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whump-a-la-mode · 3 years

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Hero and villain falling into a river together. Villain is unconscious or hurt or something so hero gets them both outta the water. They then have to figure out how to heal villain and survive in the woods.

This has the tiniest bit of angst but is mostly some fluff! This is a super interesting prompt, I hope I did it justice.

Also I’ve never seen Lost in my life.

CW//Car accidents, very unsafe driving, driving off a bridge, blood, broken legs

Nobody liked backseat drivers.

As removed from the life of a normal civilian as they were, Hero still knew that fact quite well. Powers or not, they had had plenty of experience with know-it-all acquaintances and overbearing relatives who had decided that their driving abilities could use improvement in one way or another.

Yes, backseat driving was bothersome. But that was all it was. It wasn’t dangerous.

Having two front seat drivers at once, however? Yeah, that was dangerous.

“Let go!” Villain cried out, wrenching the steering wheel to the right, threatening to throw the vehicle into a tailspin. Their position was as awkward as it was uncomfortable, kneeling in the passenger’s seat, stretched out over the center console, shoulders forcing Hero against the driver’s side door.

“You’re gonna make us crash, you daft idiot!” The hero protested, quite literally butting heads with their adversary. They, by all accounts, had the right to the steering wheel, considering the fact that they were quite literally sitting in the driver’s seat. Yet, their arms were locked in a furious tangle with Villain’s, struggling with white-hued knuckles to simply grip the damn wheel.

“You’re going to make us crash!”

“No, you are!”

“Let go of the damn wheel!”

“No!”

The two jerked the steering back and forth, back and forth, sending the car lurching back and forth like a bucking bronco.

Hero’s panicked gaze flickered in between their nemesis and the world outside the windshield. Alarms howled and metal crunched as traffic veered out of the way of the oncoming vehicle, shuddering as it was as its tires were jerked from ninety degree angle to ninety degree angle, back and forth and back and forth.

“You’re gonna kill someone!” Villain’s mouth was close enough to the hero’s face that they could feel their hot breath on their cheek.

“You do that all the time!”

“Do not!”

Despite the less-than-ideal technique with which it was being driven, the car was moving, and moving quickly. It screeched down the city’s central highway, striking traffic cones and trash cans and curbs, all in equal measure, in its rampage.

“Left!”

“Right!”

The car continued straight as both ‘drivers’ exerted as much force as they could manage onto its wheel. A pedestrian dove out of the way of the oncoming, trundling brick of metal and rubber, narrowly missing a terrible fate beneath its wheels.

For a split second, the vehicle was rendered airborne as it struck a particularly large bump in the asphalt.

“You’re going to get us both killed!” Villain snapped.

“No, you are!”

“You don’t even know-”

“What don’t I know?!”

“What street the fucking drawbridge is on, dumbass!”

Within Hero’s chest, fury was replaced by freezing, liquid cold.

“If you would have just turned left-”

“We needed to go right!”

And, yet, the car continued forwards.

It seemed as though local traffic had gotten the memo regarding the occurrence, as the street before them seemed almost suspiciously clear of vehicles.

“Come on.” Hero insisted. “There’s no way its gonna open now, right? What are the chances?”

“What are the chances that you’re an idiot who can’t see bright flashing warning lights?!”

Now that they thought about it... They had assumed the flashes to simply be from another vehicle, but-

“Shit.”

“You did this!”

“If you would’ve just let me drive-”

The duo of nemeses had their petty argument abruptly cut off by something far, far more important. To be more specific, their argument was interrupted by being in a vehicle, speeding down a road-- a road that had decided, at that very moment, to split in two. At the drawbridge’s side, a massive ferry boat honked its disapproval.

“We have to turn around, shit!” Villain hissed.

Before them, the solid, grey asphalt cracked to reveal the dark, murky depths below.

“We can’t turn around, dumbass! There’s no time!”

The villain jerked the wheel to the side, but was quickly countered. Regardless of the struggles of either side, the vehicle was staying on its path.

“Stop the car!” Villain’s foot lurched out, but missed the brake on account of its awkward position. Hero gritted their teeth-- their nemesis was practically laying on top of them!

“There’s no time!”

“Of course there’s time! What are you talking about!”

The gap was growing wider.

“We’re going too fast, we’ll never make it. We need to jump!”

“You’re insane!”

“Slow down!”

“Speed up!”

“Stop it!”

“Keep going!”

The car stayed at the exact same speed as the knot of limbs fought amongst itself. The accelerator was struck, then the brakes, then the gas, then the pedal.

And neither driver got their way.

With a pair of screaming fools inside, the car jumped the gap, and plunged into the river below.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Its easy to see cars as unstoppable, unbeatable things. Able to crush and destroy with a driver’s slight wrong twitch. Hunks of contorted, twisted metal, more than willing to maim.

And, on land, perhaps those things were true. But underwater?

The car screeched as its hood slammed into the riverbed, crumpling to a tin can with the impact alone. Contorted into a far smaller form, the river’s current swept the metal brick alone with far greater ease.

Above, the world rushed by at a million miles an hour.

Below the river’s surface, it crept along in slow motion, because Villain was not moving.

Oh, god, they weren’t moving.

Hero couldn’t care less about the alarms, the screeching lights that surrounded them. Every safety precaution had been long forgotten, they were far, far past the point of precaution.

Their nemesis was thrown around the passenger’s seat, no seatbelt or consciousness to aid in keeping them in place. The hero struggled to move closer to them, but found themself just as much beholden to the vehicle’s whims.

The car slammed once more into something, a spiderwebbing crack launching across the windshield. Water began to hiss through the fissures.

They couldn’t stay in here. The car would do more to harm them than protect them. The red, sticky fluid staining the back of Villain’s head made that fact more than apparent.

Hero sucked in an anxious breath.

They spent every day of their existence saving lives, but this was different. This was Villain.

But, letting harm come to them was out of the question.

Their nemesis was surprisingly light-- though that could have been just the adrenaline talking. With one arm, they drug the unconscious villain to their lap, holding them firmly to their chest, trying to ignore the red trickling down their neck, and the way their leg didn’t seem to quite be moving right.’

Another breath, this one deep and shuddering.

Their life as a hero would do nothing for them, here. Desperately, they struggled for civilian knowledge. An old PSA came to mind. As a kid watching it on TV it had always seemed ridiculous, but-

Wait till the car is completely submerged. That was already well taken care of.

Aid unconscious passengers. Check.

Undo or cut all seatbelts. They had been too stupid to wear any.

Then... Then open the door, and swim to the surface.

Open the door.

Just do it! Okay, on three.

1...

2...

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Villain was soaking wet.

It was the first thing they managed to notice as they struggled to jolt upright, only to find that they were already positioned in such a way.

Before their eyes were even fully open, a new instinct wracked them: The intense desire to cough. It was not an urge they could resist, and, soon, their chest was wracked as they struggled to...

Water. Water, coughing from their lungs.

They blinked, managing to open their eyes on the second attempt. Though, almost immediately, they closed them once more. They stung terribly, stinging with...

Smoke?

It was confusion that allowed them to try a thrice time, squinting to protect their eyes.

Yes, it was smoke! Grey and heavy, twisting through the air. The fire presented itself just as quickly-- small and contained, to their good fortune. An equally fortunate wind turned the singing smoke from their face, allowing them to fully see the world around them.

Trees and dirt-- a thick wood, all tangled in on its own biomass, hardly allowing them to see the dark, heavy sky hanging above.

Oh, and Hero was there.

Villain blinked, then, once their mind remembered what surprise was, yelped.

“Um...”

“Morning.” Hero lifted a hand, waving from where they sat, on the ground, behind the campfire.

“I didn’t realize you were a boy scout.”

“I’m not.”

“Then...”

“I just watched a lot of Lost.”

The hero’s gaze drifted downwards, to Villain’s legs, outstretched before them. Their own gaze followed.

A stick. On the side of their leg, secured with taut vines, was a big ass stick.

“You...”

“They did it on Lost!”

“Where are... Where are we?”

“No clue.” Hero shook their head. “But, you’re in no condition to go anywhere with that leg.”

“Then... why are you here?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your legs are fine.”

“Yeah, I know. But you’re hurt.”

“You hate me.”

“Really?” Hero raised a brow. “No one told me.”

#villain whumpee #hero caretaker #fluff #mostly #hero villain whump #prompt #ask

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boku-no-obsessedwiththisshow · 3 years

Text

red on red, nothing on everything; chapter 8

chapter 8

first | previous |

Rating: Explicit

Warnings: A/B/O dynamics, graphic depictions of violence typical to fantasy setting, dubcon

Relationships: Bakugou Katsuki/Uraraka Ochaco, Midoriya Izuku/Todoroki Shouto, Takami Keigo/Todoroki Touya, moments of Uraraka Ochaco/Todoroki Shouto, Kirishima Eijirou/Ashido Mina; eventual Kaminari Denki/Kyouka Jirou

Summary: In a world of magic and fantasy, Omega Uraraka Ochaco is the daughter of a poor noble family, ready to throw aside her pride and offer her greatest treasures to secure protection for her land and people - her secret power, and herself. Alpha Bakugou Katsuki is an outlaw, vengeful but wandering too aimless with his pack, doing damage but not to those he wants to hurt. When their worlds are thrust together and they find themselves on the run and desperately trying to survive, Bakugou tells himself there is nothing he wants with the small, sassy omega in front of him. Uraraka tells herself she will not get attached to the handsome, foul-mouthed alpha. But danger mounts as they enter deeper and deeper into enemy territory, and a game of hunter and hunted begins against a mad, powerful king, and a ticking clock inside Ochaco’s own body. They each have promises to keep, and responsibilities to return to - but perhaps, destiny can be twisted, bent, and they can find a way to happiness with each other.

They might just die trying.

Preview: “Am I wrong?” he shoots back just as quick. He feels a disturbing amount of glee at the swearing that’s mixing into her speech, a clear sign of her fraying composure.

“Yeah! All I do is what you tell me, because all you do is snap and bark orders at me all fucking day —”

“Because I’m in charge here!” Katsuki shouts. “Me! Not fucking you! And —”

“That’s not — we agreed to do this together —”

“No, I agreed to let you come with me!”

“Because you need my help —”

“I don’t need shit from you,” he snarls. “Especially since all you’ve done from the beginning is fuck things up for me —”

“That’s not true.”

“— and slow us down —”

“Stop.”

“— and ruin every fucking plan!”

“Alpha, stop —”

“You’re really not in any position to fucking complain —”

Katsuki pauses, coming to a stop an arm’s length away from her. Gods, what is he even saying anymore? It doesn’t matter. Katsuki’s mouth moves on its own, filter turned off, his brain long past the point of analyzing any of what’s coming out. All he knows right now is that he wants her to react. He wants her to hurt. So he plucks the cruellest, most callous words he can, and gives form to a truth that has lurked under the surface of his every thought and action since this entire nightmare began.

“— when you’re the reason all of this is happening in the first place.”

And, oh, there it is.

The omega finally looks up. Katsuki sees, as much as smells, the exact moment that the remains of her self-control vanish. Green tea reaches him, at the same time as her face contorts into a hateful scowl, the strength of her emotion causing her body to burn through whatever was left of the small amount of blocker she took. The smell of her is bitter and thick to match the rage in her expression. Perfect.

In a very slow, obvious motion, Katsuki moves one hand to a sword on his back, his fingers wrapping around its hilt deliberately. Her eyes flicker to his hand, then rapidly behind and around him, taking in her position, sizing up the terrain and surroundings. There is a moment — a space, a breath between breaths. She could walk away, still.

But she doesn’t, and Katsuki smiles triumphantly, dangerously.

His blood sings with the promise of what’s going to come next.

#my writing #nothing on everything tag #bnha fic #bnha fanfiction #kacchako #kacchako fic #kacchako fanfiction #kacchako a/b/o

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fandom-necromancer · 3 years

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Feeling from the heart

This was prompted by the wonderful @smolandangry001! I hope you enjoy!

Fandom: Detroit become human | Ship: Reed900 (Warnings: description of past-surgery medical care)

‘Oh, would this break never end’, Gavin sighed in deep content. Nines scanned the man more lying than sitting on a bench in Chandler Park, five minutes from the precinct, eyes closed and bathing in the sun. Immediately the warm feeling in his chest re-emerged, as it did so often these days. He should really get his heat sensors checked soon, if these malfunctions continued to come up. It was one of the first warm days of spring and Gavin had hung his jacket over the backrest sitting there in his hoodie with the sleeves pushed to his elbows. ‘You would get sunburn’, Nines stated factually. Gavin laughed. ‘Yeah, I guess. But this day’s too nice to spend it behind a desk.’ ‘I will trust your assessment and agree.’ ‘Come on.’ Gavin sat up and crossed his arms. ‘Phcking winter’s finally over, you don’t freeze your balls off being outside and you finally don’t both arrive and leave work when It’s dark. That’s not doing something for you?’ ‘I don’t care about the weather. I am waterproof and can operate in arctic temperatures. I am also not dependent on an extrinsic stimulus to update my inner clock.’ He noticed Gavin’s eye roll and hesitated to abandon the conversation just yet. ‘But… I guess as you like this sort of weather more, I will decide to like it too.’

Nines had thought that to satisfy the human but instead was met with a confused stare. ‘You decide to like something?’ ‘Yes. I wasn’t programmed with aesthetic preferences. So, I decided to like certain things others around me like based on work climate efficiency, general opinion on the subject and logic.’ ‘Oh, you do? Please elaborate’, Gavin said, and Nines missed the sarcastic undertones. ‘Humans generally seem to like dry weather more than rain. But they don’t like too hot temperatures. Also snow is an exception. Logic states I don’t need to bother about the weather. As the weather mostly is a topic for small-talk, I too don’t need it to better my integration in the force.’ ‘Geez, they really hadn’t had human interaction in mind when they build you, had they?’, Gavin sighed and Nines dropped his head minutely. ‘I am a prototype for a soldier unit. They had other tests in mind. Successors could have been outfitted with a rudimentary social module to fight alongside humans if desired.’ Gavin pushed himself forwards and rested his elbows on his knees. ‘Shit, Nines. Okay, back to the weather: Why did your neutral stance suddenly change then?’ ‘Because you like it.’ ‘Oh, and that is important because…?’, he asked. Nines didn’t know what to answer at that, but was saved before his LED could settle on red long enough for the human to notice.

‘We have a new case.’ ‘What?!’ ‘Gavin, we need to move out immediately!’ ‘Wha- Nines, what the hell?’ But he was already on his feet, fetching his jacket from the bench. ‘Hostage situation at a Comerica bank, I got the address. Demands the money the bank denied him as a loan. We are the closest to the scene, but SWAT’s already on their way.’ ‘The hell? I’m not a negotiator and neither are you!’ ‘Connor’s on the way too.’ ‘Goddamnit.’ They ran towards the street outside the park gates right as their police car arrived. Nines jumped behind the wheel and barely had to wait for Gavin to enter after him. The human immediately fastened his seatbelt and grabbed for something to hold onto, because Nines’ driving style could be described as wild at best. It wasn’t reckless, as the android calculated every manoeuvre to the millisecond, but still Gavin had his reasons to normally be the one behind the wheel.

Nines put on the sirens and left the side of the road with squeaking tires. Weaving through traffic at dangerous speeds, they arrived in less than ten minutes at the bank.

They had taken their first steps towards the building, as someone shouted out to them: ‘Stop right there!’ Through the glass doors they could see into the lobby, where not one but two people stood. One of them kept watch over the civilians cowering on the floor, while the other one held one hostage at gunpoint. Nines immediately scanned the situation, then tapped Gavin on the arm. ‘That’s good. Not another step, or I’ll blow his brain out!’ Gavin tensed, but Nines just removed his own hand from his pistol. ‘No, you won’t. This gun is fake, you purchased it from a toy store.’

Gavin frowned and looked up at Nines. But apparently, the android was right, as the two cursed, threw their plastic guns away and made a run for it the exact same moment, SWAT arrived. Gavin sighed, then began to pursue them, followed close by Nines. The two wannabe-bank-robbers were fast and knew the area, turning corners on them and even gaining on them until they got to a long straight stretch of road. Nines extrapolated their paths and as soon as he saw the car, he doubled his efforts. The first managed to enter the car, but with one inhuman leap, Nines landed on the hood, causing the first one to freeze in shock and the other one to abort his plan and run. Gavin continued to run after the fleeing man, while Nines started distorting the car doors to effectively trap the man until their backup would have caught up with them.

He ran after Gavin, who was in a far better position at the moment. He would catch up, but this one was likely Gavin’s to arrest. True to it, at the end of the road, Gavin had managed to catch up to him. With one last effort of strength, he leapt forwards, gripping the man by the shoulder and jolting him around. He looked at the Detective, who saw the panic in his eyes and was ready to call it quits by twisting his arm around and making the arrest. Unfortunately this man had been a bit more precarious than his accomplice and had packed a kitchen knife to the toy gun that he produced out of seemingly nowhere. In a reaction coming from panic and mindless self-preservation, the man pushed the knife into Gavin’s chest.

Gavin let go, eyes wide in shock as he saw the handle of it sticking out of his clothes. He wondered why he didn’t feel anything, then the pain set in and made him fall to his knees in a silent, breathless scream. In the distance he heard footsteps, but it didn’t seem to matter when all his eyes could fix on was the handle at his chest. He had been stabbed. Oh shit, he had been stabbed! Suddenly there were hands on him, gently laying him down on the sidewalk. ‘Nines!’, Gavin huffed hoarse. ‘Nines, phck, it hurts, Nines. What- Phck, there’s something inside me, get it out, get it out!’ He tried to grab the handle himself, but his sweaty fingers were caught by Nines’ cold ones. ‘Nines!’, the Detective cried in panic. ‘Nines, please, take it out! I- I’m scared, I- It hurts so much.’ The android’s unmoving face stared back at him, eyes rapidly trailing his body, without doubt analysing something. Good. Nines never made an error. But with the place the knife stuck in… He lifted his head to see the handle, but the android pushed him down again. ‘Nines? Nines, I think it’s in my heart. Phck, Nines, I can feel it. That bastard stabbed me in the heart, I will- Will I die, Nines? I don’t want to die!’ The android’s eyes still scanned him, but now his face contorted and seemed to form an expression for maybe the very first time.

Gavin couldn’t really make out what happened next as his vision faded out when the pain hit hard. Nines must have lifted him up and run back to the police cars, because he found himself lying on the bench in the back of the car. ‘Gavin. Listen. Lay still, make sure the knife stays inside and don’t touch it unless necessary!’ ‘Make sure…’, Gavin slurred, practically feeling the painful outline of the knife inside of him. ‘It stays in?’ ‘Yes! It increases your chance at survival.’ The roar of the engine seemed ten times louder than normally and almost swallowed everything Nines said. It somehow felt as if it would swallow himself, too. Gavin couldn’t focus on anything long enough to sense something, but the pain remained sharp.

He distantly heard the cacophony of sirens, tires, shouts and something that might have been his name. He saw the faceless heads of people and a regular flash of lights. He was moved, he smelled the chemical stench of disinfectant and nitril gloves and somewhere in between the iron taste of blood that made it hard to breathe. Sensations overwhelmed him, let him feel weirdly out of his own body, as if the knife was the only thing keeping his consciousness connected with it. There was a single cold touch to his hand that stood out to him as if it somehow mattered the most in all of this, then everything slipped away to peaceful nothingness.

‘Nines! Nines, are you alright?’, Connor’s voice was detected, but was categorized as a low priority, as his systems were invested in keeping everything at bay that threatened to fry them. Nines’ stress levels had never been this high, and lesser androids would had already self-destructed. Sometimes it was good to be designed as a deviancy-proof model as it meant he could deal with it better than others. Not that Nines could rely on it, he had deviated after all. But he was still here and so were his worries. ‘Nines.’ A hand on his shoulder added to the auditory input and caused him to look up then. ‘Connor.’ ‘Are you okay?’ Nines blinked at this highly illogical question, given that his LED was blinking red ever since he could scan Gavin. ‘Obviously not. I am…’ He thought about his status, not knowing what word could describe it better. ‘I am experiencing a lot of stress at the moment, likely caused by my partner’s injury.’ ‘I know, I wanted to know what you are feeling.’ Nines didn’t answer. How could he? He was never meant to… feel. He wasn’t programmed to detect feelings neither in himself nor in others. And even if he knew his internal status and what exactly was different to normal, he didn’t know how to express it.

‘Cold’, he tried, even though that had to be a malfunction as his components were running dangerously hot, one after the other. ‘I am under a lot of stress and I… When I scanned Gavin, he had a thirty percent survival rate. By the time we arrived at the hospital, it was down to twenty-two. As he was rushed to the operation room, it had dropped to eleven point three. I can only imagine how detrimental the removal of the knife will be to his expectation. It… It would be detrimental to my efficiency if he died.’ ‘He will make it’, Connor tried. ‘Unlike machines, humans are resilient. Working up to a hundred years without maintenance, regenerating from life threatening conditions and constantly fighting against other organisms that would be detrimental to them. Gavin is… particularly resilient if you so will. You did what you could do. Now you have to wait and let the other humans save him.’ ‘The chances are slim he will survive.’ ‘Just because it is unlikely, doesn’t mean it is impossible’, Connor smiled at him. Nines looked at him and for the first time wished he knew how to smile like that. Maybe then the last thing Gavin had seen wouldn’t be the faces of strangers and machines. It tipped his stress levels even higher.

‘Nines. Nines, listen to me. You have to calm down. Otherwise I would have to shut you down right now so Gavin has a partner to get back to when he survives this!’ But Nines couldn’t calm down when he didn’t even know what was causing this. It should have been a simple analysis, a simple cause of action: Get Gavin to a hospital as soon as possible and take every action in his power to ensure his survival. Now he had to wait. He shouldn’t be this stressed. He should be fine. But something messed with his systems, some processes that took logic away from him and left him in chaos. When the offer of an interface came up, Nines took it as if it was his only salvation.

He was hurled into his “zen garden” – an empty mesh of an engine housing his avatar. Red error messages were popping up all around him, almost forming a cage around him making him fall to the ground. After a short loading sequence, Connor appeared next to him, quickly rushing to him helping him up. Only then he looked around at the error messages. ‘RA9, Nines, I told you to copy mine, this is creepy’, he muttered, then started brushing a few away, taking over Nines systems without the other android even trying to intervene. The older RK managed to quarantine some of the more destructive sequences, then loaded his own zen garden as a means of comfort.

He was quickly met with a storm, rain pressing down on them and thunder crashing over the artificial sky. ‘Hell, Nines, you really aren’t okay at all…’ He pulled Nines to the central pavilion to get out of the rain and helped him sit down. ‘Nines. You have to tell me how you feel. All of it.’ ‘I don’t want him to die!’, Nines shouted out, now that Connor’s self-analysing protocols bled through the connection and made his inner turmoil somewhat clearer. ‘I need him, and I want him to come back, I…’ He looked up at Connor, his avatar’s face far more expressive as his real body could be. He looked desperate, but also shocked at the realisation. ‘I love him…’ ‘You love him?’, Connor asked, expecting almost anything but his younger brother, who hadn’t been designed to interact with humans at all, to fall in love.

‘I… I wondered why I always felt warm around him. I thought it was a malfunction, but as temperature is irrelevant for me, I disregarded it. He made my thorium pump race whenever we were close, but we mostly get close to each other on missions, so I chalked it up to the stress. I… Now it feels as if I froze over and as if my pump beats only to sustain me with the minimum. I’m… afraid? Is that the right description?’ Connor nodded and held him close as the thunder rumbled around them. ‘It’s okay to be afraid. I wouldn’t know how I would react were Hank to almost die. I can only imagine how it feels for you. You were never really confronted with such stressors.’ ‘I want it to end. I want Gavin to come back.’ ‘He will.’ ‘How can you be so sure?’ Connor looked at him. Telling him how Gavin was an ambitious asshole that was simply too stubborn to die so easily, wouldn’t help, so he just sighed and held his brother while keeping his systems stable. ‘Experience.’

- The surgery took eight hours. Only then Connor dared to close the interface and listen as the doctor explained to Nines what they had done. The smile on the woman’s face let Nines’ stress levels sink almost as much as the message itself had: Gavin was stable and had been taken to the CCU to be observed as he woke up. Of course Nines wasn’t accepting that fact until he had seen it for himself and the doctor reluctantly send him a nurse to take him there.

As he entered the room, his pump stocked. Gavin lied there in a dimmed room, a respiratory tube still in his throat and hooked up to several monitoring machines. But his chest was rising and falling, and the heart monitor was beeping steadily. ‘You can wait here for him to wake up. He won’t be able to speak with the tube, but if everything works out, we will remove it after a few hours. Call us if you need anything.’ ‘Can I-‘ Nines felt bad for asking as he was saying it, but now he had already begun, he could as well continue. ‘Can I hold his hand?’ ‘Of course. Don’t touch his chest, but I believe it will help him a great deal waking up with it.’ She gave him an honest smile and Nines hurried over, pulling himself a chair and gripping Gavin’s hand immediately. Maybe with a bit too much pressure, but Nines couldn’t help it. Fixed on his face, guarding his vital signs, his fingers soon relaxed and moved to his wrist to monitor his pulse himself. It finally let him relax. His heart was beating. His heart was beating slowly and steadily. He was alive. His human was alive.

Warnings he had disregarded until now popped up and Nines noticed how bad his condition had been before. He would have to thank Connor later. Maybe for more than only keeping his systems up and running. He looked at Gavin’s closed eyes, then to the scar on his nose, eyes brushing past the tube in his mouth to the huge reddened stitched cut on his chest. It was strange to think it had never occurred to him before that what he had deemed malfunctions could have been social protocols his deviancy had gifted him with during his adaption to life without a purpose. He loved Gavin. It was a strange word to use, but what was it but a declaration for complex actions of his body he wasn’t able to control? He loved him. He couldn’t wait to tell him.

He had to wait half an hour – a both endless time and gone in the blink of an eye. At once, regular breathing changed to one longer inhale, then eyes slowly slid open, sluggishly rolling around taking in his surroundings. They closed again Nines felt Gavin’s hand gripping his unconsciously. The human’s brows furrowed then, and he looked at his side. He tried to speak, but the tube muffled it into incomprehensible gibberish. ‘I’m here’, Nines said anyways. ‘You are at the hospital. You were stabbed.’ He had to stop Gavin’s free hand from trailing where the knife had stuck in his chest and held it too. ‘I took you here. The doctors performed surgery right away. You are okay. You are stable, now your body just has to heal.’

Gavin pressed his head into the pillow and closed his eyes, breathing deeply. Nines didn’t know what to do and imitated what Connor had done with him a while ago. He started brushing his thumb over his knuckles and if his skin retracted, he told himself it was a malfunction of recreating the scene. ‘The nurse said the tube will be removed soon if everything is alright. I… I have to tell you something then.’ Gavin frowned at him then, but Nines tried his horrible recreation of a forced smile and the human relaxed.

Two hours later, Nines had to step back as the nurses did the check-up on Gavin, inspecting the incision for infection and removing the tube, helping him to cough without irritating his wound and giving him some water for his dried out throat. After leaving a set of clothes, they left the room and Nines moved closer again, taking Gavin’s hand without hesitation. ‘You are a goddamn lifesaver, toaster’, the human whispered hoarsely at him, but smiled afterwards. ‘Never going to let me live that down, eh?’ Nines just watched him motionless. ‘You wanted to tell me something?’ The android nodded and scanned Gavin once again. ‘I love you’, he admitted quietly. ‘You…’ ‘I loved you for a while. I only noticed now because- My systems registered malfunctions that were gone as you were in danger of dying. I… I were short of self-destructing as Connor came to help. He helped me and I realised I… I loved you.’

Gavin stared at him and Nines was awkwardly made aware that until recently they hadn’t even been real work partners, much less time they had spent as friends. Maybe- ‘Nines?’ He looked up and silently waited for Gavin to continue. ‘I can’t sit up yet, so I have you to come lean forwards.’ Confused, Nines did so, asking himself what Gavin was planning. The Detective huffed a laugh as Nines had simply leaned straight forwards, hovering over his face. He couldn’t really reach his goal from there, but he just shrugged and took what he could.

Nines recoiled slightly, as he was kissed on the point of his nose. He was still processing as Gavin giggled and had to stop with a wince, as the movement pulled at his wound. ‘You got the message?’, he whispered and coughed. ‘I…’ Nines felt the heat coming back into his chest and sensed his pump running faster. On top of it, his synthetic skin glitched and turned blue around his cheeks. ‘I think I do.’

#detroit become human #dbh #Reed900 #RK900 #I'm always amazed at medicine like holy shit the research for this one was amazing #Like I have theoretic knowledge of this stuff as a biologist but I can only say how it works dissect it and compare it to other stuff #But medicine can repair all that I'm always blown away by that #like you can even survive when it's pulled out if you get qualified medical assistance in 3-5 minutes #but I guess you would have to be stabbed in the waiting room of the hospital for that one #Still cool

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miceenscene · 3 years

Text

Star-Crossed

din djarin/female oc | soulmate AU | pre-canon

wc: 2.3k / 9.8k (so far)

summary: The Way was not supposed to be a solitary one. People, house, clan. And when all else failed, your Match. “Fits like a Mandalorian Match” was the old saying. Though it wasn’t so long ago that it stopped making sense. But what's a lost Match to a man like Din Djarin?

warnings: canon-typical violence, lol does pining need a warning??

Previous Chapter | Masterpost | ao3

Chapter Four: The Difference

It was as the hull door was slowly shutting behind them that Din realized he'd invited someone to join him on a semi-permanent basis.

It was as the hull door was slowly shutting behind them that Din realized he’d invited someone to join him on a semi-permanent basis.

He’d never done that before.

Ever.

Sometimes people were more passengers than quarry, but they never stayed before.

They always left.

Nia stayed.

It took some getting used to, having another person around.

Old habits had to be adjusted. His helmet now only came off in bed or the fresher.

Though once he did forget it till he was halfway across the hull, half-awake and scrounging through the ration bars to find the good ones. It took a boot scrape on the floor above him to remind him that there was another living thing aboard.

There was an undignified scramble back to the bed cubby, but the helmet was firmly in place before Nia appeared down the ladder.

Other habits were completely abandoned.

“Heading out?” Nia asked, looking up from her flight manual as the hull door dropped slowly open.

Din pulled a few hand grenades out of the armory and tucked them into his belt. “I’ll be back in a few hours.”

“I’m coming with you.” She picked up her bo staff and the pistol that she’d taken from the Sergeant.

“There’s no need–”

“I’m not going to sit here and babysit an empty ship.”

“I work alone,” he hedged.

“You offered to help me. And since the only thing my mind seems to bother recalling is fighting, I’m sure as hell not going to let that slip out of my grasp too.” She crossed her arms and gave him a very obstinate look.

Out of habit, she got the usual treatment he gave people when they argued: silence.

It was laughably ineffective.

They just wound up staring at each other for several minutes in stubborn silence.

She’d stand there till the sun went down, he could feel it in his bones.

Call it a Match hunch, which did not technically exist but might as well have.

“Fine. But wherever I go, you go, understood?”

“Loud and clear.”

Her stubbornness didn’t stop once they were off the ship either.

A quarry got away from them for a full two days because they kept arguing about battlefield tactics.

They got the clawdite in the end. But only once they’d both apologized and made a new plan together.

And there was also the time she flew the ship without him.

Granted, he’d been knocked unconscious. And they did need to outrun the X-wings.

And for a woman who couldn’t remember where she was two moon cycles ago, she was a fair pilot.

If he didn’t care to use the ship ever again.

That dent in the hull wouldn’t come out no matter how many mechanics tried.

Even still, it seemed to take very little time at all before Nia’s presence was thoroughly expected and normal.

She seemed to… enjoy herself at times. And he did too, if he was honest.

Not that she wasn’t still deeply odd.

She spoke fluent mando’a, but fought like no Mandalorian he’d ever seen.

She could meditate for hours, and always seemed keenly aware of his exact location nearby when she did.

And then one evening, he came down from the flight deck, ready to climb into bed for some rest when he found her… contorted in the middle of the hull.

Her body was bent and stretched in ways he wasn’t previously aware that bodies could move.

Or at least move and still survive.

He watched as, without any hurry at all, she moved from one impossible pose to another; her breath and muscles in perfect control.

She could have made any of his old trainers proud with her self-mastery.

“You’re staring,” she said without looking his way.

His face heated under the helmet. He should have guessed this would be like her meditation.

“What are you doing?” he asked, moving to sit on a crate and pull off his boots.

She ended her routine by standing and bringing her hands pressed together in front of her chest and letting out one last long breath.

“I don’t know exactly. All I know is I feel restless if I don’t,” she said, turning around to face him. She patted his shoulder as she passed. “Sleep well.”

That happened often. Her touching him.

Even in the covert, even in his years of training back on Mandalore, no one had touched him so often.

And so casually too.

Like it was nothing at all for her to rest her arm on his shoulders as he demonstrated how to properly land the ship.

Or to sit so close to him when eating that her arm brushed his with every movement.

Maybe it was nothing at all to her.

But it was much more than nothing to him.

Her hands were all over him as she trained him in polearms, adjusting his grip, shifting the angle of his arms, urging him to relax the tension between his shoulder blades.

She held his hips to guide him through the weight transfer he kept overshooting, his face hot enough to melt his helmet clean off the entire time.

She quickly noticed how stiff he was around her. To his detriment.

He’d just been stepping around her in the flight deck.

Then suddenly a hand jabbed his rib cage.

He jumped, a strange noise cutting out of him as he did.

Nia broke immediately into a resounding laugh, pressing a hand to cover her mouth, doing a poor job of dampening the sound.

“I’m sorry!” she managed after a moment. “I–I didn’t know you’d… oh I’m s-sorry, Din.”

That was the first time he heard her laugh. It softened her blow considerably.

The second time he heard her laugh was when he retaliated two days later.

She leapt to the other side of the hull and was in a full fighting stance before she realized that he’d poked her.

Then she laughed again, making him laugh too, a smile beaming from under his helmet.

It happened somewhere when he wasn’t paying attention.

Somewhere between debating infiltration tactics and sparring, between knowing glances while Karga attempted to short-change them and long warm afternoons spent up in sniper’s nests, waiting for their quarry to return home…

She became his friend.

“I figured it out,” Nia said as she sat at the bar of a crowded cantina. She’d been sent in alone, semi-undercover as she was far less conspicuous than he was, to find their quarry. “An emergency induction tube. Then you can drink in bars with me and keep the helmet on.”

Outside in the alley, Din scoffed and spoke over the commlink in his helmet. “An emergency induction tube?”

“I have one now.”

He looked through the window to see her sip her drink through a straw. He chuckled then answered, “Still won’t work.”

She grunted, feigning annoyance. “‘Wherever you go, I go’ always seems to stop counting when it's time to relax.”

Under the helmet, he smiled.

“Do you have friends, Din?”

“What?” he asked over the commlink. Had he heard her right?

“I said, do you have friends? Been flying with you for a few months now, and I’m still waiting to meet them.”

“You met Ran and his crew.”

“You think Ranzar Malk and the rest of those criminals are your friends?” she asked, a little incredulously. “Didn’t Qin try to stab you during the last job?”

Technically, it was Xi’an who tried to stab him. “They’re… contacts.”

“So that’s a no on friends.”

He paused then said, “You’re my friend.”

Through the small vantage he had, he could see her smile down at her drink, eyes glancing just his way. His chest warmed.

“So one woman with a head like Corellian cheese. That’s… pretty good for a bounty hunter.”

“Same number you have right now.”

Her chuckle was low, sparking a single star burst high in his chest. “You have me there. Ah, found him. Target’s at the sabacc tables. I’ll flush him out into the alley.”

They had a good partnership. And he was happy to share most everything with her, what little amenities he could offer aboard The Razor Crest.

He didn’t realize she hadn’t been sleeping in the bed for weeks. Not until he came down from the flight deck early and found her curled in a corner of the hull, still using his cape as a blanket.

She didn’t seem to know where it had come from. And he certainly wasn’t going to inform her or take it back.

When he asked why she wasn’t using the bed, she said that it was his.

“It belongs to whoever’s sleeping,” he replied, firmly meaning it.

She took him at his word.

He hadn’t really been prepared, however, to crawl into the cubby after a long day and find that the whole space smelled like her soap.

She’d bought it in the first city they arrived in weeks back. Now it was all over his blankets.

Sea air. And wildflowers.

With the door to the cubby firmly shut, he slept with the helmet off that night…

And every night after, an unstoppable glow building in his chest.

Her memories, unfortunately, did not return. Or certainly not as fast as the droid made it seem like it would.

In several months, very little arrived.

Early childhood memories of Mandalore before the Great Purge. But no explanation of the control chip, or her skills.

She kept up a strong aloof appearance of her defect, but every so often, Din caught a glimpse of her despair hiding behind it.

They were in hyperspace, both working on small projects during the journey. He was outfitting one of his guns with a new scope, and Nia had taken to carving designs on her bo staff. It was turning into quite the fine weapon in her steady hands.

They’d been quietly working for a while when she started humming a low, slow tune. She didn’t even seem to be aware she was doing it.

Din looked up at her as her quiet song continued. Her curly dark hair twisted high on her head, back bowed over her staff in her lap as she deepend the etchings she’d done.

Her song wound back on itself and only then did she seem to realize what she��d been doing.

She looked up and sucked in a shaky gasp.

“Are you alright?” he asked gently.

She nodded, bottom lip quivering and eyes turning glassy. “My father used to sing that song,” she finally explained with a watery smile.

Though she couldn’t see, he smiled back, a tightness clenching high in his chest.

A bright fullness so wide it pushed out all the air in his lungs to make room.

He’d been feeling that a lot lately.

It wasn’t unpleasant, though it was annoying at times.

Especially when it showed up in the middle of a fight after Nia did something particularly skilled against her opponent.

It seemed to have no rhythm or source… besides her.

The galaxy was just different with her around.

It didn’t seem so soulless.

Perhaps because she noticed the small ignorable things.

Grabbing his arm to stop and watch street performers in a market he would have otherwise just passed through.

Pointing out the broad purple sweep of the planet’s rings through the night sky as they walked the quarry back to the ship.

Or perhaps because it was just simply nice to have someone around. Someone he enjoyed spending time with, someone who would have his back in danger, someone he trusted.

He knew what the star bursts high in his chest meant.

He wasn’t obtuse.

But there was a large difference between understanding and ready to admit, even just to himself.

Much less to her.

As for Nia, it took her several months to ask the inevitable.

He could feel her gearing up to ask something. Must be something pointed with how long her wind up was, nearly a full ration bar.

“Can I ask about your helmet?”

“No, you can’t wear it,” he answered, not looking up from the gun he was cleaning. He got a small smack on his arm for the answer, making him grin.

“I know that. I meant… your oath is to not show your face to another living being ever. Right?”

“Yes.”

“Not even your clan?”

He looked up now. “I don’t have a clan. I was a foundling.”

“But you could have one someday–unless that’s also part of the oath.”

He shook his head. “No, that’s not part of it.”

Nia leaned forward, deadly serious. “So… say you have a spouse, or children, they’d never know your face?”

She sounded… sad, he realized after a moment.

He’d had plenty of questions about his helmet; it came with being a Mandalorian. But none before had ever looked at his helmet and seen tragedy.

Not even him.

“When I took the creed, I gave up my old life. The helmet is my face. That’s what it means to be Mandalorian.”

“But I knew my parents’ faces… and they were Mandalorian.”

No they weren’t, a voice not his own hissed in the back of his mind, nasty and cruel and he didn’t know where it had come from.

He shook his head. “I don’t know… but this is what I was taught. This Is The Way.”

She didn’t press it any further, but the quiet disagreement in her eyes stuck with him as he drifted to sleep, alone and helmetless in sea air and wildflowers.

Chapter 5: The Discovery

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#The Mandalorian #Din Djarin #Pedro Pascal #Din Djarin x ofc #the mandalorian #mando x you #Din Djarin fanfic #soulmate au #Star Crossed #my writing

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nukyster-blog · 4 years

Text

Changing Course chapter 21) Forty minus one

Ivar awoke by the first sunlight of dawn. The white rays were watery and cold, like the temperature in the dungeon. Frost had slowly allowed itself to enter the castle’s walls and inched inside, ridding Ivar’s prison cell of the last bits of warmth.

Ivar did not recall if he slept or lost consciousness due to the cold. He guessed the latter, as the bitter cold had chilled his fingers into useless numbness and crept further down into his body. It spread painfully from his toes into his feet robbing his skin of all color.

“Maybe”, he thought, “this is not the worst day to die”; he honestly didn’t believe he’d survive the winter.

The cold of night had robbed him of strength, but not of spirit. He would not fight his death but he’d do everything in his power to keep his jaws locked and mouth shut. He’d undergo whatever punishment those Christians thought proper for his crime and die with dignity.

A gust of frigid wind wrapped around him like a shawl woven by ice itself. His teeth chattered as he tried to warm his body by rocking back and forth.

Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. He began to lose his sense of time. Back and forth, back and forth. Hunger gnawed a hole in his stomach. Back and forth, back and forth.

The dead rat slowly but steadily became a reasonable meal. Back and forth, back and forth.

“Ivar?”

Ivar glanced up to the barred window. It was Piglet; in order for her to peek into Ivar’s prison cell she had to lay her head on the ground.

“Piglet?” Ivar crawled underneath the window and stared up, squinting his eyes. The young woman above reached back for a moment and managed to shove her arm through the bars.

A polished, red apple dropped into Ivar’s lap.

“Ivar…” her voice was brittle and soft; she reached further down into the cell as a desperate attempt for a last connection.

It was impossible. Even if Ivar had been able to stand, the walls were too high.

“I guess this is it then Piglet, we had a good run,” Ivar spoke toneless, watching her hand reach and wave, “we were a proper match you and I. It’s a shame you believe in a false God…” and that was where he stopped himself from becoming sentimental. Because both of them were aware they would never see each other again, there was no reason to voice the truth.

“A shame,” he ended and shut out all of her weeping. For a while, her arm remained reaching and waving, but as Ivar remained silent, Piglet eventually gave up and left.

He’d never know if she’d spoken any last words of goodbye for him, because he blocked everything out, all while eating her apple. Even the core, because he did not want her to get in trouble and he could use all the strength given.

.-.-.

Overnight the lessers of the castle had placed a beech wooden pole in the centre near the well. It wouldn't be the only silent witness of Ivar’s punishment. The rest of the bystanders were already buzzing and whispering about what was to come.

The Giant hadn’t been pleased with Ivar’s forehead statement and had wiped off the Runen R with spit and his sleeve.

The cobblestones bruised his knees as Ivar was shoved, poked, and kicked in order to get into the centre.

The three rulers and the fair maiden had taken place nearest the pole, seated on wooden chairs. Their place had the best view for the spectacle, although Lambertus and his wife, Haedwien, did not look pleased with being present. The fair maiden had her hand pressed against her mouth, cheeks pale and on the verge of getting sick.

And Ludolf, sat sunken on his seat, bored and maybe even a bit embarrassed. For it was due to his “wound” that the slave had to suffer and be an example for the rest. The bystanders were on foot, nudging and pulling to get to the front row.

For some reason Ivar was pleased to see the Christians fight for the best spot, at least those soulless bastards had some sense of bloodlust. Maybe they were more Viking then they’d like to admit.

Ivar was forced on his knees, facing the pole. His arms were stretched far above his head and tied to the beech wood. A knife was dragged jaggedly through his humble tunic, tearing the fabric open, baring his back, shoulders and neck completely.

“Will they Bloodeagle me?” Ivar wondered stunned, as he pressed his cheek against the wood in an attempt to pick up everything that was happening behind him. But his arms were tied too high, leaving his face and most of his upper body pressed against the pole, minimizing his mobility.

The Giant spoke some biblical nonsense; Ivar concluded from the Giant’s tone. Ivar’s assumption was completely confirmed when he heard the book slam shut.

The first lash came completely unexpected and Ivar broke his solemn rule—to keep his mouth shut. A pain plagued hiss managed to escape through his teeth. The second lash managed to hit the exact same position as the first and cut through Ivar’s skin. A tortuously slow pattern emerged, one of two lashes and then a moment of ease. Ivar later learned that moment of pause wasn’t for him, no, it was for the Giant, so his arm would not tire.

The lashes seemed to rip Ivar open to the marrow, like rigged daggers the leather dug deeper and deeper into his skin. Time did not matter anymore; all that remained was the rhythm of the lashes.

A scream from deep within forced its way from Ivar’s mouth, it was not one of fright, but one formed entirely of anger that unleashed itself like a demon. It took two more lashes to silence him, fists clenching and teeth locking up all of his remaining sound. Now that his anger escaped him, there was only despair.

Ivar lost count after fifteen, his ears were ringing and he could no longer see clearly. His mind seemed afloat; his body a vacant, aching shell. There was a low indistinct sound, almost animalistic. It took him a moment to realize those where his own hoarse moans.

The cobblestones wore more and more spatters of Ivar’s blood. It did not take many more lashes for his battered skin to peel loose, falling down at his knees like bloody autumn leaves.

A deep, raspy caw called down to him. Ivar’s eyes were able to focus enough on the top of the pole to see the black silhouette of a raven, contrasting against the milky white sky.

“Father—“ Ivar watched the bird as his front teeth scraped over the beech wood.

The raven cawed again, its beady eyes mercilessly taking in the scene beneath it. With wings black as tar, it gracefully landed near Ivar’s knees. Ravens were known for their curiosity, but even they knew their limits. It wasn’t common for birds to come so near such a large crowd of humans. But the raven did not show any hesitation and pecked at the remains of Ivar’s skin. It peeked up again, taking a piece of Ivar before lifting off, heading off into the milky white sky.

Ivar inhaled a sharp breath as the leather tore at his skin again, but this time he felt elevated.

“You can beat every inch of my body,” he whispered hoarsely, “but you cannot kill me. Not today, because I am Ivar the Boneless, son of Ragnar Lothbrok, and I have my father’s blessings.”

His eyes rolled back as his body was close to giving in to the immense pain scorching his entire back. The crowd had grown silent; most faces contorted with plagued expressions. The fair maiden had fled the scene. Ludolf’s lips were twisted into a satisfied, lopsided and sadistic smile.

Pain prevails over every emotion. It conquers lust, hunger, envy, hatred. Pain can divide brothers by blood; it can drive wise men mad.

To triumph over pain, you need to be extraordinary—near Godly.

In between the last few lashes, Ivar had an epiphany: he could not die before he’d fulfilled his destiny. And, although he did not know what lay in his future, he wholeheartedly believed the Gods had laid out an exceptional path for him. It became quite clear; he had beat death too many times to simply die by the hands of a Christian commoner.

Maybe he deserved this punishment, for he’d questioned the Gods too many times and cursed them for turning him from a cripple prince into a slave. His mother had been a Vülva, able to see the past, present and future. But interpreting the will of the Gods was hard, maybe she’d seen his death wrong and had it merely been a rebirth.

He’d been resurrected from death, by his father, time after time. So for today, Hellheim and Valhalla had to wait for his arrival, for he had his destiny to fulfill.

.-.-.

In the bible Moses’ Law referred to flagellation; the law itself meant forty lashes less one; thirty-nine lashes. The term was meant as a biblical one, in that 40 lashes were determined enough to kill a man, according to the Old Testament and thus 39 lashes was the most you give a man without declaring a penalty of death.

Today the crippled slave of de Haar survived forty.

.-.-.

A/N: I’m not going to lie, I’ve been so impatient to write this chapter. At the start, I only had a few guidelines: hurt, massive hurt and excruciating hurt. But then I figured I had to keep Ivar’s spirit intact in order for him to survive. So yes, once again Ragnar in the form of a Raven reappeared. As I’ve mentioned before, you can see this every way you like, spiritual, emotional. Is it just a young man in desperate need of comfort, or is there truly a link between Midgard and Valhalla? Pick whatever you please. And in case you wonder, I’ve made up Ivar’s entire path towards his destiny like the moment I started writing this story. In my head, it’s all written out, wrapped into a trilogy. Now just the time to drabble it all out. The 40 minus 1 is a true thing btw, I’ve done some (too much) research, it’s believed that Jesus received 39 whippings and since I’ve thrown Christianity into the mix I figured I might as well add some information as well.

So that was it for today, I hope you enjoyed this chapter, or sat there cringing in your chair, either way I’ve done my job well.

Xoxoxo Nukyster

The kickass beta: @Sarahh-Jane

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scoopsgf · 4 years

Note

1 + 96

It’s raining when it happens.

Raining just like when it had happened to Ben.

Only this time they’re inside, and it’s the thunder that counts: rolling across the swelling black sky after a crack of white-hot lightning, so loud it dulls the sound of the bullet going in.

But Peter hears her fall. He scrambles off of his bed and bursts into the kitchen to find May on the floor, in a steadily-growing pool of blood, surrounded by shards of glass from the shattered window she’d been shot through.

He stops breathing. He stops thinking.

Peter swings to the hospital because it’s the fastest way there. He knows how long it takes for ambulances to travel in this city; he’s well aware of the odds of her surviving a five minute wait time. Using his biocables cuts that neatly in half.

He bursts through the sliding glass doors of the emergency room and calls for help. It comes quickly. Suddenly there is a sea of blue-scrubbed doctors taking May from his arms, transferring her to a gurney, getting an oxygen mask on her face, wheeling her away. “Were you shot? Are you hurt?”

Peter blinks. It takes a minute to register that the nurse is asking about him.

“What?”

He comes back into focus. “Are you hurt?” the nurse asks again.

“Huh? Oh, no, it’s not—it’s not my blood.”

His voice is strangely flat. The nurse grabs a chart. “Do you know her name? Where did you find her?”

Peter blinks. Does he know her name? What kind of a question is that? Of course he… of course he knows his own aunt’s name…?

“Do you need to sit down?”

“Her name is May Parker,” Peter blurts. “Just—call this number,” he takes the chart from her and scrawls down seven digits he’s memorised by heart and hands it back. “They’ll come and they’ll take care of her. I have to go.”

The nurse’s brow furrows. “Sir, you’ll have to give a statement to the police—”

He rips out of her grip and runs out the way he came in.

—

It takes three rings, but then the phone is picked up.

“I need your help.”

—

He meets her in the back alley behind his building. “Hey,” he greets, and in return he gets a punch to the chest.

Peter chokes and rubs his ribs. “God, I don’t get paid enough for this shit.”

Nat’s features contort with pity. “Sorry, but in my defence you shouldn’t have snuck up on me.”

“I thought you were supposed to be some world-renowned spy.”

“And I thought you were supposed to be a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man,” she retorts, “but here we are.”

Peter’s face darkens. It’s stopped storming and the rain has dulled to a lazy drizzle. The ends of her hair are damp and curling and her breath steams. He steps around her and scans the building opposite his own. “Up there,” he says, jerking his chin toward a window on the fourth floor—which is directly opposite the one above his kitchen sink.

Nat follows his line of sight. “You sure you wanna do this?”

“What else am I supposed to do?”

“Oh, I don’t know, be with your aunt?”

Peter’s fists curl. “I’m not just gonna stand there like an asshole while she—” his throat stings with bile; he swallows. “I want to do something. I need to do something.”

Nat raises her hands placatingly. “Whatever you say, little spider.”

—

They sneak into the apartment building. It’s nondescript, pretty much exactly the same as his own except it clearly hasn’t been remodelled since the seventies so the carpet looks like something out of The Shining, but the layout is an exact match.

Nat picks the lock on apartment 4D and they slowly creep inside.

It’s completely empty. Like, no furniture, no bed, nothing. Peter’s stomach turns as the sweep the place only to come up empty handed, until—

“Bullet casings,” he announces, crouching by the window to pick them up.

Nat’s at his side in an instant. She takes one and inspects it. “FMJ,” she says with a frown. “Jesus, whoever did this really wanted to make sure she’d stay down.”

At the look on his face, she sighs. “Sorry.”

“Oh, sure.”

Nat leans out the window and scans the alley below. There’s nothing but a dumpster and a cardboard box full of kittens that Peter’s secretly been feeding for about a week.

“What do you think?”

“I think,” she says, “we need to speak to the landlord.”

—

The landlord is a little old guy named Skipper who tells them repeatedly that he can’t give out private information.

Then Nat gets him in a chokehold and he starts talking.

“He’s this creepy dude,” Skipper wheezes, rubbing his blotchy throat. “Reggie Farbank. Lanky hair, beady eyes, tall. Comes and goes all the damn time but he never stays long. Just checks his mailbox and leaves.”

Peter and Nat exchange a glance. He returns his gaze to Skipper. “Do you have a copy of his mail key?”

—

Reggie’s PO Box is empty except for one note, folded in half with Peter’s last name on it.

Nat scowls as she reads it over his shoulder. “Son of a bitch,” she growls.

—

Tony sits by May’s bed, pinching his brow as he listens to the steady, rhythmic beat of her monitors. It’s been about twenty minutes since she was moved from the OR to the ICU; the bullet had been through and through, but it had fractured her collarbone and shattered her shoulder blade—not to mention the damn thing was half an inch from puncturing her lung.

She hasn’t woken up yet. The doctors had mentioned it would be a while.

“Where’s Peter?” He’d asked them when he’d arrived, only to be met with bewildered looks.

Only one of the nurses had asked, “Might’ve been the kid who brought her here. He looked pretty shaken up. Gave us her name and your number and then ran off.”

Tony had sworn something nasty in Italian and pressed for more information only to receive none. They were all clueless. The storm had taken out their power and they’re running on backup generators, so there’s no security footage to run through. Peter’s trackers are off—but they were turned off manually, which means he had to be alive to do that.

He’s not dead but he’s not here and Tony doesn’t know what the fuck to do.

The smell of rosemary herald’s Pepper’s entrance into the little room. She runs her hand through Tony’s hair. “Anything?”

“Nadda.”

“You’ve tried calling—?”

“I’ve tried everything,” Tony says, a little harshly, and then sighs. “I’m sorry. I—I sent Happy down to check the apartment and… and to clean it up.”

Pepper looks a little sick. She hands him her coffee. He takes a long drink.

“Pete’s phone is off.”

“Why would he do that?”

“I don’t know. I’m—I don’t know.”

He’s clueless. Helpless. It doesn’t make any damn sense. Why would Peter run? There’s no way he was involved in this, so what could he possibly be doing?

“Do you want to go and look for him? I can wait with May.”

Tony shakes his head. “I’m not leaving her. He wanted me here so I’m staying. Why else would he have had them call us?”

“Tony—”

“I’m staying,” he says. “Besides, I already called in Rhodey. He and Happy are combing the streets as we speak, but odds are he’ll show up here and I’m not gonna be gone when he does.”

He’ll need me.

—

Peter and Nat make no sound as they slowly creep through the storage facility.

He’s holding a gun.

Guns are not his thing, but he hasn’t really given himself the chance to think about it. Nat had put it in his hands and if the time comes when she tells him to shoot, he knows he probably will. He’s angry enough to, bitter enough. He can’t stop wondering how long Farbank was watching them for; he’s been feeling off for days, spine tingling as he walks through the house, the hair on the back of his neck rising when May opens the window to let fresh air in.

He should have known.

He should have seen something like this coming.

“Any idea who he is?” Nat had asked on the drive over.

“No,” Peter had replied, checking the magazine on the glock.

“Well, I guess we’ll just have to find out ourselves, then.”

Only the address had been written on the note they’d found, but Peter doesn’t need the unit number. He just follows that feeling—it’s like a game of hot or cold, but instead it’s his stomach twisting and his skin prickling.

It’s like someone is stabbing needles into the ends of his fingers when they finally find the right unit. Peter takes one side and Nat takes the other. Their eyes meet across the distance.

He nods.

She shoots the lock.

—

“She’s crashing—code blue—”

“Someone get me the defibrillator!”

—

“I knew you’d come.”

Peter and Nat stand at the mouth of the unit with their guns raised. Peter’s bones feel like lead and his mouth tastes like metal.

There are pictures of him all over the walls: some blurry, some clear as day, all taken from the vantage point of Farbank’s apartment. He feels like vomiting but doesn’t. Instead he says, “So exactly what the fuck is this supposed to be?”

Farbank looks crazed. His hair is greasy like it hasn’t been washed in days and his eyes are bloodshot, pupils blown. He’s clearly high off his rocker. “You are the bane of my existence,” he says wildly. “You destroyed my family, so I destroyed what’s left of yours!”

Peter glances at Nat, who looks just as confused as him. “Enlighten me.”

“My brother,” Farbank snaps. “My big brother, Matt. I bet you don’t even remember him, do you? It was six months ago! He was—he was all I had left—we only had each other and you tore us apart!”

Farbank sweeps one of his many monitors off his desk with his outburst. In response, Nat cocks her gun and steps a little closer to the wall to give herself a wider range.

“So what, Parker here got your brother arrested so you decided to commit murder? Get yourself locked up too?”

“At least then I would be with him,” Farbank growls. There are tears on his cheeks. “Do you have any idea what they do to people in jail?!”

“I do, as a matter of fact,” she says coolly. “So what’d he get put away for?”

Farbank looks down, mouth twisting. “Armed robbery,” he whispers.

“Oh?” Nat tilts her head. “Sounds pretty justified to me.”

“We had no money!”

“But you had other options, I’m sure,” Nat says. “Robbery is just easier. Put the gun down.”

Peter had forgotten Farbank was even holding one. He starts sobbing, but then like a switch being flicked his monologue starts back up again. “It doesn’t matter! You can kill me and it won’t matter! The whole world is gonna find out your identity, Peter Parker! I have hours of footage, frames upon frames of proof! Did you really think you could just sneak out of your apartment every night and no one would notice?”

Nat squints at Peter. “Good question.”

Peter scowls. “Suck it, Nat.”

“Whatever,” she looks back at Farbank and then, in one swift move, she lowers her weapon. “Relax, I’m not gonna kill you.”

Farbank blinks. “What?”

“Yeah,” Peter adds, “what?”

Nat shrugs. She advances toward Farbank with her hands raised. “Everything is gonna be okay, I promise. If you just hand me the gun—”

Farbank lashes out, but Nat is quicker and she sees it coming: she disarms him in one swift move and plants a Widow Bite on his neck that has him convulsing on the floor and frothing from the mouth.

“Ew,” Peter says.

Nat hums. She’s already focused on hacking into the computers. Peter zip ties Farbank’s wrists and hears her snort. “God, talk about amateur hour.”

Peter isn’t listening. He stares down at the man who shot and possibly killed his aunt. “He deserves worse than this.”

“I know,” Nat replies easily, “but I don’t want you to be the one who administers his justice. That shouldn’t be your weight to bear.”

“Some people would say it’s my right.”

“Not me.” She types a few lines of code into the system and then says, “Wiped.”

Peter watches her promptly turn away and start ripping his pictures off the wall. Frustrated, he gets between her and them. “Nat,” he says, “what he did—”

“Hey,” she puts her hand on his arm, “you’re angry right now. You want to hurt him and I get it. But you won’t. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday you’re gonna come to your senses and remember that it wouldn’t do you or May any good. In fact it would only hurt her more, so let me handle it, okay?”

He sighs and closes his eyes for a second. The next thing he knows, Nat’s arms are around him. He’s only got a couple of inches on her, so her chin rests neatly on his shoulder.

“It never gets any easier,” she mutters, “but I’m gonna make sure you’re safe from here on out, I promise.”

And Peter doesn’t really know what to say to that, but it doesn’t matter anyway because he can’t speak. If he does, he’s gonna start crying, so he just holds her back and tries to even out his breathing.

“Okay,” he whispers eventually. “Thank you, Nattie.”

—

It’s four in the morning when his kid finally shows up at the hospital.

He’s not dead and surprisingly enough he’s not alone. Nat is trailing behind him, looking grim and exhausted.

But Peter… Peter looks so much worse.

And Tony’s not about to make it any better.

He stands unsteadily. Pepper reaches out to support him but he waves her off. “Kid—”

“Is she okay? Is she in surgery or…”

And then he gets it. It’s the way it always happens in the movies, a cresting realisation, a dawning horror. Peter just goes still. “Tony,” he whispers, “don’t tell me… please don’t tell me…”

Tony reaches out. “Pete, I’m so sorry. She held on for as long as she could but she suffered a stroke—”

Peter collapses into a chair. His eyes are wide, full of unshed tears. His hand covers his mouth.

Nat looks stricken. “Fuck,” she hisses, sinking down into the chair next to Peter’s.

Tony perches on the coffee table in front of his kid and reaches out to hold his free hand. “Pete?”

“I just… I just need a minute.”

Tony nods. He’ll wait.

As long as it takes, he’ll be here.

#marvel #irondad #peter parker #tony stark #natasha romanoff #may parker #angst #prompts #my writing #LMAO #anyway

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fuwafuwamedb · 4 years

Text

The Inverted Planet (Hakuno, Gilgamesh)

Gilgamesh had decided to get out first.

It was a new planet. They needed to get some things repaired and they needed food and drink. She’d been injured during their last visit and the king was beside himself with reprimanding her. Honestly? She hadn’t minded the fact that he had stormed off Vimana and declared that if she moved, he’d kill her.

That was fine.

Totally fine.

As far as she was concerned, she was going to lay on the golden expanse that was the top of Vimana and she was going to just pass out. The man had been noisy, rambunctious, and he had been driving her to the brink of death through this migraine alone. A few minutes without him sounded marvelous.

“BYE GIL!”

The man waved as he went away, climbing onto the mainland and heading into the red brush.

The planet they were on looked… strange. They all did. Whether it was the land where all the trees grew with large lumps like someone had sat on them all to make them grow in strange bends and twists, the planet where water drifted upwards, evaporating into the hemisphere only to downpour madly on the other side of the planet due to a strange magnetism… or if it was a land like this. Every color that one would expect here, was the exact opposite on a color wheel. Golds were purple. Greenery was now all red. Oranges were blues and blues were orange.

Again, Hakuno closed her eyes and focused on what was truly important: Gilgamesh had wandered off. She had peace. Quiet. Stillness.

Her stomach could heave onto the Vimana and no one yelled at her.

She could bleed out a little in peace, without someone nearby declaring that her death was going to be by his hand alone.

Dying felt good right now and her head was about a minute from being pounded into the spaceship.

“He’d probably bring me back to life, don’t kid yourself,” Hakuno murmured, pressing her cheek against the golden ship more.

A small nap, that’s what she would take.

If he came back, she could plead that her head hurt. She could appeal to her king with a less pounding headache.

It felt so good in this silent place.

It felt so damn good to rest.

The ache in her skull dulled down. She could feel the bandages and the ointment that Gil had used on her going into effect. Things were diminishing in terms of agony throughout her person.

Who knew how long she lay there in that state of being? Who cared?

Hakuno just found herself opening her eyes after a while and looking up at the orange colored skies, sighing happily at the feeling of things being better.

“Hakuno.”

She blinked as she heard his voice, Gilgamesh had made it back.

“Did I miss anything on the planet?” she asked.

“The natives seem peaceful enough. You’re invited to one of the houses.”

They were?

She moved to sit up, noting that the king was brushing back his hair and glancing at the ship. His eyes seem to fall onto the vomit nearby.

“I um… I didn’t feel good… Earlier.” She smiled a little, keeping her gaze averted. “Hopefully, you can find it in yourself as my great and noble king to forgive me and allow me to clean it up until the ship gleams like new.”

“I’m not worried about it.”

He wasn’t?

Hakuno looked up at him as he moved forward. The man was closing his eyes, leaning in to lift her up and hold her to him. It was hard to see his face from this angle, but…

This was definitely her servant. He looked no different than before.

Gilgamesh didn’t care that she’d trashed Vimana though?

“How are your wounds?”

Hakuno shifted, glancing at the back of his head.

She didn’t see any bumps or balding on the back of his head. There was no blood coming down. She didn’t see bitemarks from some kind of strange native monster on him either. Nothing said that he’d been possessed or eaten… He felt similar…

“I… I’m doing better. Thanks to you.”

His hand pressed to the center of her back. His thumb stroked her, keeping her close to his person.

“What are the natives like?”

“They’ve modeled themselves to look like me. I think it is customary or something.”

“So they make themselves look like whomever they’re talking to?”

They had done that tango with her having three selves. She really didn’t want to do that again. Opening her mouth to say that, she found the king shaking his head, continuing that calm and quiet tone.

“It’s nothing like that,” he replied. “They just felt I suited their appearance.”

Of course, they did.

Of course, they would do that kind of thing.

It was no doubt something that Gilgamesh felt very proud of as well. The great alien race, taking after them and wanting to be as great as the great king himself. She’d be hearing about this for eons. Probably through at least a good half dozen galaxies.

“Hakuno.”

“What is it?” She glanced over at his head again, wishing he would just let her walk already.

“You’re very important… I can’t let you get that close to death again.”

“I am staying at your side. We’re sticking together, remember?”

His head bobbed a bit. “I remember… What if we stayed here?”

Stayed… Stayed here?

One glance around had her once more feeling disoriented. The planet felt so off, like someone placed everything one centimeter to the left, but they’d just changed the world’s color scheme. It wasn’t the most comfortable of places, but in comparison to some other places they’d been…

“We could stay.”

For now.

The man waved, gaining a handful of looks.

“It seems my queen wishes to remain!”

Queen?

Hakuno paused at that.

What the hell was he on about? Had the color scheme gotten to him or just some kind of hallucinogen? The others were cheering, but the eyes. All of their eyes were a strange blazing blue color, almost green as she looked their way.

They hadn’t managed to copy him fully.

It must be due to their perception of colors here.

Gilgamesh set her in the center of the courtyard between the houses they were approaching. He turned to the others, continuing this strange talk.

“Hakuno will do well as our queen!”

Why?

“She is strong enough to get through any situation. Determined enough to power through any struggle! No matter flesh eating or magic ridden- she can survive all matter of beasts!”

“Gil,” Hakuno began.

It wasn’t that simple.

Hell, the man saw him through most those things himself. It wasn’t like she was truly powerful on her own. Then there had been her other friends like Gawain, Nameless, Cu Chulainn, Lu Bo…

The others were cheering.

Everything was wrong. So terribly, terribly wrong.

Hakuno went to argue again when the king glanced her way. The same strange blue-green eyes looked over at her, the smirk as devilish as ever.

“She did agree to remain with me…”

Where the hell was Gilgamesh?

Hakuno looked around, glancing from one building to the next and the next. The places looked like they were all open, doors hanging with small Gils running in and out or women who were strangely similar to Gilgamesh leaning out the windows to speak to other false Gilgameshes.

All the buildings were open… except one.

She watched the king that had brought her here giving his speech, cheering everyone into a flurry of running and preparing. A fire was being built. She could hear talk of pleasure-

No, she climbed to her feet as best as she could and hobbled with her bad ribs and swollen ankle to the door, falling into the room rather than walking in. She kicked it closed a moment before a blond looked up from the wall.

Plastered there in a series of chains and strange, red goo, stood her king.

“…You fool!”

“SHHHHHH!” Hakuno held a finger to her lips, listening to the applause outside. The man was going to get them caught.

“You were supposed to remain on Vimana,” he hissed, lowering his voice. “You couldn’t do that though, could you? You just had to investigate. If your ribs ache even the slightest when I get out of this, I’m going to-“

There was her king.

“I got it,” Hakuno replied, keeping her voice low and grabbing a sharp swordlike object from near the door. “I’ve got it… Why do those-“

“They drank from me.”

Oh.

“I don’t know how much they know, but they knew things after they drank…”

She was getting really tired of these damn places.

So damn tired.

“The next human-like planet we find, we’re staying for at least a month.”

“So long as they’re entertaining,” he countered.

“I’ll find a mage or something. There has to be one alive somewhere.”

The man shrugged off her comment, falling forward as the goo was sliced open. The poor king lay on the floor now, his face contorted in a mixture of disgust and something like looked a lot like horror.

“I will,” she promised.

“Can you run?”

“No.”

“Then you’re pretty much useless right now, aren’t you?” He scoffed at her, hoisting her up by the thigh and waist roughly.

That was Gilgamesh.

He had his softer moments, but he wasn’t quiet or gentle. He was a complainer. He was a disgusted individual who held little time for cheap tactics like the ones these aliens had used.

And, as she noted, he had a flair for the dramatic.

“THE MAGE IS MINE!” He roared, busting the door open with her under his arm like a sack of potatoes and his gates bursting open around the fake Gilgameshes.

Roars of terror filled the air.

The king unleashed hellfire and steel upon the aliens of this planet, sending them running into their homes. Others, attempting to open the gates, found their attempts in vain.

No one could copy the king.

“GRAB YOUR WEAPONS,” the Gil that had carried her here declared, still slightly more Gil-like than the others. “GET MY WOMAN!”

His woman.

Hakuno remained in place, doing her best to pour more power into her Gilgamesh.

The false King grinned.

“I feel some of that power. Hakuno is truly one worthy of standing at my side! A fitting queen!”

“How dare you,” Gilgamesh growled.

“Gil-“

The man lunged forward, pulling out Ea from his gates and beginning to power up his Noble Phantasm. She could feel the winds churning, the air thinning.

“GIL!”

She didn’t have that king of power left! She was healing!

Gilgamesh threw Ea at the last minute, slamming the weapon into the man’s arm and severing it as they ran passed. Into the trees, through the thickets; Hakuno could feel the twigs and branches cutting at her skin, but she didn’t dare tell the man to stop.

They launched themselves onto the ship, turning Vimana towards the heavenes and casting off.

Higher and higher they went, with Gilgamesh laughing all the while.

The laughter continued, echoing in her mind and around her in the vacuum of space that the ship made so habitable for them.

The king, once more, was on his throne.

As his laughter died, he leaned back, strumming his fingers along the arms of his seat.

“So… No strange inverted planets.”

She had to say something.

The man was sitting there looking about ready to sulk for eternity.

“They glanced into my mind, Hakuno.”

Had they?

Hakuno laughed a little.

“I don’t think you’re that interested in keeping me like that. They were making it sound like they wanted to take my innocence and marry me or something.”

The silence ensued.

Hakuno stared at him for a full minute before turning away.

Did… Did he like her? Truly like her, not tolerate her as his master and the one who had stood at his side throughout the Moon Cell battles. If he did, then was his attitude how he thought women liked to be treated?

She couldn’t be a wife. She was barely able to be a proper mage!

“Hakuno…”

His voice was getting too soft. It lacked the same bite it’d had before. Worse, it was different from those aliens. The strange little flutter in her chest was making her face warm and her body want to curl up.

“Hakuno,” he purred again.

Her hand went to her face. She had to cover the blush from his eyes.

She had to not reveal what she was thinking… or feeling.

“Yes, Gil?”

“Is that your bodily fluids on my priceless Vimana’s gold surface?

She paled.

“Hakuno,” he cooed so softly, his eyes hardening to garnets in this dark void of space. “Did you happen to vomit upon my Vimana?”

She should have stayed with the sex desiring fake Gilgameshes.

(This isn’t the end of their encountering these aliens. Enjoy the “Gilg-aliens” return here. )

#drabble #drabbles #ari wanted to know why the Gilgamesh lookalike aliens wanted Hakuno so here ya go

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damienthepious · 5 years

Text

gee, elle! how many fics can you publish in one emotional roller coaster of a lizard kissin’ tuesday!? three apparently. apparently three.

Scattered On My Shore (Chapter 4)

[Ch 1] [Ch 2] [Ch 3] [ao3] [Ch 5] [Ch 6] [Ch 7] [Ch 8] [Ch 9] [Ch 10] [Ch 11] [Ch 12] [Ch 13] [Ch 14] [Ch 15] [Ch 16] [Ch 17] [Ch 18] [Ch 19]

Fandom: The Penumbra Podcast

Relationship: Lord Arum/Sir Damien/Rilla, Sir Damien/Rilla

Characters: Rilla, Lord Arum, Sir Damien

Additional Tags: Second Citadel, Lizard Kissin’ Tuesday, Pre-Relationship, (for the three of them. it’s established r/d), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Injury, Injury Recovery, Hurt/Comfort, (this will also be), Enemies to Lovers, (for damien and arum eventually lol)

Fic Summary: Strange things wash up out of the lake near Rilla’s hut, on occasion. But this monster… this monster is certainly the strangest.

Chapter Summary: Sir Damien endures a sleepless night. Sleepless for him, at least.

It has, Damien thinks, been hours. The monster has not awakened, has not even shifted or shivered or growled in his sleep, has not given any indication whatsoever that it intends to wake ever again, let alone anytime soon.

Damien’s shoulders have been sagging, slowly, as the night slips past him. His bow is settled on his lap with his hand still upon the wood, not in a lack of caution but in the confidence that he can draw as needed if the creature springs suddenly from the sheets.

His vigilance has not waned with the hours; he will destroy this creature. Whether that be at the very moment that it attacks, or when he at last convinces Rilla of her gentle folly, this monster will fall as the rest of his ilk have fallen to Sir Damien’s righteous arrows.

It would certainly be easier if the creature would simply get on with it, though.

Patience has rewards, though. Damien knows this well. Patience, patience, enough time allowed to pass with grace and tranquility and eventually-

Damien tenses as the monster makes a noise, his face contorting in pain as he shifts on the bed, and as he rouses by slow seconds to consciousness properly Damien stills, keeping a hand dutifully, carefully on his bow.

“K-Keep,” the monster groans, one clawed hand flexing and grasping at the sheets, his voice cracked and bitter and very, very weak. “Keep, I…” he drifts off, muttering something incomprehensible, and then his eyes squeeze more tightly shut for a moment. He tenses against the bed, his claws digging further into the fabric of the blankets as he blinks blearily in the dimness of the room. “No,” he hisses, just as weak. “No, no I am… I am not… I am… Amaryllis. Amaryllis, where-”

Those eyes-

Violet eyes settle upon Damien through the low light, and then the monster shrinks back into the bed, wary and betrayed and visibly furious.

“A knight,” he mutters, the slurring of sedative still slick on his tongue. “Of course. Should have expected- of course she did not mean- of course it was a lie-”

“Do not dare imply that Rilla is a liar, monster,” Damien says automatically, his eyes narrowing. He- he had not expected the creature to speak. Or- Rilla had mentioned complaints, Damien had simply not comprehended that it would mean-

“I will imply only what is true,” the monster says, and then he gasps, turning his head away to cringe and freeze against some pain, and he pants out an uncomfortable breath before he continues. “Do not p-pretend as if you are here for any reason but to kill me, knight. And that being the case, that would make the word of the doctor false. Which is exactly what I expected in the first place. A human- she was never going to prioritize my health, n-never going to protect me against her own ilk. Never.” He scoffs, his voice gone ragged and strange and his clawed hands flexing and pushing automatically against the blankets, though he seems too weak to attempt to rise. “I should never have been foolish enough to believe- no. I did not trust her. I was right not to. A lie. Of course, a lie, of course I… I knew that she…”

Damien is- torn.

Because he is going to kill this lizard. He must- it is his duty, his holy charge to protect others, his sworn pact to his Citadel, to serve his Queen and to serve the subjects of her land, and that duty means that he must destroy this beast. No matter how distasteful his Rilla finds the work, Damien knows what is expected. He knows what he must do, even if he will honor his forever-flower’s wishes until the dawn, at least.

But this monster is wrong. He is deeply wrong about Rilla’s part in this. She has not betrayed- she would never. Not even a monster, his brilliant perfect flower would never harm, would never break the bond of her word. This monster is not owed that knowledge of his fiance, but it twists like acid in his stomach, the idea of this monster feeling such unjustified betrayal towards his Amaryllis. It is- unconscionable. He cannot stand for it- can he?

“You are incorrect, demon,” Damien says, eventually, his mouth dry with discomfort. “She has indeed deigned to protect you, unworthy though you are of such mercy. The generosity of her heart is beyond measure, oh precious flower, and it extends far beyond those who are deserving of it. I have not slain you where you lay merely out of respect for her desires.” He pauses, his thumb caressing the polished wood of his bow. “But do not misunderstand. The very instant that your intentions are revealed, I fully intend to pierce you through the heart. I know, foul beast, that you cannot be trusted, and in the exact same breath during which you break the faith of my beloved you shall fall, and it shall be by my arrows. You will not get away with whatever scheme you intend to enact. Mark me, villain, I will not sit idly- I will not- I- foul creature, are you even listening to me?”

He is not.

The monster has fallen back to unconsciousness somewhere among Damien’s threats, his expression soft and exhausted and slack, one of his clawed hands caught in the blankets above him, in the middle of the act of pushing them away. Damien can see more of the beast’s upper body, now- or he would be able to, were it not nearly entirely covered in bandages, at least one of which Damien can see is speckling red from beneath. The monster trembles lightly in his sleep, perhaps shivering, or responding to further pain.

Damien fidgets where he sits.

A convincing display, certainly.

… but the blood, he is not faking that. He couldn’t be. Rilla would never be fooled by a false injury, never, no matter how clever the foe. Her skill is unsurpassed, and she would know whether or not a wound were true, and her hands had been upon the beast when Damien first arrived, performing some mysterious and delicate surgery, it had appeared- perhaps the monsters would be cruel enough to harm one of their own in a bid to insinuate themselves into the home of the Citadel’s finest physician? Perhaps-

Damien has fought countless monsters, in his time. He has killed many, his record matched only by that of his rival. He does not believe he has ever seen one sleep, before. He has seen them unconscious, he has seen them dead. He has never seen one simply… sleep. Gentle, restful.

The monster is still trembling. Damien is more confident, now, that he must be cold. There is something about the way that he is laying that suggests that he would rather be curled up were so much of his body not damaged and wrapped- or perhaps that is merely an assumption of Damien’s mind, considering the beast’s obviously reptilian bent. His breathing seems shallow- but of course, Damien does not know the pace at which this monster typically breathes. Compared to the helpless fury in his eyes in the brief moments of his awakening, his entire expression seems- soft, now. He looks vulnerable- he is vulnerable. Damien could destroy him in an instant, a single arrow would do the deed with barely a breath of effort, but-

Damien will not act as a monster would. No- of course not. Killing an innoc- no. Killing a helpless creature in his sleep; he will not be so cruel as that. He will not take that particular page of strategy from the book of his enemies.

And of course, he is simply giving his Rilla time to reconcile with what must be done. Of course. It is only… a delay. A stay of execution.

That thought makes Damien wince. He is unsure why, precisely.

Damien flinches for a more ordinary reason as a noise from the bed summons his attention. The monster exhales unevenly, some small whispering noises slipping from him as his brow furrows in unconscious distress, and his shaking, his trembling, it is growing more pronounced.

Damien stands, uncertainly, and shoots a look towards the door, towards where Rilla is currently sleeping. Is this- should he? Should he summon her from sleep to settle whatever new distress this is? Or- or would it be better if Damien simply… waited?

If the monster simply fails to survive the night… well, Damien’s conflict might very well solve itself.

The monster-

Whimpers. There is no other word for it. An utterly pathetic noise, and the creature’s claw twitches against the blankets, another shiver buzzing through him, and Damien-

Damien takes a hesitant step forward. His bow is still tightly gripped in one hand, of course, and Damien can draw in the space of half a heartbeat. If this be some trick, he will not hesitate to do his duty. The monster still appears unaware, though. He does not respond to Damien’s movement at all, though he continues breathing sharply, shaking lightly, giving small hissing gasps between his jagged teeth.

Damien steps closer. The monster fails to attack. Another step, and another, and Damien’s grip on his bow does not loosen, but still the monster merely sleeps and trembles, merely sleeps and whines.

Damien is beside the cot, and the monster is asleep. Unhappily so, but very clearly asleep. And Damien is sure, now, that at least part of the distress is from cold- the monster had pushed his layers of blankets away during his moment of wakefulness, and now he is shivering, uncomfortable enough to disturb his rest but not enough to break the heavy bonds of slumber quite yet.

Damien lifts the a hand (the one not clutched around his bow, of course), and-

He does nothing, for a long moment. He stands like a fool with his hand hovering in the air between them, and the monster does not do anything, because the monster is asleep. Or- the monster does not do anything besides shiver, at the very least.

He lowers his hand, just until it touches the edge of the covers. Still there is no movement, though now Damien can feel the vague gentle heat of his scales, close by the tips of his fingers. Not touching, not quite touching skin to scale.

Damien frowns at himself, grips the corner of the fabric, and lifts, tugging the blankets up to rest more effectively around the monster’s shoulders.

The beast settles, after a moment. The shivering subsides, the unhappy lines furrowing his brow easing, and the monster slips deeper into sleep.

Damien finds that his heart is racing. Foolishness. He- it was merely a test. A simple little attempt to draw out the violence that surely waits in this creature. Just because the monster failed to leap upon him now does not mean that he will not when he is given another chance.

Damien stumbles backward, keeping his eyes on the monster’s sleeping form until he finds the stool by the door again, and then he resumes his perch.

If this monster intends to be patient with whatever his scheme is, Damien can certainly be patient as well.

The monster wakes again, perhaps an hour later. It glares at him with violet eyes, huddling closer among the blankets, but when Damien has barely opened his mouth again to inform him of his precarious position, of his fast-encroaching end, the monster… falls immediately back into slumber.

Infuriating. Infuriating creature.

When the light around the curtains grows grey and gentle with approaching dawn, the creature wakes a third time.

“Still here, are you?” he mutters, eyes barely open, tone lazy and light. “Hours, it must have been. Are you… enjoying your little perch, knight?”

“I can hardly leave you to your own devices, beast. You cannot be trusted, not here where you may perform any cruelty upon my- Saints damn you,” Damien barks as the creature closes his eyes again. “I am speaking to you, creature!”

“Hm?” The monster blinks, refocusing on Damien after a confused moment. “Ah.. what- what?”

“I am speaking to you, you cur. Do not ignore me. Do not- do not drift off into the undeserved peace of slumber!”

The monster narrows his eyes, lip curling uncomfortably as he stares Damien down with those vicious and vivid eyes. "Perhaps I would not be so lulled if your threats were not so tiresome, little human." His eyes slip back closed, and Damien finds that he is both relieved and disappointed, for that violet glare to be pulled from him. "You sound always as if you intend to burst into song; I do not know why you are surprised that I feel lullabied. Are you certain that you are a knight?" He is sneering, though his voice is sleepy-soft, and his eyes are still closed. "I would sooner suppose you a songbird."

"I would shudder to hear the sorts of lullabies a monster would sing," Damien breathes, uncomfortable, and the monster's lip pulls tight for a moment, some strange new pain crossing his face. "They must comprise of some truly horrific melodies, to be certain."

"Mmm," the monster grumbles, pressing his face into the pillow and sighing. "Go on. Keep lilting, little songbird, and I shall slip away again in just a moment."

Damien freezes, and then he flushes dark and scowls. "Nothing I say is for your benefit, you foul thing," he snaps. "How dare you- how dare you insinuate-"

The monster slits one violet eye back open, something like a smirk curling his inhuman mouth. "Precisely like that, little songbird. Trill, trill away, with all your feathers ruffled. Quite an amusing picture you paint, driven to distress like this-"

"I am no songbird," Damien half-shouts, and then he shoots a worried glance toward the door and repeats himself more quietly. "I am not. I may sing, monster, but I will certainly not perform so for you. And my songs are not the formless meaningless cries of chaotic nature, either, beast. I weave words, not notes. I am a poet. Were I to sing, you would certainly know it."

The monster’s eyes have slipped entirely closed again, and Damien can see that his breathing is evening out, though his smirk stays in place as he murmurs, “Poet… little poet-knight… delicate as… honeysuckle, I think…”

“Stop that. I will not entertain such casual address by a villain such as you. Cease your- your false flattery, you- you-” Damien cuts off again, staring at the creature. “You’ve… you’ve fallen asleep again, haven’t you?”

The monster does not answer.

“These tricks will not serve you in the end, of that I assure you. By Saint Damien above I say that I will not soften. I will not yield. I will not.”

The monster does not answer.

Damien glares, fidgeting in place for a long moment, frustration bubbling over. “Songbird,” he scoffs. “Pfft. Nonsense, such utter…”

The monster breathes slow and even, his strange expression softened yet again in sleep, and Damien does not like what it implies, that he is already becoming so familiar with the curves and edges of this scaled face.

Damien hears Rilla wake. The hut is quite small, and he has been sitting in silent stillness for long enough that the light creaking of her floorboards and the rustle and mumblings from her room rouse his attention rather quickly. He hears her move, hears the bedroom door open and her light footsteps pad into the front room.

He hears her go still.

She curses, sharp and panicked and then her footsteps come again, much faster, and the door to the exam room flies open to show his fiance with her hair mussed from sleep and her expression utterly terrified as her eyes sweep the room, her mouth already open.

“Damien- Damien you didn’t-”

She pauses as she sees the monster, still sleeping, and then when her eyes fall on Damien himself, perched upon his stool.

“I didn’t,” Damien agrees, perhaps a little bitterly.

She stares at him, her hand at her throat, her breaths slowing as her alarm subsides, and then the corner of her mouth tilts up into a hesitant sort of smile.

“Th… thank you, Damien,” she says, quietly. “I know this is… I know. Would you- wait in the kitchen, while I look him over?” She pauses, and Damien stands, his eyes sharp on the monster’s slow-breathing form, his hand still curved around the grip of his bow. “Please?”

Damien knows, still, what must happen. Damien knows that his arrow is destined for this creature’s heart. He knows, with a certainty so sharp it could cut him, that there is only one way this endeavor can end.

Rilla looks at him with such terrible softness, and the monster breathes slow and even nearby, and Damien nods, and stands, and walks stiffly from the room.

There is only one way this can end. So it is only a small matter, if that end is put off for just a little while longer.

[->]

#elle's fanfic #the penumbra podcast #second citadel #rad bouquet #lizard kissin' tuesday #sir damien #lord arum #amaryllis of exile #scattered on my shore

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izzyovercoffee · 4 years

Text

iii. gotta have your face to the sky

They all said the same thing: Lady Luck’s blessing ain’t earned, it’s given, and you gotta be open to receive. But how to receive meant a different thing to every son-of-a-gun with a head still on his shoulders and one hand still workin’ enough to line up a sight and pull a trigger.

Superstition.

It was always a might tricky workin’ with the paranoid and delusional folk out on the desert---the kind of desert that was all hard rock and long sun, not rolling sands and sinking earth. Different kind of person to be found on the hard roads that had to live there, versus the ones that were only settled for a night between the place they come and the place they go.

Carmichael knew the score all too well.

Lady Luck, someone said to him once, showed up in a long dress with sharp heels and a sharp glass with the bar’s best in hand to look at you from under a smokey eye. Another told him Lady Luck had come up from around the river bleeding out into the dam and pursed her lips with a smile, then dragged his brother down to the current, then down under.

Gotta leave a cap out for Lady Luck. Gotta buy a drink out. Gotta open doors for the ladies, pull out seats, let them eat first. The damned lists go on, and on, until all the rituals in the Mojave blended together to some fool’s song.

Carmichael never much concerned himself with luck, or having it, or not having it. He lived a long, long time---long compared to the betting average of 30-odd before the deadbeats dropped, and 40 for the supremely lucky or supremely violent.

Men like him didn’t live to lose count of the years if all they did was depend on luck and superstition.

Didn’t mean he didn’t believe in Her, though. You just didn’t see him bending ass over head to be extra contorting to any beautiful woman that walked into a room, through a door, into the light, or sung on a mic. Hell, ask him thirty, forty, years ago about his opinion, and all he’d say is a firm-if-unsteady maybe she do, maybe she don’t, exist.

That was the safe line to take---don’t deny the Unseen to the Seen, and the Unseen don’t have to make a lesson outta you to reassert their position in the world.

Superstitions, and all that. That was the only one he’d subscribed to.

That all changed in time, of course. All things must change, after all.

Survive in a shit world, you learn how to adapt to survive. Learn how to change, how to see the signs, respect the dead and pray to the living to do the right fucking thing every once in a while, if they’d any sense and wanted to live half as long as he’d done already.

It weren’t an opinion he ever shared with anyone, save Charlie.

Charlie. That’s when he took the sightings of Lady Luck a little more seriously.

Lady Luck, is what Charlie called one strange as fuck woman.

His partner---a hard man, harder still for the anger in him that turned sharp, and bitter, with no outlet and no direction between shaking hands---raged adamant in the Lady’s walk on the long roads. Weird shit couldn’t be explained he ended up chalking out to her swinging by.

Being around Charlie for so long, hearing him wax and wane at odd intervals over long hauls with two baby brahmin still learning to get used to carrying large packages---who could blame Carmichael for tuning him out?

But eventually some things started to wiggle and sink in.

The stray bullet that clipped the armor of his shoulder when it should’a hit his head. The Deathclaw that tripped half a step and blew the fuck up on an old landmine no one’d seen until it blew the fuck up. The rad storms that soaked up hell from The Divide dissipated before it could cross their paths and sick their brahmin.

Little things. Things couldn’t be controlled, but superstition felt validated, felt good, felt right to say Lady Luck took a shine on him tonight because maybe, just maybe, he was a little bit kind, a little bit soft, a little bit pay-it-forward before they left their last rest with other people.

So maybe he never did see Her. Never saw the woman in the long gown with the perfect smile and the hands soft as a feathers. Maybe he never saw the old woman who could use a bottle of purified water to stave off the Mojave thirst. Maybe he never held open a door for a sweetheart weren’t lookin’ in the right direction.

Maybe it was all in his head.

Everyone in the Mojave havin’ mass hallucinations of some nameless women grazing their arms and witness their luck turn right the fuck around that night. Some things were just a roll of the metaphysical dice, and he didn’t want to lean too hard one way or another if that dice went rolled by a pair of elegant ungodly hands.

He stopped believin’ it was all just in Charlie’s head when Lady Luck came bearing down on them from through a goddamn set of old stained-glass windows, silent as the night before she smashed the glass and blew two Legionnaires away with a shotgun that didn’t look like it should hold together after two rounds, much less tear through thick Legion armor like ragged teeth.

Lady Luck had a name he heard and didn’t register because nobody, and he meant nobody, ever had the jump on his ass before and that should have meant he was a dead motherfucker---‘cept he was very much not dead, mostly alright, with a woman lacking hair and sense holding out a stimpack to him in the dark.

“Thanks,” he waved it away. “But I’m a’right.”

She shrugged and tucked it into the inner pocket of her bomber, and toed the closest dead bastard with a twist of dry lips. Way she angled her head to look at him headlong, he couldn’t remember another who did that.

“I was huntin’ these fucks a while,” she said. “Lucky I caught up when I did.”

“Yeah,” he said. Scratched his head. “Real lucky.”

She holstered the scrapped together shotgun, and looked back up the window. He didn’t believe his eyes, but this what he saw her do: climb up and out the fucking window.

The door was right there.

And that was the first time. Charlie didn’t say a fuckin’ thing, but Carmichael saw it on his face the way he looked at him after she’d gone back out into the night: You saw that, right?

Unfortunately.

Second time, he’d gone into the Tops Casino with Charlie to make a delivery personally ordered by some important schmuck Carmichael couldn’t remember the name of and didn’t care to be reminded. And there he saw her---almost didn’t recognize her, neither, for the hair she had growing outta her head where there’d been none, and the dress she wore that hung to the floor in a shimmer he thought he’d never see again in the world attached to a garment. She’d traded the hard plates of armor, thick pants, impossible trench for a slip of a thing that left little to the imagination, and when she turned her head to view the door…

She’d turned and angled in a way that echoed the fucking night he’d thought was little more than a bizarre fever dream.

And then she smiled. And she waved.

And Charlie got done with his delivery, and dragged Carmichael out to have a nice goddamn dinner for once, partner, and when the dinner was done---he’d gotten word from another caravanner’d been out on the town that fucking Benny, owner-of-the-tops-casino Benny, Benny the backstabbing son-of-a-bastard Benny, the checkered suit wearing cigarette smoking conniving motherfucker Benny, was dead as a doornail.

Cut and bled out in his bed, in his sleep, after a night with a dashing dame whom no one caught the name.

“Our Lady Luck,” Charlie had said in bed that night. They’d gotten a little advanced delivered to them, personal and sweet-and-easy, for another shipment and delivery, after the news, well after dinner.

“Dress don’t suit her,” he said, quiet, in the dark, and Charlie laughed.

“It did the job, didn’t it.”

That it did.

Third time’s the charm, is what they used to say. Third time’s the charm.

They were right.

Third time, they’d come along the side of the road west and out of the Mojave---over a sprawling piece of land no longer living, surrounded by hellfire and rads that even a coupl’a ghouls like them might’a had hard time soaking up over the long haul. So they walked a little south, and then east, ‘stead of west, and came across a young woman pushing cloth to her eyes as if she could soak up the sadness that spilled out of her with no end in sight.

She looked up and Carmichael looked down and he saw the face of Lady Luck torn and shredded, two sewn up surgical scars that marred the hair that didn’t want to grow in the same space as a dead memory.

“Y’all headed East?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Come on,” Charlie said. “Stand up, and dust off. You can cry on the way.”

And she did.

And that was the best fucking decision they’d ever made.

A year gone by on the open road damn near ended them---except it didn’t, and it didn’t for the extra pair of hands at their side. Sure, Charlie wakes up sometimes in the middle of the night with a start and a frantic hand searching for comfort or Carmichael, but that beat the alternative.

Alternative’s them both six feet under and a hurt soul trapped in a hell of her own making after exacting the kinda luck the Mojave didn’t ask for but sure as hell deserved.

Hell, alternative might still find them there---but Lady Luck looked Death in the eye and asked for an extension, and she got it for them. Every time Charlie so much as curses the state of the world, the sky, and the shit food this settlement stop offered them, Carmichael thanks his lucky stars and the good decisions they’ve made.

Maybe he wasn’t so sold on the superstitions bit. But the Lady wandering the land in perplexing image, inconsolable and irreconcilably different each time?

Yeah. Yeah, maybe he might come around to becomin' a believer just yet.

#writing: mine #v: fallout #g: fallout 4 #writing: fallout #oc: Carmichael #oc: Charlie #c: courier six #this has also been sitting in my drafts for a while #so just gonna ... put that down

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noxsden · 5 years

Text

Nostalgia

A longer piece that I have been sitting on for awhile, finally going to post it Hope you enjoy.

With the most important steps in front of us, it is a miracle we can get anywhere at all with how many other ways we can look at them. Different branches split off into infinity to distract and draw our attention away even if it still remains impossible to be anywhere but the one you are on.

My eyes feel heavy, it’s not the teacher’s fault the lecture is actually very entertaining. Yet I feel myself trapped at this desk, it feels wrong, out of place. This morning must have been a hectic one as I barely remember getting ready for the day. Perhaps it was just that the routine had grown so engraved in my mind that I didn’t process it to memory the exact morning that had just happened. I couldn’t even tell what period it was, second perhaps my groggy mind had simply glazed over the first and left it behind as useless.

An exclamation of discovery was sounded out, followed by shrinking back into the desk as it drew the attention of the teacher and others around him. It wasn’t stimulating because the words were familiar, as if the lesson was something he had already sat through. He managed to stay out of the limelight for the rest of the time in the prison like room The walls had seemed to collapse in on him ever since he had realized the connection. Not that he could place what was so important about it.

As the professor brought the talk to it’s conclusion the bell sounded and many of the students began filing out, leaving a few huddled around the boy that had interrupted the session. The three new faces were laughing and joking with him, lighthearted jabs accusing him of falling asleep in class again. He swore up and down that it wasn’t that simple, that he wasn’t asleep, maybe just daydreaming.

“Right so you felt like you were in a dream, you have some pretty bad imagination then.” The first boy laughed.

“No, that’s not what happened. I just had this feeling I had heard everything before is all.” Warren seemed to grow more and more embarrassed with every passing word.

“The lectures are pretty boring, maybe you just read ahead again. You are just too smart for the room after all.” The second boy, nudged elbows with the first and laughed again, stopping short as they saw the victim’s face. “Only teasing, he is a bore that’s all man.”

The lone female of the group just shook her head and stood up, pausing for a moment as if she was going to say something before she turned on a dime and headed for an exit. Stunned the three just looked on and watched her leave, eyes meeting each other before the boy stood and darted off after her. It was strange as he left the classroom, the halls seemed busier than normal. Considering he was late to leave the class, the throngs of students that walked around him was odd. Eventually being engulfed like a tidal wave by the masses. He could hear his friends calling out to him, the distance slowly seeming farther and farther away until they seemed like a memory.

The hallway had become chaos in all forms, where he had entered no longer seemed to be there, and the alluring figure that had drawn him in had also vanished. If only he could just keep walking forward, a hallway could only extend in one direction and it had to end at some point. The blurred forms of the other students began to twist and contort around him until they were towering beyond his vision. His movement halted, a burning sensation in his chest erupted with a loud scream.

*****

A startled noise came from behind him and he pulled his hand away from the pan that was sizzling on the stove. He looked back over at his wife who had a look of pure worry written across her features. Instinctively he grabbed his hand to sell the illusion that he had burned it, though he wasn’t really sure why he needed to do that.

“It’s just something minor, didn’t mean to give you a start.”

She let out a sigh of relief, her hand clutched at her heart. “That was quite the sound for something minor, if it’s bad you need to have it looked at, it’s their job to do so.”

“Yes, I’ll have them take a look at it before I head to class. I’m gonna leave now so I can.” He hurried out of the room still leaving his wife in a bit of a shock. Finishing up what he needed to leave and only calling out to her as he slipped out the door.

The school wasn’t that far down the way he was thankful for as it greatly cut down on his expenses. Affording anything travel related was inflated beyond sense, greed was the only way to survive. Hurried steps brought him to the grounds in record time, a hastily packed briefcase in his unblemished hand. It was quite the unusual morning already, he had no idea what noise she was referring to, or why he wanted to act like he was hurt. He had been under a lot of stress at work, perhaps it was a rough night of sleep that had him groggy. It was a natural sign of growing up to distinguish between important and unimportant, dreams were not something to lose sleep over. He stopped in his tracks and laughed at the sentiment, the act drew the attention of several of the passing students that gave him a wide berth.

He heard the sound of school bells chiming and broke free from his levity to hurry onward to his class. From there the day progressed rather normally, lectures given and homework were assigned. Even to him the words droned out, but the curriculum was strict no matter how many times he had made his unhappiness known they made it clear it was the only way to keep his job. He had dreamed of fun and exciting classes with projects, like the way he was taught by his favorite teachers. There was only one interruption today, by a student he didn’t recognize at first. Before he could call him down however the boy vanished out of the classroom. It was another detail to be forgotten, maybe it was all his own wake up call. Changes needed to happen and he was in charge of his classroom, all that mattered was results.

A smile crept across his face, it was resolved, he’d start making adjustments with the coming week. With that he resumed packing up his books and folders, in his musings he had missed the absence of the young voices. They were gone, he didn’t even remember hearing the door shut. Curiosity peaking he moved around his desk and pushed open the door. It was creaky as always, yet beyond the open portal was an empty hall, devoid of every form of student that was so often clamoring around between classes. It was barren, not a squeak of a sneaker or general rabble that students gave each other as they pushed themselves along. He closed the door abruptly and shook his head a few times to clear the thoughts. Unless it was an emergency he missed, it just had to be a trick of the mind.

Yet as he pulled back and gazed upon his classroom he found it expanding upwards, adding row after row of empty seats that could only be described as nosebleeds. Noise had suddenly swarmed in with the shifting room, the noise so shrill it caused him to recoil. Each time he blinked he could see figures in the seats, filling each row as it stretched upwards. The silhouettes took all shapes and sizes, all glaring down at him. When he finally gathered his wits about him he made a run for it, exiting into his prep room. The room was dark, and as he walked further into it, he realized quickly that it extended far beyond where it should have ended.

********

There was a shrill cry out that broke the silence around her, realizing it was her own voice she looked up at the man on top of her. His eyes were closed seeming to enjoy the noise, it allowed her eyes to frantically scan the room. It was familiar, it was a teacher’s room and it was one that she had seen quite often. It took awhile for her to recognize his face, the action took long enough for worry to start to show on her features. Her hands clutched onto the worn fabric of the couch, her breathing finally coming back to normal as she started to accept what was going on. It didn’t take long for her to realize how much fun it all was, playing the part well as time went on and she was praised for her renewed enthusiasm.

As a bell rang in the distance and with the deed completed, he was quick to get up and dressed. He placed all of his accessories on and headed out of the room to leave her alone with her thoughts in the room. She sat there in bliss and after glow, at least her physical form was. Mentally she was trying to piece together the day as it had gone, the last thing she remembered was this. She brought a hand up to run down between her legs, where she patted and felt around with a curious look on her face. She shrugged and fell back against the couch with a sigh, the sound of her flopping was accompanied by a high pitched giggle that came from beside her.

Sitting up with a start she looked about the dark and empty room, hurrying to fix her clothes to make herself presentable. Her act was followed by an older man’s voice seeming to compliment her on what she was putting away. A scowl held on her features now as she grabbed the closest heavy object and swung it around in a threatening manner. It took longer than she cared to admit to drop her defenses and realizing that again she was alone in the darkened room and had been for some time now. Her schedule had been cleared for the rest of the afternoon, no one was expecting anything of her. She walked over to the door and peered out from around the drawn curtain. The college looked as impressive as ever, and in her eyes the establishment peered to her in return, judgmental and unforgiving. No matter how hard she tried, work was always just over her shoulder reminding her that she couldn’t do everything that she wanted to do.

The more she looked out at it the more it seemed to call out to her, before she really understood what was going on she had crossed the empty street and up the hollow pathway that lead to the entrance. The ringing grew louder as she stepped closer to the building and yet there was no students running from the building. There was no one around that she could see, and only the tolling bell kept the silence at bay. It crept closer, lurking in between each ring, she could feel it’s grasp tightening around her ankles before the tonal sound shook them away. Whatever the feeling was, it wasn’t natural, something or many things were not right about this place. Breaking into a run now she watched as the doors grew taller, looming over her and opening slowly before she even got to them. Without questioning the matter she ran through the doorway, tripping and falling face first on the floor. As she pushed herself up and tried to get her bearings she notice motion underneath her, the ground had started to move and pull her along into the abyss.

********

What had once been empty was now full of life. A hectic path that had them tripping and falling as they attempted to maintain a sure footing. The very ground beneath them had started to speed forward. The three of them had found themselves caught up in a river of people, carried along by the ground through twists and turns. They sat unmoving but as each one of them stared into the hazy eyes of the passengers they felt an eerie level of familiarity.

“Who are you, where am I?” The three voices called out in unison to hear only the reverberations echo out in the hollow tracks. The details of the surrounding structure began to blur, the school walls that had once been a solid foundation suddenly took on a new prison like appearance.

Pushing through the crowd of people, more like trees in their unforgiving nature as the three pulled and pried to get closer to the front. If there were any answers to be had surely they would be there. As she pressed in, she began to jostle the attention of several of the commuters. Many of them just staring, the ones that did respond seemed to only speak in a gibberish that she had no recollection of. The only thing that she was sure of was that it sounded good, flowing from the lips of the handsome stranger. There was a light growing in the distance, that cast all of the passengers in a bright halo glow.

Hands reached out and sought to put her back into formation. When she turned and got a better look at what progress she had made, a sea of all shapes and sizes were on display for her. No matter how obscure the faces were or how different shapes were there was always a sense of recognition that she clung, her last rung of sanity before she would be swallowed by the infinite obstacles that enclosed around her. Obstacles, not people, their forms might have been humanoid but that was where the definition ended. Looking up at their heads was like looking into carnival mirrors.

Like strange and twisted versions of themselves, panic crossed over their distinct features and the three of them started struggling to get away from the end they had once longed. They weren’t ready to embrace it, they weren’t ready for it to end. Teen, teacher, women all pushed aside all that they came across just for the seconds they spared. Each step in the wrong direction only caused the ground to speed up. The light was fast approaching and there was no way off, each closed their eyes tightly. The movement of the ground suddenly shifted, now absent beneath their feet they were falling along with every mimic body. An abyss of light and occasional motion from all sides that grew closer after each forced breath. Devoid of sound save for a heartbeat, and soon not even that.

*****

Hunched over a desk a man sits taking labored and lethargic breaths just out of muscle memory with no enthusiasm for sustained life. Around him a modest home, with the bustle of life that pays him no mind. The clocks tick inexorably forward without his notice, not even a flick of an ear. A family that had once huddled around him now tended to other things, forgetting the hardships they had to endure for the hunched man. The only sign of attentiveness he gives is through a stack of paper that was placed under his hand. A pen works across it, writing symbols of an unintelligible language to fill each page. Shifting the completed work to another stack in order, but now the papers had run out, and in just a few more carvings he would be finished.

A masterpiece opening to an audience of one, with no reaction to signify the grand importance placed upon it. A smile had crept over his haggard features, a hand moving to lovingly stroke along the finished pile of pages. Shakily turning his head seeking out those that he remembered to find only emptiness and despair. The apartment seemed to age before his eyes, every blink sending him further and further into the future at a rapid pace. Anxiety crept over him, a cold sweat forming on his features while his body seemed to collapse in on itself. Fear read plainly on his face, fear and regret. He tried to push up from the desk but his wrists seemed shackled by time to the crumbling frame.

He leaned back, pain shooting throughout his form as forgotten muscles strained against the feat his mind had set out. Rewarded with a brief glimpse of his surroundings before his head toppled back, his neck unable to support the weight. It was in that moment that the familiar setting however decayed vanished, like a curtain over his eyes torn away to reveal his prize. A writhing abyss glistened in his sight, completely surrounding the man and his bastion of a desk. Soon even that had been stripped away, papers fluttering in the air before being snatched up by numerous appendages.of unknown origins.

The massive moving being spread out in every direction he could see, and soon a deep rumbling laughter encompassed the world he was in. There was no escaping it’s presence even as his eyes closed tight he could see the movements in the space of shadows under his eyelids. His body shivered with even greater intensity at the prospect if such a being. A new feeling took over, pain, enough that his eyes shot open, from this new position he watched as his arms were lifted up outside of his control and waved back and forth before him. The laughter returned as he watched the limbs dry up and shrivel away. Each bit of skin flaking into nothing, swallowed by the abyss that merely laughed back at his pained cries.

“Living many lives takes its toll. There will always be the one to collect. It’s a shame that you did not choose this life.”

An earth shattering bellow escaped from the void and shattered the fragile form to pieces. More of the writing mass escaped to collect everything until there was no trace left of him. Nothing but words on a page to be recited by the dark.

#original #writing #horror

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juniper-tree · 6 years

Text

Wind and flame, 9 - Time and tide

Rating: chapter is Mature, full work is Explicit.

Dragon Age: Inquisition - Cullen x Female Lavellan

Link to AO3 - thank you for reading

Summary: An admission

***

The fire, too high, too bright, scorched the night air. A bead of sweat rolled into her hair, and she sighed, her breath heavy and hot. Then a touch, a flame on her bare back, and she turned toward him. She felt his eyes, in shadow, look into her. His fingers curled around her hip and dragged her closer—she went, thrust her own fevered skin against his. His breath licked her ear, slow, burning. Then he whispered, loud as a howl.

"Inquisitor."

No. She twisted away from him, sluggish, her hands tangled in his curls. No, she thought, but her voice would not come. His arms were limp now, falling away from her, his body cold. The fire had gone dark. No. No.

With a gasp Finn awoke, her heart hammering.

"Inquisitor?" It was not his voice, but a girl, concerned and hesitant.

Blinking against the early sun, she struggled to sit up. She had contorted herself into an uncomfortable slump on the couch by the stairs, quilts stolen from the bed knotted around her feet. The girl stood at the foot of the couch, peering at her, a pale dwarf with worried blue eyes. Finn recognized her—Lyra, or Luria? She could not recall her name, a depressing thought. Everyone in the clan and half the merchants at trade stops were known to her. But here? She struggled to recall a single runner. Finn nodded to her for lack of a proper greeting, hoping poor sleep would be her cover.

"I have word from the surgeon. She said—specifically," the runner said tentatively, weighing Finn's reaction before she went on, "that Sera thrived under her care. But she woke grumbling and cursing, and demanded to be moved to her room at the tavern." She looked toward the ceiling as she tried to recollect the message, which the surgeon assuredly had demanded be as exacting as her care. "She has since elected to supervise Sera from there at regular intervals. Since the patient is making splendid progress, the Inquisitor need not worry herself over it."

Finn nodded, acknowledging what the surgeon really meant. You are not needed, and not wanted. At least Sera sounded better. "Fine," she croaked, her throat dry. "Thank you." When the girl left, she collapsed onto the couch.

All night she lay awake, her limbs hard with tension, her gut aching. When dawn came, and exhaustion took her, she dreamed of him. She gathered the quilts up to her chin, the fire and the room around her both cold. She could not stay on her furs, where it happened. How foolish she had been. How reckless, and selfish.

She wanted him, and he wanted her. There was no point denying it now, even to herself. But there was more between them. He wanted there to be something more, a different more. She was afraid of it. That, too, she could admit. There had been no thought, no desire, for anything like this when she was taken prisoner, when she was found to be necessary, when she was made a herald. Her only thoughts were to survive, to return home. What had changed? Had anything really changed?

There was not room for this. She had done things wrong, she had encouraged too much in her own mind, betrayed herself, and him. There was no point, either, in reciting the reasons why not. Those she had repeated to herself through the night, a chant to brand them into her mind, her heart. You are Dalish, he needs a healer, you have a duty. And each time the rhythm would break upon a memory—of his eyes searching hers, of his tender, earnest whispers, of his touch.

His arms around her, not when she leapt onto him like a wild thing in heat, and he—tense, but wanting—reached for her. Not then, but when he held her as she wept, his strong hands so gentle with her. How he calmed her, walked her back from the cliff she had run toward.

And he called her Ellana. The way he said it, his voice breathy and light, as though it were a gentle thing that would break under too much weight. Like it was a secret. Her name, the name no one ever used. She had always been Little Finn, Valenni's girl, the healer. To him, she was only herself.

There had been lovers in her life. Easy, giving, sensual. In the end, distant. Detached. No one who made her feel this way—aflame, but safe in his hands. At first, she dismissed it as infatuation, as lust. Something she could ignore, until she couldn't. Something she should not indulge in, until she did.

As time went on, as the night had gone on, her heart told her things she did not understand, insistent and urgent, in a language she could not parse. Perhaps she should not try.

The cold room brightened as morning warmed the windows. Stiffly she stood and took a deep breath. She drank water from the jug on her table, washed her face in the basin. She changed from her leggings and tunic—her clothes, that her mother had woven and sewn—into the breeches and boots they'd given her, the undershirt and jacket. The Inquisitor's clothes.

Scanning the empty room, she looked for something to keep her there, afraid—she could also admit—to leave the room. To face the day. Her eye fell upon a stack of reports on the desk, atop them a summary of reports from the smuggler routes and engagements, and a note from the captain at the mountain detachment below on the new fortifications against the Red Templar threat.

Sighing, she closed her eyes tight. She had a duty.

Gathering up the reports close to her chest, she made her way to the war room and asked Josephine, as she passed, to call the others.

The heavy door closed her in, and echoed its lonely finality around the still room. She put down the papers and flattened her hands against the table map. Her eyes followed the routes she had given in her reports, and they had already begun to mark the possible paths to the source. There were other markers, requests for assistance, calls for aid, threats and intrigues. So many tasks left undone. They stretched from the deserts to sea, up even to the wilds of the northern Free Marches, her home.

The door behind her creaked open, and as she turned, she saw his crimson sash, his head bent by the weight of armor. Cullen looked up and stopped, staring, the door leaned against his shoulder. His eyes were puffy—he had finally slept, thank the Creators—and as they softened on seeing her, became grieved, and uncertain.

Briefly she had imagined, when she saw him again, she would burn with shame and regret. But the lightning-bright ache she felt for him nearly split in her two. She wanted to run to him, to smooth back his rumpled hair, to take him into her arms again.

"Pardon us," Josephine's muffled, polite voice spoke from behind the door. Finn could see Cullen blink back to reality, and she turned to the table as he opened the door. She swallowed her feelings, fitful and tight in her throat.

Her advisors gathered, they began their discussions, and Finn gathered herself, quietly commenting when asked for her input. Cullen, formal and stilted, muttered his short answers without emotion. She caught herself watching him, the rigid grip around his sword hilt, the nervous shake of his head. He did not look at her again. Josephine and Leliana noticed, and shared a few obvious, questioning glances. It all wore upon her nerves. The thoughts she tried to ignore clouded her mind, clenched her jaw, and the meeting crawled on.

"And the last order of business," Josephine declared, "is how we shall behave at the Winter Palace."

Finn's teeth ground against each other. "Is it necessary to discuss this just now?"

"I second that," Cullen said, his voice weary. "Can it wait?" He did not speak directly to Finn, but all the same something in her fluttered nervously.

Josephine's pleasant face tightened with frustration. "We have delayed this several times. The ball is two weeks away. Putting aside the Empress herself, this is a perfect opportunity to make lasting connections, a good impression," she said excitedly. "The Game can be difficult but if we—"

"I'm sorry," Finn interrupted. "There are Red Templars nearly at our doorstep, Sera could have died last night, and all we are required to do is keep Celene alive." She crossed her arms tightly. "So forgive me if I am less concerned about etiquette at a fucking party," she said with a nervous laugh.

Josephine stared at Finn, her nostrils flared. "And if you will forgive me," she began, her voice cool, "I must assume you are merely ignorant, and not willfully negligent." She set down her candlelit noteboard carefully.

"Our resources are almost entirely dependent upon the goodwill and faith of the nobles you and the Commander dislike so much," she said, glancing sharply at Cullen. "We feed people, clothe them, house them, heal them. Give them weapons to fight for us. This takes enormous funds and logistics. At the Winter Palace, we have the chance to unite ourselves with the ruling power of the Orlesian Empire, to solidify these bonds of faith which we desperately need."

She leaned toward Finn over the table, her jaw set tight. "We can continue to take care of all the people here, and to fight our fight. And the cost to you is one night at a fucking party," she spat. Then she straightened, composed herself, and took up her noteboard with assured grace.

"To that end, I will schedule this discussion for tomorrow," she said. "That is all." Finn could only nod mutely, her face burning.

She stood in place as Cullen hurriedly left, Leliana close behind. As Josephine went to the door, Finn stepped toward her and began to speak, but Josephine stopped her. "I apologize for my tone, Inquisitor," she said, her manicured hand landing gently upon Finn's own, "but I do hope I was clear regarding the necessity of this."

Finn shook her head. "No, I—"

"And I understand yesterday was very trying, though I am cheered to hear Sera is well." Josephine would not let her apologize. This was clearly where Finn was ignorant—in graces and manners, in persuasions, and Josephine so skilled. She could not imagine that a trap might be laid for her in a sentence, or a gesture, at Halamshiral, but Josephine knew.

"Ah, I nearly forgot," Josephine said with a smile, though Finn was sure there was little Josephine could let slip her mind. "I wanted to give this to you personally so it was not lost in the mountain of reports. Notes from Wycome, and your clan. There appears to be some discontent," she said softly, handing her a small stack of folded papers. One at the top sealed with a line of thick amber resin. She could smell it—buttery and sweet, fura tree sap. Her clan used it to haft arrowheads. A letter, from home.

Josephine left quietly, while Finn cracked open the seal. She read the greeting:

Emma lin, emma vhenan—

Her stomach dropped. It was from her mother.

She folded the letter into a pocket at her hip.

***

Even before midday, the Herald's Rest was thick with bodies and raucous conversation, soldiers trading road stories and traveling merchants plying them with ales. Finn, weighed down by a tray full of food from the kitchens, carefully swept past a group or two, head ducked, until they recognized her. No one stood at attention, or—to her great relief—genuflected, but everyone quieted, straightened, and made room. All eyes were on her, even those who continued their stories. She longed for the day she could be anonymous again. With a quick nod, she hastened upstairs, her tray wobbling.

As she reached Sera's bright corner room, laughter echoed into the hall. "He landed right on it. Yowled like a cat who got too close to the fire," Blackwall was saying, while Sera giggled, breathless. "Didn't sit for a week."

Finn leaned on the doorframe. Blackwall sat beside Sera, who was propped against pillows and stretched out on her window seat under a pile of shabby wool blankets, holding her stomach with her good arm, laughing. The injured shoulder was thickly wrapped, her arm slung, tied tight against her. She was still pale, lips chapped, eyes ringed with dark circles. "Don't make me laugh, it hurts," she said, when she noticed Finn. Sera waved to her with a shy smile.

"Brought you some food." Finn set the tray on a small, shaky table. It was crowded with hard cheese and flaky meat pies, bottled ale, crusty bread still warm from the oven, a jar of amber honey—and two heavy butter cakes, thick with brown sugar frosting.

"Cake!" Sera pulled one of the plates onto her lap, snatched a fork from the tray and dove in. She groaned with pleasure. "Whenever I ask for cake, they tell to me to make it myself. They said Josie sends them to the nobles," she said, licking her fork. "Won't they be old when they get there?"

"That's where these were going," Finn said, squeezing between the worn, embroidered pillows on Sera's other side and pulling her legs up to her chest. "I took them while the cooks weren't looking." Sera's eyes lit up.

"Send them cakes." Blackwall shook his head. "Rather give them a two-fingered salute and a box of dog shit." Finn did not entirely disagree, but after her... talk with Josephine, she thought better of agreeing aloud.

Sera snorted, mouth full of pilfered cake, which surely made it taste all the better. "Box of dog shit, that's a good one. Here, eat it!" She scooped a massive lump of dense cake onto the fork and pointed it toward Finn, who barely managed to wrap her mouth around it. She wasn't fond of sweets, but it made Sera happy.

Blackwall sighed as he stood up. "Where do you elves put it all?"

"I can see where you put it," Sera scoffed.

Finn began to chide her, but Blackwall laughed. "This?" he asked, hand on his stomach. "This is cultivated mass. Every pound makes me more powerful."

"Me, too," Sera said, patting her own tiny frame. "Gonna get big and tough."

"Well, I think you're a fine figure of a man, Ser Blackwall," Finn told him.

Just above his beard, Finn caught the edge of a blush on Blackwall's cheeks, and he looked out of the sunny window with a smile. "Thank you, my lady. And now I will leave the healer to her work," he said with a short bow, and left the room.

Sera groaned. "Ugh. Not Beardy as well. You'll go for any old thing, won't you?"

Finn ignored that. "How are you feeling?"

Sera tried to shrug, but winced from the effort. "All right I guess," she muttered, rubbing her shoulder.

"Don't touch that," Finn said sharply. Sera was young and healthy and by all rights she would heal soon, if she didn't mess with that wound. They had been lucky the blade was not poisoned, and she showed no signs of corruption or sickness, only pain. Finn was struck, suddenly, by the memory of it, a visceral flash of fear. It had not even been a day since. A cry caught in her chest, and she held tight onto Sera's good arm—Sera, alive and warm next to her, pouting, defiant, like a child who's learned something they don't yet want to know.

She stroked Sera's hair from her face, as she had the night before, but now Sera was awake, listening. "Please," she said, trying to hold back the anxious edge in her voice, "never do that again."

With the slightest shake of her head, Sera bit her lip. "He was going to kill you, I had to," she whispered. "You're the important one. You're going to fix everything. I'm nobody," she said with a nervous laugh, though her eyes were wet.

Words like that made their own kind of wound. They could fester, and rot. "You can't think like that. You are so important." Finn squeezed her hand. "I need you here, Sera."

She saw Sera's eyes tremble and threaten to spill their tears before she turned away, to the window. "Don't be stupid," she said, laughing, pulling her hand away to wipe under her eyes.

"You all right?" Sera asked, tucking her hair behind her ears. "You look a bit shit."

Finn had avoided the mirror today, the mirror she'd begun to inspect regularly. Why was she so concerned about how she looked now? She barely cared before. "Don't worry about me," she muttered.

"Come on. Can't sit around worrying about me."

Finn sighed, shaking her head. "Just... it's something else. It's very—" What was it, exactly? She did not know how it made her feel. "Confusing," she said, with a grimace.

Sera looked at her with concern. "Is it to do with Cullen?"

She blinked at Sera. "Why do you ask?"

"He came by before." Sera poked at the cake on her lap with the fork. "He looked like you. Sad. Like he'd been wrung out."

Yes, she had seen his troubled face, his pensive eyes. She knew even less what he felt, other than what he said: that he cared for her. His words echoed in her mind. They crashed through the rumble of her thoughts like thunder. He had meant it.

"There is... something," she began, "between Cullen, and me." Sera's eyes brightened, though not as intensely as they had for cake. "And I can't believe I'm telling you this. But it isn't what you think," she stressed.

"Don't care what it is. It is." Sera uncorked one of the ale bottles and took a drink, looking at Finn. "And I didn't think anything. Wanted you to think it." She passed the bottle to Finn.

"And why is that?" Finn drank the ale, fizzy and warm, and realized it was the only thing in her stomach. She broke off a chunk of cheese, oilier and saltier than rock-pressed halla cheese from home. It didn't have the same acid bite. She missed that.

"Because I don't like Solas," Sera said quietly.

Finn quirked her brow at Sera and chewed her cheese. Not understanding Sera was a common feeling among many, she had gathered.

Sera sighed. "Elves always go with elves. So when they bang their bits they think it means something," she said, her voice mock-deep. "You're elfy enough. He's—I don't know what."

Swallowing hard, Finn rubbed her forehead. "There is no banging. There is no... anything. I don't even know him well. I'm not sure anyone does."

"You like him, though?"

She liked talking with him, but he could be combative, condescending. Finn was never sure where she stood with Solas, and she feared he would be a hard person to please, if she ever tried. She knew many people like him. "He reminds me of home, in a way."

Sera took the ale again. "Anyone like Cullen at home?" she said with a smile.

Finn shook her head.

Sera looked down, tapped her short nails against the brown glass of the ale bottle. "He's good. I think he's good," she said. "You know, in case you're afraid. Of templars."

"It isn't that, at all." Finn scratched at her legs, trying to collect her thoughts. "Before all this... my clan, all I really knew, were Dalish. There were merchants and traders but... they were not a part of my life. Do you understand?"

"No."

Finn sighed. She was making a mess of her own thoughts. It may not be possible to explain to anyone but another Dalish.

"It sounds stupid to me," Sera said defiantly. "You don't want him cause he's... what? Hairy, got round ears? You sound like a shem that calls you knife-ear. Bit sad you can't see that." She turned to the window and bit at a fingernail.

"But I don't see it that way," Finn said, softly. It sounded like someone else saying it. Perhaps it was someone else. Ideas from home—harsh as homespun wool, sour as that halla cheese. The things they said to the young ones to discourage them away from those merchants and traders. They will use you. Might as well be a gutter elf in the alienage. Might as well be a slave.

She looked at Sera, red-faced and chewing her nail. Was she a "gutter elf" because she'd been born in the city? And stayed there? No. Did Cullen want to use her? She could not imagine it. There were good reasons to stay apart, to stay free, to live the Dalish life. There were poisonous ones, too.

"You know he's good, though," Finn said.

"Don't know. You never know." Sera set the ale bottle on the tray, and the plates shook. "For now, he's good. Maybe he messes up later. Then you deal with it." She looked at Finn. "Maybe you mess up. And he has to deal with you."

They were wiser words than she would expect from someone so young. But Sera had many experiences, so much of a life, that Finn never had. Many of those she didn't envy, but they had given Sera much in return. They made her who she was, someone Finn admired. "I will think on it," she said quietly. "Now then." She tore a piece of bread from the loaf and opened the honey to drizzle it on top. "You must eat all of this food. That's an order."

***

She left Sera dozing, full of food, resting like a cat in the sun of her window seat, and stepped out into the thoroughfare, painfully bright, though a chilled breeze blew. It was quieter than the tavern, emptier, the merchants at their stalls shuffling and bored, the few soldiers unburdened by duty wandering aimlessly. Finn found a deserted corner shaded by trees. Slumping against the stone wall, ground cold beneath her, she took out the letter from her mother.

First, complaints about the brutish shem soldiers, the ungrateful shems in Wycome, about Keeper Istamae's insistence that part of their purpose was to help those who need it, whatever they may be. It was clear Valenni disagreed. Then the expected part.

If that shem army is not holding you against your will, come home.

Saran's cough is no better and he never seems to get enough air. Nessa is poorly every moontime, with a catch in her side. And little Tamlas, his foot is still turning. There are many more. Thenel is worked to the bone with you gone.

Come home, da'len. We need you here. Do your duty. Let them fight their war without you. You walk the Way of Peace. You know how few of us there are who do this. Do not let them force you to stray.

It was signed, Mala mamae, mala vhenas.

Slowly she walked across the thoroughfare, toward the stairs, up to the main hall, letter in hand. There was not a question about Finn herself in it, no hope for her safety or happiness.

It was easy to see through her mother's pleas. She wanted Finn there, to stay in the clan—not become the healer for a new clan, not to leave to work with other healers. To stay. To make children. To stay safe there, not to venture. Valenni had been fearful for so long. What was once caring became controlling, what was protective became stifling. Was it like this before her father had died? She could not remember.

But there was also truth in what she said, Finn knew. She felt it. Vir atish'an was a fragile path. Thenel had described it to her as trying to grow roses without being pricked by thorns. Already she was testing it, trying to spread peace by wielding the sharp edge of war.

Though she knew her duty in both worlds, and would not leave this one without healing all she could, without mending the sky and those beneath it... she would leave it. Her life, though small, was elsewhere. And she would return to it. It would be wrong to become attached. It would hurt more, in the end.

Cullen was not like anyone in her past. He did not seek anything easy, or distant. And she did not want to be the cause of more pain than what already weighed upon him so heavily. She could ignore it, ignore him, leave the wound she had made open—or she could fix it now, burn it shut. She could let him know she was sorry for what she did. That she would not let it happen again.

She stepped into the main hall and entered the rotunda, taking the path to Cullen's office, when she was startled by a voice, so close. "What troubles you, lethallan?"

Solas stood nearby, camouflaged by the swaths of muted color he had painted along the walls of the dim, round room.

"Forgive me," she said, "I did not see you. I would have greeted you."

"There is no need to be so formal." He pointed to the paper still in her hand. "Unwelcome news?"

She sighed, folded the letter and put it back in her pocket. "Of a sort. A letter from home."

Solas smiled, questioning. "Is that so unwelcome?" The blue-flamed lamp which hung from his scaffold, a spectral blue she had seen only in spirits, set his eyes almost aglow.

There was little she wanted to tell him of the letter itself, of her family, of the sorrow and unrest within her. "They want me to return," she said plainly. "And the simple fact is that I cannot, because of this." Finn turned her left palm up, open, and she felt the anchor pulse like her blood, could nearly see the strange magic ebb, and rise, with each beat of her heart.

He stepped forward and took her hand in his, his fingers slender but strong, his skin cold. He seemed to look into her hand, and sharp worry clouded his face. Dropping her hand, he said, his voice resigned and low, "Facts are rarely simple."

Once, he had taught her to use the anchor. But he had never been able to help her control it, to ease the pain it caused. She could not hold him responsible for that. No herb she took, no potion she created had made any difference, either. It was an unknown.

"Would you go home," he asked, "if you could?"

Finn sighed, and glanced around the room at Solas' fresco, the wolves in shadow, the swords and flames. "Yes. I've known no other life."

"But you do, now," he said, gesturing around them, to Skyhold, to the Inquisition.

If she had not become... whatever she was now, if the anchor had taken someone else's hand, and she survived the Conclave, she would have stayed. For a time. To heal and help, where she could. Who could say how long her stay would have been? "I have already chosen a path," she said. "You know of vir atish'an. The Way of Peace?"

Solas shook his head, his mouth a grim line. "I know there is no such thing," he said bitterly. He folded his arms tight and straightened to his full height. "Long ago, the elves had a saying. 'The healer has the bloodiest hands.' Do they say it still?"

"Yes." She swallowed. How many times she had heard it during her apprenticeship, had heard friends and lovers say it, when they lamented the life she chose—that had been chosen for her, by her mother. Her mother, a weaver, she a healer. Two sides of Sylaise.

He narrowed his eyes, studying her. "You know what it means, I see. How difficult the healer's path must be."

"I thought I knew," she said. "I never imagined healing a wound so deep as the breach."

"True enough." He smiled sadly. "But that is not what I meant." His arms dropped to his sides, and he took a small step closer, near enough to whisper. "How deep does the wound go in you?" he asked. "For you do not truly wish to return home."

She stared at him, and his pale eyes searched hers. She wanted to deny it, and found she could not. But her feeling did not change the truth. "I must," she said. "I will, when this is done."

He nodded. "Of course you will, he said. "But what of the meantime?"

"What of it?" she snapped, frustrated by his dancing so close to his point, never seeming to land upon it.

"You are right," he said. "You cannot leave." He took her hand in his again, traced his finger along her palm. The anchor twitched and bit at her. He looked into her eyes. "In the meantime, find something for yourself. A reason to stay, beyond this," he said, gently let her hand fall. "Beyond duty."

Words caught in her throat, sputtering. Something for herself. What she wanted had never been the reason she did anything. Her wants she had learned to forget. Until recently, when what she wanted had become impossible to ignore.

She looked hard at Solas. "And when this is over? I go back to what I have always been?"

He looked to the floor, and shook his head. "You do not know how this will end," he said. "You should find happiness with the time you have."

Every day she worried. Worried that she would die, that Cullen would succumb, that the Inquisition would fail and all of this would have been for nothing. If any of it came true, had she already wasted time—time she could have spent being happy, giving in to what they both wanted? Suddenly she felt even more foolish than she had the night before. The time they had was all there was.

Finn stroked her lip nervously, her mind spinning. "Thank you, Solas," she said.

Solas tilted his head, the glow of the blue flame shining on his skin. "Do not thank me."

***

When she pushed open the creaking door to Cullen's office, loose on its rusted hinges, he was seated at his desk, dispensing orders to a crowd of soldiers. When he noticed who had entered, he seemed to lose the track of his thoughts, and sent the soldiers away, his brow knit tight. She stepped closer to his desk. "Inquisitor," he said. Like in her dream, she did not want to hear it.

"Could we talk?" she asked, her hands in tight fists at her side, her breath shallow.

He nodded, stood, and opened the door to the battlements.

She was quiet as they walked out into the day and the cool wind, quiet as she paused near one of the stone posts, taller than her head. I don't know what I came here to say. So she remained quiet, and looked out toward the snow-capped mountains.

Cullen leaned upon the stone next to her. "It's a nice day," he said softly. As though they were having an everyday chat.

She turned to him, incredulous. When she caught the faint smirk on his face, she could not help but smile, shaking her head. "You... make me laugh," she said, "though I am not always sure you intend to."

He looked at her tenderly. "I do intend to."

The sadness in his eyes, untouched by his smile, the sweet longing in his voice, made her heart wrench.

"I thought you wouldn't want to speak to me," he said. "But here you are, so... I am relieved."

Her pulse thundered. "Cullen," she began, and she was unsure, for a moment, whether she had ever called him by his name, to his face. It was intimate. She knew now why he seemed so careful with her name, felt why his breath seemed to catch every time he said it. Everything in her hands and her blood wanted to touch him again.

She forced herself to look into his eyes. "I want to apologize," she said, "for my behavior last night. I put you in a very uncomfortable position, and I am sorry to have done it." She fisted her nails into her palms to stop her hands from shaking.

Cullen looked down at the stone walkway beneath them, unfocused and blinking. "I—" He turned to her. "You have nothing to apologize for. I am the one who pushed you away," he said, his voice cracking, "and I fear that I've hurt you. That was so utterly far from my intention." His eyes searched hers. "And I only hope you can forgive me, in time."

She inched closer to him. "No," she said. "I am not hurt, and... you were right."

He looked surprised. "Don't hear that very often," he muttered.

She huffed a laugh, and bit her lip. "I would have regretted it. I do. I wish I could undo last night. Start over."

After a pause, he answered, "Not all of it," turning his eyes down shyly. "Despite my reaction," he said, shaking his head, "I have to say that kissing you was... really nice." When he smiled at her, a warm blush colored his face, and neck.

She shivered and felt herself flush, remembering the feel of him, his body under hers, his sweet, surprised face. "I would... regret not telling you. I do care for you," she said, her voice fluttering in her throat.

"You do," he whispered, less a question than a confirmation. His lips parted softly, trembling with each breath. She reached up to place a hand upon his armored shoulder. The metal was warm in the sun, and she caressed it as though she could feel him again. As though the layers between them, between these things they represented and their real selves, were gone.

She focused on her hand at his arm. "But I—" Her thoughts, her fears, sparked and flared in her mind like a new fire, catching everywhere. "I don't know what to do. I don't know if this is right. If it's even possible." She looked into his eyes, intense and near golden in the midmorning light, his gaze meeting hers, and his hand moving to wrap around her forearm, his grip firm.

"Neither do I," he breathed, his eyes roaming her face, and she watched the cords of his throat shifting as he swallowed. "It seems too much to ask. But I want to ask it." His conviction calmed her, the fire in her steadied and burned. He gently pulled her closer, brought his other hand to her side, his knee pressed against the inside of her thigh. She fingered the silken rope at his waist, stroked the cold metal of his belt buckle.

"Please," he whispered. His head dipped toward hers and her eyes closed when she felt his breath upon her mouth.

He kissed her, slowly, softer than she had kissed him before the fire, when everything was a frenzy. Now, she could feel his lips tender against her own, feel the sharp edge of his stubble scratch at her skin. She could hear his breath, and her own heart beating. Though the wind whipped around them, at their feet, into her ears, it was nothing.

And she heard, from what seemed a far distance, a voice. She opened her eyes, cloudy as though she had been asleep. A scout approach, delivering a report, oblivious.

Cullen parted from her, his face surprised and guilty, like a young soldier caught shirking his duties. The scout realized who, and what, he had interrupted. He stopped, stared at each of them in turn, and began to stammer apology.

Cullen only glanced at him, and said quietly, "Not now." The scout mumbled a stuttered assent, and hastily disappeared.

He turned back to her and leaned his forehead against hers, sighing. "There's always something more, isn't there?"

She stroked his cheek, and brushed her nose against his. "Something more?" she asked. "I hope so."

He pulled her closer, and she felt his smile against her lips as he kissed her again.

Chapter 10: Come aloft ➳

#cullen x lavellan #cullen rutherford #cullen x inquisitor #dragon age #dragon age inquisition #cullavellan #my fanfiction #wind and flame #thank you for reading!

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scribomaniac · 7 years

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Never Poke A Sleeping Dragon, Chapter 2: Rowan Whitethorn

Rowan flew hard on the winds back to Doranelle, his magic helping to speed him along. He needed to talk to Maeve. He needed answers. Did Maeve know her niece was Rowan's mate? She couldn't have, and yet . . . and yet his instincts roared at him otherwise. His thoughts veered back to Aelin. She was beautiful. Gods, so beautiful it made Rowan's heart hurt. He knew she was his mate the second he caught her scent, maybe even before that. He had immediately wanted to hold her, embrace her in every way in bask in the gift that was their bond.

Aelin's face, frozen with fear, flashed in his mind. She recognized their bond, too. He knew she did. Just as he knew the idea of it scared her more than anything in this world. He smelled her fear, knew the exact second when that fear wrapped itself around her heart and squeezed. Rowan didn't understand. Why did their bond scare her so? He needed answers, and Maeve was the only one who could give them to him.

He stopped abruptly halfway to Doranelle, his winds continuing on without him and causing many leaves to fall and branches to moan from his magic's abuse. He remembered earlier that day, when Maeve had assigned him to seek out Aelin to train her. Fenrys had volunteered. In fact, the White Wolf had all but begged Maeve to be temporarily released to train Aelin. Maeve hadn't given him a second look, though. Without batting an eye, she ordered Rowan to train the Terrasen princess. At the time Rowan hadn't given it a second thought, but now . . .

He couldn't return to Doranelle. Not now, not with his mate out there. If Maeve had planned this—and that was a small if—then she might order Rowan to remain in Doranelle out of pure spite. He flapped his wings and took off again, back in Aelin's direction.

He'd been stupid. So stupid. How could he just leave her like that? He left her alone and completely defenseless. Pulling on his magic again, he flew on the fastest winds back to Mistward's stables and where he last saw his mate. He shifted mid air and landed on his two feet in a crouch. Aelin's scent was faint. She'd obviously hauled ass the moment he flew away. So stupid!

Shifting again in a flash of light, Rowan took off after her scent. He had to fly slower in order to track her scent. Aelin had been smart. She hadn't fled in one, easily traceable direction, she'd zigged and zagged all the way back to Wendlyn to throw off any pursuers. Her sound mind for survival, even while in the grips of fear and panic, made his heart swell with pride for his mate. The swell lasted for another whole minute before he followed her scent down a path that led towards the cliffs that overlooked the ocean.

Aelin didn't know—couldn't know—what lived in the caves of those cliffs. If she did, then she'd never take that route. Skinwalkers infested those caves. He looked to the sky. The sun was setting. Shit.

His well of magic erupted and the winds pulled him along their currents towards the cliffs. He listened for sounds of struggles, of fighting, of anything. Sounds of rustling and hissing flooded his ears and his heart dropped into his stomach. Next, the smell of death and decay hit him so hard he almost faltered from the overwhelming sense. He couldn't use his magic to kill them, skinwalkers didn't breath, and his blades wouldn't stop them for long. Rowan would need to use every bit of experience he'd gathered in his three hundred some off years to save Aelin and get the two of them away from the skinwalkers. Finally he could see them and what he saw sent a shock of surprise through his body.

Aelin was fighting. Her horse was missing, and Rowan wondered if the skinwalkers got to them or if Aelin had been able to set it free before defending herself. She had a dagger in each hand and moved like lightning, lashing out and slicing at anything that came too close to her while simultaneously flashing in and out of the skinwalker's grasp. There was a determined glint in her eyes and a flare of something else, something more, that made Rowan think she was enjoying this dance. It was exhilarating to watch, but also terrifying. Shifting quickly back into his Fae form, Rowan drew his sword and quickly sliced through the three skinwalkers and grabbed Aelin by her forearm. “Run!” He commanded, his face set in a dangerous snarl. He needed her to listen to him. Nodding with wide eyes, Aelin didn't hesitate and ran with him.

He held onto her hand as they ran from the skinwalkers. To help guide her through the now dark forest or to reassure himself that she was with him, he wasn't sure, but he refused to let go. He looked back over his shoulder and cursed. The skinwalkers were after them now and they weren't running fast enough. He looked at Aelin and cursed again. “You need to shift, Aelin. Now. Or your mortal slowness will kill us.” He knew she could shift. Maeve had informed him of that much, but he also knew from their last encounter that this wouldn't be easy for his mate.

She stiffened, her eyes widening with shock and fear, and she swallowed thickly. Her brows furrowed with concentration. At first, he wasn't sure if Aelin would be able to shift after all, when after a few moments she began to shake her head in resignation. “I can't,” she huffed out, her breathing turning shallow with panic. “I can't—” her breath caught in her throat.

Rowan pulled her to the side, hiding them both behind the trunk of a wide tree. It'd give them coverage for just a few precious moments. These moments would decide their fates. Placing his hands on either side of her face, Rowan leaned his forehead against hers and looked into her eyes. Their breaths mingled and his senses were enveloped in her scent. It made him dizzy. “Breath, Aelin,” he coached quietly, his words barely above a whisper. “Breath, and shift.”

Aelin's face contorted in pain and Rowan swore again before slamming his body against hers to smother the flash of light that came with her shift. She looked like she'd vomit, but thankfully was able to hold the instinct back. The skinwalkers were closing in on them now. They could both hear them now, talking about what they'd do to them once they caught them. Aelin's face turned pale, but she didn't make a sound. Her eyes flickered back up to his and this time when he looked in them he didn't see any fear. This time the only thing shining through her bright turquoise eyes—he could see now that there were small, golden rings around her pupils—was determination. Steeling himself, he eased off her a bit and spoke even more quiet than before since she now had Fae hearing, “There is a large river a third of a mile east, at the base of a large cliff. When I say run, you run like hell. Step where I step and don't turn around for anything. If we're separated run straight for the river,” she nodded, command after command, her jaw set with focus and attention. The skinwalkers smell was becoming stronger. They were closing in. “If they catch you, you cannot kill them—not with a mortal weapon. Your best chance is to fight until you get free and run. Understand?”

She nodded again and Rowan nodded back, “On my mark,” they lowered ourselves, winding their muscles into a tightly packed spring. Rowan sent his magic to break a loose tree limb from it's tree in the opposite direction from us and once Rowan heard the skinwalkers turn their attention towards the noise, Rowan hissed, “Now,” and ran.

Even now they couldn't go as fast as Rowan wanted. Aelin was unused to her Fae form and therefore awkward. She stumbled for a moment, but Rowan steadied her with a grasp on her elbow and urged, “Faster!”

The cliff was just a few yards ahead of them when a fourth skinwalker jumped out in front of them and swiped for Rowan. He leapt out of the way and threw a dagger at it. “Run!” He yelled at Aelin, who had looked back towards the skirmish. She hesitated, but soon began to run again after Rowan's wind pushed her along. After flinging the skinwalker away with a strong gust of wind, Rowan soon ran after Aelin and quickly caught up. “Jump!” He commanded before hurtling himself off the ledge of the cliff.

For one terrible, heart stopping moment, Rowan thought Aelin wouldn't jump with him. That for some reason, she decided she didn't want to follow his commands or escape the skinwalkers, and decided to stay atop the ledge instead. But then he saw her fling herself from the ledge, her face twisted with feral animosity as she shouted down to him, “Shift!”

He did as she commanded, his shift illuminating their surroundings for just a moment, enabling him to see the skinwalkers jumping off the ledge after them. Schemes and strategies flooded his mind as he watched their decent, preparing himself to fight them once they landed in the river. Aelin had other ideas, though, and twisted her body to face the skinwalkers mid air. Thrusting her hands out towards the skinwalkers, she hissed one word before the world erupted in blue flame, “Surprise.”

Aelin, after landing in the water, swam to the river bank and stared up at the top of the cliff side while her fire raged on and consumed everything in its path. Shifting back to his Fae form, Rowan landed on the riverbank next to her and stared in awe of her power. The little princess of Terrasen had incinerated everything in her wake. The skinwalkers hadn't even had time to scream. Aelin knelt on her knees as she watched the flames burn, then, in a flash of bright light, shifted back into her human form and dry heaved. Rowan took a step towards her, his instincts to comfort her screaming at him, but then stopped just short of her. Fear tainted her scent once more, but this time it was accompanied by second emotion: disgust.

She took a few shaky breaths, trying to calm herself down, before she was able to ask in a tired, quiet voice, “Can you put it out?”

“You could,” he said gently, hoping to encourage her to embrace her magic. “If you tried.” When she didn't respond, he repressed a sigh and turned away to look at the fires above them. “I'm almost done.” In truth, he'd been working on putting the flames out this entire time. It wouldn't be much longer before the fire was completely smothered.

Aelin was still crouching down on her knees by the time the fire was smothered, her arms wrapped tightly around her torso. Rowan could see the faint tremble in her body and this time didn't bother to suppress his sigh. He looked up into the dark sky and watched the stars for a moment before looking back to his mate. What had happened to her, he wondered, to make her fear her magic—fear herself—so much? “Come on, princess.” He gave her a smirk, trying to tease out the swagger he witnessed from her earlier that day. “Let's get you home.”

Aelin didn't look at him, but he saw her lips twitch in a hint of a smile. Standing to her feet now she seemed much more stable than just a few moments ago. Still, her arms stayed wrapped protectively around herself. Taking in a deep breath, she finally looked up at Rowan as she walked past him. For a moment, he thought she'd continue walking without a backwards glance and make it to Wendlyn without him. Then, just a few yards away from him, Aelin stopped. After a few moments of some internal struggle, she turned around and smiled shyly at him. “Well? What are you waiting for, buzzard?” Her smile turned into a smirk filled with all the bravado a swaggering royal could muster. “An invitation?” Her hand twitched, but after another small struggle, Aelin reached her hand out and offered it to him.

Breath escaped him and Rowan's heart thud painfully against his chest as he looked at her outstretched hand. He looked at her, looked her in the eyes and scented the air for her scent. Although there was hesitation, she no longer looked at him in fear. It didn't mean she accepted him as her mate, but it was a step in the right direction. Taking a step towards her, he took his mate's hand in his own and smiled softly down at the physical connection. He looked up to see Aelin watching him. Her shy, tentative smile was back, but it was sincere and honest and more than he could ever ask for.