#[ i legitimately burst into tears when i opened it ]

[morning-star-joy]

bloodshed, crimson clover

Pairing: Joel x Doctor F!Reader

Summary: You run a small practice in the Boston QZ, willing to treat anybody who needs it. After an encounter where you save the life of Joel Miller, you form an unlikely friendship with one of the most notorious, feared men in the QZ, a reputation you didn't realize existed until you come face to face with it yourself.

Warnings: Angst. Slow build. Mutual pining & tension (unresolved). Ambiguous ending. Game!Joel. Canon-typical violence. Reader captured with mentioned physical harm, Feral Joel with descriptions of torture/murder. Vague descriptions of injury treatments (bullet wound with cauterization, cleaning glass/debris from cuts, burn wound). Reader from California & Joel calls her Cali, Reader calls Joel Texas.

Wordcount: 12.1k

A/N: I've had this idea for a while, started it and it sat in drafts, and suddenly I was hit with inspiration again this past week. Also ty @cupofjoel for letting me scream about them to you and all your support, ily!!

In his own ways, Joel Miller was a complete gentleman.

A distinctly Southern one, with a show of selective manners from his upbringing before the world went to hell, paired with a charming ruggedness that pulled your attention to him from the very first time he stumbled through your little clinic’s doors.

You were one of the few legitimately licensed Pre-Outbreak medical professionals left in the QZ, and accepted each and every sick and injured person into your tiny practice. It took a long time and care to get a place out of the view of FEDRA’s ever-looming gaze, but even then you risked the possibility of having a target painted on your back if you treated the “wrong” person.

Somebody always owed somebody else within those tall steel walls surrounding the poor semblances of a society that, in your opinion, should have been left in the dust with the rest of the world. In not discerning who you patched up, you put yourself in danger of getting on the wrong side of someone distinctly more powerful, more violent than you.

But through your diligent work over the years, you’d gained enough of a clientele for your hidden practice to remain largely untouched. There were a few instances with graffiti, but even that wasn’t too terrible—immature Fireflies pissed off that you hadn’t accepted their offer to join them, most likely new recruits trying to earn their place in the rebel ranks.

So when the rickety old doors banged open hard enough to nearly tear them off the top hinge one night, you were up on your feet and running to assist the large body that almost fell to the floor with the momentum of how they had burst in.

There was not an ounce of anxiety in your body other than the familiar adrenaline of assess the damage, stop the bleeding, prevent infection and keep them alive as you wrapped your arms around their waist, using all your strength to pull them up and direct them to one of the two old clinic beds in the dingy old room that you sanitized as best you could between patients.

That was the first thing you noticed about Joel Miller, even though you didn’t know him by name or even face yet—he was heavy. Solid muscle underneath blood-stained fabric that you began to pull away from his torso, hardly paying attention to the low timbre of his pained grunts when the cloth stuck gruesomely to the gunshot wound you finally saw once you got the shirt off.

There were no questions in your mind other than how deep was it, was there an exit wound, did it hit anything vital, not caring how he had gotten it, who had given it to him, or why they had as you paced to your instruments, only taking a moment to make sure they were clean before pulling on a pair of gloves you were running dangerously low on, hoping that they wouldn’t get too blood-soaked in the process of keeping this man alive.

Yes, you would do all you could to save him—but you still knew in the back of your mind that two pairs of gloves spent on him would risk no gloves and losing somebody else further down the line.

It wasn’t a thought you wasted the time to entertain now as you quickly got to work. There was nothing to numb the pain of the man who laid back on the clinic bed, teeth gritted and half-delirious from blood loss, not even bothering to try and say anything to you while you saved his life.

You weren’t offended. In some odd way, it was a breath of fresh air.

Most, if not all patients you treated with this kind of wound, were usually tripping over fast anxiety-fueled words trying to explain to you how they had gotten into this situation. You supposed they were hoping you wouldn’t turn them in for whatever they most likely weren’t supposed to be doing, not knowing that the only thing you truly cared about anymore was keeping as many people as you could alive in this godforsaken dystopia.

This man though, he stayed silent. Not trying to assure you of his goodwill, whether he truly had any or not. He only stared up at the dilapidated ceiling, jaw practically wired shut, maybe to keep in the low grunts and groans that rumbled from his chest, exposed from where you had to remove his denim shirt to treat the wound on his torso.

Unfortunately, you did end up having to switch to a new pair of gloves, the bleeding slowing but stubbornly refusing to stop completely. You were reaching for more of your quickly dwindling supply of gauze to keep pressing against the wound when you heard his voice clearly for the first time.

“Cauterize it.”

You looked back at him with your hand outstretched halfway to the gauze, eyes widening at the simple command that fell from the man’s chapped lips in a low drawl that rasped with pain and dehydration.

Blinking, you looked from his face that was still directed towards the ceiling down towards the wound, a frown pulling onto your lips as you glanced back towards him and began to protest, “I don’t—”

“Cauterize. It.” He repeated firmly, jaw still clenched with the words hissed out through gritted teeth.

You stiffened, not particularly enjoying being ordered to make a medical choice in your own clinic, but then his eyes met yours, filled with an intense determination that had your hand pulling back slightly from its path towards a longer process that would've hopefully let the wound heal naturally.

Then there was a slight shift in the unfathomable depth of that gaze, a fracture in walls even more impenetrable than the ones that had surrounded you for almost half a decade, and his cracked lips parted, tongue darting out to wet them in a desperate attempt for hydration before he gave a quiet murmur of, “Please.”

There was the first hint of those selective manners, emphasized with an underlying sense of unspeakable eagerness, and your face set into your own determination, nodding as you set about preparing for a practice that wasn’t your favorite, but was sometimes necessary.

Maybe this man couldn’t afford the time it would take to stop the bleeding completely, sew it up and let the wound heal on its own. Maybe there was something out there, somebody out to get him.

Or somebody he had to protect, to get home to.

That last thought is what urged you not stop even when the man grabbed the edge of the bed in a large hand, fingers curling so tight around it that you marveled if the rickety old metal would actually break under the strength of that grip. It's what spurred you to keep going even through the sharp shouts of pain muffled around the clean, rolled up washcloth you had gotten him to bite down on through the procedure.

Once the wound was forcibly closed by the red-hot metal of your sterile knife the best you could manage, you found your eyes drawn back to the man’s face, tracing the strength of his features as they relaxed a fraction from relief once the onslaught of pain from the procedure finished.

When you began the process of disinfecting the closed wound, his face had grown so blank that you worried he was on the verge of passing out, but he surprised you by placing his palms flat against the bed, pushing himself up with a loud grunt the moment you were done treating him.

“Sir—”

Any protests towards his movements you were about to make were cut short as he swung his feet over the side of the bed, placing his boots on the ground, heavy-footed and nearly collapsing when he pushed himself up and strode forward anyway, powering through the weakness you would much prefer he would sit in before trying to leave.

“Sir, I really don’t think—”

But he was shaking his head towards your attempts to get him to rest, fingers fumbling with the buttons of where blood was beginning to dry on the faded denim of his shirt, managing to get it most the way fastened back up as he took increasingly more steady steps towards the door.

What flabbergasted you the most, though, was the way he turned his head back towards you, gaze meeting yours for the second time as he muttered a gruff, “Thank you.”

The second show of those bizarre Southern gentlemanly manners, and you still didn’t have a name for him yet.

And then he was gone.

Time passed, and you allowed the mysterious man with the dark gaze and deep drawl to fade into a memory.

Like with all your patients, you spared just enough thought in the days following his treatment to hope he was alive, even though you knew that any hope to ever get confirmation of survival was fruitless. There was no way to know how much longer somebody survived if you managed to save them.

Other than making that wish of wellbeing for yet another soul, you moved on with your life.

So when the door opened one afternoon weeks later, in much worse wear now than it ever had been from the time that patient had charged through it, you were surprised to see the very same man who was the cause of it standing in your doorway when you looked up.

When you saw him, you paused halfway in rising from your squeaky old rolling stool, remembering his face even from the way his head was turned to the side, observing how the top of the door was nearly coming off its rusty hinges before turning to find you.

With a nod, he stepped further into the room, surprising you with how carefully he shut the door behind him, a direct juxtaposition to his whirlwind entrance and exit when you had treated his gunshot wound.

“Doctor,” he greeted in that same low drawl—Southern, maybe Texas, you thought somewhere in the back of your mind—as you finally rose fully from your seat, returning his nod and automatically moving towards your sparse supplies.

“Take a seat,” you said more kindly than firmly over your shoulder, not in a haste to stop him from bleeding out on your floors this time as he seemed to be relatively fine.

“Sorry?”

You paused, glancing from one of the few pairs of gloves that remained back over your shoulder to see the man staring at you with a slight furrow in his brow, a pinch of confusion on an already severe face that pronounced deep lines of age.

He didn’t seem that old—in fact, you guessed he was perhaps around your age. But then, you supposed you were both old considering the world you had survived in, and even so, there was a haunted look to the man’s intensity that spoke of his longer years, one you weren’t even sure he knew that he exuded as his presence seemed to take up the entire room and all your attention.

“Your wound,” you answered simply, gesturing towards where you remembered the gunshot you had treated to be on his torso, and he followed your gaze to look down at himself, the deep lines on his forehead relaxing a bit when you clarified, “You’re here to have it checked on, no?”

“Uh—no,” he replied, giving a slight shake of his head, his head lifting so his eyes could meet yours again. “‘M healing just fine, ma’am.”

There were the manners you had recognized the first time, more distinct this time, and they drew you a step closer towards the man, your body turning away from your small tray of supplies to face him fully for the first time.

“Oh,” you said softly, head tilting as your own brows furrowed, confused as to what had brought him back to your clinic when he had seemed so desperate to get in, get treated as quickly as possible, and get out the last time. “What brings you back, then?”

There was another flicker of something across his face, some emotion you couldn’t name before he shifted the backpack you just now realized he was wearing off of one shoulder. It slipped to his side, where he balanced it on his hip, drawing your attention to how his broad chest and large arms narrowed down to his waist as he began to rifle through it, the quick flare of some feeling in your stomach shifting to trepidation at his actions.

Oddly enough, you didn’t get blaring warning signals of danger from this man. And besides, if he was trying to rob or kill you, he was going about it in a very odd way.

“Here.” His voice was gruff as he pulled something out of his pack, and you blinked rapidly, eyes widening at the same moment your jaw dropped at the sight of what he was holding out to you.

Supplies.

Medical supplies.

Gloves and bandages and—

“Jesus Christ, is that a stethoscope?” you gasped out, reaching forward to take the items before you could stop yourself, too thrilled by the notion of getting your hands on a crucial medical tool that had eluded you for years.

“That it would be,” the man replied, but you weren’t looking at him anymore, instead unrolling the worn leather pouch to see that there was, indeed, a stethoscope inside—one that had seen better days but, oh, the ways you were going to be able to properly diagnose more patients now because of this was—

You finally paused, back stiffening as you looked back up at the stranger who had so easily handed something this precious to you, a sense of unease finally curling uncomfortably in your gut as you took a step back.

“What do you want?” you asked quietly, uncertain as to the terms of whatever arrangement was happening, even as you were now holding the items close to your chest after rolling the stethoscope back up. Unwilling to give them back, even as you were suddenly daunted by the prospect of what he might want in exchange.

He watched you shift, eyes dropping to where you were nearly hugging the supplies to yourself now, and for a moment you worried he was about to try and take them back before his lips parted and he surprised you yet again by mumbling, “To thank you.”

You blinked, taken aback by the shockingly simple sentiment. The desire to repay kindness with more kindness, despite the kind of world you both lived in.

Despite the fact that just one glance at this man—with his hard muscles and intimidating presence, the grim set of his face and the way his muscles tensed not just with the anticipation of something going wrong at any moment, but almost an eagerness that it would happen, that there would be an outlet for that tension ready to snap—would give one the impression that there wasn’t an ounce of kindness in his body.

“That’s…it?” you ask slowly, still wary, hardly able to believe that there were no strings attached. You weren’t a pessimist, but being an optimist wasn’t exactly an option either, not anymore.

But he just nodded, shifting back on the balls of his feet, hands raising with palms turned out towards you, as if to show he had nothing to take, nothing else to give other than this.

“I repay my debts, ma’am,” he uttered with a deadly seriousness in that low drawl, and this time you definitely settled on Texas as being the origin of such a smooth accent.

“Oh,” you said softly, nodding at the explanation, because now this made more sense. Kindness was a rarity, nearly nonexistent, and it wasn’t what he was showing here.

All he wanted was to repay a debt, one that you weren’t even aware existed.

Though you certainly weren’t one to complain when this was the payment. 

Clutching the medical supplies tight to your chest, you reel at how saving this man from an untimely death may have just saved even more lives down the line.

You’re opening your mouth to thank him for his own thanks, but then he’s gone once again, leaving the same way he came in, with more tempered control and less chaotic storm than the first time.

You still don’t have a name.

You settle on calling him Texas.

Not that you say it to his face, or that you even see his face.

More time passes now than those few weeks in between your first two meetings with the Southern stranger. One month goes by, then two, and you once again resign him to the confines of your memories, even though the image of him is much more adamant on breaking out since the second visit.

Second and last, you reminded yourself as you disposed of a used pair of gloves after seeing off a patient, seeing his face flash in your mind’s eye as the cause of why you were able to save this life. Why you could save yet another life after this.

And it wasn’t just the gloves, but everything he had given you. There was still quite a bit of the stash left, as you were used to knowing how to make supplies last for as long as possible, dividing them and deducing who needed what the most as you saw to patients throughout your days.

You were thankful for him. Even if this was his way of settling a debt, washing his hands of you and moving on with his life, you still felt immense gratitude. 

You also felt unbearable curiosity.

Every now and then, you found yourself wondering how he had gotten the supplies, and that much at that. Surely by no legal means, and none of your business at all, but you still couldn't help but wonder.

And so with the gunshot wound he had first stumbled into your life with, you tried to paint a picture of Texas in your head.

When your hands were idle, you created stories in your mind of the life he’d led that brought him from home—or where you imagined his home to be, if you were even remotely correct in dubbing him Texas—to here. 

It was an embarrassing pastime, really, and you had no business entertaining anything more than a passing thought of gratitude about him. But still, you imagined.

Sometimes that imagination was of an exciting life for him, one of travel to far places that you never got to go, pretending that this was a man who had lived through better times and had many tales to tell of them. Tales to tell you, if you were being particularly delusional.

Other times, you pictured him with a life much more humble. Born and raised in the Lone Star State, probably proud to be. A family man who yelled at football, loved barbeques and beers with buddies, working a simple 9-5 until the world went to shit.

You liked that imaginary version of him. You liked thinking that Texas wasn’t too different from you, just trying to get by in the old world and the new.

So used to him staying inside of your mind, you were surprised the next time you actually saw him again.

In hindsight, you supposed you shouldn’t have been. With the scars you had seen just on his torso when you were treating his gunshot wound, you doubted this man lived an easy life now, no matter what it had been before.

It was late, well into curfew hours, but your tiny apartment was just a few streets away from your humble clinic, and you knew the best methods to get back and forth without being seen. You liked to stay as late as you could most nights, just in case somebody needed tending to at the odd hours when nobody else would be able to help.

Your eyes were growing heavy, a few persistent yawns you failed to fight off your body’s way of letting you know you were definitely pushing it, but you held on for a little longer.

And you’d be forever grateful you did, when he was the one needing tending to that night.

The loud, metallic creak of those loose hinges pulled your attention up from where you were staring absentmindedly at your small desk, and you were jumping from your stool the moment you saw him.

There was no stumbling this time, but you saw the streaks of red well, cuts across his face and arms, worn flannel shredded around the skin embedded with glass that glinted in the low, fluorescent light of your lamp that lit up the confined quarters.

“Sit,” you were saying before anything else, and you swore you heard a quiet chuckle under a pained breath as Texas moved to sink down onto a clinic bed.

“Good evening to you too,” he mumbled, and you glanced up at the unexpected humor, unsure if it was for your expense or benefit.

Nevertheless, your eyes narrowed slightly, and his mouth snapped shut then. He settled back as you pulled your tray with you, a neat array of the dwindling supplies from what he had given you waiting underneath your fingertips before you pulled on some gloves and began.

Much like the first time, the ruined shirt was removed so you could work, but the lack of the looming threat of immediate death and ample time to wonder about the man between his visits left you now with eyes that wanted to wander. 

You hoped Texas couldn’t see each time your gaze flickered across his broad chest in the low light of the lamp, observing the way it illuminated his scarred skin before quickly moving your careful attention back to picking glass and debris from the series of cuts across his body, doing your best to stop more scars from finding a home there.

“Gotta stop meeting me like this, Texas,” you find the words slipping from your lips as you focused on your work, your mind not even catching up to what you had said, too focused on your work until he spoke.

“Texas?”

You pause, feeling a surge of embarrassment at what you let slip, only used to him existing inside your thoughts and not in front of you, warm flesh beneath your hands, the heat of him radiating even through the latex gloves. 

Your fingers flexed from where you were bracing yourself against the center of his chest, swallowing thickly when you suddenly noticed the steady beat of his heart underneath your palm. You refocused your attention on picking another shard of broken glass from just below his collarbone, trying to gather your thoughts enough for a somewhat reasonable answer.

“I just—” You bit your cheek, struggling with what to say, a sigh held deep in your lungs before you exhaled it slowly and mumbled, “You are from Texas, aren’t you?”

Your gaze shifted up to his neck, gently cleaning the dirt from a scrape there, your new focus of attention leaving you with a perfect view of the twitch of his lips from the corner of your eye.

“Guilty.” You can feel the rumble of his voice in his chest as he mumbles the word, and you quickly lift your hand from it, not realizing that your touch had lingered there even when you had moved away from that area of his body. “Just surprised you picked up on it, s’all.”

A little smile turned up on your lips; part pleased that you had gotten it right, part embarrassed that you had even thought of it, thought of him, that much.

Quiet fell between you and Texas for a while, as you made sure the cuts on his neck were clean before finally moving up to his face.

Your eyes met with his for the first time since he had sat down that night, and it was also the first time you noticed their color.

All that time he had plagued your mind, and you realized you hadn’t even really seen the color of his eyes. You had settled on brown, but sitting closer now, you saw the green surrounding the warmer color, creating a stunning hazel that was all you could see for a moment before your gaze snapped away, the heat of embarrassment filling you again as you pulled your focus back to his cuts.

You hesitated then, one hand hovering in the air before gently gripping his chin between a thumb and forefinger, tilting his face to different angles as you treated it, a remarkably easy task when he hardly winced with each piece of glass removed, seemingly unbothered by the pain.

Once again, you were sucked into the familiarity of the focus that came with your work, and it was Texas that broke it this time, your brain taking a moment to register what he had said.

“California.”

You paused, tweezers hovering over his cheekbone, eyes meeting that hazel again to see he was watching you, and you wondered just how long he had been doing so—the whole time? Why did you hope he was?

“How’d you know?”

Texas shrugged one shoulder, and you once again forced your attention back to your work, trying to ignore the weight of his gaze on your face now that you knew it was there.

“Lucky guess,” he said in that low timbre, and you laughed softly, shaking your head as you pulled the last shard of glass from a cut above his eyebrow, eyes lingering on a scar near his temple before dropping the glass into your tin of medical waste, full of all the once painful remnants of whatever had brought him back to you tonight.

You felt like an awful person, being glad that it had brought him back to you.

Once all the cuts were properly taken care of, you leaned back with a sigh, snapping the gloves off your hands and dropping them into the rest of the medical waste. By some old habit, you patted Texas on the knee before standing, wheeling your tray away with you as you declared him free to go once again.

“It was the accent,” he says, and you pause, looking back over your shoulder as he pushes himself to his feet, and you’re reminded once again of how big the man is when he’s not sitting still while you treat him. “Your accent gave it away. Sure as hell don’t sound East Coast.”

Another laugh left your lips, curling up into a smile as you shake your head and look back towards your remaining medical supplies. Dangerously low again after tonight, but in this moment now, you found yourself not caring just yet.

“Guilty,” you repeated his own affirmation from earlier, and one glance back showed the corner of his lips turning up into a small smirk that had much larger consequences on your heart, racing now at the sight of amusement on his stoic face before you quickly looked away again.

“Long way from home, Cali,” he says slowly, and your heart skips a goddamn beat now at that drawled nickname, as if he wasn’t doing enough already. 

“Same as you, huh?” you try to sound casual as you kept your gaze focused on shifting through your supplies, reorganizing them just to keep your mind busy, even as it marveled at how he hadn’t left already,

“Not nearly as much as you.” 

At the continued conversation, you finally turn, seeing him bent over at the waist and rifling through the beat-up backpack full of duct-taped holes that he had brought in with him.

You see the gun tucked into the back of the waistband of his jeans then, a sight that wasn’t surprising given the injuries he’d come to you with, but your brows still furrow, mind continuing to create different stories to solve the mystery of him before he straightens up and turns back to you. 

He holds out a bundle of bandages and gloves to you, and you try to hold back your excitement at the offering as much as you can, as thrilled by the promise they offered for your work as you were by the idea that he’d already had the supplies ready this time.

The idea that he’d been holding onto them for you.

Delusional, an inner voice chides you, but you smile down at the supplies anyway, rubbing a thumb across the box of gloves and sighing quietly as your mind brings forth a time long gone where you never would have thought twice about the availability of what was once such a common thing.

“It’s funny, isn’t it?” you say slowly, pondering how you had recognized his accent, attributed him to a long gone place, as he did you. “How even after all this time, we still remember those little things about a world that doesn’t exist anymore.”

He’s not looking at you anymore when you glance back up. The stoicism you had come to associate with him from just a few meetings was back, and you get the sense you had taken the rare offer of a conversation too far.

You thank him for the supplies, and he nods almost absentmindedly, seemingly half paying attention to you before he moves back towards the door, and you turn back to begin to organize your new supplies, eager to restock your workspace.

The only thing that stops you is—

“What’s your name, Cali?”

Your head lifts, body half-turning around to stare at him in shock. 

Nobody has asked for your name in years. 

It’s been so long since you’ve said it out loud that the syllables assigned to you at birth feel foreign in your mouth. It taunts you with a time long past, like a bad taste you have to spit out, and when you do, he repeats it back.

The way he says it is…different. He sounds it out just the same as you, but it sounds less wrong leaving his lips. He says it slowly, as if tasting each letter on his tongue, memorizing it before giving a nod and turning to leave.

“Wait.”

He does. 

For some reason, he stops when you tell him to, facing the door that he himself was the sole cause of its state hanging off its hinges, something he stares purposefully at when you ask for his own name.

Texas doesn’t look back as his voice wraps around the sounds of his own name, distaste similar to yours when you gave him your own dripping from his mouth as it curves around his syllables.

You start to say it back. The name, his name, Joel leaving your lips quietly, but he’s already back out the door before you can even sound out the M of his last name.

It leaves your lips anyway, his name echoing alone in your clinic, clutching the medical supplies tight to your chest.

Somewhere buried deep in your thoughts, you ponder over the idea that, just from the sheer intensity that radiated from the man the few times you had met him, Joel Miller memorizing somebody’s name feels like irrefutable danger, like you’re in for a very short life span. It’s a feeling you ignore, an instinct you try to forget about as you recall no hostility in his eyes, the hazel sharp as shrapnel you once cleaned from his body with none of the lethality when he repeated your name back to you.

Somewhere, buried even deeper, your heart races instead at the thought that he intends to say it again.

Joel leaves, but he always comes back. 

It’s never a social call. The world’s gone to shit; you don’t have the time, and you’re sure Joel doesn’t have the patience.

He shows up in your doorway when he’s injured, and leaves you with enough medical supplies to keep you going until the next time he comes along. At its core, it's a business transaction. He’s just continuing to repay a debt to you so he doesn’t owe you anything. There’s nothing fundamentally personal about it.

That doesn’t stop you from looking forward to those visits. You never know when Joel’s going to show up next, and it does more than keep you on your toes; it holds you in anticipation, keeping those daydreams in the forefront in your mind rather than the back whenever you have time to yourself now.

Because each time he comes through, he leaves you with another snapshot of himself. Another glimpse into the lives he lived once and lives now—usually the former rather than the latter, much to your surprise.

You hold every reveal of the aloof man close; purely off-hand, inconsequential things, like a love for going to the movies now rendered nonexistent, or the time he and his brother rode motorcycles cross country. Those things don’t matter anymore, but you like hearing about them. You like knowing those things about him, fitting the real pieces of him in with your imaginary ones to solve a puzzle that only existed inside your head. It fuels your imagination, spurs on your delusion.

You’re not actually sure if he realizes how much you know about him at this point, while simultaneously knowing nearly nothing about him at all. The important things, like why he keeps showing up with all those injuries, remain unknown.

Joel brings it up, just once, off-hand as you’re wrapping up his shoulder in a spot where you could tell a bullet had grazed him.

“You don’t ask.”

Your hands had paused, eyes lifting from your work to his face, glancing over his side profile before his head turned and he was looking down at you from inches away.

He was waiting for an answer, but your mind was having trouble keeping up with what he had even said, too startled by the swirling of brown and green in his eyes when they were right there. A color as warm and solid as the earth beneath your feet, grounding you to him, pulling you in with that same undeniable magnetism he had first stumbled into your life with.

His facial hair had gotten longer, dark whiskers of hair framing cracked lips, a split down the top one that you had carefully cleaned earlier. You hadn't even thought twice about it when dabbing it clean, but now you couldn’t see anything else, not until—

“Cali?”

You blinked, head snapping up as your back went ramrod straight, and you quickly turned back to where your hands had frozen mid-bandage.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

“About what?” you forced the words from your lips, trying not to think about how they ached to have his own pressed to them, split lip and all molding firmly and then gently against yours—

Oh god, no, what were you thinking?

“About any of it,” Joel grumbled, waving a large hand towards his face with a vague gesture, seeming to think you had just been observing his injuries even with the way you’re now staring at thick fingers, long veins, prominent and begging to be traced—

No! Stop!

“You don’t have a policy of asking your patients questions?” he asked, arching a thick brow down at you, and you curse the way your stomach flips at the sight.

“Believe it or not, I actually have a strong one not to,” you finally answered with his shoulder now wrapped firmly, fingers grazing against the gauze before you pushed your stool away from him, gloves snapping off your hands and ignoring the ache to touch him without them. “You do what you have to in order to survive. My job is to make sure you keep surviving. Not to ask questions.”

Joel hummed, and you felt the weight of his gaze on you up until he handed you a new bundle of supplies and left again.

Sometimes, you wonder if he’s picked up anything about you in turn, the way you’ve locked away every small fragment you've learned of him. You wonder if he even cares to listen during those rare moments where you might let something about yourself, past or present, slip.

You dare to dream that he does.

Foolish. 

You can almost say with certainty that Joel doesn’t realize the things about himself that you’ve picked up on. Like the movies thing—it had been revealed through slurred words at your last-ditch effort to distract him by asking him questions through a particularly painful procedure, and he had rambled in delirium about popcorn and previews for no more than half a minute before promptly passing out beneath your moving hands.

It had caused bubbling panic in the moment, but when the moment had passed and he had awoken with embarrassment about not being able to tolerate the pain, it seemed all recollection of what he had shared had disappeared.

Or maybe he was just embarrassed about that too.

You would surely never admit that the thought of the large, intimidating man even experiencing an emotion as mundane as embarrassment only endeared you to him more.

And the motorcycle trip—well, that hadn’t even been Joel’s choice in revealing.

A few years into gaining your most returning patient—“we have to get your picture on the wall,” you had jested to him about simultaneously having the best (can somehow survive a plethora of injuries) and worst (has a penchant to keep getting them) luck at one point, much to his silent judgment at your attempted joke—he had entered the clinic the same way he did upon that first meeting, and you winced at the way the door banged against the wall in the same place it'd once left a dent during that first visit from him.

A sharp disapproval at treating your humble place of work like this was on the tip of your tongue, before you saw that Joel wasn’t alone, nor was he the one currently injured.

Any questions other than those pertinent for your new patient’s survival were rapidly dismissed from crowding your fast-moving mind, the same way as always. You helped Joel set the man down, hardly even realizing he was talking, that they were both talking, until after you had snapped on your gloves and assessed the burn wound on the back of the man's forearm.

“It worked out, didn’t it?”

“Hardly,” Joel bit back, voice rough with a harsh disapproval bordering on anger, the sound of which made the hairs raise on the back of your neck as you busied yourself getting cool compresses ready. “It was goddamn stupid, is what it was. Nearly got yourself killed.”

“But it worked.”

“Tommy—”

“Lighten up, big brother,” this Tommy said while you checked his pulse and lifted his arm above his chest, and now you understood the energy filling up the entire space of the room.

There was a blood bond between the bickering men, tested by the fraying of nerves and something deeper, some unnamable tension that came from something you didn’t know, maybe wouldn’t even understand. Some after effect of the transition into this world you now lived in, something that was none of your business.

Even then, the way Tommy’s body was constantly shifting and Joel hovering over your shoulder as they kept arguing while you tried to treat the burn is what made you finally snap.

“Hey!”

The clear echo of your voice layered over the argument, and instantly broke it, both men turning down to see your narrowed gaze shifting between the two of them.

“You need to sit still because I’m not fond of breaking burn blisters, and you won’t be either,” you ordered sternly, not wavering under the attention of the man finally focused on you for the first time since coming in, before you whipped around to Joel still hovering behind you. “And you!”

For a moment, you found a bit of humor in the utterly stupefied look on the man’s face that matched that of his brother’s, before you stood from your stool so you were chest to chest with Joel.

“You need to stop breathing down my goddamn neck and let me work,” you said firmly, pointing towards the far wall, the order clear in your eyes without even having to say it at this point.

You knew Joel saw it, and to his credit all you saw was his jaw ticking, a brief flare to his nostrils before he spun on his heel, marching towards the wall to lean against it heavily. His arms crossed across his broad chest while he watched you sit and go back to cooling Tommy’s burn.

Order was regained in your clinic, and you smiled a little to yourself at having established it, before Tommy shifted forward slightly towards you and muttered conspiratorially, but not at all quietly, “No wonder you got even this hardass to like you.”

A tremor briefly overtook your fingers with the shock of the unexpected words before you flexed them, willing your grip to steady before renewing your focus on his burn injury as Joel snarled from his spot you had assigned him against the wall, “Shut the fuck up, Tommy.”

Your gaze snaps up, making sure Joel hadn’t moved, eyes narrowing when you saw he had pushed off the wall just slightly. When he notices your look, he shifts backwards, back hitting the wall again as his glare shifts off to the side, towards the loose hinges on the door now in even worse condition thanks to both Miller brothers.

There’s a chuckle from Tommy, more bristling from Joel, and the illusive taunt of hope wound tight in your chest, but nobody says anything else until you’re sending them off with the rest of your low supply of lotion that would be adequate for burn treatment, along with instructions on how to take care of the now loosely bandaged burn.

Tommy nods, thanking you when Joel snaps at him to show some manners. The younger brother leaves with a pointed look towards your door and an offhand, not unkind comment on getting it fixed, followed up quickly by an offer of doing the work himself to pay back your kindness. 

Not a debt, but kindness, the exact verbiage he used himself in a Southern drawl a bit lighter, more intentionally charming than Joel’s rough allure.

Joel is still irritated, more than you’ve ever seen, but he still nods at you with a mumble of “thanks, Cali,” before following his brother as the younger man is saying “so that’s Cali!”

There's a hard smack to Tommy's shoulder to direct him away, Joel's reprimanding tone saying things you couldn’t hear before they disappear around a corner.

It was then that you decided you liked Tommy.

You like him even more when he stops by a couple weeks later to actually fix the door like he mentioned, filling your head with stories about his older brother you could have only ever dreamed of.

Because of Tommy you have reasons to giggle into your pillow that night at the thought of the two born and raised Texas boys racing across the country on motorcycles, smiling stupidly against the coarse fabric at the image of a younger Joel Miller with wind in his hair and a carefree smile on his face.

You’d only ever seen tiny twitches of those lips into halfway smirks, and so you dreamed of a time where they weren’t chapped from the smog of QZ air or split from punches to the face, but soft and pink and curling up into a real smile.

You dreamed of making him smile again.

Sometimes it takes a while for a visit from Joel.

Weeks turn into months in-between those short moments where you see his face for quick patch-ups and restocks of supplies.

Once there was about a year that passed without so much of a glimpse of him, and you had tried to settle yourself into the likely idea that he may have finally gotten himself hurt so bad he couldn’t even stumble into your clinic, when he proved your hidden, greatest fear wrong by turning up again.

He had limped through the door without a word, letting in a cold burst of snow laden air with him before it shut. A sigh of relief was exhaled from your lips, dry and chapped from the harsh winter months, and you hurried to him, slinging his arm over your shoulder as you helped him through the room to sit.

Peeling the blood caked jeans from his legs with a mumbled apology of the chill permeating your clinic this time of year, you barely got out one word out after of, “You—”

“Gotta stop meeting you like this, I know,” Joel sighed, avoiding your gaze as you settled on your stool with a familiar squeak of the old furniture, pulling on a pair of gloves you had set aside specifically for him months ago, ensuring that you’d have at least one left for him in the hopes that he could still make it back to you in one piece someday.

Even if that meant one less for someone down the line, potentially sacrificing a life for the uncertain possibility of saving somebody else.

It was unlike you.

Selfish, the inner voice of reason chides you again, as it always speaks in his presence.

And as always, you ignore it.

Your eyes flickered up from critically observing the stab wound haphazardly sewn above his knee—his own work, no doubt, and you were surprised at your frustration that he hadn’t come to you instead. You figured it must have not been an option, some reason having kept him from you, but you still fixed him with a hard look that the surly man actually shifted under, wary under the weight of your scrutiny, for whatever that was worth.

Shaking your head, you turned back to set about the process of thoroughly cleaning the wound, checking for any sign of infection and treating his body properly, because somebody had to do it if he wasn’t going to.

It wasn’t like he was reckless. Despite your visits with the man being few and far between—if they could even really be called visits in the first place—you had caught enough of a glimpse of who he was to know he was far from irrational. He wouldn’t have made it this far if he was.

Joel Miller could keep himself alive, of this you had no doubt.

But the repercussions that came with his survival, infection of the body or wounds that went deeper than that of flesh or blood, were things that you learned he merely shouldered as a consequence.

A burden you would lessen, even if all it meant was making sure one wound out of many wouldn’t fester, if he came to you with it.

It wasn’t until this one was treated and redressed, and he was pulling his pants back on while you stared down at the gloves on your hands—a pair that he had given you, that you had saved to save him, now speckled with his blood, a reminder that he was still alive but maybe just barely—and the words you had actually wanted to say when he came in, the ones that you had held back when he interrupted you, echoed through your mind again.

You scared me.

They aren’t spoken, not with words. Instead, your hand pats his knee again after his jeans are zipped up, fingers brushing against where his properly tended wound is now hidden beneath the heavy fabric.

The touch lingers, for just a second, before you’re up and moving away.

To your surprise, Joel follows.

He rifles through his backpack, and you notice a few new holes, more spots where there’s recently applied duct tape. You absentmindedly wonder why he sticks with this one. If he’s able to find and trade other sorts of goods, couldn’t he get a new backpack?

Thanks is given by reflex when he gives you the supplies, even though you know with this trade, you’re even once again. He doesn’t expect your gratitude, maybe doesn’t even want it, but there’s a sure cause for it this time as you shift through the pile to observe the weight of what you felt sitting unassuming at the bottom, but couldn't discern until you saw it.

Gloves.

Not thin latex, but heavy fabric, fitting in the palm of your freezing hand.

Not medical, but practical, even as the promise of warmth had now become a luxury.

Not for patients, but for you.

Joel had gotten this for you.

When you look back up at him, eyes wide with shock, he’s already explaining it away with a dismissive wave of his hand and gruff drawl, “Gotta keep those fingers in proper working condition, right?”

Your brow furrows then, more gratitude trapped inside your mouth as you notice something again that had lingered in your mind since he had shown up that night, something you couldn’t ignore anymore.

That this Joel in front of you now was different.

Joel had never been a beacon of warmth, but he’s never been colder.

He won’t meet your eye, doesn’t even seem bothered by his lack of ability to keep eye contact now. He’s rigid and tense, something pent-up deep inside of him, worse than ever before, and that’s when you know that whatever had happened since you saw him last had taken another piece of whatever he was. Another part of whoever you dreamed about once existing, gone.

“Hey,” you mumble, and he glances back at you, surely seeing the way your brows are knitted above eyes that put your concern on full display, just judging by the way he stiffened.

He waves another dismissive hand, looks away with arms crossed over his chest in a way that you’d seen before. It was like he was physically containing whatever emotions he was experiencing to his own body, holding them in with the flex of his muscles through his beat up winter jacket. A silent show of his strength, trying to protect himself with it, even if it couldn't stop whatever it was he was feeling.

You expect him to leave then, but his weather and time worn boots are glued to the ground, unmoving.

Eventually, he speaks, and the two words with the flat affect shake you to your core.

“Tommy’s gone.”

Fear blankets your body and sets every nerve on fire, pain flashing across your features as Joel sees it and quickly shakes his head, adding simply, nearly without emotion, “Left.”

The daunting grief at the possible death of the younger Miller brother fades, even as an emptiness remains when you softly say, “Oh.”

“Yeah.”

Silence fills the space, and tension with it, setting you on edge with Joel in a way you’d never felt with him before.

“Fireflies,” he finally supplies, and you nod, looking down to the winter gloves you still held tight in your grasp, even as you set the rest of your new stock down.

So that was what had happened. The last thread holding the brothers together had snapped, and Tommy had left, taking a part of Joel with him. Maybe the last part of him, of who he had once been.

No wonder the man before you was even more hardened than you had ever seen him before.

“I see,” you whisper, and neither of you says anything more after that.

Not until you look back up at his face, refocus on the familiar features, noticing a few new lines of age in the year that had passed since last seeing him, some white whiskers in the edges of his beard, and—

Your hand is reaching out before you can stop to think, gripping his chin between thumb and forefinger, tilting his face down towards you in a way similar to when you’d treated him in the past.

Maybe by reflex from those moments, he lets you do it, even as the sharp clarity of his hazel eyes meet yours in confusion.

“What’s this?” you ask, fingers hovering over the new red line of scarring across the bridge of his nose, tracing the length of it without touch.

His eyes flash, not with anger, but with an emotion you don’t recognize. He tries to pull away, but your grip tightens, keeping him in place as you wait for an answer.

“Nothin’,” he mumbles, your eyes narrowing at the evasive answer, the way his gaze shifts away.

“Texas, this isn’t—”

Joel’s hand finds yours then, thick fingers wrapping around your smaller ones to pull them away from where you were still holding his chin, and the warmth of his skin seeping into yours hits you with a jolt as you only then realize this was touch.

Skin on skin, the very thing you had been aching for, dreaming of, for years. Those thoughts of him that kept you going on lonely days and cold nights, longing for something you could never have, an impossible reality now on the edge of your fingertips as he enveloped them in a rough palm, in his touch.

Touch.

Touch you had instigated, without the barrier of medical gloves between you. Without the clear lines that defined all you were to each other��doctor and patient, business transactions, a debt repaid again and again. Lines that now blurred when he didn’t drop your hand right away.

Blurring further, obscuring your vision in a rose-tinted blush when his grip tightened, and your breath caught in your throat at the feeling of him holding on to you.

“‘Ts fine,” Joel assures quietly, your fingers finally slipping from his, the clear hazel of those eyes you had spent a year waiting and hoping to see again, not meeting yours even once.

He hasn’t looked at you even once.

Just like that, you snap from a slow motion daze back to true reality. Your fantasies hit the ground hard, leaving you shattered with the empty aches of your heart forever unfulfilled in the dark crevices of your mind.

But even then, you can’t look away. 

Again, you hear the admission aching to be revealed, slipping from the back of your mind to the forefront on waves of anxiety and need that grew larger, more disastrous, crashing through all your thoughts as you watched him looking away, but not leaving.

You scared me.

The words fill your mouth, waiting to be spoken.

But they aren’t.

Even though you wanted to tell him how his absence had filled you with fear, terror that only abates whenever he’s with you until he inevitably leaves again, you don’t dare to say it. Not when he doesn’t even look at you, even though you can’t bring yourself to look away.

The only thing you do say is an assurance that you’d make it home safe when he tells you to before he’s finally gone again.

It’s the first time that you notice that each time he leaves you with a new piece of himself, he takes a piece of you with him.

“You’re scaring my patients, Texas.”

“Good.”

“Joel.”

It’s been like this since Tommy left.

Joel visits you now when he’s nothing less than the perfect picture of health.

At first, he brings you things—the usual, necessary items that keep your unsanctioned practice running. You thank him each time, albeit with puzzled looks when there’s no visible harm on his body, confusion that only furthers when he lingers.

Eventually, he drops by without anything at all. Nothing in hand, sometimes no backpack in tow, but always with that gun tucked into the back of his waistband.

For a while, you think nothing of it. You’re glad that he’s showing his face, that you’re not glancing up with baited breath each time your door creaks open, hoping for just a glimpse of the man to assure you that he was alright.

Joel lets you see often enough now that he’s still in one piece, and for a while, you’re foolish enough to think that it’s purely for the benefit of your peace of mind.

Then one day, when he’s walking out, a patient is walking in—a younger man you’ve seen more than once, treating wounds similar to those that Joel’s had, though not quite as severe.

What is severe is the look Joel instantly shoots at him as they pass by each other, your heart sinking when the injured man scurries towards the available clinic bed while the door shuts.

You try to push it out of your mind, try to ignore the way your patient keeps watching the closed door with baited breath, until he breathes out with certain trepidation, “That’s Joel Miller.”

Pausing in the middle of splinting his broken finger, your brow furrows, glancing up at the nervous scrunching of his face as you reply slowly, “Yes, it is.”

His gaze finally shifts from the door towards you, then back again quickly, like he’s afraid the mentioned man will burst through the moment he’s not looking.

“You—” A gulp, and then the shaky question of, “You know him, don’t you?”

You finish bandaging his injury, gently placing his hand back in his lap and replying honestly, even with your uncertainty lingering at his tone, “Of course I do.”

He doesn’t say anything more until he’s leaving, glancing back at you warily, seeming to struggle over what he wants to say before settling for, “He’s…he’s got a reputation, you know. Lots of folks are scared of that Joel Miller.”

With a nervous wringing of your hands behind your back, and a calm smile on your face, you assure him, “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

Of course, you don’t know that Joel’s been waiting.

There’s no way to be aware that he’s been in the alley next to the clinic the entire time you treated your patient, no way to know that he trails the man the moment he leaves the safety of your building.

You’ll never know that the man you treated isn’t so good either. Or that he’s not nearly as bad as Joel.

Somebody always owed somebody else, after all. You knew it well, knew that Joel paid you back for this very reason.

But you didn’t know what happened when you owed him.

Or what happened when he went to collect.

And Joel ensured you were never getting anywhere near it. 

A sentiment made clear with another broken finger for the lackey of a rival smuggler late on a payment that had sought you out for the last time that day, along with a painful promise made that he and his buddies would never step foot in your clinic again.

There was no way for you to know what happened that day, but you noticed the shift afterwards.

The way Joel takes up residence along the wall of your clinic and doesn’t leave when patients come in. How he watches them, the mere weight of his sole attention setting them on edge.

You tell them it’s fine, shoot him a glare that tells him to back off. And maybe it works for a little, but not for long.

You assure yourself that it’s fine. A reputation means nothing, and you know Joel Miller, don’t you? Or you know all that matters. And you know that there’s nothing to be afraid of.

Until there is.

You’re gone.

It’s the first time since meeting you that Joel stops by the clinic, and you’re not there.

Well into the morning, and you’re not sitting there at your little makeshift desk. At this time, you should be half-rising from your stool he’s been meaning to find a replacement for just at the sound of the door opening.

You're always ready to spring into action, to save a life or make one better. Like you’ve done for him, time and time again.

It’s also the first time since before Tommy left that the door is swinging off its hinges again, and that’s when Joel knows.

You’re gone.

He doesn’t need to see the ransacked clinic, but he looks anyway. Searches frantically through the overturned furniture, your well-organized stock of supplies now a mess, some missing because he knows how much you have of everything, he silently keeps track along with you so he knows what to pick up when he and Tess go on runs.

There’s a panic settling in his gut, a burning ache crawling its way up his throat, and his hands twitch with the need to do something, to make somebody hurt, make them pay, make them talk to bring you back.

Back to the work that is your pride and joy, the four walls that have been your safety for years, a safety you’ve only ever extended to others, one you offered to him.

Joel needs to bring you back to him.

No time is wasted when he gets back to Tess. She knows you by now, having visited the clinic herself with or without Joel, for injuries or for chats. He’s noticed his partner always smiling after, the two of you forming a kinship that warms what fragments remain of his heart like so little else can.

Tess is taking charge in a way that’s familiar, and Joel is grateful for that. He doesn’t know what he’d do if left to his own devices right now, uncertain who’d wind up dead in the streets if let loose to find you on his own terms.

But he takes solace in knowing that Tess will let him do what he does best when it's time.

And when it is time, when they’ve cornered the last person who’s had your name leave their lips, the bone of their arm shatters underneath a brutal stomp and twist of Joel’s heavy boot after a series of ruthless hits that have left them begging for mercy on the ground.

But it gets them what they need—a location, information on a deal gone south for a specific kind of medicine that these smugglers had a monopoly on, medicine you most likely needed to save one patient, and deemed it a risk worth taking just for that.

Smugglers that Joel had very specifically warned to stay the fuck away from you.

The whimpering man under his boot gets a bullet to the head for not heeding his warning, for taking you from him, and they’re on their way without another word.

Fear burns so hot that it singes his veins, making him move faster, hit harder when they get to the warehouse. Red is all he sees and it’s all he feels, running through his fingers as he pulls triggers and chokes windpipes before twisting, snapping. Blood, hot and metallic, staining his skin in splatters up to his forearms as he moves from one to the next.

Joel has lost too much to make it quick, and the thought of losing you too only adds to his rage, making his preemptive vengeance all the more deadly. He lays waste to them all, sparing not a soul of his brutality. 

His shiv sinks into a neck, and he leaves it there for too long before pulling it out, leaving a streak of evidence of another life he’s stolen across his face as he turns, more than ready for the next one.

Movement catches the corner of his eye, and he’s lifting his gun towards where he sees legs pushing against the ground, a body scuttling away into a corner out of his sight, cowering behind a tower of boxes.

Joel’s finger is already on the trigger before he sees the shoes peeking out behind the cardboard, the tips of well-worn sneakers that he knows well, having seen them turn and move quickly around one tiny room for years.

Relief doesn’t rush to him yet, not until he’s rounded the boxes, not until he really sees you.

There’s an angry purple bruise forming along your jaw, and fury burns hotter, seeping through the edges of sweet relief that you’re okay, although injured.

You whimper, and his heart breaks, reaching out a hand towards you to help you up, to bring you back to him.

At the movement, you press your back against the wall, cowering away even further as your eyes fix onto his face.

Joel’s brow furrows, anger and relief both ebbing away slowly, and he says your name, holding his palm out further for you to take.

You whimper again.

Eyes wide and clouded with fear, lip quivering as you shrink away from the hand that he had stained with blood again and again to find you, to bring you back.

Above where your back is pressed to the wall, there is a line of windows. They offer a view to the first floor of the warehouse, now littered with bodies he had left, a clear trail of evidence of his path of destruction from the moment he had entered the building.

And that’s when Joel realizes you’re afraid of him.

The worst part is, he’s not surprised, not even in the slightest.

On the contrary, he thinks some part of him had been waiting for this. Waiting for you to finally open your eyes and see him for what he is.

Someone like you, who has spent her whole life patching up the kind of wounds he inflicts, who saves lives and gives while all he does is takes and takes, by his own choice or some kind of curse—of course you’re afraid.

Joel’s bloodstained fingers twitch, remembering the softness of your own the one and only time he had held them that cold winter night. His hand hovers in the air halfway to you, yearning to comfort a hand that heals with one that only knows how to kill.

But then you flinch at the twitch of his fingers, having witnessed their deadliness, and he pulls back.

When Tess arrives a moment later, you turn to her, allowing the other woman to pull you to your feet. You lean heavily on her as she helps you leave, takes you back, but not to him.

Because Joel knows now with certainty that it's a distance that was never meant to be closed.

He knows it's for the better.

Weeks turn into months once again.

Joel doesn’t come back.

As time passes, you reflect on the man you’d known, and the one everybody else knew. You compare the image of those half-smirks that you always hoped would turn into a smile to the face splattered with blood as he ruthlessly murdered any man in his path.

You feel like a fool. For more reason than one, but mostly because you knew.

You had seen the signs of just who Joel Miller was from the first time you met him, signs that you had ignored every time they lit up right in front of your face, blaring signals that you replaced with the naïve images you had created in your mind’s eye. Fantasies of a man that may have existed once, long ago, but not anymore.

It wasn’t the killing that bothered you. You knew what people had to do to survive, and you had always known just from his injuries that this was an indisputable truth heavily ingrained in Joel’s life, no matter who you imagined him to be before.

No, it wasn’t the killing that scared you, but the slaughter. 

What you were afraid of was his lack of mercy. His lethality. His intent to make them suffer.

After days of being held at the whims of dangerous men, only to discover that the only man you had come to consider a safe space in years was just as, if not more dangerous than them…

It rattled you.

Changed you.

Left a scar that even you didn’t know how to heal.

In the days that followed, you were glad that Joel kept his distance. You needed time to recover, to process what you had gone through, what you’d seen.

After a few weeks passed, you found yourself staring at the door, waiting once again for him to come back. Waiting to talk to him for once, to say the words that had plagued your mind once again. Even if they had shifted, they still rang true.

You scared me.

Because he did.

Joel Miller himself scared you, and you didn’t want him to.

Because you knew, you knew, that he’d done it for you. He'd done it to save you.

He’d saved you the same way you saved him, in the only way that he knew how.

Maybe it was senseless. Maybe it was wrong, and horrible, and unforgivable.

But he had done it for you.

So you wait for Joel to come back.

Months fade into years; one, and then two, then five and still counting.

Joel Miller never comes back.

At some point, you hear that he’s gone. Left the QZ completely with Tess at his side and never looked back.

You hope that they made it, wherever they were going.

You hope that he doesn’t think of you the way that you think of him. The image of him plaguing your mind every night, broken memories of everything you had memorized about him constantly shifting through your mind, a lonely ache filling in your heart that you knew was your own fault.

He had bloodied his knuckles for you, and you had turned away.

God, you hated yourself for turning away.

You missed him, with every breath, with every moment the door of your clinic opened and you glanced up with the automatic reflex of hoping it was him, even though he was long gone.

You know it's for the better.

Joel is not supposed to be here.

Any form of radio communication is strictly forbidden. He knows this well, knows that if he’s found here, he could be risking everything, even if his brother is married to the woman who keeps Jackson up and running smoothly.

But he’s here anyway, hands trembling with the cold and something else, something that settles deeper into his bones as he holds the microphone in hand.

Waiting.

It’s his second time up here in a week, and though he’d been lucky enough to not be caught the first time, he wasn’t an optimist.

You’re a cynic, a voice echoes in the back of his head, and his eyes flutter shut with the image of you that never seemed to quite leave him, even with the years that have gone by.

But you’re not, his own voice, younger, replies to you in his memories.

I try not to be, you replied honestly, one of your first discussions when you had begun to settle into each other’s presence. Don’t think I could keep doing this if I was.

Joel’s gaze darts down to the small notepad he had brought with him, the pages where he had written one message only to cross it out, rewrite it, and torn pages of it to throw away in frustration.

In front of him was the one left uncrossed, his eyes scanning the words he could only hope had gotten relayed to you, the message he had left for the black market radio specialist in Boston earlier that week.

Found a nice place that could use a doctor, followed by a date and time for a conversation, not wanting to air Jackson’s location without hearing confirmation from you yourself.

Following that sentence, another one, the last thing he had said: they could use you.

And another, crossed out after, the last thing that he would never say: I could use you.

Joel’s head lifts when the static on the old machine clears, a click resounding through the speakers of the radio, and his heart races with the weight of the microphone in his hands.

It’s lifted halfway to his mouth before he hesitates. Your name hangs heavy in his mouth, syllables he had not sounded out in years, but when he finally says it, it feels…natural. Like not a day has passed since the letters of your name were hanging on his lips, the way he always longed for you to be.

There is a pause, long and heavy, and Joel feels his heart sink with every second that passes.

This was stupid. So incredibly stupid. 

The last time he had seen you, there was fear in your eyes. Fear of him, well-placed at that, and surely he had taken up no voluntary thoughts of yours ever since other than your worst nightmares.

Surely you were—

“...Hey there, Texas.”

When your voice crackles to life through the speaker, Joel sighs, a sound filled with relief and a rush of longing he thought his mind had forgotten, but his body—no, his soul—had not.

And then a whisper, softly in return, with a smile on his lips.

“Howdy, Cali.”

taglist: @darkroastjoel @thetriumphantpanda @dinsdjrn @cavillscurls @tightjeansjavi @dissentientss @harriedandharassed @ladyfiery47 (tag won't work!)

[vampyrial]

thoroughbred. | pt. iii: need

summary: reader takes a drug that makes her unspeakably horny but anyone would think Levi was the one who was on it

warnings: reader deals with some weird unexpected feelings about the outcome of her pregnancy test

contains: nsfw (duh), breeding, aphrodisiacs, a little comfort from Levi, Hange is always right

author’s note: sorry I took so long to update i was in a silly goofy mood

part i/part ii

You had to admit you’d been curious about the little vials that sat on the nightstand. It wasn’t that you needed them but you’d heard their effects were potent, apparently it made your arousal more pressing, turned it into almost tortuous need to cum. That sounded a little appealing to you but you didn’t know how to bring it up to Levi. You didn’t want him thinking that you needed it and you really didn’t trust your own eloquence at expressing your desire. 

However, Levi saw you gaze at them while you laid in bed exhausted and pulled an explanation from you. “What, you think you might need it?” He asked “I’m not asking you to go again if you’ve had enough.” You shook your head. “It’s just…” You slurred. “I wanted…I wanted to know how it feels.” Levi stared at you skeptically, forcing you to further explain even though your brain was melting. “I wanted to know how it felt to be teased after I took it. Everyone says it makes you so aroused it hurts. I…I kinda like the idea of that.” You were too fucked out to even be embarrassed.

You were expecting Levi to call you out for being a pervert but you only heard him laugh which broke you out of the your sleepy haze. Your eyelids which had previously been drooping, shot open to see Levi handing you the vial. “Then go ahead. I’ll help you.” You hesitated for a moment before you smiled gratefully and downed the sickly sweet liquid.

The aphrodisiac took effect fast and soon you were squirming, your body felt so hot and every touch made you twitch. Levi obviously enjoyed this development more than he thought he would. He was more of a tease now, working you up slowly with very light touches. Pulling away each time you try to move to move your hips up, trying to feel more of his touch. Only continuing to touch you when you laid back, allowing him to be solely responsible for your pleasure. You ended up gripping the sheets trying to keep from moving all while you begged him for just a little more. 

“Leave everything to me. I don’t want you doing any work at all.”

Your body was exhausted but you couldn’t help but twitch and writhe under his hands. He took it slowly, working you up only to push your hips back down until you let him do as he wished, uninterrupted. You laid flat on your back, trying to resist riding his fingers as he pressed three of them deep inside you. You whimpered, you begged, you had tears in your eyes. And…he enjoyed all of it. He had an earnest smile on his face, not even a mean smirk, his face lit up at the sight of you like this. He was legitimately having fun. Somewhere in your love drunken mind, you were glad for it even though it felt as though you’d burst into tears if he wouldn’t let you cum.

“Oh, please…please, I can’t…” You begged once more and you saw a flicker of something in his eye, sheer glee.

“You can and you will.” Stern as ever, though his voice was soft. He set a punishing pace with his fingers, trailing kisses down your body starting at your sweaty face. It didn’t seem to bother him how much of a mess you’d become under his touch, in fact, you had every reason to believe it pleased him immensely from the soft groans he made each time you squeezed around his fingers. 

You closed your eyes at some point, the sight of him only exacerbating the throbbing need for more. You could feel his kissing trailing downward until he reached your cunt and seemed to get a bit distracted from teasing you. Your eyes popped open the second his tongue reached your clit. His mouth clinged to your clit and he simply decided to stay there nursing at it, groaning at your sounds, soft vibrations that only bring you closer. He pulls his fingers out of you with a wet smack so that he can trace his tongue over your entrance. 

He becomes so focused there at your cunt, licking up all the slick between your folds, that you think he might not mind if you try to roll your hips again. You’re wrong. The second your hips move up and your hands grasp his hair, he pulls away, seizing your hands and holding them at your sides. He looks up at you, his gaze turned stern again, wet from the nose down with your arousal. It makes you throb with need despite yourself, you’d been so close, so close that time. “I-I’m sorry,” You mumbled, panting.

“No, you aren’t,” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “But you will be.”

Before you could even respond, he had dragged you to the end of the bed, pushing your legs back further than you thought you were even capable of. He pushed in with a hard thrust that took your breath away and set an intense pace, uncharacteristically unable to control himself. You came after a few seconds of his feverish thrusts, unable to resist any longer. Levi didn’t stop or slow down even, desperately rutting impossibly deep and nearly growling like an animal as he did so, as he felt the silken squeeze of your orgasm. You were vaguely afraid your cunt had turned him feral. He laced his fingers through yours, holding both your hands so tightly it hurt, pressing them to the bed. 

All the while, you were making the most ungodly noises that might have embarrassed you if only you could hear anything over the wet smacking and the sound of Levi’s breath catching in his throat, his low groans rumbling from deep in his throat. He was finding it difficult to slow down even though you were so sensitive that his smallest movement made your vision go white. Levi came surprisingly quickly this time, not that you were complaining, you didn’t know if it was the drugs or something else that made you feel as though electrified the moment he came inside you. It was euphoric, the stall in his thrusts, his gasp, the way that he buried his face in your neck, his hands lifting your hips slightly so that they’d be flush against him. It was amazing how he never wasted a drop, even like this. Always so dutiful. 

Your head lolled back, your eyes closed and you thought the two of you were finished. But Levi, who hadn’t yet pulled out, began thrusting again this time more languidly. “Again?” His voice raw and a little hoarse. You nodded, struck dumb with pleasure. You would never have denied him anything. That time he was far more gentle, featherlight kisses at the corner of your mouth, whispering in your ear telling you to cum for him again. You were both sticky, sweaty and in complete disarray by the time you were ready to pull away from each other but neither of you really seemed to mind. You let him shower first while you gathered up the strength to get out of bed.

Sometime after your days together ended again but before your next set of meetings, you needed to report to the fertility center to be examined and tested. For some reason, you had butterflies, your heart was racing and you were anticipating bad news. You tried to remind yourself that you hadn’t been trying to get pregnant for very long, but you knew that if you found out that you weren’t you would inevitably be disappointed. 

Hange was your practitioner and greeted you warmly. They were very reassuring all throughout. “Don’t worry about the results, that’s my job,” they said as you waited for the test results to appear. “I’m not really supposed to be talking about Levi with you, in theory, but between you and me; I’m sure he won’t mind if he has to put in some extra time.” It made you smile like an idiot, looking at the floor to try and hide your embarrassment. “Yeah? How would you know?” you asked, trying not to read too much into it. They shrugged. “I just know.”

The results appeared on the paper test. Negative. You sighed. Your stomach dropped. It was ridiculous…as long as you weren’t pregnant, you got to routinely have sex with the man you desired the most. No one would fault you for not being pregnant so soon, it was normal. And it wasn’t as if you had any particular yearning for children before. So why did you feel so disappointed? Maybe there was part of you that wanted to be pregnant with Levi’s child for reasons that didn’t have anything to do with the project. Maybe the things you had babbled out, the things you imagined as Levi toyed with your body so efficiently were not just heat of the moment desires. Maybe your yearning went far deeper than you thought. 

“I’d offer you a hug if I wasn’t just handling your urine,” Hange said in a surprisingly serious tone. “Please don’t look so disappointed. It just takes some time.”

You shake your head, trying to clear away the odd melancholy rising up. “I know, it’s okay.”

Hange gave you a sympathetic look before sighing and cataloging the results. You left quickly, rushing out the front door and bumping into someone. “I’m sorry,” you mumbled before returning to reality and seeing that it was Levi, looking at you with concern. 

“Watch where you’re going next time, what the hell are we going to do if you walk into a door and give yourself a concussion?” He said. “I’m sorry…” you apologized again. “I wasn’t saying it to make you…” He trailed off. Analyzing the dazed look on your face, his concern only grew. He decided to cut the scolding and get straight to the issue at hand. “What happened?”

“I’m not pregnant,” you admitted. “I got the test and it turned out negative. It was just routine but I didn’t expect it was gonna feel this…disappointing.” Levi’s expression softened. Some part of him was disappointed too but it wasn’t at you, it wasn’t because he didn’t believe you couldn’t do it just because you weren’t pregnant right then. It was just that the image of you swollen with his child, plagued him day in and day out. The subject of his wet dreams and the image he found his mind drifting to when he needed to relax, to fall asleep. It was like a touchstone at this point although he knew it was odd and perverse to be imagining something like that, to be wanting you more than he should. It was a little bit bitter to see that it hadn’t yet come to fruition and he was weary of what that meant but in the end, he put that aside. 

“It’s alright,” he tried to assure you. “It’s not like we haven’t been trying. I heard someone say it takes six months on average even for a married couple.” Never mind that he didn’t remember exactly who he heard it from or whether it was true, it seemed like a good thing to say right then. You couldn’t help but smile at how earnestly he was trying to comfort you although it made you feel guilty that he should even need to comfort you over something so silly. 

“Thanks,” You said. “You’re not…disappointed to have to keep trying, are you?” You couldn’t help but ask, you remembered what Hange told you but you wanted to hear it from him. You felt so vulnerable, all of a sudden uncertain in a way you hadn’t been before when pregnancy was a straight path from your point of view. “No. Why? Are you?” He looked at you skeptically, as if he couldn’t fathom why you’d have to ask him something like that. “No, of course not, I just thought…” you trailed off. 

Levi was staring at you with a stern expression. “Thought what?” He asked, almost challenging you to try and deride yourself in front of him. The thought of him scolding you made you realize how stupid it was to presume he didn’t want to keep fucking you. 

“Nothing. It’s just that all of this has unlocked some weird insecurities.”

He sighed. “I get it. The whole fucking thing is weird. But I swear I’ll lose my fucking mind if you don’t get it through your head that I’m not gonna be upset no matter what results you get.”

“What if we’re at this for a year?”

“Then we’ll be at it for a year. And if it still hasn’t happened then, then we’ll be at it for two.” He sounded not only utterly sincere but as if he hadn’t considered anything else. It was obvious. The two of you. 

“Thanks, Levi. I really…I’m sorry, you shouldn’t have to comfort me over this. Not this soon at least. I didn’t expect to feel this way.”

“Well, I’m sure you also didn’t expect to be assigned to routinely fuck your captain and get prodded like an animal by strangers. I think you can let yourself live,” He said dryly. 

You laughed. He was right. It was all new to both of you but the relief that you got, knowing it was Levi you were doing this with was beyond words. He had become essential. You couldn’t imagine having to do this with anyone else, having to keep everything to yourself and deal with it alone. You were just…really glad to have him. You hoped he felt the same way.

[peppymintdreams]

Trip Down Memory Lane

Girl this story was suppose to be uploaded weeks ago I legitimately forgot to post this one my bad 😅 so I hope you enjoy what I wrote

Luca Pearce x Mc

Luca wiped his tears, chuckling. "But you know what that means now... at some point we need to start plan a wedding…and tell everyone," he said, his nose slightly pink from crying. The proposal had left his mind spinning.

“oh yeah Luca I feel like your parents are gonna whole heartedly cry,” they said laughing holding onto Luca, trying to keep them self from falling

“Oh, my parents are gonna cry for sure, both of them,” Luca agreed, smiling at the memory. “I mean, they love you. Remember when you met them for my birthday?"

Mc burst into more laughter. “Oh, yeah! They were so sweet, and OH MY GOD, when they pulled out the baby book! That had me dead!”

Luca groaned, covering his face. “Ugh, oh god, don’t remind me. I didn't think they’d whip out the baby book. They had everything prepared like they intentionally wanted to embarrass me in front of you! And they had me read the first story I ever wrote.”

“Well, that’s what parents do! You’re acting like they’re evil just for showing you in your purest, most innocent moments as a kid.”

Luca shook his head, laughing. “I mean they're great parents, and all but they really need to read the room. Well, seeing you all laugh together was worth it. I guess I can take some embarrassment if it means all of you getting closer.” He paused.

Mc gave him a reassuring smile. “Honestly, I think it’s kind of adorable. Not everyone’s parents are so proud that they keep every little thing like your first story.” They grinned. “It’s actually kind of amazing to see how much they love you.”

"Yeah and, because I’m their only child, I’m not surprised that they save everything."

As Luca recalled more about that day, Mc's thoughts drifted down memory lane, reliving the sweet and awkward moments of meeting his parents for the first time.

It was a bright, sunny afternoon when Luca and Mc arrived at his childhood home. The warmth of the sun did little to ease the nervous flutter in Mc’s stomach. Today was Luca’s birthday. BUT it was also the day Mc was meeting Luca’s parents for the first time. Luca had tried to calm their nerves on the drive over, but even his sweet reassurances couldn’t completely settle the anxiety of meeting the people who raised the love of their life.

As they pulled up to the house, Luca turned to his partner, his soft brown eyes full of warmth.

already the nerves started to bubble up again. Luca and Mc had been dating for over a year, but this was different. Today, they were heading to Luca’s home to meet his parents for the first time.

“You’ll be fine, I promise. You’ve got nothing to worry about,They’re gonna love you.” Luca said softly, squeezing their hand. Mc smiled, trying to believe him, though their palms were still clammy as they followed Luca to the front door.

Before they could answer, the front door flew open. Luca’s mom appeared with a huge grin, waving them over excitedly. “Luca! You’re here! Happy birthday my little chocolate bunny” she exclaimed, Mc barely had time to blink before Luca’s mom wrapped them in a warm hug too. “And this must be the lucky person we’ve heard so much about!”

Before they could even get a word in, Luca’s mom wrapped them in a warm embrace, immediately setting a tone of familiarity. “We’re so happy to finally meet you, Mc” she said, stepping back to beam at them.

Luca’s dad appeared in the doorway next, wiping his hands on a dish towel, his expression one of soft approval as he shook their hand. “It’s nice to put a face to the name,” he said, his voice kind and steady. “We’ve heard a lot of good things. Luca talks a lot about you, God!”

Luca blushed, glancing away with a sheepish smile. “I might’ve talked about you once or twice…”

Mc chuckled softly, face flushed a tinted pink, feeling a bit more at ease now.

“All wonderful things,” his mom beamed. “Now, come inside! We’ve been looking forward to this!”

Luca gave Mc a reassuring smile as they followed his mom inside. He greeted, walking over and shaking his son’s hand before turning to Mc. “It’s good to finally meet you,” he said with a firm handshake and a smile that was far less intimidating than expected. “It’s nice to meet you too…Mr…Pearce?” They said nervously, feeling their nerves creep in. Luca’s father let out a deep, good-natured chuckle. he said with a grin. “We’re all adults here, right? you don’t need to be so formal, you kids aren’t in highschool anymore “Also,” [Luca’s Dad’s Name] added with a playful smirk, “it might get awkward if you call me Mr. Pearce... especially if that’s what you’ll be calling my son one day, and it’ll be a part of your name.”

Mc blinked, taken aback. “Wait, what?”

[Luca’s Dad’s Name] chuckled, waving a hand. “Nothing, nothing. I’m just messing with you,” he said, laughing at their bewildered expression. “But who knows, right?” He said joking with them earning himself a good smack from his wife.

They laughed softly, a bit of the tension lifting. “Okay, [Luca’s Dad’s Name] . Sorry, just... I guess I’m a little nervous.”

The house smelled of something delicious cooking in the kitchen, and the living room was cozy, filled with framed pictures of Luca from different stages of his life. Mc’s gaze flicked from one to another: Luca in a Little bunny onesie, Luca blowing out birthday candles, Luca in his high school graduation gown.

Luca’s dad noticed their glances and chuckled. “Yep, his mom keeps every single photo.”

Luca’s mom playfully swatted him as she led them into the living room. “You should be proud of your memories,” she teased, pulling out a stack of albums from the bookshelf. “Speaking of, I thought it would be fun to show you a few of Luca’s greatest hits.”

“Oh god, Mom,” Luca groaned, but there was a smile tugging at his lips. Mc shot him an amused look as his mom flipped through the pages, showing them baby pictures and the occasional embarrassing childhood story.

“Come sit, sit!” Luca’s mom insisted, guiding them to the couch. “Luca, honey, help your dad with the food.”

As Luca walked into the kitchen with his dad, he glanced over his shoulder at Mc. They were already deep in conversation with his mom, and he couldn’t help but smile at how easily they fit into his world.

“So,” his dad started as he pulled open the oven to check on the dishes inside, “this is the one, huh?”

Luca blushed a little, grabbing a pair of oven mitts to help. “Yeah, Dad. They’re... they’re pretty special.”

His dad gave him a knowing look, setting the tray of roasted vegetables on the counter. “You’ve always been a bit of a closed book, Luca. But ever since you’ve been with them, you’ve opened up more. It’s nice to see.”

Luca shrugged, feeling a little bashful under his father’s gaze. “They make it easy, you know? I didn’t think it would feel this... right.”

His dad chuckled softly, reaching for the carving knife. “That’s how you know it’s the real deal. When it just feels natural, like you’ve found a piece of yourself you didn’t know was missing. But then again Luca and I are going to quote that show you said they loved watching "Your soulmate is your compliment, not your missing piece.” He said sounding super proud of himself

Luca nodded, watching as his dad expertly carved the roast. “I think they were more nervous than I was about today,” Luca admitted. “They kept asking if you and Mom would like them.”

“And what did you say?” his dad asked, glancing at him with a raised eyebrow.

Luca laughed. “I told them not to worry. That you’d love them.”

His dad paused for a moment, his expression softening. “You’re right. We already do. But it’s more than that, Luca. Your mom and I have always wanted you to find someone who sees you for who you are. Someone who cares about you the way you deserve.” He set the knife down, turning to face Luca. “And it’s clear that they do.”

Luca felt a wave of warmth in his chest. “They really do, Dad. And I... I love them.”

His dad placed a hand on his shoulder, giving it a gentle squeeze. “I’m proud of you, son. You’ve grown into someone who knows what he wants, and you’ve found someone who makes you happy. That’s all your mom and I could ever ask for.”

Luca smiled, feeling a weight lift off his shoulders. “Thanks, Dad. I was worried you’d be... I don’t know, more protective.”

His dad chuckled. “Well, we are protective, of course. You’re our only child. But we trust your judgment. And seeing how happy you are, how could we not approve?”

Luca felt his heart swell with gratitude, knowing that his parents' acceptance meant everything to him. “We’ve been through a lot together already,” Luca said quietly. “I can see us being together for the long haul.”

His dad gave him a knowing smile. “Good. Hold onto that feeling. Relationships aren’t always easy, but when you find someone worth holding onto, you do whatever it takes.”

Luca nodded, feeling more certain than ever. As he glanced back at the living room, seeing Mc laughing with his mom, he knew that this was exactly where he was meant to be.

“Come on,” his dad said, patting his back. “Let’s get this food out before your mom starts telling embarrassing stories about you.”

Luca laughed, grabbing the dish of vegetables and heading back to the living room, feeling lighter and more sure of his future with every step.

As Luca disappeared into the kitchen, Mc found themselves sitting with his mom, who immediately started peppering them with questions. It wasn’t invasive, just her way of getting to know the person who had captured her son’s heart.

“This one,” his mom said, holding up a photo of Luca in a cowboy outfit, “was his favorite costume for three Halloweens in a row.”

A gasp came from the kitchen, with Luca hurdling back into the living room and looking at what photo his mom was showing them, obviously flabbergasted and embarrassed.

Luca’s partner laughed, leaning in closer. “You’re adorable,” they teased, poking him gently.

“Please don’t encourage her,” Luca muttered, cheeks red.

“Oh hush up lulu you were so cute as a baby how could I not keep everything I have of you, you were mommies precious little baby, with the chubbiest most rosiest cheeks” she said acting like she was gonna cry opening her eye and seeing a blank faced Luca

“Go back to helping your father in the kitchen she said, shooing him away again to which he obliged.

You know,” Luca’s mom said after a while, her tone softening as she looked at them, “I can tell how much Luca cares about you. The way he talks about you... you’ve really made an impression on him. He’s always been a bit reserved, but since you’ve been in his life, he’s opened up so much.”

Mc felt their heart swell at her words, a deep warmth spreading through them. “I feel the same about him,” they said quietly. “He’s... well, he’s everything to me.”

Luca’s mom smiled, her eyes glistening with a hint of emotion. “I’m so glad to hear that. He deserves someone who sees how wonderful he is.”

Just then, Luca and his dad emerged from the kitchen, carrying trays of food. Luca’s dad gave his wife a knowing look before setting the dishes down on the table. “I hope you’re hungry,” he said with a grin. “We’ve got enough food here and a big cake to feed an army.”

The meal was filled with laughter and conversation, the easy flow of warmth that comes when people are genuinely enjoying each other’s company. Luca’s parents were everything Mc had hoped they would be kind, welcoming, and clearly proud of their son. They shared stories about Luca’s childhood, much to his embarrassment, and even pulled out an old photo album, complete with baby pictures and Luca’s first attempts at writing.

“Mom, seriously?” Luca groaned as she flipped to a page where his handwriting was barely legible. “You don’t have to show them everything.”

“Oh, but it’s adorable!” his mom protested, laughing. “Look how cute you were!”

As the laughter over baby photos subsided, Luca’s mom suddenly clapped her hands together, her eyes twinkling with mischief. “Actually, why don’t you read one of your first stories for us, Luca? It’s right here in the album!”

Luca’s face flushed. “Mom, no I mean, that’s… it’s so old!” he protested, glancing at his partner with a sheepish grin, almost hoping they’d help him out of this. But his parents weren’t letting him off the hook.

“Oh, come on! You were always so creative, even back then,” his dad chimed in, nudging him with a warm, encouraging smile.

With a sigh and an eye roll he couldn’t quite commit to, Luca took the crinkled piece of paper his mom held out. He cleared his throat, casting a nervous look at Mc, who met his gaze with a soft, reassuring smile. The words were scrawled in wobbly, big letters, and Luca began to read, his voice softened as he let himself sink back into the enthusiasm of his younger self.

“Once upon a time,” he started, stifling a smile, “there was a super-duper brave knight named Sir Cupcake. He was the bravest, coolest knight in ALLLL the land! Sir Cupcake had a best friend, a cat named Captain Pickles, who could talk… well, only to Sir Cupcake. Everyone else just thought he said, ‘Meow!’”

Luca’s family chuckled, and Mc’s eyes sparkled with delight.

“One day, Sir Cupcake heard about a HUGE, fire-breathing dragon that was scaring everybody! But he wasn’t scared, not even a little bit!” Luca paused, laughing. “Well… maybe a tiny bit, but he was still very brave. So he put on his shiniest armor and went to the dragon’s cave. Captain Pickles was like, ‘We got this, Sir Cupcake!’”

His family was now fully engaged, their smiles wide as Luca continued.

“Then they found the dragon, who was SUPER big and super scary, but Sir Cupcake said, ‘I’m not scared of you, Dragon!’ And the dragon was like, ‘RAWRRR!’ But Sir Cupcake just stood there, all brave and stuff, and then he realized…” Luca paused dramatically, glancing around the room, “…the dragon wasn’t mean! He was just lonely and wanted friends!”

Mc tried to stifle a giggle, but their heart swelled as they listened to the simple, pure story.

“So Sir Cupcake and Captain Pickles became friends with the dragon, and they all had a big party with, like, tons of cupcakes and a giant marshmallow cake. And then EVERYONE was happy forever! The end!”

The room fell silent for a second, then erupted in laughter and applause. Mc leaned in, brushing his arm softly. “You were adorable,” they whispered, and Luca, cheeks bright red, couldn’t help but grin. That moment sharing his childhood imagination with Mc and family felt like a memory he’d cherish forever.

Luca’s partner couldn’t help but smile as they watched Luca squirm, their heart full as they realized just how much love and care had gone into raising him. It was clear from the way his parents talked about him every story told with pride and affection that Luca had grown up in a household filled with warmth.

But the evening progressed in a way that felt almost too easy. His parents asked questions about life in London, about their partner’s work, and how they had met Luca. Each answer seemed to solidify the bond growing between them.

At one point, over dinner, Luca’s mom put her fork down and smiled. “You know, I can’t remember the last time I saw Luca this happy,” she said, looking between the two of them. “Ever since he moved to London, we’ve worried. But now that you’re in his life…” She trailed off, dabbing her eyes. “I can tell he’s found something special.”

Luca’s partner looked over at him, their heart swelling with love. “I feel the same way about him,” they said softly. “He’s… he’s everything to me.”

Luca’s dad cleared his throat, though there was no hiding the emotion in his eyes either. “We can see that,” he said gruffly. “You’re good for him. I’m glad he found someone who cares about him the way you do.”

Luca’s hand found Mc’s under the table, squeezing it gently. “Told you they’d love you,” he whispered, flashing that soft smile that had first made them fall for him.

Later, as they were preparing to leave, Luca’s mom pulled Mc aside. “Thank you,” she said quietly, hugging them once more. “Thank you for making my son so happy. He deserves someone like you in his life.”

They hugged her back, feeling a deep sense of belonging and acceptance in her words. “I promise to take care of him,” they whispered, knowing just how much Luca’s parents loved him and just how much they loved him too.

As they drove away, the sun setting on the horizon, Luca glanced over at Mc with a smile. “So… what did you think?”

“They’re wonderful,” Mc said, leaning back in their seat. “And they love you so much.”

“Yeah, they’re pretty great,” Luca said with a fond smile. “But I think their favorite person in that house tonight was you.”

Mc chuckled, feeling the warmth of that truth settle in their chest. “Maybe. But you’ll always be my favorite.”

Luca’s smile softened as he took their hand again, the quiet comfort between them settling in as they drove down the road, back toward the life they’d built together. “I’m just glad you’re part of my family now.”

[jawritter]

Carry On

Chapter 27

Summary: It was just a simple hunt, found on a pie festival. It was supposed to be easy. Something they’d all done one hundred and one times a million. No one could have told Y/N, Dean, and Sam that nothing from that point on would ever be the same again.

Pairing: Dean Winchester x Reader x Sam Winchester

Word Count: 3k

Warnings: Shit’s a bit tense....

Due to the graphic nature of this fic, and the fact that it will eventually contain Smut. This fic is an 18 + only fic! If you’re under 18 DO NOT read this fic!

A/N: This fic is beta’d by @kazsrm67​​​​ Thanks so much love! Please do not copy my work! Feedback is golden! I hope you all enjoy this ride with me!

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Y/N took a deep breath as she trudged her way through the kitchen and into the utility room where there had been an air mattress set up for Dean and herself. Her hands were shaking, and she was more than a little sick to her stomach. Of all the shit they would have their first fight about, it would be this, and on the weekend that they were due to go and meet his nephew. 

She wasn’t ignorant that some of this WAS her fault. She could have at least mentioned the fact that she was on birth control. It wasn’t like Dean was with her every waking second of the day anymore; in hindsight it would have been something very easy to miss. She just didn’t think about telling him, it wasn’t like it was something she was hiding from him. It was just legitimately something that didn’t cross her mind. She was more of a caretaker than girlfriend for so long. Sex wasn’t something that was the primary focus. When it did happen, and the progressive year to come, she was caught up in life. She was focused on fixing the house, getting Dean’s shop all lined up. It wasn’t something that even crossed her mind, and she felt more than a little horrible that she didn’t think about the fact that it had crossed his. 

She also knew that the silent treatment that she’d been giving him all day was probably also a mistake. She let her own anger at him and her emotions get the better of her. She let hurt do the talking, or lack thereof; instead of opening up to him, accepting his apology, and working together to move past this like she should have. Now, she was afraid she’d hurt him even worse. 

When she finally got the nerve up to sit down in the room that was their makeshift bedroom, she found Dean, laying on his back, fists balled up, eyes shut tight, and jaw set firmly. 

Slowly, Y/N made her way over to the air mattress, and sank down on it, careful not to jostle him, because he looked more than a little uncomfortable. “Dean?” she ventured, and even though she barely said his name above a whisper, his green orbs shot open like someone had fired a gun at him, and he turned to face her like he was shocked she spoke to him at all. “Are you okay?” 

Dean’s eyes closed tightly again, and a single tear rolled down his face. “Not really,” he admitted, and she had to fight against the ‘caregiver flight or fight instinct’ that screamed for her to rip him up, panic, and take him to the nearest hospital. “My back is killing me, and I just want to go home.”

“Do you need to go to the hospital?” Y/N questioned, still worried because of the tumble he took earlier that day. It was as if she had to ask or she might burst. Dean just shook his head without opening his eyes or even bothering to look in her direction, which she found concerning. Usually, he would do that when he didn’t want her to know just how badly he was hurting. 

“No,” he said after a while. “I just… this mattress and laying on the floor isn’t as easy as it used to be before the accident. Once the pain pills kick in,  and I get some sleep, I’ll be fine.”

Everything, every fiber in her being, wanted to gather  him up off of that floor, load him up in Baby, and take him to a hotel where he could at least lay down in a bed. It never crossed her mind that he wouldn’t be able to do this anymore. They’d all slept in some pretty strange places while hunting. An air mattress would have been like a fucking California King pillowtop for him at one point; but now, after his injuries, his body was different, and things didn’t come as easy as they used too, but he kept it hidden so well, that it was easy to forget. 

“I’m sorry,” he blurted suddenly, his voice strained as he attempted to make himself a little more comfortable. “I don’t know how else to say it, or what to say to make what I said to you any better, other than I’m really sorry. I was wrong. I already told you all of that. But judging by the silent treatment you’ve given me all day, and the fact that you’re only talking to me now because you can tell I’m uncomfortable, tells me you’re still mad at me, and I don’t know how to fix it, but I’m trying.”

“It’s not just you Dean, it’s me too. I should have talked to you. Hell, I should have said something to you a year ago. We’re both at fault. Neither of us reacted the way we should have, neither of us communicated the way we should have. It was both our fault, and it wasn’t fair for me to shut you out the way I did.”

Dean shifted again, still uncomfortable, and she wished she could just fix it for him. Just take all the pain and discomfort away. 

“Do you want too… you know… try to have a kid with me?” Dean questioned, keeping his gaze focused on the blanket in his balled-up fist. She could almost feel the tension in the room suddenly escalate to an alarming rate. “I mean, I would totally understand if you don’t. I wouldn’t be upset or anything.”

That was a lie, Y/N could tell by how tense he was that this was something his heart was set on. Still, ever true to his own destructive nature, the man would swallow whatever it was he wanted as long as others around him were happy. Always with the self-sacrificing of his own happiness. 

“I wouldn’t mind it. I’ve never really thought about it honestly. The life we lived up until now… it really didn’t ever cross my mind that this could be possible. But now? We’re stable. All of heaven and hell aren’t after our asses. Things are going pretty good. So why not? I could totally get used to a little Dean Winchester running around.”

Dean sat himself up slightly, giving up completely on trying to get comfortable and finally met her gaze. She could see it now. The tiredness, the tension in his broad shoulders. The way he almost seemed like a dog that had been kicked too often as he stared back at her with almost doe like eyes. Like a deer caught in headlights that she even agreed to try and have a child with him. 

It really made her sick to think that so often and for so long Dean had given up on the things he deserved in life; a home, a job, a family of his own, that he thought he deserved to not have those things. So it totally takes him by surprise to even think that someone would want to have them with him, and want all good things for him, instead of what they can use him for, and what he can do for them. 

“Really?” he questioned. “Do you really mean that or are you just saying that on my account? Because if you don’t really want this with me- I don’t want to make you do anything you don’t want to do.”

“Dean Winchester,” Y/N sighed in aspiration. “You of all people should know by now that if I don’t want to do something, there’s no force in hell or earth that can make me do it. You aren’t twisting my arm to do anything that I don’t want to do. I WANT a family with you Dean. There’s nothing attached to that. No hidden agendas. It’s the truth. If you want to try, I’m down with whatever happens. If it’s not meant to be, and we never have a baby, that’s fine. If we do, great. But I would love to start a family with you. White picket fence, we already have the dog and the house. Soccer games and school functions. The whole bit. I’ll be a total suburban mom. Minivan and all.”

Dean smiled in spite of himself. 

“You know I could totally see you rocking the whole minivan thing,” Dean chuckled softly. 

Then just as quickly as it started, the moment faded, and he was looking off into the distance with a strange look on his face. She wondered what it was he was seeing, what it was that had suddenly popped up to bother him all at once like that, and every time he did something like this, it sent her anxiety through the ceiling. Like it or not, there were some monsters she couldn’t chase away, and those were usually the ones that reared their ugly head from his past. 

Y/N reached for his hand, uncurling it with surprisingly little resistance judging by the death grip he still had on the comforter. 

“Hey,” she said, grabbing his attention. “Next time, let’s talk about things like this with one another, instead of avoiding it and ending up in a fight. I hate fighting with you Dean. I really, really do. More than anything, I don’t want to see you hurt over something that could have been easily fixed over a conversation. Again, I take half the blame for this one, but please, next time, talk to me.”

“Okay,” Dean agreed with a heavy sigh, before turning and looking back at the pile of pillows behind him. 

“Are you gonna be able to do this?” Y/N questioned with a nod towards his pillow pile. Dean’s lips formed a thin line and she could almost see the wheels turning in his head. 

“I really don’t know. I’m trying. I am. I don’t want to hurt their feelings or anything. Maybe if I hadn’t fallen earlier it wouldn’t be this bad, but fuck if this isn’t kicking my ass just sitting here right now.”

Y/N’s lips tightened as she tried to come up with anything, anything at all to make this easier for Dean. But really, there was  only one solution, and that was get up and go get a hotel. She knew good and damn well that she wasn’t going to be able to get him to agree to that. 

“Why don’t you try going and laying down on the couch?” Y/N suggested after a moment. “Everyone else has gone to bed already, so it’s quiet in there.”

“Yeah, but Sam’s ass is gonna be up at like, four in the fucking morning to go jogging like a moron,” Dean countered, and Y/N had to admit that he wasn’t wrong there. 

“Fuck,” Dean grumbled into his hands, she noticed they were shaking when he brought them up to his face, and that sent a spark of concern through her chest. She’d been taking care of him for over a year before things really morphed into a relationship. She knew his tells. He was in pain, yet he was downplaying it. 

“How long has it been since you took the medication?” Y/N questioned, getting up to riffle around in the duffle bag on the floor opposite of him. 

“Bout forty minutes ago,” Dean’s muffled voice answered from behind his hands. “I’ll be fine baby, lay down and get some sleep. Pain is something I’m well acquainted with.”

Y/N’s jaw tightened so fast her teeth audibly clicked together, and Dean slowly lowered his hands from his face, the look of a man that knows he fucked up;  just like that, what little bit of annoyance she had left in her towards him and how he acted faded away. 

Dean had made a lot of progress over the time they were together. He was more open than he’d ever been. He’d made a lot of emotional changes and boundaries were crossed. Things he let go of and opened up weren’t easy at all to let go of. Still, Dean was Dean, and he had some things that were always gonna fight him. The ability to admit when he wasn’t feeling well, or needed help, well, that was just something she would always have to fight with him on. 

It was just his ‘MO’, his go too.

“It should have kicked in by now,” Y/N voiced aloud as she sat back down in front of him, Dean was doing all he could to pretend to be very interested in picking at the blanket in his hand, avoiding her gaze. 

“Did the pain start when you fell earlier?” Y/N questioned, and Dean shook his head no. 

“Bout three hours before we got here,” he admitted, and honestly, he could have reared back and took a swing at her face and it would have hurt less that the absolute mental kick she gave herself for shutting down on him. He needed her, and he felt like she was giving him the cold shoulder and he couldn’t talk to her, so he pushed himself too hard. 

This felt very much like her fault all of the sudden. 

“Dean, you should have woken me up,” she said, but Dean didn’t look at her, just sniffed heavily through his nose. 

“I shouldn’t have had to wake you up; I should have been able to do something as simple as drive a goddamn car.”

“Dean—”

“Hey,” Sam’s voice cut her off from behind her before Y/N could get anything out to rebuttal him, and fuck if she didn’t want to murder him right there on the spot,be cause as soon as Dean  heard his brother’s voice, he straightened up, and cleared his face as if nothing was wrong at all. She’d never seen a wall go up that fucking fast. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah,” Dean lied, clearing his throat as he forced himself back onto the pile of pillows behind him. “I just over did it a little bit today. I’ll be okay.”

The look on Sam’s face read every bit of bullshit. Y/N was pretty sure that her face screamed the truth Dean was trying to cover up, and that had a lot to do with his disbelief.

“Liar,” Sam challenged. “What’s wrong dude, spill.”

Dean signed heavily and rolled his eyes dramatically. 

“My back hurts,” Dean said simply. “This is nothing new. My back usually always hurts. It’s a little worse today because I slipped when I got out of the car. It’s not some emergency. I’m not gonna die from it. I’ll be fine.”

Y/N watched as Sam’s eyes traveled to the air mattress that they were sitting on. Sam was no idiot. It didn’t take him long to come to the conclusion that this air mattress really wasn’t helping him at all. 

“I can call around and get you guys a room,” Sam offered sincerely. “I didn’t even think about the air mattress being on the floor and—”

Dean held up his hand to stop his baby brother’s worrying. Sam made a face, but didn’t argue with Dean either. 

“It’s okay,” Dean assured him. “I will take something else to help with the discomfort, and I’ll eventually go to sleep. I’m sure I'll be fine in the morning. Eileen has all kinds of shit she wants to do as a ‘family’ tomorrow, and I’m not going to let my discomfort ruin that for anyone. Now, back to bed before she sends out a search party for that bottle you're holding.”

Sam looked down at the milk bottle that he was still clutching in his hand, and nearly jumped when he realized that Eileen probably was still waiting for it, and he’d gotten distracted along the way. 

“Y/N, if he doesn’t get any better come get me, and we will work something out,” Sam insisted, and Y/N nodded as she watched Sam’s hair bounce as he retreated back to his room. 

“You should have told him the truth and let him rent the room,” Y/N insisted, but Dean barely blinked as he stared out of the door his brother had just disappeared from. 

“I did tell the truth,” Dean admitted. “It’s not the first time I’ve had pain like this over the years I’ve been recovering, it won't be the last; there’s no reason to freak out, and I definitely don’t want them to have to rent a room in the middle of the night for me. I’ll be okay.”

This was not a battle Y/N was gonna win, she knew that. You could set the man on fire and he’d tell you it tickled. She felt like some of this was absolutely her fault. That in just a matter of 48 hours, the trust she built with him was broken, and she was partially to blame for that. 

Was Dean wrong for yelling and blaming her for not telling him that she was on birth control? Yes. 

Did that warrant her the right to give him the silent treatment after he apologized? No. 

Did her hurt feelings become invalid because he apologized? Hell no. Still, that didn’t mean she had to totally shut him out, when she knew Dean well enough to know that doing something like that could or might trigger this behavior, and that she should have handled this a lot differently. 

Apparently Dean wasn’t the only one in the room with communication issues. 

Without a word, Y/N moved behind him as Dean sat up again to try and adjust himself. Seating herself behind him with her legs spread out on either side of his trim waist, and Dean turned slightly to look at her with a questioning gaze. 

“Lean back,” she insisted, and he did, albeit, very slowly. 

“What are you doing?” He questioned again, refusing to relax even when she pulled him against her, and wrapped her arms around him. 

“Just relax,” she said. 

It took a minute of deep breathing, but finally, Dean leaned his head back to rest against her shoulder, and closed his eyes. The tense muscles in his body gave way, and he loosed up enough to rest his weight against her. Which was something she didn’t mind at all, in fact, she always found it comforting. 

“Does this position help any?” she asked once silence fell heavily again in the room, and Dean nodded, refusing to speak. 

“Then get some sleep, and in the morning, after we’re done with the shit Eileen has planned, I’m going to drive us either to a hotel, or back home.”

Dean took a deep breath, stress once again setting in his tight jaw. 

“No, I’m sure after tonight I’ll be fine,” Dean insisted. “I just over did it today, once I get some sleep, everything will be okay. I promise. I don’t want to ruin this for them. This is a big deal for them, and they’re doing the best they physically can with what they have. I’m gonna be just fine.”

“Okay,” Y/N relented, knowing once Dean had his mind made up about something, there was no changing it. She just hoped that he was right, and after a night’s sleep, he’d be okay again for the rest of the trip. “But I’m doing some of the driving home. Cause we’re not gonna let you over do it again, and if we have to, we will stop and get a hotel so that you can rest in between.”

Dean nodded, and this time he didn’t argue with her. 

“And… even though I’m not going to take anymore birth control, it might take almost a month to get out of my system, maybe longer, I’ve been on it a long time. In fact, when we get home, I’m going to make an appointment with my doctor to get myself checked out, just to make sure that I’m physically okay, and we’re all set to go.”

She felt the tension return to Dean’s shoulders, stress was almost radiating throughout his body, and she immediately kicked herself for shutting him out all day, because she just knew that it was going to take him forever to open up to her again about it all. 

“It’s okay Dean, nothing is wrong,” she insisted to try and calm his fears. “It’s just the smart thing to do, that way you’re prepared for anything that MIGHT pop up. It’s just a precaution.”

Dean swallowed thickly, before forcing himself to relax again. “Let’s just get through tonight,” he voiced after a while. “Once we get home we can figure the rest out, okay?”

“Okay,” Y/N agreed, then started to run her fingers through his hair, absently humming Hey Jude until he finally started to drift off to sleep. 

It was easy to forget that even though Dean was a man, and was bullheaded on a lot of things. He got scared and needed reassurance too. This was still a learning curve for them both, but a lesson learned. From now on, she was going to make sure he was okay, just as she expected him to make sure she was okay. Relationships are a give and take thing, especially when you’ve been through as much trauma as the pair of them had.

Forever:

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Jensen and Dean’s Babes

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[bigasswritingmagnet]

Ruined

Fandom: Girl Genius Pairing: Bangladesh Dupree/Vole (discussed), Agatha/Gil (background) Summary: Bang has seen Vole's new look, but only now learns that the man she fell for has changed on the inside, too.

It's clearly all Gil's fault.

Ao3 link

“You ruined him!”

Gil ducks the knife automatically, but is caught enough off guard that Dupree’s foot actually manages to make contact with his jaw. He hits the ground and rolls as another knife pings off the stone floor. With an inelegant but effective twist, he’s on his feet again, but the tears in Dupree’s eyes stop him short.

“He was perfect!” Dupree wails, clutching her knife to her chest. “He was perfect and you ruined him!”

“What are you talking about?” he demands. The next knife barely misses him, and Gil is honestly not sure if Dupree is not putting her all into trying to kill him, or if her aim is affected by her crying.

It’s rather horrifying.

“Wait—Wait, are you…do you mean Vole? That was almost a year ago, why are you mad at me now?”

“Because I didn’t know until now! You made him an even bigger monster than before, but only on the outside!

"Wh—Hang on—"

“I’ve been looking all over for him! And when I finally found him, and I asked him out, do you know what he said? Do you know what he said?”

Gil silently shakes his head, mystified.

“He said he doesn’t like to kill things for fun anymore!” Dupree sobs.

Gil bursts out laughing from sheer surprise, and then immediately takes off running as Dupree hurls herself at him. He serpentines down the hallway, knives zipping past him.

Where does she keep them all? He thinks, wildly.

“Castle! Maybe you’d like to do something about the attempted murder of your lady’s consort?” he shouts at the ceiling.

‘You must know I do not.’

Gil swings around a corner, jumps up, lands on the wall, pushes off, flips over Dupree’s head and takes off back the way he came. Behind him he hears Dupree collide with and be toppled over by something metallic and heavy , but he knows it’ll only stall her.

“Agatha will be really upset.”

‘I think the young lady has a legitimate grievance against you,’ the castle says, primly.

“Oh of course you do!”

Gil makes it as far as the stairs before something hits the back of his head, hard, with a crash of breaking pottery. He goes tumbling halfway down before he manages to grab hold of the banister and stop his fall. Sprawled on the stairs, Gil looks up. Dupree stands at the top of the stairway, glaring down at him, eyes blazing through tears. She looks like she walked off the set of a particularly melodramatic penny opera.

“He was the only man I ever loved,” she says, sounding as histrionic as she looks, “and you ruined him.”

“You knew him for five minutes,” Gil points out. “You didn���t even have a conversation with him, you just listened to him rant about how much he wanted to set Europa on fire!”

“That was all I needed," she snarls.

“What is going on out here?”

Agatha and Zeetha have appeared at the bottom of the stairs. Agatha has her hands on her hips, her brow furrowed. Zeetha is finding great amusement in Gil's difficulties, but what else is new.

“Dupree is mad at me because Vole is no longer a ruthless homicidal maniac.”

“Vole?” Zeetha repeats.

Agatha gasps, her hand flying to her mouth. She looks up at Dupree, wide eyed.

“You two would be perfect for each other!” she says.

“Not now! Not after Wulfenbach got done with him!” Dupree cries. “He doesn’t even want to set anything on fire anymore! He said he was tired of fighting!”

Gil watches in open mouthed astonishment as both women walk straight past him to fuss over Dupree. Agatha pulls her into a hug and Dupree sobs against her chest.

“You poor thing,” Zeetha says, with all signs of genuine compassion.

“It’s not fair!” Dupree bawls. Agatha shoots Gil a disapproving look.

“All I did was pull him out of the time stop!” Gil cries in protest. “It’s not my fault that the process put him through a personalized metaphorical hell that caused introspection leading to a changed outlook on life!”   

No one is listening.

“Come on,” Zeetha says, gently. “Let’s get some chocolate in you.”

“He’s not the only bloodthirsty, amoral monster you’ll ever meet,” Agatha reassures Dupree as they guide her down the hallway.

Gil sits up, puts his elbows on his knees, and his chin on his fists, glowering at the far wall.

“I didn’t hear anyone complaining when we used what I learned to get Tarvek out,” he grumbles.

‘I think you should be a little more sympathetic,’ the castle says. Gil chokes.

“Are you serious?”

‘I knew Vole of old,’ the castle says, and adds, mournfully, ‘Their wedding would have been a bloodbath.’

“Oh, shut up.”

[darkpoisonouslove]

Fallen Love Chapter 3

Chapter summary: Griffin wakes up alone. She sets out to bring Valtor back. A new chapter? Already? I'm as surprised as you! Today on the menu we have: panic attacks, disappearing acts, a scavenger hunt and a game of chicken, the occasional pet name and shooting to kill (...a man)*. Complete with LOTS of dialogue - to compensate for last chapter (and the first half of this one). Oh, and Griffin gets to blow something up - as a treat. Valtor will get treats when he learns to shut up. :) *metaphorically speaking Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 Read on AO3 | FFN

The lightness behind her eyelids only seemed to replicate that in her entire body. She was floating, weightless, the sheets and mattress barely palpable against her skin.

She rolled over in search of Valtor. To bring their chests together so that his breathing would move her, too. To bridge the space between them and find herself in his reach, the weight of his arm on top of her centering her into her body again. She didn't mind the reminder that she wasn't omnipresent but instead confined to her physical form that his presence against her would be.

The cold lying in bed with her instantly seared her nerves.

---

Familiar warmth enveloped her like gentle morning sunlight caressing her eyelids.

Sleep had been elusive, her mind always alert, mistrustful of her surroundings, of the pulse of heat in every surface she touched. It drove tears from her eyes like hands around her neck choking her until she failed to recognize its telltale wrongness.

She must have finally succumbed to exhaustion after countless nights of staring at the ceiling. The grief beating in her chest was still a fresh, bleeding wound. The ooze from it stuck to her fingers whenever she reached for her magic or hair.

Words lodged painfully in her throat when she pushed to swallow them back down for the sake of another peaceful moment she could spend basking in the joy bursting in her chest. Her fingers greedily soaked up the warm touch interlaced with them.

Never one to be sated, she opened her eyes in search of glacial blue ones.

The intensity of Faragonda's storm-like gaze was cutting.

The garbled noise that slipped from her lips kept ringing in her ears; it was impossible to convince herself that it didn't resemble a legitimate word when, between her teeth, it tasted just like the name burning on her lips.

"I didn't mean to startle you," Faragonda's voice was a rope plunging to the depths of the panic drowning her.

All she had to do was reach for it and the fairy would pull her out.

Griffin had to stifle the hysterical laughter carving through her chest. It was already petrifying, bloodcurdling, just as it was, echoing on the inside.

The smile on Faragonda's face was only marginally more bearable – as if she were welcoming the sun after a century-long winter when Griffin's touch could set her life aflame.

"How do you feel?" Faragonda settled for rubbing the back of Griffin's hand with her own rather than pressing a palm to her forehead, placated by Griffin's complacency. "Did you get some rest? Would you like a touch of magic to help revitalize you?"

Griffin cringed at the thought that Faragonda might have noticed her avoidance of using her own magic, or that she might have misinterpreted it.

She hurried to cover it up, "I was just thinking about looking all fresh and rested in my little solitary cell. Or even better – to be paraded out in front of your allies"–the venom she imbued in the word didn't faze Faragonda in the slightest–"for yet another very public and humiliating execution of whatever dignity I have left."

That finally landed a punch.

Faragonda had the decency to let go of her hand and look uncomfortable. "This is a tense situation for everyone but with time they'll get used to it."

They could get in line for feeling out of place. At least they were in their own home. Both of Griffin's were a smoking pile of ashes – by her own hand.

"I wouldn't care what they think of me if that didn't dictate how they treat me. They can think me a vile monster or a senseless whore."

Faragonda flinched.

Griffin pretended not to see, pretended it hadn't been her aim to jolt the fairy. "It makes no difference to me so long as they listen to what I have to say."

She was wasted on countless arguments with Marion and Oritel that only ever went one way. She was losing her mind pacing the same trail through the palace only to be met with their disregard again. She was their greatest asset. They had to put her on the battlefield, at the very least give her access to it on paper and listen to all her intimate knowledge of the enemy they had no hope of defeating. It was unthinkable that anyone could forget how closely she knew Valtor, that they could doubt it still after they had seen her perfectly match his movements in battle without even looking in his direction.

"I've asked them to-"

"You shouldn't have to!" Griffin's teeth clattered together when she redirected in the last moment to avoid biting off Faragonda's head. "You'd think their perception of me would only lend credibility to my inside information but they're ready to tear my throat out because they don't like what they hear."

Faragonda's fingers fidgeted in the sheets, "You're not exactly... encouraging a change in their attitude."

Griffin shot up.

"This wasn't a social call, Faragonda! I'm not here to make friends." The mere word tasted vile on her tongue, like poison.

She wanted them afraid of her, wanted them to see only the woman that she had been – powerful and cunning enough to be Valtor's partner. Not the wreck, who could barely get out of bed unless she was feeding on spite, on her own refusal to die, rather than on the hearty meals magically delivered to her room. She'd lived too long like that to go back to it.

She couldn't go back.

Faragonda's eyes glimmered with unshed tears, her voice just as wet with them, "This was the only safe place for you."

"We both know that's not true." The words were tight in her throat, in her chest. "Your mother would have been happy to take me in, would have secured my protection, readily used all my information."

And she could have contacted her if she'd wanted both Valtor and the Company destroyed. It was Faragonda's own fault if she couldn't reason that far.

"You dragged me here to keep an eye on me."

"I didn't-"

Griffin slapped away the hand reaching for her. "You were thinking about what you wanted. Look at you! You're sitting here like a kicked puppy that the owner abandoned at the curb."

Faragonda looked away at that, vacated the chair at Griffin's bedside but only walked further into the room, trapping herself in there, trapping them.

"I'm not the same person from your past!" If she'd learned anything from Valtor, it was how to pick the sharpest words, twist the knife in to spill the most blood and cut deep into the marrow. "How could I be after what you did? Or more accurately, what you didn't do."

Faragonda stiffened. Even with her back turned, her aura was like a concrete wall.

Griffin's skin crawled. Her tongue itched with prayers that her mother would forgive her for weaponizing her death against Faragonda of all people – as if she weren't grieving just as much, as if she hadn't lost someone just as integral to her life.

It was the only way.

It was for Faragonda's own good.

"You're right," her friend's small voice made her doubt herself, who she'd become.

If Faragonda was still the girl for whose sake she'd burn the world, how could she do anything other than let her magic spark and start the fire? How could she look through the flames for someone else's face? How could she feel anything but relief at not finding him anywhere when his very proximity would turn her own fire on her, on Faragonda, and make her the culprit of her own loss again?

"We're both different," Faragonda turned to look at her, tried to meet her halfway as always. "I just don't know how to get used to it."

"I'm sure Hagen won't mind helping you figure that out," Griffin scoffed.

She bit her tongue as soon as the words left her mouth. The bitterness would only be like honey to Faragonda, would draw her in with the implication that she was jealous, that she'd missed her.

Instead, something raw flickered over Faragonda's face. The nature of her restraint shifted–like it wasn't for Griffin's sake anymore–to make the chasm between them painful. As if Griffin had already rolled down to the bottom, scraping and cutting herself on every sharp edge and breaking her bones on the hard stone.

"Of course," Faragonda's voice was quiet to make her lean in just to hear – a trick she'd learned from her mother for delivering a fatal blow. "Anyone but you."

She paused.

Waited for a beat.

Then another one.

When the silence remained unbroken, Faragonda's magic swallowed her to leave Griffin sticking out like a sore thumb amidst the room.

She'd love to blame the way the air grew much colder against her skin on the two majesties torturing her but they wouldn't have that much backbone.

She was starting to think that wasn't such a bad thing.

---

Griffin bolted up.

The sheets fell away from her body, revealing it to the stifling morning air. Sun rays magnified by layers upon layers of glass, every speck of dust sticking to her, even the touch of her own fingers to her body, to each other – they were all like needles in her skin. The plush white carpet tickling her soles was a live wire hooked directly to her nerves.

A sharp pang of hunger sliced through all of that, a weakness in her knees, as if she'd collapse on the floor. With her bones in a heap, knees poking through her ribcage and spine – through her skull, maybe the rising nausea would subside, wouldn't have to splash acid all over her insides just to chase away the emptiness nestled there.

Her magic fired through her body like an instant poison breaking down her cells to hurl them through space in every direction. Upon collision Valtor's presence would pull them back together. The shock wave would pulverize their surroundings as if her need had taken physical form in a bid to match the heat of his being, in a bid to leave nothing that could steal his gaze away from her.

The self-satisfaction that'd waft off him with her clutching his arm like a lifeline was already cloaking her, choking her. He could very well be waiting for her behind the first corner, just far enough for her desperation to slam her into him.

She motioned her magic to map out her surroundings instead and ground her amidst them.

Valtor had deflected her question about their location more out of vanity, to revel in the mindlessness to which he'd driven her. He'd brought her here for a purpose. He wanted her to know – sooner or later. Sooner, apparently, or he would have stayed to continue unraveling her grip on reality.

The room around her was a stunning mosaic of black and green granite – a forest canopy filling the dark void of space, breathing life into the vacuum. Only the windows and cornices, shaped like strings of icicles, were made of dyamond. The reinforced with magic and harder than diamond glass made up the rest of the building almost exclusively but the last floor relied on enchanted stone both for privacy and protection.

The windows were also layered with spells capturing every ray of sunlight and keeping all the warmth inside even when they were open. From her vantage point Griffin could see light dancing over the thin crust of ice covering the famed Diaphanous Lake outside, making it impossible to see anything under the surface. The ridges of the surrounding mountains were streaked with white already to explain all the furs and wool blankets draped over the walls and floor, the chairs and armrests furnished with thick covers. Dyamond was the only planet that had a forewarning of the early winter advancing through the whole solar system, the curses unleashed too powerful to be stopped by mere light-years of space.

Flames started in the fireplace as if by her thought, confirming the nagging realization in the pit of her stomach.

Valtor was toying with her, had been all along – with all of them. He was probably watching her right now, never one to miss reaping the fruits of his labor.

Griffin didn't bother opening the closet doors inlaid with stained glass in intricate patterns. He'd never been in the habit of leaving her clothes to replace the ones he tore off her form until they were nothing more than useless scraps of fabric. Sometimes not even that much survived of her outfits.

Her magic spilled over her body conjuring a fabric that was so dark it could easily be mistaken for black. The blue only revealed itself when light hit the brocade woven in it as if it'd been dipped in stardust. The laces of her cleavage were looped around the buttons she'd stripped off Valtor's shirt the previous night. The lacing in the back was almost too rigid to allow motion – giving her no choice but to remain upright. String-like, the ends of the silver hem of her gloves threaded through slits in her sleeves like starlight spilling from the insides of her wrists.

She liked to remove every tangle from her hair herself, spending up to an hour in a nearly meditative state as the brush would quietly move through her tresses. That was when her hands weren't clammy and shaking, lacking any semblance of dexterity. Now magic was her only viable option for securing her hair into her typical braid to keep it out of her way.

She'd bet on practicality for years but combat boots simply didn't make sense without the threat of war hanging over her head. They would only take her back to the battlefield. Returning to heels was the only natural course of action. In a few days they would no longer make her head spin from just the couple inches they added to her height.

A quick spell confirmed the absence of movements or sounds outside the door.

She slipped into the empty hallway, her steps and breaths absorbed by the thick carpeting and ostentatious tapestries and curtains by the windows. She didn't have the time or inclination to spare them more than a glance as she made her way down the stairs.

She wasn't economical with her magic, using more than strictly necessary to create diversions for the few guards she sensed in her way. The air around her rippled wildly with every burst of power from her, charged as if with electricity, prickling against her skin and heating up as if it'd catch fire. Every spell she cast was a beacon giving away her position. It would be no trouble at all for Valtor to find her.

He'd located her the previous day when the atmosphere around them had been thick and loaded with deadly curses. If he'd not intercepted her yet, then he was either making a fool of her in front of the queen again or he was off-planet, using the chaos that was partially his fault to reshape the dimension to his liking.

It was no matter. He'd run along soon enough.

Griffin made a turn to find herself staring at a vaguely familiar portrait of Dyamond's previous queen hanging on the glass wall. There weren't any guards in sight to differ from last time when a pair had been posted at every three steps ensuring no one strayed from the procession. The transparent doors of the ballroom had closed behind her like a trap springing.

Being able to see everything occurring in the hallways outside, looking at a column or wall and having someone stare at her from the other side of it had been more unnerving than the threat of Lysslis poking around in her head. Dozens if not hundreds of wolves had sunk their teeth into her every word, every part of her to see if anything would tear, ready to call her a liar just because she bled the same as them. And that had been only the beginning of the evening program.

Griffin closed her eyes and forced an exhale from her lungs to kick the past out of there before it could take over her body, start breathing with the life force it was sucking out of her. All she had to do was feel for a magical essence.

In this palace not every surface was imbued with the ancient power that had created the whole universe. It made locating a magical device infinitely easier.

A potent pull compelled her towards massive glass doors overlooking hundreds–thousands–of books appearing to be floating on their dyamond shelves. With Valtor's help the queen's restoration program had been more than successful. Under the guise of retrieving Dyamond's cultural and magical heritage, she'd easily expanded her collection of tomes further than any of her predecessors could have dreamed.

Griffin pressed her palm against the door, the call of the knowledge that was at her fingertips too great to resist. Any self-respecting thief would be tempted by the unlimited arsenal of spells and incantations, potion recipes and coded secrets until they forgot themselves and any other objective they might have had.

She swore she'd be back first chance she got and hurried away.

A different magical current swirled around her once she put some distance between her and the library.

More in the style of the royal apartments, massive doors of white and purple granite guarded the ceremonial chamber. Recently renovated for the naming ceremony of Crown Princess Icy, the masonry depicted a dark purple sky raining sapphires that bloomed into a sea of flowers as soon as they touched the snow-swaddled ground. In the middle of it, two white swans, one on every gate, faced each other, bearing crowns of aquamarine drops. Silver streaked their plumage and their wings ended in sharpened white zircon.

All the gemstones decorating the doors focused the constant energy stream from the supposed centerpiece of the room. Purposely kept a nebulous concept in the eyes of the dimension, the Ice Spring remained shrouded in power and mystery, and thus the object of all manner of wild rumors and speculation.

For Griffin there was nothing of interest behind those doors. If the spring were a weapon or a defense measure, the royal family wouldn't have flaunted its existence for generations.

It was more bait. Just like the library and the vault shuddering with ancient and forbidden power.

Still, Griffin had to concede to the strategy's effectiveness. Standing in front of the vault gates made even her heart pound in her ears with awe and excitement. She, who had seen the native magic of every world, had used the rarest spells that had ever been created by the most knowledgeable and powerful beings, couldn't help herself at the buzz echoing through her bones and moving her limbs.

These gates were forged from a sturdy metal alloy, all of its components tailored to the protective spells guarding the entrance. Even that would have failed if the doors hadn't been inlaid with pieces of bone–human and animal alike from the looks of it–to contain the most destructive of the magic's effects.

Griffin had to remind herself the kind of prize she was after before she could give into curiosity and explore. The artifacts in that vault would have to impress even her if their presence was loud and palpable behind all the enchantments keeping them safe.

Flexing her fingers, she tried to draw the thrill of adrenaline deeper into her body, to her core where she could save it and come back to it when she needed the boost.

She headed into the opposite direction, listening for a whisper of magic that was out of tune with the booming cacophony she'd left behind.

The hallway she'd chosen ended abruptly in front of another dyamond door. Here, like in the other corners of the palace that weren't meant for prying eyes, the walls were composed differently. The glass was thicker and refracted the light hitting it as if it were the precious stone it was named after. It was impossible to see what was behind it but no ordinary lock was a match for her abilities.

Used as a storage room, the space was bursting with old paintings and furniture that was out of style but was too high-grade to throw out. Easily amounting to a fortune or two, none of the objects in here could be the source of the trail she'd followed. She was missing something.

Upon closer inspection, the room's proportions didn't make sense. The paintings in the back end were squished together as if the wall was pushing against them and the ceiling above had a slight curvature to it, the wooden frames braced against open air while the ones against the other walls went all the way up to the ceiling line. The pressure of a spell that was bursting at the seams threatened to pop the room like a cheap balloon.

Griffin conjured a knife. The incantation to animate it was tediously lengthy but allowed her to keep a safe distance while cutting through the glamor. Avoiding the spots where the spell was already distorting was crucial to keep from triggering an explosion.

She had to admit the security measures surpassed her expectations. Suspecting this alliance between Valtor and the queen wasn't a fragile, newly-established one of convenience didn't make it any easier to swallow the confirmation. He had laid out a trap for her and the worst thing wasn't that she'd fallen in it but rather that she hadn't been alone in her failure, that along with herself she'd dragged down-

The paintings crashed back into the wall despite the residue of the spell that whipped her in the face like a particularly violent gust of wind. Frames cracked, pieces of wood breaking off and raining on the floor, canvases folding over or straight up tearing – all to reveal another door.

The air sizzled, all the vulnerable wood and fabrics around slowly blackening and starting to shrivel as if licked by flames. Sweat beaded Griffin's forehead, ran down her back like a shiver. Her own skin turned uncomfortable, clammy and parched at the same time, burning and stretched taut but still wriggling with every tiny gasp as if it were an entity of its own. Her lips cracked despite the sleeve pressed against them and her nose. She had to turn away just to protect her watering eyes.

The growl that escaped her didn't sound like her own voice. Frustration burst through her body, unfocused and white-hot, overwhelming even the grievous heat from outside.

She marched out of the room, the two closest dyamond doors tearing off their hinges with her momentum. She turned them sideways and barricaded the hallway. They wouldn't hold but she only needed them to buy her a second to throw up her own shield.

It took her longer than she would've liked to build a sufficient charge in her palm. The battle with her mother's murderers had taken its toll on her just as much as the emotional roller coaster that had preceded it.

Her jaw clenched painfully at the thought. Her outrage simmered harder than the heat that had already begun devouring the hallway as well. She poured all of it in her own spell before launching it directly at the enchanted door.

She dropped to the floor and curled in a ball. The smaller her shield was, the stronger she could make it without wasting power. Mistakes were not an option against Valtor's spellwork.

Everything quaked. Crystal chandeliers rattled in shrill disharmony like knives in her brain. Her ears were ringing from the shock wave. The racket of furniture hitting the floor was like fists pounding at her skull.

Her heart loosened in her chest, drumming painfully against her ribcage. Her senses sharpened as the ground shook underneath her like it were about to break up into pieces and open the gateway to a pit of volcanic lava. Everything came into focus as if time was stretching around her to accommodate her, to welcome her as she sifted through every detail coming her way, dived eagerly into that flood.

She could see the cinders swirling in the air, carried by a cold breeze, could hear glass shards hitting the floor. A curtain rod crashed down. The purple drapery withered in the heat along with the carpet. Only the patch covered by her shield didn't burn.

Dyamond chunks and the occasional metal shim or mangled spring bombarded her mercilessly. Her barrier hissed every time they drummed against it and flung them back, sometimes repeatedly when some of them ricocheted off the walls.

She forced herself to wait a full minute once things appeared to settle before letting up on her shield. A quick look at her handiwork sated the bloodthirstiness churning in her belly, for now.

Digging her nails into the satisfaction rushing through her veins, Griffin took to the air. Laughter bubbled in her at the sight of the rubble lying harmlessly beneath her on the soot-covered floor.

Amidst raining ashes and smoke the grotesque crater she'd blown in the back wall of the storage room was another flux of strength through her body. A wave of her hand cleared the black, toxic plumes to let her see her prize.

The blast had pulverized the hidden alcove, only jagged edges protruding from the floor left of the dyamond. Behind that the outer wall of the palace was also damaged, hollowed out nearly all the way, daylight streaming in through the gaps and cracks in the stone. Yet, in the midst of the destruction, on an untouched pedestal lay-

Griffin lurched back as if she'd cut herself on the crystals.

Swerving abruptly mid-air, she stirred up a small vortex of ashes. Her velocity swept more of them in the air, spraying them to her sides as she rushed back into the hallway.

She forced herself to land, conserve her magic.

She'd underestimated Valtor's involvement with the security system, and his pettiness if no one had shown up to stop her yet.

Then again, she hadn't accomplished anything necessitating an urgent response. The smoking hole in the palace wall could be fixed at any time and her strategy of following the magical trails of the building had proven futile.

She needed a fresh perspective.

In the centuries since The Point of Salvation had been devised, various conjectures had been made about its location but not one based on any tangible even if flimsy evidence. If her discoveries were anything to go by, Griffin could rule out the last floor of the palace. It was closest to the royal apartments but also the first place any invaders would look for an escaped monarch and their failsafe. No, it would be at the last possible place one could expect, just like the crystal amplifier.

To think that had been a few hallways away from the ballroom the whole time. She would grind her teeth to fine dust if she didn't watch herself.

She had assumed it'd be kept near the war room on the second floor or the armory – for easy defense. While it wasn't The Point of Salvation, its creation had been not just a key moment in Dyamond's history, but also the start of another era of magic. Treating it like a shameful failure to be buried in the back of your closet–or storage room in this case–had certainly deceived others too, not just her.

To have any use for The Point of Salvation, Raina and her children would need to secure themselves safe passage to it first. Relying on the regular hallways that would be swarming with enemies during a vicious raid on the palace wasn't just stupid but suicidal. A secret emergency route was the logical conclusion.

Testing the walls for hidden passageways was useless. She'd have to start all the way back at the royal apartments and follow the whole system of corridors to her target. It'd be a waste, especially since the passageways were most probably cloaked and impossible to detect either via magic or technology. With the crystal amplifier bombarding her with the charge it was sapping away from the wake of the explosion, she wouldn't be able to sense the Dragon Fire itself if Valtor stood right beside her anyway.

If her theory was correct, then the royals could move around the palace freely, get to any part of it undisturbed. The last place anyone would expect them to try to escape to would be the most remote point of the building – the basement. It was perfect for their last line of defense.

Griffin headed to the stairway she'd passed on her way here.

Judging by the pitch-black darkness that accosted her as soon as she rounded the first corner down, the basement was empty. She had to conjure her phone from her pocket dimension to light her way.

The first trace of magic in the air raised her skin into goosebumps like the cold draft carrying from every stone hadn't managed. A device that generations of royalty had fretted over to such extremes was bound to emit a constant charge even when not in use but this was too obvious.

The magic curling around her was invasive. The air hummed with it and it burrowed into her skin as if to reach its clawed fingers underneath and hollow her out. It tugged on her own energy to pry it lose and start siphoning it away. No one could ignore such a threat to their own integrity even if they wanted to.

She turned right at the bottom of the stairs, towards the source.

Struck as if by a lightning bolt, she stopped dead in her tracks.

She couldn't take another step. Her arm shook violently, making the flashlight rove the walls, cast shadows that writhed over them like demons welcoming her. They reached for her to drag her into one of the cells where the enchantments would suffocate the rest of her powers.

Griffin stumbled back, dropped her phone. The returning darkness choked her to strangle the remaining air out of her as memories kicked her in the ribs.

Her magic hadn't been locked away, instead flooding in her hands, rushing in harrowing waves. When she'd refused to release it, it'd gathered in her fingertips, stinging hot and electrifying. Pushing on the underside of her nails, it'd twinged, burned, like someone trying to pluck them off.

Tears had streamed down her face but she hadn't reached to wipe them away. Any movement could have been catastrophic, the agonizing tickle in her nerves already unbearable.

Stopping her leg from bouncing had required inhuman strength. Her teeth had been frantically picking apart the tender inside of her cheek that'd already been a pulpy, chewed mess. Her mouth had reeked of copper; the trickle of blood over her tongue and down her throat had choked her, forced her to hold in coughing fits that'd wracked her whole body.

The guards outside her dyamond prison had stared at her without blinking as if they could have burned holes into her with their eyes alone.

She'd stared back at them. At them and not the automated laser gun pointed at her, poised to strike at the first wisp of magic she summoned.

Raina–of all people–would have executed her and faced no repercussio...

Yes, she would have.

Griffin dug her teeth and nails in the thought, clung to it like it was driftwood holding her head above water.

In hindsight, the trap had been obvious. Catching wind of one of the Coven's operations wasn't unheard of in and of itself but the alleged target should have given her pause. Valtor and the Ancestral Witches would have never had use for the crystal amplifier, their power already exceeding most everyone else's. The descendants had only ever been pawns to be used and discarded as it served their masters. And if that hadn't made the bait obvious, the personal invitation from Raina to her younger daughter's birthday celebration should have given her pause.

The lack of activity from the Coven in the preceding weeks had kept her on her toes, a gnawing dread in the pit of her stomach. The calm before the storm had been loaded with tension so palpable and heavy that it'd slowed down her magic, her mind, made them sluggish and unreliable. Standing against Valtor and looking him in the eyes would have been a trigger pulled, all uncertainty draining from her stiff limbs and leaving only the comforting familiarity between them.

He hadn't granted her that much. Instead of claiming his victory, he'd left her in her transparent cell, singled out for others to gawk at her more if they hadn't had their fill already. With her magic going haywire, every look cast her way like daggers cutting into her, she'd lost sight of the truth.

She'd been untouchable.

Valtor would have decimated the whole palace in the fraction of a second it would have taken that laser gun to fire. He would have only preserved Raina's life and her daughters' just so that he could kill them–the girls first–for the crime of daring to wish harm upon her, let alone making her fear for her life.

If she feared someone, it had to be him. Only him.

The paralysis released its hold on her. Her chest expanded; her shoulders sagged with relief.

Perhaps she was foolish for it but she'd never feared him.

She called the phone back into her hand. Turning away from the dungeon, she left all the loathsome memories it'd unearthed to rot in there.

Her hand wobbled without her permission upon casting light on the rest of the corridor.

Her confidence quickly seeped away as an even dozen of doors greeted her. And those were just the ones she could see. It was a given that there were several times as many down the six additional hallways that branched out from the one she was in. She could easily be standing in a maze of rooms that would take far too long to check one by one.

She would have avoided all this trouble if she'd just threatened the queen from the beginning. It would have forced Valtor to return from whatever little excursion he could have gone on. The guard would hardly be able to contain her without any assistance from him and she assumed he'd want to keep his access to the Dyamond palace if nothing else.

Raina herself was useless to him, even in her quality of being queen. She didn't add anything to his arsenal – neither political prowess and connections, nor particular intellect. Following her uncle's abdication in favor of her mother, her startling, unprecedented lack of magical ability had been a cultural shock to her people, threatening to upend the belief upon which their entire monarchy was founded – that they could make a proper ruler out of anyone. All eyes were on the young crown princess now, waiting hungrily for any sign that she wouldn't turn out just like her mother.

Another reason why Griffin had overlooked the trap that'd been set for her – she'd deemed it wasteful even for Valtor to enter such an unfavorable alliance just to spite her. The easiest way to gain all the influence and access to magic he'd want would have been to put his own heir on any throne he wished, inserted himself in any court across the dimension.

She didn't need to raise the topic to know the deep aversion with which he'd meet it. Such a permanent, personal connection to any royal bloodline would be nothing but a liability, leverage to be used against him whether by enemies or even the child's own relatives and court. It was too messy for him and his preference to keep his options open even if he rarely had cause to turn on his allies, his sharp mind letting him spin any situation to his benefit.

If it were someone else's weakness, however, he wouldn't hesitate to exploit it.

Sapphire's father and his wife had been standing next to Raina for the entirety of the celebration, proudly holding the baby. The leaders of certain planets had found the circumstances of the princess' birth scandalous but the people of Dyamond had been overjoyed – just as much as the couple of nobles. Being part of Raina's own court, they wouldn't be any use to Valtor – if he'd noticed them at all.

Things could look very differently where Icy's father was concerned. Raina had refused to divulge his identity even to her own advisors per his wish to remain anonymous. It was possible that she weren't the point of the alliance at all. It didn't make her disposable, however, if she were a means to an end.

Were she wrong and Valtor was still in the palace, tracking down Raina would likely end up leading her directly to him. The last thing she needed was for him to overpower her in front of the queen. She hated to admit it but it would be embarrassingly easy for him to do it after she'd thrown most of her magic on a wild goose chase.

No, she had to make him come to her this time.

Griffin's eyes widened; the breath got stuck in her throat. She spun around on her heel to look at the dungeon again.

She had assumed Raina had held her imprisoned in a see-through cage to let others witness her humiliation. She hadn't had the presence of mind to stop and ask herself why she wasn't the only one that had been caught in the act but had never seen the inside of the cells in the dungeon.

Every time an intruder was captured roaming through the palace, they were hauled away with the excuse that it was safer that way. The truth to it had kept her from asking another logical question – why did the palace have a functioning dungeon if it was never in use? The space could be converted into a more secure vault or at least be used for storage purposes but instead, the Dyamond monarchs had kept wasting the building's energy on enchantments canceling out magic.

Griffin marched down the path between the cells. Her own powers grew fainter, dissipating like mist on her skin but a steady stream was still running in her core like an underground river. Concentrating enough energy in a powerful charge would still allow her to cast spells. It was the confirmation she was looking for.

Running her hand over the bars of several cells proved they were all calibrated to stunt magic but not sever it completely. That served just as well for masking the active power source of the device as it did as a back door in case the royals ever ended up thrown in their own dungeon. There was no way to tell which cell their captors would choose for them so all had to be connected to the secret passageways.

Griffin flung the closest door open, another rush of energy making her dizzy. Or maybe that was just the speed at which she was moving.

The side walls would lead to the neighboring cells so Griffin made her way straight to the one across from her. Any hidden passageway would be locked behind it.

The door didn't slam shut after her as soon as she was through. If Raina wasn't alarmed yet, she had to take another look at the crater in her palace walls. It was unlikely she would have disclosed any information about her failsafe to Valtor either, at least not of her own volition. She was confident in her own security measures and Griffin couldn't wait to make her regret it.

Blood magic was her best guess. A lock defended with it couldn't be forced open with stolen blood or via a coerced hostage. It had to be done out of one's own volition or through a complex, time- and energy-consuming system of spells that corroded the integrity of any magic they came in contact with.

While she wasn't closely familiar with The Point of Salvation, she could deduce it would require maintenance, or at least a periodic check to confirm it was operational. With how paranoid the queen had been about another attempt on her kingdom's sovereign status, she had certainly inspected her insurance policy for her and her daughters' survival before inviting the enemy to her celebration. Probably even more recently before the massive destruction that was about to occur on her neighboring planet.

A person well-versed in magic would know how to remove their blood traces from a once opened lock but Raina was not a magic user. Indeed, when Griffin brought her hand next to the wall, careful to keep a distance between them, and scanned it, Raina's essence was still in there like a fingerprint left on a doorknob. All she had to do was use it like a glove to hide her own essence and deceive the spell.

Quiet fizzling filled the cell as the stones in front of her vanished to leave her staring at a dark niche hidden behind it. Stepping inside triggered another mechanism that restored the wall to its previous state before the niche opened into a claustrophobic antechamber.

Another lock requiring blood didn't slow her down much.

The vanishing granite revealed a relatively larger circular chamber. The soft glow that lit the room had no visible source. It appeared to stream through the stone itself and finally allowed her to return her phone back to her pocket dimension.

The device located in the middle of the otherwise empty chamber was nothing like she'd expected it to be. It would be comical if not for how baffling the design was.

It appeared as nothing more than a dyamond tube with a... She had to stifle a hysterical laughter at the sight of the sliding door. Having been hosted by nobility and royalty all across the dimension, she'd seen infinitely more elaborate shower stalls.

The magical current that the whole charade with the dungeon was supposed to mask was undeniably stronger in here. Palpitations moved the floor under her feet like she was standing on the back of a living, breathing beast. It was probably the source of the light as well.

A more thorough look at the composition of the device revealed the reason for its simplicity. Its power source was dug into the ground along with all the rest of its vital components. A last, desperate and rather useless effort at protecting its integrity. If any enemy made it this far, The Point of Salvation's destruction was ensured.

Still, Griffin carefully examined it for any more security measures only to come up empty-handed. It was possible the thought of a panicked, hasty child reaching their ticket to freedom and being hindered by the very system set in place to protect them had overpowered even the paranoia of the earliest generations of Dyamond royalty.

The inside of the tube was just as simplistic as the outside. Apart from the amethyst crystals lining the parts of it that didn't move, there were no controls. It powered up as soon as Griffin stepped inside and was meant for completely intuitive use, designed for the worst case scenario – having to be operable by the youngest of children.

It would be absurd then to think that Griffin wouldn't figure out how to use it.

If Valtor hadn't shown up yet, there was no point stalling. It had become tiresomely typical of him not to take her seriously and force her hand into something they'd both rather avoid.

She closed the door behind her, the airtight space instantly setting off her nerves. She could try to force a rhythm to her breathing, focus her mind on her goal, but it'd be no use. Another million years wouldn't make this next part easier.

Anticipation coiled inside and around her, familiar and dreaded. It'd been her companion for years, a constant presence in the back of her mind that squeezed around her at the very possibility of Valtor's face appearing to her. She'd been waiting for the moment when she'd fail and crawl back to him just to avoid the feeling anymore, to replace it with the wild rush of having him so near she could always reach her hand out and touch him. Then the fear that everyone else that'd grown dear to her would look at her with hatred wouldn't have mattered.

She'd been such a fool. There was nothing she wouldn't give to see them hate her, nothing she wouldn't give to see them alive.

She closed her eyes and let the image of Sylvia form in her mind. She couldn't be sure where to look for her. Her mansion would be the most logical place but she had no guarantee someone as active on the political scene as Valtor was would be home. She had to focus on the woman herself and let the amethyst crystals boost the psychic waves that were supposed to guide the rest of the process.

The walls disappeared around her, the air moving freely, spinning around her body and yet still stale on her skin. There was nothing solid under her feet; she was floating in the air despite the power surges of the device still rippling under her soles.

Her nails tried to dig into her palms through her gloves. The grayish void she found was surrounding her when she opened her eyes didn't help.

Something had gone wrong.

Her palm slapped against the sliding door of the tube despite all the empty space surrounding her. The glass slid open and the gray in front of her eyes was replaced with the familiar inside of the device and the stone chamber around it.

In all of Raina's paranoia, she couldn't have missed to make sure her last line of defense worked properly. She would have tested it, maintained it, done everything necessary to keep it operational at all times. The mistake must have been hers.

Griffin closed the door again and visualized Sylvia's face carefully behind her eyelids, imagined her voice – never loud but perfectly authoritative. She hated to admit it but Sylvia had intimidated her well into her teenage years. She'd been the epitome of everything Griffin had wanted to be – powerful, respected, feared even, and perfectly unmoved by the greatest powers of the dimension; she was one of them and more often the one that everyone else had to accommodate. Yet, she'd still hated her – not because of Sylvia's treatment of her, but because of her treatment of-

The light behind her eyelids shifted dramatically. Sunbeams hit her in the face, making her raise a hand to protect her eyes.

Her heart leaped in her throat when she opened them to find Sylvia leaning against an ornate, polished desk in a spacious room she didn't recognize. She looked disturbingly smaller than usual, her curly hair loose down her back and unbrushed. It was when she turned around that Griffin jumped back and hit the wall behind her.

Sylvia's hard, sculpted features appeared frozen in place as always. Griffin couldn't identify a single wrinkle that had appeared since she'd known the woman but her eyes were now so wet and red-rimmed. Rather than the arctic blue she was used to seeing, they looked completely ashen and gray, devoid of color. Her lower lip quivered with something unspoken but it was her hunched shoulders that would poke Griffin's eyes out. They made her look like she was trying to curl herself around a piece of her that was no longer there.

Griffin opened her mouth but instantly closed it. It only made her breathing more frantic; the irregular gasps barely kept her conscious as her vision swam, to her relief. It made it impossible to look Sylvia in the eye.

"Griffin," her voice was nothing like she remembered, soft and fragile, a distant echo of the woman she knew. "You're alive. What happened on Domino?"

She didn't sound surprised. If anyone would have reasoned Griffin had gone with Valtor, it was her. Still, Griffin couldn't decide if that was the reason for her disgust or the mention of her other enemy, the one that'd fallen, the one that should have meant nothing to her anymore.

Griffin grappled for her own voice; she wasn't sure what would be worse – for Sylvia to speak again or for her to do it.

"We... I couldn't... I-I... She's dead." She was repeating Valtor's words, had to focus on the memory of his voice, the cold, steel certainty of it carving into her chest, just to be able to utter them.

"The Ancestral Witches?"

She had to bite herself to keep from laughing. She had to bite herself to keep from screaming.

"They're gone too, but Fara-"

She swallowed, then again. If anything came out of her throat, her sanity would escape with it; she wouldn't be able to keep it down.

She couldn't sit still.

If she made one step, she'd leave the device and risk being stuck with Sylvia. She couldn't take the chance of losing her way back to Dyamond and being left only with her own magic that had crawled in the darkest, dirtiest corner of her mind and curled into a small, useless ball.

Her hands found her braid, fingers picking at her hair, pushing to force their way between the tightly held strands and pull them loose. That pain was welcome, grounded her in her body, the sting of it far more tangible than the words she forced herself to fire out while she was distracted.

"You have to find her, bury her. She deserves- Not this. So much better than this... We're certainly not the ones that will give it to her."

How had it come to this? The two of them being the ones left to remember Faragonda – the ones that had failed over and over again to see her for who she truly was, to accept her, to be there for her. This had to be a cruel joke.

"Where exactly should I look for her?"

The question echoed in Griffin's mind like a slap against tiled walls. "I-"

She'd never asked. Had never asked whether there was anything left to be buried at all. No, she would have crawled inside Valtor's ribcage if possible where the only thing that mattered was his heart – beating – for her.

He never found someone to take her place. It roused a grim satisfaction inside her to know she haunted his thoughts, too, that he could not look at another and see anything but her. He'd never taken another partner, another confidante, and any lover after her would have been subjected to brutal, merciless comparison, all of them bound to disappoint. No one would have moaned like her, uttering his name through trembling lips and clutching him closer, her magic spilling for him to kiss over it. She had ruined everyone else for him, had ruined the taste of life unless he was drinking up from her lips.

It was only fair.

"How did my daughter die, Griffin?" Sylvia's voice pierced through her skull like an icicle. "Watching you fuck her– your–mortal enemy? I'm surprised you took a break to call me and arrange her burial. How do you intend to come to her funeral? Hand in hand with her murderer?"

Griffin's fingers clawed at her throat – to open it for more oxygen or to let the blood spill out, it was impossible to tell. Maybe it was to let her soul escape, away from the razor-sharp teeth in it, tearing it apart for sick entertainment. That gleam in Sylvia's eyes...

It wasn't natural.

It wasn't her.

She was talking to an impostor.

Her spell-charged fist hit the dyamond tube around her. All it accomplished was a painful reminder of where she was.

She threw the door open and jumped out, the image of the impostor in front of her popping out of existence like it was nothing more than an ephemeral soap bubble.

She couldn't wrap her mind around any of it.

Sylvia would never be so crude about it. The subtlety of her words always made them that much more brutal. She would have circled around her, Valtor's name hanging heavy in the air like a guillotine that only nicked her flesh, each cut skin-deep. It would have been the itch that would have made Griffin herself reach to tear them open, swallowing her own tears and begging for mercy.

Sylvia would have known that sticking her fingers in Griffin's wounds would only make her retreat to lick them closed – directly into Valtor's arms. He was the only one she could bear to hold her, the only one she hadn't betrayed, at least not worse than he'd betrayed her.

There was only one person who'd know how to hijack the signal of The Point of Salvation, to manipulate it.

She'd been talking to none other than the queen of Dyamond herself, had once again fallen into the trap Raina had set out for her. She could have easily made her way to the device after the explosion that had shaken the whole palace while Griffin had been wracking her brain trying to find it.

It wasn't right. She had no magic...

Valtor did. Had an excess of it to give away.

A volatile charge made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end, as if the air had filled with static electricity.

She whipped around and nearly slammed into his chest, their faces mere inches apart. His quick spell steadied her just in time.

It was a miracle his proximity didn't singe the hair right off her body. Only his intent rendered the sizzling aura around him harmless to her.

She refused to move. He'd been the one to decide the current distance between them didn't work. He'd have to bridge or broaden it.

This close to him, she could only take in separate, little fragments of his appearance – the ruffles of his shirt, completely identical to the one she'd destroyed, his unmoving throat clearly implying he found nothing to correct in their current position, his blond locks falling about his face as if he'd just stepped off the set of a hair product commercial.

His power had settled into his skin again to leave the stage all to his flawless composure. His posture was always that of someone who owned the whole world as if his height alone weren't imposing. Now it was too stiff, his shoulders pinned back to mask the restlessness that shadowed his every movement, looking for an opening to possess his muscles and ruin his carefully crafted image. It was why his gaze was trained on one single spot, perfectly poised to meet hers once she looked him in the eyes.

He had been on the hunt. The only thing that had his blood boiling beyond his control was an unfinished business, especially when he was chasing someone. Someone that wasn't her.

An ugly thing rose in her chest, hissed like a snake that'd been crushed under someone's boot, maimed but still surviving. She had to restrain herself from attacking him, latching to his mouth until he was too busy mapping out her body with his hands and kisses to remember anyone else existed.

Because she was staring so intently at his lips, she saw the sigh leaving them in a grand performance.

"I was hoping this all could be avoided. Yet, I come back to find that you've already provoked our hostess," he pressed his fingers into his temple, the image of a tortured diplomat. "I reasoned that you'd at least behave yourself long enough for me to return, if you noticed my absence at all."

"Is that supposed to make me feel better?" Griffin seethed despite her best efforts.

"I suppose not. After all, you exhausted all this magic for absolutely no reason at all. But you can take comfort in the assurance that all my efforts were invested in a posthaste return to you, starlight," he abandoned his theatrics to take her hand, his fingers twisting the silver strings of her glove around them to tie her to him.

Oh, he was enjoying this.

Whatever power her scowl might have had was demolished by the tremble of her lips at the sound of the endearment. Heat was rising in her sides–apparently so if she were to judge by his smirk–as if he were a sun nestled inside her chest. His response to her ironic "sunshine" never failed to disarm her. Of course, he wouldn't hesitate to use it now.

She could play his game.

"Why, I find the discovery I made to be more than worth it, wouldn't you agree?" Griffin looked over her shoulder at The Point of Salvation. "You can reach any part of the dimension, find anyone you're looking for."

It was better that she didn't draw his attention back to whom specifically she'd been trying to contact but she could always remind him there were still people out there that she could go to and leave him to stew in the implications as he liked to do to her so often.

Valtor's lips tickled the shell of her ear insistently, demanding that she spare no thought to anything but him, "Were you going to hunt me down, dearest? Come join me in my affairs?"

The moment she raised her hand to slap him, he'd snatch her wrist and pull her glove off, bring her fingers to his lips. All her rage, her indignation and her resolve would slip right between them and she'd fall into his bed again, without a single thought spared on how she'd be setting herself up for a repeat of events.

"I must admit that your devotion to bringing me back here is immensely flattering," he cupped her cheek and turned her face towards him again.

Griffin had to bite back a grin at how quickly his patience unraveled the moment his ego took over. It would cut that much deeper when he realized he'd set himself up for the crushing blow.

"Oh," her eyes widened to accompany the exaggerated way her lips shaped the sound, "I rather thought that since you were out there taking care of your affairs, I should do the same. You see, when I found you gone-"

His lips curled around a vicious snarl, baring his teeth – involuntarily. It settled as soon as she faltered, giving the impression of capitulation.

She could already taste his magic souring, prickling into her mouth with every breath. It'd turn to knives in her flesh if she relayed to him her conversation with Raina but she'd have wrested it from his control, would have turned it on him as much as on herself.

He'd had to fight for her undivided attention for years and settle for failure when she walked away again, hand in hand with the fairy she'd returned to, the fairy that'd had everything he wanted. Just hearing her name would set him off like a bomb that would take out the entire palace, blow a crater straight through to the core of Dyamond.

Her heart shuddered in dark, delighted vindictiveness but her jaw trembled before Faragonda's name could start forming in her mouth. Her vision flickered, losing him for a moment only to find nothing else in the gray emptiness he left behind.

"We all have to make sacrifices in our line of work, regrettably," the yearning in his voice was so potent it guided her like a lighthouse in the dark.

His warmth against her skin grounded her; his face came into focus again. The back of his fingers stroked her cheek and there it was – the ice of his gaze melted for her.

"That blue looks stunning on you," his arm slid around her waist and pulled her closer, too close for him to be able to see anything other than her face.

The light around them burned brighter than it had before, making her dress shine against her skin rather than let her be lost, engulfed, in the dark fabric and the matching insides of her mind.

Valtor's lips sealed hers like fire scorching the ground, cleansing it for new sprouts to take root – a whole garden in the making.

She leaned into him, burying her hands under his coat, under his vest to clutch at his shirt. It was bathed in the heat that had long evaporated from the sheets when she'd stirred awake, sent little thrills shooting through her as if she were holding real flames in her hands and they only licked at her skin without burning her.

It wasn't enough.

She'd have to wrap herself in it to chase away the bitter taste of smoke and lies on her tongue, to be able to stomach his words again. He should have awakened her himself, lips and hands on her skin and a hunger in him that could only be sated when matched with her own. He should have trembled with sheer offense at the very possibility of her mind straying from him for a single moment, of her body–her whole being– not trembling for him.

A single kiss was just a cruel reminder that he'd failed to prioritize her.

Valtor was quick to dive in for another one as soon as she'd drawn the one gasping breath he was willing to allow her.

Her palm against his chest only earned her a second to deter him from distracting her again. "Are you sure you won't accuse me again of provoking our hostess?"

Valtor let go of her and stepped back, allowing cold to consume her when he was the warmest thing in the room, the warmest thing in existence. His gaze abandoned her as well, moved over her shoulder to The Point of Salvation behind her.

Her heart twisted. She had to clench her fists to subdue her magic, bite her lip to tame the hexes on it that would explode the dyamond tube behind her into silica dust raining over them like snow.

"As long as I remove you from her precious device, she'd be content. Though," the corner of his mouth twitched up, "I'm sure her appreciation will grow exponentially if I deign to employ a silencing spell this time."

He looked at her, an eyebrow arched delicately as if seeking her input when the moment he decided he'd had enough of this silliness, his name would be the only word left on her lips – for the whole world to hear.

Griffin suffocated the desire to get ahead of him, "Too bad for her."

"Indeed," Valtor purred, satisfied with her acquiescence. "You can see how dangerous you are to her, Griffin. You could ruin her."

He circled her casually, knowing she'd turn after him as if magnetized, his words just as much a pull on her as his presence.

"All you have to do," he motioned for the dyamond tube in front of him, "is contact the Council, warn them of her alliance with me."

Valtor turned towards her again as if he couldn't bear to leave her out of his sight, every moment his eyes weren't on her excruciating.

Delight flared in her chest rather than the appropriate fury. The craving for violence that possessed her was only directed at his clothes and the space between them.

With his hands clasped behind his back and a solemn, subservient expression on his face, he seemed to place himself at her feet. If not for the gleam in his eyes, even she could believe he was doing that rather than taunting her.

She was only useful to the Council dead. They'd always considered her Valtor's spy; a single trace of her survival would instantly renew the interplanetary hunt for her head. No information was worth more than dispensing justice and crippling any plan of his that relied on her involvement. In their eyes she was only a tool in his arsenal, the only type of weapon he wielded on the regular and with pleasure.

"They are desperate beyond reason, scrambling to find a scapegoat to take the fall for their own incompetence." Valtor moved closer, his gait that of a predator cornering his wounded dinner. "Dyamond is just the perfect candidate that they've overlooked... until someone sheds light on my patronage of the queen."

Griffin couldn't fight off the shiver quaking her. If he could do this to her with just words, he wouldn't even need his mark to ensure Raina's compliance with his every whim. It took two to keep a secret, yet she alone would suffer the consequences if hers was revealed.

She'd made her antagonism towards Domino public every day of her reign, the fallout between her and Marion an obscene spectacle for the whole dimension to witness. Pinning the blame on her would pacify the other monarchs and all concerns they'd have for the safety of their own kingdoms. A personal grudge only succeeding with the help of a now-extinct faction was much less troubling than a conquest of a universal scope that was not entirely fruitless.

"Fear drives people to excessive, extreme measures," Valtor's voice startled her like the cracking of a whip. "I gave her the means to protect herself, provided her with security to minimize the potential for rash decisions but, apparently, she still finds you intimidating. Can you really blame her?"

Griffin pursed her lips. He couldn't expect her to fall for such a sloppy attempt to get a rise out of her, could he? She weren't Raina. She deserved more effort.

"You have always been formidable, especially to someone who has only just discovered the possibilities of magic. She's but a child playing with her new toy while you with your impeccable mastery of your craft and your reputation alone, not to mention my respect for you were bound to be imposing and draw her caution. She's not foolish enough to think herself a match for you just because I looked at her twice."

When she didn't immediately crumble at his feet or lift herself on tiptoes to bestow the kiss she'd denied him before, he added, "You did also aid those who'd colonized her planet once already in a plot against her kingdom."

The effect was instant.

The words ripped through her throat like a dagger slicing it open, "The plot was against you!"

Her ragged, heavy breathing filled the room, stuffed her chest with a clawing panic.

There wasn't space inside her for the onslaught of memories, of voices screeching in her head, fighting to take over.

They will have multiple times the firepower that they do now.

No one can know what we're doing there.

What was the nature of your relationship with Valtor?

There are intruders in the palace.

Members of your court were caught in the act, or do you deny it?

I'm sorry, Griffin.

I'm sorry. I'msorryimsorryimsorry

She was choking. Her mind was unraveling not thread by thread but all at once. Her body followed, shaking-

Valtor's hand seizing her wrist pulled her to safety, into his soothing presence. His breath was a warm breeze over her face that chased away the water from her eyes. She could focus on his.

They bored into her like she was a butterfly pinned in his gaze, paralyzed and exposed, wings fluttering helplessly. "She doesn't like being collateral damage anymore than she does like being betrayed."

The one drawback of him seeing her betrayal in everything was that it was the one thing he saw when he looked at her too.

She couldn't take it back.

She'd known that when she'd left.

She'd never been prepared for it. Especially not now that she was by his side again, in his arms and the triumphant relief of their reunion was so fragile under their feet, wailing at every step and threatening to send them crashing into the rage bubbling underneath like an active volcano.

"I'm sure she'd warm up to you if you put a little effort into showing remorse," Valtor tucked an invisible lock of hair behind her ear, the gesture more a warning than an olive branch.

Something burst inside her. Not so much a dam as it was a fuse, overloaded from years and years' worth of his veiled threats and her own regrets, anticipation and the horrible, crippling anxiety of having him so near only to lose him for good.

" Fuck her!"

Valtor's eyes flashed ominously. His jaw worked – to grind to dust the words erupting from him and replace them with other, measured ones.

"Now how would that make you feel, dearest? I'd never be so careless with your feelings." He had to love the taste of her blood to always twist the knife as viciously as possible. "We wouldn't want you to blow up the rest of the palace, now would we?"

It had to bother her more. But as long as she was in his mouth, he would never learn to live without her.

It helped her keep the petulance out of her voice, "Raina was quick to run to you with all of her problems."

"Thanks to your handiwork," Valtor gave her fingers a squeeze, "a thick smoke curtain has claimed the first floor. All the ash you've trailed down the stairs hardly compares with that but was rather useful. How do you think I found you?"

Of course. She hadn't been using any of her own magic.

Judging from his words, Raina hadn't told him where to find her, had hoped he would drag her away from her hidden failsafe with his mere return. And he would have if she hadn't left him such a convenient trail to follow. So much for Raina's secret.

"I trust you can refrain from causing further destruction to our new home," Valtor continued as if she hadn't just provided him with a–grossly unneeded–advantage.

"Where are you going?" the words tumbled out before she could catch herself, her fingers flexing, forcing him to release her.

To his credit, Valtor had the decency to look annoyed rather than smirk at her. "You have created work for me, dearest. Someone has to fix all the property damage you've left in your wake."

Instead of her jaws clenching together, her mouth fell open. The hiss on its way to leave her morphed into a rush of air that sounded suspiciously like a sigh of relief when Valtor pressed his lips to her forehead in an unexpectedly tender kiss.

"The library is yours to explore at your discretion and so is the rest of the palace," his thumb stroked her cheek to completely offset her balance alongside the wistful look her gave her.

She had to grasp at his wrist with both hands to remain upright. She didn't miss the wave of smugness rolling off him, his eyes already dissecting every twitch of her fingers in his sleeve and the fluttering of her lashes.

She had to take him down a peg.

The look she gave him was made all the more cocky by her poorly feigned demure act, her fingers toying with the hem of his sleeve, "You're leaving me to gallivant around unsupervised?"

"You are a guest here, after all. The guest of honor," Valtor fired out in contrast with how stiff his fingers had grown on her cheek. "Do try a more amicable approach when it comes to weathering the queen's moods, won't you?"

Griffin made a show of intertwining their fingers and turning to kiss his palm despite his glove.

Then, in the most level, innocent voice she could manage, she asked, "That would mean, of course, that I could roam further than the palace grounds?"

Valtor frowned, nearly pouted at the mere mention.

"Within reason." Always one to recover quickly, he leaned in like his next words were only for her ears – a love confession to tug on her heartstrings and bind her in his orbit. "Your face is not as anonymous as it used to be. You'd be putting yourself and the queen in danger if you're noticed in the heart of her home."

Griffin pulled back to meet his eyes, "There's a simple solution to eliminate the risk to Her Majesty."

The moment she dropped his hand, his magic spiked as if she'd thrown a stone in a lake and awoken the creatures in the deep. Turning her back on him was the equivalent of pouring oil in the fire.

It burst in the room, dropped the pressure and made the air crackle with static as if they were in the middle of a storm. It clawed at her form, compelling, demanding that she turn around to look at him or it would slither inside her and make her.

It shivered in delight when small charges trickled in her fingertips. Wisps of his power gathered around her hands to urge more of hers out, coaxing, cajoling her to join him, give him everything she had.

She forced herself to ignore them and focused on picking a destination. The Point of Salvation wouldn't take her anywhere but she weren't Raina. She could do it herself.

She could swear the tiniest gasp of alarm broke through the chaos in her thoughts only for him to cover it up just as quickly.

"Where are you headed to, starlight?"

His voice was an arrow through her chest. It pierced in and out to pin her heart to the wall across from her. An excessive, underhanded attempt to keep her from leaving.

She turned to look at him, to return the favor.

"Oh, I don't know. Probably Solaria. I could use the sunshine if we are to have a... shortage of it in the next few months." She feigned contemplation, "On the other hand, no one would expect me on Magix and I haven't been on a decent book hunt in ages. I can easily think of fifteen bookshops I could tour just off the top of my head."

Valtor's expression slowly changed – from furrowed eyebrows and a storming gaze to a fond, saccharine smile, "If you do end up shopping, I trust you to surprise me with an appropriate gift, for all my assistance in your relations with the queen."

A moment of silence settled between them before her heart threatened to detonate in her chest. He could certainly hear its pounding against her ribs, trigger it with a simple gesture, a single look even. Her magic dripped too slowly into her palms to provide a real outlet. He must have taken her depleted reserves to mean hesitation.

Fine. Her absence would strike him that much harder when she disappeared – this time right in front of his eyes.

Denying him her company was her last bargaining chip. She wasn't really denying him, more like delaying him, spiting him. The power she had was so little, practically nothing, but she couldn't let go of it. He'd already robbed her of so much, even now that she was defeated, completely at his mercy.

Valtor didn't budge despite her building spell.

He could find her on the other end of the universe.

She had to count on it.

Her magic ran the length of her body like little shock waves, resounding echoes of a disaster that had already happened. She hardly heard Valtor's voice over it.

"Stay out of trouble."

His gaze easily cut through the haze taking over her, drove the air out of her lungs.

She was stuck on the cold of it – frozen in place.

The shiver running through her kicked her spell into motion.

Valtor disappeared.

Her body crumbled into the depths of her magic. The pieces of her launched through space and her mind followed in a smooth jump with none of the impact of rattling around in her physical form.

White-hot agony tore through her to split her in half – one continuing to hurtle forward and the other flung back and spat out in the stone chamber again.

She was yanked backwards, each of her atoms crushing the rest, melding them into one again. The force of it rang through her bones like she'd hit a wall.

Valtor's grip on her wrist was brutal, searing through both their gloves. There was no magic to it, only his devastating fury.

Her own power was silenced; everything around them had fallen still. The air between them was charged with unbearable tension. One hair moved by her inhale was all the friction needed for a spark, for an explosion that would char them to ash.

She didn't dare breathe. Her lungs strained, burned, but she only looked at him, waited.

He could lean in and kiss her, or he'd finally go for it and choke her.

Valtor grabbed her chin instead of her neck – as if she weren't fully gripped by him already.

The quiver of her lips drained the blood thirst from his gaze and touch, made the pressure around them crumble in shards. Her shoulders sagged along with it but her eyes never left his.

"You've never been wasteful with magic," Valtor's voice unfurled through her body, from her head to the pit of her stomach, dropping heavy in there like a sinking stone. "Don't start now."

Griffin had to catch herself when his grip disappeared. It couldn't have taken her more than a second to steady herself on her feet but he was already halfway across the chamber, standing next to the exit.

He turned to her and offered his hand, "Where would you even go?"

Anywhere.

It wouldn't make a difference. Without him by her side or at least pursuing her savagely it wouldn't matter one bit if she were walking the lush forests of Linphea teeming with plant life extinct elsewhere or infiltrating the vaults bursting with all the secrets of the black arts underneath the ruins of Spheria. It would only ever feel one way – deafening, oppressive stillness that with time only mellowed out to a dull emptiness when she was alone with her thoughts.

"I didn't want to leave. I never would have if..."

The first months after had been excruciating. The smallest of charges in her fingertips had echoed back at her tenfold, tearing at her own flesh when there'd been no answer. Uttering the simplest of spells had been a death wish, a suicide. Instead of a cautious step inching forward, it had been a fall off a half-standing bridge. Yet, you couldn't see where the stone ended until you'd dropped off.

Only when she'd met him in battle, she had started recovering with the slowness of rehabilitating a broken spine, and just because Faragonda hadn't let her do it alone.

"If what?" Valtor's voice whipped against the stone walls as if he'd seen the name written all over her in the way Faragonda had nursed her back to functionality.

He bridged the distance between them again when she didn't answer, attempted to pull it out of her with his mere presence, with the mirage of it.

Like a hound to blood, Griffin latched onto that one weakness she had forced on him.

He stalked over to her before she could take her second step back. He took her chin in his hand. The firmness of his touch echoed in her body when the hard wall met her back.

He'd teleported them just to have her cornered. A clear message to pick her words carefully but not make him wait any longer, lest he decided to take them straight from her head.

It was the perfect payback – his own strategy turned on him in retribution for his silence about her friends' demise. He had to be dying to brag about his cunning and skill in outsmarting them, taking their lives in his hands and crushing them into nothingness. But he wanted her to ask, wanted her to be complicit in the pain he got to cause her. Now she had the power to make him wonder in turn, ache for the truth, for a reason she could give him to put his mind at ease, stop it from tearing apart every little memory of her for hints and clues just to have something definitive, something tangible to explain the worst part of his life.

It didn't feel like a victory, or even like an advantage of any kind. Just another fall deeper into the pit of misery they were burying themselves in. It was a miracle they were both still breathing.

Griffin raised her hand to cup his face, her glove melting away, but Valtor swatted it away like her caress was an annoying pest.

His eyes were throwing sparks, the words shredding through his teeth, "I found no trace of you where you were supposed to greet me. I found you on enemy territory – not as a captive, but worse – as a traitor, an informant, their ally."

She couldn't help but shrink away, his vulnerability always the sharpest weapon he could aim at her throat, but his fingers under her chin held her in place for the onslaught.

"How many times have I watched you choose to walk away from me and whimper after them like a stray animal half out of its mind with starvation? Was that my fault? Did I cast you aside, shove you into their arms? Was I the one to push you away?"

The cold amidst which she'd woken flared inside her chest, spread through her body to make her frigid like a stone. If she tried to beat him over the head with his own mistakes, he'd spin it around, put the blame on her again.

The realization that she didn't care settled in her bones like a chill she couldn't shake off. As long as she could spit venom in his face in turn, it was worth getting burned by him.

Valtor forced her jaws closed, trapping her tongue between her teeth. "You were wanting for nothing. You had my respect and my trust to execute plans as you deemed fit. I offered support to any agenda you had, ensured your access to magic no other witch had been allowed to witness, let alone use for herself. Did I ever meet you with judgment for your heart's desires or any act you've committed in my name or your own? I have only ever granted you the freedom to be yourself, to speak your mind without having to bow down to people who hate your guts."

Not just her mind but her heart, her feelings for him that had been denounced as more abominable than the corpses she had created with her own ha-

Griffin bit her tongue until she tasted blood, the sharp tang of it severing her thought.

His palms were feather-light on her skin when he cupped her cheeks – as if she would set him ablaze with the mere contact between them.

His voice came out guttural, growling, like he was digging deep into his core just to get it out, "I have proven time and time again that I would give you everything, that I would stop at nothing for you, even after what you did."

His shoulders shuddered just barely, his eyes stabbing through her. His breaths were too fast and shallow, like he couldn't draw in a deeper one without flinching... like he was in pain.

Griffin swallowed her blood, the taste of it soaking her insides like there was a monster there thirsting for it, making her feral – to match him.

Calculation had played no part in his disappearing act, only self-preservation. Keeping her an arm's length away had been the only solution he'd come up with to the gnawing hunger that had ravaged them both for years. Yet his fingers pressed into her skin, hard, to erase the possibility of her existing on her own, without being marked by him. His control was slipping through the fissures running across his mask from the gut-punch that was her proximity.

A sharp inhale rattled her whole body when Valtor leaned in, lips just shy of covering hers.

"I told you, Griffin," the way he rasped her name made her weak in the knees. "I am not careless with your feelings."

She blinked and he was gone, a respectable distance away from her and perfectly composed once more, smirking at her obvious need to brace herself against the wall now that the support of his body had disappeared. She'd lost count of how many times he'd subjected her to that kind of bait-and-switch just today.

"No, I could never call you careless," she crossed her arms, leaning fully against the wall, determined not to be the first one to budge. "You invested two years in this charade of an alliance just to... irritate me."

The words were small on her tongue, tasteless.

She wouldn't give him more.

The glint in his eyes was... troubling. She'd seen it enough times not to begrudge herself for the buckling of her knees, for her nails digging into her arms in a desperate bid to hold her together.

"Oh, Griffin," Valtor crooned like he meant to soothe a scared prey animal. He was leading her like a lamb to the slaughter. "You of all people should be aware I never play on a single front. Raina has been much more useful to me than you could imagine."

The dagger landed perfectly, a sharp point straight through her chest. A confirmation that he was lying would only force it deeper, would make it hollow out her sternum as well, not just slice her flesh open.

It would be much preferable to hearing about all the alleged uses he'd had for Raina of all people.

All the time they'd spent fighting each other he'd claimed his anger had been on her behalf – partly at least. Yet, instead of gunning for the heads of those he'd insisted were beneath her, he'd sunk even lower – for the sake of rubbing her face in it.

"I am well aware," the words shook off her lips and shattered at her feet but he couldn't ignore them if he wanted to close in on her. "No one in this entire universe knows you better than I do so don't even try to play your games with me."

Valtor's lips parted like he was eating up her performance, like he only delighted in her adorable attitude.

"You wouldn't have looked at her twice if you couldn't use her to spite me," Griffin spat out to keep the words from sanding her tongue down to a pulpy mess. "If she knew even half of what I did for you, she would have fled into another fucking dimension!"

The mirth drained from his expression, replaced by a grim seriousness that would frighten away a thunderstorm. "If I wanted you jealous, I would have given you thousands to be jealous of."

Valtor slipped to the other end of the room upon the sight of her bared teeth. His pace was unhurried as he circled from afar, leaving the device between them, to separate them and hide him from her gaze, only his disembodied words flocking to her side to haunt her.

"Everyone you ever met you would hate. In your mind I would have replaced you with every – one – of them."

The force in her clenched fists would be enough to pluck every ounce of magic straight out of Raina with her bare hands. Let's see how useful she'd be when stripped down only to her own strength and abilities.

"Not every one."

Three steps and she was facing the outline of her own body in the diamond tube. Another fraction of a second was all it took for a devastating spell to pool into her fist, make her fingers shake with the power of it.

Valtor snatched her wrist before it could connect with the dyamond surface, her strength failing to eat away at his... just according to plan.

She grabbed the ruffles of his shirt to pull his face down to hers. Now he was the one that had nowhere to go.

"You like to think you do everything with class, including spiting me. You wouldn't consider most people worth it even as the face of your retribution."

Valtor tilted his head like she was finally making sense, like she was finally worth listening to.

Twisting her arm only had his grip tighten like a vise around it. Her heart unclenched and she could dismiss her spell at last.

She had to bite back her grin. "You know what I think?"

Valtor raised an eyebrow at the shift in her tone, the up-and-down stroke of her palm against his chest.

"If you'd replaced me with anyone else, you would have bragged, would have listed all the reasons why they grabbed your attention – how masterful they are with their magic, how sharp a tongue theirs is, how you had to have them because everything you want, you get."

Griffin yanked her arm again – to prove her point.

His reaction was instant; he tugged her closer, threw her off balance.

Their chests collided, her breath tickling his earlobe. Her smirk had to graze his skin a certain way to cause the shiver he couldn't disguise.

She sighed theatrically, her free hand playing with the buttons on his shirt, "And if nothing else, you would have held back for the sake of appearances."

His initial anger had shifted, melded into something different by their third-fourth meeting on the battlefield. His threats had remained just as abhorrent but he'd no longer been the catalyst bringing them into fruition. He'd burdened her with that role, had never missed a chance to remind her and her friends that she would be the Company's undoing, and her own, that one day she would wake up as if from a dream and would want to take back the problem between the two of them that she'd imagined into existence. Then she'd sacrifice anything and anyone on the alter of their love.

He wouldn't have turned around and destroyed all his work just to make her eat her heart out when he touched someone else, pretended he had forgotten the taste of her name.

"You didn't replace me with anyone," Griffin stepped back, eyes on his face but she still sensed the twitch of his free hand to snake around her and cage her to him. "You just wanted to use my imagination against me."

"And here you are!" Valtor fired out, his voice swallowing hers.

Her lungs stuttered when he let go of her instead and clasped his hands behind his back, the image of restraint. A mockery, once again.

"You've blown up a part of Raina's palace and you're in her dungeons, desperately doing everything you can to lure me back here. Jealous," he spat out as if the mere idea was poison twisting up his insides, "of a woman that you yourself said I only ever allied with to get to you."

The fury in his eyes was overflowing, so much so that they looked wet with tears.

His shoulders tensed; he was clearly fighting the impulse to grab at her, shake her, clutch her to his chest and never let go. "What could she possibly have that you don't, that I haven't given you already or shown my willingness to provide for you?"

Yes! Yes, she was getting to him. Let's see him leave her behind now.

Her satisfaction had to have shown for Valtor homed in on it with laser precision. His palm cupped the side of her neck where her telltale pulse gave him an unfair advantage.

"Any magic I have given her pales in comparison with the impressive abilities you had already developed when I first met you. I have spent years," the weight he put in that one word was a sharp contrast with the centuries he'd shouldered with but a shrug, " fighting to return you to your rightful place at my side. I had you weak with bliss in my bed and disturbing her whole palace with your screams."

"And you were gone before I woke up," Griffin fired out to stop him from kissing her, " gone to scheme with her again."

She had her finger on his trigger. All she had to do was keep pushing until he let something slip, anything that would give her a clue of his plans, of who he was after. If not that, at least spur him to continue declaring his devotion for her.

Valtor's thumb pressed into her windpipe.

The real alarm was the look in his eyes – a bottomless coldness that had her teeth chatter, froze the breath right into her lungs. It was unnatural on him, completely antithetical to his being.

"A momentary taste of your own medicine is too much, isn't it?"

Griffin shoved him back, his presence crowding her, calling back to the beginning of this farce. She was so tired, a bone-deep exhaustion draining all her willpower and any bite there might have been to her point.

"After you preferred to sit back and watch as she poked and prodded me for most intimate details about us? I have to admit that it's becoming a lot, yes," she turned away.

She was sick of talking about Raina. The mere mention of her tasted like rot in her mouth, like she was eating the corpse of him – the old Valtor she'd left behind. The man that had taken his place was more alert, more driven, eager to cross any line just to rid himself of the very memory of pain now that he'd come to know loss. He hadn't stepped in when Raina had demanded that she spill her soul in front of her entire court, had allowed it just to watch her flay herself alive and drown in her own blood.

"You were the one who chose to proceed with it, to attend the celebration at all," Valtor's comeback was quick. Too quick, too clipped.

Instead of smothering her arguments before they could form in her mind, it let her imagine he had regrets about that night as well.

A cruel irony. An ouroboros eating its tail, then failing to retch with the rest of its own body still in its mouth, they were.

"Yes, and you allowed it, planned for it even!" her voice burned in her throat, every sound inflamed and agonizing, forcing her to force it out. "You gave precedence to Raina's agenda over me, over us."

He could kill every person that'd been in that ballroom and it wouldn't even begin to make up for what he'd subjected her to.

She didn't react to his steps but his hands on her shoulders jolted her. The only magic in the touch was the one his whole being was made of and still, she couldn't shut her breath in, behind her teeth. It was drawn to him like the rest of her body leaning backwards, seeking to bridge the distance between them, to soak up the flux of power flowing from him into her.

"No, Griffin," his lips moved in her hair, tingles running from her scalp to the tips of her fingers, to her toes. "If you're jealous of the queen," he squeezed her upper arms, cutting her outburst out at the root, "then it is your own doing."

One of his palms slipped to the nape of her neck, the other tracing over her collarbones as he circled her. The hard line his mouth was set in, the penetrating look in his eyes demanded her attention the same way a complex incantation did – one misstep would be fatal.

"I have killed for you," his fingers settled in the hollow of her throat, the pressure of them delicate, subtle but making her aware of every breath, every beat of her heart. "Do I have to kill her? Is that what you want?" Valtor purred, eyes already half-lidded in lazy enjoyment.

There was no way for her to hide or mask the wild spikes in her pulse, the teeth worrying her lip to carve out some space, a moment of quiet for her to figure out his offer.

He weren't above sacrificing her dignity for the sake of his plans but he was also painfully familiar with her tendency to double down in an argument, had over three and a half years of proof. He had to know that aside from the occasional quip, making her second-guess herself wasn't a viable strategy for him, would only run the risk of exacerbating the situation.

It would have cost him nothing to sacrifice the whole world to her. Raina didn't matter more than any of his underlings had, had been just as much a means to an end, just as much bait as the notion that he would put weeks of planning towards aiding anyone but himself. Eliminating anyone–whether ally or enemy–that could steal her time and attention away from him was a foolproof way to have her all to himself. In his hands those who'd dared lay a finger on her mother wouldn't have died for their sins, but for the sake of his possessiveness. He wouldn't have hesitated if he'd found them before she had.

If she asked of him to kill a pawn he couldn't be bothered to care about, she'd prove she was just the same as him, worse even. He'd be justified in having murdered the people with whom she'd shared a roof, the people with whom she'd shared her life when she herself wanted one of countless footnotes to his schemes to be removed, erased. He could twist it all to make the gruesome fate of her friends his tribute to her, an expression of his devotion.

Griffin pulled his hand away lest it hooked a gasp from her he could interpret as a confirmation, "Maybe."

A shadow passed over his face, the barest twitch moving the corner of his mouth but he banished any disappointment away, instead giving her a knowing look and a squeeze to her fingers. "Tell me when you've decided. She's just an ally – nothing more, nothing less."

He leaned in just a tiny bit and... Oh, that was rich!

Valtor, Heir of the Ancient Coven, cast his eyes downwards and played at being a shy, insecure lover.

"Valtor..." Incredulity got the best of her and the rest of her thoughts remained stuck in her throat, tied in a knot she couldn't pick with her hand still in his.

"No one has claimed the honor of being my partner."

Her heart skipped a beat.

She licked her lips.

A scream was building in her mouth but she managed to wrestle it into coherent words, "Is that... a proposal?"

She held her breath, half expected him to laugh at her.

He wasn't quite as generous.

"Do you have the stomach for it?" His grin bared pearly-white teeth but that wasn't right. They had just been in her flesh, again and again, tearing chunks out and swallowing them just to have her crawling back to him to put her together again.

All the force she would have put in strangling him barely managed to move her lips to shape something akin to a smile.

It had been a plot, after all. Maybe not from the start. Not when he'd woken next to her and stumbled out of bed, his heart pounding in his chest not with a panic but with acute need for her that had only grown along with the distance he'd put between them.

But once he'd been out of the palace, the razor-sharp awareness that her body in his bed was a chain pulling him back, digging in his tender belly, in his throat, he had figured he could keep it at bay if he had control of it. If he chose when to yank her closer and when to strand her away, when to drag her to him on her knees, begging for the respite only his company could provide.

She couldn't win that tug of war but she could make his victory bitter, incomplete. He'd grown used to ignoring her absence but in the process, he'd forgotten how her closeness even felt – the touch of her hand, the ghost of her lips on his skin, her voice calling his name. The moment he included her in his plans, he would fail to shut her out of his mind. She would always be there even when he wasn't with her. He would not be able to escape her or vice versa – she would be his.

Griffin swallowed. "I do."

Triumph set his eyes ablaze, drew his features into something manic, something unhinged.

He had forgotten – he'd returned to hunt her down, had pulled her back as if she would have taken his heart from his chest along with her, had proclaimed his undying devotion to her – all on her cue. She had made him give in.

Why should she stop now?

"I've simply outgrown the position," she pulled her hand out of his. Chin raised, she only answered his warning glare with a challenge of her own.

The tendons in his neck bulged under the collar of his shirt from how hard he was clenching his jaw, his eyes boring holes into her face, the only sound coming out of him his heavy breathing.

For the first time since she'd known him, Valtor couldn't come into a single word.

[aikoiya]

LoZ: TotK - Sky Island Fruit

I wonder what Fire Fruit, Ice Fruit, Dazzle Fruit, & Splash Fruit taste like.

I'm pretty sure we all know that Shock Fruit tastes like lemon. No, Starry or Ghost Citrus! And I think it'd tingle on the tongue like pop rocks, but what about the rest?

For the sake of worldbuilding, I need to figure this out.

Guaranteed, Splash Fruit is juicy af. Like, watermelon juicy. Maybe it tastes like a combination of apples soaked in white grape juice & white grapes soaked in lemon juice. It's the relative shape & color of a calabash, so it has a slightly bitter edge to it & a scent of squash & coconut water.

Fire Fruit are inspired by uchuva, Chinese lantern fruits, a/o cape gooseberries, so they'd likely taste like them too. So, sweet, yet tart & tangy when ripe, but sour when not. Possibly has a flavor profile a bit like spiced mandarin oranges, tomatoes, & cherries. The fruit has a similar texture to a cherry tomato. I do also think that if you were to remove the lattice leaf protecting the fruit inside & tear the actual fruit open, the juice that'd spill out would be on fire. Just liquid fire or napalm, but edible. I remember in the Wrinkle in Time movie that Disney did (the 2004 one, not the remake), Mrs. Whatsit pries open a fig-looking fruit (I think) to spill its contents on a bundle of wood, the juice was on fire, which starts the wood on fire. That's sort of what I think it'd be like. The juice would also sizzle on your tongue but wouldn't burn. Instead, it's pleasantly hot. Not warm, hot. Like a hot bath or a hearth.

Ice Fruit, I just learned, might be in some way inspired by the ice apple. Which, the heck?? Why am I only just learning about this mess??? But whatever; they'd likely take cues from that. So, Ice Fruit would actually be legitimately transparent to a degree. Known to be mildly sweet, often compared to the flavor of coconut. Their flesh has been described as jelly-like in consistency & biting into the center results in a burst of sugary-sweet juice. - Beyond that, I'd make them actually cold & refreshing, they are mildly sweet & per a really good suggestion I got, they'd taste like champaign grapes, but also a little bit like white grapes with a hint of Palm Fruit (as noted above). Their flesh would be gelatinous with a thin skin like a frost bubble (think a dry ice bubble used in mixology). And, because I wanna insert a tiny bit of wonder into this, you can literally do that breathing frost thing that you can do when it's really cold, but at any time of year or temperature every time you take a sip. Kids & grown-up children (gestures to oneself) would most likely love them. - Also, evidently, if you get a cooler, put any sort of small fruit inside with some dry ice for 20 minutes, then the dry ice sublimates, the fruit absorbs it, & you'll get a type of carbonated frozen fruit! I'm thinking to find one that I can use to add onto the flavor profile of the Ice Fruit. It just seems like too "cool" of an idea to pass up. Problem is, I'm not quite sure what kind of words to use to describe it in a more "scientific" way yet.

For a bit more information on these IRL ice apples (Borassus flabellifer), it's a tropical fruit that grows on sugar palm trees in India. The ice apple is also known as Tadgola in Marathi & Hindi, & Nungu in Tamil. They are found inside a coconut-like fruit that grows on sugar palm trees & acts as a coolant. They are fleshy & transparent with yellowish jelly-like flesh & a slightly square-ish shape.

I'm still not sure what Dazzlefruit would taste like, though. And no clue what it's inspired by. It'd probably have a bright, light flavor, hmm?? Still no clue, but they look a little like guanabanas, so I might use that.

If anyone has any ideas, I'm all ears.

LoZ Wild Masterlist

[quotidian-oblivion]

GUYS I'M GOING THROUGH A CRISIS!

You know how I'm a fandom writer for DC, right? I have like 15+ works so far and 15+ more coming. I write exclusively for DC, right? And mainly Batfamily, right?

Can someone, please, tell me, why the fuck are my sister and her friends joining the Marvel fandom?

It's not that I'm against Marvel, I'm in that fandom too among several others, but dude-

DUDE-

MY SISTER. MY PRETEEN SISTER. IS IN THE MARVEL FANDOM. WHILE HER OLDER SISTER. WRITES DC FANFICTION.

I'm sorry I cannot accept this, where are the disowning papers? (/j)

I mean, granted, she doesn't know that I write fanfiction, but she knows that I'm into DC atm!

And her friends and her are getting together to remake Endgame. Together. What the fuckkkk. Why can't I have irl friends who dont bully me for my hyperfixationsssss 😭

No, but earlier, I revealed that I write fanfiction to my irl friends before any of them could go "Hey, what are you doing always tapping away at your laptop instead of doing work?" and then see it for themselves, and when we were out one day, I took a deep breath and said, "Okay, guys, I have to come out with something."

Them: "You're gay!"

Me: "What? No. It's something else."

Them: "What is it?"

Me: *Takes a deep breath* "I write fanfiction."

As soon as the words left my mouth, their jaws flung open and fell to the floor and one of the burst into tears.

Actually. Completely. Really. Burst. Into. Tears.

Who the fuck bursts into tears when they hear that one of their friends writes fanfiction? WHO THE FUCK. I'm gonna cryyyyy. Why? Whyyyyyyyyyy. WHY.

One of them was so shocked that she legitimately burst into fucking tears what the actual shit.

Granted, they have a history of reading bad fanfiction on wattpad, but I don't write in wattpad anymore! I write on ao3! And I don't write smut! I'm allergic to it! So tell me, why are you crying please what the fuck shit do you need a tissue what's got you crying about?

This is why you never reveal that you're a fanfic writer to a group of people who think theater kids are weird. THEY THINK. THEATER KIDS. ARE WEIRD. (the different type of weird which they hate). I'M A THEATER KID. (backstage and minor character but it still counts) GVBFILCOFHIEUKB

At least I have one (1) irl friend who doesn't think fanfiction is bad. In fact, she reads it every fucking day and openly declares it and I'm proud of her for being that brave. Coincidentally, she was also the one who introduced fanfiction to me (unintentionally, i just happened to be there when she started reading it out loud to our cabin at camp. oh God, someone ask me about the camp, I have stories). And she offered to beta read fics for me as well as work on a collaborative fic. And I have multiple online friends who beta my works and co-write stuff with me and i beta back and are just lovely + readers and commenters who actually like my fics and writing and I love them all so much. So there's that!

BUT WHY THE FUCK SHE GO AND BURST INTO FUCKING TEARS? WHAT'S SO SAD ABOUT THAT IM GONNA CRY.

[fictionplumis]

Some progress has been made!

I saw a Cardiologist yesterday and almost broke my "did not cry during a doctor's appointment" streak. (We are up to 3 now, woot!)

So basically, my heart is doing one of two things. Either it's going, "I need to emulate my hero and savior Sonic the Hedgehog," and is always beating so fast for no legitimate reason. Like with POTS. Or it's going, "Oh shit, this place is fucked, I gotta beat faster to make sure all the blood goes to the right places." This would be my heart reacting to another factor in the body and feeling like it's necessary to speed up, like if I had some underlying rheumatalogical condition.

I already knew things like POTS could really fuck up your system, and I've never been officially diagnosed but I've been pretty sure I've had it since high school, when I mentioned to my mom that I get tunnel vision everytime I stand up and she immediately took me to get an MRI. I didn't think it would make just existing doing the bare minimum to live such a hell.

Anyway, he's putting me on meds to slow my heart down. Either these meds will work and I'll feel weird for a bit and then start feeling better as my body adjusts, meaning it IS my heart deciding to go 130 BMP for funsies while I'm doing literally nothing, or the meds will work but I'll feel much, much worse because my heart does, in fact, need to go that fast because this place is fucked.

And by this place, I mean my body.

Now, he did mention working out! He explained that he would usually start treatments for something like this without medication first, but unlike the rheumatologist, he took my struggles seriously and said that since simple, daily tasks are such a struggle, and my heart rate is so high at rest, the medication needs to come first so I can get to the point that I CAN start low effort physical therapy.

He also asked if I had researched my symptoms online and if there was anything I've found or heard of that I felt matched my symptoms best, which god fucking bless dude, that's one hell of a green flag for a doctor.

The hardest part about dealing with doctors for me is that I have this defense mechanism where I am "an open book" and speak honestly and openly about my struggles, but in a very friendly and humorous tone. Like, "I'm so emotionally exhausted that I can't concentrate on much anymore. I've beaten Baldur's Gate like twelve times because I know everything that happens and it's low effort now. I'm so tired of playing Baldur's Gate, man." It's true! My tone usually implies humor and a joke, and I guess that makes people go, "Oh, things are difficult for her but she's okay enough to make light of them."

And I don't know how to not do that?

Even the nice doctors that took me "seriously" still didn't seem to quite understand the full scope of me saying, "I haven't left the house for eight months for anything but doctor's appointments. I haven't seen my friends in eight months. My family goes to eat dinner without me and brings me home lukewarm, soggy food in a takeout container. I've had to stop my sewing projects because my arm gets tired so quick holding down a sewing pattern that I can't trace around it without taking a break, and then the pattern gets misaligned and I get frustrated and start crying. I'm on antidepressants because I can't do any of my hobbies, I have nothing to distract me from this hell where simply reaching up for a cup in the cabinet feels like a herculean task, my room is a mess because I can't clean it up, and I was crying three to four times a day. Now I only cry once or twice a week. I am scared, and lonely, and everyone in my house works full time so it's hard for them to help, and I try not to ask them for much. When I do need to ask for help, I often spend a few hours having an anxiety attack before working up the nerve, and if they say no, I feel guilty for immediately bursting into tears over it and making them feel bad about it. My hair looks awful because I usually keep it short but I can't go through the effort of getting dressed and leaving the house for a haircut, so I took a pair of scissors to it in a Britney Spears style meltdown and you know what? She had the right idea!"

I guess something in my tone just implies hyperbole? Or maybe I don't come across as distressed enough while saying it, so they think it can't be possibly be this awful, life-ruining thing? Unfortunately, breaking down crying doesn't convince them either, I've tried that already. So IDK how to get doctors to understand what I'm feeling.

This guy, though?

I front of his two student shadows, this motherfucker, who is the softest spoken person I've ever met, by the way, leans over his knees and looks me dead in the eye to say, "I want you to know that you're an amazing person. I can't imagine the kind of strength it takes to deal with this for as long as you have with no answers, and still be pushing yourself to come to appointments like this when everything is so difficult for you. If this is cardiac related, I want you to know that we're going to figure this out and get you back out there in the world. At your age, you should be out with your friends, having fun and living your life, not isolated and struggling like this. Do you have a support group? Who all is in it?"

Man. There is something about sincere compassion and genuine concern that hits right to the core, and I could barely keep myself from bursting into tears.

For all my jaded bullshit with the doctors and the American medical system, sometimes you end up finding a gem.

So either these new pills will work and in the next couple of months I can start a long path to recovery, or they won't but I'll be able to tell every other specialist I see that we 100% know my fast heart rate is a symptom of something else, not everything else being a symptom of a cardiac issue.

[fadedelegance]

Hey, look, it’s the reasons I’m quitting my job!

Let me get into what it’s been like working for this financial institution while neurodivergent.

My boss has been a complete twat to me, and that is the only reason I can think of why. One time when I had a social gaffe, she acted like I cussed someone out or said something racist, something legitimately awful like that, when all I did was talk too loudly. When she called me into her office, she said, “Do you want to tell me what you were thinking when you said that?” I felt so ashamed and embarrassed that I burst into tears and had to leave early. What fucking right did she have to make me feel that way when I had no ill intent and didn’t insult anyone on purpose or accidentally?

About 9 months ago, she wrote me up because a coworker completely misunderstood something I said and told her manager she didn’t want to work with me anymore—even though we’d worked together dozens of times without any problems. She was actually one of my favorite people to work with, and we both suffer from anxiety, so we understood that about each other. I was telling her about some anxious thoughts I was having about work, and she thought I was accusing her of causing it, when that wasn’t the case at all. My manager just presented me with the write up and told me why it was happening, right then and there. I was given no forewarning whatsoever—no chance to apologize to that coworker to her face, no chance to tell my side to anyone. Everything was done behind my back because apparently managers being passive-aggressive is perfectly normal and not at all petty and unprofessional. 🙃🙃🙃 That was also my second write up within a month, which led me to believe that this was an attempt at constructive termination. (The first write up I got was for not following a rule that I didn’t even know was a rule. And I didn’t even remember what I did that would have constituted breaking that rule. But yes, just escalate it to a write up. Don’t take the time to explain to me that that’s a rule, and here was how I broke it, and give me the verbal warning not do it again. Just immediately escalate it to a write up. Because that’s fair and makes sense.🙃)

I suspect the reason I wasn’t allowed to train on opening new accounts is because she thinks I’m too socially awkward to be in public, which isn’t at all true. I may be on the spectrum, but there are customers who always come to me when they stop by. I had great rapport with the regulars at my previous job. But no, just ask the bully I work for: I’m horribly socially inept and shouldn’t be unleashed upon the poor, unsuspecting public.

She has made me feel like I don’t belong and don’t fit in and like there’s something seriously fucked up and offensive about me. I have never truly understood what her problem with me is, so that’s all I can think of: she thinks I’m repulsive for being autistic. Of course, she can’t say that because that’s illegal. But she’s immature, unprofessional, and petty enough that that probably is the reason why.

The last straw for me was yesterday morning when she yelled at me in front of a branch full of customers, while I was in the middle of helping a customer myself. I could tell by the customer’s demeanor after that that she thought she got me in trouble and was inconveniencing us somehow. It was sad because she was a really nice lady. I made sure to reassure her that she was just fine and hadn’t done anything wrong. I could also sense that she felt secondhand embarrassment. I know that if I had said that my boss had just made an ass of herself, she would’ve agreed with me. I actually felt worse for that customer than I did for myself. I felt embarrassed in front of her, too, because I was working and therefore representing the organization just like my boss. I felt embarrassed on behalf of our organization. 

This is not an exaggeration: out of all the jobs I’ve had over the years, I have never been treated this way by an employer. And, of course, they pay lip service to diversity and inclusion, which, in my experience, is a complete joke. They’re fine with a bisexual woman working for them as long as she’s not autistic. 

I typed up my two weeks notice yesterday. We’re off on Monday because we’re closed for Memorial Day, so I will be submitting that two weeks notice on Tuesday. This job has caused me more severe anxiety then the pandemic did when I was in my previous job. I can’t keep living like this. She crossed a line by trying to humiliate me in front of a room full of people, so that’s why I decided that I’m going to quit. I don’t have another job lined up at the moment, but I have a whole list of places to apply to. I’m also trying to see if I can’t get my previous job back. I enjoyed being a Barista, and I was good at it.

I’m terrified about not having steady income for a little while, and not knowing when I’ll get a new job, but like I said, my anxiety has been so bad over the past 14 or 15 months, that I can’t keep living like this. If you don’t have your health—mental, physical, social (and spiritual, if that’s your thing)—what the fuck do you have?

[gildead]

CONTENT WARNING: THE FOLLOWING DRABBLE CONTAINS GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS OF GORE AND DISCUSSION OF ANIMAL/POKEMON ABUSE. READER DESCRIPTION IS ADVISED.

Part 1 Part 2 (you are here)! Part 3 (MASSIVE GRAPHIC CONTENT WARNING. PLEASE SEE TAGS FOR DETAILS.) Part 4

It was worse. So much worse than he thought.

Gold's first instinct was to grab a Hyper Potion from his bag in order to address the Wigglytuff's injuries. He approached her as she sat down on the picnic blanket. Forever coiled his body around the Wigglytuff to help her sit up, his tail pressed to the ground. He nudged her to face Gold with his snout, gently so as to not hurt her. He remembered being in this position before as a Houndour.

If anybody could help her, surely it would be his trainer! Right?

"C-can you open your mouth?" Gold asked in a soft voice.

The Wigglypuff did so, and Gold immediately wished he never asked.

No wonder she was in so much pain, Gold realized as his stomach lurched horribly. What a lot of people didn't realize was that the Wigglytuff line had flexible, inflatable bodies for a good reason: to protect their fragile internal organs and skeletons. Legitimate Pokémon battles, even with Wild Pokémon, had been shaped through years of League regulations preventing the use of excessive force. Whatever the poor Wigglytuff went through had caused extreme internal injuries, leaving a bloody, gory mess inside her mouth.

She let out a pained wheeze -- far from the melodic tones Pokémon of her species were known for.

"She needs a Pokémon center," Please hissed to Gold. She reached her snout into his bag and slid over his damaged yet still usable PokéGear. "We need the help of the living."

Gold fumbled to the PokéGear, his sleeves scrolling down to find the one connection to his mortal life who knew of his undeath. As he did so, Please lowered herself to the Wigglytuff, her voice lowering. "Now, dear, what happened?" she asked, using the same tone she used when coaxing Hurry to bed, "We're here to help you."

The Wigglytuff moved to speak, only emitting another breathless wheeze from her mangled throat. She was cut off by a sharp cough from Away. "Foolish creature," Celebi scolded, "Do you truly seek to harm yourself further? We will get nowhere if you force yourself to speak."

"She's doing her best." Typhlosion glowered at Celebi.

Celebi sighed dramatically and fluttered over to the Wigglytuff. "I simply believe there is a more sufficient way. Let me read her mind."

Please still looked irritated, but she stepped aside. Celebi had a point; after all, its psychic abilities were how it learned of Gold's plight -- and without them, her beloved trainer would have been condemned to a fate of eternal nothingness. The Time Travel Pokémon reached its single arm out to take Wigglytuff's hand, eye shut in concentration--

And both screamed.

Celebi had barely touched the other Pokémon before it recoiled in horror, nearly falling backwards into Hurry. The tiny spectral Cyndaquil dodged out of the way and hid behind his mother, disturbed. Wigglytuff sunk against Forever again and whined. Gold, startled, dropped his PokéGear into the ground.

"It's okay, Celbi." Hurry waddled to the shaken Celebi. "Just us. No big scary Pokémon coming back to eat you."

"Thank you, young one, but... this was no mere Pokémon at work." Celebi's face darkened as its voice dropped. "But rather... human hands."

Everybody, even the Wigglytuff, went dead silent. So silent, in fact, that the only sound to permeate it... was tearing fabric and breaking bone.

They turned to Gold, whose sleeves had dropped and whose body was showing the wear and tear caused by the monster from long ago. As his pupils vanished, a horde of Unown came bursting out from the wholes of his sleeves, intermingling with one another as they floated above, where the Wigglytuff could read them.

He floated over Wigglytuff, his expression frozen in rage. As she looked up, the message from the Unown became crystal clear.

SHOW ME WHO DID THIS TO YOU.

[mischievouslittlecreature]

WIP Wednesday on a Thursday

Is it even actually Thursday? I’ve been traveling all day and legitimately do not know what day it is anymore.

Tagging @areyenotfondofmelobster, @glitter-and-gasoline, @roofgeese, @natesofrellis, @confidentandgood, @emilynightshade89, and anyone else interested! 

Of Petals and Blood Chapter 1: Arrival (Elias Grodin x OC)

The truck bounced along the dirt road, mud squelching beneath the tires as they turned, venturing even further into the lush green jungle. Lily kept her eyes focused out the window, both in an attempt to hide the frightened tears building behind her eyes and to reduce the chances of getting car sick.

This had been a mistake of maddening proportions.

Her mother was right. All of that weed must have gone to her head. How could she have possibly thought that any of this was something that she could handle?

As if sensing her sudden rush of anxiety, the other nurse sitting beside her, a skinny, waifish-looking woman with blonde hair and freckles, slipped her slim fingers through Lily’s, interlacing their hands on the leather of the seat beneath them. 

She had met Flora at basic training, sticking to the more assertive, strong-willed woman like a barnacle. It had been a stroke of luck that they had both been assigned to the same division. 

They were headed to the camp of the infantry platoon of the 25th infantry division near the Cambodian border. While most nurses were assigned to the aid-station further away from the fighting, more and more nurses were being assigned further out, and closer to enemy lines. 

The truck burst from the foliage and began to descend down a hill. Lily could see a camp below, tents pitched in the dirt and men meandering about, most were clearly busy carrying out their duties, but there some just lingering, chattering to each other before scattering after a superior shouted at them to get back to work. She spotted the nurse’s tent quickly, thanks to the giant red cross stitched into the fabric. The truck came to a stop in front of it. 

“Here ya are, ladies,” their driver called, chewing on a toothpick from his place seated at the wheel. Lily grabbed her backpack where it was settled between her feet, slinging it onto one shoulder as she jumped from the bed of the truck, boots conjuring up a tiny dust cloud where they hit the dirt. Flora shouted a thank you to their driver, one Lily echoed in a mumble, before jumping down to join her.

“Oh. Well, this isn’t so bad,” Flora said. Lily bit back an incredulous, pessimistic remark as she warily eyed the camp around them. Flora gave her a look, like she was reading her mind. “It isn’t.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

Flora rolled her eyes. “Let’s just get checked in.”

A Sleepless Dream Chapter 3: Projections (Robert Fischer x OC)

It had been an incredibly stupid, impulsive idea to come here.

The warmth and humidity of Sydney was a welcome change from the snow and cold of Switzerland. There had been no sense of melancholy or loss when she left the little apartment she had been staying in. Moving was something that she was used to; never staying in one place long enough to really get attached. Alice couldn’t remember the last time she had been somewhere that actually felt like home. 

She’d gotten herself set up in a nice little one bedroom condo near the beach. The Fischer Morrow building was only about a ten minute walk away, but she had been reluctant to think too much about it. Every time she thought about approaching those big door, pushing them open the reveal the interior but more importantly, Robert, standing there, looking at her with eyes that could be soft and warm like the ocean or cold and harsh like ice, depending on his mood towards the subject of his gaze. In her imagination of their reunion, the temperature of those blue eyes changed like a kaleidoscope. Sometimes they were so warm that they nearly threatened to wrap her up in it like one would a thick blanket. Other times, the cold made her rear back, eyes watering with tears as her heart broke painfully. 

Either way, the idea of seeing Robert again never failed to twist her stomach into hard knots. 

She’d found the number for Robert’s secretary, but every time she called, the woman on the other end pointedly informed her that, “Mr. Fischer is unavailable at the moment.”

This was what she got for listening to Eames’s advice. 

Settling her elbows on the kitchen counter, she sipped at her coffee. Her foot tapped anxiously against the tile as she tried to make up her mind on what to do. 

Maybe she would be brave and go to Fischer Morrow today. Maybe Robert would be there. 

Maybe he would be happy to see her.

[flower-zombie-rob]

Hello flowers! Just gotta tell you something.

You are one of my favorite artists on tumblr, i enjoy seeing any art you post while joining on the chaos without feeling like im being too weird and it's a lot of fun when this blog just bursts into chaos and seeing you have a good time out of this and question all of the anon's sanity is very enjoyable. I hope you continue to make art and chaos!

I have a very similar sentiment myself!!!

As someone who definitly had a hard time coming to terms with niche intrests and still struggles a lot with self confidence off the internet, its been really nice and fun to meet so many funny and likeminded people. Not only that, but getting the chance to chat and be mutuals and friends with creators who are really huge and talented in this community has been amazing, its even lead to me meeting some irl! I really feel like im kind of known in the jse fandom(on tumblr at least) and its lead me to this feeling of creating my own follower community. I feel like ive tried hard to make my blog a safe space for people like me (or who were like me when i was a younger user). I dont like to tear people down or call them cringe(unless they do something legitimately that makes me uncomfortable) because the chaos is fun and quirky and its a thing i feel my blog embodies that other bigger jse blogs cant or dont. My cutesy art style serves as a way to welcome people to my blog, but i love the dynamics i get to form between you guys and the fact that youre always so open with my in my ask box and dms is really sweet and makes me feel like ive really gathered a kind and sweet collection of people who now get to meet and interract with each other through my blog as a platform, encouraging them to interract with others more too. I love you guys snd this friendly and supporting mini-community we've made around my blog and i hope it stays like that because this blog really is safe for anyone from all walks of life to enjoy if they want to without fear of judgement.

Just dont be getting all parasocial on me guys thats the only thing im affraid of with this little vibe we have. Remember you dont know me and i dont know you so dont blindly follow and agree with me on everything and definitly dont confide in me as this therapust friend for venting and traumadumping and such. But i havent had that happen too often due to how dearly you all respect me and i respect you all the same!

[skruffie]

more clinic posting

Today we had a soft opening for one of the new locations, and it was also an official sendoff for two of the trainees that my coworkers and I bonded with over the past month :[ All of us are brand new to optics so watching everything go live (so to speak) with a friends and family day--running actual eye exams and glasses purchases--got emotional. We all worked together on actual exams and purchases during training but we aren’t going to be working face to face anymore.

This is also surreal for me in a good way because I’m just over a month into this and I still feel like this is the most support I’ve had from any work team ever. I bonded with people at other jobs but there’s something a bit magical about this one. I fell more easily into stride with everyone and my (future) manager in training said something that has stuck in my head completely: “We won’t let you fail.”

The manager at the store we were just at this week is a bit iffy for me but at the end of the day today, when we were all bouncing feedback and kudos to everyone, he pointed out that I did an excellent job running the floor basically and it’s a compliment that I’ve gotten from others. I apparently am really damn good at this job to a point where some of the people on the training teams (FROM CORPORATE) were like ‘wait, you’ve really only been doing optics for a month??”

At the very end as we were wishing everyone well and wrapping the day up I accidentally uh burst into tears because I was going to miss working with these new friends and also I was trying to explain how much this meant to me as I’ve been rebuilding my confidence since leaving government work. Saying it out loud makes it feel more real. It kind of feels like pulling teeth when I try to talk about how working at state government broke me a little bit but really like... December 2021 my confidence was in the fucking ground. I can do things now like measure pupilary distance, somewhat understand peoples’ ocular prescriptions, explain features on lenses, use some of the machines, and do a really damn good job selling glasses. I get legitimately excited when there’s a little pulse between me and the patient after they find the perfect frame.

I kind of realized that I have two core memories from my childhood relating to glasse: the first time I realized I needed them, and my first pair. I didn’t know I needed glasses until I took my sister’s and put them on and suddenly everything was so CLEAR. I spent like 10 minutes pulling them off and putting them back on. The second memory is still very vivid for me: we were at the optometrist and there were these huge windows looking out to the parking lot. I can remember a woman’s voice and she’s telling me to put my glasses on and it really struck when I looked outside to the trees because I saw the individual leaves. I was like WOOOAAAH and my sister was like “yeah bek, the trees have leaves”

But working with the training team and they were talking about how they still get chills when they watch kids have that same reaction and it’s something I CAN’T WAIT TO BE PART OF

[casspurrjoybell-28]

Alpha's Temptation - Chapter 47 - Part 1

*Warning Adult Content*

My body pulses with adrenaline as I burst into the room.

"Lucien," I exclaim, tearing up at the sight of him sitting up in the bed, leaning weakly back against the mountain of pillows Wren and I arranged for him.

I haven't seen him with his eyes open in so long.

He cracks a smile.

"There you are," I break out into a sob, running to him and practically collapsing on him as I bury him in a hug.

"Lucien..." I cry, sniveling into his rumpled hospital gown.

He pats my back, chuckling.

"Easy on the hugs, my boy. Tristan's got me plugged with all types of wires."

I jolt off of him, remembering his less-than-ideal state and sniffle as I apologize.

"S-So you know about everything? About what's happened with Theo?" I ask.

A grave look comes to his face as he nods.

"Yes, Tristan informed me. I apologize deeply for what Theo did. I didn't think... I had more faith in my son than I should have. Him poisoning me to become the Pack Alpha isn't something I ever thought would happen. Goes to show how blinded you can be when it comes to your children."

"I-It's not your fault," I shake my head.

"He never showed you... his other side."

"Ah, he was good at hiding it, wasn't he?" Lucien sighs, rubbing a hand over his face.

"Yeah..." I trail off, wanting to ask and say so many things all at once but I don't know where to start.

So I just say...

"Why did you want to speak with me?"

Lucien leans back into the pillows with a small grunt, folding his hands together.

"Yes, where do I start?" he thinks for a moment, looking up at the ceiling. "Do you want to know the real reason I kept you here in my pack?"

"W-what?" I thought it was because he didn't want me to return to Dark Moon.

"I know what you're thinking. That I kept you because a wolf from Dark Moon would be a breach of pack security and that I needed to keep an eye on you. I'm surprised you and Daemon actually believed that," he laughs. "I could have sent you to a different pack to be housed and cared for. I didn't have to take the risk of taking in an enemy. It was a dangerous bargain, what I did."

I sit there quietly, confused.

"Then what was the real reason..?"

"I knew you were Daemon's mate."

'My eyes widen. What?'

"But how?" I question.

Lucien's eyes twinkle in mystery.

"Hmm, Alphas intuition, you could call it," he smiles.

I raise a questioning eyebrow at him and he chuckles again.

"Just kidding. Hmm... I don't think I ever told you this but my mate, my Luna, was very talented. She had abilities that allowed her to... see things, passed down from her mother's side. That's actually the reason we met. Young dumb nineteen-year-old me was brought along to her family's shop, which was esteemed for their 'visions', said to come to them through the power of the moon. I thought it was BS, quite frankly but my mother loved to get his spiritual readings done there. That's when I saw my beautiful Rose for the first time, the shop owner's daughter who was hiding behind the bookshelves, watching me shyly as I waited for my mother." he smiles to himself, eyes looking far off, happy to reminisce the good old days.

"The rest was history, of course. She was happy to become my Luna. She also proved to me that these 'visions' that she and her family had were legitimate, not the BS I had previously thought them to be. Her gift of sight helped us greatly as we gained power and took over the roles of my parents," he takes a deep breath.

"When we first found Daemon, not long after she had a vision. It wasn't very clear but... she saw a snapshot of Daemon's future. He was older, a man, almost unrecognizable from how huge he'd grown. But what piqued Rose's curiosity the most was that he was carrying a small white wolf in from the forest. Holding that wolf close to his chest, like it meant everything to him. We knew it must be his mate."

I'm stunned.

Too stunned to even wrap my head around this. Is that what Theo was referring to when he said I was his mother's 'gift'?

That I was sent by Rose, somehow?

"It was worrying to me, this vision. I knew there had to be a reason why it came to Rose because her visions were selective. They also didn't show us everything or give much detail. But she calmed my fears and told me that love would overcome everything."

I look down, my heart tight.

But how does he know Rose was right?

I mean, Daemon completely abandoned me just few months ago.

How could that be...?

"I know there are a lot of thoughts clouding your mind right now, Ash. But I will explain everything, I promise. That's what I told you when you first came here, didn't I?"

And then I remember.

When I'd asked him why he was taking me in so willingly.

He'd said...

"I'm going to tell you everything soon, Ash. All in good time."

My brain feels like it's going to explode.

[hausofmamadas]

You’re a fucking genius. Whatever, I don’t even care anymore. I have nothing left in me.

═

✷ He’s probably dead, right? You probably left him to die. Shirt splattered with red, arm stretched across the concrete. Gun just out of reach.

Me at the end of the last fic skdjdjdjd not realizing there was a part 2, like there is no way that mf is still alive except when I remember your Lalo fic and how you tricked me into thinking that mf was totally alive for half the fic when it turns out he was fuckifnsjhrhreheb dead the whole time, it’s fine. I’m not concerned about the potential psychological warfare I’m wading into, nopenopenope

✷ The last you saw of him, he was alive. In control. Not scared in the slightest, as far as you could tell, so that’s what you’ll remember. What you’ll cement as fact. Alive, uninjured. Unrecognisable to the man you thought you knew, but not dead, at least.

GODDDDDDDDD THE FACT THAT THEYRE TRTING TO WILL HIM ALIVE LIKE LYING AWAKE IN BED AT NIGHT, LITERALLT NOTHING IS WORSE THAN WISHING THAT SOMEONE WHO’S NOT AROUND ANYMORE COULD STILL BE AROUND, LIKE NOTHINT IS MORE INDICATIVE OF GUT WRENCHING LOSS AND ITS ONLY MADE WORSE BY THE FACT THAT READER AND I DONT EVEN KNOW WTF HAPPENED TO HIM ugggghhhdhdhdhhs also honorable mention: slapping you back and forth like we’re in a novela for the “what you’ll cement as fact” bc how very fuckign dare you

✷ A lifetime of wondering, then. That’s what you’ve been cursed with.

actually PHYSICALLYYYYY clutched my chest reading this

✷ You won’t sleep all night, wondering if he’s alive, wondering if it was a mistake to try and know him, and then in the morning, you’ll dress. Open the shop. Sell string bags and sunglasses to tourists, then go home and wonder again.

Can you see how well I’m doing not copy/pasting the entire fucking fic rn??!??????? LIKE REALLY DOING SO GREAT AT IT, A+ FOR ME this is not what failure looks like but the selling string bags and sunglasses to tourists, like once again, just trying to muscle thru a loss like that, and specifically an ambiguous loss where you’re liek “am I even allowed to be upset about this? ... probably not” so you’re just sweating and cringe smiling for Jesus bc if you allow the muscles of your face to relax into any other expression, you’ll literally burst into tears and send perfect strangers fleeing for the exit to avoid the sobbing basket case who supposedly owns this store. I mean do I personally have any experience with anything like this??? Ofc course not. But can I see how, maaaayyybeeee, possiblyyyyyyyyt, a person could pooteeeeentialllyyy feel that way. 10000% 🤫 these are not falsehoods in any way whatsoever

✷ You were half a breath away from falling for him. And the whole time, he was entwined in something dangerous enough to put you at risk. Real, true harm, only a car crash away.

AREEEEEEEEEEEEYOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUFUUUUCKINGKGGJTJJRJRJRKIIIIIIIDDDINGMMMEE YOU WERE HALF A BREATH AWAY FROM FALLING FOR HIM????????!!!;!;!4!!44 LEGITIMATELY FUCKING DISGUSTED AT HOW FIRE OF A LINE THAT IS, LIKR AVTUAL GENUINE DISGUST, I ALMOST CHUCKED MY PHONE LIKE IT WAS A HOT POTATO, I AM NOT EVEN EXAGGERATING

✷ It was cowardice, really, keeping it from you for his own sake. It made him a coward. Or stupid. Head so far in the clouds, he thought you’d never see the ground.

SKSKSKSKKSS I snorted so loud at this roast bc as dreamy as Moi is, tbis is also him, to a fucking tee

✷ Prolonged, this time, because whoever’s pressing it, down on street level, isn’t relenting. They’re just holding it and holding it, and it’s echoing off the walls either side of you, so loud it’s making you cringe. Wince.

Okay, I’m there right now bc this is monstrously descriptive (cariñoso) and I have a headache already

✷ 'Cariño,’ he replies, tinny through the box. It sounds like he’s panting, hissing the words out. It could be the connection. You can’t remember how it sounded before now, how people besides him, right now, spoke through it. ‘Let me in.’

YOU CANT REMMEBER HOW IT SOUNDED BEFORE NOWWWWWJDJDIEINESBSIEJWOXOSNNW9/&2&293&4 I SWEAR TO CHRIST IMMACRUALLY GOING TO MURDER FOR THIS BC ONCE AGAIN, SUCH TANGIBLE LITTLE MOMENTS LOKE CORNERSTONES OF AMBIGUOUS LOSS, LIKE ARE YOU TRYING TO HURT ME!!!!!!!!!!:$:&3!3&3 HAVENT YKU DONE ENOUGH IN THE YEAR WEVE BEEN FRIENDS GOOD GODDAMN

✷ You’re swinging from the door before he can ask again. Leave it open, to save time when you come back. It’s late enough in the night that you don’t have to worry about neighbours, and you’re only on the first floor, only one communal stairwell away from him.

nononononononooooooononono don’t do that, don’t leave it open, like I completely get the logic but Romeo whoever is after him is probably an actual fucking psycho, dontdoitdontdoit plsplspls, god I am grinding my teeth, THE SHEER DREAD

✷ The t-shirt and gym shorts you’re wearing were never meant to leave the home, were never meant to be seen, by him of all people, riddled with moth holes and paint. It doesn’t matter. He needs you.

The funny thing about this is I actually think the domestic, regular?ness of this? Moi would be so fucking hot for sosksksks like it’s just so completely outside what he sees all the time, like taking a field trip to a place you’ve never been, and yes, in the real world, we wear big ass t shirts and boxers to sleep in

✷ The latch on door at the bottom sticks, for a moment. You rattle it free, desperate, then lug the huge timber open to get at him.

So, I’ve like never been to Spain before but I can picture exactly what this looks like and I just love the attention to detail, that you’ve like captured the different architecture that a flat in Spain would have vs like the US, or Mexico, or the UK, like where most of the other fandoms you write for take place. Bien hecho, mi comadre, lo ves bien

✷ He’s alive, standing in front of you, and alive. You can’t wait until the door’s shut again, you have to hug him, have to feel his heartbeat against your own.

YOUUUUUDHDIEHWBWNSOKSMAPWMENE HAVETOFEELHISHEARTBEATAGAINSTYOUROWN LIKE FUCKKKKKKKKKK OOOOOOFFFFFFFFFF WITH IT OKAYYY?????BBBSJSJSJE

✷ He pushes a shaky breath, taking a half-step into the entry way. ‘Please.’ His cleaner hand shifts from your collar, to sit on your shoulder for support. ‘Upstairs, cariño.’

So likeksskeksksksks when I take this sentence entirely out of context, like so, can we all just moment of silence at how actually blindingly sexy the description of his hand sliding from collarbone to shoulder is *bows head, closes eyes* ...... and amen

✷ You can only hope he’s making the right decision again, choosing you over the medical staff he so obviously needs.

SKKPPPPPDFTTTTTTTKDKDKDK IM ACTUALLTKTJFJD FUCKIGN CHOKING BC THIS JUST SMACKS SO MUCH OF “wait, come again???? So, you’re picking me over the hospital?? God fucking help you, my dude” SKSKS

✷ He’s heavier than you expected, all limp, tired muscle, that fights you with every step. If you didn’t have to, life or death, you wouldn’t manage it.

Idk what it is about the tacit self-awareness that liek were it not a life-or-death-scenario, this rock solid hunk of muscle would probably be an immovable obstacle just grounds this in so much reality a way that makes me angry bc it’s so well-written and snaps me into the urgency of the situation in a way that is actively causing a nervous system reaction despite the fact that I know none of it is real

✷ Your door is in sight, wide open and ready for you.

GODDDDDKDJDJ NOT THE DOOR WIDE OPEN, IM MUCH AFEARED

✷ There’s blood on his chin, streaking down his neck. Everything he touches is marked with it.

What is wrong with me don’t answer that, we already know it’s everything that I read this and immediately was like ................. aight, hot. KEKW

✷ There’s a hole in his stomach, staring back at you, leaking blood that’s almost black.

GODDDDSSSMJJJJJJJJJJJ SHUTT TF UPPPPPPPPOO I HATE YOU THIS IS SO FUCKINGKDJDJEJEHWBEJDHDBE VISCERAL AND TANGIBLE AND INSPIRED AND I LOVE YOU AND I HATE YOU AND I LOVE YOU AND I HATE YOUUUUUUUVSHEB

✷ He tries to smile, nodding. ‘It’s easy, okay? I’ll talk you through it.’

I can fuuuuullllyyyyyyyy fucking see this so clearly and it’s the most charming smile, to the point I want to slap it off his face bc no, despite his efforts to console Reader DIGGING A FUCKINT BULLET OUT OF SOMEONE’S ABDOMEN WITHOUT PUNCTURING A MAJOR ARTERY IS NOT ALL HAHAHAHAHA EASY, ESE MENSO ME ESTÁS BROMANDO????

✷ No matter how thorough you are, it still won’t work, you still won’t be clean enough to root about in his stomach.

See, Reader knows what’s real

✷ 'Tranquilo,’ he sighs. ‘Tenemos tiempo.’

‘Do we?’ you bark back at him, flicking water as you shut off the tap. ‘You look like you’re fucking dying, Moisés.’

ONCE AFAINSKSKSJSJDDJ READER KNOWS

✷ 'If it was going to kill me, it would have.’

You don’t have to be medically trained to know that that’s bullshit. It could have damaged him elsewhere, somewhere deeper than surface level. He could drop dead in a day, or a week, regardless of how well you manage things right now.

I love this more than anythingjsjdjdjdjdjdjejd bc it’s so me, but also like the fact that it’s making me think Reader is for some reason, super into true crime, like listens to a lot of true crime podcasts or is like an avid fan of Grey’s Anatomy of Dr. G, Medical Examiner or some shit like that sksjejejeje like the fact that they understand how deeply unqualified they are to do this jobsksksksje like in my head, they’re going, “bitch, you telling me this as if I don’t watch prestige TV, okay?!? Like I have HBO, I have seen Breaking Bad, I have seen The Sopranos.”

✷ ... wet thumb slipping from the wheel, again and again, before you finally catch the spark.

GODDDDDJDJDUEJEHEVEB ONCE AGAIN FUCKKKKKKKK OFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF THE WAY THIS IS SO PERFEXTLY DESCRIBED ACTUALLYYYYYY LOKE IM TAKING NOTES ON THE SKILL/TECHNIQUE AND ALSO PLOTTING YOUR DEMISE

✷ The knife is wobbling in his hold, because he’s shaking more than you are. Red fingers unable to grip the thing tight enough to start. It’s not going to work. He won’t be able to do it himself.

‘Damelo.’ You pluck it from him without waiting for an answer. ‘What do I do?’

THE WAY RHIS ENTIRE FUCKING THINGGGTTT HAD ME ON THE WDGE OF MY SEATTTTTTT AND THE BOOM, READER RISES TO THE OCCASION AND CUE ME JUMPING UP, FLINGING MY BUCKET OF POPCORN IN THE AIR, LIKE IF I WAS IN A SPORTSBALL STADIUM ID BE ON THE JUMBOTRON AS LIKE THAT MEGAFAN

✷ His stomach tenses beneath you, his thighs pincer around your hips—it’s all impulse, subconscious reactions that he can’t stop. The body trying to protect itself from the intruder.

First off, hot. Secondly, disgusting. What specifically is disgusting?? No, it’s not the blood or the gore, it’s the fact that this is so concrete and real and raw and vivid, and skilled and IMJUSTTTTTTTTTTTJJ BITING MY ACTUAL FIST OUT OF FEAR AND PERHAPS MINOR AROUSAL AND THEN YOU GOT CLOCK ME WITH A LEFT HOOK WOTH THAT “the body trying to protect itself from the intruder” AS IF IM NOT ALREADY UNCONSCIOUS FROM THE REPEATED BLOWS IVE BEEN DEALT READING THIS WHOLE ASS THING

✷ The end beneath the bullet. You press down without warning, because it wouldn’t have helped anyway, and force it out. Right back the way it had come.

Pfftttkdjdj the nerdy physicist in me is like fully thinking about the fluid mechanics and nodding at Reader like 😌 yes, that’s how one should go about doing that, despite the fact that it’s probably blindingly, agonizingly painful

✷ You’re beyond words now, the both of you. He doesn’t need to guide you through it. Can’t, really. And you don’t need to lie to him that it’ll only be a little longer, only be a little pinch. It’s just time to get it over with. Sew the skin together as best you can, hope the damage isn’t enough to kill him. Toes over the edge, and jump.

UGGGHHHHHHHHHHSJDJDHSJDJDJDBSJXJSJSLWOEKEMRNT TNTOROTN RMEE I DONT EVEN KNOW WHERE TO BEGIN bc in like every movie and tv show where this happens, like this is a list of all the cliches, ways characters reassure each other but it MAKES SO MUCH SENSE that actually this would be done in total silence, like Reader needs to concentrate, Moi is just shy of passing out so ofc neither of them is trying to placate the other with like words of encouragement and something about that, like eschewing all the cinematic cliches makes this feel MORE CINEMATIC TO ME???????????? To the point THAT I AVTUALLT WANT TO FUCKING FILM THE DAMN THING MYSELF I CAN SEE IT THAT CLESRYLDKDKDKDKDJENR

✷ You’d stitched the wound as best you could, but it won’t hold. It won’t do him any good in the long run.

UHHHHHHH BEG PARDON, IS HE FUCKINGKSKDJDJDJDJDNE DYINGG, HES TOTALLY DYING ISNT HE, JUST WHEN YOU LULLED ME INTO A FALSE SENSE OF SECURITY EXCEPT ITS MY OWN DAMN FAULT FOR LETTING MY GUARD DOWN AROUND A KNOWN TERRORIST

✷ His face isn’t streaked with blood anymore.

The way I read this and went “boooooo” sksksks

✷ You didn’t mind missing out on your own sleep just to watch him.

Uhhhhhhh— I mean— this is just— sisjebwhfiisnaksdnnwnwoxmssksoddkenene this is legitimately so wholesome and romantic I want to fucking throw my phone on the ground so hard, my screen shatters

✷ The room is dim still, lit with the in-between blue of night and sunrise.

OHHHHHHFUCJJJJJJJKKKKKKKKKOFFFFFFFFFFFF THE IN- BETWEEN BLUE OF NIGHT AND SUNRISE, ITS GENIUS, I HATE YOU, IM SOBBING

✷ ‘So, thank-you, for not doing that. Don’t think I could explain a dead man in my bed.’

KSKSKSKSKSK the way Reader is lowkey like “half a breath away from loving you Moi, yes. So glad you’re not dead, but I also would not be able to explain this mess if you’d died, so double thank you” very pragmatic sksks

✷ He wouldn’t have come, he means, if he thought he would die. But what would he have done instead? Crawled off into the bush like animals do, found somewhere quiet to die on his own?

UGHHHHHHHHMYWHOLEHEARTTTTTT BC ACTUALLT YES THIS IS PROBABLY EXACTLY WHAT HE’D DO, LIKE THIS MF IS AN APEX PREDATOR, HE’D COMPLETELY STALK INTO THE BUSHES TO DIE ALONE LIKE A CAT DOES AND ITD BE SO HEARTBREAKINT BC HED THINK THAT’S EXAVTLY HOW HE DESERVES TO DIE AND UGJDODIDISJDODIKSOWOSK

✷ ‘You have a lot of questions,’ he says ... Ask them.’ He’s tired, you can tell, not only from the day before, the injuries, but from the combination of it all. From the weight on his back, the cost of folding mystery over his life. He wants out. Wants the truth between you, no matter the consequence.

Literally I have no breath or thumb strength rather to scream further, like I am as tired as Moi no I’m not, I’m just dramatic sksjs but this is so fucking poignant and beautifully written and heartbreaking and I JUSTTTTTTJFJDJDJDJEHEHDH LIKE I DONT INOW WHAT TO SAY, I AM SPEECHLESS LIKE I AM FULLY WITHOUT SPEECH TO ARTICULATE THE DEPTH OF WOW THAT I FEEL READING THSI FUCKINGKDJDJDDJR PARAGRAPH

✷ 'If you want me to leave…I’ll go. You won’t see me again.’ The knee jerk reaction is to tell him that you don’t want that, that you would’t send him away ... just because of who he is. What he does. But you know that’s a self-laid trap, waiting to be stepped in. He could say anything. He could be anyone.

'Okay,’ you reply, accepting his deal. ‘Let’s start at the beginning.’

HE COULD SAY ANYTHING. HE COULD BE ANYONE. You wanna know what you’ve done to me? This.

This is what you’ve done. These are the crimes you have committed, bc this??????b. THIIISSSSSSSS??????!!!!!!!!!!!!:&:&:Bbbbbwbebejjejenr IS SOME OF YOUR BEST SHIT TO DATE, AND IM NOT FUCJINT JOKING IN THE SLIGHTEST OR BLOWING SMOKE UP YOIR ASS OR EXAGERATTING FOR EFFECT which yes .... I have been known to do THIS IS ACTUALYYYYYYYYYYYY ONE OF THE MOST FIRE ENDINFS TO ANY FIC IVE EVER READ, ITS BESUTIFUL, ITS PERFECT, ITS LINDA EVANGELISTA OKAYYYY????????? And I love you and hate you and love you and hate you for it, nunca lo olvides que has hecho en ese día, acciones terroristas, guerra psicológica, dañó permanente y duradero de la shingada pues

the other man, pt. 2

moisés (sky rojo) x gn!reader, 3406 words

warnings for blood, gunshot wounds, DIY medical treatment

for day 17 of whumpril: cry for help | self treatment | ‘i can’t do this.’

a/n: the way this poor guy has no (?) fics on here at all, and im already maiming him. my god

tagging: @cositapreciosa @drabbles-mc​

part one here

You left him there. You left him there, and it’s been hours, sun sinking beneath the horizon, warmth slipping into cold. He hasn’t rang you. Not even a text. He’s probably dead, right? You probably left him to die. Shirt splattered with red, arm stretched across the concrete. Gun just out of reach.

You groan, turning to push your face into the pillow. It doesn’t help to imagine it. Even if he’s alive, you might never see him again. What if’s won’t do anything but torment you, if there’s never any closure, no evidence of the alternative.

The last you saw of him, he was alive. In control. Not scared in the slightest, as far as you could tell, so that’s what you’ll remember. What you’ll cement as fact. Alive, uninjured. Unrecognisable to the man you thought you knew, but not dead, at least.

Go away with me, he said. He knew they were coming. He tried to get out, you with him, hand in hand, before they got there. That meant something, right? The Moisés you knew was holding out still, before the gunfire. Putting you and him in the sun.

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