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valdederon · 1 year ago

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FLAMES JOURNEY CHAPTER #8 bitter talks an icey heart shattered shattered

valdederon and evergreen soon wrap up thier meal and make thier trek back to the guild in silence after 15 minutes 5 from walking to the guild and about 10 minutes heaing up to the guild masters quarters valdederon weakly enters the room and knocks on the door ears folded and tail between his legs half expecting to be chewed out for trying to run away.

kleo-- welcome back hun how did your bath go take a seat bud

valdederon walks over to the nest and sits by her whimpering alittle

valdederon--i..im ready t. to talk p.please dont hate me for what you might hear.

kleo perks up and gives a frown feeling the tension and fear in his voice.

kleo-- i will never hate you val.. never i love you i love you dearly.

valdederon begins talking about his past in vivid detail and the horrors he comitted during his 1 sided war against demon kind kleo listening atentively not uttering a word untill valdederon begins to tear up only to yelp as kleo coils around him.

kleo--- val .. valdederon you are no longer just a human and a wizard.though im saddened to hear what youve don it doesnt change the fact i love you and i want you to be my son.. our son.. taiga and i both feel this way youve brought a.. strange and chaotic life to this sleepy guild in the middle of pheonix valley. youl always have a home here.. and maybey you should become a dungeon delver.. or even a pheonix hawk.. a special job were your alowed to do dungeon delving and exploring but also seek out and arrest out laws help villages and citties rebuild from storms or quakes. take your time and think on it but your far to powerful to stay here couped up for ever.

valdederon stares at her speachless and wimpers softly but accepts the sudden and loving family.

valdederon--- im sorry for destroying the training hall.. the other week or when ever i….incnerated it..i was.. not ..um..my mind was a mess.. and the nightmares are always just flashbacks.. of the most horible parts of ny past..i hope they stop soon.

kleo--- its ok hun for now lets get your leg muscles built back up and then back into school.. you got alot of catching up to do mister…

valdederon growls weakly not realy wanting to go but relents knowing he still needs to learn about the world to better survive it.

over the next few nights valdederon works on the home work and school assignments he missed out on while in the hospital and over the days before the nigths exercises his leg muscles still having nightmares each night even setting taiga on fire one night having a battle flash back and unleashing a flame thrower attack in his sleep.

taiga--- kleo.. that kid is a menace in his sleepo you do know that right..

kleo--- oh come on hes only burned you once.. your a serperior youl be fine..

taiga--- an the half a dozen scorch marks in our bedroom walls… we need to find some one to help with his constant nightmares and flash backs.. you and i both know at some point it wont be just flame thrower or ember he learns.. hes a braixen now but what happens when he evolves into a delphox.. need i remind you what he did as a braixen to the training hall.. witch set us back a hard 70,000 mewns… ( mewn a currency in the world that is pressed psychickly to have mew mother of all pokemon on the front and a zoroark on the back and was created by a zoroark 1 mewn is equivelant to 200 usd ) …

kleo sighs--- i know im looking hun just bear with the kid hes starting to finaly open up to us.

taiga smiles seeing valdederon out cold in a mess of books paper an ink well and fountain pen crudely crafted by his own paws spilled over .

taiga--- atleast its a saturday ill go head out and post some more quests.. we just got a new stack of out law bounties.. the dungeons are causing all maner of chaos lateley.. its getting worse evry year.

kleo---ok babe just becarefull not to throw out your back.. ha ha your 347th birthday is today

taiga--- oh can it you old broad were literaly a year a part in age ha ha ha ha

kleo-- oh but im far younger in apearance. i am a mighty milotic the goddes of the sea its self while you look as if you went 3 rings in a boxing mach against a a roided up machamp and lost 7 times ha ha.

taiga-- ha ha ha well beeing guild master is stressfull.. dont worry ill be fine

he heads out just as valdederon sits up paper half stuck to his face as he yawns.

kleo--- morning sleepy lets get your mess cleaned up

valdederon---- so.. about becoming a pheonix hawk. what does it entail.. ive been craming all the knoledge i can about this world but i dont know if theres much more the guild has.. ive read all the books you and evergreen gave me.

kleo--- how about we head up to the archives on the 78th floor in the wet tower . theres about 40,000 books or more up there i havent been up in awhile and were always getting new books.. last time i went up was about 86 years ago i think.

valdederon---ok. so this guilds been around for a good bit.. whats the history of it like..

kleo--- ha ha ha.. good on you for not asking my age kiddo.

valdederon blushes and holdshis stomach

valdederon---my old master would have have beat the tar out of me for asking that… she did once… but in a sparing sesion were she decided to go extra hard on me.. i learned quickly to keep quiet.

kleo--- ah.. i see so you did make that mistake on asking aldy her age.

valdederon--- unfortunately… yes.. several times but yea im up for a trip to the archives.. but ..could i ride on your back.. my legs are still weak and i wore my self out last night.. my muscles feel like im beeing jabed with needles and pins.

kleo--- ha ha ha sure bud

they head up to the archives valdederon finaly takking a look at the once sleepy and quiet guild to see its prety walls stone lined with wood collums almost like an ancient castle fortress the trip up takes an hour when they enter the archive room its lined with book shelves easily 200 feet up to the cieling and the room the size of a large mansion.

valdederon--- good lord this place is huge.

kleo whistles in shock--- far more then my last visit …..far…far. more. ..miss vex were here for a few books anything on the history and stare of the world as it is now and was in the past

a small abra with faded scales and a tired look floats up to the book shelves and chuckles

vex--- you are wondering about my age arent you.. the both of you.. though the braixen doesnt want to ask… he he well im about 3,579 years old i was this ancient stone beuties guard pokemon since the day i was born….. take a seat it will be awhile bfore i can get to them books.. gota search all the shelves.

a slow 20 minutes pass before vex floats over with 7 sizable books and opens hersmokey white eyes and stares into valdederons eyes before closing them with a gentel smile.

vex-- your spirit is strong but in chaos. if you ever need to speak about it come see me in the archives

valdederon nods and grabs the stack of books and opens one up to read it. after finishing the book he starts reading another silently tail wagging softly making kleo smile brightly

kleo--- ill let you read hun ill be in my room resting i didnt get much sleep last night because of some late night guild business

valdederon gives a silent nod and continues reading the day rolls by slowly by mid afternoon hes finished all but one of the books when vex comes over with an oran berry tart with pecha berry juice.

vex--- here brought you some food and drink. youve been reading for hours with out a break any reason why.

valdederon-- im an from another world and i need to learn about this world .. and thanks for the snacks vex.

he eats the tart and drinks the juice and stretches out gently before going back to reading the last book. after finishing it he yawns and growls beeing picked up by taiga with his vines.

taiga--- dont you growl at me like that your mother my let you avoid your afternoon naps when im not around but your still a 5 year old and need them.. out worlder or not. your laying down for a nap.

valdederon--- id much rather go to the training room and practice my moves and exercise my legs.

vex chuckles as taiga lifts up the stuborn braixen.

taiga--- your already half asleep bud i doubt youl be awake much longer any way… and your always cranky when you dont rest. especialy lateley with all the lat enight cramming for tests and home work.

vall growls alittle more before yawning but not a single ember is in sight wile he growled.

taiga carries him down to thier room half way there and valdederon falls asleep on taigas back purring softly .and waking up a couple hours later in his nest grogily . he stretches out and rubs his eyes growling

valdederon--- curse this childs body its betrayed me again… i cant wait untill im older in this body. but atleast now i know enough about this world to survive.. guess having a new family could be fun.

he gets up to execises his legs by walking to the mess hall and back a few times soon running into neegan whos drinking a glass of a strange smelling drink his face red and tears fresh on his face.

valdederon--- whats wrong neegan.

neegan sighs swirling his drink ---- its my friends birthday today.. hes a pansear.. god.. the last time i saw him i was on his case about his un controlled attack in a dungeon..im such an ass hole the kid just learned a new move and i should have been happy for him but.. i. treated him like he was a criminal because people in our raid got hurt some worse then others.

valdederon---oh..uh …

valdederon takes the drink out of neegans hands as he hicups clearly abit heavy into it and walks neegan to his quarters

valdederon--- you should write him a letter.. let him know how you feel.. im sure hes upset about what happened.. if you guys are best friends you should both have a talk.. but you should rest up first

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mikaelsrose · 7 months ago

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Three days and two attempts but I am here! And I'm already dreading the state I'll be in in ten minutes!

When Tyril had asked for a doctor, Adrina knew the time had come.

I know what's coming and Im still anxious, and worried, and literally scared, I DONT WANT TO SEE THIS BUT I LOVE YOUR WRITING TOO MUCH TO PASS ON YOUR FIC 😭

I already have tears in my eyes ;-; the notion of Tyril getting old is very upsetting

He kept going, even when everything he cared for began to disappear. His friends had been gone for a long time. Imtura went first, the sea reclaiming its warrior. Mal followed not long after; the shadow desired to claim him once more but he breathed his last in the light. Nia had held on for much longer, her work never done, but she too eventually returned to the Light. And Kade read his last book a decade later.

Look, I'm an angst lover myself, but I hate you for writing this paragraph

“200 years…” he muttered after some time, “it’s not enough. There’s so much I could still do.” He took a shallow breath, a tear escaping his eye. “But I’m so tired, Adrina.” Another tear rolled down her cheek and she reached for his hand; it felt cold in hers.

“Then sleep, Tyril.” She managed a weak smile despite the tears in her eyes. “You’ve pushed for so long, done so much. You kept your promise. It’s okay to rest now.”

This right here ☝🏻 destroyed me. I am lying in a puddle of my own tears because a dying person's "I'm tired" is always, without exception, a breaking point for me, AND COMING FROM THE MAN I LOVE THE MOST IS HEARTBREAKING SOUL CRUSHING AND LIFE ALTERING IN THE WORST WAY POSSIBLE

that being said, let's proceed ✨

“Did they deny you entry?” She quickly shook her head.

“I refused to enter Elhalas without you. I told the gods to go screw themselves and came back here, to wait for you.”

“You waited for me?” He asked in a small voice.

“I’d wait an eternity for you.”

That's the kind of love I want, y'all. If he ain't waiting on me when he dies first, I don't want him. Kass the most loyal bitch even after death 🫡 in all seriousness, this moment was so bitter sweet. I'm glad they finally met and that Tyril found peace, but at the same time I'm still not past both of them being dead 🥺 and Tyril being ready to throw hands with literal gods for disrespecting his girl is quite possibly the hottest thing he ever did

Also Adrina and her daughter being with Tyril in his last moments (I started crying again writing this sentence) was heartwarming, and especially the part about him wanting to preserve his groups adventures in magical books 🥺 and making Adrina promise she'll ensure the money will be wisely spent by the orphanage 🥺🥺 this is too much for my poor heart

I had to take a break FOUR TIMES!!! because I started weeping. Woman, you are not only a machine but also a precious gem in this fandom 💎 now if you excuse me, I will go cry some more into my already wet pillow

Forever (in my Mind)

Fandom: Blades of Light and Shadow 2

Pairings: Tyril x f!human!MC (Kassandra)

Word count: 3.1k

Concept: the follow-up to Promise. TW: character death

Tags: @liviusofpella, @megas-choices, @starlight-starfury, @dutifullynuttywitch, @thosehallowedhalls, @choicesficwriterscreations

AO3 link: x

A/N: this was… an emotional rollercoaster. The amount of times I cried is unreal; this was harder and more heartbreaking to write than Promise despite an arguably happier ending. I swear, this is going to be the last sad fic I’ll write in a while. The song in this fic: “Forever (in my Mind)” by Malinda. Another song that played a large role in this fic: “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story” from Hamilton.

When Tyril had asked for a doctor, Adrina knew the time had come.

The last year had been a slow and steady decline for him; he began the year standing upright but was soon reliant on a cane, his movement still getting slower by the day despite his restrained use of the Light. A few days ago, he’d retreated to his chambers and asked to be left alone so he could rest, abandoning his gilded cane for the comfort of his bed. But after days of rest, his energy never returned. He’d stubbornly denied requests for a doctor but after some pleading and no improvement, he’d finally asked for one.

The doctor had come quickly and shut the door behind him, leaving Adrina to pace in the hall, her daughter keeping her company. No words were exchanged between the two. They knew the end was near, but Adrina’s heart sank at the mere thought that her beloved brother was nearing that end.

After a long and painful wait, the door opened, and she immediately ran to the doctor as he exited the room. He simply looked at her and shook his head.

“There’s nothing more I can do. Best we can do is make him comfortable.” Her face broke only for a moment before she regained her composure, Lady Starfury speaking as she addressed the doctor.

“Thank you.” The elf bowed and left, Adrina and her daughter rushing into the room.

Her brother had always been a driven man. Serious and driven. Nothing could stop him the moment he set his mind to something. Every setback, once mourned, only served to spur him onward, a hunter slowly and steadily pursuing prey.

She had only ever seen him stagnate once, after the battle against the Ash Empress. But his grief, his promise had pushed him forward. Always forward.

Life threw much at him, but he continued, visiting libraries, traveling to the far reaches of Morella and beyond, coming back to Undermount with stories and scars. During his short intermittent stays in Undermount, he could often be found in his study, writing feverishly into thick book after thick book, writing like he was running out of time.

Tyril had kept going through it all, his unrelenting drive pushing him forward. Spurred by his grief, his promise or perhaps a death wish, Adrina did not know but now, 200 years later, he lay fragile in bed, a face and body worn down by quests and time.

Slowly, she approached the bed, sitting down in the chair that had been placed next to it as her daughter remained by the door, too overcome with emotion to approach. The siblings didn’t say anything to each other for some time, the atmosphere heavy enough to choke down all words. Slowly, Tyril reached for the side table and grabbed a thick piece of folded paper, sealed with wax.

“My will. It has instructions and my final wishes.” He said softly, holding the paper out. Slowly, Adrina took it, holding it tightly in her hand. “I’ve ensured that the funds for the orphanage will continue. Can you make sure they’re used properly? I do not wish the children to suffer because of greed. I want them to have a good life, even when I’m gone.” She nodded, a tear rolling down her cheek.

“I’ll make sure of it. They’ll want for nothing.” Briefly, he managed to smile, before letting out a long, exhausted breath, the silence permeating the room.

“Then sleep, Tyril.” She managed a weak smile despite the tears in her eyes. “You’ve pushed for so long, done so much. You kept your promise. It’s okay to rest now.”

“But you, Amara…”

“We’ll be fine.” Adrina beckoned her daughter closer, the young elf struggling to hold back her tears.

“Uncle.” He smiled lightly at her voice.

“Amara.” The young elf approached, settling herself next to her mother, the old elf turning to look at her. He simply stared at her before whispering, “the chest.” He pointed towards a small chest that stood unassumingly at the foot of the bed. Amara nodded and brought it closer. “Open it.” She did and pulled out one of several thick, leather-bound books, tied shut.

Carefully, she untied the leather laces and opened the thick tome, opening to a page showcasing a masterfully illustrated image of Tyril and his friends at the Ancestral Masquerade, facing Duchess Xenia, the page next to it filled with words. As the book fell fully open, magic beamed in the brush strokes and the image began to move slightly, bringing the painting further to life. “My adventures… my friends’ adventures, it’s all written in these books. Kade and I… we wanted the truth preserved somewhere before we were relegated to the myths we once chased. He helped me compile much of it and I kept going when he couldn’t anymore.” Adrina couldn’t help but stare at the pages in awe.

“This is incredible. We’ll keep them safe, brother.” She assured. Amara tried to shut the book, but Tyril stopped her. He stared at the image, a bittersweet tear running down his cheek. He continued staring, running his fingers tenderly over the painted images of his friends. When he eventually pulled his hand away, Amara shut the book and placed it back into the safe confines of the chest.

They fell silent, the seconds ticking by slowly, Adrina’s keen eyes watching her brother as he continued to fade, his eyes partially shut, wishing to sleep but a part of him still stubbornly hanging on.

She could hear him mumbling but it was hard to make out what he was saying. She leaned closer, her heart twisting when she heard that it was a name.

“Kassandra.” He muttered breathlessly. A tear rolled down her cheek, as she recalled something he told her a few years back, in one of the few conversations he ever mentioned her.

You want to know the horrible truth? I barely remember what she looked like. She was the only one I ever wanted. She was taken from me, and 200 years of living couldn’t fill the hole she left behind.

“Kassandra.” He muttered again. Adrina leaned forward and placed a gentle kiss on his forehead.

“Go be with her, brother.” She whispered, her voice shaking. “Go fill the hole in your heart. We’ll be alright.” Briefly, she spied a smile on his face before a weak puff of air escaped his lips, his chest going still and his hand loosening under hers.

—

When Tyril opened his eyes, he was no longer in his bed. Rather, he stood next it. It was a strange sensation to see his own aged body still lying in it, his sister and niece weeping over it. He looked and examined his ghostly hands, finding them to be in a state of youth again. Examining his hair had similar results - gone were the grays and whites, the strands returned to their youthful black.

Carefully, he moved around the bed and tried to place his hand on Amara’s shoulder, only for it to go through her, his niece not reacting to his attempted touch. He felt a stab in his chest, but he shed no tears as it confirmed what he knew to be true.

He was dead.

He took a moment to mourn with them, though they mourned different things. As he knelt with his sister and niece, he tried to recall the final moments. His recollection had been hazy, his vision and mind unclear as he teetered between the realm of the living and the dead.

If he’d recalled correctly, a specter had come to him only moments before the darkness came. He focused on that vague memory, trying to push past the fog.

It had begun as a mysterious shape, no rhyme or reason in his failing eyes. It had eventually morphed into something, the shape becoming less and less transparent the longer it hovered above him. It had smiled at him as the shape became even clearer.

A woman. Human, dark skinned, dark braided hair, and brown eyes.

He had whispered her name and she had kissed his forehead.

Find me on the mountain.

“Mountain.” He whispered, looking above him, piercing his gaze beyond the limits of the ceiling.

He headed for the door, stopping in the frame to glance once more at his family. A tear rolled out as he looked; how he would miss them.

He wandered down the hallway in his ghostly form, servants unintentionally passing through him, whispering the news of his death among themselves; no doubt the rest of Undermount would know within the hour.

He continued to wander the halls, struck by a desire to see every nook and cranny of the vast estate before he would eventually say goodbye to it. He wandered through the library, the kitchen, the dining hall, even the servants’ quarters, trying to memorize every detail. Eventually, he found himself in the wide expanse of the ballroom, the curtains drawn but the magical orbs floating above providing just enough light to prevent total darkness in the room.

Many an evening he had spent here, helping his sister host masquerades. He’d been glad for the masks, if only to hide how much he didn’t want to be there. He mingled and chatted as expected but rarely danced, his sister and niece being the only dance partners he could bear to have; it was impossible to dance with the one he truly wished to.

The thought of her brought back the memory of the specter and the words she had whispered before the end.

“Find me on the mountain.” He whispered to himself once more, his sight falling onto a staircase, it hidden away in the far reaches of the room and partially hidden in the shadows. He knew it led up to the outside. He made his way to them, freezing when he heard a sound in the stairwell. It echoed yet it was beautiful, a gentle voice singing words he was too far away to understand. There was a pang of emotion when he listened more carefully, stepping further into the stairwell. The words he still couldn’t make out, even with his keen elven senses, but for a moment, the voice sounded familiar, dredging up painful memories of a time long ago.

In a burst, he began running up the stairs, two steps at a time, the words of the song becoming clearer as he climbed higher and higher, forcing tears down.

Like the moon, you pull me closer

Bathe my body in your lavender skies

Like a sound, you slip away

Leave a shadow of a day gone by

And I’ll love you forever in my mind.

And I’ll love you until the day I die.

He burst out of the stairwell onto the mountainside, quickly looking at his surroundings, trying to deduce the direction of the voice. The echoes of the words were carried in the breeze, guiding him in the right direction. He ran in pursuit but came to an abrupt stop when he noticed a ghostly figure ahead, standing near the edge of a sheer drop off the mountain, facing the sun. Her back was turned to him, but his stomach twisted in knots when he recognized her, disbelief and doubt overwhelming him.

And I’ll love you forever in my mind.

And I’ll love you until the day I die.

She sang softly, the wind carrying the melody of her voice to him. Slowly, she turned to face him.

It was her.

Tyril stood still as a statue, staring, emotion choking him. He couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. He tried to take a step forward, but his legs collapsed under him, his tears finally breaking past the dam of his own control. In seconds, he felt a touch and soon he was enveloped in an embrace, the touch of her hands a sensation he had forgotten long ago. He grasped onto her tightly, burying his face in her neck, weeping louder when he breathed in her scent, another thing he’d forgotten.

“You’re here.” Tyril said softly, his voice shaking. He felt her tighten her grip on him.

“I never left.” Kassandra responded, her voice shaking too. They held onto each other tightly, neither wishing to let go. Eventually, Tyril pulled away, desperate to see her face.

She looked exactly as he remembered. Still as beautiful and radiant as the day she was taken from him. He reached up to cup her face, his hand faltering for a moment. He choked back a sob when his hands didn’t go through her and immediately planted kiss after kiss on her lips, the taste so sweet but salty too. He kept planting more kisses, as if intent to give her every kiss he’d wished to give her over the last two centuries.

Far too soon, he pulled away, resting his forehead against hers.

“I missed you. So much. You have no idea…” The words were lost in his throat, drowned by another sob. “I kept my promise.”

“And you have no idea how thankful I am that you did.” She pulled back and cupped his face in her hands, brushing away his tears. “A man like you, wasting his life on tears, unable to dig himself out of the pits of grief, surviving but not living. What a tragedy that would’ve been.” Gently, he took her hands and held them tenderly, staring at them as more tears appeared. He lifted them and placed a kiss on each of her hands.

“It was not easy.” He admitted, his voice trembling. “Living a life with a fractured heart wears down even the most resolute of men. 200 years and somehow, I feel as though I’ve not done enough to live by my promise and your wish.” She smiled at him through her own tears and squeezed his hands.

“You did everything I asked and so much more. You’ve lived not only by my wish but by the wishes of our friends. Mal was so grateful for what you’ve done for the orphanage.”

“Mal? The others? They’re here?” He looked around them, seeing only the wide empty breadth of the mountainside.

“They’re in Elhalas.” Anger suddenly bubbled in him, already thinking of a few choice words for the gods.

“Did they deny you entry?” She quickly shook her head.

“I refused to enter Elhalas without you. I told the gods to go screw themselves and came back here, to wait for you.”

“You waited for me?” He asked in a small voice.

“I’d wait an eternity for you.” She leaned forward and gave him another kiss. “It hurt to wait so long, just watching and unable to touch you or help you. Years of the sweetest words you couldn’t hear. But the wait is over now. Now, we have an eternity.” Gently, she pulled away and rose to her feet, taking a few steps. She looked over the expanse of the mountainside, taking in the details. After a moment, she turned around and walked back to him, holding out her hand. “You ready?”

With a soft smile, he reached out and took her hand. Once standing, he intertwined his fingers with hers.

“Yes.” She lifted her hand and moved it in a familiar motion, a portal of ethereal light appearing before them. “Show off.” Kassandra chuckled and moved through the portal, pulling him through too.

In an instance, the mountain had disappeared. Instead, before them, was an open field, wide and expansive, the otherworldly beauty nearly causing a tear to roll down his cheek. A glistening city stood in the distance, the structures and the stones they were made of unlike anything he’d ever seen, even in the hall of visions in Undermount. It put the vast beauty of Valen to shame. A gentle wind blew around them, the air carrying with it a potent and divine energy.

“Welcome to Elhalas.”

“It’s beautiful.” He looked over the area once more, finding it hard to take in all the magnificence. His gaze fell to a hill in the distance, a single, stunning oak tree resting at the top. The leaves and branches swayed gently with the breeze when he noticed some figures sitting and standing around the trunk, the shade and the distance hiding their identities.

He could see four figures. Three seemed to be of similar stature, two seated by the trunk and the third leaning against it. The fourth was seated on the grass nearby. The leaning figure moved away from the trunk and moved to the one sitting in the grass; within in a moment, the standing figure dashed around the trunk, the sitting figure jumping up to give chase, revealing a much larger stature. As they came around the trunk, the hulking figure grabbed and tripped their assailant, Tyril seeing rather than hearing the laughter of the others as they tumbled to the grass, a wrestling match ensuing. He continued to watch them, his stomach churning with a whirlwind of emotions he found difficult to decipher.

Kassandra squeezed his hand and gave him a reassuring smile.

“Come on.” He let her gently pull him along, moving closer towards the hill. As they began to walk up, the figures became so much clearer, and he choked back a gasp.

Kade and Nia sitting by the tree, Kade playing a gentle tune on his lute as Nia tapped her hand and seemed to hum along to the song. Nearby, their typical childish wrestling match over, were Imtura and Mal, also listening to the songs played.

Nia saw him first.

The priestess stood up as they made eye contact, the others following her gaze and standing up too as he and Kassandra reached the top of the hill. All stood frozen for some time, only staring as countless emotions and thoughts swirled between them all. Then, with a sob, Nia ran to him and embraced him tightly, Tyril’s own tears flowing once more as he embraced her back. Quickly, more arms embraced him, and more sniffles joined.

“Took your damn time.” Imtura scolded, making the elf and the others chuckle. He embraced his friends tighter, feeling the last heavy weights that lingered in his heart finally lift, leaving behind a sense of peace.

“My apologies. I had a promise to keep.”

#but please dont have anyone else die i cant take it #blades of light and shadow #tyril starfury #choices blades #blades of light and shadow 2 #choices bolas #playchoices #tyril x mc

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sawyingthroughthewasteland · 2 years ago

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Wrote a kinkmas piece for one of my friend’s gifts but really liked the sfw leadup to it with the MM all coming together to make the holidays pleasant in the Commonwealth once more. Teaser for the fic and sfw snippit under the cut ;)

It was damn near close to midnight when ‘Mr. Claus’ was able to stumble his way down into the basement of the Castle. With a tired sigh, he yanked the sweaty christmas hat off his head before beginning to unbutton his costume as he walked down the stairs. Compared to the bitter winter storm that had decided to hit Boston the night of their operation, the Castle’s interior was scorching hot. It also certainly didn’t help that it was running at max occupancy with the flood of volunteers that had traveled to help. They were so packed in fact, they’d resorted to pulling out the cots not used since the place was just beginning to start up under Sawyer’s control. A faint but tired smile played at his lips as he walked through the earthen halls, heat growing in his chest seeing the various states of his volunteers- many still wearing the elf costumes that their seamstress had cranked out all last week.

It felt… well it felt fucking amazing to run such a large scale operation with the intent of something so pure. With the help of well over 200 volunteers including most of Sawyer’s closest companions, Jake’s coworkers, Baron’s entire flight squad and the combined efforts of all the settlements- every single 154 of the registered kids under 18 in the Commonwealth would be receiving gifts tonight.

It had been an absolute whirlwind getting the whole thing going, and when he’d first pitched the idea to Baron he did it out of hopeful longing. But then the man went, orchestrated multiple airdrops to all the settlements with willing pilots, then had pushed Sawyer to at least give it a try. Then Jake caught wind of the idea and well, here Sawyer was dressed as Mr. Claus, Baron somewhere in the Castle as Santa, with Danse clunking around in his PA dressed as a reindeer with a custom badge that read ‘Rudolph’. The pilots all were dressed as reindeer as well, all vertibirds custom fit with red glowing noses and codenames changed temporarily- and he’d been surprised how enthusiastic his troops were with tolerating ‘elf uniforms’ for the month of December.

Fortunately the snow storm they’d been hit with only seemed to fuel the army of cheer with the final night turning into a massive hot chocolate party as everyone gathered in the covered courtyard to wrap gifts with bonfires set up all around to keep everyone toasty and fingers functional. It was… going to be a bitch to clean everything up but certainly worth it. Over the past year as he renovated settlement after settlement with Jake’s new tech and improved infrastructure, it was only fair that Sawyer and his men would give something back for his settler’s time.

At the moment though, he needed rest. Tomorrow was a big day, complete with taking an early morning flight back home to Sanctuary to celebrate Christmas with the kids, then immediately booking it back so he could man the radio and Jim could spend time with his own kids for the day- and who knows if the storm decided to get worse and they’d have to do a quick turn around and get emergency winter services up.

#Sawyer out here working his ass off for his settlements #writing snippet #merry chrysler #happy honda days

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internalsealpanic · 3 years ago

Text

Sealing the Deal part 1

Summary: Always, always be nice to sea creatures but never ever accept their pelt.

A/n: A fic I’ve been meaning to write since forever. My contribution to mermay.

warning: Disgusting fluff and bad decisions

Main Masterlist

part 2

You look like you're gonna die from boredom in your little fishing boat.

Dick rolls over to where Jason was sprawled and used his momentum to push the larger seal into the water. Jason gives an undignified squawk of outrage. Dick just preens and looks smug.

You cup your hand over your mouth as you begin to laugh.

Jason glares even harder at Dick. Dick... couldn't care even less if he tried. All he can focus on is the wrinkle in the corners of your eyes. They'd been gone for so long these past few months. It felt like the first ray of sun after a long storm.

Dick claps his fins in excitement even as Jason snuffs and rolls his eyes. You clap in return but accidentally drop your fishing pole into the sea. Reaching for it, you fall into the water. Dick feels a little bad for laughing but you manage to get yourself back up into the boat safely. You sigh in defeat as your fishing pole drifts away. Dick notices for the first time that your face has grown gaunt from the last few weeks. Are you eating enough? Are you even taking care of yourself? Dick swims over to your boat as it rocks back and forth on the waves. He hops in easily and plops onto your stomach. You laugh and pet his head. It was a weak laugh so he croons at you in question.

“Sorry pup, I don’t have any food for you today. I mean I don’t even have any for me.” Despite the sweet timbre of your voice, Dick can still taste the bitter hopelessness in the statement.

He nuzzles his face into your chest. He can feel just how thin you’ve gotten. He has to do something about this.

To say Dick had been afraid of humans would be a monumental understatement. It had been around 200 years since humans had left the island and the first thing they did when they came back was hunt down selkies. Dick's parents had been two of the unlucky few who'd been hunted down.

So when Dick found himself stranded onshore because of a fin tangled in a fishing line, he thought he was a goner. And when he saw you approaching; well, he still thought he was fucked but he thought you'd at least be nicer than the adults.

Maybe if he acts cute enough you'll spare him.

Dick whimpered and he gave you the big innocent look.

You shushed him harshly. Dick flinched then you flinched and muttered apologies.

You approached him slowly. You looked around before crouching and fiddling with the line Dick had managed to get himself caught in. Carefully, you began to disentangle him. It hurt, especially when you took the hook out, but once he was free. He clapped and trilled before you shushed him again.

Dick thought that it was all over and he could just roll back into the sea until you scoop him up and swaddle him in your shirt.

After 10 minutes of your father screaming at you, he agreed to treat Dick who knew better than to snap at him. Your father was kind with gentle hands. He worked on Dick while you fed him fish. It wasn't the best fish but Dick can't complain.

After an hour or so, Dick started to wriggle and you pull him closer to your chest.

"Dad, can we keep him for a few days? He might still be sick." You plead with big eyes.

Your father glared at you then sighed. "No more than two. His wounds just need to close up, understand?"

You squealed a little. Hugging Dick tighter, you thanked your father before scampering off to find you a basin to put Dick in. You, thankfully, had the good sense to fill it with lukewarm water.

Dick lived like a king in those two days. You fed him a lot of fish much to your dad's exasperation. You kept him warm. You even read to him and sang songs to him.

Dick wanted to stay but he missed Bruce, Alfred, Damian, and maybe that new kid Jason.

On the fourth day (one of the wounds was deeper than expected), Dick was released back into the sea but he never did manage to stay away after that

Dick sets the odd little trinket down in front of Jason's sleeping form. It was something you'd caught in your net days before along with the meager amount of fish you'd managed to net. You'd busied yourself with it for days before throwing it out. Dick wasn't sure what it was; all he knew was that it was something Jason would like.

He waits semi patiently for Jason to notice it, nudging it forward a little until it touches Jason's snout and the larger seal is forced to pay attention to Dick.

"I know when I'm being bribed, Dickface." Jason says, glaring.

Dick volleys it with a wide-eyed hopeful look. He nudges the little trinket forward again. This time, instead of ignoring him, Jason rises to his full height, teeth bared. This... does not faze Dick.

"C'mon Jaaaaaaay," Dick says as if the prolonging of syllables would whittle down Jason's irritation. Jason suspects if he were less inclined to tell Dick to fuck off, it would have worked. Probably. But as it stands, Dick is responsible for ruining a very good, very rare nap for Jason and so he's on the shit list and has lost any favor privileges until further notice.

"I said no. Go away or ask Bruce."

"But Jaaaaaaay, it's just a teensy tiny favor. It won't even take an hour. Not with your skill at least."

"That kind of flattery may work on Harper and it may even work on West but I'm not an idiot about to get involved with whatever shenanigans you have planned with the human."

Dick lets out a long-suffering sigh. Jason isn't stupid enough to think that Dick has actually given up. No, the stubborn little fuck is worse than a barnacle. "You've left me no choice-"

"I have given you plenty of choices. Most of them involve minding your own goddamn business." Jason says with a little snuff.

"-I'm calling it in."

Jason narrows his eyes at Dick.

"Don't you dare. That was 5 years ago."

Dick smiles, evilly. "Unless you want the rest of the family to know about-"

"Fine! What do you want?"

Dick looks smug. Jason wants to bite his face off.

"I need you to help me catch fish."

Jason looks at him, incredulous. "Did you hit your head or something?"

"Not recently. Look, I just need you to help me catch fish for the human." Dick explains like it's the most obvious thing in the world. Contrary to what Dick seems to think, Jason really isn't concerned with the one human on the island. Most of the selkies on the island have barely even interacted with you outside of staring at you.

"You're insane."

"I think we reserve that term for Bruce."

Jason raises his head from the ground. "You're not wrong."

You think you hear the light pitter-patter of raindrops. You sigh. You would be lying if you say you aren't the least bit thankful for the excuse to stay indoors today. You... don't exactly like foraging for food. You had avoided it for as long as you had food in the lighthouse. You thought it would at least last you 'til the ships came in but whatever is going on in the mainland has kept the ships from your shores. You don't mind. You never did find the sailors all that pleasant on the rare occasions that you did have to interact with them.

You like your island the way it is but... you're not exactly the most skilled at hunting... or fishing. You have no idea how your father did it. You chucked it up to the miracles of loaves and fishes. You miss him.

You curl around your pillow in a vain attempt to chase the wakefulness away but the sun in your eyes was too bright. You flutter your eyes open. The sun had the audacity to be there. Still the splushing sound continued.

You strain your ears to listen, trying to make heads or tails of it. It was a squishy sound, the sound of putty hitting stone over and over again. You scramble to the front door. In hindsight, you probably should have grabbed a weapon before running towards the strange sound.

Opening the door, you're greeted with the sight of a familiar seal caught red-handed with a fish in his mouth.

You stare at each other for a long moment before your eyes wander down to a pile of fish. A large amount of fish. Laughter rolls from your lips, musical and manic as you bury your face in your hands.

You think the seal furrows his brow at you, dropping the fish in its mouth before plopping towards you. Plop. Plop. Plop. He looks at you with big dark eyes. Your mouth twitches between curling down into a frown and a smile that spread across your face. On one hand, you are confused. On the other hand, you were gonna be able eat some meat.

A concerned croon comes from the pup and your face decides that it would rather smile at the moment. You throw your arms around him, not at all caring about the seawater getting on your nightclothes.

"Thank you." You whisper and the seal answers with a happy trill.

Dick is over the moon.

He can't even help how loud his trills get. It's ok you don't seem to mind either. He's just happy that you get to eat now.... but you don't.

Dick's a little frustrated when you don't immediately start digging in. Instead, you go back inside your home, swear, shout in delight then come back out with a basin and a jar of white powder. You then run around to fill the basin with seawater then add what Dick finds out is salt into the seawater.

Dick is... concerned.

You go back inside the house. When you come out again, you have a knife in your hand. Dick waddles back a bit. He knows you won't hurt him but it's a habit. You develop these kinds of habits around Bruce.

You settle yourself onto the ground cross-legged and grab a fish. Dick looks on with mild curiosity. You begin to dismember the fish by cutting off it's head, cutting it up in the middle then removing the bones and stomach. That kind of makes sense, Dick thinks. The bones are kind of annoying. Dick nods his head agreeably until you toss the fish into the basin.

Dick looks on in utter confusion as you repeat the process with most of the fish he's brought you.

You turn to him looking equally befuddled before your eyes soften. You look sheepish. "Sorry pup, I can't eat all of this today so I'm salting them so I can eat them the next few..." You count the fish in the basin. "... weeks."

Dick tilts his head but doesn't say anything. You really should just eat more. Dick can get you more if you need it. You just need to ask but you seem content with what you're doing.

Dick is about to rest his head on your lap when you shoot up and scuttle back inside. You return with a line and a smile. Dick watches you string the fish up like laundry. He could probably help you but he has no clue if he should. Just eat the fish damn it.

Finally after what felt like forever, you start preparing the fish and actually eat. You offer Dick some and Dick has to admit cooking the fish does taste odd but not unpleasant. It's totally different from eating it raw (the better way) but it's not horrible. Or maybe it just tastes good because you've got the biggest grin on your face while eating.

Maybe.

Probably, Dick thinks as he munches on his fish, pressed to your side.

___

You sing at the top of your voice. It's a cheerful song but Dick can't quite make out the words. He knows it's human but he's not quite familiar with it. The tune is nice though. Dick rests his head on your lap closing his eyes.

He croons happily when you being to pet him.

You stop midway through the song dissolving into a fit, of what Dick can only describe as, giggles snorts. It was a despicably adorable sound that was engineered to make Dick feel all warm and fuzzy on the inside.

He looks up at you with big curious black eyes. He's not complaining but he hasn't heard you laugh this much before and he may or may not want to know how to make you laugh like this again.

When you don't answer his questioning gaze, Dick nudges against your chest. Your shoulders are still shaking but you manage to stop laughing for a moment.

"Sorry pup," you say wiping a tear from your eye, "I must look crazy to you. "

A little but not as bad as Bruce, Dick thinks. Bruce thinks you humans still don't know there are selkies on the island. Dick snorts at the idea. Everyone knows that all you humans know about selkies. That's why those men keep coming here trying to trap them.

You squish his face affectionately with your hands. "My dad taught me that song and I just realized..." Your mouth turns into a curved line of held back laughter. "...It's a sea shanty about missing being between a woman's legs." The last few words come out more as giggles than proper syllables but Dick can't enjoy that because he can feel his face warm up from the thought. He hides his face in his flippers.

You squeal, absolutely delighted with his mortification. Smiling down at him, you say: "Yanno pup, sometimes I think you understand me."

Thought process-wise, no.

Dick snuggles up to you again, blowing air out of his nose to voice his ascent. You can't just say things like that but again, you just simply seem amused by his suffering when you bend down to press a kiss to the top of his head.

Dick looks up when you pull away. No! Give him more!

Dick stretches up to return the favor, having to partially climb on your lap but only managing to boop your nose with his snout. You nuzzle your nose against his and Dick makes the happiest noise in the back of his throat.

Sometimes after wandering around you had a habit of falling asleep on the shore which Dick thought was fine until he found out that you couldn't swim. Dick being the only with brains in this duo always nudges you awake when the tide starts getting too close. Dick doubts the lapping water will wake you up before sweeping you away. After all, you managed to sleep through Tim, Kon, and Bart's rock piling contest on top of you. Dick shooed them away but even after cleaning up, you didn't wake up.

Dick sees the sailors on the shore and nudges you. You... don't even blink. You hum, content to bask in the sun as you wrap your arms around Dick. Dick huffs. He likes this but he really would prefer it if you move. Dick considers slipping from your grip and grabbing a fish to slap you with like last time.

Dick cranes his head to look at the ship again. It was far too close now, too close for you to get away without being seen by the sailors.

Dick turns you back over to your back and proceeds to body slam you with all his blubber. He winces when you make a choked noise. Dick can give you apology fish later.

"Pup, what the fuck?"

You see the ship. Your eyes widen then flicker to his injured fin. Dick had injured it when he’d been swimming by the docks and got caught in one of the old traps. You’ve done your best to help it heal but you only know so much. You’re still reading up on herbs in case it happens again.

You try in vain to push him off but he's a big loveable sack of blubber and he refuses to move. “C’mon pup, you need to move. They’ll try to catch you if they see you.” You grunt but the sack of blubber refuses to move.

You and Dick stay still as the ship draws near, neither of your chests rises or fall as the ship rocks back and forth.

The ship passes and you let your head fall back with a sigh.

Dick nuzzles his snout against your face, his whiskers tickling your face. You giggle and try to push him off. It’s useless so you let him stay there.

You both decide to take a nap on the shore with Dick huffing in your face once in a while as he snores.

You curl up on the floor in front of the fire, watching the embers flicker, flash, and fade. It's the best thing you can do to calm your fraying nerves. The storm rages outside violently as if it was trying to tear the lighthouse down brick by brick. The whole building shakes with another boom of thunder. You close your eyes and burrow under the thick blanket.

In the back of your mind, your father is chuckling. The absence of a hand on your head is disconcerting. You remind yourself that it won't come, that you'll have to learn to weather the storm alone. You sigh then tighten the blanket around you.

Tok. Tok. Tok.

You blink. The fire was dying. When had you fallen asleep?

Tok, tok, tok.

Blinking, you rub the sleep from your eyes, but the haze doesn’t lift, only growing as you watch the firelight.

Tok tok tok.

You shoot up and barrel towards the door with the frantic knocking growing louder and louder as your feet pound against the stone floor.

You run into the door in your haste. The loud thud of your body against the door causes the frantic knocks to turn into muffled shouting.

Prying yourself from the door, you open it and you don't know what you expected but this wasn't it.

Standing in front of you was a man soaked like a wet rat. You blink in confusion before pulling him inside. You run to grab him a blanket. Wait. You should probably get him a towel. No, wait. You should have gotten his name first. Fuck.

You shuffle back into the room with a towel, spare clothes, and an extra blanket. You.. what can generously be called a heart attack.

For the first time, in the soft glow of the fire, you can fully admire your guest. Not see, admire because there was a lot to admire.

The light of the fire flicking over the planes of his chest, with a light dusting of chest hair, the amber glow highlighting all the muscles of his body, framing the ripples of his toned figure. Swallowing any good sense you have, you watch the rainwater turn golden as it drips down his perfectly bronzed skin. The water cuts through valleys of muscle that could have only been handcrafted by gods. Your eyes follow the flow until... Oh.

You flush furiously, your face glowing brighter than the fire. He's- He's- Oh my god, he's naked.

You reign your eyes in. Ok, you let it linger down there a bit. Not long enough for your guest to notice. You concentrate on his face which wasn't hard to do. The man pushes his raven hair out of his face letting you fully appreciate his face. In keeping with his body, his fine boned face looked like Pygmalion himself spent hours shaping it, not satisfied until he's made the perfect face. It's handsome in an adorable way. Not intimidating. It's the kind of face you'd like to pepper with kisses. You try not to focus on his lips in case of any sinful thoughts. You just met the man. The only thing you will note is that yes, his lips do look absolutely kissable and it aggravates you.

The most striking feature however are his deep blue eyes. The kind of deep that you feel like you could drown in. The kind of depth that looked too pretty to agonize over the fact that your lungs are burning. You stare, trying to carve a perfect replica of those eyes into your mind. Those eyes... that are currently staring at you... as he steps closer... at an alarming speed.

You hold the stack of fabric in front of you like a shield. Your guest stops, looking at the stack. His face goes from concern to confusion to blinding enthusiasm. He was probably freezing.

A smile spreads on his face, the cutest dimples you've ever seen forming on his cheeks, as he accepts the stack. He thanks you and your heart leaps from your chest. Whatever chill you were experiencing from the storm was completely gone. You turn away from him, rubbing the back of your neck and mumbling a halfway point between 'no problem' and 'you're welcome'. You hope it came out as 'no welcome' instead of 'your problem'.

The man snorts and you are pretty sure which one came out. To save yourself the embarrassment, you walk to the kitchen and start preparing tea. The man thankfully occupies himself by looking at the assortment of knick-knacks you've hoarded gathered over the years. It gives you ample time to breathe.

"Do you like sugar in your tea?"

The man nods enthusiastically. You can't help but smile a little.

You sit next to him in front of the fireplace as you hand him his mug. He leans his head against your shoulder. You can feel his body radiating a comforting heat.

You two sit in silence, sipping tea and watching the fire flicker. You wanna scold him for slurping his tea. You're not exactly his mother. You don't even know his name.

You turn to him, face scrunched and about to ask him for his name when he surges forward. His lips brush against your lips as he nudges his nose against yours. You fall backward in shock and the stranger falls on top of you, his eyes still glowing bright and cool against the amber light.

There's a thrill working up your spine or is it fear? You squeeze your eyes shut and throw your arms over your face.

"Please don't hurt me." You plead barely above a whisper.

You feel the body above you lower itself on top of you. He chuckles and shakes his head. "(Y/n), you're being silly."

You open your eyes. The man is laying his body on top of you keeping you pinned down and he's... pouting at you?

"I- I don't know who you are. You can take what you want but please don't hurt me."

The pout deepens into a frown.

"(Y/n), I'm not gonna hurt you. Don't you recognize me?"

You blink. You would definitely remember someone this eye-catching. "You always sing that sea shanty to me. The one about the sailor who misses his wife's..." The stranger flushes and makes a hand gesture. Your face scrunches again. The only person you've sung that to aside from your dad is...

"Pup?!"

His frown morphs back into a pout. "I'm not even that little."

You squish his face with your hands before you let your mind wander. You think back to the scars crisscrossing his limbs and chest. "How is this possible?"

He laughs, prying your hands from his face. "I'm a selkie," He says as if that was the most obvious thing in the world. "My name is also Dick, not pup."

You stare up at him wide-eyed and stupefied. Dick snuggles against you like he always does. Somehow snuggling you in this form is better. He can hold you closer like this. You run your hand through his hair, fingers lacing through the tangles in his hair. He lets out an excited trill.

Dick might just be in heaven right now.

"I dunno how but you're somehow even prettier when I look at you in this form," Dick breathes contently. "I'm so lucky to have such a pretty wife."

You stiffen. Dick looks up at you and the confusion in your face wrenches a knife in his heart. He swallows. "That is what you meant with this, right?" Dick asks, tugging at the collar of his shirt.

Your mouth turns into various shapes trying to piece together a coherent response. It settles on the simplest one. "No."

Dick looks stricken like you'd taken a club to his head.

You reel back. "I just- I- I thought you were cold and you-"

Dick's heartaches. It's a dull ache. He thought this kind of thing would be sharp like having a hook pierce your heart.

His insides twist as he peels of you.

Your stomach sinks as you feel the cold fill your body once more. You don’t want him to go. The thought of being alone right now makes your stomach curdle. Your hands grip his shirt without meaning to. The look on his face hurts but the idea of him leaving felt unbearable. You know it's selfish but here you are begging him not to leave.

"Dick, I'm sorry... I didn't know... I-"

Thunder booms. You squeak and bury your face in his chest. You can't stand storms.

Dick smiles down at you softly. It's still pained but it's bearable.

He lays on his side and pulls you closer. He slots your face into his neck. You're still shivering even when he uses his body to shield you from the rest of the world.

You whisper another apology.

Dick shushes you, pressing a kiss to your forehead.

The sunlight floods into the room like it does every morning but the room is still cold. Your mind works to understand what's wrong with this picture. Your hand pads beside you. The space next to you is empty save for the blanket left behind.

You sniffle, gripping the sheet in your hand. You messed up, you think, pulling it to your face. For the first time in months, the tears come easily. You lay there all day because the tears won't stop.

"If you sigh one more time, I am going to rip your throat out." Jason growls not bothering to open his eyes. Why would he? Dick has been flat and mopey for the past two weeks and Jason is really starting to miss his hyperactivity.

Dick lets out another mopey sigh. Jason. Is. Going. To. Scream.

"Can't you be depressing in Roy's direction? Or Bruce's?"

Dick sighs even louder at the mention of Bruce and Jason, for once, is considering murder or at least maiming.

"She doesn't love me back."Dick sniffles and Jason really should have known this had something to do with you.

He turns to Dick. "I'm going to regret asking but how do you know that?" The sooner he sorts Dick out, the sooner he gets to sleep. "Did she tell you to go away and never come back?"

"Well no-"

It's Jason's turn to sigh. "You fucking moron, What did she even say?"

"She said she didn't know." Dick lowers his head to the sand and Jason wants to slap him with his tail.

Jason is now fully awake and very ready to throttle Dick. Or he's just cranky. "Are you telling me Bruce was right?! This day just keeps getting worse."

Something seems to click in Dick's brain. "Oh, crap Bruce is right." He mutters stupidly.

Jason will take whatever consolation he can get out of this. "She probably thought you were just some random pervert flashing her then." Jason snickers. It's petty and childish but so is interrupting a well-deserved nap.

"What?"

Jason lets out an exasperated huff through his snout. He twists his body to look at Dick with minimal effort to lift his head. "Let's see, you turned up naked at her door and then you called her your wife and nearly kissed her in what? The space of 15 minutes?"

"I got confused." Dick sputters.

"Geez, I thought West was bad but you're just a disaster," Jason chuckles, "Oh! And you made the brilliant decision to leave without explanation," Jason is having far too much fun rubbing salt in the wound. "She probably feels terrible”.

"Are you guilt-tripping me?"

"Is it working?"

"What-" Dick growls. "Well, what do you want me to do?"

"Hmmmmm, have you tried talking? Yanno the thing Bruce never does. But seriously, I can’t believe you call her your wife and then abandon her." Jason shakes his head. "And you have the audacity to call yourself the smart one."

Dick strips out of his skin and begins running towards the lighthouse... naked.

Jason debates on letting him.... he probably shouldn't.

"Dickface!" Jason calls out.

Dick doesn't stop, face crumpled in determination and his little Richard swinging wildly as he walks.

Jason is gonna die of second-hand embarrassment.

"DICKFACE!"

"What?!" Dick asks turning around his hands on his hips. Like usual, his hip tilts to the side and his foot taps as he waits expectantly for Jason to gather a mildly coherent response.

"Your little Richard..." Jason says pointing with his fin.

Dick looks down and the look of mortification on his face is satisfactory. ".... Right. Shit."

"Just steal some from her laundry."

"But she'll be pissed."

"Ok, so you would rather flash her then?"

Dick sighs and this time Jason doesn't have the urge to throttle him only because Dick is already beating his own ego into a pulp. "I hate it when you make sense."

Jason raises a brow, setting his head back down to the warm sand. "I always make sense."

Dick just cackles in response as he heads to the lighthouse.

Dick shifts his weight on the balls of his feet. He feels sick like he'd eaten one of those pickled fish you made him one time. Maybe this was a bad idea. Why did he even listen to Jason? He flips onto his hands and begins to pace. His stomach feels like it's being tossed violently by ocean currents. It feels like a shapeless lump sitting in the pit of his abdomen. Maybe you're out or maybe you never wanna see him again.

Your face had been so blown wide with shock when he had called you wife that it looked almost foreign like the suggestion had been so audacious that your face had to reconstruct itself to accommodate the shock.

Dick puts a hand to his face trying to stem the flow of thought. He was such an idiot. Why did he assume you would love him like that and why did he just leave you? Dick closes his eyes and breathes. He'll knock just once more then leave if you don't answer.

Tok. Tok. Tok.

The knocks register just above a whisper. He thinks you don't hear it.

He lets out a breath and walks away. This was stupid. He should never have come back.

Jason was right. Fuck. Dick buries his face as he walks away.

Distantly, Dick hears the squeak of rusty hinges but it's lost in the tempest of thoughts plaguing his mind, in all the little hurts from that night.

"Pup?" The sound of your voice is followed by the pounding of your feet against stand. Dick's careening to the ground before he knows it as your body collides with his.

"Pup," you sniffle into his shirt, "it is you."

Dick twist in your grip so he's facing you. Your face is buried in his shirt. He strokes your hair, wrapping an arm around you, holding you tight. "Of course, it’s me. Who else would bug you at this hour?"

Dick feels his shirt grow warm. You mumble an apology.

You look up to face Dick with half your face still buried in his shirt. You've clearly been crying based on how red and puffy your eyes are. Dick's stomach churns at the dark circles under your eyes. He feels guilt stab him in the gut. All of that combined with your generally disheveled appearance. Dick can just tell that you haven't slept well the last few days.

"Let's go inside and talk." You say, peeling yourself off of him.

Dick shakes his head, not loosening his grip on your midsection. "Let's walk around you look like you need some sun."

You flushed and put a hand to your cheek. "Do I look that bad?" You ask absently, a shy smile creeping into your features.

Dick smiles at you and pushes your hair out of your face. "Never but the weather is sunny for once and we both need some air."

"So you really didn't know that the island was filled with selkies?" Dick asks, adjusting the infernal scarf you had forced him into. He insisted that he didn't need it. He could just cuddle up to you for warmth but you were equally stubborn about him wearing a coat and the wool monstrosity strangling him.

Your face scrunches up in confusion." I- I don't even know what that is."

Dick stops.

You slow down upon realizing he wasn't by your side anymore. "You... don't know what a selkie is?" He asks, his face the definition of dumbstruck.

You shrink into your coat." My dad wasn't interested in things like that," you shrug, "I dunno much about..." Your hand twists in a circle, reaching for the right words.

Dick tilts his head. That made sense. "You thought we were all just seals?"

You nod slowly, looking like you wanna shrivel up.

Dick starts laughing and you look like you're a second away from throwing yourself into the water.

"I'm sorry," he says, flailing. He's screwing this up again. He breathes to collect himself. "I just thought it's funny that we all thought my dad was wrong about you guys not knowing."

You rub the back of your neck. "Most of us mainlanders don't really believe in magic, yanno? It's just such a foreign concept. Kind of hard to wrap my head around it."

"I get that." The smile on his face makes your gut twist. You fiddle with your hands.

"So what are selkies?"

Dick tilts his head, not exactly sure of how to word it because how do you explain something that's been obvious to you since you can remember to someone who just found out about it a few weeks ago?

"We're fae, I guess-" Your face twists in confusion.

Dick needs to backtrack. "We're fae..." This is hard. "We have this human form and we have our seal forms. We switch between them using our pelt."

Your brow knits in confusion. "Which one is your true form then?"

Dick wraps his arm around your waist and holds you closer as you walk along the cliff tops. He hums as he thinks. "Both?"

You look up at him with a weary smile. “That makes sense in a way.” You hum. Swallowing thickly, you fiddle with your hands. "So what was with the... um..." You clear your throat. "What was with the wife thing?"

Dick’s mouth dries. “Well... when we want to ask someone to be our mate... we- we kind of give them our pelt and I thought it translated to human clothes…” He stammers out dumbly.

“Oh...oh!” Your eyes widen into a look of horror. You open and close your mouth trying to form words. “Dick, I didn’t realize , that must have - I’m sorry I hurt you.”

“Please don’t apologize,” Dick says and presses his lips to the top of your head. His lips are warm and comforting. “I’ve spent so long in love with you my brain just didn’t...” Dick’s mouth twists. “It just didn’t do what it was supposed to.”

You would definitely laugh at that last part but you’re still seeing stars from the startling confession he just hit you with. You snuggle tighter into his embrace as you look over the sea. You don’t know how to respond. You really don’t and it frustrates you. It was all just a lot to take in all at once like you’d been tossed into the sea and you’re flailing and grasping at water.

But if nothing else, you’re at least glad that Dick is still talking to you.

“If you don't mind…” Dick says carefully, the look in his eyes determined. “Would it be alright if I try and pursue you properly?” Dick braces for a no. He’s not dumb enough to be hopeful twice but he needs to ask.

Inevitably, you freeze. You pull his arm closer to your chest. Swallowing, you ask: “you mean like a human courtship?”

He nods closing his eyes. “Yes, I want to court you.” He coughs clearing his throat.

You’re silent for what felt like the longest 30 seconds of Dick’s life. Dick cracks one eye to see you fiddling with your hair. “Uh Dick, there’s this one problem that might make that difficult…” Dick raises a brow. It wasn’t an outright rejection but it wasn’t an answer.

“I don't know how that works either.” You laugh nervously, burying your face in his arm.

“Good - then we don’t know if I’m doing it badly.” Dick beams with a blinding smile.

You twist to look at him, the corners of your mouth twitching. “That sounds like cheating.”

Dick snorts, “would you rather I court you the selkie way?”

“I mean it depends. What's the selkie way?”

“Fish.”

Dick startles when you let out a loud bark of laughter. “Fish? You’ve already done that so many times.” You giggle. Dick tries to wrangle his mind away from the fact that he can feel your lips through the thin fabric of the sweater.

“I thought it worked.” Dick sighs. He really did, but alas, miscommunication is a cruel mistress.

You lower your gaze trying to concentrate on the fraying needlework of his sweater. “Maybe it has.” You mumble low enough for a human not to hear. How unfortunate it is then that you’re dealing with a selkie.

Dick is beaming when you look up again. He nuzzles his face against yours. Dick is once again insanely, stupidly, incredibly happy.

__________________________________________________________________________

Because neither of you knew what you were doing, Dick's attempts to court you ranged from ridiculous (a literal mountain of fish that you ended up drying, giving away to the other seals, and selling to passing ships.) to ridiculously sweet (finding you handful of pearls). Dick nudged a little shell overflowing with pearls and looked up at you with liquid eyes. He could have gotten you pebbles and it would have been endearing.

It wasn't always gifts though.

Sometimes Dick would just sit quietly with you on the beach, snuggling against your leg as you scratched his stomach. You love the ways his squish vibrated as he purred.

When summer passed and it became unbearable to watch the stars outside, Dick sometimes spent nights in your lighthouse, wrapped up in your sheets or wrapped around you. It was nice having him around the house even if he was kind of a slob. You love him but he is a mess.

You made the mistake of introducing him to tea cakes and got him addicted to November Cakes specifically. As it turns out, your cute pest has a sweet tooth and will nuzzle you into submission just for another bite.

If you ever doubted that Dick was evil before, you now have proof.

During the winter, Dick insisted on staying in the lighthouse to keep you warm. You wanted to point out that you had a fireplace for a reason but it was so hard to turn down hugs from him.

And because you hadn't had the heart to clean out your father's room yet and Dick clearly preferred it, you let Dick sleep next to you on your cot. You felt a bit bad but Dick was just so happy with the arrangement that you didn't want to make him go away. Besides, it was nice to wake up to his sleeping face in the morning, all sleep rumpled and drooling.

__________________________________________________________________________

"Hey Jay, do you have a book on selkies?" Dick asks, caterpillaring on the rock Jason is sunbathing on.

Jason takes the opportunity to roll down the rock and knock Dick into the sea before saying: "No." It shall be put on record that there are no drama queens in the Wayne family.

Dick shakes off the seawater, big puppy eyes staring at Jason.

Jason glares at him. He can't even let Jason have a second of smugness. "Ask Selina."

No one really knows where Selina came from or why she stayed (well, they had their suspicions), but if you need something you can't find easily, your best bet was to ask her and hope she doesn't ask you to do anything ridiculously hard.

Dick hasn't had first hand experience but from what Bruce tells him, they're mostly silly things like recite poems or do a flip. He could do both those things. Well, depending on the poem. He gets tongue twisted sometimes. Hmmm, maybe he should ask if he can avoid tongue twisters so he won't bite his tongue.

Sloughing off his coat, Dick walks towards the glowing cauldron.

"Still no clothes pup? You're going to give a poor girl a heart attack." Selina tsked, reappearing from one of the other cave entrances with a handful of things Dick can't recognize.

"Oh... I- I'm still not used to it." He says sheepishly.

Selina chuckles, dumping the handful of what Dick can assume is plant debris into the cauldron while before dusting her hands off.

Dick stares at the thick vat. A bubble rises and bursts emitting what sounded like a human voice. "What is that? Should I be worried?"

"Oh no, no, this? This is just a little soup for colds."

"It screamed."

"All soups scream."

"I- anyway, I came here to ask if you have a book on selkies."

Selina tilts her head to the side. "I believe I do-"

"Great!"

"Buuuut..."

Of course, the price.

"I brought pearls and some seashells." He says hopefully.

The angle of her head does not change. Though from the gleam in her eyes, she's clearly interested.

"Tell me why you need the book."

Dick's thoughts halt. Should he tell Selina about you? His eyes dart to the boiling cauldron. "... Why do you need to know?"

Selina flourishes her hand. The book appears out of thin air."Do you want the book or not, pup?"

Dick's nerves pinch. Why does everyone call him that? "I need it to teach someone Selkie customs." He manages.

"Oh! The little lighthouse keeper!"

"You know her?"

Selina shrugs. "Do you really think I wouldn't know something going on about the islands nearby?" She pinches his cheek. "Oh little pup, I know about your little crush. You spend more time on land than you do in the sea these days. Dami's been all huffy about it."

He has.

"I've told you my reason." Dick says holding his hand out.

"Hnnnn, you have I suppose." Selina sighs.

Dick takes the book, putting it into a waterproof pouch before gingerly putting his pelt back on. He happily caterpillars out of the cave with the pouch in his mouth. He really hopes you'll like this.

You really should just fix up another cot for Dick at this point and maybe buy him a set of clothes when you go to town.

"It's too cold to sleep outside." Dick whines, flattening himself against you on the bed.

You lift your book to look at him. Dick just gives you that wide-eyed look when he wants something. You roll your eyes, letting him snuggle up to you. "Dick, it is obviously summer and you're like 40% blubber." You snort.

Dick pouts. "You're still gonna let me sleep here."

You scrunch your face up and sigh. "I can't exactly let you brace the summer cold, can I?" You say, running a hand through his hair.

"Eeeeeexactly." Dick says happily as snuggles into you tightly. He nuzzles his face into your neck wrapping his arms around your waist. You hum helplessly, curling into his embrace.

"See." Dick trills with a happy grin.

"Are you going to be smug about it all night?" You huff, throwing a blanket over the two of you.

"No," he says, "you assume I can't keep being smug 'til sunrise."

"Dork," you snicker, setting the book down. It was a book on selkie traditions that Dick had gotten you a few days ago. You devoured it the same night but you're reading it again and subtly testing things while Dick was invading your house. You hum, running your hand through his hair, fingernails lightly scraping against his scalp. Dick purrs against your chest. "There was a one eyed seal on the beach the other day. He was a grumpy fellow but kind of cute. Seals really are a sleepy lot. The big lug started snoozing on my lap after like 5 minutes."

Dick tense under your touch. He looks up at you seriously.

"That was a selkie." Dick deadpans.

You stop your rambling. "What?!"

"That grumpy one-eyed seal was a selkie." He repeats carefully.

Your breath stutters. "Are all of the seals on this island selkies? ALL OF THEM?" Dick is pretty sure your eyes are mounting an escape.

"All of them, darling." Dick nods.

"Oh." You are so screwed. "Do you guys all talk to each other?!" You shouldn't have told that seal about your little crush. You want the mattress to swallow you up.

"Yes? Should I be concerned?" Dick asks, lifting his head.

"No! No reason!" You squeal, shaking your head.

Dick pouts at you with suspicion. It occurs to you with some amusement that Dick is actually glaring. You wisely decide to sidestep the conversation.

"You guys love taking naps on people, huh?" You say, absently twining your fingers into Dick's hair. He settles his head against your chest. "That's just cus we like you." He hums.

A snort rips out of you. "You're just biased."

Dick looks up at you seriously again. "We selkies like pretty things like any fae." Dick says, wrapping his arms around you more tightly. He's being petty but Dick has always been protective of you and he isn't about to stop now. Besides... he doesn't want anyone stealing you away.

You frown at him. "Dick, there are far prettier things on this island and sweet talking won’t magically make November cakes appear." You huff, kissing the top of his head before picking up the book and using it to hide the smile shaping your lips.

You feel Dick pick himself up off of you. You peek over your book to watch Dick. He scoots closer to your face until the only thing separating you is the far too thin book in your hands.

"You don't believe me, do you?"

"No." You say. You don't mean it but it's the easiest thing to conjure up when Dick is this close. Your lips prickle from imagining Dick's lips against yours.

You weren't paying attention. Dick has apparently been going on a two-minute diatribe on how pretty you are and in that two minutes, Dick has managed to scoot even closer. He gently takes the book out of your hands to make sure you're paying attention. He fails to take into account the fact that his face is in fact distracting. Your eyes zero in on his very plush and very kissable lips. If you just lean forward a fraction, you could...

Your lips feel warm and soft against Dick's, the rest of his diatribe dying in the back of his throat as his eyes flutter shut. His mind might just be melting out of his ears because the only thing he can think about is how soft you are and how perfectly your lips fit against his.

"I'm sorry." You whisper shyly. You should be sorry, Dick thinks. Who told you to pull away?

You touch your fingers to your lips. Fuck, what did you just do?

"You can do it again." Please, he almost adds.

You lick your lips. Dick perks up and leans closer. His heart is going to leap out of his chest. You lean closer. Dick can feel his heart pounding against his rib cage.

You kiss Dick on the nose and pull away, hiding your lips behind your hand as you snicker. Dick scrunches his nose and blows air out of it.

"You know perfectly well what I meant." He huffs.

You lean back into your pillow, grinning at him. "I have absolutely no clue what you're on about." You say slowly, smug.

"Let me remind you then,"A grin takes over his face. Dick leans in, pressing his lips against yours. You exchange breaths as you drink in the feeling of each other's lips. Dick caresses your sides. He feels you shiver and he smiles into your lips. "That ring any bells?"

"Not really..." You say, flickering your eyes to him. "But if you try again... it might."

"Oh sweetheart, I can keep reminding you all night." Dick chuckles, winking.

Covering your face, you attempt to hide your embarrassment. You hate how easily he flusters you. "You can't just say stuff like that." You whimper.

"Why not? I'm supposed to be courting you and that includes buttering you up," Dick says, nuzzling your cheek. You're just too cute. Dick gently pries your hands away from your face. "Don't hide your face from me, Honey."

"Oh god, you're making me regret letting you court me."

"Never."

______________________________________________________________________

Dick's eyes are struggling to remain open as he watches the fire. He burrows further into the thick comforter you'd given him. It's not quite as warm as his pelt but the fabric is puffy and it has a sweet smell that makes his head swim.

Dick angles his head slightly to watch you. You've been toiling for hours and refuse to tell Dick what it is. Your back is still hunched over with your foot bouncing on the floor. Dick lets his eyes flutter shut, listening to the sound of your shuffling tools.

You glance down at the adorable mess dozing off on your sofa. You gently move his hair out of his face. He swats at you sleepily, face scrunched even as he sleeps. You sincerely wish you had Damian's talent for art or that you had one of those cameras. You really wish you could keep a picture of Dick's sleepy face. It's the cutest thing in the world.

"Hey Dickie," you whisper.

"Hmmmmm?" He groans.

"Could you hand me your pelt?"

"Sure," he moans, blindly padding around for it. You snort as he nearly falls off the sofa. After groping nearly every surface, he finally finds the pelt. "here you-"

The fur brushes your fingertips before Dick stops. Dick shoots up, nearly clipping your nose with his forehead. He's looking at you fully awake, drool still hanging off the corner of his lips."Are you sure?!"

"Hand it over coward." You smile gently at him. You try your best to fight off the excitement bubbling in your veins.

Dick is off the couch, his own excitement barely contained as his whole body vibrates with happiness. He sits up. You hold out your hand but instead of handing you his pelt, Dick drapes it over you like a wedding veil. It's thick and warm to the touch. You let your hands brush over the silken fur. You can feel magic thrumming from it. It feels like a minute current of electricity but it doesn't flow linearly. It ebbs and flows as it pleases, pulsing beneath your fingers. You burrow yourself in it.

Something warm spills in Dick's chest as he sees you wrapped up in his pelt. Dick kisses your nose. "You have now been wifed."

You twitch your nose. "You missed."

"Nope. Don't think so. Buuuuut if you show me where you want me to kiss you..."

You roll your eyes and surge forward, pressing your lips to his. Dick smiles into it, pulling you close and savoring the sensation of your lips melding together. He makes a happy trilling noise while you laugh against his lips.

"That clear enough, Dickie?" You ask, pressing your forehead against his.

"Yeah, I think I got it, wifey."

__________________________________________________________

THANKS FOR READING

Tag list: @batarella, @anothertimdrakestan, @lucy-roo, @multifandomgirl-us, @idkmanicantenglish , @birdy-bat-writes, @boosyboo9206, @americasmarauders , @l-inkage, @arestorationofbalance , @cloudie-skay, @wunderstell @hyp-oh-critical @glorified-red @ marshmallow12435 @vvipgot7be @jadedhillon

#dick grayson x reader #dick grayson imagine #dick grayson x you #dick grayson #dorks #seals #selkie x reader #selkie au

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blackswaneuroparedux · 3 years ago

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Anonymous asked: I enjoyed reading your posts about Napoleon’s death and it’s quite timely given its the 200th anniversary of his death this year in May. I was wondering, because you know a lot about military history (your served right? That’s cool to fly combat helicopters) and you live in France but aren’t French, what your take was on Napoleon and how do the French view him? Do they hail him as a hero or do they like others see him like a Hitler or a Stalin? Do you see him as a hero or a villain of history?

5 May 1821 was a memorable date because Napoleon, one of the most iconic figures in world history, died while in bitter exile on a remote island in the South Atlantic Ocean. Napoleon Bonaparte, as you know rose from obscure soldier to a kind of new Caesar, and yet he remains a uniquely controversial figure to this day especially in France. You raise interesting questions about Napoleon and his legacy. If I may reframe your questions in another way. Should we think of him as a flawed but essentially heroic visionary who changed Europe for the better? Or was he simply a military dictator, whose cult of personality and lust for power set a template for the likes of Hitler?

However one chooses to answer this question can we just - to get this out of the way - simply and definitively say that Napoleon was not Hitler. Not even close. No offence intended to you but this is just dumb ahistorical thinking and it’s a lazy lie. This comparison was made by some in the horrid aftermath of the Second World War but only held little currency for only a short time thereafter. Obviously that view didn’t exist before Hitler in the 19th Century and these days I don’t know any serious historian who takes that comparison seriously.

I confess I don’t have a definitive answer if he was a hero or a villain one way or the other because Napoleon has really left a very complicated legacy. It really depends on where you’re coming from.

As a staunch Brit I do take pride in Britain’s victorious war against Napoleonic France - and in a good natured way rubbing it in the noses of French friends at every opportunity I get because it’s in our cultural DNA and it’s bloody good fun (why else would we make Waterloo train station the London terminus of the Eurostar international rail service from its opening in 1994? Or why hang a huge gilded portrait of the Duke of Wellington as the first thing that greets any visitor to the residence of the British ambassador at the British Embassy?). On a personal level I take special pride in knowing my family ancestors did their bit on the battlefield to fight against Napoleon during those tumultuous times. However, as an ex-combat veteran who studied Napoleonic warfare with fan girl enthusiasm, I have huge respect for Napoleon as a brilliant military commander. And to makes things more weird, as a Francophile resident of who loves living and working in France (and my partner is French) I have a grudging but growing regard for Napoleon’s political and cultural legacy, especially when I consider the current dross of political mediocrity on both the political left and the right. So for me it’s a complicated issue how I feel about Napoleon, the man, the soldier, and the political leader.

If it’s not so straightforward for me to answer the for/against Napoleon question then it It’s especially true for the French, who even after 200 years, still have fiercely divided opinions about Napoleon and his legacy - but intriguingly, not always in clear cut ways.

I only have to think about my French neighbours in my apartment building to see how divisive Napoleon the man and his legacy is. Over the past year or so of the Covid lockdown we’ve all gotten to know each other better and we help each other. Over the Covid year we’ve gathered in the inner courtyard for a buffet and just lifted each other spirits up.

One of my neighbours, a crusty old ex-general in the army who has an enviable collection of military history books that I steal, liberate, borrow, often discuss military figures in history like Napoleon over our regular games of chess and a glass of wine. He is from very old aristocracy of the ancien regime and whose family suffered at the hands of ‘madame guillotine’ during the French Revolution. They lost everything. He has mixed emotions about Napoleon himself as an old fashioned monarchist. As a military man he naturally admires the man and the military genius but he despises the secularisation that the French Revolution ushered in as well as the rise of the haute bourgeois as middle managers and bureaucrats by the displacement of the aristocracy.

Another retired widowed neighbour I am close to, and with whom I cook with often and discuss art, is an active arts patron and ex-art gallery owner from a very wealthy family that came from the new Napoleonic aristocracy - ie the aristocracy of the Napoleonic era that Napoleon put in place - but she is dismissive of such titles and baubles. She’s a staunch Republican but is happy to concede she is grateful for Napoleon in bringing order out of chaos. She recognises her own ambivalence when she says she dislikes him for reintroducing slavery in the French colonies but also praises him for firmly supporting Paris’s famed Comédie-Française of which she was a past patron.

Another French neighbour, a senior civil servant in the Elysée, is quite dismissive of Napoleon as a war monger but is grudgingly grateful for civil institutions and schools that Napoleon established and which remain in place today.

My other neighbours - whether they be French families or foreign expats like myself - have similarly divisive and complicated attitudes towards Napoleon.

In 2010 an opinion poll in France asked who was the most important man in French history. Napoleon came second, behind General Charles de Gaulle, who led France from exile during the German occupation in World War II and served as a postwar president.

The split in French opinion is closely mirrored in political circles. The divide is generally down political party lines. On the left, there's the 'black legend' of Bonaparte as an ogre. On the right, there is the 'golden legend' of a strong leader who created durable institutions.

Jacques-Olivier Boudon, a history professor at Paris-Sorbonne University and president of the Napoléon Institute, once explained at a talk I attended that French public opinion has always remained deeply divided over Napoleon, with, on the one hand, those who admire the great man, the conqueror, the military leader and, on the other, those who see him as a bloodthirsty tyrant, the gravedigger of the revolution. Politicians in France, Boudon observed, rarely refer to Napoleon for fear of being accused of authoritarian temptations, or not being good Republicans.

On the left-wing of French politics, former prime minister Lionel Jospin penned a controversial best selling book entitled “the Napoleonic Evil” in which he accused the emperor of “perverting the ideas of the Revolution” and imposing “a form of extreme domination”, “despotism” and “a police state” on the French people. He wrote Napoleon was "an obvious failure" - bad for France and the rest of Europe. When he was booted out into final exile, France was isolated, beaten, occupied, dominated, hated and smaller than before. What's more, Napoleon smothered the forces of emancipation awakened by the French and American revolutions and enabled the survival and restoration of monarchies. Some of the legacies with which Napoleon is credited, including the Civil Code, the comprehensive legal system replacing a hodgepodge of feudal laws, were proposed during the revolution, Jospin argued, though he acknowledges that Napoleon actually delivered them, but up to a point, "He guaranteed some principles of the revolution and, at the same time, changed its course, finished it and betrayed it," For instance, Napoleon reintroduced slavery in French colonies, revived a system that allowed the rich to dodge conscription in the military and did nothing to advance gender equality.

At the other end of the spectrum have been former right-wing prime minister Dominique de Villepin, an aristocrat who was once fancied as a future President, a passionate collector of Napoleonic memorabilia, and author of several works on the subject. As a Napoleonic enthusiast he tells a different story. Napoleon was a saviour of France. If there had been no Napoleon, the Republic would not have survived. Advocates like de Villepin point to Napoleon’s undoubted achievements: the Civil Code, the Council of State, the Bank of France, the National Audit office, a centralised and coherent administrative system, lycées, universities, centres of advanced learning known as école normale, chambers of commerce, the metric system, and an honours system based on merit (which France has to this day). He restored the Catholic faith as the state faith but allowed for the freedom of religion for other faiths including Protestantism and Judaism. These were ambitions unachieved during the chaos of the revolution. As it is, these Napoleonic institutions continue to function and underpin French society. Indeed, many were copied in countries conquered by Napoleon, such as Italy, Germany and Poland, and laid the foundations for the modern state.

Back in 2014, French politicians and institutions in particular were nervous in marking the 200th anniversary of Napoleon's exile. My neighbours and other French friends remember that the commemorations centred around the Chateau de Fontainebleau, the traditional home of the kings of France and was the scene where Napoleon said farewell to the Old Guard in the "White Horse Courtyard" (la cour du Cheval Blanc) at the Palace of Fontainebleau. (The courtyard has since been renamed the "Courtyard of Goodbyes".) By all accounts the occasion was very moving. The 1814 Treaty of Fontainebleau stripped Napoleon of his powers (but not his title as Emperor of the French) and sent him into exile on Elba. The cost of the Fontainebleau "farewell" and scores of related events over those three weekends was shouldered not by the central government in Paris but by the local château, a historic monument and UNESCO World Heritage site, and the town of Fontainebleau.

While the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution that toppled the monarchy and delivered thousands to death by guillotine was officially celebrated in 1989, Napoleonic anniversaries are neither officially marked nor celebrated. For example, over a decade ago, the president and prime minister - at the time, Jacques Chirac and Dominque de Villepin - boycotted a ceremony marking the 200th anniversary of the battle of Austerlitz, Napoleon's greatest military victory. Both men were known admirers of Napoleon and yet political calculation and optics (as media spin doctors say) stopped them from fully honouring Napoleon’s crowning military glory.

Optics is everything. The division of opinion in France is perhaps best reflected in the fact that, in a city not shy of naming squares and streets after historical figures, there is not a single “Boulevard Napoleon” or “Place Napoleon” in Paris. On the streets of Paris, there are just two statues of Napoleon. One stands beneath the clock tower at Les Invalides (a military hospital), the other atop a column in the Place Vendôme. Napoleon's red marble tomb, in a crypt under the Invalides dome, is magnificent, perhaps because his remains were interred there during France's Second Empire, when his nephew, Napoleon III, was on the throne.

There are no squares, nor places, nor boulevards named for Napoleon but as far as I know there is one narrow street, the rue Bonaparte, running from the Luxembourg Gardens to the River Seine in the old Latin Quarter. And, that, too, is thanks to Napoleon III. For many, and I include myself, it’s a poor return by the city to the man who commissioned some of its most famous monuments, including the Arc de Triomphe and the Pont des Arts over the River Seine.

It's almost as if Napoleon Bonaparte is not part of the national story.

How Napoleon fits into that national story is something historians, French and non-French, have been grappling with ever since Napoleon died. The plain fact is Napoleon divides historians, what precisely he represents is deeply ambiguous and his political character is the subject of heated controversy. It’s hard for historians to sift through archival documents to make informed judgements and still struggle to separate the man from the myth.

One proof of this myth is in his immortality. After Hitler’s death, there was mostly an embarrassed silence; after Stalin’s, little but denunciation. But when Napoleon died on St Helena in 1821, much of Europe and the Americas could not help thinking of itself as a post-Napoleonic generation. His presence haunts the pages of Stendhal and Alfred de Vigny. In a striking and prescient phrase, Chateaubriand prophesied the “despotism of his memory”, a despotism of the fantastical that in many ways made Romanticism possible and that continues to this day.

The raw material for the future Napoleon myth was provided by one of his St Helena confidants, the Comte de las Cases, whose account of conversations with the great man came out shortly after his death and ran in repeated editions throughout the century. De las Cases somehow metamorphosed the erstwhile dictator into a herald of liberty, the emperor into a slayer of dynasties rather than the founder of his own. To the “great man” school of history Napoleon was grist to their mill, and his meteoric rise redefined the meaning of heroism in the modern world.

The Marxists, for all their dislike of great men, grappled endlessly with the meaning of the 18th Brumaire; indeed one of France’s most eminent Marxist historians, George Lefebvre, wrote what arguably remains the finest of all biographies of him.

It was on this already vast Napoleon literature, a rich terrain for the scholar of ideas, that the great Dutch historian Pieter Geyl was lecturing in 1940 when he was arrested and sent to Buchenwald. There he composed what became one of the classics of historiography, a seminal book entitled Napoleon: For and Against, which charted how generations of intellectuals had happily served up one Napoleon after another. Like those poor souls who crowded the lunatic asylums of mid-19th century France convinced that they were Napoleon, generations of historians and novelists simply could not get him out of their head.

The debate runs on today no less intensely than in the past. Post-Second World War Marxists would argue that he was not, in fact, revolutionary at all. Eric Hobsbawm, a notable British Marxist historian, argued that ‘Most-perhaps all- of his ideas were anticipated by the Revolution’ and that Napoleon’s sole legacy was to twist the ideals of the French Revolution, and make them ‘more conservative, hierarchical and authoritarian’.

This contrasts deeply with the view William Doyle holds of Napoleon. Doyle described Bonaparte as ‘the Revolution incarnate’ and saw Bonaparte’s humbling of Europe’s other powers, the ‘Ancien Regimes’, as a necessary precondition for the birth of the modern world. Whatever one thinks of Napoleon’s character, his sharp intellect is difficult to deny. Even Paul Schroeder, one of Napoleon’s most scathing critics, who condemned his conduct of foreign policy as a ‘criminal enterprise’ never denied Napoleon’s intellect. Schroder concluded that Bonaparte ‘had an extraordinary capacity for planning, decision making, memory, work, mastery of detail and leadership’. The question of whether Napoleon used his genius for the betterment or the detriment of the world, is the heart of the debate which surrounds him.

France's foremost Napoleonic scholar, Jean Tulard, put forward the thesis that Bonaparte was the architect of modern France. "And I would say also pâtissier [a cake and pastry maker] because of the administrative millefeuille that we inherited." Oddly enough, in North America the multilayered mille-feuille cake is called ‘a napoleon.’ Tulard’s works are essential reading of how French historians have come to tackle the question of Napoleon’s legacy. He takes the view that if Napoleon had not crushed a Royalist rebellion and seized power in 1799, the French monarchy and feudalism would have returned, Tulard has written. "Like Cincinnatus in ancient Rome, Napoleon wanted a dictatorship of public salvation. He gets all the power, and, when the project is finished, he returns to his plough." In the event, the old order was never restored in France. When Louis XVIII became emperor in 1814, he served as a constitutional monarch.

In England, until recently the views on Napoleon have traditionally less charitable and more cynical. Professor Christopher Clark, the notable Cambridge University European historian, has written. "Napoleon was not a French patriot - he was first a Corsican and later an imperial figure, a journey in which he bypassed any deep affiliation with the French nation," Clark believed Napoleon’s relationship with the French Revolution is deeply ambivalent.

Did he stabilise the revolutionary state or shut it down mercilessly? Clark believes Napoleon seems to have done both. Napoleon rejected democracy, he suffocated the representative dimension of politics, and he created a culture of courtly display. A month before crowning himself emperor, Napoleon sought approval for establishing an empire from the French in a plebiscite; 3,572,329 voted in favour, 2,567 against. If that landslide resembles an election in North Korea, well, this was no secret ballot. Each ‘yes’ or ‘no’ was recorded, along with the name and address of the voter. Evidently, an overwhelming majority knew which side their baguette was buttered on.

His extravagant coronation in Notre Dame in December 1804 cost 8.5 million francs (€6.5 million or $8.5 million in today's money). He made his brothers, sisters and stepchildren kings, queens, princes and princesses and created a Napoleonic aristocracy numbering 3,500. By any measure, it was a bizarre progression for someone often described as ‘a child of the Revolution.’ By crowning himself emperor, the genuine European kings who surrounded him were not convinced. Always a warrior first, he tried to represent himself as a Caesar, and he wears a Roman toga on the bas-reliefs in his tomb. His coronation crown, a laurel wreath made of gold, sent the same message. His icon, the eagle, was also borrowed from Rome. But Caesar's legitimacy depended on military victories. Ultimately, Napoleon suffered too many defeats.

These days Napoleon the man and his times remain very much in fashion and we are living through something of a new golden age of Napoleonic literature. Those historians who over the past decade or so have had fun denouncing him as the first totalitarian dictator seem to have it all wrong: no angel, to be sure, he ended up doing far more at far less cost than any modern despot. In his widely praised 2014 biography, Napoleon the Great, Andrew Roberts writes: “The ideas that underpin our modern world - meritocracy, equality before the law, property rights, religious toleration, modern secular education, sound finances, and so on - were championed, consolidated, codified and geographically extended by Napoleon. To them he added a rational and efficient local administration, an end to rural banditry, the encouragement of science and the arts, the abolition of feudalism and the greatest codification of laws since the fall of the Roman empire.”

Roberts partly bases his historical judgement on newly released historical documents about Napoleon that were only available in the past decade and has proved to be a boon for all Napoleonic scholars. Newly released 33,000 letters Napoleon wrote that still survive are now used extensively to illustrate the astonishing capacity that Napoleon had for compartmentalising his mind - he laid down the rules for a girls’ boarding school on the eve of the battle of Borodino, for example, and the regulations for Paris’s Comédie-Française while camped in the Kremlin. They also show Napoleon’s extraordinary capacity for micromanaging his empire: he would write to the prefect of Genoa telling him not to allow his mistress into his box at the theatre, and to a corporal of the 13th Line regiment warning him not to drink so much.

For me to have my own perspective on Napoleon is tough. The problem is that nothing with Napoleon is simple, and almost every aspect of his personality is a maddening paradox. He was a military genius who led disastrous campaigns. He was a liberal progressive who reinstated slavery in the French colonies. And take the French Revolution, which came just before Napoleon’s rise to power, his relationship with the French Revolution is deeply ambivalent. Did he stabilise it or shut it down? I agree with those British and French historians who now believe Napoleon seems to have done both.

On the one hand, Napoleon did bring order to a nation that had been drenched in blood in the years after the Revolution. The French people had endured the crackdown known as the 'Reign of Terror', which saw so many marched to the guillotine, as well as political instability, corruption, riots and general violence. Napoleon’s iron will managed to calm the chaos. But he also rubbished some of the core principles of the Revolution. A nation which had boldly brought down the monarchy had to watch as Napoleon crowned himself Emperor, with more power and pageantry than Louis XVI ever had. He also installed his relatives as royals across Europe, creating a new aristocracy. In the words of French politician and author Lionel Jospin, 'He guaranteed some principles of the Revolution and at the same time, changed its course, finished it and betrayed it.'

He also had a feared henchman in the form of Joseph Fouché, who ran a secret police network which instilled dread in the population. Napoleon’s spies were everywhere, stifling political opposition. Dozens of newspapers were suppressed or shut down. Books had to be submitted for approval to the Commission of Revision, which sounds like something straight out of George Orwell. Some would argue Hitler and Stalin followed this playbook perfectly. But here come the contradictions. Napoleon also championed education for all, founding a network of schools. He championed the rights of the Jews. In the territories conquered by Napoleon, laws which kept Jews cooped up in ghettos were abolished. 'I will never accept any proposals that will obligate the Jewish people to leave France,' he once said, 'because to me the Jews are the same as any other citizen in our country.'

He also, crucially, developed the Napoleonic Code, a set of laws which replaced the messy, outdated feudal laws that had been used before. The Napoleonic Code clearly laid out civil laws and due processes, establishing a society based on merit and hard work, rather than privilege. It was rolled out far beyond France, and indisputably helped to modernise Europe. While it certainly had its flaws – women were ignored by its reforms, and were essentially regarded as the property of men – the Napoleonic Code is often brandished as the key evidence for Napoleon’s progressive credentials. In the words of historian Andrew Roberts, author of Napoleon the Great, 'the ideas that underpin our modern world… were championed by Napoleon'.

What about Napoleon’s battlefield exploits? If anything earns comparisons with Hitler, it’s Bonaparte’s apparent appetite for conquest. His forces tore down republics across Europe, and plundered works of art, much like the Nazis would later do. A rampant imperialist, Napoleon gleefully grabbed some of the greatest masterpieces of the Renaissance, and allegedly boasted, 'the whole of Rome is in Paris.'

Napoleon has long enjoyed a stellar reputation as a field commander – his capacities as a military strategist, his ability to read a battle, the painstaking detail with which he made sure that he cold muster a larger force than his adversary or took maximum advantage of the lie of the land – these are stuff of the military legend that has built up around him. It is not without its critics, of course, especially among those who have worked intensively on the later imperial campaigns, in the Peninsula, in Russia, or in the final days of the Empire at Waterloo.

Doubts about his judgment, and allegations of rashness, have been raised in the context of some of his victories, too, most notably, perhaps, at Marengo. But overall his reputation remains largely intact, and his military campaigns have been taught in the curricula of military academies from Saint-Cyr to Sandhurst, alongside such great tacticians as Alexander the Great and Hannibal.

Historians may query his own immodest opinion that his presence on the battlefield was worth an extra forty thousand men to his cause, but it is clear that when he was not present (as he was not for most of the campaign in Spain) the French were wont to struggle. Napoleon understood the value of speed and surprise, but also of structures and loyalties. He reformed the army by introducing the corps system, and he understood military aspirations, rewarding his men with medals and honours; all of which helped ensure that he commanded exceptional levels of personal loyalty from his troops.

Yet, I do find it hard to side with the more staunch defenders of Napoleon who say his reputation as a war monger is to some extent due to British propaganda at the time. They will point out that the Napoleonic Wars, far from being Napoleon’s fault, were just a continuation of previous conflicts that arose thanks to the French Revolution. Napoleon, according to this analysis, inherited a messy situation, and his only real crime was to be very good at defeating enemies on the battlefield. I think that is really pushing things too far. I mean deciding to invade Spain and then Russia were his decisions to invade and conquer.

He was, by any measure, a genius of war. Even his nemesis the Duke of Wellington, when asked who the greatest general of his time was, replied: 'In this age, in past ages, in any age, Napoleon.'

I will qualify all this and agree that Napoleon’s Russian campaign has been rightly held up as a fatal folly which killed so many of his men, but this blunder – epic as it was – should not be compared to Hitler’s wars of evil aggression. Most historians will agree that comparing the two men is horribly flattering to Hitler - a man fuelled by visceral, genocidal hate - and demeaning to Napoleon, who was a product of Enlightenment thinking and left a legacy that in many ways improved Europe.

Napoleon was, of course, no libertarian, and no pluralist. He would tolerate no opposition to his rule, and though it was politicians and civilians who imposed his reforms, the army was never far behind. But comparisons with twentieth-century dictators are well wide of the mark. While he insisted on obedience from those he administered, his ideology was based not on division or hatred, but on administrative efficiency and submission to the law. And the state he believed in remained stubbornly secular.

In Catholic southern Europe, of course, that was not an approach with which it was easy to acquiesce; and disorder, insurgency and partisan attacks can all be counted among the results. But these were principles on which the Emperor would not and could not give ground. If he had beliefs they were not religious or spiritual beliefs, but the secular creed of a man who never forgot that he owed both his military career and his meteoric political rise to the French Revolution, and who never quite abandoned, amidst the monarchical symbolism and the court pomp of the Empire, the republican dreams of his youth. When he claimed, somewhat ambiguously, after the coup of 18 Brumaire that `the Revolution was over’, he almost certainly meant that the principles of 1789 had at last been consummated, and that the continuous cycle of violence of the 1790s could therefore come to an end.

When the Empire was declared in 1804, the wording, again, might seem curious, the French being informed that the `Republic would henceforth be ruled by an Emperor’. Napoleon might be a dictator, but a part at least of him remained a son of the Enlightenment.

The arguments over Napoleon’s status will continue - and that in itself is a testament to the power of one of the most complex figures ever to straddle the world’s stage.

Will the fascination with Napoleon continue for another 200 years?

In France, at least, enthusiasm looks set to diminish. Napoleon and his exploits are scarcely mentioned in French schools anymore. Stéphane Guégan, curator of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, which, among other First Empire artworks, houses a plaster model of Napoleon dressed as a Roman emperor astride a horse, has described France's fascination with him as ‘a national illness.’ He believes that the people who met him were fascinated by his charm. And today, even the most hostile to Napoleon also face this charm. So there is a difficulty to apprehend the duality of this character. As he wrote, “He was born from the revolution, he extended and finished it, and after 1804 he turns into a despot, a dictator.”

In France, Guégan aptly observes, there is a kind of nostalgia, not for dictatorship but for strong leaders. "Our age is suffering a lack of imagination and political utopia,"

Here I think Guégan is onto something. Napoleon’s stock has always risen or fallen according to the vicissitudes of world events and fortunes of France itself.

In the past, history was the study of great men and women. Today the focus of teaching is on trends, issues and movements. France in 1800 is no longer about Louis XVI and Napoleon Bonaparte. It's about the industrial revolution. Man does not make history. History makes men. Or does it? The study of history makes a mug out of those with such simple ideological driven conceits.

For two hundred years on, the French still cannot agree on whether Napoleon was a hero or a villain as he has swung like a pendulum according to the gravitational pull of historical events and forces.

The question I keep asking of myself and also to French friends with whom I discuss such things is what kind of Napoleon does our generation need?

Thanks for your question.

#question #ask #napoleon #french #french history #history #military history #bonaparte #france #historiography #republic #historians #personal

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imagine-knowing-a-name · 3 years ago

Text

Mysterious Girl (Part 6 - 2012)

Summary: A mysterious figure saves your life...twice, and becomes an integral part of it.

Pairing: Natasha Romanoff x Reader

A/N: I really have nothing to say about this one, other than I have no idea how to write crushes. But enjoy :)

Warnings: Talks of past torture and murder

Word Count: 2194

Series Masterlist

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Natalia’s group regathered outside the tower, beginning to say their goodbyes. “So what are you doing now?” she whispered to you.

You shrugged, “I have a plane to return to Ireland. Plus a house there.”

“I thought I could detect an accent”

“I lean into it more when I’m there” you offered, removing the Russian completely from your voice.

“Is that so... can I come with you?”

Your eyes widened at the question, you’d been preparing to ask her that, now the roles were reversed. “Yeah- I- of course”

“Great. My apartment here got destroyed so otherwise I’d have to bunk with Clint until Stark rebuilds this as an Avengers tower”

Your heart fell, you were just the temporary accommodation. Then she’d be back and gone from you again. She seemed to notice, biting her lip slightly, but she didn’t say anything. The two of you said goodbye to her team, then you drove off towards where you’d left the jet.

“You didn’t land in JFK?”

“It was shut, something to do with flying aliens restricting airspace”

“Oh yeah” she sighed, and you fell back into silence. It lasted a couple of minutes before she spoke up again, “I spent eighty years looking for you...”

“That’s a long time. I’m sorry” you replied. But even you noticed the bitterness in your tone, you hadn’t meant to but it slipped through regardless.

“You don’t need to apologise, it’s just- I don’t want to lose you again” she confessed with a sigh, and you risked a glance over at her. She was looking down at her lap and you nudged her, smiling when she looked up.

“I’d rather not lose you either”

“You up for a change in scenery” she asked you honestly and you nodded.

“About time, I don’t know how much longer I can look identical to ‘24′ year old me”

She giggled, “how long has it been?”

“A bit over 6 years”

“You’re a good looking 30 year old”

“Why thank you”

“So, anyway, I talked to Tony- and obviously this is only if you’re up for it- but if you do want I was thinking- maybe, you could move into the tower with me?”

You glanced at her again, smirk on your face when you saw her fidgeting with her hands. “How did that sound even more nervous than the first time you asked?” you teased.

She rolled her eyes at your smug face, “is that a yes?”

“It’s a yes” you confirmed, then continued, “is it because I’m older now?”

She relaxed back into her seat, turning her head to watch you drive, “I mean, what were you going to do last time? say no? You were 16 and your options were to stay or freeze to death.”

“I might have”

“You wouldn’t”

“I wouldn’t” you agreed.

Arriving at the airstrip, you handed the car back and boarded the jet, glad to see it had been refuelled when you were gone. “So you know how to fly a jet” the redhead began once you were both settled in the cockpit.

“It’s been an eventful 200 years”

“You’re telling me” she scoffed, “so what else have you been up to?”

It took a while for you to reply, too focused on working to get the plane into the air to start with. “I’ve been here and there” you finally said, “the vampire who turned me, he spent maybe 15 or so years continuing the experiments on me, testing what would effect vampires”

“Just you, or...”

“There were a whole bunch of us. He wanted us to survive, but he didn’t care, not really, a lot didn’t make it. He wanted to find out more ways to kill us.” You exhaled, glad to finally get that off of your chest. So many people had told you it felt better to talk about your trauma, but who were you supposed to tell? Connor from the butchers? ‘oh hey man, you’re skilled with a knife, just like the guy who chopped at me a couple of hundred years ago to see if I’d die’.

Natalia though, you could tell Natalia. She knew about you, and you used to tell her everything back when you used to live with each other. She rested her head on your shoulder, the small act comforting you more than words.

“Someone else killed him” you continued, “but they only became the new leader, didn’t free us. The experiments stopped at least, she had us working for the Russian government instead, apparently she was some agent before she was turned. Red Room or something. They trained assassins.”

Natalia stiffened next to you, and sat up straight again. You stayed quiet, expecting an elaboration from her. When she didn’t, you spoke, “you know it” you prompted. It wasn’t a question.

“I didn’t- I- well. I didn’t do well with losing you. I made some bad choices.” She shot you a sad smile, apologetic in a way. “When I gave up on you. When I thought you must be dead. I let them capture me. I was back in Russia, I- I went on a rampage, killed a lot of people.” She sighed, gritting her teeth before going on, “a group of women surrounded me, holding guns. I have enough practise to avoid getting shot now-” you let out a quiet laugh and a smile ghosted her features. “-I could have escaped them but I just... didn’t. I’d given up so I let them take me. They were from the Red Room. Trained me to be a Black Widow.”

She didn’t have to say what came next, nor did you have to explain the next years of your life. You’d both given up. Innocent people had died because of that.

“How long for?” you asked softly

“112 years. I only just got out.”

“We overlapped” you calculated.

“When did you get out?”

“1905. That first revolution. Blew down the wall of my cell and I just... ran as far as I could.”

“I wish I held out for you”

“You shouldn’t. You weren’t going to find me. I prefer that you lived some sort of life.”

“I literally only got out 10 years ago” she smirked, but there was no humour behind it.

“Natalia-”

“Barton found me. Shot me before I could see him. We had a nice heart to heart and he broke me out of the Red Room’s brainwashing. Took me to America to work for SHIELD instead.”

There was a beat of silence as you worked out what to say. “I’d hug you right now, but I’m kind of flying a plane”

She laughed, and you smiled over at her, “When we land then. I’ll hold you to it”

“I wouldn’t dream of letting you down”, another pause, “thank you... for looking for me and going through... all of that”

“You’re the best friend I’ve ever had” she shrugged, as if that made up for it.

“It’s weird, how short 10 years seems now”

“That’s because you’re old” she teased with a grin,

“I am only in my early 200s thank you very much. Unlike some people here”

She shook her head laughing, before sobering, “those 10 years felt longer than the next 190 years, more important.”

“That’s because we were changing still while the world stayed still. Now we’re the same yet the world has changed so much.” The jet was quiet after your point, then Nat broke into poorly supressed laughter.

“Did you get that from a fortune cookie? Because it sure sounds like it”

“Hey” you pouted, “I was trying to be honest”

“Speak for yourself. I’d been a vampire for 150 years at that point. I was not ‘changing’“

You sighed but didn’t hide the smile tugging at your lips. You’d missed her. “Fine. Well I was biologically changing. You were emotionally changing”

“Emotionally changing? Now what the hell is that?”

“Changing emotionally” you deadpanned, earning an unamused stare from Natalia.

“I saved people before I met you and I saved them after I met you too”

“But you didn’t bake them cakes for their birthdays, did you Tsarevna?”

She rolled her eyes, “maybe I did, and you didn’t notice”

You gasped, playing along with her game, as if she hadn’t just confessed to spending 80 years looking for you and then becoming slightly- read very- villainous when she couldn’t find you. Not that you blamed her at all, if you had known she was alive and you hadn’t been locked up you definitely would have done the same.

Michael was quick to inspect his plane when you landed. “I suppose I can’t fault you. There’s not one scratch”

“Told you” you answered, “I’m a good pilot”

He shook his head lightly, “what did you even need it so urgently for?”

“Had to meet a friend”, you indicated over your shoulder to where Nat was standing. She waved.

“You flew 13 hours both ways to pick up a friend?”

“She’s a good friend”

“Must be. Did she fly some of it? You can’t have been there long enough to rest between flights”

Oh yeah. You’d forgotten about normal things, like exhaustion. “Uh yeah, we switched it a bit on the way back. I got my rest, don’t worry” you lied.

“My main worry now is that you let a stranger fly my plane!” he exclaimed again with fake annoyance. His plane was fine.

Nat spoke up from behind you, “the American government let me fly for them. I’m a good pilot”. When you turned around she had two thumbs up and a cheesy grin on her face.

“Hmmph, Americans” Michael grumbled, “well at least it’s not the English”

Now it was your turn for mock offense, “you know I’d never give your plane to the English, come on Michael”

“I should hope not. Now off you two go. I need to inspect my plane properly”. You said goodbye and thanked him again. Then you led Nat through the familiar streets back to your house.

“Nice place” she commented

“It’s no castle” you shrugged, “but real estate isn’t what it used to be”. You probably could afford a castle, 200 years of working and investing making you richer than your average mortal. But you wanted to blend in, not draw attention to yourself so it wasn’t clear that you hadn’t aged at all. So you settled for a two bedroom house, a little bit on the small side, but it was no issue. You had many houses in multiple countries, and you switched between then, so everything you owned was equally distributed too.

“Do you still own the castle?” you asked, and she nodded.

“Inherited it from myself about 10 years ago” she said proudly, “very nice place”

“So which ancestor was Natalia Romanov?”

She hesitated, “great, great, grandmother? See, two generations of my family always seem to die at the same time, it’s tough to know” she smirked, running with the joke. In fairness, it was an easier way to deal with the whole inheritance thing, pretend you had a lot of children. It was a lot easier back in 1800s Russia, when the government didn’t bother checking, at least not in the small town you lived in.

You showed Natalia to your guest room, which was even more sparsely decorated than your other rooms, and left her to be. Telling her to call for you if you needed anything.

You were sat in the living room watching TV when you heard her padding in. “Y/N”

You hummed in response, looking up, only to see her clad in nothing but a towel. It covered the main part of her body, but you still looked away, feeling like you’d intruded. “You’ve seen me worse, don’t get modest now” she teased and you chastised yourself mentally. I mean sure you didn’t realise you had a crush on her back then, but she was right.

“What’s up Nat?”

“Yeah, I just had a shower, right? And it’s just occurred to me that I didn’t bring any clothes.”

“Oh”, your mouth opened and you forced it shut into a tight smile. “You can just borrow mine and then we can go out shopping.” You checked your watch, “there’s still time today”

“Thanks Y/N/N”

“Anytime Tsarevna”. She followed you up to your room, watching intently as you sorted through your drawers and wardrobe, now was exactly the time to wonder why you’d never sorted the clothes. There were still some outfits here that you’d last worn in the 1940s; you doubted they’d be back in style anytime soon.

And so you settled on the basic clothing; “here you go, trousers, t-shirt, hoodie” you announced as you thrust them at her.

She raised an eyebrow, “trousers?”

“Don’t get all American, this is Ireland. Trousers, брюки if you prefer.”

“I do prefer that, yes”

“I know I agreed to move in with you, but I’m not switching to American slang”

“As you wish” she poked, “but I do also need underwear”

You would definitely be blushing now. You dipped your head to avoid Nat’s smirk as you threw some over.

Next Chapter

#natasha romanoff #vampire!natasha romanoff #natasha romanoff x reader #natasha romanoff imagine #marvel #mcu #ikan mysterious girl

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disturbedbydesign · 3 years ago

Text

Lie To Me - Epilogue

Pairing: dark!Professor!Bucky x reader

Epilogue Word Count: 800

Summary: After getting a spot in Professor Barnes’s coveted writing workshop, you start to form a close relationship with your handsome new teacher. But Bucky Barnes is not who he appears to be, and once he has you where he wants you, he’s not going to let you go.

Warnings (for complete work): noncon/rape, dubcon, sexual assault, daddy kink (not ddlg), voyeurism (hidden camera), blackmail, manipulation, age gap (reader is 21, Bucky is late 30s), student/teacher dynamic, physical violence, reader has history of physical and sexual abuse by a family member, mentions of domestic violence, mentions of campus rape, body image issues (reader has scars), ableism, smut/explicit sex (oral, vaginal, anal), unprotected sex (wrap it up, kids!), choking, biting, breeding

A/N: Written for the @writing-in-the-dark-bingo challenge (bingo card at end of chapter). This one got away from me but there’s just something about creepy manipulative Professor Bucky that really does it for me. I apologize in advance for how messy this gets. Also, please heed warnings. This is a dark!fic and you are responsible for your own media consumption. 18+ only, no minors.

If you prefer to read on AO3, you can do so here.

Epilogue

Three Years Later

You’re walking through Washington Square Park when your phone rings; it’s Sharon, and you almost don’t pick up, but you know what it’s about.

“Hey,” you say. “So he’s out, then?”

“Yup. They released him last night. How are you doing?”

“I’m good,” you reply. “Just fucking pissed.”

“He’s a rich white guy with connections. There was no way he was going to actually do all the time he got.”

“I know, but two-and-a-half years for all of that? What a joke.”

“Look,” she says, “it could have been way worse for you. You know that. And he can’t come within 200 feet of any of us or else he’s going right back in.”

You sigh because she’s right, even though it doesn’t feel like it.

“Listen, I gotta run,” she says. “Call me if you want to have dinner next week. And I still want you to consider the internship over the summer. I know you wanted to travel with Zara after graduation, but Nat really thinks it would be good for you and I have to agree with her.”

“Fine,” you say. “I’ll think about it.”

“That’s all I ask. Talk soon.”

Sharon hangs up and you make your way to class. After all this time, you’re finally in your last semester of college. Natasha had helped you transfer to NYU when you were finally ready to go back; she’d helped you with a lot of things you didn’t even know you needed help with. She’d confessed to you that she’d known some of the things Bucky was doing to his students over the years—not the full extent of it, but enough that she should have done something knowing how dangerous he could be.

You’re not bitter about it; she had suffered with him, too. Half the stuff he’d told you about their relationship—all the stuff about her using him and his family for money and connections—was complete bullshit, designed to elicit sympathy from you. Sometimes you feel like her charity case, but you really like her. She’s become a mentor and a friend.

Sharon you have a tougher time with. You go between blaming her and feeling kin with her. She suffered, too, you have to remind yourself, and she was the one who got rid of the evidence that could have put you in jail. You’d never known that her literary skills were matched only by her technical skills, but you’re grateful for it. Sometimes you hate her, but you always come around.

You have a date tonight—your second date with a guy you met at the coffee shop near your apartment. He’s very cute and very nice and very funny, but you’re not ready for a serious relationship. He doesn’t know about your past, but he does know that you want to take things very very slow, and he’s cool with that.

“I just like being around you,” he’d said. “No pressure.”

You head to your apartment to shower and change after class, and as you’re putting your makeup on you get a text from Zara.

Miami is awesome. Met a cute guy at the club last night. Probably gonna sleep with him. I’ll send you pics from the wedding xoxo

Zara is away for the weekend for her cousin’s wedding in Florida. She’d invited you to be her plus one but you’d thought it was a bit much. You could spend a weekend in your apartment alone. You were doing ok now, most of the time at least.

Your dinner date goes surprisingly well, and you think that maybe there could be something there—in the future, when you’re ready to open your heart up and feel feelings again. He walks you home but he doesn’t try to kiss you goodnight. Part of you wants him to, though, because you’re starting to feel like it’s time to let yourself live again. You haven’t had sex in three years. You’ve wanted to a couple of times, but you stopped yourself.

You’re still afraid, but your therapist (and Zara, and Sharon, and Nat) all say that you’ll know when the time is right. You say goodnight to the cute boy on your doorstep and walk upstairs, thinking that maybe that time is coming soon.

When you open the door to your apartment, the cold air from the open window hits you. You know you didn’t leave the window open. You never leave the windows open. You look over to the coffee table and see a dozen red roses in a vase. You turn on your heels and start to run but a cold metal hand clamps down over your mouth. Your nose is filled with him and his breath is hot against your ear.

“Hey, babygirl. Daddy’s home.”

#bucky barnes fanfiction #bucky barnes x reader #bucky barnes smut #bucky barnes x you #bucky barnes au #bucky barnes #sebastian stan #professor!bucky #professor barnes au #dark!bucky barnes #dark!bucky x reader #dark!bucky x you #dark!fic #lie to me

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anystalker707 · 3 years ago

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Bubblegum Bitch (part 1)

Pairing: Pastel! Frank x Punk! Reader [lowkey Gerard x reader] Word count: ~ 3 200 Genre: Enemies to lovers / Funny / Song inspired / Almost shameless self insert, mwah Summary: Frank has everyone's heart, but not (y/n)'s and he's too proud and shy to change that.

> Part 2

A sweet smell always follows him, lingering behind for a few seconds, something maybe like cotton candy. It suits him perfectly, not only because of his pastel looks and also not because of his personality—he’s bold, more like peppermint bubblegum—, but something unclear hovers there.

Once he disappears around the corner to the other hallway, my eyes meet Gerard’s almost automatically. The dumbass has been watching me for the whole time.

“Man, why don’t you talk to him?” Gerard finally lets the grin he’s been holding back tug on his lips and leans back against the wall, arms crossed over his chest. “Don’t you have a few lectures with him? Like, he’s always in the library when I go there, so maybe I could–”

“Gerard– Gerard, hold on!” I roll my eyes at how he twists his mouth with an exaggerated bitterness. “Like if he’d pay attention to me.” I make a vague motion to myself and, c’mon, I’m no big deal. “There are more chances he’s gonna play me than anything else, you know… Fuck, not to reference the shitty rumors, but you see how he goes around, like? Never saw anyone actually date Frank or get past his teasing.��

“Well, if you pay attention to it, he only uses the people,” Gerard breathes, shaking his head to himself. “But I mean, look at him...” He shrugs a little.

“Last girl who fell under his spell was carrying his books last week and hell knows where she is now,” I sigh. Maybe only admiring him from the distance is enough, I’m absolutely not up to hearing people gossipping around the corners about how ‘Frank even caught the college’s punk’ or whatever.

“Either you try your chances,” Gerard says, “or forget about him.”

“I’m mad because you’re not even wrong this time.” I mock him, twisting my mouth like he did earlier, and punch his shoulder lightly—both of us laugh. “See you later, dumbass.”

“Love you too!” He pulls me for a brief hug and presses a kiss to my cheek before we can follow our ways, ankling down opposite directions.

Either I try or forget. Not wrong, but still a harsh choice. People often say Frank’s dumb, which’s not quite truth; it’s the exact opposite. All he does is to chew people up and spit them out after they try something with him, never letting things progress, and nonetheless, he never lost his reputation. People are always falling for him and the weirdest thing is how things haven’t been like this forever. He got here two years ago, so did I, but my oldest memory of him is from a year ago. Not saying I wouldn’t do the same if I were under the same conditions as he is, though.

Perhaps I’m right, perhaps I’m wrong and Frank has no depth at all, being only a vain person interested in his own self profit and all that caught my attention on him is how his aesthetic is the exact opposite to mine. Whatever, I got assignments to work on.

Leaving the building and moving to the next one alone with my thoughts has me almost regretting not asking Gerard to skip that lecture and spend time in the library with me. Despite having the same major, Gerard and I don’t share all of the professors, which sucks a lot. Sometimes I just want his presence around to keep me from overthinking or to have someone help me with the assignments. He’s read most of the books I need or at least has a great critical sense I often rely on.

The library isn’t crowded. A few people sit by the wide table down the side and a couple others take place on the computers whilst most of the small tables are free.

I need a moment of standing there to get used to the darker ambient then finally take my phone out of my pocket, running my eyes over the title of the book we’re supposed to get. There better still be a copy left because I don’t want to bother Gerard with help on assignments regarding books again nor pay a kidney for an online copy that’ll only be available for a couple weeks.

“Where can I find this book?” I ask the librarian quietly after approaching her desk, showing her my phone.

Mrs. Flowers raises her eyebrows, pushing the glasses up the bridge of her nose before nodding. Her dark red strands fall messily over her dark skin as she leans down to grab a pen and a piece of ripped paper, scribbling a few numbers over it. “Here, dear.”

“Thanks.” I smile briefly and take the paper in hand, walking away, phone back in my bag.

Two years in this place mean I explored most of the wide art section, but it rarely took me to the second floor of the library, never being directly related to my studies. Seeing the indications to the shelves upstairs makes me stop in my tracks and glance back at the librarian as if she would read my thoughts. On the other hand, Mrs. Flowers has never been wrong, so I don’t think she is, not to mention how I’m not in a place to judge since I barely know what we’re supposed to do.

The second story of the library is quieter, as predicted, judging by the time. Mostly, it’s frequented by the Information and Psychology people whilst the lower one counts on Humanities and Art subjects. Arts and Information schedules don’t tend to match a lot, after all, for some reason.

Numbers in gold by the sides of the shelves guide me down the place until seeing the numbers seventy-one and seventy-two with arrows pointing to their respective directions makes me stop and yet again question Mrs. Flowers infallibility when I read Neuroscience written right under them, but again, the book’s to do with art and the brain, so..

And there stands Frank, trying to reach for whatever book on the last roll of the shelf, standing on his tip-toes, making the front of the pastel purple Chuck Taylors bend not so nicely.

“Fuck,” he mutters under his breathe, muffled by a lollipop—it wouldn’t be Frank if it weren’t there because he’s always around with one of them, stuffing his right cheek. Not even a strand of his dark brown hair falling over his eyes makes him take a pause on reaching the book, so I allow myself to observe him in such a hopeless state for a moment. He’s wearing one of his many soft pink sweaters and pastel green shorts, nails matching his shoes. The pastel pattern is only broken by his golden rings and chain necklace.

A small smile tugs on the corner of my lips for the few seconds I try to find out what Frank is looking for before I’m surprised by catching on, there on the last row, the familiar title. Choosing to wear my platforms was maybe one of my best choices.

Frank jumps startled and sets himself back down on his heels, looking at me like he saw a ghost, and for some reason, he follows me with his gaze as I inspect the book that’s now in my hands, but whatever, he’s a weird guy, anyway. I’m starting to walk away when I hear him protesting.

“The hell? I was trying to get that book!” He glares, hands on his hips, and nods after I glance at the book with a raised eyebrow.

“Apologies, but I got it first.” I shrug and walk away despite his complaining.

The fact we’re in a library goes absolutely ignored by Frank as he calls for me and only stops when catching up with me and I wish going down these stairs in platforms was easier.

“Hear me out, this is the last book!” Frank groans, messily adjusting his bag over his shoulder. “I bet you can fix some help with a friend of yours about that book so you can do whatever you want or maybe get it online, but I can’t, okay? I need it for my essay!” He rushes down the stairs and stops in front of me before I’m able to go down the last step. “Pretty please?” His bottom lip sticks out in a pout and he looks at me from under his lashes, batting them.

To be honest, Frank looks pretty cute. Cuteness is taking us nowhere, nevertheless. “Nope.”

“C’mon! (Y/n), right?” He pops the lollipop off his mouth and grins at me.

“Not gonna happen.” I don’t even bother to fake him a smile before I walk past him and move to Mrs. Flowers’ desk once again. I didn’t fall under Frank’s spell during this whole time, so it’s not gonna happen now, not to mention when he only tried to talk to me to get the book he wanted.

I may end up thinking about the situation for longer than I intended to because I’m surprised by Gerard commenting about how annoyed I seem whilst the two of us sit at the cafeteria for lunch.

“I’m not annoyed.” I shrug, sipping on my juice.

“Oh, of course not.” He rolls his eyes.

“Let’s do something today,” I sigh, “let’s… dunno, maybe we could watch TCM again or just listen to Rise and Fall and talk.” Trying to act normal by now is useless, even with motherfucking Gerard knowing me way too well—what can be either a blessing or a curse, sometimes both—, so maybe I can avert his attention. Not to mention he does deserve to watch TCM for the millionth time.

“TCM? Really?” He slowly nods to himself. “Okay, but don’t forget to tell me if there’s something wrong.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I breathe, taking another bite of my food.

Only now I’m aware of the pastel mess sitting on a table as I look past Gerard’s shoulder and I can tell, by the way Gerard looks at me, my bitterness is clearly visible. I mean, Frank only talked to me because he wanted the book, nothing more, didn’t even make some effort to seem nicer or whatever. Why does it even bother me so much, anyways? Fuck off.

The thoughts only leave my mind when Gerard and I are lying down together on my bed in our dorm, talking nonsense as Texas Chainsaw Massacre plays in the background and this calmness takes over me.

I wake up in the morning to a loud sound. “Fuck you, Gerard,” I groan before even opening my eyes because what would it be if not Gerard dropping some random thing? Probably him bumping hip-first into the dresser or the edge of his bed, but nothing else.

“Sorry, sunshine,” he chuckles. “Also, there’s something for you.”

“What do you mean?” I raise an eyebrow and lift my head off the pillow, looking at him.

“Uh, I guess someone slipped it under the door.” He points to the bedside table. An envelope. I sit up to take it in hand; my name is written across it in black ink. “It was on the ground near the door when I woke up. Weird.”

“Truly.” I yawn, opening it.

Good morning, baby. I hope you have a good day. –Miss Sugar Pink

“What?” Gerard raises an eyebrow at me, almost laughing at my probably miserable state, but he isn’t in a nice position either, struggling to pull his tight jeans up.

“When’s that free period of yours, again? In which you run into Frank.”

Of course the day goes by with Gerard trying to figure out what happened, but I don’t really tell anything, both because there isn’t much to tell and I’m sure not letting my fucking disappointment show won’t be an easy task. Why am I even disappointed, in first place? This shit isn’t happening to me.

Gerard is practically vibrating as he follows me into the library, eyeing me with curious eyes and needing to suppress a smile sometimes. I love him, but damn.

Frank jumps on his place on the chair when I suddenly slam the note down on the table, not caring much if Mrs. Flowers is going to complain or some other random students glare at me. Frank looks up at me, green-ish eyes wide with fake innocence.

“You’re not buying me with sweet notes written in glitter gel pens and sprayed with your perfume.” I twist my mouth—I’m sure Gerard is looking at us wide eyed, even if he’s behind me.

“Buy you?” Frank pouts. “What would I buy you for?” The question dismisses an answer and I glare at the fucker instead, which actually makes him giggle and I sigh sharply, about to start walking away when he takes a hold of my wrist. “No, no, hold on, I’m sorry!” And he glances at Gerard, who’s also fucking laughing, but falls silent after I glare.

“Fuck off,” I tell Frank.

“No, look,” he eases, slowly letting go of me, “both of us know I can’t trick you, you’re smart.” He purses his lips, staring at me for a moment. “But, y’know, I really need that book.”

“What book?” Gerard raises an eyebrow, suddenly closer, setting his chin on my shoulder.

Frank sighs softly and rolls his eyes. “Reductionism in Art and Brain Science.”

“I need it.”

“Well, but I found it first?” Frank looks at me with wide eyes, but with a sparkle that’s far from innocence anymore, eyebrows furrowed together, not angry or frustrated, but still both. “Fuck you for your platforms, but that book was supposed to be with me right now!”

Inhaling, I’m about to reply to him when we’re suddenly interrupted. “Guys? I’ll need you to leave.” Mrs. Flowers stands there, something between stern and concerned.

After being forced by Frank to wait for him to pack up all of his things, we leave the library and follow to the outside as Gerard suggests. By the way he’s been following us and taking part in the conversation like he also needs the book suggests it won’t take long until he’s talking about the whole thing on the group chat to update Ray and Mikey about the whole thing.

“Now,” Frank crosses his arms, standing in front of Gerard and I—both of us sit down on the few stair steps down the back door of the library. He’s wearing a soft purple hoodie today and baby blue pants, same Chuck Taylors and only rings. “The book.”

Gerard and I start laughing at the same moment, sharing a look, only making Frank turn deep red. “S-Sorry,” I chuckle, almost choking on my own spit. Another burst of laughter escapes my lips and I raise a hand to ask for a moment, recomposing myself. Who does he think he is? “But sorry, buddy, that’s not how it works.”

“You don’t understand,” Frank exhales, looking away and his eyes are... glassy? His leg bounces lightly as he plays with his rings. “I really need the book and can’t find another copy here. I can’t fail this semester.”

I shake my head to myself, not able to voice my thoughts due to Gerard speaking up. “But what do you need it for? Dunno, maybe you two can share the book if you don’t need the same parts or need it at different times.”

Again, I love Gerard, but goddamn it.

“Gerard...” No. Okay. Not worth complaining, nevermind. I shake my head at their questioning gazes. “But are you good at returning it?” I raise an eyebrow at Frank. “Like, you better be punctual or else I’m getting that damn book to myself, okay? It’s easy seeing you wandering around the halls, followed by these idiots, when you shouldn’t.”

Frank gasps, placing a hand over his chest, but the posture ends up dropping with a giggle. “Alright, alright, hun, I’ll do my best.”

“Don’t hun me.” I throw my head back against the wall, narrowing my eyes lightly at Frank. He’s about to say something when I speak up instead. “How do people fall for you even if you can barely act, Miss Sugar Pink? You break into giggles every time I point out something. And I know people aren’t always stupid. You’ve been faced with your little… manipulation before.” I observe the hesitance taking over him, which Gerard also seems to catch on.

“I…” Frank furrows his eyebrows and shrugs. “You wouldn’t get it.”

Gerard suggests that we exchange numbers before leaving and I wonder if Gerard has any interest in Frank—the thought of it makes me uncomfortable, for some stupid reason I don’t know. For a moment, I let it show, probably staring at Gerard too much because he looks at me questioningly before I’m shaking my head and continuing to type down Frank’s number, soon saving it and then making sure he’s got my number right.

“You’re quiet,” Gerard says after Frank leaves, taking the book with him. “It won’t be that bad, (y/n).” He places a hand on my shoulder.

I shake my head, humming quietly. “It’s not that.” But what’s it? Angry at having to make a deal with Frank? Annoyed at the thought of Gerard possibly having interest in Frank? Hell, I hate myself.

Gerard inhales, but nothing comes and he leans against me, giving me a brief hug.

“Also,” Gerard finally speaks up, “what’s up with the Miss Sugar Pink thing?”

“Frank signed the… letter, note thing like this.” I chuckle.

Later, I am leaving the last morning lecture when Frank tells me to meet him in the cafeteria and I stand in the hall for a solid minute, cogitating if it’s a good idea, but I don’t have much of a choice when my body is pleading for food and I really want that book back.

Finding Frank in the cafeteria is easy and half of me wished he was alone instead of with that girl by his side, practically giving him all of her lunch.

“You already did what you needed with the book?” I raise an eyebrow, not even waiting for the two to finish talking when I approach the table, ignoring the annoyed gaze from the girl.

“Not really, but I got what I needed for now.” Frank hands the book back to me, carefully. “But I’ll need it for real tomorrow, if that’s okay.” He looks at me from under his lashes and even if I’m doing nothing, the girl looks like she would murder me right now and here if it wasn’t for keeping her good posture for Frank. Wow, inspiring.

“Then return it tomorrow?” I raise an eyebrow, not taking the book. “Man, do everything you–”

“Sorry, but I’m going to be really…” He trails off, looking away for a moment while shoving the book in my hands. “Busy today.” A shy, maybe uncomfortable smile tugs on his lips and the girl is giggling. Now I get it. Gross.

I roll my eyes, not bothering to hide how I feel about it as I take the book. “I hate you.”

A desperate gasp comes from the girl. What’s the bitch’s name, anyways? Whatever, she ends up complaining, saying I shouldn’t say something like this, but both Frank and I end up ignoring her. Frank chuckles at me instead, “love you too, hun.”

_____________

> Part 2

_____________

Tagging list: @lubbockshusband | @trans-ylvania

#frank iero x reader #frank iero #x reader #x male reader #x female reader #x gender neutral reader #x non binary reader #x trans reader #mcr x reader #mcr oneshot #oneshot #mcr imagine #imagine #my chemical romance #fan fic #fan fiction

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voiceswithoutlips · 4 years ago

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Calico - Chapter Two

— pairing: Hybrid ot7 x Human Reader (Female) — genre: hybrid AU , fluff, angst, slow burn (like real slow), eventual smut — word count: 2K — Rating: M — warnings: trauma, mention of past abuse.

Click for Tag List

— chapter summary:

Y/N runs a animal shelter, Calico was built on a simple principle, to help those who were in need. What will Y/N do when her sanctuary is threatened by an unexpected hybrid?

— A/N: This is going to be a series, I’m just getting back to writing, so I’d really appreciate your input and feedback <3

Ch. 1 Ch. 3 Ch. 3.5 Ch. 4 Ch. 5 Ch. 6

I stumbled out of bed with a groan, it was almost noon and my hangover was killing me. Last night I was too stressed so I drowned my worries in a bottle of whisky. Why was adulting so annoying, ugh. The house was quiet, Jason had probably already gone to the shelter. I made my way to the kitchen, my zombie brain screaming for coffee. I like my coffee black and bitter, just like my soul. Kidding, I don’t have a soul.

My phone rang somewhere in the living room. The place looked like a tornado had torn through it. The floor was covered with papers and cushions and clothes and other unidentifiable mess. What the fuck happened last night? By the time I found my phone the ringing had stopped. 28 missed calls from Jason and 2% battery ...great.

I made my way to the exam room, the most likely place for Jason to be. It was just a five minute walk from the house. I was in my pajamas, my hair sticking out and the coffee cup in my hand. It was Sunday, I was grumpy.

There was a half-naked man sitting on the exam table, no not a man, a hybrid. His white fluffy tail was droopy. Long white ears poked from his long black hair, he desperately needed a haircut. His ears were limp on his back. There was a hole in his left ear, it was properly done but too big for a piercing. My eyes widened with realization, I’d seen that before on cattle, his previous owners must’ve tagged him.

The hybrid showed no reaction as I went to stand beside Jason, and directly in front of him. His upper body was muscular, he had a thick neck and washboard abs. He was gorgeous. He had a strong jawline, cute eyes and a small nose. The combination of cute and sexy was deadly. His hands were clasped together and he was hunched over, trying to make himself look small, not an easy feat to achieve.

“Y/N, this is Jungkook,” Jason introduced the hybrid. The bunny stiffened, he didn’t raise his head to look at me. What do I do? I wasn’t good with people, I preferred animals to humans.

“Hello, I’m Y/N,” I greeted. He was sitting so still that you would think he wasn’t even there. Was he even breathing? He was still looking down.

I looked at Jason, I didn’t know what to do. “I found him near the hatch this morning so I brought him in for a checkup.” I nodded.

“Are you hungry? I’m practically starving!” I asked, extending a tentative hand towards the bunny, palm up. He flinched. I kept my hand where it was. I would stand here for hours if I had to. My stubbornness knew no bounds. Minutes passed slowly, Jason was leaning on the counter perfectly at ease, he was a good actor.

Slowly Jungkook took my hand. “Let’s go have breakfast,” I whispered, a smile on my face as I slowly led him to the kitchen. Well kitchen was an overstatement, it was a small room with six refrigerators and two freezers, most of them contained medical supplies. A sad, overused coffee machine and a small stove for “Emergency Ramen”, it was our own special recipe.

I opened the fridge with a “No Science Allowed” poster taped to its door. I pulled out a bunch of greens to make a salad, rabbits need their greens. We always stocked the fridge for humans and the animals. I wasn’t a particularly good cook, I could cook enough to not starve but that was the extent of my cooking skills. A quick chicken salad, eggs and toast and a bunch of pancakes and breakfast was served.

Jungkook was still standing near the door where I had left him, eyes downcast, ears flopped. I was an idiot, a massive idiot, I assumed he would sit at the table on his own. Bad Y/N!

“Jungkook, come sit with me,” I mentally hit myself, it sounded like a command, I was terrible at this. I was used to animals, you tell them what to do, you can’t ask a dog if he’d like to sit with you, but Jungkook was a person. I can be an animal therapist but humans? They were beyond me. I didn’t know how to get to him.

He sat at the table. I pushed the food in front of him, expecting him to eat, another mistake. Hybrids are supposed to obey, they don't do things on their own. I was supposed to tell him what to do. I wanted to pound my head on the table. Stupid Y/N.

“What would you like to eat?” I asked in the gentlest voice possible, at least I hoped it was gentle.

No response.

“Go on this is all for you,” I tried to be encouraging.

Nothing.

“Tell you what, if you finish your breakfast, I’ll give you a treat,” his ears twitched. He tentatively picked up a fork and started eating. His movements were small, he barely made any noise as he chewed but at least he was eating.

I was still confuzzled, it is a word, a made up word, but then again all words are made up words. Confused and puzzled. I had no idea how to approach him, do I treat him like a human or a rabbit. The ‘treat’ card worked but will it work every time? He was taking small bites, I wondered if the food tasted bad. Maybe I forgot to add sugar to the pancakes? Did I forget to season the salad? I sighed internally. He needed a proper meal but sadly, Jason and I were terrible cooks. We lived on take-outs and ramen. Maybe it was time to learn how to cook.

I stood up, he froze. I had to get him used to people. I ignored his stiff posture as I walked to one of the freezers and pulled out a container that held my favorite ice cream. It was ‘ice cream for breakfast’ kind of day. I didn’t bother with bowls, two spoons and I was back in my seat.

“You know this is my absolute favorite ice cream in the entire world. It's called Chocolate Brownie Fudge with Marshmallows. It's like a little piece of heaven in a plastic container,” I offered him a spoon. He looked at it as if it was going to bite him. “Go on, it's your treat!” I encouraged with a grin. It was meant to be a small smile but he was too cute and the ice cream made me happy.

I dug into the ice cream as if my life depended on it. Jungkook watched me curiously, the spoon still in his hand. He hadn’t finished his breakfast but it was a start. For me, it was Sunday, the day where I threw caution to the wind and ate what I wanted. He hesitantly took a spoonful of ice cream, watching me as if I was going to pull the container away from him and tell him it was a joke.

As soon as the spoon touched his tongue his eyes lit up like christmas. “Amazing isn’t it?” I asked, taking another bite. He nodded excitedly. Apparently he had a sweet tooth. I pushed the ice cream towards him and watched him devour the whole thing in minutes. God he was adorable!

I settled down on the couch in my office, I desperately needed a shower but that’d have to wait. Jason had taken Jungkook back to our house, he was going to stay in the guest room for the time being. It's not like I was going to put him in the hybrid shelter building, nobody deserved that and he couldn’t stay as a rabbit forever.

I had a file in front of me, a file on Jungkook. All hybrids are installed with a microchip and registered in the hybrid database as soon as they are born ...or rather created in the labs. Hybrids couldn’t procreate, they were made in labs owned by big corporations. Jason had scanned Jungkooks microchip, the file contained everything about his life.

He was created in Corebear Tech’s lab and sold at the age of six to a wealthy family as a pet for their son. He was sent back to the company when he was twelve because he had grown too big for a rabbit hybrid. Corebear Tech then sold him to Apexi Pharmaceuticals and I guess that’s where Yonu found him.

I felt …I didn’t know what I felt. Maybe a sense of defeat. Jungkook was twenty-three, he was in that lab for eleven years. He was just one year younger than me. I was lost. I couldn’t even imagine what he must’ve gone through. There was no way I was going to let Apexi take him back. I called Song Hwa and gave her the file. After all we had evidence to collect and a case to build.

“Not this again!!” I ran through the front door as soon as I smelled smoke in our kitchen. Jason was standing in front of the stove fanning a pot with a newspaper.

“I was cooking rice, I don’t know what happened,” he said opening the windows.

I took a peek, the rice was black, utterly totally burnt. “Jason …you’re supposed to add water to cook it…”

“Oh,” Jason loved to cook, the problem was he just couldn’t. I was 200% sure that he was cursed by some evil witch. The moment Jason tries to cook, all hell breaks loose.

“You’re on clean-up duty,” I grumbled. At least it wasn’t that bad, the cake incident was still fresh in my mind. Once upon a time, when we still lived in our dorm, Jason decided to bake a cake …in a pressure cooker. Needless to say, it was a disaster. The cooker blew up, damaging half the kitchen. Thankfully no one was injured.

I softly knocked on the guestroom door. Jungkook had spent the whole day in his room, not that I blamed him. New place, new people, it was bound to be scary.

“Hey Jungkook, you want to come out for dinner?” I asked. I could deliver him ramen to his room if he wanted but I hoped he’d come out and eat with us. Yes, we were having ramen, Jason and I still lived as we had lived in our dorm, the only difference was our house was nicer and we had a garden.

Jungkook opened the door, he hadn’t locked it. He scrunched his nose as soon as he stepped out. The house was full of burnt smell from Jason’s cooking adventure. The smell must be stronger for him.

“Yeah, Jason tried to cook rice. Pro tip, never eat the food that Jason makes, he’s a terrible cook. Do you want to come eat with us?” I asked. I got a small nod in return.

“Let’s gooooo!! Do you like ramen? We have a really good recipe, well its nothing special, we just throw in some bacon and rice cakes and of course a fuckton of cheese,” I rambled as he followed me to the dining table. “You can never go wrong with cheese, unless you’re Jason,” Jason made protesting noises, I rolled my eyes at him.

Dinner was a bit awkward. Jason and I kept trying to make Jungkook talk but it didn’t work. The poor bunny hadn’t spoken a single word since he’d arrived at Calico. The only thing we got out of him were small nods and silence. I wondered if we should consult a therapist. He was human after all and he needed help.

I heard a sharp gasp from my left. Jungkook’s eyes were huge, he was frozen in his chair. He had accidently knocked the salt shaker off the table.

“I’m so..sorry. Please don’t punish me. I’ll do anything,” his voice was so small, it made my heart ache.

“Oh honey no!” I said as I held his hands. “It was an accident. You remember what I told you? This is a safe space, you’ll never be punished here. I won’t let anyone hurt you, okay?” I was mentally cursing myself for holding his hands on impulse. What if he didn’t like people invading his personal space? My worries were put to rest as he squeezed my hands.

“Okay,” he said in the smallest voice.

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wickedsingularity · 4 years ago

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Can’t Sleep Without You [One-shot]

Fandom: Star Trek Pairings/characters: Jim Kirk x reader (but not really), Leonard McCoy, mention of Spock Words: 2359 Warnings: Use of medication, use of possible addictive medication, insomnia, nightmares, almost graphic description of a disturbing dream

Note: A somewhat self-indulgent story that I posted a little while ago, but had panic about after a few hours and then deleted. It felt too personal, too self-indulgent, amongst other things. I planned on giving it some time, and then rewrite it so it was less personal. I did give it time, but I haven't rewritten it, just edited. And now I'm giving it another go, hoping that I don't panic this time around and telling myself so fucking what if it's self-indulgent. And hopefully people enjoy it because I do like this story.

Summary: Having suffered from insomnia for a long time, Jim is the only thing that manages to calm me enough to function when it gets bad. But Jim is off on a mission...

"You look like something the cat dragged in, Commander."

"Thanks a lot, Doctor." I glared up at Leonard McCoy as he towered over me. Even if I couldn't stand the stuff, I was now on my third cup of coffee of the day. But I was also on my fourth day of barely any sleep, and I was desperate for something to keep me alert.

"Have you had trouble sleeping again?"

I downed the last of the coffee, cringing as the bitter liquid made its way down and sat the cup down on my empty lunch tray. I closed my eyes for a moment and grit my teeth, trying not to snap at the obvious question. "Looks that way."

The doctor sat down at the other side of the table and looked at me with worry, not even phased by my annoyance. "I've seen you getting worse the last few days, Commander. Why haven't you come to see me?"

"What you gave me three days ago made me wake up after four hours with a nightmare from hell. I'm still seeing ghosts in broad daylight."

He pursed his lips. "Please stop by the medbay at 2200 hours. We'll try something else."

I sighed, knowing that there was only one thing that would help, and it was not something our Chief Medical Officer could provide no matter how good he was. But I nodded. "Yes, doc." Then I pulled myself to my feet, grabbed the tray and went to put it back in the replicator for recycling.

For as long as I could remember, I'd had some form of insomnia. It hadn't been a problem when I was younger, I had been more energetic, more durable, not to mention more careless. But as I got older it got worse. Most of the time I managed to keep it under control, but sometimes it took on a life of its own. And when it did that, there was no medication, meditation or treatment that worked better than the captain of the ship, my boyfriend.

There was just something about Jim that calmed my mind like nothing else.

Funnily enough, insomnia was what brought us together. I had been wandering around the ship one night, after several nights of little sleep. Finding myself in the briefing room, I had sat down in the chair reserved for the captain, put my feet up on the table and gazed out at the streaking stars. After a few minutes of silence, the door had slid open and Captain Kirk had walked in. We were already on friendly terms, so I hadn't bothered taking my feet off the table or giving him the chair, even when he made a joke about it being his.

He'd been having trouble sleeping too, claiming his mind was running at warp 5 after an exhausting meeting in that very briefing room earlier in the day. He'd chosen to go back there in the hopes that it would clear his head.

We sat next to each other, him in the First Officer's chair and I kept occupying his, and chatted for a while. All the while we both seemed to gravitate more and more towards each other and I got sleepier at the same time, until I fell asleep with my head on his shoulder. He had gathered me up in his arms and ordered a site to site transport, dropped me off on my bed and pulled a blanket over me, before going back to his quarters, falling asleep as well. After that, our friendship had shifted and things escalated quickly from there.

Now though, he and Spock and several admirals were trying to work out a peace treaty between the Federation and the Klingon Empire. We had dropped them off on a colony near the Neutral Zone and had then gone off to survey a newborn nebula a couple of systems over. We weren't scheduled to go back for them for another two or three days, the trip itself took a whole day. And my body was kind enough to refuse to sleep properly without Jim now, no matter how much in control of the insomnia I was.

I made it through the day somehow, with at least two more disgusting cups of coffee. Thankfully, there was more than enough to do in Engineering that I decided to not leave once my shift was over, it was better to keep working than sitting in my quarters and feeling like I had been in the middle of a warp core breach. As soon as Jim and Spock came back, Starfleet wanted us to check out an uninhabited planet that a passing cargo ship had detected held large deposits of deuterium and our long-range sensors had detected too much atmospheric disturbance for transporting, so we had to adjust the shielding on several shuttlepods. I was barely conscious when I stumbled into the medbay at 2200 hours.

"Not looking any better, I see." Bones appeared out of nowhere and would have scared the daylights out of me if I hadn't been so sluggish.

"Your bedside manners are always so lovely."

He ushered me over to a biobed and pulled a tricorder from one of his pockets.

"There's no need to scan me. We both know what's wrong. Just give me what you think I need and I'll be off." I looked at the tricorder with annoyance.

He didn't answer but started scanning me anyway, so I sat there patiently, closing my tired eyes and listening to the whirring of the device. "It's a wonder they haven't found a cure for this yet, after 200 years of research," he muttered to himself.

I looked up at him and saw him analysing the results. "You've found a cure for some pretty serious viruses on your career, why don't you find the cure for this?" I argued.

"This isn't a virus, sweetheart."

"Still, I'm sure you're brilliant enough to find a solution." Bones always said that flattery would get you nowhere with him, but I found that more often than not, he enjoyed having his ego stroked. He was that good too.

He just huffed and went over to a cabinet. I saw him pull out a vial and fill up a hypospray. "I know you have tried this before and it didn't work so well. But that was a few years ago, it might work better for you now." I nodded and obediently bared my neck to him. One touch of the cold metal to my skin and it was done. "I want you to go straight to bed now. It should work quickly and you have to be in bed when it does."

"Yes, sir."

It did not work. Or, I did sleep through the night, but the dreams had me waking up more exhausted than if I hadn't slept at all. It had been worse than last time, the irrational, weird and disgusting dreams had just come at me, one after the other. I would honestly prefer good old-fashioned nightmares over this. I called Bones as soon as I had showered away the night and he was at my door by the time I had dressed.

"Sit down," he barked, the tricorder out and a deep furrow between his brows. "What happened?"

I told him all about the night, even gave him some snippets of the nasty dreams for emphasis, each one of them still crystal clear and disturbing in my mind. The way he cringed at some of it, told me just how disturbing they had been. It wasn't normal to dream that you're pooping out severed arms, after all. *

"This is very strange," he said after he was done scanning. "Barely any light or deep sleep at all. Dream sleep almost all night. I've heard about a few phenomena that cause a person to not have any dream sleep at all, but not nothing but dream sleep. You're not getting any more of this medication, and I'm making a note in your medical file."

I sighed, trying to think about what I could do to help myself that night. But Bones had suddenly gone very quiet. I looked up at him and there was a deep furrow between his brows, his eyes gazing down at the tricorder, but it looked like he was mentally lightyears away. "What's wrong, doc?"

He didn't react right away, but then he blinked and looked down at me. "There is something we can try, but it can be highly addictive if the dosage is off by even a fraction. Call Scotty and tell him you'll be a bit late. I need to take some blood for analysing."

All through that day, I felt a bit apprehensive about what Bones was planning on giving me later. And I missed Jim so much it ached. This was the worst it had been without him and it was also the longest we had gone without each other since we got together. I missed him because of his absence, of course. But in my sleep-deprived state, it felt a million times worse. It felt like there was a gaping, bleeding hole inside me where he should be. I needed him to calm my mind, to kiss me and tell me it's okay if I can't sleep, that I'll sleep when I'm ready and he would be there with me all the while. I needed him to breathe with me. I needed to feel him. He was able to relax me enough that I could function.

After working well past my shift again and forcing down too many cups of coffee, I forced back tears of exhaustion and desperation and went to the medbay, got the mysterious hypospray and went straight to bed.

Apart from the fact that I woke up every ten to fifteen minutes, this one worked a lot better. In the morning, I felt less like I had been hit with a meteor shower and more like I had just tumbled through a thick atmosphere without a spacesuit. Bones came to check up on me in engineering after lunch and I asked if I could get a higher dosage, hoping that maybe that would finally be what helped me sleep through the night. But he refused, he had given me as much as my body could handle without becoming addicted or suffering other nasty side effects. In defeat, I told him if I couldn't have a higher dosage, I didn't want it at all. Then I started counting the hours until Jim came home, and drank all the coffee I could stomach so I wouldn't feel like a zombie.

I was just starting to doze off. It was probably just an hour or so until my alarm, but I let sleep take me. I would take anything I could get. What felt like just a minute later though, the computer spoke to me.

"The time is 0630 hours. The time is 0630 hours."

"No no no," I moaned in annoyance, screwing my eyes shut to the illumination in the room becoming stronger. But then a pair of lips landed on my cheek.

"Forgot to turn that off," someone said.

I didn't process this right away, but in the back of my head I knew that voice and knew it was important, so I forced myself to open my eyes to the way too bright room. Jim was there next to me and judging by his one barely open eye, he had just woken up too. "Hi..."

My heart was beating wildly in my chest, the room seemed to be spinning a little, my vision getting blurry, but then he smiled with his eyes closed and started to clumsily kiss my cheek and jaw and everything cleared up.

"When did you come home?" I whispered.

Jim didn't answer but kept trying to kiss me, but he was struggling, he too seemed exhausted, not able to aim. "A while. Laid down minutes ago. Tired. Want lips."

I made a happy sound and rolled around to face him. He opened his eyes a fraction, revealing the brilliant blue I loved so much. His lips landed on my nose, then my cheek before finally finding my lips. The gaping aching hole inside me seemed to vanish. I moved closer, pressing my lips and my body to his and everything inside me seemed to settle down, mind was quiet, all tension washed away. When I needed air, I pulled back just enough so I could stare into his eyes and see every little shade of blue in them. "You're home."

"The time is 0635 hours. The time is 0635 hours."

"Home and tired." His breath washed over me when he spoke and I wanted to breathe nothing but him for the rest of my life.

"Ditto. Haven't slept since you left."

"I know, Bones told me. I'm so sorry, Supernova."

"'s okay. Just missed you." My voice broke, and all the frustrations from the past week made a few tears fall. Jim snuck one of his arms around my waist and I moved even closer, burying my face into his neck, breathing in the smell of stars and nebulas and galaxies. "How were the peace talks?" I asked between lazy kisses to the soft skin on the side of his neck.

Jim didn't reply right away. Instead, he kissed my hair, breathing it in for a moment. "Exhausting. I'll tell you all about it later."

"The time is 0640 hours. The time is 0640 hours."

"Have to get up," I mumbled against his skin, but my entire body felt like lead in Jim's arms.

"Computer, turn off the alarm." A gentle beep confirmed it was now turned off. Then Jim pulled back just enough to look into my eyes. "Bones told me to tell you that he has declared you not fit for duty today and that he has ordered bed rest, and if you disobey his orders, he will not hesitate to have you strapped to a biobed with a force field."

I blinked. "But..."

"And your Captain concurs. He recommends you spend the day with him in bed and sleep." He was grinning at me. "He's been flying fancy admirals in a shuttle all night and is in need of some tender loving care from the love of his life."

I knew there were things I had to do in Engineering. It would take time and almost all the Engineering staff to get the shuttlepods ready in time for exploring the deuterium planet. But as I looked into Jim's eyes, I felt exhaustion all the way to my bone marrow, and there was no point arguing with that, or the Captain and the Chief Medical Officer. I teared up with relief and buried my face in Jim's neck again.

Jim settled down on his back and pulled me halfway on top of him. I swallowed down my emotions and rested my head on his shoulder, tangled my legs with his, and laid my arm across his stomach. Peace filled me and I barely had time to mumble love you before I was fast asleep.

Note: * Yes, I have actually dreamed that as a side effect of taking melatonin.

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