwise it won't work." "Alright, I'm concentrating. I want your body. I want your body." I focused on my ring. "I want Doug's body." A few seconds had passed. "Matt I feel strange, like I'm burning up." "Me too. I think it's beginning." We both looked down at the rings. They were starting to glow. "Matt what's happening?" "It worked. We're going to switch bodies!" The lights began to dim. A cool breeze started to flow around us. The energy from the rings slowly traveled up our arms and gradually enveloped our entire bodies. I grabbed Doug with my free hand and pulled him against me. I smiled at him. Doug looked frightened. "Don't worry Doug, if you don't fight it, it won't hurt as much." "Ok! I'll try not to fight it." "Give me a kiss for good luck." "A kiss?" I reached up and kissed Doug and held him tight. We continued kissing passionately when the transformation started. I could feel my body begin to change. My shoulders were getting wider, my waist was tightening. My abs were shifting position. I could feel Doug's body changing while we were pressed up against each other. My legs and torso were stretching taller. When we separated from our kiss we were exactly the same height. "Matt this is incredible! I'm becoming you!" "I know isn't this amazing!" We sounded exactly alike. I continued to grow taller and wider.

Doug was shrinking before my eyes. He had lost 4 inches in height in a matter of seconds. I watched as his features changed into Matt's. He slowly morphed from a blue-eyed blonde Nordic to a black-eyed black-haired Roman. I could feel my features changing as I watched Doug changing into me. Gradually the transformation ended. The rings separated and our arms dropped to our sides. Doug and I stood there staring at each other's new body. "Matt this is unbelievable! You've got my body! Wow, I sound just like you" "Like I've been trying to tell you... I wasn't Matt, I was David. Now do you believe me?" "Yeah, I guess I have to now, since I'm standing here in Matt's body. I've got to see what I look like naked." Doug ripped off his clothes and began to pose in front of the mirror. "David what's going on?" "What do you mean?" "Look at my dick. It's only 5-inches long. When you had Matt's body it was 9-inches. What happened?"Kevin locked the office door. "I thought we might want to have some privacy, David." Matt was nervous and excited at the same time. "Sure Kevin. Uh, what did you have in mind?" Kevin smiled, grabbed Matt and pulled him tight against his body. Matt was getting aroused at how aggressive Kevin was. Matt slowly placed his hands on Kevin's torso. He could feel Kevin's well defined abs through the tight muscle-t. He moved his hands over his thick chiseled chest and hard biceps. He could feel how powerful and masculine Kevin was. Now he understood why David was so turned on by Matt's own body, because now he found Kevin's muscles incredibly sexy.

Still, he kept wondering why a stud like Kevin would be attracted to a scrawny guy like David. Suddenly he felt his dick stirring in his shorts. It was getting hard. Not only was it getting hard. It was starting to get a lot longer and thicker too. Kevin looked down and saw Matt's dick growing in his shorts. "Dave, I'm glad you're enjoying this as much as I am." Matt's dick pushed it's way out of his shorts. The head of his penis was sticking out about an inch. "Oh my God, I've got a 9-inch dick again!" "It looks incredible, and so do you." Kevin passionately kissed Matt. Matt was surprised how wonderful it felt having his lips pressed against Kevin's. He loved the feeling of Kevin's goatee as it rubbed against his face. Kevin plunged his tongue into Matt's mouth. Matt felt like he was melting into Kevin. It was like they were becoming one with each other. He grabbed Kevin's firm round ass and squeezed it tightly, and slowly moved his hands up to Kevin's muscular back, then over his hard, massive shoulders. Matt's dick was hard as a rock. He suddenly pulled away from Kevin. Kevin looked puzzled. "What's wrong David?" "I'm not sure. I've never had these feelings for a man before. I can't help but wonder why you're even attracted to a guy like me?" "That's simple. You're the sweetest, nicest, most caring guy I know. I'd be crazy not to be in love with you." "In love? You're in love with David? Um, I mean me." Kevin smiled. "David, sometimes you are so slow." Kevin leaned over and kissed Matt tenderly on the lips."Doug I think I know what happened. When we switched bodies, my 9-inch dick must have returned to my old body." "Oh, I guess that makes sense.

That wasn't part of Matt's body, so it wouldn't transfer with him." "I'm sure Matt must have been pleasantly surprised.", I said. "Well David, even with a 5-inch cock, Matt's body is incredible. I've fantasized about being intimate with Matt hundreds of times. Now I'm actually him! This is so unreal." Doug was looking in the mirror, feeling the contours of his face. "I know. I couldn't believe it when Matt and I switched bodies. I've always dreamed of having a body like that. I'm not really looking forward to giving it back." "Who says you have to give it back right away?" "Eventually I'll have to trade back. It's not fair to Matt. That is his body after all." "I guess your right, David." "Earlier today I used the rings to shrink Matt into a 120 lb. weakling, while I grew into a 6-foot-3, 270 lbs monster. Having that kind of power turned me into someone that I didn't like very much." "Well, what are going to do?" "I'm going to go over to Ripples and switch bodies with Matt. Will you come with me?" "Sure. But do we have to leave right this second? Why don't we get in the shower and have some fun?" "Sounds terrific, Doug." "First, I want to switch back into my own body. I don't think I can make love to my own body. That's just too weird." "My thoughts exactly. Besides, I'm looking forward to sticking Matt's dick up your ass." I gave Doug a wicked smile. Doug laughed... "Oooh, you're such a charmer David." I snapped the rings back together. I few minutes later Doug was back in his body, and I was Matt again. We kissed each other and headed for the showers. We spent the next 2 hours making love as the warm water cascaded over our muscular bodies. It was the most beautiful experience both of us had ever had. We finally left the showers, walked over to the lockers and toweled each other off. We stared at each other for a moment, knowing that we would never see each other like this again. We embraced in a kiss.

Then we smiled at each other and headed out the door."David, how about going back to my place?", Kevin said. Matt didn't know what to do. He had never felt such a strong attraction to anyone, let alone a man. The thought of being intimate with Kevin was very exciting. Then he thought about Kevin feelings. He was in love with David. Not someone else inside of David's body. He knew if there were any chance of having an honest relationship, he would have to tell Kevin the truth somehow. He wasn't sure how he was going to do it. "Kevin, I'd love to go back to your place. But, I have something I need to tell you first." "Let me guess, it's another man?" "No, not exactly. Actually, I'm another man." "What do you mean? You've got multiple personalities?" "I know you're not going to believe me, but this morning I was Matt Johnson, a personal trainer at World Gym. I had a huge muscular body, just like you." Kevin just stared at Matt with a blank look on his face. Matt continued, "David and I found these rings in our lockers. We put them on and snapped them together. A few minutes later I was in David's body, and he had my body. Mr. Asito, the guy that gave us the rings, told me that I needed to look within myself before I could return to my body. I think I've done that. I discovered that I had kept my real feelings buried deep inside and I was taking it out on everybody else by being a pompous homophobic bully." "Wow David, that's quite an imagination you've got there. That would make a really cool episode of the X-Files. But if you don't want to go back to my place, just say so. I'll understand." Matt was getting frustrated. He had to think of some way to convince Kevin.Doug and I arrived at Ripples. We walked in and found Brian sitting at the bar by himself. Matt wasn't there. "Brian where is Matt?", I said. "Hey, David! Um, I mean Matt.", Brian smiled. "Never mind that. What happened to Matt?"

"Oh, he's having a very private meeting with Kevin. I wouldn't disturb them if I were you." "Don't worry. He'll be glad to see me. Come on Doug, let's go." We headed upstairs."Kevin, I do want to go back to your place. It's just that I wanted you to know that you wouldn't be with the person you thought you were with." Kevin looked really confused. "I'm not sure what you're talking about, but I find it really cute that you're trying so hard to convince me that you're not David." "Did I ever show an interest in being with you before?" "We'll not really. You said I was very attractive, but that you had this major crush on a guy named Doug." "That's the other personal trainer at the gym! David knew that Doug wanted to be with me, I mean Matt. That's why he wanted to be me. David was in love with Doug, and the only way he could have a chance with him was to become Matt. Then it really happened. We swapped bodies. While I was David, I realized that I was a gay man pretending to be this macho straight guy. Then I saw you standing there behind the bar, and I suddenly knew that I wanted to be with you." Kevin had a worried look on his face. "David, I think you actually believe your own wild story. I'm starting to get concerned. Maybe you need some sort of medication or therapy." "I swear Kevin, I'm telling you the truth!"I knocked on the door. Kevin said, "Come on in."

Doug and I walked in. "Hi Matt. Hi Kevin. Sorry to bother you two.", I said. "Who are you?", Kevin asked, "...and why did you call David, Matt?" "Well, that's sort of hard to explain." "Don't tell me, let me guess, you're David, right?" "How did you know? Did Matt tell you?" "Ok, a joke's a joke, but this is really sick. I'm getting out of here." Kevin headed for the door. Doug blocked his path. "He's telling the truth. I think you ought to hear him out. In fact, David came here to tell Matt something important." Kevin stopped and turned around. "Fine, I can't wait to hear this." I walked over to Matt. "I've decided to swap bodies with you, permanently. Having this kind of power over someone is too destructive. I don't like the person I've become." "Really David? That's funny... ever since I became you, I got to know the real me inside. I discovered that I'm also gay, and that I was so afraid that I was taking it out on you and your friends. I'm truly sorry for being so abusive and for trying to hurt you earlier today." I could see that Matt was sincere in his apology. "I forgive you Matt. Now let's get back in our own bodies." I instructed Doug and Kevin to stand back. I could tell by the look on Kevin's face that he didn't believe any of this. I gave Matt the other ring. He slipped it on his finger. "Ok Matt, here goes." We snapped the rings back together. "Matt you go first", I said. Matt stared down at the rings, "I want to become Matt again." I focused my thoughts on the rings, "I want to become David again." Rings began to glow. The room lights began to dim. A cool breeze started to envelop us. Kevin looked frightened and started to back up towards the door. Doug grabbed him and told him it would be ok. The glow of energy covered our bodies one more time. I could see a change happening under Matt's clothing. His chest was expanding. His arms started to fill out with muscle. His waist was tightening. I could see his abs forming. I felt myself growing taller, becoming weaker. I saw my arms deflating. Kevin couldn't believe his eyes. He realized that Matt was telling the truth. Matt's legs swelled with muscle. He burst out of his shirt. It fell to the floor in tattered rags. His chiseled chest glistened from the sweat trickling down his v-shaped torso. His shoulders continued to widen as his lats filled in.

A few minutes later the transformation ended. We stood facing each other in our old bodies.Kevin walked over to Matt. "That was incredible. If I hadn't been here I never would have believed it. You were telling me the truth. You really are Matt... and if you don't mind me saying so, you are gorgeous." "Thanks Kevin. I was hoping that some day I'd be able to kiss you in this body. That day is today." Matt reached over and passionately kissed Kevin. Kevin reciprocated by grabbing Matt in a tight embrace. "Why don't we head back to my place and you can tell me the entire story. Then afterwards, who knows?" "Sure thing Kevin. See you later guys." Matt and Kevin heading out the door."Well Doug, I guess I'd better head back to the gym and return the rings to Mr. Asito." "I'll go with you David." On the way back to the gym, Doug and I started to talk. "David, I much as wish you were still in Matt's body, I think you made the right decision by switching back with him. You were living in a fantasy world, even though it was a wonderful fantasy, it was just that... a fantasy." "I know. I'm really going to miss having those awesome muscles and that handsome face." "David, you're handsome in your own way. You're a really sweet, caring guy. Don't forget that." I grabbed Doug's hand. "I won't Doug. Thanks."We arrived at the gym and walked into the locker room. There sweeping up the floor was Mr. Asito. "Hi Doug. Hi David. I see you've returned to your body. Very interesting." "I didn't like the person I had become when I had the power of the rings, so I came back here to return them to you." I handed Mr. Asito the rings. "Very impressive David. That kind of power can corrupt the most noble of people. It is a wise man that makes the difficult choice that will benefit him down the road of life." "Thank you, Mr. Asito." "Please, call me Daniel." "Ok, Daniel. I just wanted to thank you for giving me the opportunity to live out a terrific fantasy." "It was my pleasure David. But this fantasy is not over quite yet." "What do you mean?" "To reward you for your truly unselfish act, I want you to put the rings together one last time." Mr. Asito placed one ring on each of my hands. He turned me to face the full length mirror. "Now David, join the rings." I looked over at Doug for his opinion.

Doug smiled and shook his head. I looked down and snapped the rings together. Mr. Asito held his hands over the rings and spoke a lengthy incantation. His hands started to glow with a bluish-white aura. A bolt of energy went from his hands into the rings. The rings began to ebb and flow with the blue and white glow. Slowly the glow made it's way up my arms, over my shoulders, up to my neck. It gradually covered my face. I looked in the mirror and saw it move down my torso until it enveloped my entire body. The lights flickered then went completely out. The only light in the room was emanating from my body. I could feel a cool breeze swirling around me. Mr. Asito spoke, "Now it shall begin."I looked in the mirror and saw my body start to change. All of the fat around my waist slowing began to disappear. In about 30 seconds, I was totally lean. There wasn't an ounce of fat anywhere on my body. I looked like the volleyball players I had always admired at the beach. I thought it was nice that Mr. Asito had given me the gift of a lean fit body. I took off my shirt and waited for the glow to subside, but it didn't.

The glowing started to get even brighter. My waist began to narrow and tighten. I could see my oblique muscles developing on my sides. My stomach started to flatten. I rubbed my stomach with my hand and felt a six-pack of abs forming right under my skin. I watched as they slowly grew out from my tightening torso. My abs were now hard as a rock. "Doug, look what's happening to me! Look at my abs!" "I know David. It's incredible!" My rib cage was expanding. My chest started to grow outward and down. I could feel the muscle forming, getting thicker. It felt like I had two slabs of stone attached to my body. In a matter of seconds, I had a massive chiseled chest hanging over my ripped abs. Then my arms started to move away from my sides. My lats were growing at an accelerated rate. My arms were hanging at least a foot away from my waist. My shoulders started to burn. I looked to my right and saw my shoulder swelling with muscle. Then my 13-inch arms expanded to a solid 19-inches. My forearms thickened.

I looked down and watched my legs as they continued to grow. My quads and hamstrings blossomed out. Becoming full and thick. The huge muscles looked like they were carved into my leg. When I flexed my thigh I could see all of the muscle groups separate. My calves suddenly ballooned to 3-times their size. "It is not over, look in the mirror, David." Mr. Asito requested. I looked up and saw my face changing. My jaw-line was becoming more angular. My chin was more square. My nose was narrowing, becoming straighter. My cheekbones were moving up my face. My lips were becoming more sensual, fuller. My eye color changed from a brownish grey to a crystal clear sky blue. My eyebrows filled in, looking thicker and making my eyes look even more sexy. When I smiled I saw 32 perfect teeth smiling back at me. Then as quickly as it began, it had ended. The breeze died down. The lights gradually came back on. The glow encompassing my body vanished. "The transformation has finished.", Mr. Asito has proclaimed. I stared at my image in the mirror. I was even a more spectacular specimen that Matt. I couldn't believe it was actually me. Then I wondered, "Daniel who have I become? I didn't have the ring connected to anyone else.", I said in a much deeper voice. "This is the real you, David. Standing before you is what you would have become if only the best parts of you had been able to develop.

The rings filtered out the worst parts of your genetic code, leaving you with what you see before you." "I think I understand." Doug walked over. "David, you look amazing! You're even larger than me!" "I know. This is unbelievable." "I think the two of you have a lot to discuss." Mr. Asito winked and smiled. I handed Mr. Asito the rings and gave him a big bear hug. I turned to Doug, "You know I love you, Doug. Do you think you can learn to love the new me?" "There's only one way to find out." Doug put his hands on my face and gave me a passionate kiss on the lips. "I think I might be able to used to the new you!" Doug had a big smile on his face. We both laughed. Then we put our arms around each other's waist and headed out the door together. Doug and I had a feeling this was the beginning of something wonderful.

-- The End --

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egg-and-koji · 4 years

Text

“Shadows of a Legacy” Lok Fanfic Ch 3 - Mako

160 AG

“Mako, come now, my sweet Dragonfly. We have to keep up with the line.”

At the airship station in Republic City, a mother called her young son. She held her hand out for him which he grasped as sacred. As they walked, he copied her steps; his gait overextended so his shorter legs kept up with her tiger-swan ones. When they reached the back of the waiting crowds, his grip on her soft, slender hand loosened as he jumped, trying to look over the people.

“I think. I see. Dad and Bo,” Mako said with each hop.

His mother laughed softly as she fixed his spiked widows’ peak. “I promise you’ll be taller than your father someday.”

The eight-year-old raised his sharply angled eyebrows and gave her a small crooked smirk. His mother pulled him close, hugged her arms around him then clasped his small hands between hers and held their arms out like the bow of a ship. “S.S. Naoki is clear for sailing, Captain Mako,” she whispered into his temple.

“Aye-aye!” He cheered and with a mix of giggles and engine sounds, the two politely cut through the waves of people to reach the rest of their family.

“Oh no, Captain! A pirate has First Mate Bo!”

A six-foot, middle-aged man dressed in a red scarf twisted around to face them. “Mwah haha, you’re too late to save him, Captain Mako,” he snarled dramatically out of the corner of his mouth and bounced the little chubby boy on his shoulders. “This whipper snapper’s turned to a life of pirating!”

Bolin wrapped his father’s scarf around his own head and shouted, “Yar!” A bell marked the arrival of an airship. He dropped the scarf and wiggled against his father’s head. “It’s here, it’s here!”

“Easy, little caterpillar, you’ll take my eye out with your heel,” his father chuckled.

The young family moved with the flow of bodies as they lined up to have their tickets authenticated. Bolin ran his chubby fingers through his father’s greying hair, gripping tight whenever he pretended to drop him on Mako. The older brother laughed and tugged on the younger’s suspenders, making him whine and pop his thumb in his mouth for comfort. Naoki frowned at him and gently tugged on his hair.

Mako sighed and allowed her to usher him forward in front of her. His scrawny shoulders were caged in her silk-wrapped arms; his shelter; warm and loving as always. He tucked his arms up in hers, securing himself further as the comfort melted his bones. In every sense of the word; she was his world. When his firebending manifested two years ago, he deemed himself her protector; neither she nor his father were benders. The neighbors often teased Naoki, saying she made him without her husband San’s help. Mako had her pale ivory skin, sleek rook black hair, sunset orange eyes, and finely angled eyebrows. At least Bolin looked more like their father.

“Do Granma and Granpa know we’re coming, Dad?” Mako tilted his head up to San walking beside them.

“I’m sure they received my letter,” he answered. “And I know they'll be very excited to meet you, boys.”

“But you said Granpa was sick?”

“He is,” his mother answered with a gentle squeeze, “and that’s why we’re going to Ba Sing Se before he gets too sick for visitors.”

“What about momma’s Granma and Granpa?” Bolin slurred around his thumb.

“You mean mom’s mom and dad, not their mom and dad, Thumbsucker,” Mako mocked then tugged on his foot. Bolin whined and kicked away from him, his heel digging into their father’s armpit.

“Hey, come one now,” San warned.

As they inched closer to the ticket booth, Bolin squirmed. “I gotta potty!”

“I thought you took him already,” Naoki asked.

San turned to her with a disappointed look and whispered, “He tried.”

“I know where the bathroom is,” Mako beamed, “I can take him!”

“Hold on a second,” his father stopped Bolin from trying to wriggle off him. His stubby legs dangled as he touched the ground. San removed his scarf from around his neck and wrapped it around Mako. He weaved it around his neck like a tie. “There. Now we can find you in the crowd.”

Mako pulled the red cloth up over his nose; it smelled like his father’s cologne; a mix of the restaurant’s wood oven, cigars from his patrons, and a hint of Panda Lily from whenever he hugged Naoki.

“Come on, Bo,” Mako said, grabbing his little brother’s free hand.

“Mako keep your little brother safe. Bolin, make sure you don’t let go of your brother’s hand, sweetie. Use your manners, boys. Oh and wash your hands,” Naoki called out after her sons as they disappeared in the sea of loud strangers and trolley whistles.

170 AG - Present Day

“Hey! You gettin’ off here kid?” The trolley conductor barks at Mako, taking him out of his brief, unsatisfying nap. Amber eyes snap up at the old metalbender. He points out the window behind Mako’s head. “You said the police headquarters.”

“Yeah,” Mako grumbles, stretches from his slouched position against one of the trolley’s leaning poles then hops off.

The mist that started at the end of his shift picked up into a drizzle. He pulls up the collar of his jacket to keep the rain from soaking his neck and scarf. The squeal of metal on metal echoes down the road as the conductor and rear metalbender push and pull the trolley on the rest of its route.

A break in traffic lets Mako jog across the busy street to the front door of the Republic City's Police Headquarters. He drops his chin and shoves his hands in his pockets as he ducks in behind a sobbing family.

The chaotic movement of employees and civilians roars through the massive building. Wild, ringing alarms and telephones amplify the headache he desperately tried to ignore on the ride here.

Suck it up, Champ, he tells himself over the noise.

He makes his way to the record department passing an elite metalbender officer sticking his nose up past a couple of out-of-shape, under-trained non-bender auxiliaries. Two upper-middle-class couples shout petty insults at each other and hurl baseless Equalist accusations. A freshly arrested triad initiate gets berated by a loud, red-faced shop owner, bringing up a shameful sense of deja vu for Mako.

It’s odd to walk through the station without an escort and metal bracelets around his wrists. But the last few years haven’t given him a reason to be in any type of trouble with the law; the Fire Ferrets have gained a steady fan following and are now the team to look out for this season. Even better with the increase in Triad and Equalist activity.

Tension in the city has gotten worse since Amon’s disciples started publicly protesting again. As such it’s not unusual for some mistaken hooligans to get a little roughed up before getting cleared of whatever minor infraction brought them in.

Mako rounds the corner of the main hall towards the department of records but stops and ducks back around the same corner.

Shit.

Shady Shin’s obnoxious blue trench coat isn’t hard to miss against all the wood and metal features of the building. Mako slips away in the other direction, taking the long way around. He’d rather not deal with the Triple Threat right now; not after the other day. As if Bolin’s water tribe damsel even needed his help.

Leave it to Bo to try to “save” the Avatar.

All he can do is suck it up and hope they have more important shit to deal with. He runs a hand through his damp hair, spiking up the front in his usual style, and straightens out his jacket before entering the department office.

Shadows from towering metal filing cabinets and massive volumes of paperwork cast over the front window. A few weeks ago this room was nice and tidy. The only thing remotely clean is the desk pushed up against the front. But no one’s there.

Maybe the old man finally got crushed by the mess.

He isn’t on his lunch break as Mako memorized his activity; can’t miss out on office hours if he knows the times by heart. Plus, he made sure to get there early, just in case.

Mako taps the call bell and waits.

No answer.

He’s about to tap it again when he hears shuffling footsteps.

An old, hunched clerk hobbles out from behind a pile of boxes. His crusted lips smack together as he huffs and groans his way up to the front desk. He doesn’t bother his visitor a glance as he flips through a thick ledger and deadpans, “Name.”

“Mako.”

With another smack of his lips, he says, “Oh, you again…”

Mako ignores him. “You said two weeks, sir.”

“Eh, your request hasn’t gone through,” he says, flicking his wrinkled hand at the backed-up in-voices.

“That’s what you said two weeks ago.”

“Well, so-rry...but the chief’s rather busy with Equalist and triad yahoos.”

“All she needs to do is sign the form,” Mako says in a neutral tone.

The clerk smacks his lips again and sizes him up. He scoffs. “And all you need to do is wait for it...unless you’d rather get one of your buddies to forge her signature.”

There’s no point in trying to argue with the cranky geezer. Mako clamps his teeth to keep his jaws from twitching.

Cool-under-fire.

He keeps his tone neutral as he says, “I’ll check back in another few weeks.” He places his hands on his upper thighs and gives his elder a low bow. “Thank you, sir.”

“Mhm,” the clerk sniffs then crawls to the back of his lonely dusty cave.

Mako leaves the office. It takes every ounce of control to not slam the door on the way out. He takes a second to collect himself; white-knuckled grip still wrapped around the doorknob.

First they “misplace” it, now they ignore it.

The irony isn’t lost on him. But he lets the frustration fade and makes his way back up to the main floor. After a quick peek to make sure Shady isn’t there, he leaves the building. The rain died down to a light mist again and the trolley to get back to the arena is already there taking in passengers. Mako lines up with the rest of them.

As the line shifts, someone to his right seems to forget the concept of “personal space”. Then another one to his left. Behind the trolley, a familiar thundering engine lowers to a hum. Mako sighs internally as the driver's expensive leather shoes clap against the pavement.

“Well if it ain't the captain of the street rats-whoops Fire Ferrets, Fire Ferrets-my mistake, Champ," Shady Shin snivels behind him.

Ping-to Mako’s right-hisses at the waiting riders making them scurry up into the trolley. Mushi moves from his left side to intimidate the conductors to move along. No one on the street bats an eye as the Triple Threat surround the young firebender.

“Ya know,” Shady continues, “the boys didn’t appreciate Bolin’s little stunt the other day.” Mako doesn’t blink as Mushi spits out a glob of chewing tobacco at his feet. Shady drapes his arm over Mako’s shoulder. “Bail’s gettin’ pricier every day and we’ve got a sweet deal bringin’ in some serious paper tonight. But now...we got the tinmen on our asses, Champ.”

“I can pay you back next week.”

“With the team’s winnings? Oh wait, that’s right...you don’t got any. Well, I bet the plant’s payin’ good with the city’s new programs in place huh?”

Here, we fucking go…damnit, Bolin.

Mako shrugs, “Yeah.”

“Thought so, but not everybody’s happy about it. Matter of fact, the supervisor’s a regular at The Jolly Cat and let me tell ya, man’s a real talker once you get a few drinks in ‘em,” Shady muses, “says profits took a hit from havin’ to cough up extra pay to all the fuckin’ ash makers he’s forced to hire.”

Ping snickers as he weaves a coil of flames around his fingers to light the cigarette hanging from his thin lips. He inhales deeply and blows the cloud of smoke in Mako’s face.

Mako tilts his head away then runs a thumbnail over one of his brows. He keeps a lookout for another trolley as he sniffs, “So what do you want Shady?”

The waterbender’s twisted smile lives up to his name. He tsks, “Pah, the boss wanted me to bring you both in for the usual "talk" but...I persuaded him otherwise.”

“By?”

“Like I said, we’ve got a deal goin’ down tonight. No doubt our competitors’ve heard about it so we’re callin’ in all the bodies we can. And that includes you, Mr. Star-Athlete.”

"I've got a match tonight."

"It won’t be ‘til after. Plus, I'm sure you'll bring your A-game so this goes over smoothly."

A close-by trolley sounds its bell. Mako catches a glimpse of it in his peripheral vision. His jaw flexes as he says, "and if I refuse?"

"We all know you're smarter than that," Shady shakes his head. "But if it helps, the supervisor cried he'd get canned if the owner knew he hired any ex-traid. Got a real hard-on for us goodfellas."

The trolley pulls up and stops a few feet ahead. Mako eyes Shady Shin. "Where?"

"Cabbage Corp Docks.” Shady gives him his infamous slimy grin and pushes off his shoulder with a light pat. Mako boards the trolley and watches the three Triple Threats slitter back to Shady’s hotrod. As he climbs into the driver's seat, Shady calls out, “Good luck on your match, Champ."

Bolin’s gone from their dusty attic when game time comes around and having rested a few hours before soothed Mako of his headache.

He partially dresses in his gear; the rest in the locker room. The team’s waterbender, Hasook waits for him in the hall outside of the gym. He’s silent as he trails behind Mako dressed in a similar Pro-Bending uniform; a thick, neck-high protective undershirt and matching tights, a long-sleeved jersey and loose trousers with attached shoulder, elbow, and knee pads, and a pair of light-weight flexible boots all in their team’s white, red, and orange colors. The only differences are the few strips of color marking them as a water, fire, or earthbender.

The faint hum of the cheering crowds gathered to watch barely registers over the sound of his brother’s boisterous laugh coming from the locker room. The two benders enter to see Bolin with the Avatar laughing and leaning against the opened stadium railing.

“Aw man you’re lucky you’re the Avatar,” Bolin says, “you’d prolly be locked up for a while with the mess that fight caused.”

The Avatar shrugs and clicks her tongue. “Yeah, it’s nice to have “connections” in the city.

Connections my ass.

Mako takes a silent deep breath through his nose. Upon his exhale, he becomes “Team Captain” and tunes out the rest of their chatter as he opens his small locker and starts strapping on his padded fingerless gloves. His mind goes blank; empty for a few minutes before the light above the locker doorway signals the team to step out onto the platform.

He grabs his helmet, shuts the locker, and walks towards the platform, ignoring the Avatar as she says, “Hey thanks for your guys attempt at helping me out. I obviously didn’t need it, but I still appreciate the thought.“

“Come on, Bolin,” he says, “we're up.”

“Yeah, sorry about that,” Mako hears Bolin tell her as he walks away from them, “my brother just gets real... focused before the match.”

Focused?

Focused would have gotten me that police report. Focused wouldn’t have gotten me pulled into shit with Shady.

Focused...focused would have saved-bury it away, Champ!

The thick padding of Mako’s helmet muffles Bolin’s quick footsteps as he jogs onto the platform with the rest of their team. From his peripheral vision, his brother stretches to psych himself up. This is just another game for him. Hasook on his other side looks like he’d rather be anywhere else but here. Mako buries his annoyance. He figured something like this with him was coming sooner or later. He just didn’t think it’d be right as the fucking match starts.

The stadium goes dark. The crowd’s hum gets louder. Spotlights from the ceiling shine down on the playing field. Rising from the platform in the middle, the announcer raises his microphone, points to one end of the field where an extending platform carries the three Fire Ferrets forward, and shouts to introduce them.

Bolin’s obnoxious fangirls are somehow the loudest in the full house. The crowd roars and applauds. For an insignificant-unwanted-moment, Mako wishes it was really for him; that the people actually wanted him.

But he knows...

Pro-Bending...the power plant. These are the only ways a firebender like me gets accepted in this fucking city.

And acceptance is key to his and his brother’s survival. So like a good little firebender, he salutes and waves to the crowd with a small smile.

The two teams line up on either side of the field's centerline and assume Bending stances; hunched forward, knees slightly bent and fists held high. Mako eyes his opponents, The Tigerdillos; older benders with several more games under their belts than them. But his team wants this win more. They need two more wins to enter the tournament. He takes a deep breath, feeling his chi energies flow; the heat builds in his stomach and spreads out to his limbs, pooling at his fingers and toes.

Focus.

The bell clangs and the two teams leap back to the back of their first 'zone', flinging elements at each other. Mako kicks out a burst of flames at his target while Bolin and Hasook deal with theirs.

Cool-under-fire.

He keeps his fists up to protect his head as he dips out of the way of an earth disk and flame blast. The elements whistle past his head. He takes a quick inhale and counters on the exhale with two fiery jabs. A stream of water and another disk fly at him. He keeps his elbows tight as they fly past his head then inhales deeply this time to send out a powerful fireball. The attack barely misses the middle Tigerdillo and the other two come forward to strike at Hasook and Bolin. Both attacks land, pushing them into the second zone.

The buzzer sounds and the zone border lights up.

The Tigerdillos advance on Mako. He dodges their attacks with a few backflips, but an earth disk hits him square in the gut. All the protective padding absorbs the painful force but the impact still sends him sliding back. One foot just over the zone's backline.

Buzzer.

He stifles a snarl as the border lights up again.

The centerline of the field lights up green, giving the clear for all three Tigerdillos to advance into the Fire Ferret's first zone and the Pro-benders continue their attacks.

Bolin launches an earth disk that gets deflected back by the Tigerdillo’s earthbender. It hits Hasook, knocking him into the final zone.

Another buzzer.

The Tigerdillo waterbender kicks a disk of water at Mako and Bolin. The brothers dodge it, but Hasook is knocked off his feet. After another attack, he disappears from the field. Mako and Bolin brace together before splitting apart to dodge water and earth attacks. Bolin’s knocked into zone three. Mako follows shortly after taking a hit of his own.

Fuck. He doesn’t bother looking up at the score lights.

“Round one goes to the Golden Temple Tigerdillos!” The Announcer shouts as the bell clangs repeatedly and the crowd hollers.

The brothers take their places back in their first zone as their waterbender rejoins them.

Mako tilts his head to him and says, “come on Hasook, get your act together.”

The bell clangs and the next round starts. The Tigerdillos line up to send consecutive attacks. All three connect with the Ferrets and immediately push them back into the next zone, but they quickly counter, pushing the opposing team all the way into their last zone, winning them the round.

Bolin and Hasook cheer. Mako ignores them and uses the break to try to catch his breath.

The last round starts. Both teams leap back at the bell. The Tigerdillo waterbender targets Hasook. He dodges two attacks and nearly stumbles into Mako. Another attack pushes him into Bolin instead.

The two tumble onto the floor.

“Get up!” Mako shouts then sends out a few jabs.

The Tigerdillo earthbender kicks a disk at the two tangled Pro-benders, striking them as they're in the process of getting back up and both are sent flying out the back of the field, leaving Mako in a three-on-one showdown.

The Tigerdillo waterbender kicks a shot at Mako, who dodges under it. Additional attacks of all three elements come at him as he runs across the arena, ducking and spinning to avoid each one until he’s backed up against the edge of the field. Another step backward and he’ll be in The Drink with the rest of his team and another season cut short.

He pants. His ears throb from his quickened pulse. Sweat drips down his face.

‘Mako…’, he hears his mother whimper.

No... not now!

He tries to calm his breathing as the Tigerdillos advance. They’re relentless.

But Mako’s calm, bobbing and weaving and patient. He waits for his chance to strike. Waits for the Tigerdillos to wear themselves down.

Always waiting for the opportunity to come out on top.

There!

He twists out of the way of an attack and throws his own. The fireball passes right through the Tigerdillo waterbender's prepared attack, turning it to steam, slamming into his chest, and tumbles straight over the back edge of the field.

The crowd’s roar vibrates through Mako’s veins. With it, he goes on the offensive. A heavy fireball jab. Two fiery flying kicks. And a deeper inhale to let out a massive flare generated with both arms extended. Although the remaining Tigerdillos block some of his attacks, their Firebender takes a hit, flies backward into the railing, and bounces out the back and into the water.

‘Mako-’

A red, buring haze falls over the world as Mako and the last standing Tigerdillo toss attacks with abandon. Both benders want this victory.

Mako needs it.

Earth and fire collide. Disks explode. Mako kicks a powerful flaming slash into the dust cloud. It connects with the Tigerdillo and pushes him back into his zone three.

Mako leaps into the dust cloud with a flaming fist. He strikes the Tigerdillo’s earth desk. A wave of flames shatters his pathetic shield; the impact sends him crashing over the edge of the field.

The bell clangs.

The game ends.

The arena trembles with the crowds’ thunderous cheers.

And the Fire Ferrets' firebender stands alone in utter silence.

‘Promise me…’

He lets out a short sigh of relief, becoming “Team Captain” again, and pulls off his helmet to gaze out at the cheering crowd before stepping back to the extending platform to return to the locker room.

Hasook joins him on the platform as it moves. “Well played, Captain. But if you wanted to show off, you could have just told us.”

“You serious right now?” Mako side-eyes him then keeps his focus ahead. “Yeah, I carried your ass since you did more harm than good out there and almost cost us the match,” Mako sneers as they reach the locker room.

Hasook rips off his helmet and scoffs, “We fucking won didn't we?”

“Barely.”

“Fuck off!” Hasook throws his helmet to the floor with a growl and stomps out of the locker room.

“Useless.”

“You guys were incredible out there,” the Avatar says, souring his mood. “Especially you, Mr. Hat Trick.”

He walks past her without a glance. “Oh... you're still here? Thought you’d have Avatar stuff to work on.”

“Oh, you're still a jerk?” She mocks, “don’t you have people skills to work on Team Captain?”

“Ooh and the Avatar showcases her firebending with a sick burn, ha ha,” Bolin laughs.

Mako fights with the straps of his gloves as the Avatar continues. “Anyway, I've been immersed in Bending my entire life but I never learned how to move like that. It's like there's a whole new style here. Think you could show me a few tricks?”

“Ab-so-lutely,” his brother sings.

Having stripped off his gloves and stored them and the helmet back in the locker, Mako heads out to leave the room and says, “You kids have fun with that.”

The Avatar scoffs, “Pft kids? Aren’t you like, what, seventeen?”

“Eighteen,” Bolin corrects, then asks, “Mako, you’re not gonna watch me-your little brother-teach the Avatar...ya know, “master of all four elements”, some of my earthbending tricks? Seriously bro?”

Mako pauses. His back is to them. His brother can’t see his smirk fade into a restrained frown. “Nah,” he shrugs, “gonna see a guy about some job.” He holds up a hand in a half-wave as he steps out of the room. “Nice to meet you... Avatar Korra.”

After a quick shower and change of clothes, Mako barely takes two steps out of the arena’s peninsula when he sees Shady Shin already waiting for him in his hotrod.

“Killer game, Champ,” Shady whistles. He flicks away his cigarette butt as Mako gets in the passenger seat.

“I thought we were meeting there,” Mako says. He leans an arm on the door and keeps his head low.

“And miss my boys’ game, not a chance,” he smirks.

The tires squeal as he rips downs the street. The golden glow from the Pro-Bending arena is replaced by Downtown's bright lights. It’s close to midnight, but Republic City never sleeps. Night only brings out the downtrodden side everyone pretends doesn’t exist. Traffic is chaotic, not that it matters much with Shady’s driving. He weaves between cars, inching them closer to their destination.

“You’re awfully quiet,” Shady drawls from the corner of his mouth, “thought you’d be peppier after your big win, just one more right?”

“Mhm,” Mako says indifferently. He adjusts his long legs, fixing a fold in one of his knee-high spats, and says nothing else.

“Always so serious, kid. Eh, maybe it's good. Keep yourself level-headed huh?”

Shady pulls in behind the docks of Cabbage Corp; the city’s first automobile manufacturer; gone downhill since Future Industries created a monopoly off all the city’s technology. Two moving trucks come from another direction and park between some stacked high shipping containers. Ping and Mushi-two of the other Triple Threat officers-hop out. Some of Shady’s low ranking henchmen jump out from the back of the trucks.

Shady parks a few feet away. Mako follows him out of the car. He shoves his hands in his pockets and scoffs, “You called half the crew, the fuck you need me for?”

“The extra firepower’s nice, but really... we just need your “Jazz Hands”, kid, in case these guys feel like wisin’ up.”

Typical.

“Zolt’s too caught up ruling his empire, he can’t do it himself?”

“What can I say, he’s a busy man.”

The two join the rest of the gang huddled around the trucks. Shady Shin checks in with Mushi then tells the rest of those gathered to be on guard of their dealers. Mako’s greeted with enthusiastic praise for the Fire Ferrets’ win. Several non-benders gush about the play-by-play they heard on the radio.

“Ey, hold on. How come your little bro’s gettin’ more tail than you?" One of them snickers.

“He ain’t getting shit,” Mako sniffs, crossing his arms and leaning against the hood of one of the trucks.

“True, he’s too much of a chump,” Mushi laughs wickedly. Some of the guys chuckle.

“Alright, but what’s the deal with you, Mr. Big Shot?” Another Triple Threat eyes him with a gap-toothed grin. “You had that prissy eye-candy for a while there-uhh-” He snaps his fingers trying to remember.

Shady says, “Mr. Sato’s girl. You lose your game with’er, Champ?”

“No,” Mako says as he shifts his weight to his other leg, “it just didn’t work out.” A universal echo of disappointment ripples through the gathered men.

“Eh, it’s cuz he’s a chump...like his brother,” Ping croaked as the groans and boos died down.

“Oh yeah?” Mako softly challenges.

“Yeah,” Ping repeats himself then lights a cigarette. “Man...skills like yours, I’d have dames left and right; one for every day of the week.” He whips around, starts dry humping the truck’s headlight and in a high pitched scratchy voice moans, “Ooh, Ping! Ahh...you’re soo much better than that little prick Mako...mmm, ahh!”

The other Triple Threat screech and holler at Mako’s expense.

He takes a flask from an older earthbender and says, “A partner helps, but nothing’s stopping you from practicing by yourself. Oh, shit wait-you meant firebending? Nevermind mind then, can’t help you there. Sorry.”

That earns him a few chuckles from some of the older Triple Threat members. Ping flicks his still-lit cigarette away. Mako uncaringly takes a swig from the flask and passes it to his right. The liquor pricks down his throat. Numb. Just like he wants to be for the situation Bolin unknowingly dragged him into.

Shady Shin whistles everyone to attention as a few Cabbage Corp trucks pull up to them. Shady and the other officers form a half-circle in front of them. Mako stays towards the back with the rest of the Triple Threats. He takes another swig of the flask when it makes its way around again. It drowns his long ignored and buried loneliness.

A couple of guys dressed in the business’s jumpsuits get out of their trucks. The lead dealer walks up to Shady. Mako doesn’t hear what they're saying nor does he really care. The dealer signals for one of his people to unload the truck. They push over a few crates of boxed car parts. Shady stops one and has them open it. Mushi’s hulking figure steps up to one. His hand disappears into the box.

Then it clicks in Mako’s head. There’s a reason Shady’s putting so much trust in the giant earthbender. Mushi pulls his massive hand out of the box. A small amount of pale green powder sits underneath his disgusting long pinky nail that he dumps onto the tip of his equally disgusting tongue.

Mushi pulls his lips back over his gums like a beast. “It’s good boss.”

Duffle bags packed with stacks of yuans exchange hands. The Triple Threat peons load the crates into their trucks. With the deal done, the Cabbage Corps guys scatter. Mako’s left disappointed, leaning against the hotrod as the Triple Threat’s recruiter dismisses the rest of his gang.

Shady returns to the car. “Looks like we didn’t need you at all, my bad, Champ.”

“Figures…”

Shady pulls out a roll of yuans from his pocket and tosses it to him. “Think of it as an investment into your future.”

“Don’t bother. I’ve got it covered,” Mako says, tosses it back, and walks away.

“You mean the plant,” Shady calls out. “You’re no more a machine to them than the piles of scrap metal they use your bending to power Mako...you know the Boss’ll take you back. No questions asked.” The young firebender stops in his tracks. Shady presses. “It’s a long walk to the arena…”

Mako stands far enough away that Shady can’t hear his defeated sigh. He calls out over his shoulder, “I can manage.”

Pale rising scarlet paints the sky by the time he gets back to the arena. Bolin’s snoring reaches the gym floor as he walks in. His footsteps on the creaky stairs don’t wake his heavy sleeper brother. Pabu chirps as Mako reaches the top step into their apartment. The little fire ferret pokes his head out from his owner’s loft. Mako holds his finger up to his lips to urge the critter to go back to sleep.

He strips down to his old, torn white tank top and faded, striped boxers then crawls up the ladder to his separate loft. He flops down on his thin, lumpy mattress. Pride and shame battle over his decision to toss back Shady’s cash.

It could've been enough to get them out of their living situation. But it was dirty money. He spent the last three years trying to do right by his brother. Tonight he came close to crossing his line.

His eyelids grow heavy and his head lightweight as the last of his energy slips from his body.

There isn’t enough to push her voice away again.

‘Mako...promise me, you’ll keep him safe.’

He swallows the sand in his throat and blinks away the stinging at the corner of his tired eyes as his lids finally fall.

#fanfic #lok #lok fanfic #legend of korra #legend of korra fanfic #mako #lok mako #legend of korra mako #mako fanfic #mako headcanon #ao3 #ffn.net #Wattpad

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arcadenemesis · 6 years

Text

Happy Holidays and to those who celebrate it, Merry Christmas! My terrible gift to you is another chapter of this mess.

Laws of The Universe

[ao3 link] words: 10k, ch: 3/6

Chapter 3: Motion

3AM blinked at him in angry red, as if admonishing him for still being conscious at such an absurd hour. His trip to the Garrison Space Centre had been brief and frustrating, impeded by the presence of the case’s lead detective and Prosecutor Holt. He had barely had a chance to question any Centre employees or inspect the crime scene before Holt had ordered him off-premises, furious and intimidating even shackled in his heavy handcuffs. Shiro was still at a loss as to how the man was heading the case against Kolivan. As far as he understood it, the jailbird Prosecutor was on death row for the murder of a gifted robotics technician seven years ago at the very same Centre. His father, no less. Never minding the sheer mind boggling aspect that the man was somehow still legally allowed to practice law, it just seemed in poor taste for him to be leading the case for another murder at the Centre all these years later.

Shiro shook his head, trying to refocus. The decisions of the District Attorney’s office were none of his concern, and he could waste his time pondering the ethics involved in the loopholes later - after he had solved Keith’s murder. The answer had to be here, somewhere in the mountain of evidence from the Garrison Centre. Somehow the pieces of the puzzle still floated around him though, staying just out of his reach so he couldn't start fitting them together. He pinched his eyes closed in frustration, reaching up to grip his bandaged shoulder. He could almost picture Keith scolding him now, a fond turn of his lips undermining his tone.

“Idiot.” His voice was quiet and low. Intimately so. “You need to rest. Even the Voltron Law Office’s brightest star can’t keep solving cases on no sleep.”

He leaned in, and Shiro could smell the faint mix of lemongrass and motor oil that belonged only to him, feel the warmth of skin as he reached out to touch…

Shiro startled himself awake, head whipping to the clock on the desk. 3:04AM. His eyes shot back to the empty space before him, trying to stop his chest from heaving and fighting the itch in his throat.

It was at a moment like this he wish he had some kind of vice - alcohol, a tendency for reckless daredevil activities, anything - to keep him running from the reality of everything that had happened these last few days. He ran his hand over his face, stubble scratching at his palm, and turned back to his stone cold coffee. The spilled contents of his case file strewn across the desk gave him pause and he released a humourless sound.

Maybe he really did have a vice after all.

"What's going in that head of yours there, Supernova?”

Keith blinked at the nickname, eyes refocusing on Shiro again. “Ah… um, it's just, I realised…” He turned his attention back to the wrench, tightening the front wheel axle. He took his time to complete his thought while Shiro waited patiently. “I guess I only just realised I've known you longer now than I knew my dad.”

Shiro stopped still. For him, they had passed that milestone very early in their friendship with little fanfare. But only because he hadn't had a chance to know his parents at all. The moment for Keith would undeniably hold far more weight, and Shiro was at a loss for what to say.

“Keith…” he started, hoping the words would just come.

The budding astronaut looked up to him with a smile, wiping the sweat from his forehead, only to smear it with the grease on the back of his glove. “I'm fine,” and Shiro felt a swell of pride. “I guess I'm just glad that you're still here.”

Shiro placed a hand on his shoulder, squeezing. “I always will be,” he said seriously.

Keith reached up to place a hand over Shiro’s briefly with a smile. But when he tried to turn back to his bike, Shiro captured his chin gently. Caught off-guard for a moment, he quickly levelled him with a suspicious glare. “What are you doing?”

In reality, Shiro was trying not to internally combust over how easily Keith's jaw fit in the palm of his hand. Or how soft and warm his skin was under his fingers. Instead, he calmly plucked the clean rag off of the motorcycle seat. “Hold still, you've got shit all over your face.”

Keith's immediate reaction of course was to squirm away. “Get off me! I'm not a baby!” he protested as Shiro tried to grip him a little more forcefully into place.

“Don't be a pain in the ass, I'm just trying to hel—ah!!”

The yelp - one that Shiro was definitely going to deny making later - came out about two octaves higher than he would ever care to admit physically possible as Keith threw an elbow into his solar plexus, trying to knock him down. Briefly they wrestled, and early Shiro had the upper hand easily. But in a moment of real fear that Keith would abandon the sentiment of two minutes ago to skin him alive if he knocked over his beloved bike, Shiro found himself pinned to the floor, with 170 pounds of amateur mechanic planted firmly on his stomach.

“Idiot,” Keith said almost fondly, before pulling the hem of Shiro's cotton shirt up to his face to wipe it clean.

“H-hey!” he complained, furiously fighting down the electric hum that had settled under his skin. The vision of Keith above him like this was far too much for his latent feelings to handle. If he didn't get control again soon, Shiro knew his body would betray him in the worst way. But before he could think of a way to dislodge him in a way that wouldn't involve recklessly grabbing hold his hips, Keith jumped away, watching with a grin as the law student curled up to take note of the damage to his shirt.

“Don't get that on my bike.”

“Really?” Shiro gave him a dry look, releasing the material. His next words left him before his mind caught up. “I could take it off it it bothers you so much.”

Keith’s eyes widened ever so slightly, before he quickly spun on his heels to return to the bike with a scowl. “Don't be dumb.”

Quickly laughing the comment off, Shiro jumped up to his feet. Keith half-heartedly shoved him off as he scruffed at his hair, returning to the other side of the bike.

“Try to be useful,” the younger man teased, tossing the cleaning rag at Shiro’s face. “Pass me that screwdriver.”

The two worked in silence for hours, Shiro stealing glances at the easy smile on Keith’s lips. His love for his bike was second only to his love for space, and Shiro took joy at observing it from such close proximity. He knew to see him like this was a privilege that no one else had. And he treasured it dearly. He was loathe to interrupt it, but it had to be getting late.

“We should wrap up, Keith.”

He didn’t look up. “Another thirty.”

Shiro leaned back with a sigh. “Come on, surely you’re hungry.”

All he received in response was a shrug.

“Okay, well I’m hungry.”

Keith glanced up guiltily at that, putting down his tools immediately and wiping his hands on his jeans. "I have something stashed in the mini fridge. Give me a sec. I’ll meet you on the roof.”

When Shiro pulled up the roller door, he was surprised to find it was already dark outside. Keith followed him up onto the roof only a few minutes later, tossing something foil-wrapped and cold at him. Stomach growling, he ripped the foil off, biting into it indiscriminately. He gave a muffled sound of approval while Keith just shook his head with a quiet laugh, unwrapping his own parcel with a little more care.

”Whoever came up with the idea of meatballs... in a sub... was honestly a genius.” Shiro turned his face up as if to thank the heavens for his blessed sandwich, chewing reverently. “Mm... stars look beautiful tonight. You know what else is beautiful?”

Keith gave him a judgemental look over his own mouthful.

“Meatball subs?” he asked, deadpan.

“Meatball subs!” Shiro cried back.

Keith just rolled his eyes, hiding a smile behind his sandwich.

“Idiot.”

The shock of sunlight told Shiro he had fallen asleep properly at some point, but a cursory glance at the clock told him it was no more than 3 hours at an optimistic guess. If he had dreamed of Keith again, or the explosion, his mind had mercifully wiped it from memory. A sharp twinge down to a fist he couldn't form reminded him he was well past time for his next dosage, powering him upright past the fog in his mind to stumble into the kitchenette where he dry swallowed two more little white pills.

Waiting for the chemicals to kick in, he headed for the bathroom and started stripping down to shower, praying the warm water would bring some relief. It was still a clumsy affair alone. He was far from mastering his tasks one-handed, but he did so with a clinical detachment, as if it wasn't his own shortened arm that he was unbandaging. He stared past the sewn skin and staples as the gauze came away, turning the hot water all the way up and stepping into the spray. His skin prickled under the temperature, mottling pink immediately, and the cut over his nose stung as though fresh. He let his head hang, water cascading in rivers down to his chin as his body started to shake and heat rose behind his eyes. He squeezed them shut tightly, fighting the sensation. Bracing his fist against the shower wall, he waited there until the medically-induced numbness finally took over.

Tying the new bandage off was an exhausting exercise, completed only by holding one end between his teeth as he pulled the other tight. It was hardly hospital-grade hygienic practice, but with limited options, at least it got the job done. Frustration had spotted his lashes wet by the time he finished, but he resolutely kept his mind on task, knowing it brought him one step closer to his investigation.

He took the opportunity to go over the case file and autopsy report again during the equally slow task of getting dressed. The moment his top button was fastened, he hastily gathered it all up, shoving the documents into a shoulder bag. He paused in his rush out the door when a flash of red caught the corner of his eye. The sight of Keith's jacket laid delicately on kitchen chair made his heart squeeze painfully. He moved to it and picked it up with infinite care, stopping still to bring the collar to his lips, closing his eyes. With a shaky breath, he gathered himself, holding tight as he continued on his path.

‘Have you been here before?’

Shiro's own question echoed in his mind as he walked the steps up to the Garrison Space Centre. It had only been five days since he had last grimly taken this journey, Pidge falling out of step beside him.

‘Ah… no. Of course not,’ he heard the ghost of her voice reply. A throb went down his absent arm again. 'We should hurry…’

“Hey, hold it there! Wait up!”

Shiro suppressed a curse, recognising the voice from the previous afternoon. Turning around, he saw the owner running up the stairs and steeled his tone. “Detective,” he greeted, clipped, as the man doubled over to catch his breath, hands on his knees.

The other man looked up with a grin, still panting. “Shirogane, right? One of Voltron’s for the defense today?”

“Not at this moment,” Shiro replied, trying to sound disinterested. “We decided to… go our separate ways for now.”

The man straightened but planted his hands on the back of his hips, still visibly puffed. Shiro frowned. Weren't detectives meant to maintain some level of physical fitness? This guy was absolutely hopeless. “Oh… Well, Prosecutor Holt did ask that you not interfere when he saw you yesterday…”

Understatement of the Universe. Holt had been livid to find a defense attorney on his - quote, unquote - crime scene. The string of insults and threats that had followed had been more than enough to drive Shiro away, still honestly a little creeped out by the iron shackles on the man's wrists. Even the surrounding officers assigned to the jailed Prosecutor had seemed uncomfortable. Shiro braced himself to defend his presence better this time.

“But I mean, I could always keep an eye on your investigation if you're here while court is in-session. All in the name of justice.” The detective tapped his nose. “What Prosecutor Holt doesn't know won't hurt him. Just don't mess with anything, otherwise I'll have you kicked out of here immediately.”

Shiro's surprise was palpable. “I— uh, yes of course,” he replied dumbly. Having a shadow during his investigation was less than ideal, but it beat being booted from the Centre for the second day in a row. Besides… Shiro was fairly sure he'd be able to lose this guy by the end of the day. He didn't strike him as particularly bright…

The detective beamed up to him none the wiser, gesturing forward. “Lead the way.”

Forty-two minutes and one furious phone call straight from the Courthouse later, Shiro found himself free to wander as he pleased. He felt an absent flood of triumph when he had heard Holt shouting down the line from his spot a good seven feet away from where the detective had been standing. Apparently Allura had found evidence that had blown the case right open, and now Holt was clawing for his own to snap it shut again. It had just been a matter of waiting silently in the background while the flustered detective had desperately tried to placate his boss, running off to search another area on his orders.

Shiro stepped quietly into Boarding Lounge One, nodding to the sole officer guarding the scene. When they made no effort to immediately remove him, Shiro cast his eyes over the room. Not much had changed since his last visit, in those first few hours after the phone call that changed his life. The holographic display on the walls was still set to a splendid and entirely fantastical view of Saturn's rings from Titan. By the stationed officer, there was a control pad that led to the corridor of Launch Pad One. But Shiro felt his eyes drawn away and down to the white tape laid out on the ground to his left.

It was a surreal feeling as he approached, trying to imagine Keith lying in the shape of the outline. He kneeled beside it, careful not to disturb the evidence, and removed his satchel from his shoulder. Wincing a little, he readjusted his sling so the remainder of his right arm rested a little more comfortably against his body.

It was quick, the coroner had told him. Keith had been barely conscious when he had arrived in the lounge, having been caught in the catastrophic explosion at the HAT-2 rocket just before launch. He had endured through physical exhaustion to carry both Kolivan and precious moon rock samples from a mission seven years prior back to safety. Whoever had buried that knife in his chest had caught him unaware, and he had been dead before he hit the ground. Small mercies, they told him.

Shiro disagreed wholeheartedly.

Keith had always been full of fire. Someone who never took no for an answer and threw himself headfirst into every challenge that came his way, no matter how bleak the odds. Given even half the chance, he would have fought. God, he would have fought. And Shiro had no doubt he could have overcome. To have his opportunity to defend his life stripped away was the cruellest reality of all.

His head whipped up when he heard the hiss of a door opening, blinking away the moisture that had sprung to his eyes. But instead of the detective, Shiro saw two figures peering into the lounge. Both wore uniforms of the Garrison Centre and the larger one appeared rather on edge as his companion scanned the room from around the corner with a shifty look. Clearly he was here to pry while the lead detective was otherwise occupied. He locked gazes with Shiro and suddenly he straightened with wide eyes, yelping when his scramble to escape was immediately thwarted by running straight into his buddy. The big guy made a similarly embarrassing noise, but didn't even stumble as Agent One of the World's Worst Spy Duo bounced off of him and onto the floor.

“Hunk…” he heard him whine.

Shiro was over to them far quicker than he had any right to be with his injuries, pulling the guy up by the scruff of his blue collar. “Who are you and what are you doing at the crime scene?”

Great, now he was sounding like Prosecutor Holt.

“You sound like that grumpy convict Prosecutor.”

If Shiro had a hand to spare, he would have pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Lance,” the big guy whispered behind his hand, and Shiro deduced that subtlety was clearly not a skill taught at the Garrison, “it's the guy from Keith’s desk photo. He's got an attorney’s badge too.”

Shiro's heart jolted again, deciding not to unpack that remark for now. “Hunk and Lance then,” he sighed, releasing Lance’s jacket. He cast his mind back to the profiles of the Garrison employees in his case file, drawing the names from his memory. Lance McClain, 20. Another one of the Centre’s young astronauts. A grumpy pout sullied his angular features as he fixed his short brown hair and straightened his clothes. And Hunk Garrett, also 20. Not an astronaut but a robotics engineer. A nervous but friendly face who stood almost as tall as Shiro, but with a least 50 pounds on him. He looked like he couldn't hurt a fly. “This area is off-limits to staff until the conclusion of the investigation. Why are you here?”

Hunk broke into a sweat instantly, eyes darting around anxiously. Taking one look at him, Lance’s expression switched to exasperated pity and he took charge. “Look, don't tell Chief Iverson but Robo-boy here has lost one of his Robo-kids.”

Shiro raised a skeptical eyebrow and Lance continued sheepishly, throwing up his hands.

“And yeah okay, maybe I volunteered to help because it meant I could snoop around a little too. Sue me.” He froze then, hands still in the air, eyes fixing on the attorney’s badge on Shiro's lapel. “Ha… actually please don't.”

Shiro stared at him a moment, before deciding to move on without comment. He turned his attention to Hunk behind him. “So you lost a piece of Garrison tech and didn't tell the police?” He fought to keep his voice even and calm. “What's to say it's even here anyway? The culprit in this case could have intercepted it and moved it off-site.”

Hunk gulped. “Actually,” he pulled out a small handheld display, “all robots in the Centre are fitted with a GPS. This one is a little damaged it seems, so I can't get an accurate read, but it's definitely on this side of the centre.” He turned the display around to hand to Shiro. “See? Nothing wrong. But if Iverson finds out it's been missing then he'll tear me to shreds.”

The thought of a guy as big as Hunk cowering under the wrath of the Centre Chief was… amusing. Iverson was a man who looked like he had fought wars with his bare hands - and won - but he was a little long in the tooth, and his ambitions for space exploration gave him a bit of an eccentric vibe. Shiro knew he had been a thorn in Keith’s side at times, but was otherwise harmless, and frequently ceded to the will of the Centre’s top scientists and investors. A dog with a bark, but no bite. Shiro was curious now though. With no new real leads over the last few hours, he was willing to follow up anything. “In that case, let me help you find it. Have you been able to check the corridor to Launch Pad One?” Both men shook their heads. Shiro glanced conspiratorially toward the officer posted at the door on the other side of the room. “I'm going to get you past that guard.” He returned back to the body outline where he had left his bag, but as he stooped, a large hand crossed his vision to take hold of the strap.

“Let me.” Shiro saw Hunk eye his sling briefly, but his expression was kind and - relievingly - devoid of pity. “This way it looks like we're the ones helping you instead of the other way around.”

Shiro knew it wasn't the primary reason the engineer had taken up his bag, but he appreciated it nonetheless. “Good call,” he smiled, adjusting his jacket instead. He saw Lance’s stare as he turned, fixed suddenly on his arm as if only just seeing it for the first time.

‘Not the most observant one then…’

The look of abject horror was equal parts darkly humorous and nauseating. Shiro could see the question charging on his tongue.

“Follow me and don't say anything,” he intercepted quietly.

His lips snapped shut at that. Shiro thanked God for small mercies. With as much purpose as he could muster, he strode over to the officer. He steeled himself, preparing to be shut down immediately. ‘You can do this Shiro,’ he told himself. ‘You make your living out of bluffing your way through tricky situations. It's just one guard...’ But barely a dozen words and a glance at his badge and suddenly they were being waved through into the corridor. ‘Either I'm getting good, or the Department is getting slack… Probably the latter.’ The door closed with a soft hiss and Shiro turned to face his two new companions. “Right, so—"

“You're missing an arm!!”

Hunk turned a look of pure dismay onto Lance at his outburst.

“I'm sorry!” the young astronaut screeched defensively, arms flailing. “But, I mean come on! It's just… not there!”

Hunk actually looked green, obviously humiliated. “Lance… please…”

“It's fine,” Shiro interjected with a rueful smile. “There was a bombing at the Courthouse four days ago.”

“Another bombing?” Hunk breathed, wide-eyed.

“Four days!?”

Shiro nodded to Hunk, deciding ignoring Lance flat out was the most productive course of action. “Yes. Same as the one that went off here and stopped the launch,” he said. “I was heading up the defence when the countdown reactivated.” He looked to Lance, who was now gaping openly at him. “Only casualty though,” he said wryly, waving the stump of his arm ever so slightly. He felt a wave of dark amusement as the astronaut responded with a muffled screech.

“You were Kolivan’s attorney…” Hunk realised. “Then that's why his case was postponed.”

Shiro peeled his eyes away from where Lance was short-circuiting. “It restarted today, actually.”

“Huh?” Lance had unfortunately found his voice again. “But if you were his attorney, then why are you here?” He blinked, deciding to amend. “Actually scrap that, why aren't you in hospital?!”

Shiro felt his usually enduring patience starting to run thin. “Long story,” he said, voice clipped.

“Keith,” Hunk said quietly, understanding.

Shiro swallowed through the tightness in his throat. “... Let's find this robot of yours.”

#sheith #fanfic #ace attorney au #takashi shirogane #keith kogane #vld #lotu #all i want for christmas is to finish this damn story.......

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multi-fandom-inserts · 7 years

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Babygirl

Reader x No-one... YET!

Author Note; Hello my loves, I’ve missed you, here’s something I’ve been working on. Let me know who you want the reader paired with as this will be a series ;)

Warnings: Violence !

Belle Reve is a maximum security prison for those deemed a threat to everyone, it housed some of the most dangerous people in the world, including yourself. Your cell was lace in the middle of a huge, vacant room that had a long strip of reinforced balcony running along it's perimeter, the room itself had a large steal door locked from the outside with no windows, no view to the outside world. Your cell was a large bared room with walls 12 x 14 meters with high ceilings containing a shit thin mattress bed with scratchy blankets and cardboard thin pillows, a toilet and sink and a stack of books that guards allowed you to keep in your cell.

Attached to your cell on the right hand side was an identical cell housing one of the most psychotic and dangerous woman in the world – Harley Quinn – the prison warden had housed you together in the hope it would cause a bitch fight, little did they know that you were the Joker's little sister.

Harley and you had hung out plenty of times before, every time J was out doing business neither Harley or you were allowed to help in, you two hung out, didn't matter if it was in J's club or at your apartment and got along like a house on fire, both as crazy and fearless as each other but the days had turned into weeks, then months and both of you were getting incredible restless.

You scratched the days you've been in Belle Reve on the floor of your cell: 145 days in total. You sat on the edge of your cell smoking a cigarette next to Harley as she pricked a needle that had been dipped in ink into your ankle. You had a lot of tattoos, full sleeves on your arms, one vine slipping up your neck and plenty totted on your legs with your trade mark “BABYGIRL” tattoo across your knuckles and a tiger on your abdomen but unlike Harley you have non on your face, an order from your older brother, he had said plenty of times that your face was too beautiful to taint with ink. It was no secret you were beautiful, with shoulder-length blue hair and piercing Y/C/E eyes and porcelain skin.

“All done!” Harley sung as she put the needle down, she was surprisingly good at tattoos and you'd love to see what she did with a real tattoo gun, looking down at your ankle to see it's a black rose with “Harley” written through the vines and leafs.

Smirking, you tell her you love it. She giggles like a child before sitting against the cell wall bravely knowing it's electrified to keep you two apart but they only turn it on when we pose a threat to the guards – which is often.

The days were slow and boring, Harley was more like a child than you'd realised and was getting restless and you were getting more agitated keeping her entertained, in the outside world you had plenty of work to do that kept you from getting bored, admittedly, it was killing people but it was a job nonetheless. Harley rattled on the cell wall and chanted at the guard that walked along the balcony during our checks – they usually happen every hour – holding an automatic weapon aimed at us at all times.

On the 170th day though, something weird happened, the guards entered the room in a large number of fifteen, all with guns and riot gear on with thick helmets and goggles. A smirk settled on your lips at the sight of them, trouble was emerging and trouble you liked. You nipped a new cigarette between your lips and lit up, Harley had ripped her bed sheet up and was handing from the roof of her cell like a bat – pun intended considering it was Batman who put her and myself in here – the guards ordered her down and for my to get up from the floor.

We both refused the orders, they unlocked the cell and entered cautiously, guns aimed at you. The first guard that entered was one of the main guards, you recognised the sinister green eyes from all the times they tortured you for information on your brother, his large hand grabbed your shoulder sending you into defensive mode.

You slam your elbow done into the crook of his elbow, knocking his hand off your shoulder, the guard steps forward to throw his weight into a punch, you duck and dive your first into his stomach, just below his diaphragm into his chest. You slip past him, using his bent knee as a step up, wrap your leg around his neck to move yourself onto his shoulders, the guard yelled and panicked, but the fight had been boring and less than a challenge for you. Holding the guards head still, you turn it flawlessly, angling his chin upwards during the turn, snapping his neck like a twig.

Harley giggled as the guards body dropped to the floor causing the rest of the guards to fall back a little. Suddenly, a force knocked your chest sending you flying backwards into the bars of the cell, then a excruciating pain snatched your body making you tense and your jaw clench so hard you thought your teeth were going to break. Harley's scream snatched the room taking your attention from the pain in the centre of your chest and then suddenly it let up.

Looking over at Harley, she's laid out semi-conscious on the dirty cell floor, a gunshot echoed through the room snatching your attention from Harley to look at a tall man stood at the front of your cell holding a black handgun with smoke erupting from the top. He was tall, slightly tanned, very handsome with a goatee and short brown hair. He was dressed in a Special Forces uniform with a bulletproof vest and a automatic weapon in his right hand holster.

“Hey there, Cap-tin.” you smirking, drawing out the word “captain” to make fun, he was clearly in charge of the guards but he wasn't in charge of you or Harley.

“The name is Flag, Rick Flag,” he said sternly, “Not captain, it's Colonel.”

You let out a long and patronising 'oooh'. He smirked before stepping into your cell, grabbing you by the throat and dragging you from the cell and throwing you into a wheelchair. The guards acting quickly, strapping your legs and wrists into restrains and putting a strap around your throat to stop any unnecessary moving. You managed to get a glimpse of Harley before being wheeled out. They had strapped her to an upright board with far more straps and restrains.

The guards lined you both up before the large metal doors as they slowly began to open, you felt a sharp prick on the left side of your neck and then you heard Harley squeak. Your vision became blurred and then everything went black.

You came too just as the light hit your face, your vision cleared quickly and before you knew it, you were outside for the first time in 170 days. The warm weather was a blessing, the sun hit your face and the wind blew in your hair but this wasn't a time for celebration, why were you outside?

Before you had a chance to ask, the guards entered a paddock area filled with army dressed men, some had taken their jackets off but they all had weapons and were paused in a circle trying to contain something. The guard pushed you and Harley to the edge of the circle before undoing your restraints. Harley immediately jumped up and screamed, “Hello boys!” raising her arms above her head revealing her stomach.

You had thanked yourself silently for taking off your prison jacket, you would have baked in this heat otherwise, so instead you stood silently in a white, very short tank top and prison trousers that were an unflattering colour of orange, but as you examine the circle, you see two other men wearing similar inmates clothing. One was covered head to toes in strange tattoos, even his face was tattooed like a skull, his tanned skin and accent as he mumbled to himself suggested he was Mexican. The other man was dark skinned, bald with a thick black beard, you recognised him instantly from your killing days – his name is Floyd Lawton aka Deadshot, one of the best contract killers around.

“Hey baby-doll,” he smirks spotting you across the circle, he makes his way over to you, despite the grumble from the guards and sweeps you up in his arms for a hug, it's been almost a year and a half since you last saw him but I guess you know why now.

“What's going on?” you ask as he lets you go, but Floyd just shrugs. “How's Zoe?”

Floyd looked at his feet, knowing you didn't mean to hit a nerve with your question because you cared for the young girl, he would sometimes drop her round when he was called on a last minute mission and you never said no, he was thankful for that and always appreciated it. You'd formed a friendship and with you both being assassins, you knew one day, one of you would be sent to kill the other; it's just how it works out.

“Who's the man of tattoos?” you whisper.

Floyd shrugged, “Some guy who killed his family in a fire, apparently he can control it, pretty neat huh?”

“Klling the family or controlling fire?” you questioned earning a chuckle from Floyd, just then two more people appeared, one strapped to a board like Harley, covered in scales and slime – Killer Croc – they let him go but not before strapping a thick black collar around his neck. The second was a dirty looking man, built with huge muscles, a messy beard and an annoying accident, when they removed him from the bag he flung himself at another guard knocking the poor guy out cold.

Impressed, you studied him gently as his eyes gobbled the image of you and Harley up. Pig, you thought as you moved back over to Harley who hugged you tightly as you leaned against one of the large containers. Eventually the last prick arrived, he was huge with large armour, as soon as he got out of the car, his fist slammed straight into a female guards face.

Without hesitation, you sprint and jump at the six-foot-five man, kicking him swiftly in the face before manoeuvring your body round his head and neck, to pull your body weight round, his body flipped over and fell to the ground whilst you landed on your feet and offered a hand to the female guard, she took it and you helped her up before you felt the cold barrel of a handgun press against your temple.

“Move away, Y/N.” Rick's voice echoed throughout the silent circle, putting your hands in his view, you moved away from the guard back to Harley who was cheering and jumping up and down like a cheerleader. “Okay, now you're all probably wondering what’s going on. Truth is, the government has decided that we need to fight evil with evil, and you guys are going somewhere very bad, to do something that's gonna get you killed. But until that happens, you're my problem.”

“Lucky you.” you mumble as he pulls out a tablet and holds it in front of us,

“And this is the voice of reason.” he says sternly, a image popped up on the screen but it was gone too quickly for you to see what it is. Then a woman popped up on the screen, she was stern looking with a headset on and dark, cold brown eyes, for a moment she was silent, gobbling up out image in prison clothing before speaking in a very authoritative voice;

“For those of you who do not know me, my name is Amanda Waller, there's an active terrorist event in Midway City. I want you to enter the city and rescue HVT1 and get them to safety. Complete the mission you get time off your prison sentences, fail the mission and you die.” she threatens, “If anything happens to Coronal Flagg, I will kill every single one of you. Remember I’m watching.”

“Looks like you got yourself a fan.” you tease with a smirk, the rest of the inmates giggled.

“Lady! Shut up!” Rick yells angrily making Harley jump beside me, he composes himself quickly, “You disobey me, you die. You try to escape, you die. You otherwise irritate of vex me and guess what? You die. Those collars my men are now putting round your neck is to ensure you death if you do any of what I just listed. It's collar is as powerful as a hand-grenade and can only be opened by my fingerprint.”

His men then drop a large trunk at each of our feet, our names are written on the top in marker, kicking yours open it reveals all your clothing and weapons you were arrested with. Smiling to yourself, you start to rummage through my items, taking off your clothes without much care of the men around you, you slip on a pair of flexible black jeans, a white crop top and a leather jacket – that J had given to you on your birthday – the only shoes you had were little black boots, there wasn't much of a heel but it didn't bother you, you had fought in much worse.

Your weapons hadn't been touched or damaged, clipping your holster round your waist and to your upper thighs, you slipped in your Glock handguns into the holsters, inside your leather jacket, you put your favourite four inch knife into the protected pocket.

“Won't fit anymore?” you heard Harley ask Floyd.

Looking up, you see Floyd has out on his famous Deadshot outfit, a red catsuit that clung to every muscle he's got. You listen to their conversation as you wrap your hands in bandages like a boxer would before a fight, it helps with the impact of punches, hand-to-hand combat was your favourite, guns are to quick.

It was getting to five minutes before wheels up, everyone was finishing off with getting ready, Harley was putting on make up and insisted on putting some black lipstick on you so it would look nice with your hair. You wander over to the guy will all the tattoos, he was looking down at his palms in bewilderment.

“You okay?” you ask, he jumps a little before shoving his hands into his pocket, you smirk before nudge his arm and showing him your palms, in the centre of both you had a large snowflake tattooed, “You know, my ma, she just used to call my Ice Hands, before they were always so cold, here...” you say as you touch his hand with yours, his was super hot but yours were just above fridge cold. His heated eyes cooled down as he invited the cold, you stood there for a few minutes before the cold of your hands had gone warm and his cold.

“I'm Diablo,” he tells you, you smile kindly.

“I'm Y/N,” you tell him softly,

“AND I'M HARLEY QUINN!” Harley screamed jumping into the conversation, clearly thinking this was a meet-and-greet but the rest of us rolled with it, the scruffy man was called Boomerang and the prick that you dumped into the ground is called Slipknot. Killer Croc just wanted to be called Croc so you didn't press him for his real name.

“Let move, Suicide Squad!” a voice yelled over the paddock as a quinjets engine roared.

“Suicide Squad?” Floyd questioned as the rest of them mumbled.

You shrug, “Guess that's us,” you say not bothered at all by the name, better you die outside of Belle Reve than inside it's walls.

Taking Harley's hand the two of you kipped towards the quinjet, the rest of the team followed you, settling down in the seats of the jet, Floyd took the seat to the left of you, he smiled at you and touched your hand gently.

“Always check your six, babygirl.” he remains me before sitting back in his seat and signing loudly. Harley was yapping like normal to Croc who looked as thought he wanted to kill her already. Boomerang was being a pervert and staring you up and down as well as Harley.

But you pushed them all from your mind, this mission sounded dangerous and unlike anything you'd seen before, was this J having one of his jokes or an actual threat. You had no idea what to expect, non of you did but you had to suck up your doubt and put on a brave face.

It's survive or die, and you planned to live a long life.

#suicide squad #harley quinn #deadshot #captain boomerang #rick flag #reader insert #fandom insert #reader x character #the joker #joker #mr j

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flauntpage · 6 years

Text

Matt Riddle is Indie Wrestling's Stoner King

Matt Riddle puts on a track suit and flip-flops and stomps through slush in a Quality Inn parking lot north of Boston to circle up and smoke a joint that’s as stiff as a chicken bone. Passing left to Rico de la Vega, a ponytailed pro wrestler, and Abby the Butcher, a pseudonymous fan-turned-friend, Riddle looks and sounds less like a growing indie wrestling superhero, and more like a Southern California lifeguard sparking one up behind the snack bar.

Neither the slush nor the cannabis have an obvious effect on Riddle, who spends most weekends living out of a suitcase: Thursday he was in Florida, Friday in the United Kingdom, and Saturday night in Queens, where he stayed out until 4 or 5 AM before driving up to Massachusetts. Now, Riddle is passing time before a Sunday doubleheader in the town of Melrose. In the afternoon, he’ll ply his trade with indie promotion Beyond Wrestling. In the evening, he'll wrestle for the WWE feeder league Evolve Wrestling. Then it’s back home to Pennsylvania by morning, where he’ll watch Stranger Things with his three kids and maybe hit the gym once or twice before the traveling circus begins again next weekend.

“I’m not bitching like this lifestyle is so hard. It’s rough, it’s tough, but it’s extremely fun,” Riddle says. “Take into consideration I get to play-fight in my underwear every week, and I get paid very well to do it.”

Riddle’s life is, without exaggerating, ridiculous. One moment he’s pulling off suplexes to chants of “Bro! Bro! Bro!” The next, he’s eating a horrible looking Stromboli to replenish abs that, considering his lifestyle, are unfairly chiseled. But Riddle knows all of this. His self-awareness is evident as he opens up about his journey from the blood and treasure of the Ultimate Fighting Championship to the skivvies-based storytelling of pro wrestling.

In the UFC, Riddle was a 170-pound wunderkind—never rising above a prospect, but fighting three times a year and making good money during a dozen-fight stint that ended with four straight wins. Then came two failed drug screens. Now, he’s the King of Bros, one of the brightest prospects on the booming independent wrestling circuit, with an MMA-centric style that’s earned him wide praise and meetings with WWE higher-ups. Whether he ends up with wrestling’s standard-bearer depends on whether they can look beyond Riddle’s leafy past, or whether Riddle even wants to surrender his freedom and the six-figure income that he says he makes as an in-demand indie wrestler.

Whatever happens, Riddle is happier taking bumps in the squared circle than bleeding for Dana White.

“MMA is like the Colosseum in Rome: the fans want to see violence,” he says. “You might be their hometown guy, but if you get your jaw broken, they’re still gonna go crazy for the bloody knockout, you know? That’s fight culture. With wrestling, it’s more like theatre or a movie. And even though it’s a show and it’s entertainment, it’s just as difficult in its own right. I get more respect doing professional wrestling than I ever did in MMA.”

In a sleepless third-floor room strewn with suitcases, the conversation centers around shutting down a bar after last night’s show in Queens, and the designated driver vomiting up reheated Jamaican food during the early-morning drive. Abby, a bald, middle-aged Puerto Rican grandfather who befriended Riddle at the front end of his wrestling career, disappears then returns with orange juice and pastries, setting a continental breakfast next to some vape pens. De la Vega crawls under covers and begins snoring.

The King of Bros is unfazed by dawn. Riddle’s is a particular kind of bro-ness: not a frat-house misogynist or a curls-in-the-squat-rack meathead, but a worry-free party animal whose breeziness is infectious, and who disarms through self-deprecation. He talks about meeting Triple H, the executive vice president of talent at the WWE, at an Evolve show like it was a deleted scene from Super Troopers. “He came up to me and goes, ‘Hey Matt, I appreciate what you’re doing here,’ and I go, ‘I appreciate what you’re doing here.’ Then he said, ‘I wanna thank you for everything you’re doing,’ and I go, ‘I wanna thank you for everything you’re doing, Triple H.’ That was my elevator pitch—he probably thought I was an asshole.”

Riddle grew up in upstate New York, where as a teenager, he says he had a knack for skateboarding: he’d see a new trick once, then land it effortlessly. Riddle learned mixed martial arts the same way. In high school, he became state wrestling champion at 189 pounds—there’s a picture of him atop a wrestling podium a few platforms above Jon Jones, who is arguably the most talented (and self-destructive) MMA fighter ever. He picked up fighting by reading a B.J. Penn instructional book and ragdolling his roommate in their apartment.

He caught the UFC’s eye after a single amateur bout, and in 2008, debuted on The Ultimate Fighter 7 reality show as a goofy-grinned 22-year-old who shattered an opponent’s jaw. Afterward, Riddle bought a house in Vegas, got a Brazilian jiu-jitsu brown belt, sired three kids, and spent five years as a perennial UFC prospect, accumulating a 7-3-2 record.

That “-2” spelled the end of his UFC career. In 2012, after choking out Chris Clements, Riddle tested positive for marijuana, turning his win to a no contest. The following year, after a split-decision win over Che Mills, Riddle pissed hot again.

Weed has been a part of Riddle’s routine since he was a teenager, taking it illicitly as an alternative to his ADHD medication. “I did my research,” he says. “I’ve had hand surgeries, I’ve used pharmaceuticals, and I [eventually] felt like, ‘Holy shit, this is addicting and I shouldn’t be taking this because I want to take more and I’m not even in pain.’ Marijuana never felt like that. I just like the way it makes me feel. I’m about to be 32, I barely work out, and I’m shredded. I don’t think it’s because of the weed, but I don’t think it’s hurting me either, you know?”

"I’m about to be 32, I barely work out, and I’m shredded. I don’t think it’s because of the weed, but I don’t think it’s hurting me either, you know?”

Abstaining weeks before drug tests and holding a Nevada medical marijuana license didn’t save him. The UFC released Riddle from his contract. (Drug testing overhauls would eventually relax standards around marijuana use.) But by the time the UFC cut him, Riddle says he was already disillusioned—with staffing changes at UFC HQ, with veteran fighters getting the shaft, with penny-pinching corporate greed. (“I broke a dude’s jaw in three spots [on The Ultimate Fighter] and I got zero dollars. He got zero dollars.”) And he was disappointed with fans’ attitudes. “I’m training every day, cutting weight, using all this discipline to make myself into a lethal machine, and then a bunch of keyboard warriors would be like, ‘Oh, his hands looked like shit out there.’ It’s like, I fucking just got Fight of the Night in the UFC.”

After false starts in other MMA promotions, Riddle found himself on his couch watching WrestleMania and contemplating a new line of work. He’d grown up watching the WWF; he started amateur wrestling, he says, because it was the most analogous youth sport. Now, he saw pro wrestlers throwing knees and latching on submissions—the same things he’d been doing in the UFC. He thought he could do it better.

“I called my buddy and said, ‘Hey, what would you think if I quit fighting and started doing pro wrestling full-time?’” Riddle recalls.

His friend replied: You’d be perfect for it.

Riddle has adapted his skills from inside to the UFC's octagon and now uses them inside the ring. Photo by Soobum Im-USA TODAY Sports

Abby pilots the rented Chevy Suburban through metro Boston while Riddle FaceTimes with his wife, a competitive weightlifter. (The pair look as if they were paired off for selective breeding.) He talks about pissing blood while cutting weight back in his MMA days. These days he weighs about 40 pounds more than his UFC weight class, yet none of it is added fat or muscle—he’s just not dehydrating himself on purpose. We park and sneak into Melrose Memorial Hall through a side door.

Ahead of the Beyond Wrestling matinee, the venue resembles a high-ceilinged flea market with a dais in the middle and painfully stiff chairs around the perimeter. A woman in a hoodie returns to her seat holding a paper tray piled with pulled meat, gripping several-dollar bills and cradling a green stuffed animal. Everyone in the audience seems to be wearing a wrestling t-shirt. One says “Get high, watch wrestling.” There are too many Bullet Club logos to count.

In 2016, when ten-year WWE vet Cody Rhodes asked for his release from the promotion and landed with Bullet Club, a faction within New Japan Pro Wrestling, it proved a commonly held feeling: non-WWE and independent wrestling leagues are booming in ways not seen since the blood-and-barbed-wire heyday of the ECW.

“As far as alternatives to WWE, there are probably more viable options and ways [for wrestlers] to make a living now than really at any time in the last 15 years,” says Dave Meltzer, founder and editor of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, the leading pro wrestling publication. Ring of Honor business increased 29 percent last year, he says; All American Wrestling and Pro Wrestling Guerrilla saw their own swells in attendance. The surge is made possible by high-quality performers with social-media-ready personalities, an arms race to pull off the craziest GIF-friendly high spot, and a WWE-weaned fanbase yearning for something grittier than Monday Night Raw.

Abby, a lifelong wrestling fan, stopped watching after the WCW rolled into WWE; after catching the Young Bucks six years ago, he now averages an indie show every other weekend. “To me, it’s about watching the rise of a particular character—the come-up of these people as they’re progressing and tweaking their personas and repertoire,” he says.

“There’s a style that gets over really big with the indie fans, but it’s a very hard style on the body,” Meltzer says. This is where MMA begins to bleed into pro wrestling. The sports’ histories are inextricably linked: legend has it that Mitsuyo Maeda, a Japanese judo master and turn-of-the-20th-century pro wrestler, taught grappling to Carlos Gracie, whose family passed that knowledge down to inaugural UFC tournament winner Royce Gracie. Former UFC heavyweight champion Brock Lesnar and 0-1 UFC punchline CM Punk were WWE royalty turned high-profile UFC signees. Now, many UFC fighters are finding a second act in pro wrestling, including Tom Lawlor, Shayna Baszler, who competes in WWE developmental league NXT, and former UFC poster-woman Ronda Rousey, who just signed a WWE contract. Even with scripted outcomes, bona fides as a real-life tough guy or lady go a long way.

“You hear the term being thrown around: Is this guy legit? Can he really beat up the other guy if the match goes south?” says Chuck O’Neil, another former Ultimate Fighter competitor and MMA-fighter-turned-indie-wrestler. “It gives it a mystique, and I think fans are drawn to that.”

Riddle sold his house in Vegas and moved to a suburb near Allentown, Pennsylvania in 2014, wife and kids in tow, to pick up pro wrestling from scratch. The triangle chokes and takedowns came easily. Emoting did not. “In fighting, if you get hit in the face, you don’t show it. You can’t show it,” Riddle says. “Even if you smile, you reacted because I hit you really fuckin’ hard.… In wrestling not only do you have to react, you have to react where the whole building can see.”

When Riddle began performing in 2015, his UFC fame earned him his first wrestling bookings, but now his MMA résumé isn’t really a part of his act or appeal: by all accounts, he’s a prodigy.

“There’s only a handful of guys in my life that I’ve seen adapt to pro wrestling as quickly as he did,” says Meltzer, whose Wrestling Observer Newsletter named him “Rookie of the Year” in 2016. Riddle’s style is nakedly based on MMA—more flesh-slapping Muay Thai strikes and less diving through tables—and he has natural instincts for smoothing out performative creases. “If there’s a hiccup, he keeps it going. Every match he wrestles is so clean,” says O’Neil, his real-life friend and occasional scripted foe. “Fans are usually like, ‘did you see that move?’ and then forget about it in a week. There are matches that [Matt]’s had that people say, ‘Holy shit, did you see this?’ and the match happened six months ago.”

It helps that Riddle’s true self and acquired character blur together. “When you first get into wrestling, everybody tells you, ‘Be yourself times ten.’ When you first hear that, you’re like, ‘What the fuck does that mean?’” he says. “But it’s just acting. Will Ferrell playing a serious role isn’t really Will Ferrell; him playing a comedic role, that’s funny. It’s the same in wrestling: you can play a viking or whatever, but it just doesn’t fuckin’ make sense because that’s not who you really are. I’m Matt Riddle. I can be this all the time. It doesn’t have to be me times ten.”

Among wrestling fans, Riddle’s refusal to wear shoes is a bigger wedge issue than weed, but his marijuana habit has hindered him with the management, if not to the level it did with UFC. Not long after his first-ever match, Riddle tried out with WWE; months later, they passed on signing him and pointed him toward the feeder league Evolve Wrestling. The culprit was his history with weed. “It wasn’t that I failed a drug test [in the UFC]—it was my political stance on marijuana,” Riddle says of why WWE looked past him. “It was the fact that I think it should be recreationally legal, it should be medically legal.” And last fall, New Japan Pro Wrestling torpedoed a deal to bring Riddle to its World Tag League. “If it wasn’t for the marijuana stuff, my gut [feeling] is that he’d be a superstar today either in Japan or in WWE,” Meltzer says.

But changing social attitudes mean marijuana isn’t the impediment it used to be. It’s an open secret that many wrestlers smoke pot; Rob Van Dam, a former WWE champion, famously made marijuana part of his character. Under WWE’s wellness policy, a positive marIjuana test incurs a $2,500 fine. (“A lot of wrestlers just call it the pot tax,” Meltzer says.) But much as Riddle loves getting stoned, he insists it’s not why he hasn’t moved on from the indies. “If the money was right with [WWE] and they said you have to quit smoking, I’d quit smoking. If New Japan was down, I wouldn’t bring weed to Japan—I’m not an idiot,” he says. “I know [the Japanese] drink, so I’d still enjoy myself.”

The bigger question is whether it’s worth exchanging his freedom and income for a bigger platform in a famously controlling promotion. “Honestly, right now I make six figures. I make my own merch. I’m the main or co-main event of every show I’m on. I get to be me and I get to wrestle like I want to. Can they promise me that? If not, why would I go to WWE to probably make less money and be gone more? By the time they do pick me up, if they decide to, I’ll be worth so much more.”

Back at Melrose Memorial Hall, a derivation of “Regulate” by Warren G plays over the sound system to announce Riddle’s arrival. His match with the British wrestler Martin Stone will be the last performance before intermission. Watching Riddle, the physical languages of MMA fighting and pro wrestling collapse into one vocabulary. He shoots for takedowns and spins for armbars and toeholds. He and Stone trade slaps that bounce off the ceilings. Riddle poses and preens between suplexes, but Stone puts his forearm on Riddle’s jaw to kill the momentum. The crowd cheers a slam that looks like an out-of-control hamster wheel and, moments later, Riddle closes out the 14-minute encounter with his signature move: the Bromission, a tap-out-inducing neck crank MMA fans might recognize as the Twister. The lilting match looked just enough like a real fight, though clearly aimed at blood-free “yes, and…” improv instead of intentional damage.

At intermission, Riddle—sweaty, shirtless, still in spandex—mans a folding table in the lobby next to a beefy, buzzcutted Viennese grappler named Walter (The two will slap each other around at the Evolve Wrestling show a few hours later). Riddle makes small talk with fans and hawks t-shirts—$20 each, 20 or 30 of them on a good day, he says. Some fans approach to snap photos. At least three ask Riddle to autograph glossies portraying him in the Octagon.

Indie wrestling is an always-on job, one for which Riddle is uniquely suited. He raises his arms in a Jesus Christ pose, clutching a can of Mountain Dew. His eyes are nearly shut. The shit-eating grin hasn’t left his face all day.

“This is my world,” he says. “This is where I’m king.”

Matt Riddle is Indie Wrestling's Stoner King published first on https://footballhighlightseurope.tumblr.com/

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amtushinfosolutionspage · 6 years

Text

Matt Riddle is Indie Wrestling’s Stoner King

Neither the slush nor the cannabis have an obvious effect on him because his feet are always exposed and he’s almost always high. He’s high when he’s pulling off suplexes to chants of “Bro! Bro! Bro!” and high when he eats a horrible looking Stromboli to replenish abs that are unfairly chiseled after a fight. He’s high when he opens up about the journey from the blood and treasure of the Ultimate Fighting Championship to the skivvies-based storytelling of pro wrestling.

Weed is a portable pleasure for Riddle, who spends most weekends living out of a suitcase: Thursday he was in Florida, Friday in the United Kingdom, Saturday night in Queens, where he stayed out drinking until 4 or 5 AM before driving up to Massachusetts. Now, Riddle is passing time before a doubleheader in the town of Melrose, where in the afternoon, he’ll ply his trade with indie wrestling promotion Beyond Wrestling and, in the evening, WWE feeder league Evolve Wrestling. Then it’s back home to Pennsylvania by morning, where he’ll watch Stranger Things with his three kids and maybe hit the gym once or twice before the traveling circus begins again next weekend.

Once upon a time, Riddle was paid to real-fight in his underwear. In the UFC, he was a 170-pound wunderkind—never rising above a prospect, but fighting three times a year and making as much as $30,000 each time during a dozen-fight stint that ended with four straight wins. Then came two failed drug screens. Now, he’s the King of Bros, one of the brightest prospects on the booming independent wrestling circuit, with an MMA-centric style that’s earned him wide praise and meetings with WWE higher-ups. Whether he ends up with wrestling’s standard-bearer depends on whether they can look beyond Riddle’s leafy past, or whether Riddle even wants to surrender his freedom and the six-figure income (self-reported) that he makes as an in-demand indie wrestler.

Whatever happens, Riddle is happier taking bumps in the squared circle than bleeding for Dana White.

In a sleepless third-floor room strewn with suitcases, the conversation centers around shutting down a bar after last night’s show in Queens, and the designated driver vomiting up reheated Jamaican food during the early-morning drive. Abby, a bald, middle-aged Puerto Rican grandfather who befriended Riddle at the front of end of his wrestling career, disappears then returns with orange juice and pastries, setting a continental breakfast next to some vape pens. De la Vega crawls under covers and begins snoring.

Riddle grew up in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where as a teenager, he says he had a knack for skateboarding: he’d see a new trick once, then land it effortlessly. Riddle learned mixed martial arts the same way. In high school, he became state wrestling champion at 189 pounds—there’s a picture of him atop a wrestling podium a few platforms above Jon Jones, who is arguably the most talented (and self-destructive) MMA fighter ever. He picked up fighting by reading a B.J. Penn instructional book and ragdolling his roommate in their apartment.

He caught the UFC’s eye after a single amateur bout, and in 2008, debuted on The Ultimate Fighter 7 reality show as a goofy-grinned 22 year-old who shattered an opponent’s jaw. Afterward, Riddle bought a house in Vegas, got a Brazilian jiu-jitsu brown belt, sired three kids, and spent five years as a perennial UFC prospect, accumulating a 7-3-2 record.

Weed has been a part of Riddle’s routine since he first smoked at 10 years old, taking it illicitly as an alternative to his ADHD medication. “I did my research,” he says. “I’ve had hand surgeries, I’ve used pharmaceuticals, and I [eventually] felt like, ‘Holy shit, this is addicting and I shouldn’t be taking this because I want to take more and I’m not even in pain.’ Marijuana never felt like that. I just like the way it makes me feel. I’m about to be 32, I barely work out, and I’m shredded. I don’t think it’s because of the weed, but I don’t think it’s hurting me either, you know?”

“I’m about to be 32, I barely work out, and I’m shredded. I don’t think it’s because of the weed, but I don’t think it’s hurting me either, you know?”

“I called my buddy and said, ‘Hey, what would you think if I quit fighting and started doing pro wrestling full-time?’” Riddle recalls.

His friend replied: You’d be perfect for it.

Riddle has adapted his skills from inside to the UFC’s octagon and now uses them inside the ring. Photo by Soobum Im-USA TODAY Sports

Abby pilots the rented Chevy Suburban he rented for the interstate trip through metro Boston while Riddle FaceTimes with his wife, a competitive weightlifter. (The pair look as if they were paired off for selective breeding.) He talks about pissing blood while cutting weight back in his MMA days. These days he weighs about 40 pounds more than his UFC weight class, yet none of it is added fat or muscle—he’s just not dehydrating himself on purpose. We park and sneak into Melrose Memorial Hall through a side door.

Abby, a lifelong wrestling fan, stopped watching after the WCW rolled into the WWE; after catching the Young Bucks six years ago, he now averages an indie show every other weekend. “To me, it’s about watching the rise of a particular character—the come-up of these people as they’re progressing and tweaking their personas and repertoire,” he says.

“You hear the term being thrown around: is this guy legit? Can he really beat up the other guy if the match goes south?” says Chuck O’Neil, another former Ultimate Fighter competitor and MMA-fighter-turned-indie-wrestler. “It gives it a mystique, and I think fans are drawn to that.”

Riddle sold his house in Vegas and moved back to Pennsylvania in 2014, wife and kids in tow, to pick up pro wrestling from scratch. The triangle chokes and takedowns came easily. Emoting did not. “In fighting, if you get hit in the face, you don’t show it. You can’t show it,” Riddle says. “Even if you smile, you reacted because I hit you really fuckin’ hard…In wrestling not only do you have to react, you have to react where the whole building can see.”

When Riddle began performing in 2015, his UFC fame earned him his first wrestling bookings, but now his MMA résumé isn’t really a part of his act or appeal: by all accounts, he’s a prodigy.

“There’s only a handful of guys in my life that I’ve seen adapt to pro wrestling as quickly as he did,” says Meltzer, whose Wrestling Observer Newsletter named him “Rookie of the Year” in 2016. Riddle’s style is nakedly based on MMA—more flesh-slapping Muay Thai strikes and less diving through tables—and he has natural instincts for smoothing out performative creases. “If there’s a hiccup, he keeps it going. Every match he wrestles is so clean,” says O’Neil, his real-life friend and occasional scripted foe. “…Fans are usually like, ‘did you see that move?’ and then forget about it in a week. There are matches that [Matt]’s had that people say ‘holy shit did you see this?’ and the match happened six months ago.”

It helps that Riddle’s true self and acquired character blur together. “When you first get into wrestling, everybody tells you, ‘Be yourself times ten.’ When you first hear that, you’re like, ‘what the fuck does that mean?’” he says. “But it’s just acting. Will Ferrell playing a serious role isn’t really Will Ferrell; him playing a comedic role, that’s funny. It’s the same in wrestling: you can play a viking or whatever, but it just doesn’t fuckin’ make sense because that’s not who you really are. I’m Matt Riddle. I can be this all the time. It doesn’t have to be me times ten.”

It’s nearly 3 PM by the time Riddle walks in to the ring to face British wrestler Martin Stone. Hours earlier, Riddle and Abby smoked another joint down to the roach, and Riddle met with a parking-lot connection for THC Cheez-Its. (He doesn’t hold a medical marijuana card in Pennsylvania.) He jokes about scromiting, the barely believable condition said to afflict heavy marijuana users with bouts of simultaneous screaming and vomiting. Between bites of Stromboli he says, “Wouldn’t it be so cool if I puked this up during my match?” and pantomimes an anime-style power barf.

Among wrestling fans, Riddle’s refusal to wear shoes is a bigger wedge issue than weed, but his marijuana habit has hindered him with the management, if not to the level it did with UFC. Not long after his first-ever match, Riddle tried out with the WWE; months later, they passed on signing him and pointed him toward the feeder league Evolve Wrestling. The culprit was his history with weed. “It wasn’t that I failed a drug test [in the UFC]—it was my political stance on marijuana,” Riddle says of why the WWE looked past him. “It was the fact that I think it should be recreationally legal, it should be medically legal.” And last fall, New Japan Pro Wrestling torpedoed a deal to bring Riddle to its World Tag League. “If it wasn’t for the marijuana stuff, my gut [feeling] is that he’d be a superstar today either in Japan or in WWE,” Meltzer says.

But changing social attitudes mean marijuana isn’t the impediment it used to be. It’s an open secret that many wrestlers smoke pot; Rob Van Dam, a former WWE champion, famously made marijuana part of his character. Under the WWE’s wellness policy, a positive marIjuana test incurs a $2,500 fine. (“A lot of wrestlers just call it the pot tax,” Meltzer says.) But much as Riddle loves getting stoned, he insists it’s not why he hasn’t moved on from the indies. “If the money was right with [the WWE] and they said you have to quit smoking, I’d quit smoking. If New Japan was down, I wouldn’t bring weed to Japan—I’m not an idiot,” he says. “I know [the Japanese] drink, so I’d still enjoy myself.”

Back at Melrose Memorial Hall, a derivation of “Regulate” by Warren G plays over the sound system to announce Riddle’s arrival and the start of his match with Stone, the last performance before intermission. Watching Riddle, the physical languages of MMA fighting and pro wrestling collapse into one vocabulary. He shoots for takedowns and spins for armbars and toeholds. He and Stone trade slaps that bounce off the ceilings. Riddle poses and preens between suplexes, but Stone puts his forearm on Riddle’s jaw to kill the momentum. The crowd cheers a slam that looks like an out-of-control hamster wheel and, moments later, Riddle closes out the 14-minute encounter with his signature move: the Bromission, a tap-out-inducing neck crank MMA fans might recognize as the Twister. The lilting match looked just enough like a real fight, though clearly aimed at blood-free “yes, and…” improv instead of intentional damage.

“This is my world,” he says. “This is where I’m king.”

Matt Riddle is Indie Wrestling’s Stoner King syndicated from https://australiahoverboards.wordpress.com

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drtanstravels · 4 years

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I’ve spent a lot of time in South Korea, but the bulk of that was working in Daejeon 12 years ago. However, I’ve made several trips to Seoul as recent as December last year and every time I’ve been I haven’t needed to travel too far out of my way from where we were staying or if I have, I’ve had someone showing me around. This time we would be traveling for another of Anna’s conferences, but we would also be in a position where we had to try to find everyone else we wanted to meet up with by ourselves. My friends, Andy and Hayley, were still living in Seoul and in recent months I’ve had quite a few friends from Singapore move to Seoul for their work with General Motors, namely Tom Cargill and his wife, Leonie Brown, joining him, plus our mate, George Svigos, and his family. Add to this the fact that mutual friends of all of us from Singapore, Peter Gratz, and his girlfriend, Ray, had timed their Korean holiday to coincide with ours, plus an old colleague of mine from Daejeon that I always enjoy catching up with, Christina Eunjoo Kim, would make the trip down as well. It looks like we had a fun couple of days ahead of us.

Thursday, October 17, 2019 We arrived at Incheon International Airport at around 7:00am, got in a taxi, and made our way through the crazy Seoul traffic for about an hour or so to our hotel, Lotte Hotel World in Jamsil-dong. It was too early to check in, but we were able to dump our bags, get changed, and spend the morning and early afternoon trying to navigate the labyrinth that is the adjoining Lotte Department Store and Lotte World Mall. As is always the case when we land at this time in the morning, the first port of call would be anywhere besides Starbucks that sells coffee. Once caffeinated we explored the supermarket and food area of the mall, looking at the live seafood, marvelling at seeing beef being aged underwater for the first time, and weighing up our options for lunch before walking around both the mall and the department store. The department store was pretty much all luxury brands, not really our thing so we stuck to the enormous mall until it was time to check into our room and grab a bite to eat. A stroll around Lotte World Mall and our hotel:

A small sampling of the live seafood in the food section

Anna’s hand next to a lobster for perspective

This thing was gigantic!

Wet-aged beef

Dried fish

I can’t imagine a child from a western country wanting broccoli-themed toys

Maybe they should’ve checked Urban Dictionary before naming their brand

I wonder who their demographic is

Inside our room

The view from where we were staying

A bad photo, but Anna wanted one of me with this sign

Anna and our lunch

Me doing the same

That was some damn fine clam rice

After lunch we caught a cab down to where we had stayed on our previous trip to Seoul, around Gangnam and Sinsa-dong to do a bit more shopping, but in an area with more of the type of stuff we like. Because of the insane Seoul traffic it took a while to get there and it was quite late, but we finally made it and had a great time just shopping and looking around for a bit until we were hungry again. Andrew and Hayley weren’t in town, Peter and Ray weren’t arriving until the following day, and Tom and Leonie were both working late so we were left to do our own bidding that evening. First of all there was dinner to think of and one of the things I love in South Korea is all of the fried chicken and beer places that are everywhere. Sure, they sell other stuff too, but the main reasons to go to them are the cheap beer and the Korean fried chicken. The only downside is the condition of the toilets, but that is a small sacrifice when the food is this good and the beers are such a bargain. The chicken is served with all of the side dishes that come in any restaurant here, but we learnt our lesson last time when we clearly over-ordered, the servings are massive, so we just got a plate of chicken, some vegetables, and a 2.7 litre (91.3 fl. oz.) jug of beer to get us started.

Once dinner was done the next step was to find a bar to settle into so we found a shisha bar, grabbed a pipe and some drinks, and kicked back for the night. There were free flow pretzels and I’ve had a habit while eating them that dates back to when I was bored at Christmas as a child — I always try to chew them in a way that they form letters to spell things out. My name is easy to do and when Anna saw the initial result of both of our names, she wanted to get in on the act and add the name of our dog, Kermit. We got it done, however, it took many attempts to get the photo right, but here’s a look back at our first night in town:

Anna warming up

Showing her how it’s done

Dinner is served

Mission accomplished

The carnage afterward

I wasn’t kidding about the toilets, it was unisex, too

The view from the shisha bar

Just starting out

My initial creation

Finally got the picture right for the camera on the front of an iPhone

Anna’s contribution

Friday, October 18, 2019 Anna would be spending the entire day at her conference so I would need to occupy myself. That wouldn’t be all that hard, because there were plenty of errands to run, the first being finding an ATM that would accept my Singaporean card. Normally this isn’t too difficult in most countries, but it wasn’t particularly easy in the Lotte maze. I used a credit card to buy some coffee and then spent the next three hours trying to find an ATM or bank that could deliver the cash, all while hopelessly lost again. There weren’t a whole lot of ATMs around and I couldn’t withdraw from the bank either, but five ATMs later I found one that would do the job. Now it was just a matter of finding out where I was and getting a cab back to Sinsa-dong to have an extended look at some stores I had seen the previous day that would have Anna probably quite bored, but no taxis would take me. Instead, I opted for the subway and it turned out to be a blessing in disguise, only taking a little over 30 minutes, instead of being caught in traffic jams for an hour or more. Once there it was interesting walking around this particular neighbourhood. Last time I was here I wrote about how prevalent cosmetic surgery is in Seoul:

Plastic surgery in South Korea is socially accepted. Double-eyelid surgery (also known as blepharoplasty) creates an eyelid crease that makes the eye look bigger and is the most common cosmetic procedure performed in South Korea. Due to the differences in the facial bone structure of Asians, who have a flatter facial bone structure than their Western counterparts, facial bone contouring surgeries are quite popular. V-line surgery (jaw and chin reduction) and cheekbone (zygoma) reduction surgeries are used to change the facial contour. Many celebrities are required to undergo these surgeries to trim their cheekbones, jaw, and chin to create an oval shaped face.

South Korea has also seen an increase in medical tourism from people who seek surgeon expertise in facial bone contouring. Korean surgeons have advanced facial bone contouring with procedures like the osteotomy technique and have published the first book on facial bone contouring surgeries. There was a 17 percent increase in the sales of cosmetic surgery from 1999 to 2000, reaching almost ₩170 billion (Korean won) (US$144 million).

Oh, and vanity isn’t just restricted to women here:

While expectations of female beauty usually outweigh male expectations, South Korea is notable for the standards placed on men. Many of male standards are similar to that of female beauty – the body is slim and the skin is clear. Idols and celebrities especially are expected to not be too traditionally masculine and often adopt androgynous traits, such as a lack of facial hair and use of makeup. In 2012 20 percent of male beauty products were bought by South Koreans.

Sinsa-dong is one of Seoul’s capitals for plastic surgery and I took photographs last time of just a handful of the clinics offering their services in this part of the city, but those were all taken at night and until this trip I had never experienced this area in the middle of the day. I discovered it’s not unusual to walk around Sinsa-dong and see people with swollen, bandaged heads or pairs of friends who had gone for matching nose-jobs and are now shopping with the tape, plasters, and bandages still intact. These people are everywhere here during daylight hours, I even saw one girl out shopping who still had all the lines from a consultation for the procedure she was going to soon undergo drawn on her face with a marker!

Anna had a dinner for her conference at 6:00pm at Lotte World Tower so I got to the station at 5:00pm to give myself plenty of time to shower, put on a suit, and walk over, however, there was a small problem; when I arrived the subway station was packed, but I couldn’t just use my size to bully my way onto the train, like is the standard procedure in some other countries. People line up properly in two lines in Korea and politely wait until they can fit in the carriage so I would just have to wait until enough trains had passed and I had made my way close enough to the front of the line to be able to board. This took some time and when I was finally back at the hotel I had a shower-in-a-can, got changed, and met Anna for the dinner. The first event of the night would be going up to the viewing platform of Lotte World Tower for a look over the city:

Lotte World Tower is a 123-floor, 555-metre (1,821 ft) supertall skyscraper located in Seoul, South Korea. It opened to the public on April 11, 2017 and is currently the tallest building in South Korea, and is the 6th tallest building in the world.

We stood for a while in a queue to get in the elevator, but once inside it took only a minute to make it up to the fully-enclosed viewing deck on the 120th floor, stairways accessing higher floors, all offering a breathtaking view of Seoul:

Looking over one side of the city

Now over the river

Straight down

Standing on a glass floor 123 storeys up

Proof we did it

The dinner was actually quite fun, there was no cringeworthy interactive beatboxing display for a bunch of professors this time, but I get the feeling that the organisers this year believed that not many people attending would eat Korean food. Anna had told me that lunch was all Italian with the main dishes being pasta and it turned out that dinner would be predominantly French.

The dinner finished up at 9:30, Pete and Ray were now in town and neither Tom nor Leonie were working so we went to meet up with them in Hapjeong-dong, but there was just one minor problem — The insane Seoul traffic again, even at that time on a Friday night. We thought our ride would take about 30 minutes, but it was the best part of an hour before we arrived to meet the other four at bar nearby called Cream. We all had a blast catching up while requesting terrible songs at Cream and then we switched things up a bit after a while and went to a small bar that Tom loves called Wolf Bar for a few more at the end of the night. It wouldn’t be the only time we would visit either place over the course of the weekend, but here’s how the second part of Friday night looked:

What we’d be eating at the dinner

I always feel proud when I see Anna’s work posted around the place

Outside Cream

Going up the stairs

Now inside with the guy who’d be taking our requests

People draw stuff and pin them to the wall…

…and some of them are really impressive

Probably Pete’s idea

Now doing shots with the owner of Wolf Bar

I guess Tom went a little too hard before we arrived, because this was not long after he got home

Saturday, October 19, 2019 Anna still had to go to her conference for a bit on Saturday, but there were still a few plans for the day; we were going to change hotel so it would be easier to meet up with our friends, but I also had another buddy to meet up with. Just like the last time we came to Seoul, as well as a couple of times when she visited Singapore, I was going to meet up with my old friend from when we both taught at St. Mary’s Elementary School in Daejeon back in 2007, Christina Eunjoo Kim. Christina’s plan was to catch a train to Seoul to spend the day with me and then stay with one of her other friends in a different part of the city that evening so I checked us out of our hotel, stored our luggage, and met her at Jamsil subway station. We always have a great time when we meet up so the first plan was just to grab a coffee, stroll around Lotte Mall for a while, and then have some lunch, bibimbap this time. We were walking around again for a while after lunch when Anna had a gap in her schedule so she met up with us for an hour before heading back to the conference.

Me at each subway exit

After that it was walking around a nearby lake and taking in a weird Korean European dancing display until it was time for Christina to leave and this was another occasion where I got hopelessly lost. I wanted to get back to the hotel and wait for Anna to come back, but I also mentioned earlier that this entire Lotte complex was massive and nigh on impossible to navigate. Most subway stations in Seoul including the nearest one, Jamsil, have eight exits so I thought I’d try and use those as a landmark for getting back to the hotel, all I would need to do is wander around and find the right one. I stumbled upon the nearest one, walked up the stairs and could see the hotel across the rather wide road that, from a distance, appeared to be behind exit number three. I tried to make my way through the mall to that exit, eventually found it, but when I exited I couldn’t even see the hotel, I was now around the side of a completely different building. Back down into the cavernous mall I went to find another exit, locating one that now had me diagonally opposite the hotel. Fortunately for me, the next exit would be a charm and I would be back at the hotel a mere hour after I made what should have been a 10-minute walk to get there. A look back at a fun afternoon with an old friend:

Having a bite to eat with Christina

Lunch!

Anna joining us for coffee later

This soft-serve in coffee kind of looks like a poop

Walking around the back of the mall

I’m not sure if they’re supposed to be European or just pirates

The lake behind the mall

Now looking across the lake at Lotte World

We seem to be encountering a lot of geese recently

Looking up at Lotte World Tower

Anna soon met me at Lotte Hotel World so it was time to get in a cab, check into our new hotel in Jung-gu, and then meet everybody else at Tom and Leonie’s place to watch Australia take on England in the semifinal of the Rugby World Cup before heading to dinner at 7:30pm. We left our hotel at 6:10pm, but even on a Saturday night it took us over an hour to make the 14km (8.7 mile) journey to our new residence for the next couple of nights, L’Escape, leaving us to check in 15 minutes before we were supposed to be at dinner. Luckily for us there was a screen in the cab showing us a terrible K-pop reality show to keep us amused along the way. Once our bags were up in our room that looked as if it were co-designed by Noel Fielding and Jack the Ripper, we were going to take the subway to avoid the horrendous Seoul traffic, but we still knew we were going to be at least half an hour late regardless, because according to Google Maps we had to do the following to get to the restaurant:

Walk 11 minutes to City Hall Station

Once the train arrived ride six stops on the subway to Hapjeong Station (12 minutes)

Walk six minutes from Hapjeong Station to the restaurant

There was one major flaw with this plan, however — Google Maps doesn’t really work that well at the best of times, but it essentially doesn’t work at all in South Korea, because they want you to use their own online map app, KakaoMap, an app we didn’t have. When using Google Maps in South Korea, besides randomly relocating the user and having them floating through buildings as it does anywhere in the world, it has a couple of other problems; A lot of streets in Seoul have the same name, but are numbered, however, Google Maps doesn’t show the number of the street. Also, the directions don’t show you a route using roads and streets, it just draws a direct line through buildings to where you need to be, as if it were designed by Archimedes himself. This meant that not only did we have to figure out the general route by ourselves, but the usual Google Maps errors initially had us facing in the wrong direction, leading us to walk about a further 15 minutes away from the restaurant, crossing over several exceptionally busy roads and back again in the process. It was close to 9:00pm before we made it to 미담왕파족, our barbecue restaurant for the night, and everyone else had finished eating, but were more than happy to stick around for more beers and soju while we cooked a lot of beef (there was no pork due to a recent swine flu outbreak), recalling hilarious tales from the past, mainly about falling through ceilings, and then trying to decide what to do with the rest of the night.

Once dinner was done we headed out, sans Leonie who was suffering a migraine. We went to the same haunts as the previous night, but it took a lot longer than usual, because we kept having to stop and wait for George. George has a wife and kids, his wife is cool and knew his friends were in town so he wanted to make the most of his night out with old mates, but there was one problem; George gets really distracted when he ‘s drunk. He was constantly just stopping and talking to random people, including yelling “You’ve got this!” in encouragement to a girl who was trying to help her absolutely inebriated boyfriend back to his feet. Once we got to Cream we thought we had lost him again, only to turn around and see him taking a photo for a table of girls in the bar. We went to a few other places and finished up at Wolf Bar again, Tom checking out relatively early because he had to catch a flight to China for work the next day. Naturally, Pete thought doing shots several times was a great idea, but it was a hilarious night out.

That day my pedometer said I had walked a grand total of 18km (11 miles) and I guarantee about half of it was spent hopelessly lost, but here’s how the rest of Saturday looked:

Entering our room at L’Escape

It had a kind of murderous burlesque feel to it

The bathroom

Out the front of seafood restaurant en route to Cream

At the barbecue restaurant. Back row: Leonie, Tom, George, me, Anna. Front row: Peter, Ray, Andrew, Hayley

George distracted again

Me wearing Whitty’s horrendous 80s cap

George secretly taking over the music at Wolf Bar

Sunday, October 20, 2019 We were now staying in an area that had some great hole-in-the-wall type food places and, although we had had Korean barbecue the previous night, Anna still wanted more proper Korean food. While we were having coffee near Namdaemun Market I noticed a small laneway across the road called Hairtail Alley that could have some potential. It turns out I was right. When we walked in we found several stalls selling galchi jorim, a red, spicy stew with hairtail fish, and it looked damn good so we joined the long queue for a table in one of the tiny stalls and waited our turn. Slowly we progressed to the head of the line where at any given time there were multiple pots of the soup boiling on a stovetop with a giant container of fish fillets nearby to keep the service as fast as possible in the minuscule eatery. Once at the very front of the line we started to get curious as to why, despite the fact that they were aware that there were only going to be the two of us eating there, the staff kept taking Korean couples lined up behind us, generally older people. Were they worried that if people saw foreigners inside it may ruin the credibility of their extremely traditional restaurant? Nope, one of the older men working there tried to explain in his very best, but extremely basic English, accompanied by some hand gestures, that they had to wait for a seat in an area big enough to accommodate me to become available. Once we were seated inside I saw the problem he had faced; there was an upstairs seating area, but I wouldn’t have made it up the stairs or most likely under the ceiling. In the main area a lot of the seats were in front of walls and it wouldn’t be possible for me to pull a seat out far for me to even fit at the table. They also brought in other customers to share larger tables once other patrons had finished eating, yet they wouldn’t be able to get me on a shared table, because I wouldn’t fit between someone and the wall, but if I sat on the aisle side, I would block it. We just had to wait for an entire table to become available and when one did we were glad we had waited. The soup was fantastic once we figured how to eat the fish without having the inside of your mouth pierced by tiny little bones and we also had steamed egg which was great as well. See for yourself:

Anna when we first got to the market

As soon as I saw that little alley on the right, I knew we’d be having lunch somewhere down there

The sign above Hairtail Alley

Getting bowls ready before customers have even sat down

Just keep ’em coming

Not a lot of room inside

This was after we had progressed a fair bit in the queue, it was even longer behind us!

They go through so much fish so quickly they just leave the container out once it’s taken from the fridge

We finally have a seat and our lunch is served

Anna looking a bit blurry, but also excited

Me in a seat with a little extra space (except to my immediate left)

Once it was time to pass our table on to the next patrons we explored more of Namdaemun Market, first the food section near Sungnyemun Gate, which was still selling plenty of pork products despite the swine flu outbreak, and then on to the massive Dongmyo Flea Market that runs several blocks and is described as:

Dongmyo Flea Market started life in the late 1980s. Every day an array of street stalls open up along the stone walls of Dongmyo Park. The main items bought and sold here are antiques of every type, including items such as wallets, electronics, old books, film posters etc. Recently vintage clothing and shoes have become the main area of interest. Prices are typically around 1,000 won so you can have fun browsing and shopping without worrying about the cost.

There are all kinds of items from everyday miscellaneous goods to antiques. If you get peckish while shopping, boiled duck’s eggs cost just 1,500 won each or bindaetteok (mung bean pancake) make very satisfying snacks. The market is always crowded with people at weekends. The most popular item in Dongmyo Flea Market is used clothing. When new stocks arrive, the market is packed with people looking for bargains. Prices are normally around 1,000 won, but leather items or furs reach around 10,000 won. Designer labels can reach over 100,000 won. The best time for shopping is on weekend afternoons.

That description brings up clothing several times and maybe it was just because winter was rapidly approaching when we visited, but one thing it fails to mention is that an extremely high percentage of the infinite stalls were solely selling secondhand jackets. It honestly seemed like about two thirds of the stalls were selling just jackets and each one of these stalls had a flock of people trying to score a bargain. We also found some other great stuff there besides jackets, but when it comes to clothing and just about any items in general in Dongmyo Flea Market, it’s amazing how many had the Supreme logo on it. That stuff is huge there, whether it is legit of counterfeit! We saw a lot of really cool stuff as well, including a man working in a jacket stall that was wearing a full, powder blue, velour San Diego Clippers tracksuit from the late 1970s, before the team moved to Los Angeles, and a store where I picked up a very rare Korean copy of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in great condition for next to nothing!

After hours of exploring the market we caught a train back to Hapjeong for dinner and a quiet drink. Leonie’s migraine was gone, Pete and Ray were spending their final night in Seoul before heading down to Busan, but Tom was now in China for work, George had to hang out with the family, and Andy and Hayley were back at their place far out in the suburbs. Ray wasn’t feeling all that spectacular so we opted for ginseng chicken soup, always a good choice and it seemed to help. Once dinner was done we found a cool little bar to have a drink and a chat, but it couldn’t be a late one, we all had important things to do the next day. A whole bunch of photos from the markets and a bit of our dinner:

God, I love chilli

Fine or coarse

Not sure what is going on here

Sungnyemun Gate

Don’t let swine flu stop you from selling pig heads

If you look closely you can make out some pig faces

I wonder how long they’ve been sitting there

Walking down one of many streets in Namdaemun Market

Merely a handful of the jackets on offer

Stone statues of people doing it

One of many antique stalls

“Duct tape. I need it for… taping something.”

Just a pile of toiletries

Is that a Louis Vuitton / Supreme collaboration fire extinguisher?

Seems legit

This flamboyant looking man was the king of the jacket sellers

Harrison Ford seems younger than I remember. More Asian, as well

My dinner, abalone ginseng chicken soup

Anna’s soup

Monday, October 21, 2019 We were going to be flying out in the afternoon, but we still had time to have a look around the mall across the road from where we were staying, particularly the supermarket and food court. I love kimchi and all of the other side dishes and we both love the local soups so we wanted to stock up on a heap of those, as well as have one last proper Korean lunch before we returned to Singapore. We checked out of our hotel, stashed our suitcases, crossed the road and went down to the basement where all of the good stuff was. First we bought a toasted cheese lobster tail to snack on and Anna had a craving for cold noodles so I kept our table, one of the only free ones in the extremely crowded foodcourt, but there was one problem; our table was specifically for customers of a nearby stall, but none of the staff were capable of telling me that at first. Eventually an employee was able to so I apologised using one of the very few Korean phrases I know and went to find Anna to tell her we no longer had a place to sit. Our food soon came so we both spread out to hunt down a table in the massive foodcourt and after a couple of minutes a staff member from where Anna had bought lunch was running up to me from another area, trying to convey the message that Anna had found a table. I’m really not used to being served by people in a new place that are genuinely helpful who don’t want anything in return, it’s kind of refreshing. It also helps that I’m easy for them to see in a crowd, but even after we had sat down some girls on the next table showed Anna the best way to eat those noodles and then just went back to chatting to each other. Once we were finished with lunch we went around the supermarket looking for snacks, soups, and sides to bring back to Singapore, but we had to be rational, we had limited space inside our check-in luggage, however, we chose well. Our last meal for this trip to Seoul:

I love this dried seafood

Cheese and lobster is a great combination

I’m probably drooling in this picture

Hell yeah!

The noodles weren’t bad, either. Or the dumplings

Our stay in Korea was over, but I’m always proud when I go to Anna’s conference dinners and see the praise that she gets from her peers, as well as seeing her work pinned up around the place. This trip was made even better by getting to meet up with some old friends that I haven’t had the chance to see for quite a while. I always appreciate the effort Christina makes to come see me whenever I’m in Seoul, I’m glad Tom and Leonie have hit it off so well with Andy and Hayley, It was great of George’s wife to look after the kids for the night so he could have a night out with us all, and it was cool of Peter and Ray to make their holiday coincide with our stay.

Until next time, Seoul, geonbae!

Meeting friends and shopping in the most inconvenient ways possible I've spent a lot of time in South Korea, but the bulk of that was working in…

#bars and pubs #food #Lotte World #market #Seoul #traffic

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