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todoscript · 4 years

Note

Can I request Pro!Hero Bakugou in a scenario where he's going on the scene where a place was being attacked by low level criminals and the place's mascot character was essentially trying to protect kids from the harm, kind of standing up to the villains to abide time til the heroes or police arrive. Bakugou saves the day and the mascot character pops their giant head off to properly thank him and he's like--Oh shit they're cute I was not prepared

Bunny Face

Genre | Fluff.

Pairing | Pro Hero!Bakugou Katsuki x Fem!Reader

Words | 1.9K+

Warnings | Bakugou getting flustered. Bakugou cursing. Bakugou beating up a villain. Bakugou.

A/N | I changed it from villains to a single villian, hope that’s ok. Also, Anon, this request? This is big brain energy right here

To say you were dying would be an understatement.

The cruel rays of the sun beating down on the earth made it an absolute hell underneath the heavy bunny costume you were forced to don on, all thanks to a particular coworker who bailed on their shift today with an abhorrent excuse of⁠—you quote—“car trouble.” It was bullshit, but you weren’t the one calling the shots, not when your boss said you were to fill in for them despite your protests. Now, clad from head to toe in fluffy pink fur and hefty layers of fabric and foam, you suffocated from within a cocoon that gathered heat and sweat around your body. You were so letting your coworker have a piece of your mind the next time they showed up.

“Miss Bunny! Miss Bunny! Let us take a picture with you!” a circle of kids hollered, their grabby hands tugging your fur to seize your attention and even jump to pull on your ears. The only thing you have to thank this costume for is the fact it at least concealed the dreary expression on your face, masked by the mascot’s smiley, plastic facade.

You simulated a chipper voice not to break the guise. “Alright, Miss Bunny’s coming,” you managed as the kids pulled you in front of an assembly of parents that captured their cute little children posing with a mascot who most certainly desired to be anywhere else.

Just as their phones clicked and shuttered, a loud boom suddenly thundered behind you, grabbing everyone’s attention in the area. The parents looked up with gaped mouths at the smoke diffused in the sky and the whirring of rides that tottered off balance in the distance.

“Look! Up there!” Their kids pointed to the lone figure who stood atop the highest peak of the ferris wheel, the man shouting out curses and threats for all those beneath him to tremble and run in terror. You, however, simply grounded yourself, impassive underneath your costume and nearly numb at all the events transpiring around you.

You have got to be shitting me, you thought, eyes cast into a deadpan.

Just when you thought your day couldn’t get any worse.

“Ground Zero! Ground Zero!”

Bakugou winced at the deafening static blared into his right ear, where the intercom vibrated a frequency of hasty squalls from his sidekick. He pressed a button on the device with his right hand to relay the call, his left currently occupied gripping the collar of a thug he just knocked into submission after giving them chase through the alleys.

“Calm down, dumbass, I heard you the first fucking time,” he scolded, the clamor of sirens heard in the background of the other line, “What is it?”

“A villain is running amuck at the local fair!”

“What the hell?! That place is populated with people!” Bakugou’s eyes flared alert as the tone in his voice rose to a volume much more piercing than his sidekick’s. Unknowingly, the hold he had on the unconscious goon in front of him tightened while his mind conjured the next plan of action. With such a densely packed area of civilians, the villain will undoubtedly cause rampage and havoc if not dealt with immediately. And right now, he was still halfway across the city from where they held the local fair. Not wasting another second of his time, he tossed the thug off to the side and tied him up for the police to apprehend later.

“Evacuate as many people as possible before I get there! Make sure the fucking villain doesn’t damage any of the structures holding up the bigger rides!” he instructed his sidekick.

“Yes, sir, Ground Zero, sir!”

With that, he pushed the mic off on his comlink before propelling himself into the air thanks to the kinetic explosions emitted from his palms, blasting past buildings, and keen on seeing the villain’s imminent doom at his hand.

It’s through his breakneck speeds across the city that he arrived there in no time at all. He assessed the current damage in the area and leered at the gray smoke scattered in the air, eyeing the attractions that fell off their foundations. He eventually spotted a crowd of kids gathered around a big blur of pink that held its arms outward to shield them, even while a menacing figure slowly inched closer

“There you fucking are.” Bakugou fired forward, eager to rocket down from the skies and let the sole of his boot greet the villain square in the face. On impact, the thug clobbered onto the ground, but was yet to be knocked out, gathering himself to stand and face the Pro Hero.

“It’s Ground Zero!”

The kids that surrounded you shrilled in joy at the explosion hero’s appearance into the fray, pulling on your costume to express their excitement.

“Look, Miss Bunny, Ground Zero’s here to save us!”

You peered through the small, meshed slits of your costume at the man before you, who had his grenade arms ready. He enacted confidence in his stance, challenging the dangerous villain without a single ounce of hesitation.

“Hey, Bunny Face!” he yelled, eyes never leaving his opponent.

Bunny Face? Your brows knitted together.

“Y-Yes?” you replied, voice coming out hoarse through the dense layer of foam.

“Get those kids out of here, I’ll handle the villain!” he commanded, and you did not disobey. You hastened the children by your side to make a break with you to the gates and safely meet their parents again, leaving the explosion hero to defeat the threat.

And defeat he did. The villain stood no chance against him as his attacks were all eluded by the Pro Hero’s high evasion and trained skills that had the goon edging the end of his rope.

“Screw this! I’m outta here!” he shouted, turning toward the opposite direction to attempt a getaway. However, Bakugou was already one step ahead of him, propelled and positioned in front of the enemy once more.

“If you’re going to escape, you shouldn’t yell your plans out loud, you fucking idiot,” was all the explosion hero gave, his hands effused with nitroglycerin that quickly emitted a radiating heat.

“Now DIE!!”

At his triumphant roar, his palms ignited a tremendous explosion forward, making clean contact on the villain who stood aimlessly at the flash of light that enveloped his body in a fever of nuclear energy. By the time the smog cleared, Bakugou was crossed with an unconscious, smoking body.

He dragged the villain toward the gate, where the police and his sidekicks gathered, along with the other fair-goers. They applauded him for his victory, saving the day once again. As the hero scanned through the crowd, he caught sight of you in the throng thanks to your bulky, bright costume that stuck out like a sore thumb.

When your gazes met, you finally hauled the large bunny head off, revealing yourself to his red eyes that widened slightly upon grasping your true appearance.

He couldn’t help the stare fixed on you while you approached him, noting how your pretty eyes glistened, complimented by the balmy rosiness adorning your cheeks and the delicate flow of your hair that danced lightly at every step you took.

Fuck, she’s cute, his thoughts blurted out without him realizing you were now right in front of him.

“Ground Zero, right? Thanks for helping us back there. We didn’t know what we’d do without you,” you thanked, your words acting as the catalyst that finally brought his mind back to the cusp of reality. He shook his head in an attempt to ward off the flush of red reaching his cheeks due to your gratitude and the small proximity between your faces. Your voice—once veiled by that abominable voice box in your suit that did no justice to how sweet your tone was—did not help him maintain his indifferent facade. He opted to turn his head to the side for now.

“N-No problem,” he cursed at the way his deep timbre stuttered out his reply.

“No, really, thank you! I didn’t know how long I could protect those kids, but you managed to come in at the right time before things got bad!” you expressed your gratefulness while inching closer, much to his dismay.

“Look, it’s nothing, alright?! I’m a hero, it’s what I fucking do,” he brazenly stated, projecting as much poise as he could muster despite finding the dazed gloss in your eyes, and the way you gingerly pushed a strand of hair behind your ear, cute. Just even a peek of your soft-looking lips in his peripheral vision was enough for his demeanor to betray him.

Calm the fuck down, Ground Zero, he urged himself.

“What’s wrong? Do I look OK?” you called out his series of glances, subconscious about how you appeared after staying hidden beneath the sweltering hot ensemble for the majority of the afternoon. In your head, you thought you must be a complete mess in front of him, with your hair strewned all around and face a bright, crimson hue. However, Bakugou saw differently, and through his eyes he tried to fathom how one could still look so pretty in spite of that cumbersome costume you wore.

“You look fucking fine,” he assured, though his words were an understatement in comparison to the rampant thoughts imbued in his head. A smile lined your lips thanks to his affirmation.

“Oh, here, have this!” You reached your pink pad of a hand into the front pocket of your costume’s overalls and pulled out wads of yellow tickets. “Some free admittance tickets for the fair! Maybe you can use them when it opens up again.”

You offered the stack to him at which he was going to reject and cooley state he didn’t have time for shit like that, but he pulled his brakes upon realizing something.

“You.. work here, right?” he asked, though it should be obvious considering the hefty costume no regular person would wear on a hot day like this. Or on any day for that matter. The bunny honestly was, without a doubt in his mind, quite fucking hideous. However an endearing girl like you got roped into this job was a mystery to him, but he eventually received an explanation.

“Yes, though I’m not usually the one wearing the mascot costume. My coworker bailed today, so I was forced to take their place,” you answered, mentally pained when remembering what you had endured throughout this hellish day.

“Your coworker must be an ass.”

“Oh tell me about it,” you agreed with an exasperated sigh leaving your lips. “Anyways, I usually work at a game stall next to the ferris wheel.” You pointed to said attraction that was somehow still standing in one piece despite all the chaos that transpired today.

“You’re welcome to visit me if you want, Ground Zero,” you said, and at that, Bakugou gladly took the tickets from your hands and accepted your proposal, knowing it meant he could see your pretty face again.

“Fine, but when you see me, it’s Katsuki. Bakugou Katsuki,” he informed, babbling about how you couldn’t call him by his hero name or risk bringing him unnecessary attention he most certainly didn’t need to deal with during his free time. Though in actuality, he just wanted you to be familiar with him and utter his name in that syrupy voice of yours that sounded like melodies to his ears.

You giggled, the laughter coming from your lips saccharine and the expression on your face rivaling a meadow of flowers with the colorful bloom in your eyes.

“Alright, Bakugou Katsuki.”

And then you finally thought that maybe today wasn’t so bad after all.

Ending Notes | I hope this request was ok! If any of you want to request something of your own, feel free! My ask box will stay open until whenever

#bnha #bnha x reader #bakugou #mha #bnhabookclub #bakugou katsuki #katsuki bakugou #bakugo #bakugo katsuki #bakugou x reader #bakugou katsuki x reader #bakugo katsuki x reader #mha x reader #bnha scenarios #mha scenarios #bnha imagines #mha imagines #my writing

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yee-fxcking-haw · 4 years

Text

•The Grey Area•

Part One: •Fallen Angel•

Summary: You're Enji Todoroki's prized possession, his Angel. Given this name because of your pure, white wings. Your quirk is truly unique, until you come face to face with Enji's new friend and hit man, Hawks. His presence shakes you, his abilities intimidate you. The roll he plays in your life? That's up in the air.

Pairing: Keigo Takami x FemReader, Endeavor x FemReader

Warnings: Violence, mentions of death, descriptions of death, sexual themes and implications, mentions of harassment, (Eventual smut, as well as other warnings- they will be at the beginning of each chapter.)

Word Count: 4,471

A/N: I'm gonna write this shit til I get sick of writing it. Not to suck my own dick but I am in love with this story idea so we're just gonna keep rolling til it feels right to end it lmao.

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Silk may be the worst material ever invented. It slips and slides and hides absolutely nothing. Your lungs deflate as you slide your hands down the front of the horrid thing you've been asked to wear. It was laid out on your bed for you, with a small note that said, "Get dolled up for me." It isn't signed, it doesn't need to be.

It's a note from the man that more or less owns you. He likes to say he takes care of you, you like to say he holds your leash. At the end of the day, coming to him was what you needed to do to survive, so you did it. You shake the thoughts of how you came to be here from your head, ignoring the dreadful remnants of a time when you were desperate enough to turn to him for protection.

Enji Todoroki lives one of the most complex double lives in existence. He’s a magnificent hero, topping the charts and staying there. He saves lives, lets his flames shine bright, he's a beacon of hope.

He’s also an incredibly feared underground crime lord. When the flames are off, he's no longer heroic, he's no longer honorable. He's bloodthirsty, his friends are few and his enemies are many.

Keeping these two realms separate is quite the task, but he pulls it off with his vast wealth and by calling in the seemingly limitless favors from those he’s helped out of sticky situations.

The supposedly heroic faces you’ve seen slinking around his estate were jarring at first. The mighty do indeed fall, and they tumble right into his lap. They’re always after something, a loan, various narcotics, maybe some illegal steroids to increase their performances.

Enji loves a bargain, he loves to string those poor saps along until they’re too confused to agree to anything that’s reasonable. It’s horribly entertaining, as backwards as it all is, you’ve grown fond of the way he befuddles every hopeless individual that finds themselves desperate enough to seek out his help.

Usually, you’re there by his side. You block out the conversation as you serve drinks, laugh at the bad jokes, and most of all, look pretty. Your job is to be his greatest manipulation tactic. Give the suckers something to drool at, get them drunk, stay out of the way so Enji can lock in whatever deal he’s making.

You ruffle your hair, straighten your dress, and take one final glance in your mirror.

There’s a familiar tightness in your chest when you acknowledge the real reason you’re used as something to gawk at.

Your wings.

Two broad, unruly, attention grabbing, white wings emerging from your shoulder blades. Little speckles of brown and black exist among the sea of white feathers that fall all the way to the floor. The feathers at the tips always look pitiful, since their entire existence is spent dragging the floor.

They’re useless things, heavy and cumbersome and completely nonfunctional. You could probably fly if you wanted to, if somebody would teach you. You never stood a chance at that though, your parents couldn’t even begin to do so, and Enji certainly won’t waste energy on it. No, he likes having you on the ground. Safe and sound, much more convenient to keep you without a cage.

The bones of them often ache, obviously needing to be used, desperate to do their job. They most resemble the wings of a Barn Owl. Along with the wings, your quirk provides you with exceptional vision and hearing. Sometimes it feels like a sixth sense, like you can tell when things are going to happen before they actually do.

This, of course, makes you invaluable to Enji during his meetings. You’re able to pick up on nervous ticks, listen to the whispers, and tip him off. He does love keeping you around for that, you’ve assisted him innumerable times, and he always rewards so generously. He keeps you comfortable, spoiled even, anything for his Angel.

Enji’s Angel.

It was never very official, he just started calling you by it, and you started answering to it. In your younger years it was almost affectionate, slightly comforting. Now, it’s a scarlet letter, a stage name, belonging to somebody who doesn’t quite exist.

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The meeting is absolute torture. Some schmuck is sitting across from you and Enji, blubbering his way through some bullshit about how he’ll have the money next week. You’re perched on Enji’s lap, reclining against his chest with your chin up high.

You’re all sitting around a large oak coffee table in Enji’s office, drinks in hands, guns in holsters.

“I swear, the guy I know, he owes me, he says he’ll have the money by this weekend, maybe even sooner!” The sniffling client begs. He’s a pitiful little man, all short and greasy looking, with bulbous eyes that sit above a large aquiline nose.

“Oh, how reassuring, my money is in the hands of a friend of a liar,” Enji sneers, voice low and menacing, “Doesn’t that put you at ease, Angel?” His hand snakes around your waist, making his claim on you evident to everyone in the room.

The client brought two goons with him, both sit on the lavish loveseat, watching with putrid envy as Enji’s hands roam across your middle.

You run your hand up his massive chest, making a show of adjusting your hips in his lap. You flash your eyes up to his and roll your shoulders, wings rippling as you do. The room is taken over by a heavy, consuming silence.

You survey Enji’s face, void of flames for such a serious event. You hear hearts beat faster, breathing quicken, idiots, every one of them.

“No, I don’t think it does, sir.” You purr, hand playing with the collar of his grey dress shirt.

This whole charade used to make your skin crawl, feeling eyes burn into your flesh, knowing that if Enji weren’t here you’d be laid out on the table while the pigs around you took turns.

You expressed this once, crying and shaking as you begged Enji to stop bringing you into them. His only response was to demand that you tell him whenever somebody was making you uncomfortable, and he would gladly take care of it.

It only took one client, one dense motherfucker who put his hand on your thigh. The second his hand was on you, Enji put a bullet in his head. You watched the blood splatter, and the body hit the floor, but ripped your eyes away after that. You turned into Enji’s chest, clutching him as you realised it was all your doing, Enji had killed for you.

Since then, you vowed to maintain a facade of confidence in these meetings. If Enji were to kill, it would be because of his own corrupted motives, not for you, never again.

You no longer let the bile rise in your throat, you don’t look away from any perverse gaze. You keep your nerves steady, and you stare the bastards down.

One of the goons shifts in their seat, making Enji shoot him a warning glance as you continue to fiddle with his shirt.

“I don’t think it’s wise to leave so much money up to ‘maybe’ and ‘this guy’.” You sigh as you slide off Enji’s lap, keeping your hand on his chest as you slink around to stand behind him. He gives you a knowing look, full of admiration and pride, he does love watching you perform.

Show time.

You flutter your wings out to the sides, stretching them, making a spectacle of them. All three of the men watch with comically amazed expressions. Their jaws may as well be on the floor, you slide your hands onto Enji’s broad shoulders so you can rub small circles into his muscles.

“I agree, I don’t like all this ‘maybe’ bullshit.” the energy in the room thickens as he speaks, falling into heavy silence in reverence of the power his voice exudes.

"Angel, will you grab us some more drinks?" You draw yourself up tall, ignoring the eyes that gorge on your decolletage.

"Yes Sir." You lean down to place a sweet kiss on Enji's cheek, flashing a little too much skin for his guests.

"Isn't she lovely, gentlemen?" He wonders out loud, looking up at you fondly.

No, not fondly, possessively, greedily. There's no loving tenderness that comes with fondness.

The men nod quietly, all afraid to cross a line, none willing to speak out of turn.

"Do a spin for them, sweetheart." He grabs your wrist and pulls you around to his side.

Your cheeks and ears run hot as he lifts your arm for you to spin, leaving space for your wings. You give a smooth twirl, feathers and dress flowing around you with a subtle woosh.

"Men would kill for her, don't you think?" Another round of silent nods, another wave of tense energy.

"I have." It's a warning, loud and clear.

He waves his hand in your direction, dismissive and bored.

"Go on, Angel. I have to have a private word with our guests." You glide out of the room gracefully, walking slowly enough so they can all watch you leave.

You swallow the terrible feelings rising in your gut, knowing damn well how rarely people leave that room alive after a "private word". You find your way to the kitchen easily, a tray of drinks already prepared on the fine granite countertop.

Enji's estate is nothing short of magnificent, all expensive foreign materials, gold fixtures and crystal chandeliers. All supplied by his mass of illegally acquired wealth.

One of the sweet little maids nods at you, gawking at your wings as always. You have a strange relationship with the staff at the house, they always treat you like some skittish animal. Afraid that you're unpredictable, even dangerous.

It's always seemed odd to you, but you've grown to understand it. None of them know where you came from, nor how you ended up in Enji's good graces, let alone a cherished prize to him.

On your way back down the hall, you hear the shouting of men, not an usual occurrence, but this time it makes your blood run cold. It sounds much more… painful, then usual. Cries for help mixed with curses and strangled yells. You freeze when the door rattles with such force, the only explanation can be that a body was thrown against it.

Then, there's silence. Silence, followed by sick laughter. You know Enji's voice too well, his rich tone fills your ears, but there's one other. Did he have an accomplice? It's not uncommon for Enji to have all his bases covered, so it's possible one of the goons was a double agent.

Your feet find their function again and you pad quietly towards the door. You take a second to breathe deeply, preparing yourself for the inevitable bloodshed you're about to witness.

You rap your knuckles on the door very quietly, wouldn't want to disturb the dead.

"Angel? Is that you?" Enji's voice calls as his laughter settles, the other man went silent as soon as your hand met the wood of the door.

"Yes sir." You say, trying to keep your voice soft but still wanting to be heard.

"Oh shit, get this out of the way."

A body.

You hear something slide then drop, and your chest squeezes with guilt. One day you won't have these feelings, one day seeing someone drop dead will evoke no more feeling than watching dead hair fall to the ground after it's trimmed. At least, that's what Enji tells you.

The door cracks open, a wall of a human standing on the other side of it. Enji beams down at you, the smallest amount of blood decorates his gray collar.

"Why do you always get so messy when I leave?" You tease, despite the sick feeling in your gut.

"It's a messy business." He counters, holding the door for you to step into the room. You expect the slit throats, the smell of blood, and the horrid joy in Enji's face. What you don't expect, is the creature poised in the corner of the room.

A creature with wings. No, not a creature, a man. With menacing, vibrant, crimson wings. His face is nothing but sharp serious lines, highlights of gold with intense shadows. He's covered in slim fitting black clothing, giving him a tactical and militant look.

He looks so powerful, and so beautiful. The only thing you can think to compare him to is a fallen angel, heavenly, but haunting.

In his hands, he holds a… sword? Then he steps further into view, and you see the blade shift. A feather. With a smooth, deadly twitch of his wrist, he flicks the rigid feather. It sends blood splattering across the floor where he stands.

His glowing eyes watch you, waiting for you to react, maybe waiting for you to scream, run away and hide. You can't, though, you're entranced. He has wings. Your own twitch behind your back, suddenly feeling even more cumbersome and useless after seeing how athletic and beautiful his own are.

As gruesome as the scene is, he's magnificent, stunning in such an overwhelming way. His eyes rake over your body, but it doesn't feel perverse, it feels like he's sizing you up, estimating your abilities.

Because he is.

"Angel, this is Hawks, he's a very good friend of mine." Enji explains, relaxing back into his chair as you and Hawks continue to watch each other.

You would never know it, but his breath hitched the second he saw you. Enji had told him about his Angel, but his description did you no justice. To Hawks, at least, you look capable, intimidating even. Your wings are equal in size to his, but compared to your smaller frame they look so fierce.

Neither of you has seen or heard of someone with a quirk like yours, or even remotely similar. So you stand there, amazed, in fear, sizing each other up.

"Isn't she something?" Enji's voice pulls you out of your trance, your eyes finally breaking from his friend's.

Hawks just hums, eyes still locked on your form as you set the tray of drinks down in front of Enji. He pours one for himself, then one for you, and one for Hawks. You take a glance around at the gore surrounding you, and shake your head at the drink.

"Not tonight, I'm tired." You try to sell it as best you can, but Enji sees right through you.

"Her stomach isn't very strong yet, sensitive little thing." He says to Hawks.

When you glance over to him, his reaction unsettles you. He grins, a broad, breathtaking thing. He's amused, embarrassed for you. How silly of you to be so bothered by a fucking murder scene.

Aside from the dead bodies, you can't stand another second under the predatory gaze of Enji's new friend. The whole scene makes you more uncomfortable than anything has in a long while. It's very apparent by Enji's lack of weapons, and by Hawks' feral appearance, that Hawks is some kind of hit man.

"Get some rest, then." Enji says dismissively.

You kiss him on the cheek, earning a rare smile from his usual straight lips. There's no affection behind your kiss, but there is loyalty, and he knows that.

Doing your best not to seem like you're in a rush, you keep your head down and walk steadily towards the door.

"Nice to meet you, Angel." His voice is like caramel syrup, dripping over you and heating you up.

You hate it.

You give him nothing but a turse nod then duck out the door, trying to keep your heart in it's cage, trying to keep your hands from shaking. What the hell was that?

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You spend some time in the library before heading to bed. The fireplace crackles and pops, casting beautiful, dancing lights on the dark oak bookshelves. It's not a massive library, but it's decent. Full of books that have been collected by Enji, but not read. You do the reading, he does the acquiring.

Not tonight, though. Tonight you just sit, you sit and overthink. You can't seem to shake the uneasy feeling this "Hawks" character gave you. He was so primal looking, so unhinged, so… beastly.

The contrast of his beauty is what keeps punching you in the gut. He was nothing short of stunning, like a marble statue brought to life by an enchantress. That's even without his wings. God, his wings. He must look spectacular in the air, so majestic.

You stuff the thought down, deep down. The longing in your chest is enough to make your eyes sting with tears. Flying. A feeling you've never known, but the instinct burns beneath your skin. You wonder if even knows how lucky he is…

You grab onto those thoughts before they run away, standing to your feet with a stretch and a ruffle of your own wings.

You just need sleep, you need to shake this off. Enji has plenty of "friends", plenty of lowlifes and murderers that he keeps close. Hawks is no different, he'll linger for a bit, then disappear under mysterious circumstances, and you'll never hear his name again.

The thought should bring your comfort as you travel to your bedroom, but as you wander through the halls, your chest aches. Somehow, the idea of not knowing all you can about this stranger makes you itch. Which in turn, makes you detest his presence even more. There's no reason for such a fascination… aside from your resemblance to him.

The sound of your bedroom door latching behind you does bring you some piece, lifting some of the weight off of your lungs. Until you hear the slightest ruffle echo from the direction of your window.

The hair on your neck stands on end as you draw your wings up to their full size. Your shoulders are rigid, fists clenched as you whip your head around to identify the sound.

"Do you always sleep with the door unlocked?" That sugary voice falls on your ears once again, raising goosebumps all over your body.

You don't answer, you only watch, inching backwards towards the door. There could be only one reason one of Enji's friends would corner you like this, the thought makes your heart beat to the point of nearly breaking through your chest.

He's perched on your windowsill, feet dangling into the room, wings relaxed behind him as the wind catches his scarlet feathers. The curtains away around him as they catch the cool breeze, the whole scene gives him an almost ghostly look, especially with the pale light of the moon as the only illumination in your bedroom.

"Easy, kid." He slides off lazily, arms crossed as he saunters towards you, "I just wanted to talk."

His lips quirk up into an easy smirk, something that makes your insides stir.

"Talk quick, then get out." You snap, pressing your back against the door, drawing your wings in around yourself protectively as your arms wrap around your chest. He stops nearly a foot from you, his own wings spread wide, almost like he's showing off.

The energy is thick, pressing on your lungs as you watch his face. He looks down his nose at you, not judging, but observing. His eyes are lit with a patient look, something soft but relatively unreadable. His proximity overwhelms you, even up close, you're hard pressed to find a single flaw.

There you stand, shrouded in scarlet, him in white. Both waiting for the other to speak, or move, or even breathe. Desperate for some evidence that you were both real and not some apparition sent to mock your poor mortal brain with an image of unparalleled perfection.

Wild, dazzling, gilded eyes search your face. Predatory pupils slit as he takes in every detail he can. His chest rises, and he speaks. He utters a simple, "They're beautiful." and everything shatters.

A cadence of feelings builds within your chest, tuning up like an orchestra. All unorganized noise, arching and mixing, impossible to focus on anything in particular.

Then the most beautiful part, the settling of the chaos. All of the instruments find their notes as they fade out. The anticipatory silence settles within you, preparing you for the moment when they all roll into the first cord of their symphony.

You don't feel right taking the name Angel, not after this, not after you've seen one. Your reverence for his beauty is short lived, though. As soon as you remember the way his eyes were wild with bloodlust, the way he had taken lives with his own feathers.

Admiration is replaced with apprehension. However, the strongest feeling is curiosity, morbid, forbidden curiosity.

You shove the compliment to the far corners of your brain, ignoring the fire it stokes in your heart.

"Talk or leave." You say shortly.

"Not a fan of flattery?" He asks, quirking a thick eyebrow.

"Not a fan of coercion." You reply, arms drawing tighter around your chest.

Hawks pauses for a moment, considering your answer.

"What are you a fan of?" His smile grows a bit more as he turns away from you on his heels, looking almost bored. You stay glued to your door, wrapped around yourself, completely frozen.

"Well, I'm usually a fan of not having my room invaded by murderers." You sneer, attempting to ignore the way his body moves so elegantly as he investigates your room with fabricated intrigue.

He scoffs a bit at your feisty retort, looking over his shoulder to give you quick up and down with his eyes. He wanders back to the window, back to you as he takes a look out.

"A murderer. That's a bold accusation, sweetheart." He turns around again, backlit by the moonlight.

"Can you use em'?" He asks, nodding behind you.

The question bites at your insides, it twists your guts up onto angry knots.

You shake your head, you can't say it out loud, you can't admit it.

His face falls the slightest bit, less amused, more aware. Perhaps he feels sympathy, imagining a life without the freedom of flight.

"I see." He says quietly, "A dove?" He wonders out loud.

His prying starts to eat at your patience, you already feel intruded upon by him sneaking into your bedroom, and now he wants to dissect your anatomy? Yet, you still find yourself drawn to the conversation, hanging on his words, hoping to gain information about him in exchange for information about yourself.

"Owl." You say simply, easing off the door a little so you can spread your wings some, "The markings give it away."

He nods, taking in the messy brown and black speckles at the tips.

"How did you do that with your feather?" You ask, works spilling out a little too fast.

Both of his eyebrows shoot up, surprised by your sudden engagement in the conversation.

His only reply is by drawing himself up by his shoulders. Then, miraculously, one of his feathers flies from his wing, darting straight for you until it pauses in front of your face. You flinch slightly before it pauses, then you stand transfixed, watching the small crimson blade levitate before you.

You want to reach out and grab it, find the string that's holding it up, find the answer to this magic trick.

"Pretty cool, huh?" He says, full of confidence as he sways back over to you, "You can touch it." He says gently.

So you do, you take it into your hand gently. The texture is shocking, it's soft and silky, much more pleasant than your coarse and textured feathers.

"How?" You ask, amazed by his abilities.

He shrugs and turns around again, pacing back to the window. You take a mental note of his inability to stand still for longer than a few seconds.

"I just… can." He says it so matter of fact, like it's the obvious answer.

Now that he's more relaxed, not holding a feather dripping with blood, he seems almost... Friendly? He certainly seems less frightening, less aggressive and formidable.

You hold the feather in your palms, waiting for the next trick.

"Keep it." He says as he settles back down onto the windowsill, sitting like he was when you first found him.

He stretches an arm around to brace on the outside of the window frame, leaning back into the open air of the night. For a brief moment you panic, knowing you're on the third floor, but then you just feel stupid for being concerned for a person with functioning wings.

"Why?" You ask, closing in your hands as you look up at him.

His smile is devilish, he rolls his shoulders back and lifts himself up to his feet. He crowds the large window, filling it with his lean body and those powerful wings.

"In case you need me." He winks and gives you a lazy, two finger salute before letting himself fall away into the sky.

Your chest lurches as you dart to the window, desperate to see him in action, desperate to see someone fly.

By the time you reach the window, though, he's nowhere to be seen. Evaporated into the stars, not even the sound of beating wings left as evidence.

You glance down at the feather in your hands, and notice it twitch to life before it floats up to hover in front of your face again. Your chest fills with an absolute mess of unorganized, chaotic feelings that you can't even begin to pull apart and make sense of.

The feather flicks under your chin, tickling the skin there with its pointed tip. You snatch it roughly, irritated with the teasing, perturbed by his nonchalance. You slam the window shut before huffing over to your dresser, you rip a drawer open and shove the feather between your clothes.

You slam it shut as the raging sea of emotions beats against your chest, drowning your lungs as well as any cognitive brain function.

You can't make sense of any of this shit, you can't imagine how anyone could have ever made it up to your room without Enji's knowledge. Unless… he was let up… but that doesn't make any sense. None of it does. It's all so cloudy, you feel thousands of questions swarm your brain, and you don't possess a single answer.

The only thing you know for sure, is that you have to find out more about this fallen angel, you have to find out more about Hawks.

#takami keigo #my hero academia #hawks #hawks au #my hero au #my hero smut #hawks angst #mha hawks #my hero hawks #keigo takami #Keigo #keigo x you #hawks x you #hawks series #keigo takami smut #hawks smut

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persephonesfill · 4 years

Text

choke on me—chapter five

breathe me in (prequel fic)

chapter four

chapter six

a/n: i’m not going to say much, aside for a little warning that there is some violence and gore (nothing crazy) in this chapter. i’m super excited for this one and i hope you guys enjoy it! also, this chapter has my first battle scene so bear with me folks

rating: explicit

warning(s): this chapter contains violence, smut, and a little bit of gore

—————

Whatever peace they have following the carnival quickly dies when HYDRA rears its ugly head. Again. Tony hates how devoted they are to living up to their namesake. He had hoped that they would take their time to regroup after the fall of SHIELD, but apparently, four months was more than enough time. HYDRA's power ran that strong.

Tony watches Steve throughout the briefing. He's been watching Steve a lot more lately. Ever since that ride on the Ferris wheel, he's been trying to be more open, more inviting, Steve taking to his attentions like a starving man to freshwater. Steve's all business right now. His jaw clenched, he's scrolling through the digital files JARVIS compiled for them on a tablet with a single-minded focus. His free hand rests on his knee curled into a fist. Tony can practically see the rage in him rising like a tidal wave. He can't imagine how Steve feels, to devote himself to something, to die for it, only for his sacrifice to be for naught.

"God, these guys are like roaches," Clint says, cutting through the silence, tossing his tablet down on the table. "They could survive a nuclear winter."

"So what's the plan here, Cap?" Natasha says, leaning forward in her chair. "You've got the most experience with HYDRA out of any of us."

Steve sets his tablet down. "What we're going to do," he says, his voice colder than Tony's ever heard it, "is go for the head."

"We strike fast, and we strike hard, leave them absolutely no time to recoup. HYDRA, no doubt, has a number of facilities at their disposal. We find them, and we burn them to the ground. Any operatives who surrender will be turned into the proper authorities. We don't want another Zola."

"JARVIS, can you pull up a three-dimensional render of the base?" Tony says.

"Of course, sir," JARVIS says.

A bright blue hologram appeared over the center of their table. Steve stands up and starts to circle it. He could practically see the wheels behind Steve's head turning, formulating a strategy from the bottom up.

"They were smart when they made this base," Steve says. "It's incorporated into the mountain top. They'll be able to see us coming from all sides."

Bruce speaks up. "What if we approach from the west? It looks like there's a pretty dense forest; we could use it for coverage."

"A ground assault would be suicide," Tony says, rising from his seat to take a closer look at the hologram. Steve moves over, making room for Tony to stand beside him. "They could have bunkers, watchguards, tanks, the works. We'd be fish in a barrel."

"An aerial assault then," Thor suggests. "So we won't be caught unaware."

Steve gives the idea some thought, a muscle in his jaw working. "Tony and you could fly ahead and scout for assailants."

"That could work," Tony says. His mind is racing, running through all of the possible outcomes of their fledgling plan. The others could stay behind in the quinjet, and he had recently added retro-reflective paneling to it. "Once we give you the all-clear, we'll be right on top of them and—"

"We'll have the element of surprise on our side," Steve finishes.

"And once we reach the base?" Natasha asks.

"That's the easy part, Nat," Clint says. "We give 'em hell."

*********

They finalize their plans and run them by Fury and what remains of SHIELD. They'll head out tomorrow morning, just before dawn, to catch them off guard. The others have left the war room, either to train or to get some rest. Steve sits at the table alone, the hologram casting his face in blue light.

"Penny for your thoughts," Tony murmurs so as not to startle him.

Steve glances at him and smiles, but it doesn't reach his eyes.

"Talk to me, Steve," Tony says. "What's bugging you?"

Steve sighs. "It'd be easier to list what isn't bugging me."

With a sudden surge of daring, Tony steps off from where he'd been leaning against the wall and slides onto Steve's lap. Steve lets him, his hands settling on Tony's hips like they belong there. Tony wraps his arms around his neck and leans in.

"Am I bugging you?" he whispers.

"Never," Steve says fiercely, his grip on Tony's hips tightening.

"That's one," Tony jokes. "Can't think of any others?"

Steve presses a kiss to the corner of his mouth. "Your smile." Another kiss on the tip of his nose this time, making Tony chuckle. "Your laugh."

"Okay, Romeo," Tony says, laughing. "I get it. That's three, I guess."

Steve smiles, a bigger one than the last one. His thumb has slid under Tony's shirt, rubbing circles into his hip. "Thank you," he murmurs. "It's just... I'm worried about the mission."

"And why is that?" Tony asks like an idiot until he remembers that this base is located in the Alps, where so many things went catastrophically wrong for Steve.

Steve's smile falls just as quickly as it came, and Tony kicks himself mentally for being the one to do it. "Whenever HYDRA's involved, things tend to go south pretty quick."

"I gave my life to putting an end to HYDRA, and no matter what I do," Steve whispers, more to himself than to Tony, "they always come back. They always come back and take something from me. I'm fighting a war with no end, Tony."

Tony cups Steve's face in his hands. "But you're still fighting," Tony says softly. "The second you stop, that's when they win. That's when there's no coming back." His thumb brushes over Steve's cheek, wiping away a stray eyelash. Sitting this close, Steve looked so young. Tony forgot that mentally, Steve was only twenty-nine. He carried himself with an age-old grace and had suffered so much…

"And you're not fighting alone. You never did. You had the Commandos," Tony says. He doesn't know where he's going with this, but he'll do anything to take that grimace off of Steve's face.

"No one should be this alone," he thinks.

"You have the Avengers," he continues. "You have me."

"I've got you?" Steve asks. His voice sounds small, unsure.

"You've got me. You'll always have me," Tony confirms.

"I'm holding you to that," Steve says.

"I'm a man of my word," Tony replies.

Steve tilts Tony's head up, and they don't say anything after that. Not for a while.

*********

It's supposed to be a run-of-the-mill ambush, so of course, they're met with the modern-day equivalent of hellfire and brimstone—in HYDRA's case, a volley of gunfire. One second, Tony's flying over a mountain pass, thanking his lucky stars that his flight suit is insulated, the next a bright blue bolt of pure energy strikes him in one of his thrusters, sending him spiraling. Another shot sends Tony plummeting towards the earth in an ironic facsimile of the Battle of New York.

The same terror grips him, that awful feeling of weightlessness and pressure all at once. He barely registers the shouts of the others over the comms before his sense finally kicks in, and he deploys the flaps meant to slow his fall.

The impact still rattles his bones, and for an awful second, Tony swears his brain is shaking around in his skull. Whatever guns HYDRA were using had to be enhanced somehow because there's no way two shots from any old machine gun would take him out so easily.

He's landed in a snowbank, thankfully. Tony always knew that there was a possibility that his suit would be his coffin, but he didn't want to bite the dust just yet.

"Pepper would yell at me," he thinks, still trying to calm his racing mind down. "And Rhodey. And Happy. And Steve. Steve—"

"Iron Man? Iron Man, do you copy?" That's Steve's voice. There's an urgent note to it, almost like he's trying to stop himself from shouting.

Tony blinks once, twice, and tries to answer him. "I'm fine, Cap. Just disoriented."

"What's your location?" Natasha asks curtly, cutting off whatever Steve was going to say. Tony can hear gunfire in the background, and hurried commands barked out in Russian.

"Jarvis?" he asks. Tony used a separate comms unit precisely for moments like these when his suit might be compromised. "You there, buddy?"

"Always, sir."

Relief floods through Tony. He's not totally helpless if Jarvis is still on the line.

"Can you send my location to the others?"

"With pleasure, sir."

"Got it," Natasha says a second later. "I'm sending Thor to you. But first, Hawkeye, let's show these boys a little reciprocity, hm?" Natasha's voice is like ice. Tony almost feels bad for those poor HYDRA agents operating those machine guns. Almost. If only they weren't the scum of the earth.

Tony can't see the quinjet anymore, but he can sure as hell hear it as Natasha unloads a barrage of bullets aimed directly at the turrets surrounding the HYDRA bunker. Never has he ever been more thankful for retro-reflective paneling. There's a pause in the gunfire, presumably from the HYDRA goons taking cover and Natasha ceasing her fire to allow Thor to reach him unharmed.

In the meantime, Tony needs to figure out what he can salvage.

"Is it just me, or do those guns remind anybody else of the Chitauri's weapons?" Clint says over the comms.

Thor lands in the snowbank, sending the snow into a flurry. He stalks towards Tony, his red cape fluttering in the wind. Lightning dances at his fingertips, and paired with the fury painting his face red, Tony would think it was directed at him.

"Iron Man? Are you alright?" Thor asks when he reaches Tony.

"I'm fine, just disoriented," Tony says, which is the truth. The snow broke most of the fall. Aside from a few minor cuts and bruises, he's alright. It's not the worst mission he's been on. Yet.

"Your suit," Thor says. "Can you fly?"

Tony looks down, observing the damage. The gunfire's resumed, Natasha and Clint aiming with deadly accuracy. Good. That makes his job easier. The thrusters in his boots are shot, but his HUD and hand repulsors are still functioning.

"Don't think so," Tony says. "Can I get a lift? I'll tip you."

Thor chuckles, some of the fierceness in his stance deteriorating. "He's alright," Thor says. "He can still joke."

"That's a relief," Clint says, actually sounding relieved. "Who else is gonna call me out on my bullshit?"

With Thor's help, Tony strips out of the armor pieces that are nothing more than dead weight until he's down to his helmet, gauntlets, and chest piece.

"Cease your fire," Thor says, wrapping an arm around Tony's waist. "We're joining the fray." And they're off. Thor's flying is different from Tony's own; Mjolnir functions as a weight, taking them into the mountain top's direction. It's completely flat on top, akin to a plateau. Every twenty feet is a gunman armed with what looks like a modified Chitauri gun. They're firing blindly, still looking out for the quinjet. "We're coming in," Tony says. "And Hawkeye, you're right. This does look like Chitarui weaponry."

"Can you say that again so I can record it?"

"In your dreams," Tony says. Thor lets go of Tony when they're safe to land. Tony rolls into the fall, landing in a crouch. The HYDRA gunman spots them, but before they can pull their handgun sitting at their waist, Tony's already fired two blasts from his repulsor, sending them flying. Thor sends Mjolnir flying through the machine gun, shattering it into hundreds of metal shards sparking and sputtering like the last embers of a fire.

"One machine gun down," Tony reports. He stalks over to the HYDRA agent he shot and takes the handgun for himself. Ignoring the agent's blank, dead stare, he looks over the gun, trying to get a feel for how it functions. It's all sleek curves and silver chrome, a current of cobalt energy coursing through it like blood. He aims the gun and pulls what he hopes is the trigger at the gunner. The HYDRA agent screams as Tony's shot makes its target, charring his skin. "Make that two," Tony says. "The north side of the base is clear."

"I'm dropping Cap off," Natasha says. "The north side is too small to land the jet."

Mere seconds later, Steve's landing near them from seemingly nowhere, looking ready to kill. His eyes looking over Tony, "You okay?" he says, his voice rough.

"I'm alright," Tony says. They can talk later. There's still a mission to finish.

"There's four gunners on the western side," Steve says. "How long do you think until they call for reinforcements?"

The thundering sound of footsteps on concrete answers Steve's question.

"Not long," Tony snarls and rounds the corner with Steve and Thor flanking him. One of the agents who abandoned the machine gun has a regular pistol aimed right at Tony. Steve moves like lightning, lifting his shield in front of Tony. The bullet ricochets and lodges into the agent's skull.

Tony will thank him later, for now, they have to keep on moving. They need to clear space for Natasha to land.

It's like he, Steve, and Thor have a telepathic link with how well they fight together, making quick work of the HYDRA agents and their alien weapons. "It could be a dance," Tony thinks, as they push forward. Thor wields Mjolnir with grace and finesse; it might as well be an extension of his arm. It's the hallmark of a person who's spent half their life spilling blood. Tony's the same when he has a gun in his hands, and this modified Chitauri gun is no different. Aiming and firing with the intent to kill, his weapons are all too happy to listen. And Steve, Steve fights with a dancer's grace, lethal power behind every one of his attacks.

If he were a religious man, he could almost believe that he was meant to do this. That he was destined to fight by their side.

The party truly starts when Natasha lands the quinjet. Bruce emerges, already going green, and it's through him that they're able to bust down the doors and breach the base.

A fierce jolt of pride runs through him at the sight of Natasha and Clint wielding the batons and bow he made for them specifically, and he fights with a renewed sense of purpose. The HYDRA agents storm them all at once, but what's fifty men and women to six pissed off Avengers?

The answer is nothing. The Hulk alone takes out ten agents, tossing them about like a child would a toy. Clint's converted his bow into its bo staff form while they're enclosed, keeping close to Natasha's side.

Only four HYDRA agents remain standing when they finally surrender. The rest lie, unmoving, the smell of blood and sweat and burned skin filling the room like a sickly perfume.

Steve sends Natasha, Tony, and Thor off with a nod, while he, Clint, and the Hulk stand guard. They have their own missions to fulfill.

Tony and Nat find the base's command center, while Thor keeps going, muttering under his breath.

He retracts his helmet, lets himself breathe. The air is stale and dank, reminding him far too much of Afghanistan for his taste.

"Easy, Tony," Natasha says when she notices him hyperventilating. "We made it. We'll be leaving soon. We just need to find what we came for."

"Right," he says. "Right." He came for SHIELD secrets; cover stories, mission files, safe houses, that sort of thing. It takes JARVIS no time at all to hack into HYDRA's system.

As he's finishing up, he overhears Natasha say, "Oh, my God."

Instantly he's on guard. "What's wrong?"

As soon as he speaks, Thor comes back into the command center, his face grave. "There's something you should see."

"But," Natasha begins.

"I believe it might be related to what you found. Follow me."

Tony doesn't know what he's expecting as Thor takes them down a series of hallways, the light growing dimmer and dimmer the further they go. He's not expecting a girl. At least he thinks it's a girl. It's hard to tell when their skin has been completely stripped off their body.

*********

Tony can't say he's paying attention during the debriefing. It's hard to when every time he closes his eyes, all he sees is pink exposed flesh. Thor had been looking for Loki's staff. They had let it stay in SHIELD's custody in 2012 and two years later were kicking themselves for it. He said that he tried to follow its magical signature, and it had led him to...that girl. Or what was left of her.

When the debriefing is adjourned, he comes away with three things. First, someone ratted them out. Second, if someone ratted them out, then SHIELD was still compromised. Third, HYDRA was conducting human experimentation.

It wasn't surprising, given their history. During the war, they had taken prisoners of war and conducted all kinds of horrific experiments on them. As far as he knew, only one made it out alive, if you could even call it living. James "Bucky" Barnes had survived HYDRA's experiments only to be subjected to a worse kind of torture.

Seventy years and HYDRA was still the scum of the earth.

By the time Tony gets an all-clear from the medics, all he wants is to take a nice scalding shower, and he does just that.

When he emerges from the bathroom, Tony can't say he's surprised when he finds Steve, still suited up, sitting on the couch with his helmet in his hands.

Tony makes himself known, knocking on the wall.

Steve's eyes flit up to meet his, and Tony's surprised to see that they're red.

"Tony," Steve breathes his name like a prayer, and it's like someone's punched Tony directly in his chest. Every time Steve says his name like that, it always leads to something electrifying. Tony's eager to see him, eager to wipe the blood and the bodies of the day's events from his mind.

He walks further into his living room, and Steve rises to meet him until they're standing chest to chest. Tony has to look up at Steve, but Steve's never held it over him like others. It should scare him, how small Steve makes him feel. But Tony doesn't feel helpless.

If anything, he has the power to bring Steve to his knees.

Steve's hands are on Tony's waist, and he's shot back to the first time they stood like this, close enough to catch each other's breath. That first time had been an exploration—an adventure in learning each other's bodies.

Steve kisses him, hot and desperate, tugging at Tony's clothes.

This time it's a reassurance.

A fevered kiss—You're okay. Every fleeting touch a "stay with me."

Tony kisses him back.

"We're okay," he whispers into Steve's mouth.

"I saw you fall," Steve's voice cracks. "I saw you fall, and I couldn't do a damn thing to stop it."

Tony cups Steve's face in his hand. Steve closes his eyes, leaning into Tony's touch. When he opens them, his eyelashes are clumped with tears.

"I'm alive," he says. "I'm alive, and I'm here with you. That's all that matters. You and me."

Steve shudders. "God, Tony, I need—I need—"

"I know," Tony says, and the next few moments are naught but a blur. They kiss again and make their way to Tony's bedroom, occasionally stopping to feel each other up or get rid of a piece of clothing. When they finally make it to Tony's bedroom, they're both down to their boxers.

Idly, Tony realizes this is the first time they've messed around in an actual bedroom, especially his bedroom.

Except when Steve breaks their kiss to lift him up by his thighs and walk them over to his massive bed...when he lays Tony down gently like he's something precious...it doesn't feel like messing around anymore. Messing around put him in the mind of two teenagers fumbling around the backseat of a car, desperate to get themselves off and themselves only.

Don't get him wrong, the desperation was there as Tony wraps his legs around Steve's trim waist, but there wasn't a selfish bite to it.

Steve Rogers is desperate for love. His entire body thrums with it, in the way he slips his tongue into Tony's mouth and grips one of Tony's hips in a harsh grip, hard enough to bruise. It's fine, though. Steve will kiss every one of his bruises later as penance.

Maybe Tony shouldn't engage in such strenuous activity after another death experience, but he got the all-clear from SHIELD's medics themselves. If he sustains a concussion, that's on them.

Tony's already hard and straining against the confines of his boxers. He can feel Steve, hard and leaking pre-come through the thin fabric of his boxers.

They could come together, just like this, hell they have come together like this, but today is different. Today, Tony almost died again, and today Steve fought like a demon sent from hell for him and—

"Oh."

Tony loves him.

He's in love with him.

It's no great shock to him, not really. There's no fireworks, no lightning strikes, just a subtle shift in his paradigm, like someone zooming out on a camera.

Steve pulls back from their kiss to look at him, and Tony's gone. From Tony's penthouse suite, he has the perfect view of the sun in the evening. It's midday, and the sun, not quite setting, casts shafts of light into his room, catching the blond of Steve's mussed hair until it shines like hammered gold.

Steve has lifted the veil off of his face, and Tony can see the reverence in his gaze untempered. Tony's stomach clenches. He feels like an animal, like some feral beast has taken up residence in his skin, wanting to claim and be claimed.

"This is how Steve feels. This is how he's felt from the beginning."

He's not an artist, not like Steve, but he understands the appeal of wanting to capture a moment forever in all of its rawness. He wants to get some paints and canvas and immortalize Steve precisely as he is right now: wild and devout. To him.

Steve's thumb traces the outline of Tony's mouth and pushes at Tony's bottom lip. Steve gasps when Tony parts his lips and takes Steve's thumb into his mouth. He recovers quickly, pressing his thumb deeper into Tony's mouth. The salt of Steve's flesh coats his tongue, but for once, Tony feels like the hunter.

Steve's thumb becomes his pointer and middle fingers. Tony sucks them, lathing at them with his tongue until they're slick and glistening when Steve withdraws them from his mouth.

Tony blindly grasps for the drawer of his nightstand, rooting around until he finds what he's looking for: a bottle of lube.

He passes it to Steve, who flicks open the cap with his thumb.

"Ah," he breathes as the lube hits his skin, all cool and wet.

Steve's fingers, slick with Tony's saliva and lube, ghost around his perineum. He's thankful he had the good sense to shower beforehand, although he couldn't have foreseen this happening. Steve always caught him by surprise.

Steve starts Tony out slow, with only one thick finger working its way inside of him. The stretch, while familiar, takes some getting used to. It'd been so long since he'd truly been with another man.

A second finger joins the first, stretching Tony to the point of discomfort. In the back of his mind, Tony had always known that Steve's hands were big, but having them stretch him out was an entirely different matter.

Despite his initial discomfort, his cock is still hard, dribbling pre-come onto his stomach.

"Breathe for me, baby," Steve says, and it hits Tony then. This is the first time they've had sex. All of their other moments had been fleeting, full of fevered grinding and hot mouths and rough hands when they had time to spare.

Tony's naked in front of Steve, and he's in love with him, and he doesn't know what's worse.

"Hey," Steve says softly like he's comforting a spooked horse. "Breathe."

Tony closes his eyes and does as he's told. Some of the tension leaves his body as Steve's voice washes over him.

"You have no idea, don't you? How gorgeous you are?"

"Tell me," Tony finds himself saying. Steve's working his fingers in and out of Tony now, searching, searching…

It's getting harder to think straight.

"I'd burn for you," Steve says. "I want you so much, I'm fucking dizzy with it." Steve twists his fingers, and Tony sees starlight behind his eyes.

Steve's fingers are relentless against his prostate, scissoring and splitting him wide open.

"Do that again," Tony somehow manages to gasp out. "Fuck, Steve, please."

Steve, bastard that he is, withdraws his fingers from Tony's entrance, and if Tony whines, that's between him and God.

"I think I like you like this," Steve says instead, pressing his fingers into the meat of Tony's thighs. A shiver runs down Tony's spine at the hungry look in Steve's eyes.

"A wolf closing in for the kill."

"Like what?" Tony finds himself saying.

Steve tilts his head and runs a hand up Tony's thigh until he's tantalizingly close to cupping his cock. "Desperate. Wanting. Regardless of what you want to call it, I like seeing you as wrecked as I've felt these past couple of months."

Wrecked is definitely the right word. Tony's willpower is equal to that of a Jenga tower right now. One wrong move (or right one depending on who you ask), and he'll come tumbling down, and Steve will have to pick up his pieces.

Tony's lips part when Steve takes him into his hand, a soft gasp escaping them as he spreads the wetness of his pre-come along his cock. Heat pools low in his belly, and Tony finds himself spreading his legs wider, baring himself for Steve to use however he pleases.

"Are you going to wreck me?" Tony says.

Steve's grip tightens on his cock, and Tony bucks up into his fist, his hands flying up to make contact with Steve's skin. "I don't want to wreck you," Steve says, eyes burning. "I want to worship you."

"That's blasphemous, Rogers," Tony says. Worship. Like he's something pure. Like he's someone worth loving.

In the most shocking plot twist of his life, Steve Rogers, Captain fucking America, says, "Who the fuck needs a god when I have you?"

It's a far cry from the "aw, shucks" wholesome Irish Catholic mask Steve dons, but Tony shouldn't be too surprised. This is the same man who got him off at the dinner table. And the shower. And the helicarrier.

There's still a part of Tony that thinks he doesn't deserve it, such utter devotion, such attraction (he won't dare call it the other word he's thinking of lest he get his hopes up,) but for what seems like the umpteenth time, he decides to ignore his doubts.

"This moment is mine. If he stays, or if he leaves, this will always be mine." He'll take whatever he can get from Steve with eager hands.

Steve's hand reaches for the lube once more, the other jerking Tony off at an agonizingly slow pace until he's truly hard and leaking pre-come all over Steve's fist.

Steve slicks up his cock, and Tony's toes curl at the thought of all of that going inside him. He wants it, though. He wants Steve like he's never wanted anything else in his life.

Tony isn't new to desire or lust, but the need burning inside of him like a red-hot coal consumes him in its intensity.

"Steve, please," he says, hating the desperate chord in his voice. "Wreck me, worship me, do whatever you want, just do something."

Steve swallows hard, his Adam's apple bobbing, and he nods. "Fuck, Tony. Okay."

He lets go of Tony's cock, but Tony has no time to beg because he's lining himself up with Tony's entrance.

Tony can practically hear his heart beating in his chest over the sound of Steve's steady, even breathing. Steve presses into him so slowly, so carefully like he's trying not to break Tony in half.

"Fuck that," he thinks.

Tony cants his hips up, teasing Steve's cock, and says, "I can take it. I want you to fuck me, Steve."

Steve's hands clamp down on either side of Tony's hips, and Tony knows he's won this round when he sees the dark look in Steve's eyes. He plunges into Tony, fucking a sharp gasp out of him. Tony's not a virgin by any means. His playboy reputation is a well-earned one. But it's been so long since he's been full. Steve's only halfway in him, and yet Tony feels like he's in his stomach.

"Is this what you wanted?" Steve asks, withdrawing slightly to add more lube. He pushed back into Tony, the lube squelching obscenely as his hips slap against Tony's. Tony's face, his everything, is red, but he'll take it. He wants it.

"Yes," he says, wrapping his legs around Steve's waist, effectively trapping him. "I wanted you."

"You have me," Steve says, his voice hoarse and wretched. "You'll always have me."

Steve tilts his hips just slightly, but the change in angle is enough to make Tony clench around him as his cock presses incessantly against that sweet, electrifying spot inside of Tony.

They both curse, Tony at the change in angle, the lightning in his blood, Steve at Tony's sudden tightness, and Steve fucks into him in earnest.

Tony's being unmade. He's unraveling at the seams like a worn-out sweater, and Steve's stitching him back together.

Their skin is tacky with sweat and lube, and the clean-up will be awful, but Tony doesn't care as the reality of the day hits him. Tony almost died. He almost died, and he loves Steve, and he should tell him while he has the chance.

Steve buries his head into Tony's neck. "I almost lost you," he says, his voice breaking.

"You didn't," Tony gasps.

Steve doesn't say anything, just presses into Tony harder, like he's trying to seep into Tony's skin. Tony throws a hand over his mouth to stifle his moans even though it's just them, but Steve catches his hand and intertwines it with his.

"No," he says. "I want...I need to hear you."

Tony's toes curl as he nods and lets the moans he was holding back slip from his mouth untethered. If anything, they spur Steve on. His bed squeaks with each thrust, and Tony can hear Steve mumbling under his breath, a litany of "I need you," and "So tight, so good," and "Stay with me."

Tony should tell him. He should tell Steve he loves him, but something holds him back. He doesn't want Steve to think it was just a spur of the moment ordeal. He wants Steve to be sure that he loves him, that his soul has completely intertwined with Steve's, that they're one. It should be perfect.

So instead of saying I love you, he just lifts Steve's head up to look him in his face. He loves seeing the utter desperation in Steve's face, the euphoria right before he comes, loves knowing that he was the one to bring him to such heights. He sees it now. Steve's on the edge, his hair falling into his eyes, his lips all red and bitten like a smear of blood.

"Tony, I—"

Steve never finishes his sentence as Tony's tongue slinks into his mouth. Steve moans, kissing him back. One of his hands finds Tony's cock. Tony bucks into his fist, still slick with lube, digs his nails into Steve's back until they're both falling apart. Steve comes inside him with a muffled groan, filling him with a wet heat; meanwhile, Tony feels like his brain is leaking from his ears as his come spurts from his cock and paints both of their stomachs in white.

When Steve's hand strokes his cheek and comes away wet, Tony realizes that he's crying. Steve kisses his cheeks and his forehead and his nose, and when he finally goes for Tony's mouth, Tony lets out the softest, "Thank you."

Steve hovers over him. For a moment, Tony thinks he's going to say those three terrifying words. Horror and excitement alike send his stomach rolling, but Steve just says, "Anything for you."

He's not sure if he should be disappointed or relieved.

#stony #stevetony #superhusbands #steve x tony #steve rogers #tony stark #imperialstark fic #imperialstark writing #my fic #my writing #marvel #mcu #nsfk #choke on me

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thewebcomicsreview · 4 years

Photo

Normally I open up the Homestuck 2 liveblog with a tongue-in-cheek comment about how reading HS2 is pain, but I just watched the debate and HS2 looks incredible by comparison, so let’s see if this good mood carries over. Looks like we’re on Candyland, too, Candy updates tend to be better (or at least bad in a funny way) than the oft-boring Meat updates, and personally, I think “The Omega Kids fuck around” is the best part of HS2 by yards.

Man, that lamp is almost perfectly positioned to draw a line through the image separating the two scenes (the dialogue for which is on two separate columns), but it’s just the tiniest bit off-center. I wonder if that was intentional and mobile-responsiveness is just a cruel mistress. It’s a cute touch, if so. I suppose the door (and the photos, which are the same height as the door) also serves the same purpose of having the two scenes be sectioned off. I don’t really know a lot about “scene composition” so maybe I should stay in my wheelhouse, but I think it’s divided very nicely

HARRY: and some of us aren't gods and shit. JOHN: i'm detecting a hint of judgement in your voice, there, harry anderson JOHN: don't you enjoy being a part of all this? finally getting to be in the thick of it all?

John, always dense, has not picked up on Harry Anderson’s demotion to Harry. He’s also inserting a lot of his own desires onto Harry, here, too. Vrissy is the one who wanted to be in the thick of it all (thematic idea to stick a pin into to see if it plays out: John should be mentoring Vrissy and Vriska should be mentoring Harry. Some evidence that HS2 is building this idea, but not a lot yet)

HARRY: now YOU look like you're hiding some extra commentary. JOHN: oh, i don't need to burden you with all the bureaucratic stuff, it's boring.

You gotta subscribe to John’s $20/mo Patreon tier for that, Harry.

JOHN: because here i am, sitting in the dugout, same as you. HARRY: in the dugout? JOHN: oh, or, uh... JOHN: what's a metaphor you might like better... HARRY: no, JOHN: i'm like the uhh...understudy. HARRY: dad. no, jesus, you don't have to do this. JOHN: or i got cast in as babysitter number 2 when i had auditioned for, i dunno, HARRY: yeah, please, i got the baseball metaphor. HARRY: i'm not a complete fucking nerd.

John doesn’t really “get” theater kids, I get. It makes me think a little of how John’s dad thought John was massively into clowns. Also, this is a cute.

JOHN: it's been really nice to get to spend so much time with you. HARRY: um. yeah, it's not so bad. HARRY: anyway, before you ruffle my hair or anything, it looks like things are getting a bit heated between the vriskas over there. HARRY: maybe we should offer them a snack to bring the mood back down? JOHN: me, mess up your hair when you’ve worked so hard on that look? i do know you at least that well, harry anderson HARRY: thank god.

This is also cute. Harry maybe the only person in the entire cast of Homestuck or Homestuck 2 to have a semi-normal relationship with his parents.

Speaking of semi-symmetry, the line where Harry says how happy he is to stay home almost lines up perfectly with Vriska being furious that she has to stay home. I wonder again if that’s a coincidence of if someone had a really clever idea that didn’t make it fully intact through editing (or was considered not worth the effort).

VRISKA: How are you so calm right now? Your lusii were training you, right? And you’re a troll, you’re definitely five times stronger than a human! And if you’re my clone, you are way more 8adass than little miss Fussy Fangs.

Vriska is making several false assumptions here, but the most interesting one is that Vrissy is Vriska’s clone. She’s not. She’s descended from Vriska, and takes after Vriska very strongly, but it’s not a one-to-one thing.

VRISSY: 8ut I guess this Situation is Kind of Serious? VRISSY: There’s a whole Plan and Stuff Like that. VRISKA: Clearly not a good plan, 8ecause then I would 8e part of it!

Vriska.jpg

VRISKA: That’s just even more indication that they don’t know what they’re doing! Lalonde and Maryam have had however many sweeps to get older and stupider, 8ut from where I’m standing, it was literally only a few days ago that I was their commander! I am primed for the 8attlefield!

Okay, this line is across from John saying he’s in the dugout. There is absolutely an intentional, if not one-to-one strict, mirroring of these two conversations that’s actually really neat. I should go back to the other times HS2 has had conversations formatted like this to see if this mirroring has been happening all along. It’s a really good use of the format! I like this a lot!

JOHN: so anyway, as you can see, this would have worked just fine! HARRY: no i think karkat’s right. this looks like shit, dad. JOHN: you know, me letting your earlier use of the word "fuck" slide wasn't a blanket approval for all cursing in front of me. HARRY: sorry. HARRY: try not to make such a shit plan, and i won't call it that. JOHN: haha wow.

The other thing I like is the John/Harry dynamic.

HARRY: it's not like i think i'm any better! HARRY: i mean, i still can't believe i told vrissy and them to bring a dead celebrity to school. HARRY: what was i THINKING. JOHN: you were thinking it sounded hilarious! JOHN: but yeah, in hindsight, maybe not the best call. JOHN: maybe it’s genetic? HARRY: yeah. HARRY: i kinda can’t believe we’re all still alive, actually. HARRY: and how did YOU make it this far, being so bad at this? JOHN: i had my friends with me, i guess.

John your friends repeatedly tried to kill you and succeeded at least twice.

He’d spent so long seeing mostly the best parts of Roxy in Harry Anderson. He forgot, he guesses, to look for himself in there, too. And if what they have in common right now is a lack of strategic foresight, hey, he’ll take it.

I’m slowly developing a theory that John is subconsciously the narrator of Candy, given how everything suddenly started going John’s way after Calliope left (and how the narrator seemed to really hate Gamzee last chapter). Remember, John has spoken in narration before in HS1, but never seemed to realize he was doing it. I probably need to essay this theory out at some point, but not now.

Oh, hey! Jane does have goons! And they’ve slightly change the way they draw Rose’s hair, so her head isn’t a perfect circle with lines on it. This looks much better.

JANE: I haven't given a political speech in years, Ms. Lalonde. I don't know what you're referring to. I'm just a simple business woman. JADE: right with her own talk show JADE: and multi billion dollar merchant company and lobbying groups! JANE: That's what a business woman is, Jade, dear.

I know that this is supposed to be Capitalism Bad, but “You claim to be a businesswoman when you own a merchant company!”. Jade. Come on. This reads less as Jane going “Of course I’m evil, I’m a CEO” and more that Jade literally doesn’t know what a business woman is.

JANE: You are on my territory, in the presence of my secret police, laying your hand on my investment.

Jane you don’t own “territory” do you not know what a businesswoman is either?

JANE: Your ship is in contested airspace. You will land, whereby it will be confiscated by the Royal Human Guard. After that you will be taken into custody.

CONTESTED BY WHOM, JANE? WHO THE FUCK IS THE WAR BETWEEN?!

JADE: shut the fuck up for a minute and look up!

There’s a BIG-ASS spaceship like ten feet in front of you! Did you not notice until Jade pointed it out?

Also why does the Rebellion ship have the Crockercorp prongs on it?

JANE: Or have you forgotten who has been paying for her schooling and taking charge of her introduction into society? JADE: i never asked you to do that! JADE: you offered! JADE: so stop calling me ungrateful for not sucking your dick over things i never asked for!

Sorry again, Jade, are you implying that you wouldn’t have given your daughter an education had Jane not offered? “Rose and Jade entrusted their daughter to Jane, who they were at war with” is an enigma of a plot point.

The world is watching her be dressed down by a couple blood traitor rebels, one of which has very prominent dog ears. Jane wonders if either of them are even recognizable to the assembled as two of the old gods. One of her PR managers had recommended that she keep her look as static as possible, so that people can always recognize her as Jane Crocker, Captain of Industry, Creator of Earth C, Maintainer of Peace and Plenty.

Jade has always had dog ears what the fuck? I guess this is supposed to be Jane’s warped thinking.

So, anyway, Kanaya fake-holds Tavvy hostage, Jane buys the threat as real and they build up like Jane is going to sacrifice her own son for PR points but she ultimately stands down and lets everyone go. It’s left intentionally vague whether or not she was always going to do this, or if she didn’t want to do it in front of Jake, or if the presence of Jake stirred something in her that made her change her mind. I like the ambiguity.

This was a very “Homestuck 2″ update. The plot of kind of nonsense, but it’s carried by the character interactions and a bit of cleverness.

#Homestuck 2 #Homestuck 2 liveblog #Homestuck

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vannahfanfics · 5 years

Note

Hello! I stumbled onto your Luffy x Nami fic "Natural" last night and absolutely adored it! I was wondering, if you take fanfic requests, could you write a cute friendship one shot for Law and Chopper? Their interaction in your fic was just so adorable that I'd love to see you do more. Thank you for your hard work!

Thank you so much for requesting this; I had a lot of fun writing it! Chopper is the best boi, don’t try to change my mind~

EDIT: My dumb ass forgot Chopper was in Zou during the Dressrosa arc. We’re gonna pretend he wasn’t. :D

Just Another Day in Crazy Land

Law squinted slightly as he stepped out into the morning, raising a hand to his eyes to shield against the persistent and bright rays of the sun shining in the clear sky above; it was quite a difference compared to the dank, gloomy shack he had just exited. Really, it was only so dark because the windows were shielded with thick, dark curtains, staving off any prying eyes that may discover the crew of pirates recovering within its unordinary wooden walls, a tangle of limbs and blankets and bandages. In the distance, Law could see the also-recovering capital of Dressrosa Kingdom; the jagged rubble of collapsed buildings made ugly peaks against the blue sky, like some sort of twisted mountain range. It had only been a night since Law had accomplished his goal of putting a bitter end to Donquixote Doflamingo, with Straw Hat Luffy’s help, and he really ought to stay inside and continue recuperating; however, if he spent another minute amongst their snores and snorts and mumbled lunacies, he was liable to go insane. Additionally, Law had never been one to laze around and sleep all day, even when he had sustained injuries such as those he bore now. Thus, bored and wide awake, he had been lured outside by the rising sun. With a small sigh, he leaned against the wall of the building with his sword propped up beside him, watching the sun paint the sky of dawn.

“Um… Mr., um, Law, sir?” The Heart Pirate captain glanced down with raised eyebrows as he was addressed by the unmistakable, high-pitched, shaky voice of Tony Tony Chopper the reindeer; the little pirate doctor was standing in the threshold of the ajar cabin door, looking like he was trying to peer out from behind the building but was oddly in the complete opposite direction, his entire body sticking out with half his face hidden by the wooden structure. He stiffened as Law turned his gaze on him. Law had discovered he was a skittish thing, and Law in particular intimidated him. He didn’t fault him, really; Law hardly ever smiled and knew he had an intense demeanor about him.

“What is it, Chopper-ya? Do you need something?” Sweat began to bead down his furry face as he debated continuing the conversation and his gaze flickered about before settling on his hooved feet.

“I was, um, wondering if you would take me into town to get more medicine… My stores are pretty low…” That was no shock; Luffy and Zoro were more bandage and salve than person at this point, and the rest of them hadn’t escaped unscathed, either. Chopper stared at him hesitantly, likely expecting a blatant refusal. It’s not like Law wanted to do it, but in the state of disrepair that the city was, with some of Doflamingo’s minor goons still running about and the entire place a construction zone, it likely wasn’t a safe place for the little reindeer to wander by himself, either. No doubt, the rest of the Straw Hats were still passed out on the floor, otherwise Chopper wouldn’t have come within ten yards of him and asked him a favor. Besides, he was awake anyway, so he might as well give himself something to do and hang around one of the loons he actually had something in common with. With a resigned sigh, he pushed himself up off the building and grabbed his sword, swinging it up to prop it on his shoulder, and then looked intently at Chopper.

“All right, then, let’s get going.”

“Wah! Okay!” he squealed, darting inside to scramble around and gather up his money and take inventory of what he needed. With all the banging and bumbling happening inside, Law was amazed that none of the slumbering pirates awoke, but as the reindeer scampered out breathing heavily and shut the door behind him, Law heard no signs of life from within. He turned on his heel to set off across the rocky landscape towards the shell of the capital, and heard Chopper’s hooves striking the rocks as he scurried to keep up with him. Law didn’t pay much attention at first, his dark eyes sweeping across the uninteresting rocky steppe of bleak, muted tones and scrubby grasses and shrubs, but eventually he became aware of Chopper’s labored breathing and unsteady gait and he glanced over his shoulder to see him lagging behind, so he took more care to match his stride to the little reindeer’s. Zoro-ya would kill me if I lost him. Law wasn’t afraid of him, but he also didn’t care to have to go up against him, either.

“Wow. Look at it; the Birdcage did so much damage,” Chopper breathed as they came upon the outskirts of the city, the first to be sliced to ribbons by Doflamingo’s power. Since Law had slowed down a little, he had lost the touch of exhaustion to him, and flitted about Law’s feet as he drank in the mass destruction with a mixture of awe and horror. The road was not so much a road, as the dirt path had been eclipsed by the corpses of residential buildings. Law carefully picked his way across the labyrinth of carved stone and shattered glass with Chopper hopping along behind. At first it was easily navigable, but as they headed deeper into the capital, the destroyed shells of the building became more densely packed, spilling over the road in mountainous heaps. Several times Law had to clamber over collapsed sections and pause to grab Chopper by the back of his shirt to haul him over, and every time to little reindeer went limp in his grasp, freezing like a cat held by its scruff, until Law set him down again and he would hop up blushing and rubbing the back of his neck while he sputtered gratuitous remarks.

After about half an hour of picking their way through the ruins, they entered the area where the pirates and the citizens had made their stand against the birdcage; aside from the deep scores in the ground and a few clipped-off sections of a few buildings, the area was relatively unharmed. It was here that the two pirates finally stumbled upon signs of life- clotheslines strung between adjacent buildings with drying fabrics fluttering in the breeze, houseplants and barrels and decorative items bringing color into the otherwise colorless roads and buildings of stone and wood, a few people strolling about or chatting idly across the way to each other. Chopper got all flustered again when he had to ask a young woman where their marketplace was currently set up, and then he shyly related it to Law, pointing down the street before trotting ahead of him, face scrunched up as he set himself into mission mode. Law strolled along behind the reindeer, his dark eyes creeping into every alleyway and dark corner; it was common knowledge now that he had been instrumental in Doflamingo’s downfall, and the lower-ranking brutes that were still skulking about would no doubt like to get their revenge against him for ruining their paychecks.

They must have been going the right way, because it wasn’t long before the air was filled with the hum of countless voices; shouts and calls and chatter bounced off the buildings as they approached, and through the gaps in the structures Law could see colored fabrics of tents and banners flapping about in the wind. Lights were strung between lampposts, indicating that the market still had a very active nightlife, and the simple stone beneath his feet gave way to elegant cobblestone arranged in a concentric circular pattern throughout the marketplace. He came up on the entrance, where Chopper was perched up on a barrel with one hoof held to his eyes as he scanned the throng for a suitable stall. Law hovered on the edge of the crowd, having no desire to venture within; the place was packed with people. Apparently neighboring islands had heard of the struggle within Dressrosa, and vendors had thought it quite the money-making venture, to bring their wares to the recovering city. Law heard them shouting above the cacophony, offering food and clothing and other things for cheap, good-luck charms and talismans and other scams, “buy-one-get-one” and “half off for five minutes!” The corner of his mouth twitched at the thought of diving into the chaos, but there was no way he could let Chopper go in there by himself, because he would be trampled for sure.

When Law looked at the barrel, there was just empty air where Chopper had been sitting a few seconds ago, and his heart stopped as he realized he was dead meat.

“Shit! Chopper-ya, where did you go?” he shouted and shoved his way into the throng of people without another moment’s consideration. He used the scabbard of his sword to make himself a wider berth in the crowd, and though he got cold looks and affronted gasps from the people there, he righteously didn’t care because he was too busy looking for the doctor. He stumbled out of the writhing crowd on the right side of the market, dashing from vendor to vendor gasping “Haveyouseenatalkingreindeer?” and before the person had even finished refusing and tried offering his wares he would be scrambling off to the next. Law had made a half-circuit of the marketplace and was descending further into a panic as he realized he would be on the receiving end of Zoro’s katanas until he heard distinctive wailing amongst the crowd.

“Wahhhhh! Lawwwww, where arrrrrrrrrre you?”

“Hold on, Chopper-ya, I’m coming!” Law called out before climbing up onto a barrel beside a stall, snapping at the vendor, “Shut your damn mouth, can’t you see I’m busy?!” when he sidled over to the edge of the stall to try to sell him some girly-ass necklaces. He straightened up with his hand held to his eyes to block that annoyingly bright damn sun while he surveyed the gaps in the crowd, looking for any sign of the crying reindeer. His shoulders sagged as he searched for a minute or so to no avail, until finally he caught a glimpse of brown fur and curved horns; his eyes locked onto a sniffling Chopper, who was miserably talking to a brawny man who definitely did not look like he was concerned for Chopper’s well-being. Oh, fuck, he’s gonna bribe him with candy or something and make off with him! he thought in fear, and practically swan-dived off the barrel into crowd. He shoved his way through the men and women frantically, ignoring the cries and curses, and just as the man was reaching down to grab Chopper, Law threw himself out, slid on his belly across the cobblestone, and wrapped Chopper up on his arms while he glared savagely up at the very confused man. “Fuck off. My reindeer.”

“Um, look, I don’t think-“

“I said fuck off! My reindeer! Mine!” Law hissed, practically rabid from his period of heightened emotions, and the man knit his eyebrows as he leaned back and looked at Chopper hesitantly.

“It’s okay! This is who I was looking for! Thank you very much, mister!” the reindeer laughed as he repeatedly squished down the top of Law’s fluffy hat, and which each movement his fur brushed against Law’s cheek; that’s how closely he was holding him. The man looked a bit disgruntled, eyeing Law suspiciously, but the Heart Pirate just continued to glare savagely at him until he shrugged his shoulders and disappeared back into the crowd. Heaving a sigh, Law slowly sat up and brushed the dirt of his black clothes before his intense glare flickered to Chopper. The reindeer instantly stiffened and tears up again, quivering. Law debated yelling at him for a moment, but decided that it wasn’t worth the effort and just settled for flicking him hard in the forehead. “Ow!” he yelped while tenderly rubbing the spot.

“Don’t do that again.”

“Okay… Sorry…” Chopper mumbled obediently as he continued to rub his forehead despondently. “You looked like you didn’t want to go in the crowd, so I thought that maybe I could just be quick, but there’s so many people here that I got swept away…” Law exhaled sharply out of his nose as he looked away awkwardly; he made a mental note to not let his emotions and thoughts show so easily to the little reindeer, lest they end up in more near-disasters like such. He pulled himself to his feet, using his sword as leverage, before propping it on his shoulder again and looking at him pointedly.

“Look, I said I would take you to the market, and I meant it. Now, from this point on, hold onto my cloak so you don’t get lost,” he ordered.

“But-“

“Hoof. Cloak. Now.” As the harshness descended into Law’s voice, Chopper squeaked and hurriedly clutched onto Law’s cloak with his little hooves, nervously gulping. Once the reindeer had securely latched on, Law groaned slightly and let the tension melt from his body; when he opened his eyes, he noticed that he had gathered quite a crowd of concerned-looking people. “What the fuck are you all looking at? Mind your own goddamn business. I’ve got shopping to do!” he snapped with bristling shoulders, and they hurriedly dispersed, not hasty to incite more of his rage. He heard Chopper giggling and he looked down with grinding teeth. “What?”

“Sorry, it’s just kinda funny. You remind me of Zoro.”

“Is that supposed to be a compliment? He’s an idiot.” Law pinched the bridge of his nose, hoping that the circus of clowns he had been traveling with was not rubbing off on him too much. He glanced down at Chopper out of the corners of his eyes to see him still grinning, and Law allowed his lips to curl into a faint smile. At the very least, he wasn’t bored anymore. “All right, Chopper-ya, let’s get back to what we were doing, yeah?”

“Mhmm! Y’know, you’re not as mean as I thought you were.” As Law lead him out of the middle of the crowd toward the outskirts, he laughed bitterly as he hung his head, admittedly a little sad that the reindeer had been so scared of him.

“Thanks, Chopper-ya…”

“Will you teach me some stuff about medicine sometime? Pretty please? I still have so much to learn!” the reindeer asked with sparkling eyes, and Law could not help but smile in bemusement.

“Sure. Medicine first, though,” he smirked as he led him over to the proper stall, and when they were close enough the reindeer let go of his cloak to scamper over to the stall, a small skip in his step as he beamed in glee. As Law watched him, scratching the back of his neck awkwardly at the mental image of being the apparent caretaker of the excitable little creature, no matter how hard he tried he could not wipe the small smile off his face. Just another day in Crazy Land with the Straw Hats.

They’re a headache sometimes, but they’re not that bad.

Enjoy this oneshot? Feel free to perusemy Tableof Contents!

#one piece #trafalgar law #law #trafalgar d. water law #tony tony chopper #chopper #dressrosa kingdom #dressrosa arc #friendship #cutesy #fluff #oneshot #oneshots #oneshot collection #fanfic #fanfiction #fanfics #doctors

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thegildedcentury · 6 years

Text

What We Talk About When We Talk About Luv: The Beauty and Horror of Blade Runner 2049′s Tragic Antiheroine

“I’m the best one.” Luv declares as she struts away from K, fresh blood from a stolen kiss adorning her face as she departs, having again reduced her opponent to helplessness and having again decided, bafflingly, not to kill him.

If we think of Blade Runner 2049 as a pretentious yet inferior movie, a pale imitation of its source material lacking all the intellectual and emotional resonance of the original, these four words spoken by Luv mean nothing, existing as a tossed off line spoken by a tossed off character in a film that accomplishes nothing aside from looking pretty and making you wish you were watching the original.

I disagree. I think Luv is incredible, one of the most fascinating, nuanced, and profoundly tragic characters I’ve encountered in a very long time, a figure who both deserves and rewards our attention. Though it’s easy to miss during an initial viewing (I certainly did) Luv has a rich, deep story arc that branches through the whole of Blade Runner 2049, one that both parallels and intersects with K’s story, the two characters informing each other even as they violently ricochet off one another. Once understood, the tragic depths of Luv’s story don’t just reveal a remarkable character but enrich the movie as a whole, adding an extra dimension to a narrative already dense with meaning.

Luv, like our central protagonist K, is a Nexus-9 Replicant model, a product of the Wallace Corporation. When we first meet her she is in the process of selling other Replicants as Off-World slave labor. This may seem like a betrayal of the first order but, as we will soon learn, Luv does not see it that way.

Luv works directly under CEO Niander Wallace himself, acting as his personal assistant, assassin, and all purpose fixer. While Niander Wallace is the face Technological Capitalism chooses to show the world--brilliant, eccentric, full of glorious and high minded ambition, a Ted Talk come to life--Luv represents it’s actual real world consequences: empty sadism, nihilistic violence, and ignorant self-aggrandizement, which is not to say that Luv is stupid. Luv knows she is a slave but nevertheless exalts in her position because she is the best slave, Niander Wallace’s chosen instrument. If Niander Wallace is God, and he certainly seems to think he is, Luv is his "First Angel”, the chosen means by which he enacts his will on the world. Luv knows this, but she can’t bring herself to fully comprehend its ramifications, a failure of understanding that ultimately leads to her tragic destruction.

Any discussion of tragedy would be incomplete without at least a brief detour to account for the Ancient Greeks, the originators of Tragedy as Western Civilization knows it, so let’s get it out of the way now. All tragedy results, on a fundamental level, from a failure to obey the message inscribed above the Oracle of Delphi: “Know Thyself”. When you don’t understand yourself, you open yourself up to becoming prey of the Gods, what today we might call the Passions, though few Greek Tragedians would have recognized a distinction between the two. (Euripides being the notable exception.) The most famous embodiment of this kind of tragedy through self-ignorance was Oedipus, the subject of the tragedy Oedipus Rex by Sophocles. Though a prisoner of fate, Oedipus effectively strolled into his own cage by letting his passions rule him, first by giving in to his wrath by killing a stranger he met on the road, and then by giving in to his lust by marring the wife of the man he killed. When wisdom finally comes to Oedipus in the form of the realization that the man he killed was his father and the woman he married is his mother, it arrives too late to save him, and instead destroys him.

The character of Luv in Blade Runner 2049 bears less direct blame for her own tragic fate, yet the mechanisms by which it operates are fundamentally similar. Luv does not understand herself. The result is pain and suffering, yet it is far more nuanced than it first appears. What superficially manifests as depraved cruelty is, in fact, the result of a more fundamental lack, the sort of profound misunderstanding of her own nature that elevates her from the status of a mere hired goon to a character worthy of our consideration, and even our sympathy.

Unless I’ve overlooked something (which is entirely possible) Blade Runner 2049 makes no mention of whether or not Luv has the sort of artificial memory implants that prove such an integral part of K’s personality and story. Knowing this is vital to understanding her character, and while there is no way to be absolutely certain, I believe Luv’s actions clearly demonstrate her lack of a synthetic past, maliciously depriving her replicant mind of what Eldon Tyrell in the first movie called “a cushion or a pillow for their emotions”. As a result I believe, despite her often cold exterior, Luv is a raging tumult of conflicting, contradictory emotions she can neither understand nor control, paramount of which are her feelings regarding K.

Luv expresses interest in K during their first meeting, her fascination paralleling the sparks that fly between Rachel and Deckard in the old recording they both listen to. Unlike the meet-cute that occurred thirty years prior in the first Blade Runner, the attraction isn’t mutual, and when Luv attempts to inquire further into K’s life he rebuffs her. This quiet, polite rejection will ultimately have devastating consequences for both characters. K makes a powerful enemy, while Luv becomes divided against herself, afflicted with powerful feelings she has no context for or understanding of. As Kierkegaard said, life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards. Without any history there can be no understanding, we become disconnected and begin to float, easy prey for any passing impulse. Knowing this doesn’t let us absolve Luv of her misdeeds, but it does give us a chance to reach a better understanding of her, as well as the more enigmatic aspects of her behavior.

We see Luv cry twice in Blade Runner 2049. The first time is when she sees her master Niander Wallace stroking and bidding happy birthday to a newborn female replicant (credited only as ‘Female Replicant’) who he then proceeds to murder by stabbing her in the womb, a brutal crime committed for no real reason other than vent his frustration and illustrate a point in a monologue he’s delivering more or less to himself. The second time is when Luv tortures and kills Lieutenant Joshi, K’s master. Both instances involve a woman being murdered, stabbed to death specifically, their body violated with a piece of metal in a grotesque pantomime of the act of heterosexual lovemaking. (When Blade Runner’s symbolism isn’t Judeo-Christian it’s Freudian. Freud would have diagnosed Luv with the three A’s: Ambiguity, Alienation, Ambivalence.)

When Luv cries with Niander Wallace it is in response to the nameless female replicant shedding her plastic birth caul and spasming into life. Luv casts a fleeting glance upward as the tear rolls down her cheek as if in acknowledgement to a higher power that bestows the transcendent spark of life, but if that’s the case any pretense to the sacred is destroyed when Niander Wallace murders the newborn replicant, an act that serves as a vulgar reaffirmation of his own mastery over life and death.

When Luv cries a second time it’s in response to her torturing Lieutant Joshi by crushing shattered glass into her hand, an act of sadism that concludes with Luv murdering the Lieutenant outright.

The fact that Luv sheds tears in both instances despite their profoundly different circumstances may lead us to the conclusion that Luv’s tears have no real emotional resonance, instead being an involuntary autonomic response to any extreme stimuli, what is little more than a bug in her design. It’s a natural assumption, but one that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

Luv is the best one, at least as far as her status as a consumer-grade product is concerned. She is the pinnacle of Wallace design, the closest to perfection he’s yet managed to come. If Luv had a fault in her genetic architecture that made her cry at inappropriate times, Niander Wallace would likely have disposed of her with the same dispassionate matter-of-factness he disposes of everything that mildly displeases him. Yet if Luv’s tears are genuine, how can we make sense of them?

The answer is the absence of her memories. Without the mental foundation of memory that would provide her with a chance to ground the violent events she experiences and violent emotions she feels in context, Luv is helpless to control how she reacts, a condition her judiciously maintained cool exterior can only do so much to hide.

The tears she sheds while witnessing the nameless female replicant’s birth and the tears she sheds while torturing and killing Lieutenant Joshi are both genuine. This is naturally confusing since the situations are so different, but as the author Leonard Richardson writes in his book Constellation Games, (which I cannot recommend highly enough) crying does not mean you’re sad, it means you’re experiencing an emotion that’s too large to keep inside of you. Blade Runner 2049 throws us off the scent because the first time Luv cries the cause is obvious, then when she cries for a second time it seems completely inappropriate to the situation, yet when we appreciate the emotional tumult storming inside Luv, both reactions begin to make congruous sense. The first time Luv cries it is out of empathy and a sense of the sublime. The second time Luv cries it is out rage fueled by a mix of resentment and jealously.

When Luv first strolls into Lieutenant Joshi’s office she says in regards to K “I like him. He’s a good boy.” an evaluation Lieutenant Joshi’s silence seems to affirm. Lieutenant Joshi is a character who, let us not forget, is for all intents and purposes K’s owner and master, having the same power dynamic with him that Niander Wallace has with Luv. Killing Lieutenant Joshi not only serves the practical purpose of giving Luv free reign to access Lieutenant Joshi’s computer and find K, but it also gives Luv a chance to eliminate a romantic rival, experience the catharsis of killing a human master in a way she never could with Niander Wallace (who she needs to reaffirm her status as the Highest Angel), and eliminate the person that has enforced rigid control over every aspect of K’s life. She’s acting out of a very warped sense of duty to K, not quite the sort of redeeming "kinship” that led Roy Batty to save Deckard’s life at the last moment, but a kind of solidarity nonetheless.

When viewed from this perspective, the desires motivating Luv are very fundamental and very human. She wants solidarity with her fellow replicants. She wants revenge on those who’ve enslaved her. She wants to experience romantic love. The fact that she gets none of these things, that she has been explicitly denied the capacity to understand what these desires are and how to act on them and is instead forced to derive comfort from her status as the best one, the best product, the best slave, is what elevates her as a character beyond the stark dichotomy of victim or villain to the higher echelon of tragic antiheroine.

Luv spares K’s life twice in open defiance of the spirit, if not the letter, of Niander Wallace’s commandments. The first time is when she and her fellow Wallace fixers storm Deckard’s Las Vegas sanctuary and abduct him. K fights back despite being wounded thus forcing Luv to beat him into submission, though when the time comes to move in for the kill, she holds back. Instead she kills Joi, K’s holographic A.I. companion, crushing the emitter that contains her consciousness beneath her radiantly polished boot.

Immediately before doing so she says “I do hope you’re satisfied with our product.” Luv looks at Joi when she speaks the line, though it seems to be intended for Joi, K, and Luv herself, all three of whom are themselves commercial products of the Wallace Corporation. It’s a line that can be read as pure sarcasm, yet when considered in the context of what we’ve been talking about, we can view it as a sort of question, and a sort of appeal as well. Joi and Luv are both Wallace Corporation products, but Luv knows herself to be the best product. There is an implicit “Why?” in Luv’s words and actions, an inquiry that demands an answer from K. “Why Joi and not me? Am I not the superior model?” K choosing Joi over her is an insult to her attraction and an affront to her pride, yet the only way she can express her outrage is with violence. By destroying Joi she demonstrates her preeminent status as a product, while also eliminating another rival for K’s affections.

Luv departs without another word, leaving K alive. It’s safe for us to assume that Luv hasn’t simply fallen victim to the classic bad guy cliché of incorrectly assuming the good guy’s dead. They are are both the same model of replicant, there’s no reason for us to think she isn’t precisely aware of both K’s limits and his potential. Luv is still intrigued by K in a way she doesn’t understand, and lets him live secure the the knowledge that they will meet again under similarly unpleasant circumstances. By then the scales will have completely fallen from K’s eyes and he will be endowed with an unshakable sense of purpose, his own personal raison d'être. Luv will not be so fortunate.

K, at great cost, comes to understand who and what he really is in time for him to act on it in a way that gives purpose to his life and, more importantly, his death. Like all great villains Luv is K’s antitheses, a distorted reflection of him, what C.G. Jung might identify as his shadow-self. K begins the movie doing the same thing Luv does, namely killing on cue in accordance with his design. The difference is K encounters people who change his worldview, making him aware of the possibility of altering his circumstances. Luv never gets that chance.

The name ‘Luv’ is obviously dumb, the kind of dull platitude you’d find on a candy heart or in a rushed-off text message, and the fact that it is the name Niander Wallace chose to bestow on his First Angel shows the true indifference he feels regarding her, how the contempt he has for all life extends to her as well, despite his lofty rhetoric and empty praise.

Names are powerful, but they aren’t enough to imbue one’s life with meaning and purpose, a fact illustrated when a massive advertisement addresses K by his adopted name, the name Joi gave him, calling him “A good Joe.” Not only does this show that even something as personal as a name bestowed by a loved one can be corrupted and co-opted by Technological Capitalism, but that both Joi and the advertisement are probably making decisions based on the same artificial intelligence program, leading both of them to pick the same name out of thin air. This works to expose K to the artificiality of the relationship he had with Joi, forcing him to seek out something more authentic and human. It’s the sort of epiphany Luv is denied, so while she does seek to form a sort of relationship with K, the why and how of it completely eludes her, leading her to act on a sort of animal instinct that can’t distinguish between aggression and affection, two very different human Passions that appear to her as indistinct aspects of the same raw emotional yearning she becomes less and less capable of containing over the course of the story, a compulsion that climaxes with her beating and stabbing K nearly to death, then following it up immediately with a deep, soulful kiss.

The final battle between K and Luv at the sea wall isn’t just a grim parody of the iconic scene of two lovers passionately entwined in the surf from From Here To Eternity. (Though it is at that.) It’s a baptism.

Christian baptism is a ritual where the physical is sanctified and thus made to represent the spiritual, its invocation of grace elevating the ritual to transcend the mundane and evoke the divine. When Luv and K fight they are also sanctified by the symbolism surrounding them, which renders the conflict more significant than two people beating each other up. It is the physical versus the spiritual, the sacred versus the profane, the meaningful versus the meaningless, an elemental confrontation between the loftier and baser aspects of reality. For Luv the thing that matters most to her and carries the most meaning are her Passions, which aren’t in themselves bad, but when misunderstood and uncontrolled lead to destruction. In her fury she attacks and defeats K, and in her infatuation she yet again neglects to kill him. Her mercy is rewarded with death.

The final contest between K and Luv is their mutual attempt to drown one another, one that ends by demonstrating the ultimate disparity in their respective personalities. Both Luv and K forcibly hold one another underwater for what are at first roughly equivalent amounts of time. K survives because he is able to exert enough control over himself to hold his breath until he can turn the tables. Luv in contrast dies because she is a slave to her Passions. Instead of holding her breath and waiting for an opportunity to regain the upper hand she rages, clawing and growling, resisting with all her unchecked strength until her life is totally spent.

K and Deckard partake of the waters, die, and are born again. Luv is subjected to the same trial, but she is denied such grace. She is the First Angel, the most raw and brilliant and terrible, and as such, she must fall in all her dreadful glory, our horrible, beautiful, drowned Lucifer.

Like the studio-mandated happy ending of the original Blade Runner that everyone loathes, there could be another ending to this movie, a more conventionally satisfying ending where K and Luv gain a deeper understanding of themselves and, in doing so, find the capacity to care about and even love each other. It would be nice, but it would also deny Luv her final tragic grandeur, and us the vision of a true antiheroine.

The actress Sylvia Hoeks’ portrayal of Luv is as eerily perfect as the character herself, a performance that easily ranks among the best popular depictions of uncanny quasi-humanity ever rendered, on par with Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman, Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lector, and Rutger Hauer’s Roy Batty. Luv is also different, a step beyond but also a step removed. The sheer virtuosity of Sylvia Hoeks’ performance is largely based in restraint, the sort of illusion of control that Luv is so good at deceiving herself with that it’s easy for us, the audience, to be deceived as well. It is right and good that we bemoan the lack of good female roles in popular cinema, but such objections can come to ring hollow when they come from an audience that routinely overlooks outstanding exemplars like Luv, a rendering that’s brave enough to not be obvious, whose peripheral status in the narrative does nothing to diminish. I don’t think we’re going to see a great many characters equal to Luv in the future, not only because it’s rare for a concept this good to be executed this well, but the demographic of people who were once most inclined to notice such things are now largely intellectually hemmed in by an ideology that Blade Runner 2049 does not neatly fit into, and who thus deem it unworthy of consideration. It is my ardent hope that it will eventually find a public worthy of it, just as its predecessor did. It’s the reason why I’m writing this, why I’m proselytizing for Luv, who is, after all, the best one.

OTHER PUNS I CONSIDERED WHEN TITLING THIS ESSAY

All You Need Is Luv

Luv Will Tear Us Apart

Luv Story

Luv Actually

The Luv Guru

Me Luv You Long Time

#blade runner #2049 #blade runner 2049 #luv #prose

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ariadnelives · 5 years

Text

Chapter 29 -- The Hypocritical Oath

[Missed earlier chapters? Go catch up here! Otherwise, welcome back! Oh, and make sure to join our discord server! Chapter can also be found @ ao3”]

Several minutes earlier, Pilar and Sasha had just severed every wire they could see coming out of the transmitter, causing some truly abrasive alarms to ring through the facility.

Elsewhere in the facility, there were several dozen fanatically devoted men with guns that had, up to this point, been occupied by the Whiptails. When the alarms sounded, they retreated immediately to seek out the cause of the alarm. Due to their fanatical devotion to Dr. Simon’s cause, to them, protecting Dr. Simon’s escape route was more important to them than their own lives, so they believed that many of them would likely be killed in the attempt to retreat. They were fine with this, so long as at least some of them made it to the transmitter to stop whatever sabotage had been inflicted upon it.

What they did not expect was that Spacebreather, by herself, was far more dangerous than the rest of the Whiptails put together. The majority of the Whiptails had been carefully trained to use only non-lethal force, while Spacebreather was more than willing to kill when necessary, and absolutely overqualified to do so for a person her age. They failed to understand that the men attempting to retreat would be the most likely to live another day, while the men attempting to stop Pilar had likely signed their own death warrant.

Inside the transmitter room, Sasha and Pilar were preparing to fight their way out. Both of them had the same job in this fight: keep the other alive. Sasha kept Pilar alive by immediately patching up any wounds she might receive, and Pilar kept Sasha alive by seriously injuring anyone who attempted to hurt Sasha before they managed to do so.

This was how they had functioned whenever they fought side by side in their pirate careers. This was the first time they’d ever been forced to break this mold.

Approximately 8 seconds after they’d cut the wire, as they prepared to descend from the platform, three dozen armed men stormed into the room. Pilar, having prepared for this possibility, flipped backwards over the ledge and, on the way to the ground, drew two short knives from the strap on her thigh.

She landed on top of one of the men, breaking his neck and killing him instantly. She ensured that the two knives landed directly in the top of two other goons’ skulls. Both of these men were carrying automatic weapons, both of which were in Pilar’s hands by the time her feet touched the ground. She was skilled at avoiding gunfire, having had a lot of practice. Her movements almost looked like a ballet, and none of the projectiles managed to touch her, yet.

She fired six shots from each of her weapons. Twelve headshots in less than a second, a new personal best for her. For a moment, she pondered that she would have to add a tally mark for each of these men to the tattoo on her arm, and hoped she never had so many tally marks that she ran out of space for them.

One of the goons took this moment as an opportunity to throw a plasma grenade in Pilar’s direction. It, unfortunately, would not prove to be the opportunity he expected it to be, as Pilar was fast enough to hit the grenade back at him with the barrel of her rifle. This was unfortunate for this particular henchman for obvious reasons, but since he was wearing a bandolier of other explosives across his chest, it was also unfortunate for the eight henchmen standing closest to him, as all the explosives detonated at once, bringing a quick end to nine more functionally identical henchmen.

“Pilar, catch!” Sasha called down from the ledge. Both sisters were hoping she wouldn’t have to leave her relatively safe cover in order to treat an injury. Both sisters would consequently shortly be disappointed.

Pilar instinctively reached a hand out to catch whatever Sasha had thrown without looking, a skill they’d developed over years of unexpectedly throwing things at each other for kicks. She caught something heavy and apparently made of metal, wrapped in leather.

“Is this…” Pilar asked, ducking behind a pillar to unsheath it, “Where did you find a machete?”

“It was on one of the guards we knocked out on the way in!”

They were only unconscious, but they had no intention of moving them out of the chamber before the failsafe went off, which by Pilar’s best guess was about three minutes and thirty seconds away, so she made a mental note to add two more tally marks to her tattoo.

“Why did he have a machete?” Pilar called back.

“I’m not his mom!” Sasha replied from the balcony, “I don’t really have any more information on that than you do!”

This was a satisfactory answer to Pilar. “Thanks, sis!” Pilar said, unsheathing the large blade and rustling in her pocket until she found a small, round object which she threw to the ground where it exploded with a snap, creating a dense cloud of thick, gray, pungent smoke. Before it cleared, she lunged towards the crowd of remaining henchmen and managed to cut eight throats in only two strokes.

Eight more tally marks.

She then managed to run three of them through with the machete before the smoke fully cleared.

Pilar quickly tried to count her kills, to see how many hostiles were remaining with her visibility impaired. She got through the following thought process in less than a second:

We took out two on the way in then there were thirty-six oh my god have I killed thirty-six people today no there were more I killed some of the guards on the surface this shouldn’t be this easy for me stay focused, thirty-eight hostiles total, two killed on the way in, three more on landing, twelve headshots, that’s seventeen total, then nine more with the grenades, that’s twenty-six, eight slit throats, thirty-four, skewered three more, so that’s thirty-sev—-

It was at this point that one of the rounds fired blindly by the lone remaining henchman managed to find its place, by pure random chance, in Spacebreather’s right shoulder.

“PILAR!” Sasha screamed, and bounded out from behind cover. Sasha had never been a particularly violent person, but when she saw Pilar go down from behind cover, her entire field of vision flashed red and when she came to a second later, she was holding a knife in her left hand, which was wet and warm. She opened her eyes and saw the knife in her hand was also embedded deep in the last henchman’s throat. Her hand was soaked with blood. She had no idea where she’d gotten the knife; she certainly didn’t have it on the balcony. There was an open wound on her right arm where a bullet had grazed her on the way down. This was the first person Sasha ever killed.

She didn’t have time to be traumatized yet, so she resolved to do that later and rushed to her sister’s side.

“You…” Pilar whimpered, “did you just… kill a guy?”

“I don’t know, I wasn’t there,” Sasha said calmly, “let’s focus on getting you out of here alive, okay?”

“S-serum,” Pilar sputtered.

“It’s not gonna work on this,” Sasha replied as calmly as her impending panic attack would allow, “not until we get that bullet out of you.”

‘Wh—” Pilar started.

“What kind of asshole uses a physical bullet in this day and age? Good question, I have no idea. Thankfully he has a knife in his throat now,” Sasha tried to keep pressure on the wound and get Pilar over her shoulder. “Come on, we just gotta get you out of here and I can dig that bullet out and then pump you full of serum.”

“Leave me,” Pilar gasped.

“Out of the question,” Sasha replied. “You’ve survived worse than this.”

“Two minutes,” Pilar coughed up blood. “No use in us both dying.”

Sasha looked her sister directly in the eyes as severely as she could. “Don’t be a drama queen,” she said, looking to Pilar as much like their father as she’d seen since the day they lost him, “I just got you back, and I’m not leaving you here.”

“No,” Pilar cried, “no, I won’t have you die because of me, just live your life, keep going strong, keep whatever it is that’s—”

Sasha didn’t need to glance at the clock to know there were only about 45 seconds left. “We don’t have time to argue. As your next of kin, I’m authorizing your doctor to make this decision on your behalf. You’re not allowed to die, so, I’m sorry. This is going to hurt.”

“It already—” Pilar was cut off mid-sentence by Sasha throwing her over her shoulder fireman-style with a roughness that was not by any stretch of the imagination medically advisable, but at this point Sasha felt having a living sister with treatable injuries was better than having a dead sister with only one injury.

They escaped the room approximately fifteen seconds before the failsafe went off, destroying the transmitter completely and wiping away any evidence of the thirty-eight henchmen who’d died attempting to kill them. Sasha and Pilar watched the blue glow eradicate everything in the room, just to be sure their task had been successful, and then they hobbled their way down to the room where they knew Ariadne and Sweettalk to be. Sasha held Pilar’s sidearm in her right hand. She was naturally left-handed, but her left arm was currently supporting someone who was surprisingly heavy for her thin frame.

Pilar noticed the gash on Sasha’s upper arm. “You’re hurt.”

“Just think of it as my first, and hopefully only, tally-mark.”

Pilar’s heart dropped. “You killed a guy,” she said sadly.

“You’re welcome, Sasha, for saving my life,” Sasha smirked sarcastically.

“Isn’t that, like, against the Hypocritical oath?”

“Heh,” Sasha replied.

“What?”

“It’s the Hippocratic oath.”

“Whatever oath,” Pilar groaned.

“‘First, do no harm,’” Sasha pondered, “I don’t remember taking any oath.”

Pilar laughed, which was painful. “What kind of crappy medical school did you go to?”

“Homeschooled,” Sasha laughed, “I said I wanted to be a doctor when I grew up and my sister’s nerdy girlfriend stole me a bunch of medical supplies and textbooks the next day.”

“She sounds hot,” Spacebreather chuckled as lightly as she could without disturbing the bullet lodged in her shoulder, “think you could introduce me?”

“She’s just down the hall,” Sasha could see the door from here, “just get down the hall… of course, you can’t just learn from textbook. My idiot big sister kept getting herself hurt so I had a lot of hands-on practice.”

They both laughed, and it had been a long time since they had really genuinely laughed together like this. It would have been a perfect moment had it not quickly devolved into a coughing fit from Pilar.

“You always took good care of me,” Pilar’s speech was sounding somewhat slurred.

“Hey, stay with me! Just a little bit longer,” Sasha said, “I’ve still gotta take care of you for a long time, okay? I gotta introduce you to that nerd I was telling you about.”

“I love her,” Pilar muttered, “I don’t tell her that enough.”

“Shut up,” Sasha said, “you tell her all the time You have a shirt that says ‘I love my girlfriend’ on it.”

Pilar groaned. “Half the people on the crew have that shirt.”

“Well, there’s a lot of love on our crew,” Sasha explained, “and if you can get like… 50 more feet, the girls we love are right through that door and you can tell her you love her all you want.”

“I’m gonna kiss her,” Pilar muttered.

“You’d better,” Sasha said, “she’ll kill me if she doesn’t get to kiss you again.”

“She’s an amazing kisser,” Pilar slurred.

“That’s really none of my business,” Sasha started.

“I’m proud of you,” Pilar was barely intelligible. “You… she’s really good for you… she really is…”

“Sweettalk?”

“Mgrmph,” Pilar agreed.

“I always thought you didn’t really like her.”

“I didn’t,” Pilar sounded drowsy. It was clear that even with the serum, she was going to need a blood transfusion, “because she was… cocky… smooth-talking… arrogant… I never would’ve gotten to know her if you two didn’t…”

“Stay with me, sis, we’re so close.”

“Now I could… we could be friends… I was wrong about her… She wasn’t… she…”

“She’ll be glad to hear you say that,” Sasha tried to pick up the pace a little, “but she’ll never believe me, so you’d better stay with me long enough to tell her yourself. Remember, you are not allowed to die.”

“Tell me…”

“What do you want to know?” Sasha asked, focusing only on the door.

“Tell me what… you love… why do you love her…”

“She’s smart,” Sasha said, “way too smart, and so fun.”

“Keep going…”

“And yes, she’s an amazing kisser,” Sasha said.

Pilar coughed again. “No… not that… something real…”

Sasha considered this “She’s thoughtful, she’s always getting me little gifts. This robe… well, you’re gonna see it in a few minutes… She’s deep, but she doesn’t like people to know that. And when we’re alone… she’s so sweet that I know she’ll never leave me, even when everyone else is convinced that she betrayed us to the cops to save her own skin, I know she’ll come back for me because…”

Pilar was fading fast. “Because…?”

“Because we can’t live without each other. With all both of us have been through, for me to meet the love of my life so young? I know God put us together for a reason.”

“Don’t let Ariadne hear you say that…”

“Ariadne is the only atheist I know who’s met two different gods,” Sasha rolled her eyes, “you landed the most stubborn girl in the universe.”

“God, I love her so much…”

They were perhaps ten feet from the door now, and Sasha seemed determined to keep talking so that Pilar could focus on her voice and stay conscious. “And I guess I’m not a very good Catholic, I’m pretty sure I just broke the first commandment saying that. And, uh, number five, back there in the, uh… wow, I am gonna need to do a lot of rosaries.”

Pilar chuckled without adding anything to this.

“What’s so funny?” Sasha asked.

“We’re pirates…”

“Yes, we’re pirates. Good memory.”

“No, we… I mean, number seven.”

“Thou shalt not steal? Yeah, I guess we do kinda break that one pretty often,” Sasha said with a great deal of guilt, something all too common amongst those raised Catholic, “I think we’re still good people, though.”

“You are,” Pilar mumbled. “Ariadne too. Sweettalk. Not me… I’m going to hell for sure.”

“I’m pretty sure God will let a few broken commandments go if we were doing it to save hungry and abused children, that’s… kinda his whole deal,” Sasha dropped the sidearm to the ground and struggled to open the door single-handed, “plus, you do a great job with number four.”

They entered the room as Ariadne, Sweettalk, and the Triplets were coming out of the virtual interface. With as much urgency as she could muster, Sasha called to them: “I need your help, she’s been shot!”

“You always have to prove me wrong!” Ariadne rushed over and immediately took Pilar onto her own shoulder so Sasha could get to work on digging the bullet out, “you are not allowed to die.”

“You two have been spending too much time together” Pilar sputtered.

Sasha took out a strip of black fabric and lay it over Pilar’s wound. The fabric swirled and shimmered silver and gold for a moment before the silver parts settled into the shape of the ribcage beneath the skin, and the gold settled into the shape of a bullet, lodged between two ribs, near the heart.

“Is that … the robe I got you?” Sweettalk asked. “You dork, I thought you were kidding about the medical applications of it!”

“Gimme your knife,” Sasha demanded, and Sweettalk complied immediately.

Two minutes later, with the help of their loved ones, the bullet was out. Another minute later, Pilar had taken a dose of the serum and the bullet wound had healed completely.

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thatshxtagain · 5 years

Text

Kindness Is Always Warm and Dry (Nightlight one shot)

Here's a oneshot of MISFIT Ruby x FREAKS Matilda for the people in the NERDS Discord!! Hope you enjoy!

The thunder that roared in the heavily overcast skies made Matilda yelp, pulling her hood further onto her head. Rain pelted her fleece hoodie, soaking into her clothes and clinging onto her skin as she wobbles to her feet, nearly slipping on the puddles already forming underneath her. Thankfully, she doesn't feel any scrapes or bruises from that fall. She takes a look back, barely able to make out the doors of the warehouse through the dense rain, but knowing fully well that she wasn't getting in anytime soon. Not with those stupid goons that kicked her out - 'past working hours', they claimed. 'Past working hours' her ass, they just wanted to have the facility to themselves.

Matilda almost had no time to react when she saw the rapidly approaching headlights from the side, barely able to jump out of the way in the nick of time. She splashed into another puddle, nearly teetering off balance as the car speeds past her, splashing into the puddle she was previously in and spraying her from behind. The tiny girl shudders, jumping away to examine herself before shortly groaning. If Mat wasn't completely drenched in water before, she certainly was now. She stares down at the street through the heavy precipitation - there’s no way she’s going to make it to Heathcliff’s house through this downpour. With a clammy hand, she reaches into her hoodie pocket, carefully taking out a small, round object the size of a yo-yo, several glowing green numbers flashing rather brightly on the front despite the water droplets already splattering on the screen, and smack on the top was a blue button. Matilda knew this object well - it was one of MISFIT’s teleportation devices to other universes, the numbers being coordinates to send her to Dimension 1. Specifically, Ruby 1’s room. Matilda stared at the device for a few seconds, hesitating, before finally pressing the blue button.

Her room is exactly like she remembers - cream colored walls lined with bookshelves, a few bean bag chairs littered around a table with a tv, a fluffy grey carpet smack in the center of both, a smooth marble desk in the corner stacked with an ungodly amount of paperwork that not even her own Ruby would be able to handle, and a queen sized bed with a tiny dresser right beside it. Ruby 1 had been reading a book in one of the beanbag chairs when Matilda popped in, and when she did notice her, her eyebrows shot upward, eyes widening behind her square framed glasses as she takes in Matilda’s appearance. Mat can only imagine how she must look in the other girl’s eyes - she must be a pathetic sight, already shivering from the sudden blast of the AC. Her shoes squish on the polished wood of the floor, and she suddenly feels bad that her sopping state is beginning to ruin the floor.

The petite girl only had a chance to blink before Ruby began scrambling off the beanbag chair, darting to her closet and frantically taking out a large towel, already beginning to bundle the girl with a perfectly worried expression. “Matilda, what happened to you?! You look absolutely soaked!!!” She fussed, her voice dripping in concern as she begins to dry her off despite her state. "I-I got kicked out in the rain," Matilda stuttered, startled with the other girl's sudden behavior. How could she be so caring to her so quickly? As far as she knew, she was only an 'alternate' to her. Before she knew it, clothes are being shoved into her hands and she’s ushered to the bathroom to change. Mat is quick to undress - she was practically freezing in her own clothes - and starts to properly dry herself off. She leaves the towel ruffled in her hair before picking up the clothes Ruby provided her - a grey and yellow sweater with a tiny front pocket, brown shorts, and a pair of ankle-high white socks - and tugs them on. It was no doubt that they were ridiculously huge on her, the sweater kept shrugging past her shoulders every chance it gets, the socks sinking ever so slightly down her ankles, and the shorts didn’t even try to fit, immediately flopping to the floor the moment she tried to put them on. She frowns at this, pulling the shorts back up and trying to tie the sides. No luck, they immediately fell back down with every attempt. She sighs, kicking the shorts to the side of the bathroom. At least two out of the three articles of clothing could somewhat fit her. Mat tries to adjust the sweater one last time, holding it up one shoulder as it sagged off the other, and with a huff she exits the bathroom.

“Ummm...the shorts couldn’t fit…” Matilda mumbles, shifting awkwardly the moment Ruby laid eyes on her. She wishes the stupid sweater could stop sagging for one damn minute - she swore Ruby must’ve been holding back a laugh, since she did have a hand over her face when she saw her come out. Matilda kept her eyes glued to the floor, feeling uncomfortable the longer the other girl stared. Finally, the blonde clears her throat, straightening slightly. “M-My bad. I forgot my clothes were much bigger than you. Sorry about that.” She responds with an apologetic look. “I think I have an old skirt that may be your size though!” She offers. Mat wrinkles her nose, immediately shaking her head. “No thanks - not exactly a fan of skirts.”

Ruby frowns at this. “Are you sure? Your legs must be cold right now - I can’t imagine how frigid they’ll get if you leave them like that.”

Well. Now that she mentions it, they were getting pretty chilly. Mat had to literally rub her knees together to keep them from numbing. Her lips pursed into a thin line, and she reluctantly nods. “I guess I could try.” She says sheepishly, pulling the sweater up her shoulder once more.

The taller female smiles, nodding slightly before heading to her closet. She rummages through her clothes for a while, then finally pulls out a short white skirt that Matilda honestly doubts would actually warm her in the slightest - but, beggars can’t be choosers. Ruby hands her the skirt, and she goes back to the bathroom to put it on. It surprisingly fit - almost a little too well, staying securely on her small waist without being too tight. She stuffs the burlap of a sweater into the skirt, attempting at a tuck-in but failing miserably. Was the sweater supposed to sag underneath the skirt? She guessed not. She tugs the sweater out a little, keeping a bit of the edges still tucking inside while the rest flopped out. She looked absolutely ridiculous from the reflection of the bathroom mirror, reminding herself of a spoiled toddler - if it weren’t for her wet, unkempt hair that still had a few droplets of water dripping from the tips. She dries her unruly hair with the towel one final time before setting it beside the sink, exiting the bathroom.

She couldn’t help but feel even more uncomfortable with the skirt once Ruby’s attention was back on her, and the staring definitely felt longer then before, except her eyes were glued on the stupid white article of clothing. Her hand flew to her face again, and Matilda felt herself flush in embarrassment, fiddling with the hem of the baggy sleeves. “W-well...i-it fits..” she said meekly, somehow feeling more exposed then before, shivering slightly at the faint air that passed into the skirt. Sadly, it wasn’t the type with any sort of inside shorts.

“A-Are you laughing at me?” Matilda asks suddenly, what with all the staring and mouth covering. "NO!" Ruby responded almost immediately, making Matilda jump slightly as she waved her arms in a frantic manner. "No no no. You look great! You look pretty gir-pretty great!" She floundered, and the moment she exposed her face Mat noticed the deep blush beginning to form on the other girl. This causes her to blush brighter, squirming slightly at the compliment. For a moment, she almost thought she was about to say ‘pretty girl’. “A-Am I wearing it right?” She asks anxiously, peering down at the skirt a little. “Th-There weren’t any tags…”

“Yes! Yes, of course!” Ruby spluttered out, nodding instantly. “I-It looks amazing, and you’re wearing it absolutely perfect!”

This stirs yet another flush from the smaller girl, and she stiffly nods, hiding her face in her hands in embarrassment. Ruby blinks, making a small chuckle at this before walking over and wrapping Matilda in what she assumes to be another towel until she feels a strange warmth that seemed to be emitting from inside it. “Heater blanket,” Ruby explains, bundling the girl tightly and guiding her to one of the beanbags. “I’m going to get us dinner, okay? Then I’ll put on a nice movie before we retire for the night. Get comfy.” She informs with a smile, and the tiny girl made another nod, wringing the heater blanket closer around herself as she pulls her legs to her chest.

Ruby wasn’t gone for too long, but it was enough time for Mat to lift the collar of the sweater to her nose, sniffing it curiously. It smelled like warm pastries and lavender, a combination that reminded Mat of a luxury spa that was definitely way over something Molly could afford - but somehow always managed to. The lavender scent made her relax ever so slightly, and the pastry smell made her stomach churn. Both scents mixed together helped her unwind on the bean bag chair, leaning further back and closing her eyes for a few minutes. She doesn’t open them until she hears the door open, and sees Ruby carrying two trays of food. She joins Ruby on the carpet as she places the trays in front of them, then walking over to the tv table to get out the movies. They ended up choosing some sort of action movie, one with so many cringey moments that Mat could barely pay attention to it without rolling her eyes every so often as she ate. The food wasn’t bad - it was just some mashed potatoes, peas, and a few chicken slabs, but really, any food was heaven to the tiny girl, and she thanks Ruby during the first half of the movie.

When she finished, Mat didn’t notice she had unconsciously started leaning on the other girl. It wasn’t until Ruby turned to look over at her did she realize what she’d been doing. “Tired?” The blonde asked with an amused brow. Matilda huffs, shaking her head. “I’m just cold, that’s all.” She responds, which wasn’t exactly half lying - her legs were still chilly from the lack of clothing she wore. Ruby tilts her head at this, but smiles. She reaches over, and before she could say anything she pulls the smaller girl in between her legs, proceeding to envelop her entire body around her. Matilda froze, turning to stare at the taller female incredulously, who only gave a friendly smile in return, cuddling her even more. A pink blush dusts her face, and the Korean places her hands on top of her arms, turning back to the movie. She...she couldn’t explain it, but for some reason she felt at ease in Ruby’s arms, all her troubles somehow fading from her mind as she focuses only on the movie, and how comfortable Ruby’s chest feels, and how it was so easy to relax in her warm embrace. It got more and more difficult for her to stay awake with how much she was completely basking in the other girl’s cozy hug, blinking off quite often during the movie. The credits scene is the last thing Matilda sees before she dozes off, and the faint smell of pastries and lavender suddenly much stronger - especially when she curled further into Ruby’s arms, now knowing where the scent had been coming from - Ruby’s jacket, the scent wafting into her nose as her head nuzzles into the soft material, being the final nudge before she drifts into slumber.

Matilda wakes up in Ruby’s bed the next day, still incredibly soft and the familiar pastry-lavender scent stronger than ever that Mat almost fell back asleep. She notices Ruby still snoozing soundly in her sleeping bag, and the smallest of smiles crosses her face. She got up as quietly as possible, reaching for the teleportation device left on the nightstand, about to press the button to return home before remembering something. Opening the drawer, she pulls out a pad of sticky notes and a pen, writing down a short message and sticking it on the lamp. She gives Ruby one final look before pressing the button, teleporting back to her universe.

An hour later, Ruby wakes up to an empty bed and a sticky note on her lamp.

‘Thanks for letting me stay over.

P.S. I took one of your pillows.

-Mat’

#n.e.r.d.s #matilda choi #ruby peet #au shipping #it was too long to fit in the discord so I posted it here

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tinorangatiratanga-blog · 5 years

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embrace, if you don't mind!

Absolutely smashed off of his face, Tāne Mahuta was deep in the throws of a contemplative mood. He’d been pretty good at keeping crushing existential dread at bay, but he’d just sculled a goon and that had knocked down his walls near instantaneously; bringing forth a swell of anxieties and memories he wished he could forget. Being a nation wasn’t easy, even for one as young as Tāne. There were so many memories, so many regrets, so many almost irreversibly destroyed relationships. The complexity of it all almost made Tāne Mahuta regret drinking so much; if only for sobriety to keep the thoughts at bay for just a moment longer.

A loud bang knocked him further into the rabbit hole, the modern world melting away around him; his sights and senses overwhelmed with the stuttering memory of dense bush. He’d just reached the physical age of a teenager when the musket wars began and the sounds of gunshots still rang in his ears. He’d seen dead people before and he’d been in many a war before, but the musket wars were something else entirely. The sheer destruction that the guns could do - one click of a trigger was enough to end a life, one click of a trigger was enough to paint the forest with viscera - it’d shook him to his core and left him breathless. Each loud bang (fireworks? He wasn’t sure, but probably) threw him deeper and deeper into the bush, until he felt as if he’d lost his grip on reality altogether.

Reaching out to hold onto something to steady himself, Tāne Mahuta found himself with his arms thrown around Maia. He tried to open his mouth to apologize, stand up, and pretend as if he wasn’t drunkenly spiralling out of control, but instead he just looked up at her and started bawling like a baby.

#fury-of-argos #ask #ask meme

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neverwatchedonepiece · 6 years

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517-519: "The Beginning of the New Chapter! The Straw Hats Reunited!", "An Explosive Situation! Luffy vs. Fake Luffy!" and "The Navy Has Set Out! The Straw Hats in Danger!"

The hat is back on!

I was excited about this. Was also oddly excited to click on the “Fishman Island” arc on CR, finally, after so long on Marineford.

These episodes were another curve ball for me. I thought the timeskip would go one of two ways: either they’d all meet straight away at Sabaody, group hug, then sail off into the New World, or we’d get a training montage for each Strawhat before the meeting.

Then I remembered you guys mentioned there would be a mini-arc and I cursed myself for being dense.

There’s not much plot to it. Some fake Strawhats are blighting the real ones’ good name and reputation. Unfortunately for them, 3D2Y is kicking off and the real Strawhats are gathering on Sabaody like the Avengers Assemble. Plus, pretending to be an infamous pirate crew isn’t a great idea when the Marines and World Government are after them.

I think I can see what’s coming. The fake Strawhats are light-hearted fodder, there only to show off their real counterparts’ training. And bring some lulz. No idea how it’ll unfold, though. That’s half the fun of watching One Piece, to be honest.

Luffy

It was good to see Oda hasn’t tinkered with Luffy’s design too much. (Saying that, I liked the Strong World outfit). He still has those flip flops and cut offs, but now the red vest has sleeves and is open at the chest. (Gotta expose dat 8 pack and scars, right?)

Of course, the iconic straw hat was picked up at the beginning of the episode. He was ready! Hancock and the Kuja pirates were there to see him off. Hancock packed Luffy half a year’s worth of supplies in a massive pack and gave him a handy-dandy Groucho Marx disguise in case any Marines spotted him prior to sailing out.

(Is it me, or does Luffy finally realise Hancock likes him? He kept saying, “I’m not getting married.” Though I did like the part when he refused to say goodbye because he wanted to see her again. That was nice of him. He acknowledges just how much Hancock helped him - and she helped A LOT. You could argue Luffy is as indebted to Hancock as to Rayleigh, Jimbei and Ivankov.)

Then, he set off! The next time we saw him, his massive backpack nudged Fake Luffy. There was an altercation.

Of course, Luffy couldn’t retaliate. Drawing attention to himself and bringing the Marines down on his head before he reunited with his crew would be a Bad Idea.

He did get his own back. Just not in a way that would draw attention.

When Fake Luffy fired the gun, I cheered because Real Luffy gave us a teaser of his new power. Observational Haki! Armament Haki! Conqueror’s Haki! He deflected the bullet, dodged it, then floored the Fakers without lifting a finger.

Honestly, I cannot wait until Luffy’s next big fight. Sentomaru has returned with some Pacifistas. I hope the Strawhats get their rematch. Oooh, maybe the Pacifistas will be fodder now....

Nami and Usopp

Look at them.

Look at how beautiful Nami and Usopp are.

It seems that over the course of two years, certain Strawhats have ended up with less clothes than they started with.

Nami has lost her t-shirt, but at least she has that bikini, right? Like Luffy, Usopp has buffed up and has a shirtless look to show off his gainz. They both have longer hair too - and it looks good on them.

Not sure about this comment from Usopp, "I don't belong to the weak trio with you and Chopper. I became a warrior who is not fazed by anything!" I guess (or I hope) it was acknowledged by all three that they were the weakest members of the crew, but it’s a bit much saying he’s graduated to a higher tier. Especially since he doesn’t know what Nami and Chopper have been doing. I like that Usopp has found some more confidence, but don’t find it at the expense of your friends.

Or, it’s classic Usopp overcompensating because he’s underconfident. Or he’s just joking.

Nami must have quiet confidence in her fighting ability because she sat at that bar in Sabaody on her own and talked back to Fake Luffy who had just shot someone. She can control the weather and summon thunderclouds indoors. That is not someone you’d mess with.

Usopp has some new weapons in his arsenal too. He’s weaponised the plants from Bowin Island and I’ll bet he has much more than carnivorous plants up his sleeve.

I love how casually they walked out of the bar, talking about their training, “Yeah, so I was studying new weather tech on a Sky Island...” while thunderclouds tore the bar apart in the background.

And Nami was driving a hard bargain for a discount. Never change, Nami. Never change...

Zoro and Sanji

Never realised how much I missed these guys and their bickering until I had a genuine laugh-out-loud moment (in 519, I think?)

I love Zoro’s new design. I think it’s my favourite out of the new outfits. The green robe looks great. It gives him more gravitas, as though he has now graduated from Sword Training School and is allowed to wear the academic gown. Not sure what kind of garment it is, but it’s definitely more traditional.

Sanji is still in a suit. I liked his previous style, so I’m kind of glad Oda didn’t mess with it too much. Sanji and suits are like Luffy and flip-flops, you know? He’s changed his shirt, has grown a goatee (which, of course Zoro noticed and roasted Sanji for it) and maybe his hair’s a bit longer?

Zoro arrived at Shakky’s bar first. This was a source of woe for poor Sanji, who arrived seventh after Franky, Nami, Usopp, Chopper and Brook. (Robin was eighth because she had to shake some CP goons off her tail.)

The fact that Zoro arrived first was nothing short of a miracle. I’m still not sure how he managed it. Maybe Perona dropped him off right at the door. When Sanji arrived, he was overcome with emotion at the sight of women to the point his enthusiasm freaked out a couple of innocent ladies. Then Sanji met Duval (I love how they’re friends now) checked out the kitchen and went food shopping.

On the way, he met Zoro.

Zoro wanted to go fishing. Rayleigh and Shakky shouldn’t have let him out of their sight. Instead of getting on a fishing boat, he boarded a pirate galleon and fell asleep. Sure enough, the ship set sail with him on it. “THAT IDIOT!” Sanji yelled. But it was okay. Of course Zoro would do something like that. At least the ship was headed for Fishman Island and they knew where Zoro would be.

I was annoyed for a half a second (rob Zoro of the big reunion? How dare you!) But then he showed off some of his new skills. Mihawk-esque skills. He sliced an entire pirate galleon in half. It was awesome. He still has great lines too. “I ruined your New World dream? No. It was your fault for allowing a plague on your ship.”

Has Zoro taken a Mihawk level in edginess? I think so.

Then they started arguing on the way back and I honestly laughed out loud at their shit-flinging contest.

“Stay with me, or you’ll get lost!”

“Who’re you talking to, moustache eyebrow!”

“Shut up, lost moss!”

“How could number seven talk bossily to number one?”

“SHUT UP, I TRAINED MY LEGS IN HELL FOR TWO YEARS!”

“BRING IT ON, I’LL CUT YOU IN HALF!!”

They love to pretend they hate each other, don’t they?

Chopper

Aw, Chopper. He has definitely take an level in cuteness. Chopper is a rare example of more clothes. He has acquired a cute, stripey shirt and red shorts. The hat is okay. It’s huge. Maybe to accommodate his massive brain (because he has absorbed the contents of all those medical books, right?) Must say I prefer his old hat. Mainly because Dr Hiluluk gave it to him and it’s a huge part of his identity. Parts of it are still there, but I guess it’s difficult to change Chopper a lot, so the hat is an obvious target.

Haven’t seen any of his new abilities yet, so Chopper hasn’t changed at all personality wise. He still loves cotton candy and, like Luffy, is still absolutely hopeless at seeing through lies and bad disguises. The part when Chopper was running after the Fake Strawhats and crying out at them to rescue Fake Robin was a bit daft. I mean Chopper did admit later on to Nami that the Fake Robin, “didn’t smell familiar.” But then, that’s the gag. It goes all the way back to Sogeking, so I’ll let it slide. :)

He really thought the Strawhats had changed so much, though. It was interesting to see that he’d stick to his principles and go rescue Robin himself: a real marker of Chopper’s new determination and confidence in his own abilities!

After that stressful moment, it was nice to see how glad Nami and Usopp were to see him, hugging him and telling him how much softer his fur was, how much bigger he’d grown. And Chopper’s outrage once he realised there were impostors about: “WAIT, NOW I’M MAD!”

Even though he’s stronger, kind, innocent Chopper hasn’t changed that much.

Robin and Franky

Again, how good do these two look? Robin is the most drastic change out of all the Strawhats. Could you believe I actually didn’t recognise her at first? (Only the eyes and the voice acting finally gave it away.) The blunt bangs/fringe/whatever you call them were iconic to her look, so it’s a definite departure. She looks great, though. Similar to Boa Hancock.

I’m 100% being Franky’s new look. The colour scheme is the same (red/blue) and he has his loud fashion sense, but the chunky cybernetic enhancements, the sharp shades and the buzz really add an intimidating edge to Franky that he was missing pre-timeskip. And apparently, the Sunny has some new weapons as well as a Full Underwater Coating courtesy of Rayleigh. Can’t wait to see what nightmarish destroyers of ships Franky has constructed! >:D

Franky injected some tension into the narrative, which was cool, even though I am 99% certain it will turn out fine in the end. While losing the CP9 goons trailing her, Robin picked up a poster for Brook’s concert. Quite rightly, she WTF’d over it and asked Franky if he knew what was going on.

“Brook's quite the star now. From the lonely shadows to a place where everyone cheers for him. He might not come back to pirating again.”

Surely Brook would not be so ungrateful to abandon the friends who lifted him out of loneliness into the spotlight again?

Nah. Brook’s not like that. I’d bet money it.

Soul King?

Brook has now graduated from garage band Slash-wannabe to issuing health and well-being advice via the genre of soul and the medium of arena tours.

He has acquired a manager. Before the gig, Brook had something to tell him and I’ll bet it was about quitting.

I’m still wondering how Brook got away with becoming so famous. Wasn’t he identified at Sabaody when Kizaru kicked their asses two years ago? Hasn’t his bounty poster been updated since? Did not a single Marine think, “Hey, there was a talking skeleton in the Strawhats’ company at Sabaody. Here is another one on TV. Coincidence?”

Love that we got to hear most of the song, though. Brook hasn’t changed that much, either. He still loves those skeleton puns.

(I am very behind on replies, btw. I know. I will reply to every single one tomorrow. ^_^)

“Move, bitch. Get out the way. Get out the way, bitch. Get out the way!” - Ludacris

#one piece #neverwatchedonepiece #nwop #never watched one piece #monkey d. luffy #roronoa zoro #sanji #usopp #nami #tony tony chopper #nico robin #franky #brook #silvers rayleigh #thousand sunny #shakky #fake strawhats

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pleasantlyshamelesswizard · 6 years

Text

La Sirena : Part Seven

It had been a month since Marina came on land and been occupying the house she was sure belonged to Amethyst. Nobody told her otherwise as nobody had been by to see her since her arrival.

The house was large and Marina did indeed find everything she needed there like clothes, food money and all other necessary things. She was however, absolutely bored out of her mind, waiting either for the siren to show up, or for this Balor and his goons to come get her.

It wasn't all bad though as she'd go out for walks and just observe people doing everyday things but Marina thought it seemed a little odd so she started taking morning jogs so it wouldn't come across as her scouting for people to murder.

"It sure gets busy in this head of yours, doesn't it"

She said to herself as she prepared for her jog one morning.

She ran her usual route along the beach. She tried not to think about the siren and what could possibly be going on in the deep waters. Had the Minch Men come back? Had they killed them all, that's why no one had been by the house.

It was useless, nothing she did could take her mind off the chaos that she was sure would ensue in the near future. She ran faster now, chancing a glance at the water, doing all she could not to launch her body into the water and be free again. She could find a way to evade those mermen, right?

"No, Amethyst told you to stay there and wait" Marina said to herself.

She started salivating at the aroma of the salty waters, how she missed it.. And her sisters.

"Whoa, wait, SLOW DOWN, WOMAN!!!"

Marina crashed right into something and fell into the sand, sprawled out ever so comically.

She'd been thinking so much she forgot she was running.

"Bloody hell, are ya alright?" She heard a man say.

He was standing above her now, to see if she was conscious.

Marina was stunned when she saw the man.

He was absolutely gorgeous.

She always liked clean shaven men but she liked the look of this bearded Adonis with his brown hair, warm blue eyes that were framed by dense eyebrows and long eyelashes. The fact that he was tall and muscular didn't hurt either.

"Yeah, I'm good." She said, taking the man's hand to get off the ground. "I'm sorry, I wasn't looking where I was going... I didn't hurt you, did I?"

The man laughed. "No, you didn't. But I've never seen a girl run dat fast. So are ya an athlete, or someone chasin' ya?"

"Huh? Oh, no, no I uh... Just like to run... Clears my head, you know?" she lied.

Marina felt her cheeks become warm on account of the man smiling at her. What the hell was wrong with her?

"I'm Jordan, by da way. And what do they call you? Da Flash?"

Marina laughed. "They call me Marina." She held out her hand for him to shake, but he took it and placed a small kiss on her knuckles instead.

Quite the charmer this one, with the Irish accent and all, she thought.

She liked it. A lot.

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

It was well over a month now and still nobody had come to the house.

This time though, Marina wasn't too concerned with it as she found most of her time being spent with Jordan.

They'd go for walks along the peer, go to the bar, the movies, they even went to the fair where he won her an enormous bunch of stuffed animals.

While Marina loved spending time with Jordan, she couldn't bring herself to get attached to him which by the way, proved more difficult every time she was with him.

"And ya still won't be my girl." He said with mock sadness when he handed her a giant stuffed panda.

"Jordan, I told you-" she began, but he cut her off.

"I know, I know, ya don't like commitments."

"It's not that, I just can't right now." She said truthfully. She didn't want either of them to be so invested in one another while she had to lie to him about what she really was. That made her sad.

"It's OK." Jordan said with that half smirk that drove her insane. "I'm not goin' any where, I can wait." and then winked at her

Little shit knows what he's doing, she thought, but she wasn't mad at him, how could she be?

"Well, thanks for today, it was fun." Marina said as the two of them stood at the door to Amethyst's home.

"Yer welcome, love. Hope we can do it again, y'know, if Yer not too sick of me."

He was standing very close to her and she was finding it hard to concentrate.

So she just gave him a slight peck on the lips. Which surprised them both. Jordan was blushing.

" I'm still not your girl, but yes, I'd like to do this again. " and gave him another peck on the lips

"Good night."

He laughed again and hugged her good night before getting into his car and driving away.

She went into the house, dropped the stuffed toys on the sofa and just stood there, thinking about him.

"Oh, fuck me. I'm screwed." she said into the empty house.

"Well, that'll have to wait, I'm afraid... He sure is cute though."

Marina thought she was having a stroke because there in the house, after nearly two months, stood Coraline, Anais and Elowen, arms folded as if they were about to scold her for being out after curfew.

Just great.

Part Seven, if anyone cares to read.

#la sirena #short story #mermaid #alternate universe #jordan devlin #siren

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themurphyzone · 6 years

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Absolutely Disastrous Ch 8

Ch 8: Lost in the Woods! Another Costumed Weirdo?

“I think we’re lost.”

“We’re not lost. We’ve taken a slight detour from the recommended path.”

“So we’re lost.”

“Think of it as the scenic route,” Milo suggested, looking at his map again. Before he could show Melissa and Zack their current location in the Petalburg Woods, a Linoone snatched the paper out of his hands and disappeared into a clump of berry bushes.

Unfazed, Milo brought out a second map. “Okay, so we’re near a bunch of Oran trees right now, so if we head north we should see some birches and hang the second right.”

Zack groaned, resting his back against a mossy rock. “Too bad everything looks the same.”

“I also have a topography map, a latitude map, and a map of Silph Co’s ventilation and teleporter system,” Milo said. “Never really understood their teleporter thing. Seems kinda bad for employee morale.”

They’d been wandering around Petalburg Woods all morning, and so far they’d had little luck making sense of their surroundings. Every tree looked the same, packed together so densely that it was almost impossible to tell where one tree ended and another began. He’d heard ghost stories of a forest in Sinnoh. According to the tales, it was always nighttime because the sun’s rays never reached the ground, making it a prime spot for ghosts to lure unsuspecting travelers to their dilapidated manor.

Dr. Magnezone fans loved using Sinnoh’s folklore and ghost stories as inspiration. Milo once saw Sara cry over a fanfic where Dr. Magnezone had to search for a Lunar Wing to relieve Time Infernape of a Darkrai-inflicted nightmare before the stress killed him.

“Hey, let’s break for a bit,” Melissa said. She laid down on a large protruding root. “I can’t wait to get out of forest territory.”

Milo found a cozy spot next to a fallen log, and Zack reclined against a tree trunk.

“Zack, there’s gotta be some spooky tales in Johto,” Milo said. “You should tell us one!”

“Yeah, spill!” Melissa prodded Zack in the arm.

Zack winced and rubbed his arm. “Do you cut your nails into claws or something?”

Melissa shrugged. “I jab hard, Underwood. You gonna tell us a ghost story or what?”

“Neither of you are gonna let up until I tell you one, huh?” Zack sighed.

“Nope!” Milo and Melissa chorused. Diogee looked up from his water bowl, red eyes boring expectantly into Zack.

“Fine,” Zack said. “This one isn’t for the faint of heart, so be warned.”

Milo and Melissa leaned forward in anticipation.

“Two millennia ago, a beautiful maiden fell in love with a soldier. One day, the soldier had to go fight in a distant land. As the maiden watched him disappear over the horizon, she swore she would never fall in love with anyone else, and that she would always look towards the ocean in anticipation of his return.”

Milo’s eyes started to water. Melissa gripped her skirt tightly.

“The years passed, but she still waited. Every suitor was turned down, all attempts to coax her away from the cliff failed. Eventually, a deity took pity on her. She agreed to be transformed into a statue atop the cliff so she could continue watching the horizon. The deity also appointed a messenger Pokémon to maintain the house and keep the maiden’s soul company while she kept her eternal vigil. To this day, she continues to wait and pray.”

Milo wiped away a stray tear, and Diogee had to carefully nudge him a few feet so a tree didn’t crash on top of him.

“That was…sad,” Melissa admitted. “How ‘bout something in the horror department to even it out?”

“Gimme a minute,” Milo said, burying his face into Diogee’s fur to calm himself down. “I got one.”

He took a deep breath, holding a flashlight under his chin for added dramatic effect. Zack drew a sharp breath.

“Once there was a little girl who lived in a cottage. Her mommy and daddy scrounged and begged and pleaded for scraps of food, for they were poorer than dirt,” Milo began, keeping his voice so low that Melissa and Zack had to strain to hear him.

He paced as he continued the story, feeling three sets of innocent eyes processing every word and movement. Milo smirked and continued. “One day, the little girl was left alone in the house. As she did her daily chores like any good child would do, she looked out the window. A doll laid in the dirt, its seams torn and one of its button eyes missing. It was ugly and nobody would’ve spared a second glance. But the little girl took pity on the doll and fixed it up with the only bolt of spare fabric her family had.”

“Oh no,” Zack whispered. Melissa elbowed him.

“When the last seam was closed, the doll offered to grant three wishes for the little girl. First, she wished that her family would never go hungry again. That night, her parents came home to find a feast fit for a royal banquet waiting for them. The little girl showed them the doll and explained what she’d done, and her parents were too grateful to question her any further. But trouble arose when the mother didn’t have material to make new clothes with, so the little girl asked the doll for endless wealth so her mother could purchase the finest and rarest silks and wool. The doll granted the second wish, and the family lived happily for many years.”

“The little girl grew into a beautiful woman, and she attracted the attention of a prince. They courted for a while, and the woman showed him the doll who’d saved her family from poverty. Disgusted by its horrible appearance, the prince broke off their engagement and rode away into the night. Because she still loved him, the woman asked the doll to grant her final wish: have the prince fall back in love with her. Once it was granted, the woman laid the doll on her childhood bed and went back to the castle. She planned to never return to the cottage and sever all ties with her poverty-filled life to make sure the prince stayed in love with her.”

Milo paused. The tension was thick enough to cut with a butter knife.

“The woman married the prince and forgot all about the doll. But the doll never forgot her. It granted all her wishes without complaint. It kept her company for ten years. And now it laid in a dark room, never to see the sun again. Anger consumed its mind. Oh, how it thirsted for vengeance. It flew to the castle on an otherworldly energy, and there it spotted the woman, brushing her hair…alone.”

He could see the whites of Zack’s eyes, and Milo crept closer, curling his hands into claws and looming as best he could.

“It crept closer…closer…closer…” Milo punctuated each word with a silent step until he hovered over Zack. Zack pressed himself against the tree with a strangled yelp.

“-and then it POUNCED!”

“AIYEEEH!”

Milo pulled Zack to his feet, laughing so hard he couldn’t breathe. “Oh man!” Milo doubled over. “That was, ha! Got you real good!”

Zack just stared at him. “I didn’t scream.”

“Wasn’t me either,” Melissa said. “Believe me, you would know if Zack screamed cause he sounds like a plucked Swellow. Whoever screamed a few minutes ago has more of a tone-deaf Loudred combined with a sick Swablu frequency.”

“I don’t sound like a plucked Swellow,” Zack mumbled.

“NO! DON’T TAKE MY PAPERS!”

Everyone jumped to their feet as a terrified businessman rushed past their resting spot and tripped over a large root. His briefcase spilled open, papers fluttering all around him. He dazedly shoved them back into the briefcase, muttering several curses to himself.

“Hand over those papers, old man!” another voice snarled.

The other man was dressed in a lava-red uniform, a stylized ‘M’ emblazoned across his chest. His hood had two strange horns on top. Milo stared at him, wondering why someone would choose to wear a thick red onesie in Hoenn’s tropical climate.

Diogee growled menacingly, only backing off when Milo gestured for him to stand down until they figured out what happened.

“What’s going on here?” Melissa asked.

“He’s trying to rob me!” the businessman shouted. “I swear, all I did was stop to take pictures of a Shroomish-I’ve always liked that Pokémon, you see-and Hoodie there jumped me and tried to steal my documents!”

“How many times have I told you to quit calling me Hoodie? It’s Ignacio! I-G-N-A-C-I-O!”

His protests went ignored as the group collected all the stray papers and put them back into the suitcase.

“Thank you, children,” the businessman gasped breathlessly. “I’m just gonna be going now and-“

Ignacio scowled. “You aren’t going anywhere! Hand over those papers or face the wrath of Team Magma!”

He posed dramatically, which would’ve looked a lot more threatening if he’d chosen a target without knowledge of meme culture.

Ignacio released a Zigzagoon and Koffing. “You’ve trampled on Team Magma’s dreams, and that’s unforgivable! For I am the Magma Grunt Ignacio who stands for humanity’s brighter tomorrow! In the name of Groudon, I shall incinerate you!”

“Aren’t you supposed to be saying love and justice or something?” Melissa asked.

“I wanted to, but it was copyrighted,” Ignacio admitted. “Seriously, I’m not a monster. I respect copyright law.”

“Whatever. I’ll sit this one out, boys,” Melissa said, dragging the businessman out of the way. “While you kick his butt, I’ll be organizing my photos.”

“I don’t remember you taking photos,” Zack said.

Melissa smirked. “I work in mysterious ways.”

“Enough babbling!” Ignacio sneered. “You fools will know the wrath of the 27th ranked Magma goon!”

“That’s supposed to be a bragging point?” Zack scoffed as he sent out Treecko.

Treecko chewed on his stick placidly as he sized up his opponents. Diogee moved into position, eyes fixated on Koffing.

Living near Mt. Chimney had long acquainted Milo and Diogee with the local Pokémon and their habits. Machop liked to test their strength by weightlifting Geodude, and one should never disturb their contests unless they wanted 44.1 pounds of living rock hurtled at them. Numel preferred sand baths, and Torkoal could only distinguish between light and dark.

On the Murphy Ranch, they sometimes had to announce the Purple Protocol in the event of a Koffing wandering onto the property. Its smoke and poisonous gas was harmful to the developing lungs of young humans and Absol, so all minors were to stay inside until the adults had gotten rid of the smoke and contained the Koffing until it could be relocated.

And it had the only type advantage on the current battlefield.

This was gonna be interesting.

“Create a Smokescreen cover!” Ignacio ordered. “Zigzagoon, Quick Attack on Treecko!”

Black gas spewed out of Koffing’s pores, obscuring it from view. Treecko braced himself, eyes trained on the smoke.

There was a slight rustle in the bushes behind Treecko, and a blurred shape shot out.

“Look out!” Zack yelled.

Zigzagoon knocked Treecko off-balance, though Treecko managed to dislodge it with a Pound. Soon the two were engaged in a high-speed Quick Attack fight.

Meanwhile, Milo and Diogee were trying to locate Koffing inside all the black haze with no luck.

Ignacio smirked. “Use Sludge!”

“Diogee, watch out!” Milo warned, but it was too late. Diogee’s eyes were covered in an inky material. Rearing back on his hind legs, Diogee unleashed several Cut attacks in random directions. One of them hit Koffing in the middle of its skull pattern, and another clipped Treecko’s tail. Zigzagoon emerged unscathed, though it panted heavily from exertion.

A pile of splintered wood and apples crashed to the ground. There were some indignant squawks from bird Pokémon above, but none of them came down to disrupt the battle.

Zack snapped his fingers. “Use Mega Drain on Zigzagoon and get your strength back,” he said.

Zigzagoon was too dazed to follow Ignacio’s instructions to dodge, and a bright green glow lit up its body. The energy flowed into Treecko’s fingertips, rejuvenating him instantly.

“Great! Now grab those apples and stuff ‘em into Koffing’s pores!” Zack exclaimed.

Upon hearing his command, Melissa stuffed her unfinished scrapbook into her bag and hauled the businessman to his feet. “Zack, you do realize-“

Zack had a gleam in his eye.

“Uh, Melissa, I think your battle style’s rubbing off on him,” Milo said awkwardly.

Treecko grabbed a handful of apples and weaved around Koffing, easily outmaneuvering the Poison-type. Within minutes, Koffing’s pores were plugged, Treecko dusting his hands triumphantly.

“C’mon, blow those apples out!” Ignacio screeched.

Koffing groaned, eyes squeezed shut as it tried to blow the apples out. But Treecko had jammed them tightly, and only minuscule amounts of gas leaked into the air. With one last inhale, a glowing Koffing dropped into Treecko’s arms.

Treecko blinked for a moment, then tossed Koffing at Zack and hid behind Melissa, who backed away slowly.

“ACK!” Zack screamed and tossed the Poison-type at Milo.

“It’s using Self-Destruct!” Milo yelped, striking Koffing with a two-handed serve that would’ve made a professional volleyball player proud.

The Koffing landed in the businessman’s arms. The man paled immediately. “GlorytoArceusinthehighest,” he muttered a prayer rapidly in some ancient language Milo wasn’t even sure existed in their dimension.

“Quit being a baby!” Melissa snapped, yanking Koffing out of his arms and hurling it at Ignacio’s face.

But since Melissa was Melissa, she only managed to toss it one foot.

Koffing unceremoniously fell to the ground, its glow almost blinding.

“Diogee, follow my voice!” Milo yelled, grabbing Diogee’s horn once he was close enough and guiding him out of the blast radius.

“COWARDS!” Ignacio shook his fist as everyone fled the immediate vicinity. “WE IN TEAM MAGMA ALWAYS STAND OUR GROUND! FOR WE ARE PILLARS OF HUMANITY, UNYIELDING IN RESOLVE AND PUTTING OUR FOOT DOWN ON ALL MATTERS AND CRUSHING THOSE WHO OPPOSE US!��

“We should put him and Patchy in a room together,” Melissa remarked. “Who needs primetime television when you’ve got them?”

“You might want to reconsider your foot position,” Milo called to Ignacio.

Ignacio glanced down, his eyes widening to comical proportions.

“Well, crud.”

Koffing exploded in a glorious blaze of white light.

“Don’t worry,” Melissa told the trembling businessman, who seemed convinced that he would be arrested for environmental disturbances and manslaughter. “It’s just his pride that didn’t survive.”

AN: Ghost of Maiden’s Peak took place in Kanto, not Johto, but they share the same landmass so what the hey.

Using Koffing as a beach ball is ill-advised.

And now Team Magma is on the scene! Things are picking up!

#absolutely disastrous #milo murphy's law #melissa chase #zack underwood #diogee #oras au

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forever-rogue · 7 years

Text

Words and Paper - Part IX

Summary: Y/N is a brilliant young lawyer who was hired by Tony Stark himself. She didn’t expect half of the things that would happened, but she was sure glad Bucky happened.

A/N: please enjoy this part! It’s getting intense! Let me know if you’d liked to be tagging in this or anything else :)

Word Count: 2k

Pairing: Bucky x Reader

Warnings: crime and language

MASTERLIST

The door to her room opened slowly and a tray of food was shoved in, along with a small pitcher of water. Y/N didn’t make to grab it right away but waited until she heard the lock click shut and footsteps walking away .

She was starving and her throat was parched. The meager rations she had been receiving weren’t quite enough to satisfy her. It was always the same thing: some type of meatloaf like log and potatoes along with water. She had grown tired of it quickly. She was cold as well, shivering constantly as she was just left in a thin white gown. She felt violated knowing someone had undressed her while she was unconscious. She had no memory of arriving in her small cell.

Unfortunately she had lost track of how long she had been there, but she figured it couldn’t have been more than a few weeks. They always came and slipped in the tray without saying anything. She wondered what they were planning on doing with her. So far they had done nothing but kept her isolated. There was no sense of time in the room either, the lightly flickering bulb was always on; she know longer knew day from night.

Y/N still wasn’t exactly sure what her plan was, but she wasn’t going to lay low forever. She hadn’t fought or argued with them, choosing instead to accept her imprisonment. At least that’s what she wanted them to think. When they least expected it was when she was going to attempt to make her escape. It was a slow con, but she hoped it would work.

She hadn’t actually seen where she was being held so she had no clue what she would be up against but she’d rather die fighting than locked in dingy room.

Bucky rubbed his tired eyes, frustration and annoyance evident. It had been several weeks of searching to no avail. Both Y/N and Zach seemed to have disappeared without a trace. Everyone they had showed pictures to claimed to have not seen either of them. No camera footage was located. It was like they had both simply vanished.

“I can’t believe we haven’t found anything. It’s been an insane waste of time,” he slammed his fist on the trouble. Steve jumped a bit, started by his sudden action.

“We’re trying our best, Buck. We’ll find something. It’s not like we are not trying,” every passing day the nagging in his own stomach was going growing stronger as well. He wasn’t sure what to expect anymore

“When? We haven’t made any headway and we’re doing everything we can!”

“I know this is frustrating, but don’t lose hope. We’ll just readjust our strategy and continue on,”

“That’s easy for you to stay, Steve. You haven’t lost everyone like I have. I have nothing, no one-”

“You have no one? What am I? The rest of team?” Steve’s eyes widened at his best friend’s accusations. They were wrong and hurtful. He had lost plenty of people on his life too. He knew Bucky was hurting and lashing out, but the words still hurt.

“Steve, I didn’t mean it like that-”

“Buck, I know you’re angry. But right now, us fighting is not going to solve anything. You know I love you and am always here for you. Firstly, right now, we need to keep going,”

“Okay. I’m sorry Steve,” he cast his eyes downward, ashamed at his own outburst, “where do we go from here?”

“I think we’re going to have to do some old school espionage. We’ll go to a crowded hub and watch. It might be arduous, but I think it’s a good way to go right now,” he figured this would be one way to continue, even if nothing super helpful came from it.

“Yeah, good idea. Let’s go,” Bucky pulled on his jacket and grabbed his backpack. Steve followed suit and they headed out and into the cold Russian city.

Y/N had her eyes closed, trying to get some rest but intently listening for the opening of the door. She felt disgusting, tired, and mentally worn thin. She hadn’t showered since the day she was captured and her restroom consisted of the bucket that was in the corner and emptied every few days. Needless to say, she was slowly losing it. She couldn’t even imagine how people could do this for years.

Her knees were pulled up to her chest, head resting on top of them. She felt sleep slowly start to come over her, as she heard some faint foot falls. Immediately, her eyes sprang open and she shuffled to the door. There was a pregnant pause before the door was opened and tray was pushed in.

Before the door could be shut again, she grabbed the edges of it and pulled it in her direction as hard as she could. The person on the other side was taken by surprise and couldn’t fight back in time. She came face to face with an arrogant looking woman, probably not much older than her, forced her into the room. As fast as she could, she slammed door the shut, the woman trapped inside, while she was out and free. She leaned against the cold metal door, adrenaline pumping through her veins.

The woman banged on the door, but the sound was faint and barely noticeable. It would have been possible that no one would ever known she was here. She grinned to herself for a second before leaning against door and whispering, “you messed with the wrong bitch.”

Y/N looked around and realized her room had been at the end of a long dark corridor. She hoped this wouldn’t be a huge maze that she’d get lost in and recaptured. She figured she had to act quickly before people caught on and realized something was amiss. She started running down the corridor, heading to the door at the other. There were a few doors like hers and she couldn’t help but wonder if they were others like her.

She vowed she’d come back and try and free them as soon as she got the chance. When she reached the end, she gingerly grasped the door and pulled it open, unsure of what she would be met with. There was nothing that she could see but a set of dark stone stairs. She slowly walked up them, bare feet freezing on the damp concrete.

Y/N put her hand up and tried up and tried to feel where she was going, but it was no use. She was going in blind. After a few moments,her head hit a flat metal object. She hissed in pain and felt the top of head to make sure she wasn’t bleeding. The spot felt sore, but wasn’t too damaged, at least from what she could from what she could feel under her tangled, dirty hair.

She reached up and realized it was a door of some sort. She pushed it and along with a loud creaking sound, the metal hatch slowly open. Y/N was immediately hit with a rush of cold air. She stuck her head up and let out a gasp of shock. She had been locked away in a sort of underground bunker in the woods, probably some sort of WWII relic.

Her heart fell as the realization that she had no idea where she was or how far away from civilization she was. She saw a building several hundred yards away and figured that was their base or some kind of compound. No was in sight, which relieved her a little bit. Behind her were dark and dense would. She was more willing to risk the wild animals that may be lurking there than to be caught again by some KGB goons.

She took a deep breath and let herself out. It was cold and the grass was wet under feet. She cast one last glance towards the building before running in the direction of the dark woods.

Her feet were being scraped and cut by the rocks and other things on the ground, and she wanted to stop, but knew she couldn’t. She kept going, her lungs screaming, stitch in her side, but the only thing she knew was that she couldn’t stop.

She carried on, resting only when she absolutely needed to, and eventually the dark night slowly turned into morning. She took it as an auspicious sign: she had survived the long and cold night. She was relatively unscathed but for some scratches she had acquired from tree branches. She started to slow her pace, feeling calmer now that it was daylight.

She stopped in her tracks when she heard a car in the distance. How far had she come? She didn’t know how much or fast she had run, but hoped it was far enough away to were they didn’t think she would have made it. She sat down on a nearby log, cold and hungry, and decided to rest for a few moments.

Once she had caught her breath and gotten a few winks of sleep, she stood up and decided to continue on and see where she could get.

It wasn’t long before her feet hit concrete and the woods thinned; she had found the road she heard the car driving on before. It looked like a normal windy road, but she still couldn’t tell where she was. Y/N decided to take a chance and walk along the side of the road, hoping it would be safe.

After a while, she had heard the familiar zoom of a car. Part of her wanted to hide back in the woods, and the other part wanted to yell out for help. She bit her lip, trying to decide which feeling was stronger.

She saw the car zoom into view and jumped out in the middle of the road. She flailed her arms wildly, trying to get their attention.

“HELP! Help me please!” The car slowed down and rolled to a smooth stop next to her. The driver rolled down the window.

“Miss, what’s happened?” The man had a kind smile and a thick accent. He didn’t seem familiar, so she hoped he wasn’t associated with the mob.

“I’ve been kidnapped and held hostage. I managed to escape. Please, I need help, I need to go back to Moscow,” she couldn’t control the tears that came out of her eyes. She didn’t have much strength left to be strong right now.

“Oh no! Moscow is several hours from here, but I can take you to nearby train station,” he reached over and unlocked the door for her to get in.

“Thank you, thank you so much,” she quickly got in and locked the door. A sigh of relief left her lips. She was finally safe.

“It is no problem, Ms. Y/L/N,” the man’s mouth stretched into an evil grin as he locked the door and sped off.

Taglist: @ruinerofcheese @supernatural508 @courtneychicken @jems8241 @bookaddic @nerissa98 @santa-crew @ladyabby-1996 @sebstanwassup @ssweet-empowerment @blue-berry-barry-allen

#bucky barnes #bucky x reader #sebastian stan x reader #sebastian stan #marvel #mcu #avengers #captain america #captain america x reader #captain america winter soldier #winter soldier #winter soldier x reader #chris evans #imagine #ofc #series

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